At most it gets written off as “well, women’s rights in the US were terrible, the USSR promised women better despite that being debatably actually true, most of those people were just American women fleeing the conditions of almost every country at the time, they wouldn’t have done it if they were men and the US economy wasn’t in a once in a lifetime crash”. Without ever talking about the other Western countries people fled to the USSR from. Or the men who went in similar numbers, at least when we consider only the people who went because they were socialists and wanted to contribute to building socialism. (I’m absolutely willing to believe Western women who weren’t communists went to the USSR simply because they were told by socialist women that it was less patrarchical, or at least trying to be, than any Western country at the time, possibly in greater numbers than men who weren’t communists and went seeking work and affordable basic needs, when a lot of people were out of work in multiple Western countries and the USSR proudly announced they needed skilled labour.)
And then we look past the 20s and 30s surge as the first Red Scare spiraled out of control, to the end of the Great Patriotic War and the Cold War truly beginning in earnest, and… You hear every story of folks from Warsaw Pact nations defecting to the West. But the stories of all the people who defected to the Soviet Union? You don’t hear a single one. It happened, but you don’t hear about it.
At most it gets written off as “well, women’s rights in the US were terrible, the USSR promised women better despite that being debatably actually true, most of those people were just American women fleeing the conditions of almost every country at the time, they wouldn’t have done it if they were men and the US economy wasn’t in a once in a lifetime crash”. Without ever talking about the other Western countries people fled to the USSR from. Or the men who went in similar numbers, at least when we consider only the people who went because they were socialists and wanted to contribute to building socialism. (I’m absolutely willing to believe Western women who weren’t communists went to the USSR simply because they were told by socialist women that it was less patrarchical, or at least trying to be, than any Western country at the time, possibly in greater numbers than men who weren’t communists and went seeking work and affordable basic needs, when a lot of people were out of work in multiple Western countries and the USSR proudly announced they needed skilled labour.)
And then we look past the 20s and 30s surge as the first Red Scare spiraled out of control, to the end of the Great Patriotic War and the Cold War truly beginning in earnest, and… You hear every story of folks from Warsaw Pact nations defecting to the West. But the stories of all the people who defected to the Soviet Union? You don’t hear a single one. It happened, but you don’t hear about it.