This study portrays the beginnings of what has been termed industrial immigration from Czechoslovakia to Soviet Russia in the interwar period. On the basis of materials mainly drawn from Russian archives, it tracks a group of 14 miners and mining engineers primarily from the Kladno mining district, but also from the North Bohemian mining district, and eight members of their families. They departed for the Soviet Donbass region in June 1921 with a vision of earning good income for a period of one year and of the possibility of permanently settling there, but after only a few months some already began returning to their homeland disillusioned and lacking funds. By tracking the fates of individual members of this expedition we elucidate the causes for the failure of this particular program as well as other unsuccessful attempts at employing foreign experts in Soviet industry at the beginning of the 1920s.