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The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia | 
 enlarge | Author: Tim Tzouliadis
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 9252
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594201684
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.00413
EAN: 9781594201684
ASIN: 1594201684
Publication Date: July 17, 2008
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Product Description
A remarkable piece of forgotten historythe 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 anothers 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 AmericaDetroit, 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 Stalins 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 livesThe 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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A very important contribution August 7, 2008
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
Anne Applebaum in Gulag: A History discusses briefly the issue of foreigners in the Gulag. But she does not give us a figure as to how many were there. Elsewhere stories have popped up from time to time of notable American leftists who journeyed to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and disappeared into Stalin's system. This, finally, is a full account of these people and who they were and where they came from. The author attempts to claim that many of these people were 'ordinary' but this is probably far from the truth. Many of these people were beleivers in the Communist dream, as a time when Capitalism seemed to be failing during the Great Depression. There were also hard core subversives among them, true beleivers in the Stalinist ideology who were 'returning home' to fight for COmmunism. In the supreme irony many of these higher minded intellectuals who hated American, found that the USSR was capable of doing things ten times worse to them than the U.S would ever imagine doing to Communist radicals. THey were rounded up when they tried to have outbursts of free speech, they were beaten, raped and placed on trains to the East. Once there they were worked to death. Few survived. As foreigners they were especially suspect as Stalin's grip became even more paranoid. Americans were imprisoned along with many other people from all over the world who had come to experience the 'Socialist utopia'. These poor people were not the only one's taken in. The New York Times came to Russia in the period and wrote a glowing peice about the miracle of Stalin's Russia. It has taken 70 years for these stories to come to light. It is a pleasure to read this wonderful and important account of these lives who were shattered.
Seth J. Frantzman
Mordor Incarnate July 31, 2008
14 out of 23 found this review helpful
I found this a captivating story. Told with a dark humor, it tells a story most Americans are probably completely unfamiliar with. It should be required reading. It serves as reminder that, even in a self-styled 'Modern Age' The State is capable of unleashing surreal horror upon all. Speaking for myself, I was only superficially knowledgeable about many of the details which Mr.Tzouliadis delves into. I walk away from the book feeling queasy, but enlightened.
Americans in particular should acquaint themselves with their Foreign Service in action, to serve as a warning. How would you like to have your life depend on the intervention of a self-absorbed Ivy League functionary? No wonder the American immigrants were essentially wiped out. When you become cast as an ideological enemy, your own countrymen can be counted upon to remain bystanders to the onset of calamity. Sort of like watching the early onset of AIDS in the 80s, or Hurricane Katrina.
As a Leftist, I am instinctively cautious when I see cited here sources such as Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes. These scholars are known among the left as writers with a Right-Leaning Ideological tendency. And from the notes, I see Mr.Tzouliadis makes liberal use of Conquest, in particular. Nevertheless the breadth of sources Mr.Tzouliadis delved through to produce this work is truly impressive.
I have asked myself how one can immerse oneself into the subject of Stalinist Terror and the Gulags without developing a McCarthy-esque mind. I am not sure it is possible. At the end of the work Mr.Tzouliadis briefly equates Stalinism as the natural outgrowth of Bolshevism and the communist experiment in general. This is a subject of some controversy among the left today. While some Philosophers, like Slavoj Zizek would equate Stalinism as a natural outgrowth of Bolshevism, I remain unconvinced of this. Somewhere between the aspirations of Bolshevism and Lenin's ideas, there was some sort of decisive break, from which Stalinism emerged. Rather than be a Stalinist Apologist, a leftist should take away from the twentieth century the understanding that the problem of the power of the State remains to be resolved. I think one can reasonably conclude that the Stalinist model of imposition of totalitarian political and social structure on the proletariat and intelligentsia results in the corrosion of production, not its development. Communism/socialism thus has to be rebuilt, with a new praxis. A task for a new century.
PS I note the lack of photos. Even so, I don't think photos would quite have captured the magnitude of the Events described.
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