The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

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, many of the Americans were arrested alongside untold numbers of other Americans. Some were executed. Others were sent to "corrective labor" camps in the gulag where they were worked to death.[8] For two more generations the Americans were prosecuted.

Thousands of American Prisoners of War from World War II were reported in the USSR. For example, 119 American prisoners of war were held back by Stalin, because their names had “Russian, Ukrainian or Jewish” origins. Although most of these prisoners were later released after United States protests, 18 died in Soviet custody and “some ended up staying in camps for a long time.”

In a 1992 letter, Boris Yeltsin stated that nine US planes had been shot down in the early 1950s and 12 Americans had been held prisoners.[9] As a result, in March 1992, a joint Russian American Task Force Russia was created to review these cases.[10] [11][12][13] Dmitri Volkogonov, a former Soviet general and co-chairman of the Task Force Russia told a US Senate Committee that 730 airmen had been captured on Cold War spy flights.[14]