In the 1950s, amid Cold War paranoia, Western governments began offering their most radical leftist intellectuals a chance to “voluntarily” relocate to the Soviet bloc. Marketed as a gesture of ideological tolerance, this policy—nicknamed Welcome to Leave—quietly expelled dissenters to the East. There, welcomed as trophies by the USSR, these thinkers would confront a new reality: living under the system they once defended from afar. What began as exile soon became a reckoning…
What If: The Archive 