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The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia
A history of the migration of thousands of Americans to Soviet Russia in the years prior to World War II recounts how Depression-era Americans from all walks of life pursued what they believed would be better opportunities in Russia only to be targeted, incarcerated, and executed by the Stalin regime. 30,000 first printing.
436 pages, Hardcover
First published July 17, 2007
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August 13, 2012
The other Joads
Many people will be familiar with the story of the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the great epic of the Great Depression in America, or from the film of the same name directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Tom and his family are dirt poor ‘Okies’, who escape from Oklahoma’s ever expanding Dust Bowl, moving west to California in search of a better life. Instead they are met with hostility and exploitation.
The Joads were lucky. There were other Joads, other poor Americans who tried to flee the Depression, going off in search of a better life, taking their families with them. But these people did not go west; they went east; they went all the way to Stalin’s Russia. There they met something worse than hostility and exploitation; there they met slavery and death.
This is no fiction; this is a real American tragedy, a tragedy in which the hapless and the helpless were betrayed not just by their hosts but by their own government. These are the forgotten Americans and this is a forgotten story. At least it was until the appearance of The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.
I’ve read several accounts of the impact of Stalin and Stalinism but this is possibly the most poignant. This is the story of people lured east in what the author describes as the least heralded migration in American history. They were lured away from their homes by lies and stupidity; the lies of Soviet propaganda and the stupidity of intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, who swallowed the propaganda whole, seduced by the biggest Potemkin façade ever devised.
They were deceived also by their own countrymen, by the likes of Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who wrote articles urging Americans to come to Russia. For a man on the spot, Duranty’s understanding of Russia was abysmal and his ‘journalism’ biased enough to border on deception and fraud. His reports earned him a Pulitzer Prize, which might give some insight into the true value of this benighted award.
To begin with things for the Joads were not too bad. They found work in the new Ford factory on the banks of the Volga among other places. They brought their own pastimes with them, playing baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park. It was the early 1930s, a period of relative calm in Soviet history. People were generally welcoming. Still, there were worrying signs. The migrants were obliged to surrender their passports. Most of them never saw them again. Most of them were never to see America again
History fell on Russia with the abruptness of an Arctic night. The murder of Sergey Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, in December 1934 was the beginning of an epic tragedy. As Russia moved by stages into the Great Terror, fear gripped the American community. There was no more baseball. All at once the American Embassy in Moscow was besieged to people wanting to go home. They were met not with sympathy but indifference. Those turned away were arrested in the street by the NKVD, the Soviet security police. Whole families were rounded up and sent into the night and fog of the gulags.
Tzouliadis tells his story with insight and vigour, leavened by an undercurrent of incredulity and anger. It’s difficult not to feel anger at the fate of so many people who were effectively abandoned. They were no more, as one American diplomat put it, merely flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life, adding that “they are born, live and die, and their existence has probably no individual effect on any governing or supervising authority.”
They certainly had no effect on the despicable Joseph Davis, a multi-millionaire appointed as ambassador to Russia by President Roosevelt, on the basis of what qualification or talent is impossible to determine. While he ignored the plight of the Americans in Moscow he fawned over Stalin, even taking the infamous Moscow show trails at face value, contrary to the opinion among the rest of the embassy staff. While Americans were drawn in ever greater numbers into Soviet death camps, Davis descended into lugubrious lyricism over Stalin’s “exceedingly kind and gentle brown eyes”.
The blindness and betrayal goes on. There is Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term in office, a Soviet stooge who but for fortune might have gone on to becomes President in his own right. During the war he visited Magadan in the remote Kolyma district, the very centre of the Soviet system of mass labour and mass death. In his blindness he saw nothing.
Wallace was a fool. Worse still is the case of the black singer Paul Robeson, who became aware just how bad the oppression was while continuing to laud Stalin. Acutely aware of racial injustice in his own country, he was wilfully blind to murderous injustice in Soviet Russia. His speeches and actions, as Tzouliadis says, had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least he was morally culpable. After Davis he is the one character in the story that filled me with particular loathing.
Thinking of the Joads, some lines from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago comes to mind. It’s about Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, whose fate sounds as an echo for all the martyred and brutalised children of the earth – “One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”
There are some stories of survival in The Forsaken, none more remarkable than that Thomas Sgovio from Buffalo, New York, but most have left no trace at all, unlike Lara not even a name. This important book does well to fill some of the silences of time
Many people will be familiar with the story of the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the great epic of the Great Depression in America, or from the film of the same name directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Tom and his family are dirt poor ‘Okies’, who escape from Oklahoma’s ever expanding Dust Bowl, moving west to California in search of a better life. Instead they are met with hostility and exploitation.
The Joads were lucky. There were other Joads, other poor Americans who tried to flee the Depression, going off in search of a better life, taking their families with them. But these people did not go west; they went east; they went all the way to Stalin’s Russia. There they met something worse than hostility and exploitation; there they met slavery and death.
This is no fiction; this is a real American tragedy, a tragedy in which the hapless and the helpless were betrayed not just by their hosts but by their own government. These are the forgotten Americans and this is a forgotten story. At least it was until the appearance of The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.
I’ve read several accounts of the impact of Stalin and Stalinism but this is possibly the most poignant. This is the story of people lured east in what the author describes as the least heralded migration in American history. They were lured away from their homes by lies and stupidity; the lies of Soviet propaganda and the stupidity of intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, who swallowed the propaganda whole, seduced by the biggest Potemkin façade ever devised.
They were deceived also by their own countrymen, by the likes of Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who wrote articles urging Americans to come to Russia. For a man on the spot, Duranty’s understanding of Russia was abysmal and his ‘journalism’ biased enough to border on deception and fraud. His reports earned him a Pulitzer Prize, which might give some insight into the true value of this benighted award.
To begin with things for the Joads were not too bad. They found work in the new Ford factory on the banks of the Volga among other places. They brought their own pastimes with them, playing baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park. It was the early 1930s, a period of relative calm in Soviet history. People were generally welcoming. Still, there were worrying signs. The migrants were obliged to surrender their passports. Most of them never saw them again. Most of them were never to see America again
History fell on Russia with the abruptness of an Arctic night. The murder of Sergey Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, in December 1934 was the beginning of an epic tragedy. As Russia moved by stages into the Great Terror, fear gripped the American community. There was no more baseball. All at once the American Embassy in Moscow was besieged to people wanting to go home. They were met not with sympathy but indifference. Those turned away were arrested in the street by the NKVD, the Soviet security police. Whole families were rounded up and sent into the night and fog of the gulags.
Tzouliadis tells his story with insight and vigour, leavened by an undercurrent of incredulity and anger. It’s difficult not to feel anger at the fate of so many people who were effectively abandoned. They were no more, as one American diplomat put it, merely flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life, adding that “they are born, live and die, and their existence has probably no individual effect on any governing or supervising authority.”
They certainly had no effect on the despicable Joseph Davis, a multi-millionaire appointed as ambassador to Russia by President Roosevelt, on the basis of what qualification or talent is impossible to determine. While he ignored the plight of the Americans in Moscow he fawned over Stalin, even taking the infamous Moscow show trails at face value, contrary to the opinion among the rest of the embassy staff. While Americans were drawn in ever greater numbers into Soviet death camps, Davis descended into lugubrious lyricism over Stalin’s “exceedingly kind and gentle brown eyes”.
The blindness and betrayal goes on. There is Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term in office, a Soviet stooge who but for fortune might have gone on to becomes President in his own right. During the war he visited Magadan in the remote Kolyma district, the very centre of the Soviet system of mass labour and mass death. In his blindness he saw nothing.
Wallace was a fool. Worse still is the case of the black singer Paul Robeson, who became aware just how bad the oppression was while continuing to laud Stalin. Acutely aware of racial injustice in his own country, he was wilfully blind to murderous injustice in Soviet Russia. His speeches and actions, as Tzouliadis says, had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least he was morally culpable. After Davis he is the one character in the story that filled me with particular loathing.
Thinking of the Joads, some lines from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago comes to mind. It’s about Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, whose fate sounds as an echo for all the martyred and brutalised children of the earth – “One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”
There are some stories of survival in The Forsaken, none more remarkable than that Thomas Sgovio from Buffalo, New York, but most have left no trace at all, unlike Lara not even a name. This important book does well to fill some of the silences of time
April 27, 2014
The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is an important and tragic piece of history.
This is an extremely well researched book and tells the forgotten and relatively unknown story of families who emigrate to Russia from America during the era of the American Depression in the hope of a new life only to become victims of Stalin's terror during his 5 year plan in which millions of Russians and thousands of Americans are brutally interrogated and either assassinated or sent to Gulags in Siberia. We learn of the nightmare of the secret police, nightly disappearances, famine gulags and torture that innocent people had to endure at the hands of a bizarre leader. I really felt the fear and the distrust of Russian citizens during this period of history throughout this book and while I have read quite a few books set around this time I had not realised so many American had been victims of Stalin's regime also.
There is much about this book that I would praise. It is extremely well researched and deals with a part of history that will educate and inform the reader and you know the information while harrowing and depressing is correct and the story brilliantly told. I learned a lot from this book and am so glad I read it.
A word of warning though the book reads like a history book as it is a very detailed piece of work and at times I did find it slow reading as there is a huge amount of information to digest but the book was a fantastic account of thousands of Americans who moved to the Soviet Union only to perish or be imprisoned in the harsh and cruel gulags. I had not been aware or read about this anywhere until I came across this book on Goodreads.
I really felt the book could have benefited with photographs of 1930s Russia and also a map of areas mentioned would have been so helpful as I think it is important to give the reader a better idea of the setting.
Overall a powerful historical read and a book that will stay with me for a long time.
This is an extremely well researched book and tells the forgotten and relatively unknown story of families who emigrate to Russia from America during the era of the American Depression in the hope of a new life only to become victims of Stalin's terror during his 5 year plan in which millions of Russians and thousands of Americans are brutally interrogated and either assassinated or sent to Gulags in Siberia. We learn of the nightmare of the secret police, nightly disappearances, famine gulags and torture that innocent people had to endure at the hands of a bizarre leader. I really felt the fear and the distrust of Russian citizens during this period of history throughout this book and while I have read quite a few books set around this time I had not realised so many American had been victims of Stalin's regime also.
There is much about this book that I would praise. It is extremely well researched and deals with a part of history that will educate and inform the reader and you know the information while harrowing and depressing is correct and the story brilliantly told. I learned a lot from this book and am so glad I read it.
A word of warning though the book reads like a history book as it is a very detailed piece of work and at times I did find it slow reading as there is a huge amount of information to digest but the book was a fantastic account of thousands of Americans who moved to the Soviet Union only to perish or be imprisoned in the harsh and cruel gulags. I had not been aware or read about this anywhere until I came across this book on Goodreads.
I really felt the book could have benefited with photographs of 1930s Russia and also a map of areas mentioned would have been so helpful as I think it is important to give the reader a better idea of the setting.
Overall a powerful historical read and a book that will stay with me for a long time.
April 16, 2012
My dad, when I was a kid, used to refer to Joseph Davies, America's 2nd Ambassador to the Soviet Union and native of our hometown, as a "communist." As I got older, I used to chalk this up to a latent McCarthyism within him, but Tzouliadis has helped me understand better something I think my dad knew about: American complicity with the rise of Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
Davies, among others, stands out in this book as the poster child for a quiet admiration held by many in the American government for the worker's paradise. It wasn't a love for communism per se, but it was a respect for it in light of American struggles in the Great Depression. FDR himself admired Stalin to the point of character flaw and may have done far more to set the table for the Cold War through his inattention to Stalin than the atom bomb.
Sadly, as this book shows with graphic detail, even Americans were dying at the hands of Stalin in the purges. These Americans, admittedly, were no great patriots, but they had not become Soviet citizens by any legal means, either. The US had a responsibility for these people and either did not, or would not, believe the reports coming back regarding their treatment in the Gulags.
Tzouliadis has done the world a favor, albeit a grim one, in giving us a picture of their experience. This book haunts. The most painful lesson is the lesson learned when the one you thought was the hero turns out to be a villain. This is true of Stalin, but it is also true of many American diplomats of the period as well...and people died due to this distortion of the truth. Tzouliadis tells a tale we should pray never repeats itself.
Davies, among others, stands out in this book as the poster child for a quiet admiration held by many in the American government for the worker's paradise. It wasn't a love for communism per se, but it was a respect for it in light of American struggles in the Great Depression. FDR himself admired Stalin to the point of character flaw and may have done far more to set the table for the Cold War through his inattention to Stalin than the atom bomb.
Sadly, as this book shows with graphic detail, even Americans were dying at the hands of Stalin in the purges. These Americans, admittedly, were no great patriots, but they had not become Soviet citizens by any legal means, either. The US had a responsibility for these people and either did not, or would not, believe the reports coming back regarding their treatment in the Gulags.
Tzouliadis has done the world a favor, albeit a grim one, in giving us a picture of their experience. This book haunts. The most painful lesson is the lesson learned when the one you thought was the hero turns out to be a villain. This is true of Stalin, but it is also true of many American diplomats of the period as well...and people died due to this distortion of the truth. Tzouliadis tells a tale we should pray never repeats itself.
July 23, 2015
One of my friends once asked me, “Why do Russians want Stalin back? He was a mass murderer and killed Russians by the millions. Why do Russian people think he was a good ruler?” All I could say was, “Well, if I knew the answer, I would still live in Russia… I moved to Canada, because I can't justify those sentiments.” Then he continued: “Have you heard about the thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union to escape the Great Depression? And they vanished in the Gulag”. Never heard of. To follow-up our discussion he sent me a gift – a book titled The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.
I thought I knew quite a bit about Stalinism and the Gulag. I had read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. My teacher of literature encouraged us, future humanities students, to learn as much as possible about the darkest chapters of the Russian history. My family suffered from the repressions, after all. Yet, the book proved how little did I know.
The Forsaken starts with the introduction of a few individuals who, among many others, left the USA for the Soviet Union lured by communist propaganda and driven by the desperation of the Great Depression. As one reviewer on Amazon said, “many saw the apparent failure of capitalism contrasted unfavorably with the apparent success of the 'Soviet experiment' and emigrated freely to join the new socialist state unaware of what the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' truly entailed.” History is like a panoramic picture – you can't make out too many details there or individual faces. But the bigger picture that historians usually strive to provide makes each particular life seem unimportant. Sometimes to comprehend the lessons of history, we need portraits. Tim Tzouliadis portrayed history through life stories of a few American expats, which makes the narration more powerful and gives a reader a fiction-like experience.
I read fast in both Russian and English, but it took me a few months to get through this book. I liked the writing style of Tim Tzouliadis, but what he wrote about was often overwhelmingly gloomy. I had to take a break after each dozen pages. Some episodes were particularly unbearable, so I took longer pauses. When I read about routine tortures or mass shootings “by quotas”, I literally felt the sour smell of blood.
Yet, the book is not about ultimate suffering or the incomprehensible cruelty of the Stalin's regime. It is not even about the Soviet Union. Not solely about it. It is about little people and great powers playing a great game. And, most importantly, about the justice that was denied to millions of innocent victims, among which are thousands (probably, hundreds thousands) of Americans. “At the end of the war, allied investigators found it difficult to comprehend how one million people could have been killed in a few acres of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. Only after the downfall of the regime, and the arrival of the victorious Allied armies, could the enormity of the crime be revealed—and later, in Nuremberg, a measure of justice brought to bear. In the Soviet Union, there was never a victorious army to expose the consequences of Stalin’s rule; nor would there ever be a Nuremberg. Instead, the victims of Kolyma, and every other terminal point of the Gulag, remained concealed even as the killings continued unabated. In Kolyma, the rhetorical question Joseph Goebbels had asked in his diary actually came true: “For when we win who will question us on our methods?”, Tim Tzouliadis wrote.
If I had a chance to talk to Tim Tzouliadis, I would like to ask him a few questions. How did he manage to get through those archival documents, memoirs and other evidences of the terror (the bibliography section of the book is really impressive)? I know that the people who investigated crimes of the nazi regime often suffered from the nervous breakdowns. How did he find the strength to carry on? Did he try to get access to the Russian archives? Russian authorities still keep documents about Stalin's crimes classified, but some papers were unearthed during 1990s and early 2000s, this is how I managed to find the information about my family. Did he receive any feedback from Russian readers, and, perhaps, from descendants of those who kept the repression machine running? How did American readers react to this book? Though the author realistically estimated the chances for a Nuremberg for Stalin as very slim, nearly non-existent, is there any hope for a thorough investigation of what happened in the Soviet Union and was persistently ignored by the rest of the world for decades?
And, of course, I would like to thank the writer for his honest book. Your work is very important, Mr. Tzoudialis.
I thought I knew quite a bit about Stalinism and the Gulag. I had read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. My teacher of literature encouraged us, future humanities students, to learn as much as possible about the darkest chapters of the Russian history. My family suffered from the repressions, after all. Yet, the book proved how little did I know.
The Forsaken starts with the introduction of a few individuals who, among many others, left the USA for the Soviet Union lured by communist propaganda and driven by the desperation of the Great Depression. As one reviewer on Amazon said, “many saw the apparent failure of capitalism contrasted unfavorably with the apparent success of the 'Soviet experiment' and emigrated freely to join the new socialist state unaware of what the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' truly entailed.” History is like a panoramic picture – you can't make out too many details there or individual faces. But the bigger picture that historians usually strive to provide makes each particular life seem unimportant. Sometimes to comprehend the lessons of history, we need portraits. Tim Tzouliadis portrayed history through life stories of a few American expats, which makes the narration more powerful and gives a reader a fiction-like experience.
I read fast in both Russian and English, but it took me a few months to get through this book. I liked the writing style of Tim Tzouliadis, but what he wrote about was often overwhelmingly gloomy. I had to take a break after each dozen pages. Some episodes were particularly unbearable, so I took longer pauses. When I read about routine tortures or mass shootings “by quotas”, I literally felt the sour smell of blood.
Yet, the book is not about ultimate suffering or the incomprehensible cruelty of the Stalin's regime. It is not even about the Soviet Union. Not solely about it. It is about little people and great powers playing a great game. And, most importantly, about the justice that was denied to millions of innocent victims, among which are thousands (probably, hundreds thousands) of Americans. “At the end of the war, allied investigators found it difficult to comprehend how one million people could have been killed in a few acres of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. Only after the downfall of the regime, and the arrival of the victorious Allied armies, could the enormity of the crime be revealed—and later, in Nuremberg, a measure of justice brought to bear. In the Soviet Union, there was never a victorious army to expose the consequences of Stalin’s rule; nor would there ever be a Nuremberg. Instead, the victims of Kolyma, and every other terminal point of the Gulag, remained concealed even as the killings continued unabated. In Kolyma, the rhetorical question Joseph Goebbels had asked in his diary actually came true: “For when we win who will question us on our methods?”, Tim Tzouliadis wrote.
If I had a chance to talk to Tim Tzouliadis, I would like to ask him a few questions. How did he manage to get through those archival documents, memoirs and other evidences of the terror (the bibliography section of the book is really impressive)? I know that the people who investigated crimes of the nazi regime often suffered from the nervous breakdowns. How did he find the strength to carry on? Did he try to get access to the Russian archives? Russian authorities still keep documents about Stalin's crimes classified, but some papers were unearthed during 1990s and early 2000s, this is how I managed to find the information about my family. Did he receive any feedback from Russian readers, and, perhaps, from descendants of those who kept the repression machine running? How did American readers react to this book? Though the author realistically estimated the chances for a Nuremberg for Stalin as very slim, nearly non-existent, is there any hope for a thorough investigation of what happened in the Soviet Union and was persistently ignored by the rest of the world for decades?
And, of course, I would like to thank the writer for his honest book. Your work is very important, Mr. Tzoudialis.
March 31, 2009
The full title of this excellent book is "The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia". It's a very readable non-fiction account of the lives of the many Americans who emigrated to the USSR during the Great Depression. In the 1930's the US was going through an enormous economic decline and rampant unemployment. The USSR seemed attractive to many Americans: the country was stabilizing after the October Revolution, in the middle of what was considered a grand social experiment - the first communist country. This was exciting at the time - a young country that had just overthrown Tsarist rule and was trying a new, radical form of government. Thousands of Americans emigrated, searching for work and prosperity, feeling like the original American pioneers looking for fortune in an unknown land. They found work, brought over their families, started a prosperous immigrant society. Russia in the 30's even had baseball leagues and English language newspapers. Henry Ford did good business with Stalin and helped him set up an automobile construction plant, manned by American engineers and workers.
In the second half of the decade, the Stalin regime started becoming more paranoid, arresting and detaining some of the original revolutionaries in its drive to consolidate its power. This process would become completely unhinged as the years went by, leading to the arrest of hundreds of thousands of people --- including the American immigrants. Many of them ended up in the Gulag "corrective labor camps" - concentration camps in Northeast Russia, mainly there to mine gold and later uranium in the most horrible circumstances. The vast majority of the prisoners died within a few months of arrival, necessitating ever more new prisoners to keep the gold flowing. It's hard to wrap your mind around the amount of people who died in those camps.
Meanwhile, the American embassy in Moscow was completely ineffectual in trying to protect US citizens or get them released from the Gulag system. One American ambassador actively misinformed Roosevelt to protect his own lavish lifestyle. The fact that most of the immigrant Americans were forced to release their passports and take on Russian nationality didn't help. The end result is that thousands upon thousands of Americans were basically abandoned to their fate.
Even more heartbreaking is the fact that some of the prisoners who managed to survive the camps were released after the second World War, only to be re-arrested when the Cold War broke out in the years after WWII. "The Forsaken" details the entire period from the early 1930's through the post-Stalin years, and even deals with some of the problems researchers encountered in the post-Glasnost era when trying to access some of the historical records.
This is an excellent book, well-researched and, despite the subject matter, very readable. The author deftly combines the personal stories of the American immigrants with the history of the era. The book is informative and touching at the same time.
(One note: I had to find a second book to read because, after reading a few chapters of "The Forsaken" before bed, I had some really horrific nightmares - and this was even before I got to the more detailed descriptions of the Gulag camps. The book is very tasteful and never graphical, but it still affected me very strongly, so I read "The Forsaken" during the day only.)
In the second half of the decade, the Stalin regime started becoming more paranoid, arresting and detaining some of the original revolutionaries in its drive to consolidate its power. This process would become completely unhinged as the years went by, leading to the arrest of hundreds of thousands of people --- including the American immigrants. Many of them ended up in the Gulag "corrective labor camps" - concentration camps in Northeast Russia, mainly there to mine gold and later uranium in the most horrible circumstances. The vast majority of the prisoners died within a few months of arrival, necessitating ever more new prisoners to keep the gold flowing. It's hard to wrap your mind around the amount of people who died in those camps.
Meanwhile, the American embassy in Moscow was completely ineffectual in trying to protect US citizens or get them released from the Gulag system. One American ambassador actively misinformed Roosevelt to protect his own lavish lifestyle. The fact that most of the immigrant Americans were forced to release their passports and take on Russian nationality didn't help. The end result is that thousands upon thousands of Americans were basically abandoned to their fate.
Even more heartbreaking is the fact that some of the prisoners who managed to survive the camps were released after the second World War, only to be re-arrested when the Cold War broke out in the years after WWII. "The Forsaken" details the entire period from the early 1930's through the post-Stalin years, and even deals with some of the problems researchers encountered in the post-Glasnost era when trying to access some of the historical records.
This is an excellent book, well-researched and, despite the subject matter, very readable. The author deftly combines the personal stories of the American immigrants with the history of the era. The book is informative and touching at the same time.
(One note: I had to find a second book to read because, after reading a few chapters of "The Forsaken" before bed, I had some really horrific nightmares - and this was even before I got to the more detailed descriptions of the Gulag camps. The book is very tasteful and never graphical, but it still affected me very strongly, so I read "The Forsaken" during the day only.)
December 8, 2009
One of the best, most important books I've ever read. It should be required reading in all US classrooms to explain why we fought the Cold War and why we continue to fight for freedom today. Many people, some avowed communists, some just looking for work ventured to the "Worker's Paradise" the USSR during the Great Depression most never to be seen of or heard from again, worked to death in Stalin's gulags. All but abandoned by the US, their story is truly important, and a vivid lesson as to why we need to study history in order to not repeat it.
February 17, 2010
This is a book that every American school student should read. It will show them that their government was complicit with the Soviet Union in the imprisonment, torture and murder of thousands of American citizens. There were many American service members who were captured in Korea during the Korean War who were sent into the Soviet Gulag system and never returned.
November 16, 2009
I knew I wanted to read this after all those books about Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons, and although it took me a while to find it (someone's TBR pile is, um, a little large), I did!
For some reason, probably because a Motel T is on the cover, I thought it was about Ford workers who moved to the USSR and disappeared during Stalin's decades-long Terror. But instead, Tzouliadias provides a comprehensive overview of the many Americans--some Communists committed to Stalin's cause, some simply seeking jobs during the Great Depression, and some who simply went with their families. There also were some Ford workers who went over when Henry Ford sold a factory that he was about to destroy to Stalin, and thus made is possible for the USSR to begin motor vehicle production.
In a horrifying twist, most of these first cars ended up in the fleet of the NKVD, the secret police of the time--or those who arrested, tortured, and ran the prison camps in which so many died during Stalin's mass murder of close to twenty million people. (Yes, twenty million)
Regardless as to why they went to the USSR, almost all of these Americans who went, even the die-hard Communists, soon found themselves rounded up and sent to one of the many camps where so many died--and although this book does focus on the Americans who moved to the USSR and died, Tzouliadis doesn't stint on discussing the effects of Stalin's brutal and mind-boggling cruelty on Russians as well as POWs in WW II, as well as the startlingly inept response those Americans who did try to get help from the US embassy or government received. (The descriptions of one of the US ambassadors at the time (along with most of his staff), made me feel sick to my stomach, as does the fact that so many documents about the Terror were classified for years by the US Government--I sure don't think as much of President Roosevelt as I used to after reading this book)
Overall, this book serves as a good introduction to Stalin's ferociously efficient and brutal murder of millions, with a particular focus on those Americans who died. For an even more in-depth look at the Terror as witnessed by those who suffered most--Russians--please read The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes, which is truly outstanding, and for a ferocious rebuttal of those who supported Stalin and turned a blind eye to what he was doing---and how his purges still remain mostly unnoticed by history, read Martin Amis's blistering Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.
For some reason, probably because a Motel T is on the cover, I thought it was about Ford workers who moved to the USSR and disappeared during Stalin's decades-long Terror. But instead, Tzouliadias provides a comprehensive overview of the many Americans--some Communists committed to Stalin's cause, some simply seeking jobs during the Great Depression, and some who simply went with their families. There also were some Ford workers who went over when Henry Ford sold a factory that he was about to destroy to Stalin, and thus made is possible for the USSR to begin motor vehicle production.
In a horrifying twist, most of these first cars ended up in the fleet of the NKVD, the secret police of the time--or those who arrested, tortured, and ran the prison camps in which so many died during Stalin's mass murder of close to twenty million people. (Yes, twenty million)
Regardless as to why they went to the USSR, almost all of these Americans who went, even the die-hard Communists, soon found themselves rounded up and sent to one of the many camps where so many died--and although this book does focus on the Americans who moved to the USSR and died, Tzouliadis doesn't stint on discussing the effects of Stalin's brutal and mind-boggling cruelty on Russians as well as POWs in WW II, as well as the startlingly inept response those Americans who did try to get help from the US embassy or government received. (The descriptions of one of the US ambassadors at the time (along with most of his staff), made me feel sick to my stomach, as does the fact that so many documents about the Terror were classified for years by the US Government--I sure don't think as much of President Roosevelt as I used to after reading this book)
Overall, this book serves as a good introduction to Stalin's ferociously efficient and brutal murder of millions, with a particular focus on those Americans who died. For an even more in-depth look at the Terror as witnessed by those who suffered most--Russians--please read The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes, which is truly outstanding, and for a ferocious rebuttal of those who supported Stalin and turned a blind eye to what he was doing---and how his purges still remain mostly unnoticed by history, read Martin Amis's blistering Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.
April 17, 2010
Reveals the fascinating and little-known phenomenon of Depression-era Americans moving to the Soviet Union and ending up trapped in a Stalinist hell. The author unearths the stories of these forgotten individuals, and lambastes the Americans who facilitated their tortures. Ambassador Joseph Davies actually proclaimed that Stalin's show trials were legitimate. Many Americans were arrested by the secret police literally right outside of the embassy, having been turned away after seeking help. Paul Robeson's willful blindness disgusted me. Walter Duranty, the New York Times journalist, is probably the worst offender of all, concealing the truth, rather than reporting it. A troubling book that should be widely read.
May 21, 2021
"Their return was often the point at which the prisoners realized it had not been enough to survive . Their essential task was yet harder: to survive and keep one's soul intact."
In early 2020, I had read an HF by Sana Krasikov "The Patriots". I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the number of disillusioned Americans who had been duped into chasing after Stalin's shimmery lure of promised jobs in the Soviet Union - during the US depression of the 30's - only to be deprived of their US citizenship, arrested and lost to the Gulag.
"The Forsaken" has been the result of my search for more information about what really happened during this time. So very few of those American souls ever made it 'home' again ; indeed forsaken and lost to history. And not only those searching for work but all of our prisoners as well from WWii and Korea who were never reclaimed.
How many Americans are even aware of the truth... the lies, the suffering, and the lost?
"It was a time to be...
'quieter than water, lower than grass.' "
__ Alexander Blok
Having read so much NF about FDR, Eleanor, Churchill, and all of the BIG names of that time in history, I have to say the one piece of information that served as a well placed 'final blow' to the solar plexus ... the name revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union as the "most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States".
"The Forsaken" leaves this reader ... a choking sob stuck in her throat.
"Russia is a Sphinx. Grieving, jubilant.
And covering herself with blood
She looks, she looks, she looks at you--her slant
Eyes lit with hatred and with love."
__Alexander Blok, "The Scythians"
In early 2020, I had read an HF by Sana Krasikov "The Patriots". I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the number of disillusioned Americans who had been duped into chasing after Stalin's shimmery lure of promised jobs in the Soviet Union - during the US depression of the 30's - only to be deprived of their US citizenship, arrested and lost to the Gulag.
"The Forsaken" has been the result of my search for more information about what really happened during this time. So very few of those American souls ever made it 'home' again ; indeed forsaken and lost to history. And not only those searching for work but all of our prisoners as well from WWii and Korea who were never reclaimed.
How many Americans are even aware of the truth... the lies, the suffering, and the lost?
"It was a time to be...
'quieter than water, lower than grass.' "
__ Alexander Blok
Having read so much NF about FDR, Eleanor, Churchill, and all of the BIG names of that time in history, I have to say the one piece of information that served as a well placed 'final blow' to the solar plexus ... the name revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union as the "most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States".
"The Forsaken" leaves this reader ... a choking sob stuck in her throat.
"Russia is a Sphinx. Grieving, jubilant.
And covering herself with blood
She looks, she looks, she looks at you--her slant
Eyes lit with hatred and with love."
__Alexander Blok, "The Scythians"
November 15, 2009
An incredible book about Americans who found themselves caught up in the Soviet Gulag, a phenomenon that has largely been lost to history (although authors like Whittaker Chambers and IB Singer mentioned it). Hard as it might be to believe, thousands of American leftists moved to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, convinced it would be the vanguard of the future. Instead, they found a cruel, paranoid totalitarian state that would eventually arrest and kill them all. There are very few happy endings in this book. If you weren't shot, you were shipped off to the camps for re-education, but the camps were set up to be killing machines. You were simply worked to death, thousands of miles from anyone who could help. Tzouliadis thoroughly traces the crimes of the Soviets, and his descriptions of the elements of the Stalinist Terror - from the late night arrests by the NKVD to the torture sessions in Lubynaka prison to the show trials to the brutal transportation to Siberia and beyond to the harrowing life of a slave laborer in the land of "social justice" - are masterful, not to mention harrowing; but special mention should be made for the American progressives who encouraged people to emigrate to the Soviet Union and then turned a blind eye when everyone they knew in Moscow was being arrested and "liquidated." There was Walter Duranty, the NY Times correspondent who never wrote a negative word during his years in Moscow. There was the US Ambassador Joseph Davies who wrote a memoir of his time in Moscow that was so obsequious the Soviet censors did not have to change a word. There was Paul Robeson, who literally sang songs to Stalin. And there was Henry Wallace - vice president in FDR's third term - who actually toured the Gulag (while in office!) and pronounced everything hunky-dory. All of these men would see their reputations destroyed during the McCarthy Era, which makes me think McCarthy may have been on to something. The connection between Stalinist Russia and certain elements of the American Left has never been presented more clearly or starkly. My only complaint, Tzouliadis refers to a number of photographs and documents that he viewed, but ... doesn't reproduce them in the book! This is one of the best books of the year, and highly recommended.
April 3, 2025
Excellent book. Well-written, good pacing, a nice mix of personal history and general history. The author is primarily concerned with Americans imprisoned by the Soviet gulag, which probably amounted to thousands of them over several decades, if not tens of thousands. Many of those Americans unjustly imprisoned freely moved to Russia for work during the Great Depression. Most of them never came back. Other Americans included military personnel from WWII.
But the author also discusses the political situation between America and the Soviet Union, including the actions (or lack thereof) taken on America's behalf by our various ambassadors. In summary, they knew what was happening but did little, if anything, to stop it. It was pretty sad.
The author also gives details about life in the camps for various Americans, from the few who survived to tell their tale. It's not much of anything new for gulag geeks like myself, but gripping just the same.
But the American angle is new, or at least the story told in its entirety. It is another reminder of how Russia has never held itself responsible for its Communist crimes - and how other countries have not forced them to. Some of Stalin's worst henchman, like Molotov, lived to a ripe old age in peaceful retirement. They deserved no better than the Nuremberg Nazis got.
This is a story that is crying out to be told, and this author has done a fine job of it.
But the author also discusses the political situation between America and the Soviet Union, including the actions (or lack thereof) taken on America's behalf by our various ambassadors. In summary, they knew what was happening but did little, if anything, to stop it. It was pretty sad.
The author also gives details about life in the camps for various Americans, from the few who survived to tell their tale. It's not much of anything new for gulag geeks like myself, but gripping just the same.
But the American angle is new, or at least the story told in its entirety. It is another reminder of how Russia has never held itself responsible for its Communist crimes - and how other countries have not forced them to. Some of Stalin's worst henchman, like Molotov, lived to a ripe old age in peaceful retirement. They deserved no better than the Nuremberg Nazis got.
This is a story that is crying out to be told, and this author has done a fine job of it.
April 11, 2012
The Great Terror that Joseph Stalin brought upon his own people during his reign as dictator from the early 1930's until his death in 1953 is a shadowy and largely unknown story to most Americans. The Nazi atrocities are far more well known for many reasons -- the Nazis were our enemies during World War II, while Russia was our ally; the Nazis left massive amounts of evidence behind in the form of photographs, documents, and eyewitnesses, while Stalin obsessed about covering up all of his evil doings; and many people in the U.S., including high-ranking political and business leaders, ideologically and financially wanted good relations with the Soviet Union to the point that they allowed themselves to be deluded by cover-ups, propaganda, and wishful thinking.
While this book focuses on the thousands of Americans who were victims of the Great Terror, for me the real story was the scope of the terror itself. Estimates of the dead range from 10 million to 30 million. Personally, I appreciate the knowledge I gained from this book even though the reading experience seemed to be not quite what it should have been.
While this book focuses on the thousands of Americans who were victims of the Great Terror, for me the real story was the scope of the terror itself. Estimates of the dead range from 10 million to 30 million. Personally, I appreciate the knowledge I gained from this book even though the reading experience seemed to be not quite what it should have been.
July 2, 2009
Like the blurb says: "A remarkable piece of forgotten history ..." How thousandsof Americans were lured to the Soviet Union during the (first) GreatDepression and then how so many of them (including many Finns) were "disappeared" during Stalin's Terror ... Absolutely riveting story!
July 25, 2019
“The Forsaken,” a book about the great Soviet/Stalinist purge and murder of millions in the 1930’s and 40’s.
In particular it is about a large number of Americans who fled America during the Great Depression hoping for a better life in what they believed was a workers paradise in the new communist Russia. It is a long and exhaustive recall of the evil which seems to be woven in human DNA and which has led to many repetitions of such inhumanity.
But while the dream lasted some 25 thousand relocated to Russia with promises of guaranteed jobs that would always support their families. And the immigrants included workers, skilled craftsmen, learned professionals, artists, musicians, and athletes. The American influence for a while was pervasive, even to the extent of baseball and American music being played in Gorky Park as well as baseball leagues formed among the various auto plants scattered out along the rivers.
Reading this book adds a sizable layer of knowledge about how this tragedy came about. It also highlights the unbelievable stupidity and cupidity of American officials all the way up to Roosevelt, or maybe what could be described as normal and yet unimaginable bureaucratic indifference to human suffering and injustice. When the dream of the workers paradise collapsed many of the surviving Americans wanted to come home. The US by and large refused those requests as the unfortunates were liquidated either by the pistol or the gulags.
It also gives one a good idea why Joe McCarthy was so convinced there were Soviet spies and sympathizers all over the government and universities. There were indeed. Many of them, and one of them was believed to be Roosevelt’s personal public works advisor, Harry Hopkins, who slept in the White House. That may not have been proved, but he was at the very least a sympathizer....as many, many people were in sympathy in those days during and right after the Depression, when confidence in America was at a low ebb.
Many of these people simply refused to believe that Stalin was murdering far more persons than even Hitler and Tojo did combined. Some estimates have as many as 20 million disappearing. One census came up just short of 26 million.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Russia received a lot a accolades and positive feedback from much of the world. Even though it should have been obvious by the mid-1930’s what Stalin was doing, we were perhaps eventually blinded from the truth because both countries were trying to become wartime allies against a common foe, Germany.
One thing that is usually forgotten or ignored is the role Henry Ford played in Russian industry following the revolution. Ford sold the Soviets complete automobile assembly plants including designs and tooling. Ford was of course also involved in sourcing materials from many countries where he invested in the suppliers.
This book was suggested by the daughter of one of my old Hungarian instructors, Jozsef Gundel. After leaving the Army Language School at the Presidio of Monterey, Joe became head of the German department at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he ultimately died. Joe, like all of the language school instructors, was strongly anti-communist, and this would be understandable coming from people who had first hand experience with the Soviets. Joe came from a wealthy family and had he stayed in Hungary he would have been shot or else sent to one of the gulags in Siberia, where he would have been beaten and starved to death in the work camps and gold mines. I put some photographs of him as a tank commander in one of my blog posts. We all loved him.
As is often the case I stand in awe of the authors who can show what determined scholarship and written words can do. The book goes on and on about details that will not stick in memory, but which accumulate in one’s historical consciousness. I am not able to fully convey how much I respect the people who can produce such written word. There are almost a hundred pages of acknowledgements, footnotes, and bibliography. The author is of 1968, a Brit from Oxford, BBC, NBC, and Nat Geo.
In particular it is about a large number of Americans who fled America during the Great Depression hoping for a better life in what they believed was a workers paradise in the new communist Russia. It is a long and exhaustive recall of the evil which seems to be woven in human DNA and which has led to many repetitions of such inhumanity.
But while the dream lasted some 25 thousand relocated to Russia with promises of guaranteed jobs that would always support their families. And the immigrants included workers, skilled craftsmen, learned professionals, artists, musicians, and athletes. The American influence for a while was pervasive, even to the extent of baseball and American music being played in Gorky Park as well as baseball leagues formed among the various auto plants scattered out along the rivers.
Reading this book adds a sizable layer of knowledge about how this tragedy came about. It also highlights the unbelievable stupidity and cupidity of American officials all the way up to Roosevelt, or maybe what could be described as normal and yet unimaginable bureaucratic indifference to human suffering and injustice. When the dream of the workers paradise collapsed many of the surviving Americans wanted to come home. The US by and large refused those requests as the unfortunates were liquidated either by the pistol or the gulags.
It also gives one a good idea why Joe McCarthy was so convinced there were Soviet spies and sympathizers all over the government and universities. There were indeed. Many of them, and one of them was believed to be Roosevelt’s personal public works advisor, Harry Hopkins, who slept in the White House. That may not have been proved, but he was at the very least a sympathizer....as many, many people were in sympathy in those days during and right after the Depression, when confidence in America was at a low ebb.
Many of these people simply refused to believe that Stalin was murdering far more persons than even Hitler and Tojo did combined. Some estimates have as many as 20 million disappearing. One census came up just short of 26 million.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Russia received a lot a accolades and positive feedback from much of the world. Even though it should have been obvious by the mid-1930’s what Stalin was doing, we were perhaps eventually blinded from the truth because both countries were trying to become wartime allies against a common foe, Germany.
One thing that is usually forgotten or ignored is the role Henry Ford played in Russian industry following the revolution. Ford sold the Soviets complete automobile assembly plants including designs and tooling. Ford was of course also involved in sourcing materials from many countries where he invested in the suppliers.
This book was suggested by the daughter of one of my old Hungarian instructors, Jozsef Gundel. After leaving the Army Language School at the Presidio of Monterey, Joe became head of the German department at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he ultimately died. Joe, like all of the language school instructors, was strongly anti-communist, and this would be understandable coming from people who had first hand experience with the Soviets. Joe came from a wealthy family and had he stayed in Hungary he would have been shot or else sent to one of the gulags in Siberia, where he would have been beaten and starved to death in the work camps and gold mines. I put some photographs of him as a tank commander in one of my blog posts. We all loved him.
As is often the case I stand in awe of the authors who can show what determined scholarship and written words can do. The book goes on and on about details that will not stick in memory, but which accumulate in one’s historical consciousness. I am not able to fully convey how much I respect the people who can produce such written word. There are almost a hundred pages of acknowledgements, footnotes, and bibliography. The author is of 1968, a Brit from Oxford, BBC, NBC, and Nat Geo.
February 28, 2020
A haunting book recounting the tragic fate of thousands of Americans who moved to the Soviet Union in early 1930s.
In the depths of the Great Depression from 1930-35 thousands of Americans moved to the USSR desparate to find work in a country that promised a brave new world a decade or so after the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time some even thought that immigration to the USSR would rival the great immigration waves to the US in the 19th Century. Many of the American's moving to the USSR were of a rdical/progressive worldview who believed that the USSR would be far prferable to the US.
Upon reaching the Soviet Union many of these Americans naturally started playing baseball in various Soivet cities and even started nascent leagues and got covered in the Russian papers. The cover of the book even shows a team pic of Americans in baseball uniforms with Cyrillic text.
The tragedy is that within years of this mirgation to the USSR the country would be caught in the grips of Stalin's Great Terror. Now instead of being the welcome guests the American immigrants became suspected outsiders presenting a risks of espionage and sabotage to the Soviet state. In due time almost all of there Americans would arrested and killed in outright executions or worked to death in the Gulags.
Tzouliadis notes the travails of two American teens who would be swept up and spend decades working in slave camps in the Artic Circle before finally getting released and getting back to the USA in the 1950s and 1960s.
One of the real crimes of the book is how utterly unconcerned and unhelpful the FDR administration was in trying to protect its citizens. No one in the US embassy in Moscow or the State Dept or FDR himself said a single word of protest as hundres and thousands of US citizens were arrested and murdered.
In the depths of the Great Depression from 1930-35 thousands of Americans moved to the USSR desparate to find work in a country that promised a brave new world a decade or so after the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time some even thought that immigration to the USSR would rival the great immigration waves to the US in the 19th Century. Many of the American's moving to the USSR were of a rdical/progressive worldview who believed that the USSR would be far prferable to the US.
Upon reaching the Soviet Union many of these Americans naturally started playing baseball in various Soivet cities and even started nascent leagues and got covered in the Russian papers. The cover of the book even shows a team pic of Americans in baseball uniforms with Cyrillic text.
The tragedy is that within years of this mirgation to the USSR the country would be caught in the grips of Stalin's Great Terror. Now instead of being the welcome guests the American immigrants became suspected outsiders presenting a risks of espionage and sabotage to the Soviet state. In due time almost all of there Americans would arrested and killed in outright executions or worked to death in the Gulags.
Tzouliadis notes the travails of two American teens who would be swept up and spend decades working in slave camps in the Artic Circle before finally getting released and getting back to the USA in the 1950s and 1960s.
One of the real crimes of the book is how utterly unconcerned and unhelpful the FDR administration was in trying to protect its citizens. No one in the US embassy in Moscow or the State Dept or FDR himself said a single word of protest as hundres and thousands of US citizens were arrested and murdered.
February 1, 2009
Slowly paced (esp. in the first few chapters) but engrossing account of three groups of Americans caught in the Soviet Union:
1. Americans who came over during the early 30's to escape the Great Depression
2. the children of those workers
3. American soldiers & pilots from during the Cold War (particularly Korea)
There are some problems with the book, however, that are probably not the fault of the writer. Because the number of sources for information about the Gulag is so small (unlike Nazis, the Soviets did not document their atrocities on film & still pictures), the book can feel like it leaps from anecdote to anecdote, rather than following a storyline. The two men it does follow, Victor & Thomas, both have compelling stories which are preempted in order to bring out parallel stories & supporting anecdotes.
OTOH, the author does an amazing job of showing the "eyes closed" policies of the U.S. in dealing with the U.S.S.R. as they fought the Nazi regime. The abuse of Lend Lease materials to increase the size of the Gulag & the calculated abandonment of the American workers & their children by the American embassy is stunning.
The author doesn't spend much time on why those choices might have been made (military & strategic considerations are not a focus here). He also doesn't spend a lot of time on the reality of Soviet spy networks in the U.S. and at the highest levels, though he alludes to it. (There's another interesting book there...)
One other weakness - without some knowledge of Soviet history, some of this is pretty tough sledding.
1. Americans who came over during the early 30's to escape the Great Depression
2. the children of those workers
3. American soldiers & pilots from during the Cold War (particularly Korea)
There are some problems with the book, however, that are probably not the fault of the writer. Because the number of sources for information about the Gulag is so small (unlike Nazis, the Soviets did not document their atrocities on film & still pictures), the book can feel like it leaps from anecdote to anecdote, rather than following a storyline. The two men it does follow, Victor & Thomas, both have compelling stories which are preempted in order to bring out parallel stories & supporting anecdotes.
OTOH, the author does an amazing job of showing the "eyes closed" policies of the U.S. in dealing with the U.S.S.R. as they fought the Nazi regime. The abuse of Lend Lease materials to increase the size of the Gulag & the calculated abandonment of the American workers & their children by the American embassy is stunning.
The author doesn't spend much time on why those choices might have been made (military & strategic considerations are not a focus here). He also doesn't spend a lot of time on the reality of Soviet spy networks in the U.S. and at the highest levels, though he alludes to it. (There's another interesting book there...)
One other weakness - without some knowledge of Soviet history, some of this is pretty tough sledding.
December 23, 2019
The story begins with a picture of a baseball team. The year is 1934.
I liked the opening quote of this chapter. The quote, 1926 says:
There is much to say about Soviet Russia. It is a new world to explore. Americans know nothing about it. As long as the red flag waves over Kremlin. There is something in the air of Soviet Russia that throbbed in the air of Peracles' Athens; the England of Shakespeare; the France of Danton; ...
The Foreign autoworkers of Moscow playing against the Autoworkers' Club of the city of Gorky.
Why did these Americans go to Russia- jobs; economic necessity.
Some responded to the ad: "Soviet call for Yankee skill."
The Media portrayed Russia as more than it was.
Some people were struggling to survive in parts of the America. Some could not even listen to FDR's inaugural speech. They had traded in their radios for cash. During this time more people were leaving the United States than were arriving.
tens of thousands of Americans migrated to the Soviet Union, recruited for their technical skills in a time of widespread joblessness.
A Soviet trade agency in New York advertised 6,000 positions and received more than 100,000 applications, Tzouliadis reports.
A reason that was listed was “interest in Soviet experiment” for their exodus.
The Americans, one by one, started to disappear into the Gulag. Diplomat George Kennan observed that the Soviets justified this by unilaterally first making Americans citizens of the Soviet Union, thus negating their rights.
I liked the opening quote of this chapter. The quote, 1926 says:
There is much to say about Soviet Russia. It is a new world to explore. Americans know nothing about it. As long as the red flag waves over Kremlin. There is something in the air of Soviet Russia that throbbed in the air of Peracles' Athens; the England of Shakespeare; the France of Danton; ...
The Foreign autoworkers of Moscow playing against the Autoworkers' Club of the city of Gorky.
Why did these Americans go to Russia- jobs; economic necessity.
Some responded to the ad: "Soviet call for Yankee skill."
The Media portrayed Russia as more than it was.
Some people were struggling to survive in parts of the America. Some could not even listen to FDR's inaugural speech. They had traded in their radios for cash. During this time more people were leaving the United States than were arriving.
tens of thousands of Americans migrated to the Soviet Union, recruited for their technical skills in a time of widespread joblessness.
A Soviet trade agency in New York advertised 6,000 positions and received more than 100,000 applications, Tzouliadis reports.
A reason that was listed was “interest in Soviet experiment” for their exodus.
The Americans, one by one, started to disappear into the Gulag. Diplomat George Kennan observed that the Soviets justified this by unilaterally first making Americans citizens of the Soviet Union, thus negating their rights.
November 21, 2008
For those who want their history to be as fast-paced and fasciating as a best seller...
This is a story about a little-known group of emigrants - the thousands of Americans who travelled to the USSR in the 30's to escape the Depression and become part of the first Communist Revolution to build a new society. Although many went for ideological reasons, others went for the promise of guaranteed employment and a new life.
Tzouliadis details the saga of these Americans who became labeled as "Enemies of the People" during Joseph Stalin's 1937 purges. Those who weren't executed outright entered the "meat grinder," that is, the GULAG slave labor system used to implement Stalin's Five Year Plans to take Russia from feudalism to an industrialized power.
The vastness of the structures and systems of daily life inside the Siberian gold mining camps in Kolyma, run by the NKVD secret police, are revealed, with an emphasis on the American citizens caught in its frozen maw.
The author also details the complicity of auto titan Henry Ford in luring Americans to their Siberian fate, the pro-Soviet propaganda written by New York Times reporters who were living like kings in Moscow, and the convenient cluelessness of politicians and ambassadors including FDR, his third-term veep, Henry Wallace, and Ambassador Joseph Davies (married to heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post - watch them shop for Russian treasures as millions die around them!)
This is a story about a little-known group of emigrants - the thousands of Americans who travelled to the USSR in the 30's to escape the Depression and become part of the first Communist Revolution to build a new society. Although many went for ideological reasons, others went for the promise of guaranteed employment and a new life.
Tzouliadis details the saga of these Americans who became labeled as "Enemies of the People" during Joseph Stalin's 1937 purges. Those who weren't executed outright entered the "meat grinder," that is, the GULAG slave labor system used to implement Stalin's Five Year Plans to take Russia from feudalism to an industrialized power.
The vastness of the structures and systems of daily life inside the Siberian gold mining camps in Kolyma, run by the NKVD secret police, are revealed, with an emphasis on the American citizens caught in its frozen maw.
The author also details the complicity of auto titan Henry Ford in luring Americans to their Siberian fate, the pro-Soviet propaganda written by New York Times reporters who were living like kings in Moscow, and the convenient cluelessness of politicians and ambassadors including FDR, his third-term veep, Henry Wallace, and Ambassador Joseph Davies (married to heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post - watch them shop for Russian treasures as millions die around them!)
December 18, 2012
This book chronicles a sad portion of American history: the fate of Americans who, desperate for work during the Great Depression, emigrated to the Soviet Union. Although they led productive lives in the beginning, eventually, they were forced to relinquish their American passports, and hundreds of them were among the 19 million + people imprisoned and/or the 7 million + people executed during Stalin's reign of terror. Sadly, sometimes through fear, sometimes through willful denial, and sometimes because of the smug attitude that "they were Bolsheviks, and got what they desrved," the United States government and the Red Cross did absolutely nothing to help these people. Even more tragically, this hands-off, look-the-other-way attitude of the United States government persisted even when American servicemen were captured during WWII and the Korean War and forced into labor in the gulags. The horrors endured by gulag prisoners, which included Soviets, Americans, and people of numerous European and Asian nationalities, is unimaginable. The story of these people deserves to be told, and Tzouliadis has done this well. Read this book; remember those people.
June 28, 2015
This is a book about the great terror in Soviet Russia. It focuses on the fate of the thousands of Americans who emigrated to Russia in search of a better life during the depression of the 1930s. The emigrants were naïve in the extreme, and when Stalin unleashed his murderous purges they were liquidated. Few survived to tell the tale.
What is sickening is that the US Government did next to nothing to help its erstwhile citizens. Many of the functionaries dealing with the increasingly desperate pleas for assistance were sympathisers to the Soviet cause, and there was also a theme of good riddance to bad rubbish in that many of the US emigrants were socialist or communists. Particularly odious were reporters such as Walter Duranty who shamelessly spouted propaganda as news - Ukrainian famine? what famine?
Whilst cases such as that of Raoul Wallenberg show that even where Governments did intervene there was faint hope of reprieve once the NKVD had someone in its clutches the USA could at least have tried.
A good book - worth a read.
What is sickening is that the US Government did next to nothing to help its erstwhile citizens. Many of the functionaries dealing with the increasingly desperate pleas for assistance were sympathisers to the Soviet cause, and there was also a theme of good riddance to bad rubbish in that many of the US emigrants were socialist or communists. Particularly odious were reporters such as Walter Duranty who shamelessly spouted propaganda as news - Ukrainian famine? what famine?
Whilst cases such as that of Raoul Wallenberg show that even where Governments did intervene there was faint hope of reprieve once the NKVD had someone in its clutches the USA could at least have tried.
A good book - worth a read.
March 23, 2015
This book was amazing. It is a history book about the thousands of Americans who immigrated to the USSR during the great depression and what happened to them along with the blind eyes of the American government. These people were viewed as "flotsam and jetsam" and were unimportant in WW2 or the beginnings of the cold war, not that many had survived the Terror of the late 1930's. Tzouliadis' book covers from the beginnings of the depression to the end of the USSR with a high focus on the area between 1934-1956. The book is very well written and does a good job of sharing the panic that men felt being unable to provide for the families in America and the hope they had in travels to the soviet republic which soon turned to terror and death as they and their loved ones were killed either by bullets or the gulag. I highly recommend this book that was written with help from the memoirs of two survivors, two men who had been taken to Russia by their father's, sent to a death camp, and through luck managed to make it back home.
May 7, 2015
I can't recommend this book highly enough. For as much as we think we may know or be aware of regaring the Stalinist period (which was so long and so deadly), lovers of freedom are going to feel the heartbreak of the fate that awaited the sincerely optimistic and forward-looking Americans who believed that the way forward for mankind was to build the "workers' paradise". What is tragic is that they and their ideals were betrayed by the very place that they believed would uphold freedom. The class society and descrimination in the Soviet Union was much more extreme than even what they were exposed to in the USA. In the Soviet Union, forced labour was the norm, with payment (food for subsistance) not being equal for all. The awakening of these idealists was even ruder when their own diplomats ignored them for other interests.
There are many fascinating anecdotes in this book, but overall, the major theme is so well-presented, so tragic and touching, that the book may leave you in tears at times, as it did me.
There are many fascinating anecdotes in this book, but overall, the major theme is so well-presented, so tragic and touching, that the book may leave you in tears at times, as it did me.
August 20, 2011
Anyone who tries to defend the policies and history of Trotsky, Lenin, or Stalin has no credibility and doesn't know what they are talking about. Trust me, I've done my homework on these things. Don't believe me--take a look at my reading list. Soviet Communism is just like the modern day Republican Party--it had principles that aren't practical, it was full of illusions and broken dreams, it was full of talking heads like Glen Beck, Rush Bimbaugh, and inevitably Soviet Communism led to a crisis in mismanagement and government. Where did all of this lead to? Oh, just the deaths of millions of people including to my surprise the deaths of many American's. This excellent book shows how many young American's bought into this false illusion, packed their bags, and were led astray into a jungle that eventually led to their deaths. Sad. True. But most of all, it's a lesson to all of us that we should be careful what ideals and leaders we put our stock into.
May 20, 2018
This fascinating book tells about three generations of Americans in the Gulag. I was impressed with the author's original archival research and courage in speaking out about uncomfortable facts, e.g., failure by the American government to rescue thousands of their own citizens. Some naive Americans went to the USSR during the Depression in the 1930s, in search of jobs; others, the Allied soldiers and officers were captured by the Nazis during WWII and, upon the liberation of the Nazi camps, were imprisoned by the Soviets and dispatched to Siberia to mine uranium and to die. The American Embassy and Red Cross often knew about these people and did nothing to help. Uncovering the names of those Americans who had disappeared in the Gulag forever was a noble task. Tim Tzouliadis is also a superb storyteller. Despite the difficult subject matter, I wanted to keep reading his book because I was learning a lot from it and because it's so well written.
March 5, 2010
Professor Harvey Klehr has chosen to discuss Tim Tzouliadis’s The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia , on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject - Communism in America, saying that:
"This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed..."
The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interview...
"This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed..."
The full interview is available here: http://thebrowser.com/books/interview...
April 8, 2011
4.5
This should be required reading! I did not learn about this in any of my history classes, but most likely because it hasn't been known -- or rather accepted -- until recently. I knew Stalin was evil; I just didn't understand the depth and breadth of it until reading this book. It was difficult to read at times and very difficult to understand how this could have happened. Hitler and his concentration camps killed 6 million people. Stalin and his gulag "labor camps" killed nearly 3 times that amount. It is hard to even contemplate the numbers of people that were killed for no other reason, but one man's lust for power and his fear of losing control. I would have given the book 5 stars, but I didn't appreciate some of the assumptions the author made regarding what people thought.
This should be required reading! I did not learn about this in any of my history classes, but most likely because it hasn't been known -- or rather accepted -- until recently. I knew Stalin was evil; I just didn't understand the depth and breadth of it until reading this book. It was difficult to read at times and very difficult to understand how this could have happened. Hitler and his concentration camps killed 6 million people. Stalin and his gulag "labor camps" killed nearly 3 times that amount. It is hard to even contemplate the numbers of people that were killed for no other reason, but one man's lust for power and his fear of losing control. I would have given the book 5 stars, but I didn't appreciate some of the assumptions the author made regarding what people thought.
August 14, 2009
This book was an eye-opener for me. I was amazed that nearly 10,000 depression-era autoworkers became expatriates to Stalin's Russia, following political idealism in order to establish automotive plants and worker communities in the Soviet Union, yet becoming political pawns completely abandoned by the U.S. as nearly all were consumed by Stalin's gulags. This is the most fascinating book I've read in years, with remarkable parallels to modern political-industrial situations.
November 23, 2009
So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons...So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed.
Andrei Sinyavsky, On Socialist Realism.
This book was eye opening as was this quote, which sheds a TRUE light on socialism.
Andrei Sinyavsky, On Socialist Realism.
This book was eye opening as was this quote, which sheds a TRUE light on socialism.
February 22, 2024
A must read. So poignant and heartbreaking, the stories of the Americans who trusted the soviets and their fellow Americans and left for a better life for them and their families just to endure the horrors of the Purges and the Gulag, are beautifully told. As I said, this is a must read.
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