How Moscow’s 1957 World Youth Festival Inspired Me to Go On Pretending: Guest Essay by Alina Adams

Today we welcome Alina Adams back to the blog with an essay about her interracial family’s trip to Moscow (before the war in Ukraine) and its connection to her recently released novel, Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025), featuring a fictional interracial family. You can read our previous conversations with Alina here and here. As one of the excerpts below shows, a key element in her novel is the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, which was meant to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s liberalization and racial tolerance (you can guess how that turned out). The reference to the festival immediately made me think of a different novel by another ex-Soviet Jewish immigrant writer in which it is an important plot element: Petropolis (Penguin Random House, 2008) by Anya Ulinich. If you would like to know more about this lesser-known event and about the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia and race, let Alina explain below and then order Go On Pretending (and Petropolis).

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2025 Books by Post-Soviet Authors

2025 is going to be a big year for books written by immigrant authors hailing from the Soviet Union who now call North America home. Since 2021, I’ve kept a running list of books coming out from our community as a way to keep tabs and, frankly, because no one else was doing it. Last year, when my own debut novel came out, there were only 7 books out from our community, a couple of them paperback editions of 2023 novels. This year, however, we have twelve new titles, plus three books–including my own–being released in paperback. A recent record! I imagine the war in Ukraine might have had something to do with this increased output as several of the authors below engage with the war and the resulting refugee crisis. As the war drags on and the public’s attention on it wanes, this feels like an especially critical time for our voices to be heard. This is why I’m glad to see that our books are finding publishers and readers, and I hope that the incredible variety of books on this list is encouraging to other writers in our community. From poetry to dystopian novels to short story collections, nonfiction, and a cookbook memoir, check out the list of FSU books and please support these authors by pre-ordering.

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