Maurice Gerschon Hindus

Background

Maurice Gerschon Hindus was born on February 27, 1891 in Bolshoye Bikovo, Russia. He was the son of Jacob Hindus, a kulak, and Sarah Gendeliovitch. After his father's death, the family fell on hard economic times, and Hindus came to the United States with his mother and siblings in 1905, settling in New York City. He took a job as an errand boy, attended night classes, and became a naturalized citizen in 1910 or shortly thereafter.

Education

After two years at Stuyvesant High School, Hindus attended Colgate University, graduated with honors in 1915, and earned a Master of Science a year later. A year of further graduate study followed at Harvard University.

Career

Confident of his mastery of the English language, Hindus plunged into freelance writing, which was to become his career. His first book, The Russian Peasant and the Revolution, appeared in 1920. After a visit of several months in 1922 among Russian émigrés in Canada, he sold a number of articles about them to Century magazine, whose editor then commissioned Hindus to return to Russia to study the collective farming system. Several books resulted, including Humanity Uprooted (1929) and Red Bread (1931), both of which were well received. Most of Hindus' works deal with Soviet life and current events, and he revisited his homeland many times. His autobiography, Green Worlds: An Informal Chronicle (1938), describes his experiences on an upstate New York farm and draws contrasts with Soviet collective farming. Hindus spent nearly three years in the Soviet Union during World War II as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, an experience reflected in Mother Russia (1943), a sympathetic portrayal of wartime conditions there.

During the cold war, Hindus became highly critical of the Soviet government, although he was always careful to distinguish between the Kremlin and the Russian people, whom he characterized--as in Crisis in the Kremlin (1953)--as decent, long-suffering, and peaceloving. "Anyone who has broken bread with them, " he wrote, "or has slept in their homes or has heard them talk and laugh and weep, must attest that they are crusaders neither for world revolution nor world conquest. "

Hindus also wrote four novels during his career: Moscow Skies (1936); Sons and Fathers (1940); To Sing with the Angels (1941), about Czechoslovakia; and Magda (1951), the story of a Polish farmer who emigrates to America. In the late 1940's Hindus traveled in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine. In Search of a Future (1949) chronicled his visits there.

He died in New York City.

Achievements

• Hindus was a prolific writer, with twenty books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, and he lectured frequently. Reviewers praised his works for their narrative and descriptive qualities and for his portrayals of Russian peasant life, but they found the analytical skill of some of his work uneven. Hindus undoubtedly helped to increase American understanding of, and sympathy for, the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and during its years as an ally in World War II.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (A Midland Book)

    ( First published in 1931 and long out of print, Red Brea...)

  • Mother Russia,

    (The author went to Russia on assignment for the purpose t...)

  • Crisis in the Kremlin

    (319 page hardcover book published by Doubleday & Company ...)

  • Hitler cannot conquer Russia

    (G/FAIR, INSCRIBED TO ALLBY AND SIGNED BY AUTHOR, 299 PAGES)

  • A Traveler in Two Worlds

    (Dust jacket design by E. D. N. Studio. A memoir of the ol...)

  • The Kremlin's human dilemma;: Russia after half a century of revolution
  • The Russian Peasant and the Revolution
  • To sing with the angels.
  • Humanity uprooted
  • The Cossacks : the story of a warrior people,

Politics

Hindus' disenchantment with Soviet foreign policy during the cold war paralleled that of many of his fellow Americans, and he had no illusions about his native land. In House Without a Roof (1961) he wrote that although the Russian Revolution was "the most violent revolution ever engineered by man, it has also been spectacularly creative; else there would have been no sputniks, no cosmonaut, and Russia would not have become the superpower that it is, second only to America. But the creativeness has been achieved in a traditional Russian way, by iron rule from above and in complete disregard of human cost and the freedoms that the West cherishes. "

Connections

In 1957 Hindus married Frances McClernan.

Father:

Jacob Hindus

Mother:

Sarah (Gendeliovitch) Hindus

Spouse:

Frances (McClernan) Hindus