In the summer of 1922, Ruth Epperson Kennell, a children’s librarian, left New York City for the far reaches of Siberia. She travelled with her husband Frank and 132 other ‘pioneers’. In Siberia, they joined the Kuzbas colony, a utopian commune in the coal-mining town of Kemerovo, founded by ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, a leading Wobbly (Industrial Worker of the World) who had jumped bail in the United States and escaped to Russia. Haywood and hundreds of other foreigners were eagerly establishing industrial and agricultural communes to aid the ‘new Russia’. Kennell claimed that the Kuzbas pioneers – re-enacting American settlement of the West and industrial development on a new frontier – were building, not a new Atlantis, but a ‘new Pennsylvania’.
In signing a two-year contract with the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, and leaving the comforts of middle-class life in the US, Kennell made a decision that was surprisingly popular. An article in the radical Liberator by the proletarian bard Mike Gold, headlined “Wanted: Pioneers for Siberia,” provided the spark that set the Kennells’ life in a new direction. It also gestured toward the attractions of a broader exodus that was not just about escaping the US: these pioneers wanted a part in the building of something new. This was especially the case for US women at a moment in which they’d gained the vote but otherwise nothing had really changed for them. Appealing to ‘the Young Intellectuals who have not fled to the boulevard cafés of Paris, there to sip cocktails in a sort of noble protest against American Puritanism’, Gold’s article convinced the Kennells to pack up their worldly goods and leave their 18-month-old son in California with his paternal grandmother.
Although more men than women volunteered their services to Russia in its early years – and many of the women who did come were simply accompanying husbands – Kennell was among those who went to Russia not as dependent wives but as workers. Indeed, what made the Kuzbas enterprise appealing to her was the chance to escape what Lenin had described as the ‘crushing drudgery’ of housework, by living communally.