Manya Gordon

Manya Gordon Strunsky (1882-1945), best known as Manya Gordon, was a Ukrainian-born Jewish-American historian and political activist. Gordon is best remembered as a pioneering social historian of the Soviet Union, especially Soviet Russia, through her 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.

Manya Gordon was born in about 1882 in the city of Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. A family of ethnic Jews, the Gordons emigrated to the United States from the increasingly anti-semitic Tsarist regime in 1896, settling in New York City. 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 (PSR), an organization dedicated to the forcible overthrow of in Russia. She was also involved in the assisting newly-arrived Jewish emigrés from Russia and Eastern Europe, aiding them in finding jobs and housing in America.

After the Russian Revolution, Gordon worked as a freelance journalist specializing in the topic, contributing articles to Harper's magazine, 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. The couple would have two children.

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