In the UK, we accepted some German refugees by the name of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, and the former spent an aweful lot of time in the British Library work on a book of somekind, "Kapital" or something, whilst the latter did some work in Manchester as a textile entrepreuner to fund his compatriots failed literay career.
In 1907, London played host to a small obscure group of Russian radicals, including a certain Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. This is after Trotsky had already fled a prison camp in Siberia and escaped the country. The British government was even so kind as to send out the local constabulatory to stop the street children picking on the poor russians. Apparently, they also toured London on a red bus, commenting on how "bourgeois" and decadant was the architecture of the British Museum, and also went to visit said "Marx" in a London grave yard.
The US accepted many members of the Communist League from the 1840's who were compatriots of this "Marx" fellow, some of whom went on to become minor figures in the US civil war on the Union Side. This has been of interest to Pro-Confederate Libertarians who want to accuse Abraham Lincoln of being a dangerous marxist revolutionary trying to crush states rights.
They weren't the only ones as when Communism failed in Europe alot of them went to the US to start co-operatives.
Leon Trotsky stayed in the US for a period in 1916 before being interned in a Canadian prisoner of war camp. He also contributed to a New York periodical for his time there. But that was before he successfully overthrew the Russian Government in 1917, but after he unsuccessfully participated in the revolution of 1905. There are also rumours he was involved in a backstage role in a hollywood film (false unforutnately).
There was the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory fleeing Nazi Germany for America. Depending on who you ask, these are the fine people who brought you "Cultural Marxism" to destroy western civilisation with sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Then there's
Wilhelm Reich, who was expelled from the German Communist Party for being too extreme, fled the Nazis and arrived in the US as where the FBI engaged in the largest episode of book burning in US history in the 50's because they weren't comfortable with his investigations of a mysterious sexual energy called Orgone. he also conducted psychotherapy sessions with his patients naked to help the Orgone energy express itself. He was locked up in a mental instuition, but it turned out he was actually "sane", just paranoid.
And they let this man practice psychotherapy in their country.
The US even let
Oswald back in after defecting to the USSR. Opps!
And then there's
Stalin's daughter, who defected between the US and the USSR several times. Here she is, talking a walk on a rural road in Wisconsin. she died in 2011, a British Citizen after living in Bristol until 2009.
let me repeat that. Stalin's Daughter died a
British Citizen.
ahh! the Freedom!
