Maurice Gerschon Hindus (russian: Морис Гершон Хиндус) (February 27, 1891 – July 8, 1969), was a Russian-American writer, foreign correspondent, lecturer and authority on Soviet and Central European affairs.

Background

Maurice Hindus was born into one of four Jewish families in Bolshoye Bykovo, a village then part of the Russian Empire, in modern-day

Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...

. His father Jacob Hindus was a

kulak Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...

; his mother was Sarah Gendeliovitch, and they had eleven children. When his father died, the family was impoverished. In 1905, Hindus, his mother, and his siblings came to America and settled in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. He worked as an errand boy while attending night classes, and eventually enrolled at Stuyvesant High School. Yearning to return to a rural setting, Hindus answered an employment agency advertisement for a farm laborer in Upstate New York and, in the Spring of 1908, removed to North Brookfield in

Madison County, New York Madison County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 68,016. Its county seat is Wampsville. The county is named after James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, and was fir ...

, where he worked at various farms over the next three years. He attended high school in North Brookfield for three years and, thereafter, wishing to pursue a course in agriculture, he applied to Cornell University, but was rejected for a lack of sufficient high school courses. However, he was accepted at Colgate University, where he earned a degree in literature, with honors, in 1915. After engaging in part-time lecturing on Russia on the Chautauqua circuit in the American Midwest, he furthered his education with a year of graduate study at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. During the Second World War, he spent three years in the Soviet Union as a war correspondent for the '' New York Herald Tribune''. He also wrote four novels, and travelled to Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine in 1947. In 1957 he married Frances McClernan. On July 8, 1969, Hindus died in New York City at the age of 78, after spending the previous weekend in his beloved North Brookfield.

Russia and writings

Maurice Hindus started as a freelance writer. His first book, ''The Russian Peasant and the Revolution'' was published in 1920. He spent several months in 1922 among Russian émigrés, and then wrote several articles about them for ''

Century Magazine ''The Century Magazine'' was an illustrated monthly magazine first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City, which had been bought in that year by Roswell Smith and renamed by him after the Century Associati ...

,'' whose editor asked him to go to Russia to study the farm life and system. Several books were written from that experience, including ''Humanity Uprooted'' (1929) and ''Red Bread'' (1931). At the time of his writing, Hindus was often criticized by other Soviet experts for not presenting an objective view of Soviet reality and being overly sympathetic or naive about the actual conditions of Soviet life in the 1920s and 30s. Most of Hindus' writings are about Soviet life and current events. He visited his home country several times, staying three years during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. After this time, he wrote ''Mother Russia'' (1943), an account of wartime conditions there. During the Cold War Hindus was very critical of the Soviet government, though he always distinguished between the Kremlin and the Russian people. He wrote ''Crisis in the Kremlin'' (1953) in response, painting the peasants in a sympathetic light. Hindus helped increase American understanding of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and as an ally in

Books

*
The Russian Peasant and the Revolution
' (1920) *
Broken Earth
' (1926) *
Humanity Uprooted
' (1929) *''Red Bread'' (1931) *
The Great Offensive
' (1933) *''Moscow Skies'' (1936) *
Green Worlds: An Informal Chronicle
' (1938) *
We Shall Live Again
' (1939) *''Sons and Fathers'' (1940) *''To Sing with the Angels'' (1941) *''Hitler Cannot Conquer Russia'' (1941) *''Russia Fights On'' (1942) *
Russia and Japan
' (1942) *
Mother Russia
' (1943) *
The Cossacks - The Story of a Warrior People
' (1946) *''In Search of a Future'' (1949) *''Magda'' (1951) *''Crisis in the Kremlin'' (1953) *''House Without a Roof: Russia After Forty-Three Years of Revolution'' (1961) *''A Traveler in Two Worlds'' (1971)

References

*W. F. Mugleston, "Hindus, Maurice Gerschon (1891–1969)," ''Dictionary of American Biography'', Supplement Eight: 1966-70 (New York, 1988): 260-1.

External links

*

Syracuse University Library. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hindus, Maurice G. Writers about the Soviet Union Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States Russian Jews Belarusian Jews American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent People from Slutsk District 1891 births 1969 deaths Colgate University alumni Harvard University alumni American expatriates in the Soviet Union