The Repatriates

The plot of the novel The Repatriates by the American writer of Russian origin Sana Krasikova (the original English title of the novel - The Patriots) covers a wide period of Russian life, from the 1930s to the present. The events in the book touch on American-Soviet relations and are described through the eyes of an American woman who came to Russia to take part in building a "new life". Many young Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s lost their jobs and their hope for a better future in America - and as a result became victims of Soviet propaganda that promised them everything they dreamed of: decent-paying jobs, social guarantees, and the absence of racial and national discrimination in "the world's first country of victorious socialism. Faced with the reality of their arrival in the USSR, they quickly learned the price of these promises, but the way back was closed. Very few managed to survive in the Soviet Union and return to their homeland; most perished in the torture and hard labor camps of the Stalinist regime.

The book is based on KGB archival materials. The realities of personal and public life are supplemented by fiction. But the author does not try to show the horrors of the Lubyanka or the Gulag; in this respect, the novel is more psychological than documentary or historical.

The author raises many moral questions and invites the reader to reflect on how a free-thinking, educated young American woman, finding herself in the harsh conditions of Soviet reality, turned into an obedient, blindly believing in the IDEA of man, ready for the sake of this IDEA to commit and justify her treacherous acts. And even at the end of her life, after she had returned to America with her son's family, thus closing her life's path, she was unable or unwilling to recognize the fatal mistakes she had made, to reevaluate her attitude toward the country that had mutilated not only her life but also the lives of people close to her. The tragedy of people dedicated to IDEA instead of ethics and morality is the inability to recognize, even to themselves, the greatest deception to which they have been subjected and to which they have dedicated their lives. A deception that has become their core, and that is why they cannot get rid of it.

Reading the novel should serve as a warning to idealistic young people who confuse their ideas with a political movement.