As Communist dictator Joseph Stalin consolidated his power in Russia in 1931, a 20-year-old Sheridan woman accompanied by two young men from Germany made headlines across the country by driving from Berlin to Moscow.

Adolf Hitler was still a couple of years away from becoming Germany’s chancellor and Soviet Russian leader Vladimir Lenin had been in his Red Square tomb for seven years.

As they covered the 1,131 miles between the two cities in a week across unpaved Polish and Russian roads, Joan Platt became the first American woman many of the peasants in those countries would meet. And she experienced their hospitality as well as their hostility.

Platt’s father was working as a mining engineer there when she went from mentions in the Sheridan-area newspaper’s social pages to a New York

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