Manya Gordon Strunsky (1882 – December 27, 1945) was a Ukrainian-born Russian-Empire-expatriot 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 Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. A family of ethnic Jews, the Gordons emigrated to the United States from the increasingly

anti-semitic Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

Tsarist regime in 1896, settling in New York City.Jerome S. Legge, Jr., "Manya Gordon Strunsky (c. 1882-1945)," in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, ''Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.'' In Two Volumes. New York: Routledge, 1998; vol. 2, pg. 1354. Gordon was educated at home but later received academic training in history and drama through courses completed at Columbia University. In New York Gordon was active in the American section of the Russian

Socialist Revolutionary Party The Socialist Revolutionary Party, or the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (the SRs, , or Esers, russian: эсеры, translit=esery, label=none; russian: Партия социалистов-революционеров, ), was a major politi ...

(PSR), an organization dedicated to the forcible overthrow of Tsarist autocracy in Russia. She was also involved in assisting newly-arrived Jewish emigrés from Russia and Eastern Europe, as a fellow Jewish-American helping them to find jobs and housing in America.

Scholarship

After the

Russian Revolution The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire which began during the First World War. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and ad ...

, Gordon worked as a freelance journalist specializing in the topic, contributing articles to ''

Harper's Magazine ''Harper's Magazine'' is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. Launched in New York City in June 1850, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. (''Scientific American'' is older, b ...

'', the '' North American Review'', and other publications. Her entry into the journalistic orbit brought her into contact with Simeon Strunsky, an essayist and member of the '' New York Times'' editorial board, whom she later married, legally taking her husband's surname while continuing to use her maiden name as a

pen name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...

. The couple had two children. In the years immediately after the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks were murdering fellow socialists as assiduously as they were murdering conservatives in the Russian Civil War, Gordon critiqued their reasoning: 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 E. P. Dutton was an American book publishing company. It was founded as a book retailer in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1852 by Edward Payson Dutton. Since 1986, it has been an imprint of Penguin Group. Creator Edward Payson Dutton (January 4, ...

. In the book Gordon's "bottom-up" attention to the lives of common people rather than the intricacies of high politics anticipated the turn to

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

during the 1960s and beyond in the field of Soviet Studies. In ''Workers Before and After Lenin'' Gordon made use of Soviet sources of economic data in arguing that under the Communist regime the

standard of living Standard of living is the level of income, comforts and services available, generally applied to a society or location, rather than to an individual. Standard of living is relevant because it is considered to contribute to an individual's quality ...

of the working class had deteriorated substantially. The point of using Soviet-issued data was that even the government's own rosy numbers showed a deteriorated reality, precluding any

specious {{Short pages monitor * * * * * *

Works by others

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gordon, Manya 1882 births 1945 deaths Writers from Kyiv Writers from New York City Columbia University alumni Socialist Revolutionary Party politicians 20th-century American historians Jewish socialists Historians from New York (state) Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States