Book: The First Time in History

Overview
Anna Louise Strong describes her 1920s journey through Soviet Russia with an upbeat, witness-driven voice that seeks to capture a society striving toward radical change. She presents the Soviet experiment as a dramatic break with the past, focusing on the practical work of reconstruction after years of war and revolution. The narrative aims to show the potential and merits of the new system by foregrounding everyday efforts at building schools, factories, and communal institutions.

Scenes and Encounters
Strong moves through cities and countryside, giving close-up portraits of workers, peasants, teachers, and children. She records conversations with factory workers and cooperative organizers, and sketches the rhythms of urban life in Moscow and Petrograd as well as the quieter adjustments of rural communities. Her attention to detail, machines, classrooms, kitchens, public meetings, creates a sense of immediacy that stresses human initiative and collective improvisation.

Thematic Focus
The central theme is possibility: the belief that social organization can be consciously remade to serve a majority rather than privilege a few. Education and youth receive particular emphasis, presented as engines of both socialization and practical skill-building. Labor and production are described not only as economic activities but as moral and civic exercises, places where new loyalties and identities are forged. Alongside optimism, Strong acknowledges material hardship, arguing that scarcity and disruption are part of a larger historical turn rather than proof of failure.

Political and Historical Context
Set against the aftermath of revolution and civil war, the narrative situates everyday transformations within the broader political experiment of Soviet governance. The New Economic Policy and debates over the pace of change provide a backdrop to local initiatives and policy experiments. Strong frames political choices as collective learning processes, emphasizing debate, experimentation, and the attempt to replace hierarchical privilege with organized popular control.

Style and Tone
The prose combines reporterly immediacy with persuasive rhetoric. Strong's language is often vivid and anecdotal, using concrete scenes to make abstract ideals legible. Her tone can be celebratory, at times admonishing Western readers for skepticism, yet she rarely lapses into blind advocacy; criticism, when it appears, is usually folded into an argument for perseverance. The work reads as both travelogue and advocacy journalism, blending observation with interpretive commentary.

Contemporary Reception
The book found a receptive audience among those sympathetic to socialist experiments, praised for bringing alive the human side of revolutionary change. Critics hostile to Bolshevism accused Strong of romanticizing or overlooking repression, while many progressives welcomed the empirical challenge her reporting posed to stereotype and rumor. The book functioned as a polemical antidote to prevailing Western narratives of chaos and decline.

Legacy
As a historical document, the book remains valuable for its eyewitness energy and its portrayal of early Soviet aspirations. It is often read today as an example of American leftist engagement with the Soviet model and as testimony to the hopes that animated many foreign observers of the period. Whether judged as advocacy or reportage, the narrative offers a vivid window onto a society in transition and the convictions that drove international interest in its future.