Fred Erwin Beal (1896–1954) was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion. In 1929 he had been a cause célèbre when, in Gastonia, North Carolina, he was convicted in an irregular trial of conspiracy in the strike-related killing of a local police chief. But having escaped to the Soviet Union, his decision in 1933 to return and bear witness to the costs of Stalin's collectivist policies, including famine in Ukraine, was disparaged and resisted by many of his erstwhile supporters.

The New York Times remained committed to what it has since acknowledged was the "tendentious" reporting of Soviet achievements by its Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. It was left first to Forverts, the Yiddish-language version of a New York socialist daily, and then, nationwide, to the right-wing Hearst Press to publish Beal's accounts.

In his later memoirs, Beal's disillusion with communism extended to his experience as a labor organizer with the Communist Party in the United States and with what he concluded had been the party's calculated sacrifice of his, and his co-defendants', interests in their Gastonia trial.

When Beal decided to skip the appeal of his Gastonia trial conviction, and travel to Russia he was following his co-defendant and Communist Party (CPUSA) comrade, Clarence Miller. Both men had been facing seventeen to twenty years hard labor in the Raleigh penitentiary. In Moscow, their paths parted. Beal was sent away on a propaganda tour of Central Asia (where he was alarmed to see children mobilized for work in the cotton fields). Then in 1931, after being persuaded by the American party leaders to end an undercover return to the United States, to a new large-scale tractor plant in Kharkiv. This was a project hailed by Stalin as "a steel bastion of the collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine".

Meanwhile, Beal describes Miller, "who was never a worker", as "blossoming out" in Moscow as a "Red professor" with a comfortable apartment. From his vantage in Kharkiv, Beal wrote, "I could not, like Clarence Miller and so many other complaisant dream-walkers, convince myself that the suffering and futility which I saw everywhere in Stalin-land were but figments of the Capitalist imagination."

At the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, Beal directed "Propaganda and Cultural Affairs" for a colony of several hundred foreign workers and specialists. Under his name, Moscow published a Pictorial Survey of their contribution to "socialist construction". In this, Beal admitted only to the voluntary renunciation of "luxuries". Later, he was to give a very different account. The colony suffered acute shortages of food and fuel, but was "divided by a chasm from the ten thousand Russian workers employed". To protest their conditions, these workers resorted to the only weapon open to them, "silent sabotage". Meanwhile, at the factory gates there was starvation.

In the surrounding countryside Beal, in the spring of 1933, reported finding bodies unburied on abandoned fields and in deserted villages.

I have seen dead people who had died naturally, before. But this was from a cause and a definite one. A cause which I was somehow associated with, which I had been supporting. [...] Some bodies were decomposed. Others were fresher. When we opened the doors, huge rats would scamper to their holes and then come out and stare at us. [Behind the houses] signs were stuck up on graves [...]