The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a 2008 book published by Penguin Books. It is a story of Americans immigrating to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Background

Immigration

In the first eight months of 1931, a Soviet trade agency in New York advertised 6,000 positions and received more than 100,000 applications. Ten thousand Americans were hired in 1931, part of the official "organized emigration".[1][2][3][4]

In February 1931, The New York Times reported:

...[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.[5]

In March 1932, The New York Times reported that immigration to the Soviet Union was 1000 a week, but increasing.[6]

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.[4]

The Foreign Workers' Club of Moscow baseball team, a group of Americans, played regular games in Gorky Park.[7]

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".[4]

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.[4]

By 1937, most of them will be arrested alongside untold numbers of other Americans. Some will be executed. Others will be sent to "corrective labor" camps where they will be worked to death.[8]

Reviews

  • " The horror that was Stalinist Russia is still incomprehensible to many Americans...Reading this book is certain to open their eyes." - Richard Pipes, The New York Sun
  • " Gripping and important...an extremely impressive book." -Noel Malcolm, Telegraph (London)
  • " Tzouliadis's clear, strong narrative discloses the terrible fates which awaited those... who wandered into the Soviet sphere.... [A] grim, brilliantly told story." - Financial Times
  • "When Tzouliadis focuses on individual stories, such as that of Thomas Sgovio, who was imprisoned for almost a quarter-century before being allowed to return to the West, his words leap off the page. Too often, however, he veers away from his main subject with criticism of American journalists, ambassadors, artists and fellow travelers."[9]
  • "Tzouliadis's narrative—though rather tuneless—holds the reader's attention and illuminates an overlooked chapter in 20th-century history."[1]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 "THE FORSAKEN An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis". Kirkus Review. July 21, 2008. Retrieved 29 October 2017.
  2. ↑ Robert Legvold, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Foreign Affairs, (November/December 2008).
  3. ↑ Dillin, John (October 9, 2008). "'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". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 29 October 2017. ...by the mid-1930's around 10,000 American citizens responded to Soviet-paid "help wanted" ads in US newspapers.
  4. 1 2 3 4 The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia
  5. ↑ Walter Duranty, The New York Times, February 4, 1931.
  6. ↑ Walter Duranty, The New York Times, March 14, 1932.
  7. ↑ Anne Applebaum, Deluded and abandoned, Anne Applebaum on the new book by Tim Tzouliadis, The Spectator, (23 July 2008).
  8. ↑ Tim Tzouliadis, [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293668/the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis/9780143115427/ The Forsaken An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia], Penguin Random House, (2017).
  9. ↑ "The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 29 October 2017.
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