One-Way Ticket

The Soviet Return-to-the-Homeland Campaign, 1955-1960

Glenna Roberts & Serge Cipko

6 X 9 inches, 208 pages

THE RESULT OF DECADES' worth of interviews and archival research, One-Way Ticket collects the stories of those who heeded the call of the Return to the Homeland Committee, a highly organized propaganda machine enticing displaced Soviet citizens and their families to return to the motherland in the 1950s and 1960s.

In this major work of Cold War-era history, Glenna Roberts and Serge Cipko throw the reality and rhetoric of the Soviet return-to-the-homeland campaign into sharp relief — from the committee's seemingly harmless early days to its sinister twilight in the 1960s.

Interviewees, many the Canadian-born children of Ukrainian and Russian emigrants, reflect on what it was like to leave Canada behind when their parents made the trip back to the Soviet Union: the shock and excitement of new surroundings, the tearful departures and reunions, and the often-stifled attempts to return to Canada.

One-Way Ticket is at once an indispensable work of archival and oral history, and a deeply affecting exploration of the complexities of citizenship, immigration, and family in the context of the Cold War.