{"id":227,"date":"2026-06-01T13:42:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=227"},"modified":"2026-06-01T13:42:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:42:29","slug":"the-plight-of-the-radicals-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"The Plight of the Radical\u2019s Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Russian Revolution aimed to dissolve the family. Neither true equality nor true freedom could be achieved, the Bolsheviks argued, until class bonds trumped all other loyalties\u2014that is, until people no longer felt greater responsibility toward their family than they did toward strangers. \u201cThe worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine,\u201d Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet Union\u2019s first people\u2019s commissar for social welfare, wrote. \u201cThere are only our children, the children of Russia\u2019s communist workers.\u201d The early government \u201ctried its best to separate the children from the family,\u201d as Leon Trotsky later wrote, \u201cin order thus to protect them from the traditions of a stagnant mode of life.\u201d<\/p>

Read more The Spanish Exception<\/a><\/p>

This radical attempt to dilute and deny family attachments is the specter haunting The Hill<\/i>, a remarkable debut novel by Harriet Clark. The author is the daughter of Judy Clark, a onetime member of the American Marxist militant group known as the Weather Underground. Judy, a single mother, left 11-month-old Harriet at home when she drove the getaway car in a 1981 robbery of an armored truck that left a Brink\u2019s guard and two police officers dead. \u201cRevolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,\u201d Judy told the jury at her trial. The judge gave her the harshest available sentence: a minimum of 75 years. Harriet grew up first in a commune on Manhattan\u2019s West Side and then, starting at age 5, in the home of her grandparents, Ruth and Joe, both disillusioned American Communists. (They had raised Judy partly in 1950s Moscow, where Joe had written for the Daily Worker<\/i>.) Harriet got to be with her mother only during visiting hours, mostly at the maximum-security women\u2019s prison in Bedford Hills, New York.<\/p>

With The Hill<\/i>, Clark has transformed her unusual childhood into a beautiful, unrepeatable bildungsroman. One of her essential maneuvers is to treat politics\u2014and in particular the millenarian views that once animated and then fractured her family\u2014as an exhausted subject, an aspect of character rather than a topic in itself. As Suzanna, the protagonist, tells us in narrating her childhood: \u201cThough previously in the family attempts had been made to act on the world, great efforts to change it, what had been communicated to me was that the world was none of my business.\u201d Young Suzanna, like The Hill <\/i>itself, is a green shoot rising from the crater of a fiery political experiment\u2014and giving new meaning to it. \u201cIf you figure out a way to be happy,\u201d Suzanna\u2019s mother writes to her, \u201cit changes everything. Not just everything to come but everything that came before.\u201d In this seemingly vanilla request to pursue happiness lies a profound theme: the inevitable decay of a pure and uncompromising ideology when confronted with the pure and humanizing presence of children.<\/p>

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The Hill: A Novel<\/div>
By Clark, Harriet<\/div><\/div>