Manya Gordon

Manya Gordon Strunsky (1882 – December 27, 1945) was a Ukrainian-born Russian-expatriate American historian and political activist. Gordon is best remembered as a pioneering social historian of the Soviet Union, especially Soviet Russia, through her seminal 1941 book, Workers Before and After Lenin, which looks at the track record of Vladimir Lenin and his heirs in transforming the economy of the Russian Empire into that of the Soviet Union.

Biography Early years Manya Gordon was born in about 1882 in the city of Kiev , Russian Empire (now Ukraine). A family of ethnic Jews, the Gordons emigrated to the United States from the increasingly antisemitic Tsarist regime in 1896, settling in New York City. Gordon was educated at home but later received academic training in history and drama through courses completed at Columbia University. legally taking her husband's surname while continuing to use her maiden name as a pen name. The couple had two children.

The continual development of the Revolution to form Soviet culture and the Soviet economy was an ongoing source of fascination in the United States throughout the decades of the 1920s and 1930s (whether horrified, enthusiastic, or merely curious fascination, depending on each reader). Demand existed for reporting and analysis of what was happening in the USSR. In the 30s Strunsky began work on a monograph dealing with the evolution of treatment of the working class before and after the advent of Bolshevik power. This was published in 1941 as Workers Before and After Lenin by prominent New York publisher E.P. Dutton and Company. Nominal wage gains (which the government boasted about) had been more than offset by large price increases, including of staple goods,

Later years Throughout the 1930s Gordon did solidarity work with imprisoned Russian social democrats in the Soviet Union, serving as Secretary of the New York Society for Socialist Party Prisoners and Exiles in Soviet Russia.

In later years Strunsky worked as a literary critic for the New York magazine Saturday Review of Literature.

Death and legacy Manya Gordon Strunsky died of a heart attack on December 27, 1945 in New Canaan, Connecticut. She was 63 years old at the time of her death. She left a legacy of evidence-based political and historical analysis that showed the squandered potential of the February Revolution and how a humane and progressive type of social democracy—which, as a center-left position, is often attacked and disparaged from both left and right—belies the flaws of its detractors' arguments.