Slavery Primary Sources | American Federation of Labor

"Free Labor vs. Slave Labor: Irrepressible Conflict"
Published in Slave Labor in Russia: The Case Presented by the
American Federation of Labor to the United Nations, 1949

At the beginning of World War II (1939-45), the Soviet Union (a former country of eastern Europe and northern Asia that united Russia and various other soviet republics) under Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) had been allied with Nazi Germany; however, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had ended this alliance. As a result, the Soviet Union joined forces with Great Britain and the United States against Nazi Germany. Even before the war ended in 1945, this alliance was falling apart, largely because of different ways they treated human life: America and Britain were, for all their faults, countries with a high value for freedom and human life, whereas Stalin's regime was built on slave labor, repression, and...