you're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning greg miller greg miller is a former us army infantry men who served in iraq and is a member of coffee strong a veteran own operated g i coffee house located down in lakewood washington so start out tell us about what was your motivation in joining the military ok i joined the military back in two thousand and eight  i lived in a in a small town in northeastern pennsylvania and at the time i was thirty years old when i joined the army and i guess at the time growing up in northeast p i guess you could say the economy had been pretty bad there kind of long before it hit nationally and a lot of people worked in factories and things like that i mean it was it was a very blue collar area  ended up kind of find myself only having a high school diploma not really a lot of job options you know and i was just really kind of in and out of work things were things are pretty tough i didn't really have a way to get out of the area hadn't gone to college you know i mean i kind of really kind of felt stuck but i found myself kind of face of the choice of you know looking at that  as more my future or i kind of revisit the idea of joining the military which is something i've been interested in since i was a kid you know the recruiters to come to school at all seem really cool but it never seemed like something i would actually go ahead and do but at that point i kind of revisited that idea in more of a serious way what could this do to get me out of here and get me on a track to be able to go to college things like that so at the time  you know i felt like i was pretty up on the issues you know i but i guess really in retrospect i was pretty naive i thought in joining the military now i want to be able to you know go to college but i figured i'd probably be doing something good i'd be helping out you know i mean i really had no understanding of everything that went into the history of you know american the middle east and stuff like that and i just figured anybody that wanted to you know very nasally figured anybody that you know wanted to pick a fight with us probably wasn't good so i figured i'd be killing two birds i'd be able to go help some people out do something i always wanted to do and go to college it's in time and did you anticipate that you would be going to iraq when you joined of course i think everybody the point cycle was so frequent at that time especially everybody knew even your recruiter told you hey you're going to go to iraq or afghanistan so yeah it was something that i was  looking for doing and then the time i thought it was it was something good and some needed to be done so yeah i joined knowing that i would end up going over there all right so when did you start having second thoughts about your new career i think my approach to it at the time was i was going to join and i was going to kind of feel it out i initially enlisted for three years and i figure i get there i'd see how it was and make a decision if i wanted to you know stay for twenty years and retire so i started basic training in november of two thousand and eight and i came to fort lewis in but it was march or april of two thousand and nine  and really didn't take me too long there to really get a feel for what the army was like i think part of what led me to to join the army was i felt very dissatisfied with the jobs i had previously i  really felt like i had a strong sense of integrity doing the right thing you know being squared away and it always seemed like those were not the qualities that got you ahead in any sort of other job i had i always felt like i was working for people that i couldn't figure out how they ever got to be put in charge and i figured you know kind of frustrated with that in the other stuff i mentioned i was like you know if there's one place we're doing the right thing and be in squared away definitely will benefit you and get your head it's got to be the military so i was looking forward to that you know i kind of bought into you know the army values as they were you know honor integrity all that stuff you know which i which is something that you know is still important to me now even though it turned out i didn't find that in the  military it really probably only took me a couple months to really get to get my bearings and and realize that it was like it was like the thirteenth grade it was just like a high school bully culture with with no boundaries  i mean it started pretty early on and you know it would be like three o'clock in the morning and your twenty three year old team leader would come in drunk and pull you out of your room and have you don't push ups and everything out in the hallway till you threw up and clean it up with your shirt you know in your off time you know they're just drunk this is just for their own amusement and that was one of the first things that kind of turned me on to what it was actually like there you know i guess certainly expected to be rigorous you know in a military way but there was a lot of nonsense outside of that that really had a big impact on your life it really just made your life hell and it was really just for someone else's amusement so that really kind of got me that was probably the first sort of warnings i had that you know it wasn't as advertised and then you when did you end up going to iraq itself about six months later since i showed up before lewis they were already well into the cycle of preparing to deploy we are wrapping up  training end of it and then you go into a few month period of literally just inventorying everything that you have and you know preparing to deploy so i found myself in iraq about six months after that and arti by that time having decided you know i'm just going to do my three years i'm going to get out and go to go to college i got to iraq and it really again you know didn't take me very long once i got there to just realized i think what the truth about what we're doing there was the truth about what had happened prior to my arrival in those years was it was really surprising just realizing and kind of having it hit me really early on in my year long deployment that we had we had destroyed that place it was very disheartening not only having seen the true character of what i thought was you know the top of the military you know the infantry you know better than everybody else more professional all that stuff and really really getting an idea of what the true character of the military or the army was and then to go on to see the reality of what i was doing and what i was part of what i was furthering and that was just we're just we're just harming people that we had no reason to harming that were not a threat to us and basically just we're making their life so by the time you got there the bulk of at least from our perception here in the u s the bulk of the combat was over it was basically peacekeeping at that time what did  what would a typical day be like they're well on our deployment we i didn't realize i said the time but towards the end we're told that we're the last they called that the last combat brigade in iraq so that was the last year of operation iraqi freedom where it was supposed to be you know full spectrum or fair you know whatever whatever that entails and then after we left that was that big exit that was on it was pretty widely publicized it was just you know long lines of strikers driving down the highway in iraq and out through into kuwait and then it became operation new dawn so your typical day would look like they're kind of varied we usually went on one or two combat missions or patrols every day we're also involved in trying to train the iraqi army do things like that every every day and it was kind of like groundhog day you know you wake up at some very random hour go out walk around drive around trying not to hope you don't get blown up that sort of thing and or go try to sometimes we would cordon off the whole city just literally form a boundary around it with our strikers while the iraqi army emptied every citizen from the city at the report to some other location and they would just question those people search every single house in the entire city of one hundred fifty thousand people it would take all day who'd be from before the sun came up to the time the sun went down it was doing a very oppressive style of governance so it's just just kind of some mix of that just it was it was also is very disappointing i guess just to see that i realized that it seemed like nobody i worked with was able to even look at iraqis as people in any sense you know and i mean it was just very i don't know they just looked at them as subhuman and that really translate into the way that we treated them and i guess so early on i mean just just realizing all these things the nature of what i was doing there and what i was part of what the people around me were like was was a real letdown i felt like i didn't see any of those army values i kind of come there seeking you know in unfortunately kind of felt like  mean i felt like i was one of the only people i felt like that was trying to do the right thing and unfortunately that turned out to really not be the culture to try to have any sort of moral compass in and so i  was just absolutely disgusted with it and then i had basically an entire year ahead of me already you know being in that frame of mind like i can't believe what i'm doing here you know i mean so it was it was a long year it was very disheartening and i just counted down every day until i could leave that place and i still had about another two and a half years in the army from the time that i got there so it was a long time so how would you deal with that on a daily basis it's obviously you said that felt like serco which means there's really no one else there that you can talk to could you find any other allies in your beliefs you know it really wasn't something that somebody talked about and what was talked about was kind of the opposing viewpoint like just basically just always racist nicknames racist talk you know violent aggressive talk stuff like that so especially being i was only a private at the time you know so i just kind of kept my mouth shut it's very it's very isolating to have a completely different point of view than everyone around you in such a violent circumstance and culture  i just kind of kept it to myself and it just it just really felt like you know in the same way in that movie the guy that's trying to do the right thing finds himself on the receiving end of you know the heat from all those piers and you know always find himself you know interest you know get in trouble department stuff like that it just it just really felt like swimming upstream and so i just kind of tried to keep it together i was really concerned about my discharge even though it was a couple years away  really after a while just just kind of trying to keep this in and it was just like you know is this is this even real is this really happening i cannot believe i'm here right now feeling this way being stuck here was extremely frustrating  really felt like i was going crazy i mean by the end of the point i just would i felt like i was i didn't sleep i would just stay up all night i would literally wander around the base wondering if i was going crazy and do you realize when you've gone crazy and once you have is there any way to come back from it i mean it was literally i felt like it was driving me insane trying to keep everything bottled up trying not to act up or act out not having to go to my chain of command and saying like this is disgusting i just cannot be part of this anymore because  you know i figured if if i did not come out of this on the other end being able to accomplish my goal of going to college move on with my life you know i just i couldn't take that idea were there any outside resources that you could use during this time like let's say family just talking to family that would help i mean i was able to you don't talk to my family on the phone sometimes and stuff but and i had tried broaching the subject a bit you know with my parents who are really like the only people i had to talk to outside of you know as far as who knew me well enough to try to talk to about something delicate like that but i don't really feel feel like they understood and you know i would try to feel it out and bring it up a little bit with them but i'm not sure if they wanted to hear it either so not really you know nobody do you feel like the attitudes of everyone around you was  instilled from a top down army type attitude or is this just something people came into the army with or a combo of both i think it's definitely a little bit of both kind of the way that you know like much in the way that i came to the army you know believing a lot of naive ignorant stuff that there was a bunch of people in the middle east that just wanted to you know harm america harm americans you know not really having any sense of politics or the world around me you know and especially you know i had no excuse i was old at the time you know but especially coming there eighteen one thousand you don't know anything about anything so you know you believe what you're told you kind of assimilate to the culture that's around you so i feel like there are a lot of people with a lot of ignorant beliefs that were really solidified by this indoctrination you know the intentional and the and here and aspects of that that the military put you through where they you know really dehumanize you and they did humanize everybody else but specifically whatever your enemy is at that time you know and all the training that i had before going to iraq and all the training that i had after we were always we're always fighting muslims and they may have been from mexico you know here wherever you know around the world these different training scenarios where they're supposed to be from they're muslims and it's just a very reinforced concept that these people are not human and that you know they're they're just bad it's really very simple that they're not human and they have to they have to do that to you because i mean there's no way you can look at someone as another human being and then harm them when they're not threatening you so i think it was they they came with a lack of understanding and a willingness to i really feel like it satisfied their self esteem in some way to be this you know aggressive the founder of america and i don't know it just seems like everybody bought into it except for me all right so once you knew that you were leaving the army was there and you went through this long waiting period how soon after you got out of iraq before you got to get out of the army i had a year and a half  after we came home from iraq and you know i i guess even while i was there i realized something was wrong something really did not sit right my understanding of what we were there to do and what we were doing didn't match up with what i was seeing but i was just having such an awful time there that i didn't really have very much free time and i didn't really have very much free mental ability left to really look into what we're doing kind of like what really did lead up to the war in iraq what were we really doing you know and when i came home i found i had a more free time and i really became obsessed with you know the politics and the events what led up to us going to our achan you know that when that was all very overwhelming to me you know coming back was a very overwhelming to just trying to you know live with my wife and again  part of you know this world but also really learning you know what a sucker i was and what a sucker i think many people were so made me feel even worse about what i had what i had done and it  really just made that year and a half ahead of me look like it may as well been forever it was very tough i absolutely loath what i was a part of you know in every way even now you know  at that time i should say you know being home stateside army i just i hated it i hated everything it stood for i you know really just started having a lot of troubles i had a lot of like i said problems i just was was really really mentally unwell at the time and was just having a real hard time with that and it took me probably about six months before i felt like i was not able to keep it together anymore i wasn't able to kind of control the way i was feeling on my own i was just having a really hard time with with what happened in iraq and what you know again just going back to you know just the truth of wh was part of and just being part of that culture i just absolute can stand it anymore and i felt like i was just on the verge of doing something doing something just that seemed kind of crazy to me and i knew that that's not the sort of person that i was and that's you know i had lived for thirty years prior to joining the army and i knew that the person i was in you know late two thousand ten early two thousand and eleven was not the person that i used to be and you know i kept hearing that there were people that i could talk to about it you know the army kept pushing that on this you know if you feel like you're having troubles if you feel like it's really getting overwhelming you know talk to your chain of command talk to the chaplain or go see a mental health provider and  so i finally started looking into that i didn't tell anybody i self referred and i started i went to a place called soldier readiness service and started going through this mental health process at fort lewis and for some other things i wasn't able to sleep i slept about two hours or less a night and i've been doing that for close to a year and i started finding that these processes were just they were just a complete failure you know the first one was a sleep clinic that i was supposed to go to and you know between that and the mental health place it seemed like everywhere you went you sat down in front of someone who looked at you like something they learned about in college and really had no attempt at a personal connection to personally understand what your issue was and how they could use their training and their experience to kind of help you sort your mind out it was really kind of reminded me of it was stilted in the way that kind of reminds me of you've called technical support you know that person might not be an expert on that device but they have some advice from their company that they're trained to pass along to you and it really seemed to be i seem to find myself getting a lot of trifold brochures that said things like you know well if you can't sleep don't drink a whole pot of coffee before you go to bed you know and i was up with nightmares and sleeping like one and a half hours two hours and i and i was just well beyond the standard issue health that they had to give and it felt like everywhere i went this was the kind of help i was receiving and i felt like my problems were getting worse i felt like this process was extremely frustrating it was extremely insulting i felt you know and i felt like i was doing the things the army told me to you know i had gone a soldier in a service i tried having conversations with the chaplain i try to bring it up with my chain of command and i think things are only getting worse and i felt like the only thing keeping me hanging on was  that i was married and i really couldn't stomach the thought of doing something that would ultimately leave my wife hurt by it and i could even feel that that that link was the strength of that was thinning on me so i ended up becoming aware of coffee strong which is right outside the madigan gate of fort lewis and i don't know too much about it i knew it was a place it was a coffee shop i knew it was run by some veterans and supposedly they helped soldiers and i heard a lot of things about it there's a lot of bad information a lot of misinformation that goes around about what coffee strong is people use all kinds of slurs like hippies you know things like that at the time which are in the army that's a very powerful word you know but i figured you know whatever i just literally you know at the end of what i can take in i'm willing to try anything so i ended up walking in there one day and after having gone through months and months of just starting from the moment to literally like that the first day back at the army from when i came home from iraq they give you like forty eight hours off and then you come back into the army and then you spend an entire day a couple days just processing back into the army this big warehouse state building going to all these different stations standing in lines people sitting at desks they ask all kinds of questions you fill out all kinds of things and i felt like even just within that building i probably told my life story to about twelve different people and you know i'm just trying to be like are you are you the person that can help me you know and then it would come down to it though i'm just the person that's the appointment for three months from now and that was pretty much what i felt like that process was for that for all those months from the time i got back till the day i walked in a coffee strong was pouring my heart out to these people and having people you know tell me to call this number five feel like killing myself and it was just a really frustrating insulting process and you know i was so tired of having to explain myself from square one all the way through you know the current time to all these different people it really takes a lot to do that and just just really being a let down by everyone that you talk to no one will listen to you they really it's not to get out to off track but it's really an interesting  kind of system because realizing now after the fact looking back i don't know of another you know psychologist or mental health provider who you can go to for some sort of trauma or say you'd like to kill yourself and their goal is to send you back to the source of your trauma anywhere except the military you know i mean you're not you keep you know if your child is being abused or raped by you know an adult you wouldn't go to a therapist who would try to help you gain some re to go back and continue to be traumatized you know and it just seemed like a concept that they couldn't understand you know that i would be that at odds with myself over what i was part of what i was doing and that there was nothing that they could tell me that was going to get me to go back and continue to you know serve my purpose but at any rate i just basically about to give up i walked in a coffee strong one day and you know part of the problem of trying to explain yourself to these folks in the army going back real quick is that if you can't convince them that you have a problem you don't have a problem so it's really this game of trying to like sound crazy enough without science sounding too crazy and you know it just never seems to work so i walked in the coffee strong and there was a guy sitting at this table who appeared to be working there and i sat down and started talking to him and i really didn't get very far in my story at all he said man i understand i was in the infantry too and that was just probably one of the most relieving moments of my entire life just to know that i don't have to convince this guy that i was crazy i didn't have to try to articulate my experiences to him because he had been in iraq as it turns out you know at a much worse time than i had so i mean like you know that was a really great thing to have found you know and so i just really started talking to this guy and he understood and then i discovered you know the work that they were doing there and what the purpose of coffee strong was and just really being a place where soldiers or vets but especially you know active duty people can just walk in the door and speak the truth about you know what it really is like to serve in the military and what it really is like you know what the truth is you know about going to iraq and i had to go all the way to iraq to learn what the word imperialism meant but now i finally had a place where i could talk to other people who had been through the same experiences and come out in a very similar way you know whereas over a four lewis when i was at work i felt like i was the only one you know i never heard anybody saying anything like i thought you know i think part of part of what was so troubling for me after i came back from iraq was i really you know had this question you know just really question the way i felt i was like man i signed up for this you know i can't believe i that this is how i feel about what i'm doing you know and it was very troubling i just really felt like i wasn't living up to some expectation i have for myself or something and really come to find that here's all these other intelligent articulate people who have done the same thing and come out saying the same thing they saw the same truths and they've come to the same conclusion it was it was just it was just such a weight off me to know that i wasn't crazy for thinking the things i had and that really realizing that i had signed up for something else entirely you know i mean i didn't sign up to go harm people who were not a threat to my country you know i had no problem with what my job was i had no problem with doing my job but there's a big difference to me in the motivation behind behind it you know i mean we were just pulling those people and they were dying and getting turned on to what was going on at coffee strong was really something i really do believe that that it saved my life it was really interesting to have you know i  kind of felt like you know when i got to iraq it kind of felt to me like my entire system of belief and understanding the world had been torn from me you know and i it was a very empty very very distressing time to really not have some sort of you know i don't know just to have kind of your beliefs kicked out from under you and nothing to take its place you know and part of what was so beneficial of gone into coffee shop for me was that you know i felt like i had a new community of people with a new way of viewing the world and understanding it that match what i felt i felt like that really took the place of that for me and i feel like for all the help the army you know i use that word in quotes that they say that there is for you what helped me out the most was really just realizing that i was not crazy that i was not wrong and that really helped me reconcile everything that happened to me in the military and in iraq understanding it in the context of yes i was used to perpetrate you know these greedy ends you know and then i wasn't defending the country i wasn't defending freedom anything like that at that so that really kind of helped put that in perspective for me and then so i kind of  at the time surreptitiously became involved with coffee strong in iraq veterans against the war and was interested in the work that they were doing providing services to to soldiers and veterans all kinds of stuff i mean literally a person could walk in there with any sort of pretty much any sort of problem i mean it seems like soldiers and vets always seem to have the same kind of problems and that's something you know i discovered is that we're all unique our stories are all different but we all kind of come to the same conclusions with the same problems and you know you really don't even have to kind of like i guess i imagine it kind of like the guy that i talked to when i went to coffee strong man i understand i was in the infantry it's like i was very glad you know in my time working over the summer i volunteered full full time pretty much with coffee strong and i was really glad to be able to to be on the receiving end of that you know having to be behind the counter making coffee and have someone come in and i could tell that there was just something heavy on their mind that they weren't saying it's like hey can i get you something hey yeah i feel like kill myself you know i mean like some of that that simple and you get these these vets walking in the that just lay it all out there for you and they just they feel like they can trust you a i'm really glad that i'm now able to be there for other people who are me you know just just a little while ago well i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning sure thanks for hav we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning robert w czerny robert w czerny is professor of history at san francisco state university he is the author of multiple books including the anthology american labor and the cold war union's politics and post war political culture co edited with william eisel and kurian taylor american politics in the gilded age eight hundred sixty eight to one thousand nine hundred a righteous cause the life of william jennings bryan and he is a speaker at today's event celebrating seattle's striking history and going to be talking about the last history of the seattle seattle commune yes i was very intrigued by your subject as i'd never even known that this commune existed that was the first i was hearing about it well i think not many people know about it  was a it was formed by a group of people from this area from the pacific northwest i know for sure that that one of them came from bellingham some of them others from as far south as astoria oregon but but concentrated around the seattle area in one nine hundred twenty one they put in a proposal to the government in the soviet in soviet russia in response to a request by of russia especially the parts that were their agricultural heartland they'd gone through a serious drought that had driven many people off the land the civil war had raged through those parts of russia a soviet government offered to give land to people from outside the united states outside russia including the united states if they would come to russian establish agricultural in the pacific northwest a group of about ninety people decided that they would do that these were mostly people who had been born in the old russian empire they were immigrants to the us from finland from russia itself from the ukraine from other regions that had been a part of the old russian empire there were a few who were born in the united states but mostly of those ethnic backgrounds they put in a proposal to the soviet government the soviet government was receptive and gave them almost one thousand square miles of land in the far south of russia near the port city of rostov on don about a hundred miles from that port city so this is a region known as the north caucasus it was a region that had been particularly hard hit by the civil war in russia and by the famine so that this this land was virtually abandoned it had been all a part of the a state of some noble who had been stripped of his land during the  a commune there it was tough going at first but over time they were able to make it one of the most productive farms in all of the soviet union they became a showplace in fact for visitors from outside russia to see what it was like to establish socialist agriculture now how did you get interested in the subject well i came across it by accident in one thousand nine hundred six i was a fulbright lecturer at moscow state university i taught american history there for a semester and while i was there i took advantage of the fact that the archives of the communist party of the united states had been open to researchers after the collapse of the soviet union a huge archive of the papers of the american communist party were opened up to researchers very few american researchers had done anything there and here i was with a whole semester in moscow so i started poking around at the papers for the pacific coast california washington oregon and i got very interested in doing some of the history of the communist party in those three states because the resources in moscow were so rich and eventually i started finding in the california papers requests to transfer their party membership from california to the california colony and in southern russia and that was a first inkling out that there was something going on here so i started pursuing this topic and eventually i discovered that there were three agricultural communes established by people from the pacific coast in the early twenty's the california colony was mostly people from los angeles the san francisco colony was consisted entirely of members of the moloch can church from san francisco the moloch and church was a version of russian protestantism that had broken away from the russian orthodox church and then there was the seattle colony with people from the pacific northwest about a year or so ago i sent an email to the fulbright office in moscow where i'd kept some some contacts over the years and ask if there was any american who was teaching in rostov the nearest big city to where this commune was located and moscow fulbright office put me in connection with seth bernstein who was teaching english in that area seth is now a ph d student in russian history at the university of toronto but he had been spending two years as a fulbright teacher in russia as a way of getting his own russian up to to the highest level of proficiency south was very interested in this project and started digging into the russian archives in that area and he actually at post war recession following world war one there was huge unemployment across the united states official in unemployment was above ten percent the seattle newspapers reported that there were six seven thousand men walking the streets of seattle looking for jobs it was it was a difficult time economically in the united states and so you put this economic hardship that existed in the us together with the opportunity being presented by the soviet government to take up a large amounts of land and establish agricultural communes you begin to have some understanding as to why people might be interested in taking part in this experiment the other part of it that i think is important is that for the group from the pacific northwest and also the group from los angeles these seem for the most part part to have been dedicated  socialists they we don't know this for sure yet this is a next step in the research is to find out more about them when they were living in the united states but my guess is that these were probably all members of the foreign language federation of the socialist party before world war one so they were probably all dedicated socialists and many of the people who'd been in the foreign language federations of the socialist party moved over to the communist party after the revolution in russia and after the establishment of a communist party in the united states so these were people that were also illogically motivated they wanted to go to the soviet union to help build socialism these were people who thought that what had been created  in russia was the future it was the civilization of the future and they they wanted to be a part of creating it and my understanding from you sharing one of your papers with me was that  soviet union required them to pay a fee prior to coming over well it wasn't so much paying a fee as getting together some capital because the russian government essentially said to them we'll give you la we'll give you transportation to get to the land everything else you have to supply so to think about farming one thousand square miles i mean that takes a lot of equipment and the russian government laid out specific capital requirements everybody who joined the seattle commune had to put up five hundred dollars which was a lot of money in one nine hundred twenty one one thousand nine hundred two and some of them put up much more than that so some of them put up as much as five thousand dollars so what they were doing clearly was putting their whole life savings into this operation before the group left seattle they'd raise two hundred thousand dollars and if you translate that into purchasing power today that means they had about two point three million dollars in in purchasing power from two thousand and nine they use this to buy the very best most efficient most powerful american agricultural equipment so they had a ship load farm equipment that they took with them along with enough supplies clothing tools even food to last them for two years that was a requirement by the soviet government that if they were going to come and take up the land they had to come well supplied they had to come ready to to to engage in transforming what was really empty step into productive farmland so talk about their experiences of when they got there and what they had to deal with well when they arrived they were expecting that there would actually be some some buildings where they could live because they were told this was the estate of a former noble family what they found was that most of the buildings were in very sad state of repair the few that were habitable were lived in squatters were driven out some by the members of the commune and some by the local authorities but as a result and i just discovered this in the last couple of days by driving out t they alienated all of the local peasants around them so that their local neighbors refused to give them any assistance at all for the first couple of years that they were there so they really had to make do with what they brought with them one report of a foun in the archive at the university just yesterday said that the local peasants wouldn't even sell them so much as a chicken for the first two years that they were there mice got into their clothing on on the ship and when they were coming from the united states to russia and and ate through a lot of their clothing so they had to replace all of that they had the money to do it but there wasn't supplies easily available to replace all of the things they brought with them they also discovered that the land they'd been given was swampy in places and during the first couple of years as many as two thirds of them were suffering from malaria much of the time  and that the malaria weakened them so much that it was really difficult to get much work done during those first first couple of years until they were able to get quinine brought from the united states to treat the malaria  they had a really tough time of it their farm equipment that was so important to what they were going to do was delayed in transit in russia and they didn't get it until about eight months after they arrived so they they came there they arrived in october of one hundred twenty two and they had planned that they were going to put in winter weight right away but they didn't have any quitman and they were all sick with malaria so they were very slow in bringing the land under cultivation ultimately they brought most of it under cultivation they were able to farm almost all of their nine hundred square miles eventually and they had a whole brigade of tractors to do this they they continued to bring more american farm equipment over succeeding years one of their caterpillar tractors won an award as being the most productive tractor in the entire soviet union one year because it was in operation for more continuous hours than any other tractor in the entire country and they were able to do this because they had the skills to maintain the equipment you know these these people who had come from from the pacific northwest included people who had been metal workers who had been mechanics we don't know what all of the occupations were but they clearly included machinists and blacksmiths and  mechanics there they were more than one hundred miles from the biggest nearest big nearest big city and in order to maintain their farm equipment they had to have the ability to actually make replacement parts and selves they couldn't just order replacement parts from there as caterpillar dealer because the nearest caterpillar dealer was in the united states so they had the skill and the tools the machine tools in order to keep their machinery running at the most effective level and they continued to invest in the most modern farm equipment because they did have the capital that they brought with them they had the very first combine in the soviet union so this made them a highly productive agricultural commune by the late one nine hundred twenty s early one nine hundred thirty s they became something of a showplace in fact where the soviet government would bring visitors to show them the successes of socialist agriculture and they really did organize the whole farm as in a sense an agricultural factory they lived in the unmarried members of the commune lived in dormitories one for man one for women there was also  everyone went for their their baths they had childcare set up for all the members of the commune so it was a very communal lifestyle they it wasn't just that  they cooperated in doing the farming every aspect of their life was organized communally and it was organized very effectively very that the goal was always to  make it possible for the members of the commune to spend a maximum amount of time at work on the work of the commune we have accounts of the meals in in which  people would come in sit down the meals would be served they'd eat silently and they'd be gone within fifteen to twenty minutes and and back to work even meals were organized to take make maximum use of the time and to avoid losing time for work from my reading of your paper it didn't sound real happy about it in some like a pleasant place i mean if you couldn't you know talk to people at a meal that just didn't seem entice him to me well i had the same reaction in some ways but i kind of wondered if there might not be other reasons for for the mealtime rules of not talking and just getting in and out as quickly as possible because what we discovered or what seth really discovered in his research in the russian archives was that by the way almost immediately beginning in one thousand twenty two and continuing until nine hundred thirty there was a lot of conflict  who made up the large majority the original members of the commune and the slavic speakers the russians the ukrainians and the others and this rule about not talking in the dining hall might well have served t purposes it meant that they were in and out of there and back to work quickly and it may have also cut down the opportunities for the kinds of political discussions or other discussions that might have led to further conflict and that conflict took the form of especially of controversy over the leadership of the commune because the fans always elected fans the fans had the large majority so the governing board of the commune almost always consisted of fans it wasn't until the mid twenties that they found a commune had his title was either chairman or president it's not clear that both of those terms of pure who was a latvian and who was apparently a good compromise between the finns and the front slavic speakers and who had no big ethnic constituency of his own he was the only latvian in the entire commune and so he seemed to be acceptable to both the finns and the russians and and was a very effective leader for commune from the mid twenty's all the way up until that time the german army overran the commune during world war two and executed him but there was this ongoing ethnic conflict between the finns and the others and ultimately in one nine hundred thirty about two thirds of the finns left they went to correll yes which is the part of the soviet union next to finland where the soviet government was trying to create a finnish national homeland for finns who were living inside the soviet union at that point and at that point the ethnic conflict seems to a cooled off a lot after that point  one group had the overwhelming majority that the finns had formed up until nineteen thirty it continued to be a multi ethnic commune with russians ukrainians about what russians latvians lithuanians stony and still some continuing finns and at least a few other people from from other parts of the world who had joined the commune by that point so finally happened in the commune and did any of the people involved in it ever return to seattle i think probably some of them did return to seattle that's another part of the research we have yet to do i do know for example that the san francisco commune was closed down in thousand twenty seven and they all came back to san francisco in the early years of the seattle commune there were a number of them who numbered the people who left and i would expect that some of them came back  what happened to it eventually was that under strong pressure well they had direct orders in fact from the government in moscow they converted it from a commune to a collective farm that happened in one nine hundred forty collective farms were the official policy of the russian government for agriculture they managed to resist this conversion for can full years but finally in one nine hundred thirty nine the order came from moscow you shall do this and they did it and they voted in one thousand nine hundred eighty that they would convert themselves to a collective form they really had no choice about the vote but they took a vote because that's the way they did things and at the same time they changed their name from seattle to stalin perhaps as to commemorate a party congress that probably much less politically sensitive than and naming somebody after a russian leader some of the finns came back at that point after  death it continued as a collective farm until the collapse of the soviet union we found one newspaper article from two thousand and two that said that with the collapse of the soviet union and the collapse of the collective farms all over russia that the seattle farm had been converted to a joint stock company so it had become a capitalist enterprise at that point my guess is that probably the people living there became  the stock holders because in the in the transition to capitalism in russia there was there were off and there was often stock issued in in the socialist enterprises that existed and i would guess that probably much of the stock in this in this particular collective farm was was given to the people who worked it and they changed their name again back to seattle but i should also mention that from the very beginning the commune had two names in english it was always referred to as seattle in russian it was referred to as say ya tall which is a slightly different word if you translate a rate seattle a they made a russian word of it the russian word say ya tell means so or as in a person who sews green so it was a very interesting word play from the beginning and you find this this to the two names in use consistently any time that there was an english language publication it's referred to a seattle but in russian it's always say yah tell and that's the name that it has today there's a small village called say atal that's about one hundred miles from rostov on don that was the center of the old commune only a couple minutes left so what are you pursuing your research wise on the project now well seth and i are continuing to look for more information about the commune and what i want to do next in this project is to begin to find out more about the life of the commune members before they left the united  states we found a very interesting article by a russian journalist from one nine hundred twenty three who said what an amazing thing this is here we have all these people born in the russian empire who went to the united states and they came back and now they're not like russians at all they're like people from another planet so somehow during their their time in the united states they became very americanized so that the their russian neighbors looked at upon them as being americans rather than as being russians like themselves i want to find out more about their life in the seattle area i want to thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us this morning thanks it's been a pleasure