The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

In the first 8 months of 1931, a Soviet trade agency in New York advertised 6,000 positions and received more than 100,000 applications. 10,000 Americans were hired in 1931, part of the official "organized emigration".{{cite news|title=THE FORSAKEN An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis|url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tim-tzouliadis/the-forsaken/|accessdate=29 October 2017|work=Kirkus Reviews|date=July 21, 2008}}{{Cite news |last=Legvold |first=Robert |date=2008-11-06 |title=The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia |language=en-US |work=Foreign Affairs |issue=November/December 2008 |url=https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2008-11-06/forsaken-american-tragedy-stalins-russia |access-date=2023-05-25 |issn=0015-7120}}{{cite news |last1=Dillin |first1=John |date=October 9, 2008 |title='The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia' The tragic story of a group of Americans who sought a better life in 1930s Russia |work=Christian Science Monitor |url=https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2008/1009/the-forsaken-an-american-tragedy-in-stalins-russia |accessdate=29 October 2017 |quote=by the mid-1930s around 10,000 American citizens responded to Soviet-paid "help wanted" ads in US newspapers.}}{{cite book | last=Tzouliadis | first=Tim | date=2009 | title=The forsaken: An American tragedy in Stalin's Russia | publisher=Penguin Books | isbn=978-0-14-311542-7}}

In February 1931, Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter sympathetic to the USSR reported:

{{blockquote|...[The soviet immigration] was the greatest wave of immigration in modern history...The Soviet Union will witness in the next few years an immigration flood comparable to the influx into the United States in the decade before the World War...It is only the beginning as yet of this movement, and the first swallows of the coming migration are scarce—but it has begun and will have to be reckoned with in the future....When the day comes that foreign workers here may write home and say, 'Things are pretty good here, why don't you come along? There are jobs for everybody and plenty to eat. Russia is not so bad a place in which to live and there are no lay-of s or short time and you get all that is coming to you' . . . Then immigration to the Soviet Union will begin to rival the flood that poured into America. At the present rate of progress that day is not far distant.{{cite news | first=Walter | last=Duranty | work=The New York Times | date=February 4, 1931}}}}

In March 1932, The New York Times reported that immigration to the Soviet Union was 1000 a week, but increasing.{{Cite news |last=Duranty |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Duranty |date=March 14, 1932 |title=IMMIGRATION NOW AN ISSUE IN SOVIET; Workers Entering on Tourist Visas Found Often to Have One-Way Tickets Only. FIVE-YEAR PLAN IS UPSET No Provision Made for Influx From Outside -- Regulation of Entry Likely in Near Future. |pages=8 |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1932/03/14/archives/immigration-now-an-issue-in-soviet-workers-entering-on-tourist.html |access-date=May 25, 2023}}

Soon, an official edict was issued that in the future all Americans must carry a round-trip ticket and would no longer be given jobs, simply because there was not enough space to house them all. Moscow and all the major Russian cities were already overcrowded.

The Foreign Workers' Club of Moscow baseball team, a group of Americans, played regular games in Gorky Park.{{cite magazine | last=Applebaum | first=Anne | author-link=Anne Applebaum | url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/2008/07/deluded-and-abandoned/ | title=Deluded and abandoned: Anne Applebaum on the new book by Tim Tzouliadis | work=The Spectator | date=July 23, 2008 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160512185820/https://www.spectator.co.uk/2008/07/deluded-and-abandoned/ | archive-date=May 12, 2016}}

In the summer of 1932, the Soviet Supreme Council of Physical Culture announced its decision to introduce baseball to the Soviet Union as a "national sport".

The American immigrants opened an Anglo-American school in Moscow, with 125 pupils on the register by November 1932, three quarters of them born in the United States. Over the next three years, enrollment rose so high that the Anglo-American school moved into a larger school, School Number 24 on Great Vuysovsky Street.

By 1937, many of the Americans were arrested alongside untold numbers of Soviet citizens. Some were executed. Others were sent to "corrective labor" camps in the Gulag where they were worked to death.{{Cite web |title=The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis: 9780143115427 {{!}} PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books |url=https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293668/the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis/9780143115427 |access-date=2023-05-25 |website=PenguinRandomhouse.com |language=en-US}}

As documented by Tzouliadis, they were essentially abandoned by the U.S. government and its diplomats in Moscow.Ted Lipien, [https://www.coldwarradiomuseum.com/new-york-times-reviews-former-communist-elinor-lippers-book-debunking-u-s-office-of-war-informations-soviet-propaganda/ 1951 – New York Times Reviews Former Communist Elinor Lipper’s Book Debunking U.S. Office of War Information’s Soviet Propaganda], Cold War Radio Museum, July 4, 2023

The book was praised for bringing public awareness to American emigration to the Soviet Union in the wake of the great depression{{r|Marshall 2009}} and the presence of American citizens in the Gulag system.{{cite journal | last=Várdy | first=Steven | title=Status of Gulag research in the United States, with specific attention to the Hungarians | journal=Hungarian Studies | volume=27 | issue=1 | date=2013 | issn=0236-6568 | doi=10.1556/HStud.27.2013.1.10 | url=http://real.mtak.hu/38954/1/hstud.27.2013.1.10.pdf#page=12 | page=158 }}{{Cite magazine | last=Lloyd | first=John | date=July 14, 2008 | title=The Forsaken | url=https://www.ft.com/content/96827618-4f11-11dd-9a15-000077b07658 | url-access=subscription | access-date=2023-05-25 | work=Financial Times}} Reviewers found the life stories of individuals in the Soviet Union to be engaging and well-told.{{r|Marshall 2009}}{{cite journal | last=Legvold | first=Robert | date=2008 | title=[Review of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, by T. TZOULIADIS] | work=Foreign Affairs | volume=87 | number=6 | pages=173–173 | jstor=20699412}} The book's style has been described as "journalistic", {{cite thesis | last=Perry | first=David | date=2018 | title=Strangers in a Strange Land: American Lives under the Soviet Gaze | publisher=Institute of International Studies, Charles University |degree=International Masters in Economy, State and Society | hdl=20.500.11956/116327 |hdl-access=free | url=https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/116327/120300563.pdf#page=16 | page=8}} like a movie script,{{r|Várdy 2013 158}} or compared to Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum's Gulag.{{r|Marshall 2009}}

Marshall describes the book as repeating outdated Cold War-era historiography. She critiques the book's strong reliance on American sources, including unreliable McCarthy-era ones, while failing to utilize the Russian archives and recent research.{{cite journal | last=Marshall | first=Alex | date=2009 | title=Book Review: The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia. By Tim Tzouliadis | journal=War in History | volume=16 | issue=4 | issn=0968-3445 | jstor=26070665 | doi=10.1177/09683445090160041601 | pages=534–536}} Tzouliadis doesn't know the Russian language, but did commission Russian speakers to do interviews and archival work in Russia.{{Cite news | last=Malcolm | first=Noel | date=20 July 2008 | title=The Forsaken: Americans in Stalin's gulags | url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3556836/The-Forsaken-Americans-in-Stalins-gulags.html | access-date=2023-05-25 | work=The Daily Telegraph | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090411060127/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3556836/The-Forsaken-Americans-in-Stalins-gulags.html | archive-date=2009-04-11}}

In the book, Tzouliadis expresses passionate indignation against American public figures and government officials who he feels should have acted to support and defend their compatriots in the Soviet Union.{{r|Legvold 2008}}{{cite news | first=Richard | last=Pipes | date=July 29, 2008 | url=https://www.nysun.com/article/arts-banished-the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis | title=Banished 'The Forsaken' by Tim Tzouliadis | work=The New York Sun | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080731073254/https://www.nysun.com/arts/banished-the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis/82839/ | archive-date=2008-07-31}} Marshall asserted that Tzouliadis' animosity toward the Roosevelt administration overcame his analysis, sweepingly denigrating every official without exception, and offering a confusingly alleging the administration was "simultaneously naive, hopelessly corrupt, and infiltrated".{{r|Marshall 2009}}

Reviewers found the book unfocused, covering personal stories of Americans in the Soviet Union, Soviet-American government relations, the history of the Soviet Union, and American public figures who spoke well of the Soviet Union.{{r|Marshall 2009}} Only the first of these topics was done well.{{r|Marshall 2009}} Marshall says "his treatment of the Soviet-American bilateral relationship... never rises above a grim caricature of reality".{{cite journal | last=Marshall | first=Alex | date=2009 | title=Book Review: The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia. By Tim Tzouliadis | journal=War in History | volume=16 | issue=4 | issn=0968-3445 | jstor=26070665 | doi=10.1177/09683445090160041601 | pages=534–536}} The book was regarded as lacking in nuance.{{cite magazine | date=5 May 2008 | title=The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia | url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59420-168-4 | accessdate=29 October 2017 | work=Publishers Weekly}}{{r|Marshall 2009}}

• Americans in the Gulag
• Victor Herman - An American who was imprisoned in Gulag camps
• Robert Robinson (engineer)
• The Eternal Road (film)

{{reflist}}

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• {{cite journal | last=Golubev | first=Alexey Valeryevich | title=Book Review: The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia. By T. Tzouliadis | work=Ученые Записки Петрозаводского Государственного Университета | volume=10 | number=104 | pages=77-79 | issn=2542-1077 | language=ru | url=https://elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=17940988}}

{{refend}}

{{American defectors to the Soviet Union}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia}}

Category:American emigrants to the Soviet Union

Category:American people imprisoned in the Soviet Union

Category:Books critical of communism