The Forsaken
by Tim Tzouliadis, Little Brown, 472pp
Reviewed: 10 January 2009
Tim Tzouliadis traces the horrifying fate of several thousand American citizens caught in Stalin’s Russia during the years of the Great Terror.
Most of the Americans had gone to the USSR voluntarily in the 1930s, either as Communist idealists hoping to build a socialist new world order, or as contract “experts” fleeing the unemployment of the Great Depression in capitalist America. They ranged from artists and assembly-line workers to architects and engineers. Most sold up their belongings and took their families with them.
The largest group comprised several hundred Ford Motor Company employees hired to run the Soviet Ford car plant at Nizhni Novgorod. At the time the USA did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and consequently no Embassy or Consulates to represent them.
Most were tricked or bullied into giving up their American passports and acquiring Soviet ones. As Stalin’s internal terror campaigns escalated from 1936, the lost Americans became targets. Attempting to leave, or even expressing a desire to go home, became acts of treason earning death or deportation to the burgeoning Gulags, from where less than ten percent would ever return.
There are many appalling accounts of culled from correspondence, from Soviet archives, from survivor accounts, and most sadly from the records of the US State Department and other official sources. Most chilling are the accounts of how these Americans were treated by other Americans.
President Roosevelt is portrayed as almost willfully blind to the character of Stalin and his regime.
Not for those who prefer a rose-tinted world view, this book will confirm any conviction that civilization lies not in the mobilization of power over the people, but in the restraint of power by the people.
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