Lement Harris was friends with the Edwards family, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1933-1934.

Willard Harris was the child of a wealthy family who lost his fortune in the stock market crash. He was eventually unable to find work in the USSR and returned to America, never to return to the Soviet Union. His wife was a bird fancier who was emotionally disengaged from her children. After she lost her job as an instructor in an experimental school, she returned to America with the family's youngest child, Bert. The teen aged Marjorie was abandoned in the Soviet Union with her brother, Dan Kenneth, who had taken up Soviet citizenship.

Marjorie did not like the Soviet Union and wanted to return to America, but as a young girl alone (she felt that she could not involve her brother Dan because, although he had accepted Soviet citizenship he was still viewed as a foreigner) she did not have the guidance she needed. On a trip into the city of Moscow to visit a friend, she was taken into custody, her passport was taken from her and she was frightened into signing Soviet citizenship papers.

In the collection is a 55 page document telling the story of her years in the Soviet Union and her trip out in 1941-1942, as the Germans were nearing Moscow, via Kuibyshev, Teheran, Basra (where she worked as a secretary to an American Counsel), Karachi, New York, and finally back to Fairhope, Alabama where she had started her trip almost ten years earlier. She never saw her brother again, and she never forgave her father for abandoning her in the Soviet Union. The memoir is a fascinating read and reveals much about the life in Russia before and during World War II.

Lement Harris corresponded with Dan (whom he calls Kenneth) in 1964 and 1965 and these letters are included in this addendum.

Digital copies of these items were given to Carl Harrington by Olga Bukhalova, Willard's great-granddaughter. Carl in turn shared them with us, with Olga's permission.