The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia | Tim Tzouliadis

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia | Tim Tzouliadis | A revelation

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The Forsaken: An A...

	The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia Tim Tzouliadis Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A remarkable piece of forgotten history?the story of how thousands of Americans were lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives only to meet a tragic, and until now forgotten, end

The Forsaken starts with a photograph of a baseball team. The year is 1934, the image black and white: two rows of young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms around one another?s shoulders. They are all somewhere in their late teens or twenties, in the peak of health. We know most, if not all, of their names: Arthur Abolin, Walter Preeden, Victor Herman, Eugene Peterson. They hail from ordinary working families from across America?Detroit, Boston, New York, San Francisco. Waiting in the sunshine, they look just like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms.

These men and thousands of others, their wives, and children were possibly the least heralded migration in American history. Not surprising, maybe, since in a nation of immigrants few care to remember the ones who leave behind the dream. The exiles came from all walks of life. Within their ranks were Communists, trade unionists, and radicals of the John Reed school, but most were just ordinary citizens not overly concerned were politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigrants: the search for a better life. And to any one of the millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, even the harshest Moscow winter could sustain that promise.

Within four years of that June day in Gorky Park, many of the young men in that photograph will be arrested and along with them unaccounted numbers of their fellow countrymen. As foreign victims of Stalin?s Terror, some will be executed immediately in basement cells or at execution grounds outside the main cities. Others will be sent to the ?corrective labor? camps, where they will be starved and worked to death, their bodies buried in the snowy wasteland. Two of the baseball players who survive and whose stories frame this remarkable work of history will be inordinately lucky. This book is the story of these mens? lives?The Forsaken who lived and those who died.

The result of years of groundbreaking research in American and Russian archives, The Forsaken is also the story of the world inside Russia at the time of Terror: the glittering obliviousness of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the duplicity of the Soviet government in its dealings with Roosevelt, and the terrible finality of the Gulag system. In the tradition of the finest history chronicling genocide in the twentieth century, The Forsaken offers new understanding of timeless questions of guilt and innocence that continue to plague us today.

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One ofthe best books about Stalin's Soviet Union I have ever read.

I never knew that Stalin had such an easy job of butchering thousands of American citizens, it was like taking candy from a baby. The U.S Government did not lift a finger to save the ones who were there by will (the immigrants who went there as invited workers during the depression) to those who were not (their innocent children and subsequently POWs from WWII and the Korean War.)

After reading this book I now know not to count on the State Department for help if traveling abroad. I can't believe how stupid the American government was, and how idiotically it enabled Stalin to keep the Gulag rolling along.

The book is very readable, but it is not for the faint of heart. So much suffering and death is brought to mind, and that is not what most Americans want to know about. But even if you think of Stalin as some kind of aberration of those years in the 20 th century that seemed to give rise to so many murderous maniacs such as Hitler and Mao, don't think that this situation will never happen again. It probably caught the Soviet people unawares and by the time they realized that Stalin's Terror would leave no one untouched, it was too late to do anything about it.

It is estimated that somewhere around 26 million people died in Stalin's Terror, many perished under the harsh unlivable conditions they had to endure in the Gulag prison camps. Including continuous starvation and exposure to extreme sub artic temperatures while being forced to work at hard labor. These were actually concentration campls, no different than Hitler's.

But still the U.S Government's indifference to the deaths of its own citizens is what is the most mind boggling to me.

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A revelation

To me, having never read The Gulag Archipelago, this book was a revelation. It's the absorbing story of American prisoners of the USSR and the indifference shown them by our government, particularly the state department. Most shocking to me, however, was his description of the gulag camps north of Magadan, where the prisoners were slowly starved while subjected to long days of labor in unearthly cold, 365 days a year, in the mines. It's hard to imagine a worse death. The Terror is also revealed in its wide scope, its cruelty and its arbitrariness.

Moving, Poignant, Stellar History

Like most books about Stalin and the Great Terror, The Forsaken is a troubling and unsettling endeavor. It awakens the conscience and has the unintended effect of making us grateful for the lives of privilege we now lead. Tim Tzouliadis is an excellent historian and his narrative is both vivid and scholarly. It's a tough balance to maintain, but this author succeeds in the spirit of Anthony Beevor (my favorite historian).

What I found most tragic was the fate of those GIs kidnapped from western Europe after the war. They spent the rest of their days in the GULAG digging out gold, uranium or mercury with their bare hands. Some of this made for tough reading but it is exquisitely told. Most of the forsaken made the mistake of traveling to the Soviet Union for work and handing over to the Russian government their documents which were then funneled to NKVD agents who made their way back to the United States. Without papers they became, in effect, Soviet citizens which left them with no protections once the state began to eat and destroy its own people during the Great Terror of the thirties. In this account we find that nearly 20 million people were arrested and soon found their way into the GULAG machine--if they were not executed in the basement of the Lubianka or upon a Katyn-like field first.

The Roosevelt Administration, particularly Ambassador Joseph Davies, were the secondary villains of this tale. All it would have taken, on their parts, to free the individuals (who were once full-fledged Americans) would have been for FDR to link lend/lease aid to the freeing of citizens. He declined to wield any stick and gave the USSR a bevy of riches while US ships made the evil of Kolyma possible. Roosevelt's confusion regarding Stalin was horrifying and the dictator's contempt for FDR was palpable. He played and manipulated our president with astonishing ease. I could go on and on about this work as it was absolutely superb. I do not know Tim Tzouliadis personally so am not biased in his favor but can honestly state that this was the best book I have read, thus far, in 2008.

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A SAD NOTE IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

Not too far from where I live is a small National Cemetery. Way in the back corner are a half dozen or so markers of World War II German POW's. Some of those German soldiers buried there committed suicide because at the end of World War II, the US Government was going to repatriate them back to the Soviet Union. You see, they came from a part of Ukraine, settled by Germans, under Catherine the Great, when the Germans invaded the USSR, they joined the German Army. They apparently also understood what awaited them in Stalin's Russia. This is just a side bar in the great history, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. The author tells the story of what became of American nationals, who out of committment to communism, hunger during the depression, or just plain naivete emmigrated from the United States to the Soviet Union during the great depression. Out of tens of thousands of immigrants from the US to the USSR during the 1930s, very few lived to tell the tale of their experiences under the greatest terror conceived by any dictator. Stalin out of his own twisted paranoia had many of them executed or sentenced to the slow death of the Soviet Gulag's. But, more disturbing than that is the fact that the US Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, knew what Stalin was doing to US nationals, including downed American Pilots originally captured by the Germans or who crash landed in Soviet territory during our war with Japan, and quiety acquiesced to allowing them to be executed or imprisoned by the Soviets. So much for "Nothing to fear but fear itself." Unless of course your President, for lack of a better description admires and kisses up to a Soviet thug. The Author paints a clear picture of how the first American Ambassadors to the USSR were so enamored of Stalin the Soviet experiment they were willing to look the other way. It also paints a sad picture of how the Roosevelt administration contributed to the Soviet "Terror" by choosing to ignore it, only to be followed by the Truman administration's gullibility when it came to trusting Stalin and his regime. This book will hopefully open American eyes to just how not great FDR and give 'em hell Harry really did this nation an diservice when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union. As I mentioned earlier, there are side bars here, namely how the Soviet's used our lend lease materials, trucks, ships, etc. to feed the terror, namely transport people to the Gulags, and not fight the Germans. This is a well written history, but deeply disturbing because of the facts it reveals. This book is highly recommended if one wants to really understand how the United States government by its elected an appointed officials aided Stalin's terror against not only his own people, but foreigners too.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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