[1][2][3][4] In February 1931, Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter sympathetic to the USSR reported: ...[The soviet immigration] was the greatest wave of immigration in modern history...The Soviet Union will witness in the next few years an immigration flood comparable to the influx into the United States in the decade before the World War...It is only the beginning as yet of this movement, and the first swallows of the coming migration are scarce—but it has begun and will have to be reckoned with in the future....When the day comes that foreign workers here may write home and say, 'Things are pretty good here, why don't you come along?

[6] Soon, an official edict was issued that in the future all Americans must carry a round-trip ticket and would no longer be given jobs, simply because there was not enough space to house them all.

[4] The Foreign Workers' Club of Moscow baseball team, a group of Americans, played regular games in Gorky Park.

[4] The American immigrants opened an Anglo-American school in Moscow, with 125 pupils on the register by November 1932, three quarters of them born in the United States.

[13][10][14] The book's style has been described as "journalistic", [15] like a movie script,[11] or compared to Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum's Gulag.

She critiques the book's strong reliance on American sources, including unreliable McCarthy-era ones, while failing to utilize the Russian archives and recent research.

[13] In the book, Tzouliadis expresses passionate indignation against American public figures and government officials who he feels should have acted to support and defend their compatriots in the Soviet Union.