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The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

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In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression squeezed the United States in its iron grip, a group of Americans who had seen the propaganda about the "workers' paradise" being built in the Soviet Union, traveled over to find a little piece of paradise for themselves. Almost immediately things began to go wrong - many found their passports stolen by Russian officials, or conveniently "lost." With courage and boundless optimism they began to work in this strange new land, even forming their own baseball teams. But, within four years their "paradise" turned into hell on earth, as the Soviet secret police began to arrest and murder civilians by the thousands. Their American citizenship did not protect them, it made them targets - and when all was said and done very few made it out alive!

This is truly a gripping book. The author does an excellent job of telling the story of the Soviet terror, which resulted in the deaths of so many innocent people, and of telling the story of the Americans who were helplessly caught up in it. I could not tear myself away, turning pages deep into the night, as I watched the horror blossom in front of me, bearing its heartbreaking, heartrending fruit.

This book is a searing indictment of communism, but it is also an indictment of the American government, which took absolutely no action to protect or aid the Americans who they knew were about to be brutalized and murdered. The depth of the Roosevelt administration's complicity is appalling, with the American ambassador even attending show trials and admiring Josef Stalin. The American press was well aware of just what was happening, but they took such small steps (if at all) to inform the public of just what really was happening.

Yeah, as you can tell, this is a very moving book. The author really draws you into the tragedy, and the lives of the people caught up in it. This book should be on everyone's reading list for 2008 - it is a book that should be read by generations to come. I give this book my highest recommendations.

This book reflects a great amount of scholarship on the part of Mr Tzouliadis, he has done a remarkable job of research here to add to what is already known about the grim story of the gulags. This book is well written and engaging but it also is a fairly thorough survey of the literature on this general topic. I have discovered several good first hand sources that I did not realize existed.

This book also sheds a good amount of light on the question of why the conditions in Russia were so little known in the 1930s. Basically, once a person was inside Russia, censorship of their communication was full and these people had their passports confiscated by the Russian government so it was almost impossible to leave. The Russian government claimed that these American citizens had renounced their citizenships, resulting in the fact that the American state department was not able or very willing to help these poor people.

In addition it appears that the treaties with Russia establishing diplomatic relations were not thoroughly drafted with safeguards for the protection of American citizens in Russia. The Soviets exploited these loopholes extensively.

Mr Tzouliadis sketches in a number of missing pieces in the dynamics here. The Russian foreign ministry was deathly afraid of the NKVD, and so inquiries to the Russian foreign ministry were fruitless. The problem of helping these people could only have been addressed by the highest level of interaction meaning FDR to Stalin. However, unfortuanately one of FDR's key sources was Walter Duranty, one of the most famous newspaper reporters of his time and unfortuantely it appears that Mr Duranty was a very serious apoligist for Stalin at the very least, and quite possibly was an agent of the NKVD as some defectors have alleged. (the existence of these defectors was unknown to me) Hence, several of FDR's sources with respect the the reality inside the Soviet union were compromised. It also appears that bureaucratic lethargy played a role.

Mr Tzouliadis also sheds much light on the question of MIA's possibly being left behind in Asia. From reading this account it becomes pretty clear that American prisoners of war from World war two and Korea have been spirited into the Gulags. The reasons why this was desirable are not clear and Mr Tzouliadis does not engage in any wild speculation. It also becomes fairly clear that the Americans were far from alone in being pulled into the camps, it appears that many nationalities were present in the camps. It also appears that some other nations were perhaps more diligent in pursuing the release of their citizens.

In summary this is a sad tale, but one which fills in some important gaps in the overall story of the camps. It also clarifies why the reality of what was going on inside Russia in the 1930s was simply not known widely and unfortuantely this did lead to a good number of American emigres suffering horrendously and being trapped inside the abyss. I found some of the discussion of the state department behavior and Mr Duranty's writings and influence very interesting. The fact that nobody could get back out of Russia and that several of the most important information channels were tainted goes a long way to explaining why a better understanding of the realities of the Soviet Union under Stalin took so long to come to pass.

This is an excellent and very impressive book and it deserves a wide readership.

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

I saw a review of this book in the Economist a few weeks ago, and it reminded me of a brief newspaper article I read in about 1996. It talked of thousands of US POWs who had disappeared after WW2, apparently kidnapped by the Russians. At the time I thought that was pretty big news given the uproar over the relatively small number of MIAs in Vietnam. It was just a cursory article, and when I asked around, no one seemed to know anything about it. When the Internet arrived I searched a bit, but didn't find anything much either. This review was the first time I'd seen the thing mentioned in 12 years, so I got the book immediately. It's really a brief (and in my opinion very well written) history of the gulags, with the American angle (both 30s emigrants and post-war pows) as a selling point, and as I didn't know much about the gulags either I found it fascinating from both ends. Moreover, as the reviewer from the Economist said, "the horrors of the Gulag ought to be as well known as Auschwitz, but they aren't". Hard to know if the scale of the atrocities or the general ignorance about them (notably with the Russian population now heading willingly back into a neo-Stalinist styled state) is more disturbing.

It is as Solzhenitsyn predicted in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, 3:482; trans. Harry Willetts (New York: Harper and Row, 1978)). In this work, Tim Tzouliadis seeks to arouse an interest, to create an insight into the barbarities committed throughout the "socialist experiment" in Soviet Russia. Writing particularly to an American audience, Tzouliadis recounts the story of the lost thousands of American to the oppression of the Soviet state. Virtually unknown to Americans is that the existence of these thousands was well-known to U.S. government officials and journalists stationed in the Soviet Union during the 30's, 40's, 50's, and 60's, people who simply remained silent in the midst of their fellow-citizens' disappearance and murders.

This book is a primer on the brutality of the Communist regime. For those unfamiliar with this history, it is an introduction. For those who have read Anne Applebaum, Robert Conquest, Vassily Grossman, John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Elinor Lipper, the Medvedevs (Roy and Zhores), Richard Pipes, Edward Radzinsky, Varlam Shalamov, Vitaly Shentalinsky, Dmitri Volkogonov, and, of course, Alexander Solzhenitysn, the history is not new. But, the story of Americans who once played baseball in Gorky Park only to end up executed by the gun or hard labor in Siberia is news to most.

Particularly of interest is the author's revelation of the betrayal of their fellow-citizens by government officials at the very top of the U.S. government. While the identities of the likes of Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Dexter White, Paul Robeson, Joseph Davies and others is well-known to those familiar with the history of the era, Tzouliadis provides new insights by relying on more-recently divulged information to establish the extent of the betrayal of traditional American moral virtues.

The bones of the victims of Soviet repression cry out for acknowledgement of their torture and degradation, as well as condemnation and judgment of their persecutors. The victims of Communist deceit, it must be recognized, are us all. It is time for the full story to be told.

In addition to his simply telling this story, Tzouliadis offers a moral tale that is supremely relevant today: those with utopian ideals and a fractured understanding of human nature cannot be trusted to lead a nation.

Read this book; its style makes it an easy encounter; its disclosures make it essential reading for those who would be intelligently informed.

Not too far from where I live is a small National Cemetery. Way in the back corner are a half dozen or so markers of World War II German POW's. Some of those German soldiers buried there committed suicide because at the end of World War II, the US Government was going to repatriate them back to the Soviet Union. You see, they came from a part of Ukraine, settled by Germans, under Catherine the Great, when the Germans invaded the USSR, they joined the German Army. They apparently also understood what awaited them in Stalin's Russia. This is just a side bar in the great history, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. The author tells the story of what became of American nationals, who out of committment to communism, hunger during the depression, or just plain naivete emmigrated from the United States to the Soviet Union during the great depression. Out of tens of thousands of immigrants from the US to the USSR during the 1930s, very few lived to tell the tale of their experiences under the greatest terror conceived by any dictator. Stalin out of his own twisted paranoia had many of them executed or sentenced to the slow death of the Soviet Gulag's. But, more disturbing than that is the fact that the US Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, knew what Stalin was doing to US nationals, including downed American Pilots originally captured by the Germans or who crash landed in Soviet territory during our war with Japan, and quiety acquiesced to allowing them to be executed or imprisoned by the Soviets. So much for "Nothing to fear but fear itself." Unless of course your President, for lack of a better description admires and kisses up to a Soviet thug. The Author paints a clear picture of how the first American Ambassadors to the USSR were so enamored of Stalin the Soviet experiment they were willing to look the other way. It also paints a sad picture of how the Roosevelt administration contributed to the Soviet "Terror" by choosing to ignore it, only to be followed by the Truman administration's gullibility when it came to trusting Stalin and his regime. This book will hopefully open American eyes to just how not great FDR and give 'em hell Harry really did this nation an diservice when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union. As I mentioned earlier, there are side bars here, namely how the Soviet's used our lend lease materials, trucks, ships, etc. to feed the terror, namely transport people to the Gulags, and not fight the Germans. This is a well written history, but deeply disturbing because of the facts it reveals. This book is highly recommended if one wants to really understand how the United States government by its elected an appointed officials aided Stalin's terror against not only his own people, but foreigners too.

My Dad told us kids the story of Russian soldiers on the front lines battling Germany during WW II. When an order was given to advance, any soldier that would not go quick enough or simply refused would be shot by his commander on the spot.

As a kid, I thought to myself, "Wow, those Russians were pretty tough". After reading The Forsaken, I think the Russian soldier hesitated because he couldn't decide if death or capture by the Nazi's was better than facing life in Russia.

The Forsaken tells the story of Stalinist paranoia from the point of view of Americans who were drawn to the Soviet Union for jobs in the workers paradise of communism. Interestingly, these immigrant Americans brought baseball to Russia and the sport actually started to become popular. But as Stalin began to `cleanse' his country, the dream of a better way of life faded. Through his political police, the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs), everyone was a suspected traitor and could be detained for any reason. From the early 1930's to Stalin's death in 1953 people were executed, tortured and imprisoned in forced work camps or Gulags. This period is known as "the Terror".

I picked up The Forsaken because of its focus on America during that period. I am so glad that I did. I had no idea of the sheer scale of the atrocities that were committed; it is estimated that ten percent of the Soviet population were affected. I also had no idea how ignorant the US was to this travesty. It is truly an eye opener. The forsaken is a powerful warning of government out of control and government out of touch.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Communism/Socialism became popular in America. At the same time, America was going through a serious economic depression. Russia began advertising about how wonderful things were there, actively seeking immigrants. Even Henry Ford set up an automobile factory in Russia during that time and sent many workers to Russia to teach the Soviets how to make cars. This is the premise of "The Forsaken," but it doesn't come close to describing the totality of this incredibly important book.

Addictively readable, you will learn many things about the Soviet Union, Stalin, President Roosevelt, Communism, the US State Department, Russians, torture, imprisonment, slavery, and human nature, among other things.

Before reading this book, intellectually I knew about Stalin, I knew that he made Hitler look like a kindly grandfather, but until I read this book, it didn't really hit home. We have pictures of Hitler's concentration camps, but Stalin didn't allow pictures. Stalin had his minions murder tens of thousands at a time for months and years on end, paying them very nice bonuses for their murderous work, and then in paranoia, would have others murder these very men to keep his evil work hidden. And then those would be killed. And on and on.

To give a tiny taste of information I didn't know that is in this book, on page 249: "In Buchenwald, ... there were prisoners who had suffered in this camp under the Nazi and the Soviet regimes." You see, if you were Russian and captured by the Nazis, when your countrymen liberated your camp, you weren't freed, you weren't welcomed home, you were either shot or imprisoned. You were a traitor to your country.

As someone who is primarily a fiction reader, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Truth really is stranger, and far more horrible.

The most immediate subject of this interesting history is the little known saga of a few thousand Americans who during the hard times of the Great Depression left the United States for the Soviet Union to find a better life. In a display of remarkable scholarship, Tzouliadis hunts down the small public record of the fate of these people. After brief periods of employment in manufacturing or agriculture, some building Ford cars in a new Russian plant, most of these Americans were arrested, stripped of their US passports, and either shot outright or sent to the Gulag for what remained of the short and brutal life of the inhabitants of Stalin's slave labor camps. By some remarkable good fortune, however, two of the Americans managed to survive the camps long enough to be released during Kruschev's brief mid-1950's retrenchment, return to the United States, and tell their stories to the world. Tzouliadis uses these individual stories as the framework of the book.

But the Soviets' treatment of this small group of Americans is only the narrow factual setting of a much larger picture of "government by terror." Mr. Tzouliadis tells the compelling story of how the Soviet Union, in the name of Communist doctrine and social justice, terrorized its population. The numbers of those arrested and killed are mind-numbing, ranging in the tens of millions. The Soviet state, for example, in the early 1930's systematically starved to death some 5-7 million innocent souls in the Ukraine and other regions of the USSR. In a masterful inter-weaving of individual personal stories and high level Soviet policy measures, the author recounts how the Soviet secret police, the KGB and its predecessor organizations, became an integral part of life in the Soviet Union and the personal instrument of Stalin's repression -- arresting and either shooting to death or sending to "corrective" labor camps millions of innocent people for a short life of starvation and crushing work in conditions so brutal that it beggars the imagination.

But the real theme of the book is a phenomenon that has troubled fair minded people for decades - not how Stalin and the Soviets could have committed such atrocities, not how a seemingly benevolent social theory could be used for such malevolent ends, but how so many of the Western intellectual elite, in government, in academia, and in the arts, could have embraced Communism, an ideology and political system that has no equal in the history of the world in repression and mass murder. Throughout the book, Tzouliadis almost wonders aloud how people like George Bernard Shaw, Paul Robeson, Erskine Caldwell, and Jean Paul Sartre, among many others, could have spoken and written so warmly of Communism and the Soviets in the face of mountains of evidence of their atrocities.

The most troublesome question in this regard, however, is not how writers, artists and academicians could have supported such horrors, but how people in the US Government could have done so. Mr. Tzouliadis throughout this book raises troubling questions about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his New Deal advisors, and the political left. How could people in such positions, who came to power in the name of social justice and whose job it was to know what was happening in the Soviet Union, have so ardently supported Stalin and the Soviet Union. Almost from the moment he took office in 1933, FDR used his personal prestige and the great power of his office to validate a regime ruled by gangsters. He extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933, completely bypassing the State Department, and at precisely the point in time when Stalin had completed the Ukranian terror famine in the winter of 1932-1933. An estimated 5 to 7 million people were systematically starved to death at that time. With the possible exception of Mao's ghastly measures in China, there is almost no greater horror in the history of the world, yet Roosevelt extended the friendly hand of the United States to Stalin's barbaric regime that perpetrated this genocide.

Whispering into Roosevelt's ear at the time was Walter Duranty, the corrupt New York Times reporter stationed in Moscow, who made a career of disseminating to the world the most transparent falsehoods and disinformation concocted by his Soviet masters. "It was Walter Duranty," says the author, "more than any other individual, who persuaded Franklin Roosevelt of the wisdom of granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union." In 1932, Duranty , a British citizen, won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting in The New York Times in which he assured the American public that the Ukranian famine was a myth. He later reported the Stalin show trials in the most favorable and complimentary way. Duranty has since been exposed as having intentionally falsified the facts in response to Soviet emoluments or intimidation, even to the extent that in recent years there has been an effort to revoke his Pulitzer prize. How could Roosevelt, Tzouliadis asks, one of our greatest presidents and one who was committed to the common man, with all the worldwide resources of the US Government at his disposal, have ignored the steady drumbeat of horror emanating from the Soviet Union and entertained for a moment the momentous falsehoods disseminated by Walter Duranty, described by Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who served with Duranty in Moscow, as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met."

But this was only the beginning of Roosevelt's affinity for "Uncle Joe" Stalin and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt's first ambassador to the Soviet Union was William C. Bullitt, a wealthy Philadelphian and friend of the president whose affection for the Soviets is reflected in his short-lived marriage to Louise Bryant. She was a fervent supporter of the Bolsheviks and the widow of John Reed, author of the famous "Ten Days That Shook The World," a 1919 paean to the Bolshevik revolution. But when Bullitt himself, after three years of exposure to the real Soviets in Moscow, changed his opinion and told Roosevelt in the frankest of terms that the Soviets were really mass murderers, what did Roosevelt do? He yanked Bullitt and appointed Joseph E. Davies as his successor.

It is difficult to know where to begin to describe the character flaws of Davies. He was a personal friend and golfing buddy of FDR, having served with him in the Wilson administration. Davies was general counsel to one of the Post companies owned by Marjorie Merriweather Post, socialite daughter of the Post cereal fortune, one of the wealthiest people in the world, and a major contributor to FDR's 1936 campaign. After he caught Marjorie's eye in 1935, Davies divorced his wife of 33 years to become her third husband. It seems that his principal qualification for diplomatic duty was his friendship with FDR, and he reminds one of George W. Bush's 2003 appointment of Michael Brown as head of FEMA based on his experience as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. Davies diary recorded that on January 5, 1937 he and Marjorie set sail from the US on their journey to the Soviet Union and that "Walter Duranty is aboard."

The first thing that Davies did upon arrival in Moscow was to attend six days of one of Stalin's show trials then in progress, universally regarded even then, and this was known to Davies, as the most outrageous of shams. He sat in the first row of the proceedings along with Walter Duranty, thereby proclaiming to the world that the United States thought these political purges were just fine. He then reported to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and later to the public in his book "Mission To Moscow," that the trials had uncovered real conspiracies to overthrow the Soviet government for which the defendants, Stalin's potential political rivals, were justly punished. It was as obvious then as it is now that the KGB had tortured confessions out of these unfortunate victims. At the show trials, the accused fell all over themselves to proclaim their participation in the most fantastic of plots, all in an effort to avoid further torture to themselves and their families. During this time, Davies became a tool of the Soviets, courting personal favors from Stalin and his henchmen, while at the same time he and Marjorie were cruising the Baltic in one of Marjorie's yachts and buying up Russian national treasures looted by the Bolsheviks in the early days of the revolution.

After two years of service in the Russian capital, Marjorie had had enough of the Russian winters and so FDR replaced Davies as ambassador in 1938. On his return to the United States, Davies wrote the bestseller "Mission To Moscow" (1941), which was a loose collection of diary entries, letters, and reports to the State Department during Davies' time in Moscow. In the book and later movie, which were praised by FDR, Davies found the Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland to be to be justified as self-defense and made only benign reference to Stalin's 1939 pact with Hitler, which laid the groundwork for the shameless German and Soviet attacks on Poland and the start of World War II. The book was eventually made into a movie starring Walter Huston as Davies, a copy of which was duly presented to Stalin by Davies himself in 1943. Davies was eventually awarded the Order of Lenin in gratitude for his unwavering support of the Soviet dictator. The award was presented by Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor in the show trials, and a person who is now universally regarded as a ruthless villain and stooge of Stalin.

As Tzouliadis points out, however, these incidents are only a taste of Roosevelt's consistent support of the Soviet Union throughout the twelve years of his presidency. Perhaps the most shameful episode is the now infamous Katyn Forest Massacre. After the Soviet Union seized its half of Poland pursuant to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, the Soviets shot, and buried in mass pits, some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals. Some of these people were buried in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. When the Germans took this territory in 1941 as part of their attack on the Soviet Union, they discovered this mass grave and announced the atrocity to the world. The Soviets promptly denied it and accused the Nazis. There followed several investigations of the incident, which concluded that it was the Soviets who had committed the murders. One of these investigations was done at FDR's request by his friend, George Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania and then an officer in the US Navy. Earle concluded that it was the Soviets who had shot the Polish officers and communicated that to Roosevelt in a written report. When Roosevelt rejected the report, Earle threatened to publish it himself, only to be specifically ordered by Roosevelt, as commander of the armed forces, not to do so. Earle was then transferred to meaningless duty in a remote area of the Pacific for the remainder of the war.

With pungent irony, Tzouliadis references the many socialists who found their way into the Roosevelt administration, many of whom used their positions to skew US policy in favor of the Soviet Union and to disseminate disinformation that served no other purpose than to promote the interests of the Soviet Union. This conduct was not limited to secret Soviet agents like State Department official Alger Hiss or White House staffer Lauchlin Currie. Roosevelt's closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, who actually lived in the White House during the war, was such a deeply committed socialist that he carried out the US aid program to Russia "with a zeal which approached fanaticism." [John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (Viking Press 1947), p. 90. General Deane was head of the US Military Mission in Moscow during WWII.] He used his position as administrator of the Lend-Lease program to ferry massive amounts of material to the Soviets on terms much more favorable than those extended to the UK. In fact, Tzouliadis writes that a US Army major, a Lend-Lease expediter and liaison officer with the Soviets during the war, testified in Congress in 1949, later published in book form, [George Macy Jordan, "From Major Jordan's Diaries" (Harcourt Brace & Co. 1952, Ch. 5 "The Black Suitcases"] that in 1943 he inspected a number of black suit cases sealed with red wax that the Russians were sending to Moscow by the hundreds and for which they claimed diplomatic status even though they had no connection with any embassy. The inspection took place in the Great Falls, Montana air base on an airplane about to leave for the Soviet Union. The officer there discovered a letter from "H.H." on White House stationery to a Soviet official enclosing engineering drawings and atomic bomb technical information that an unidentified person had obtained from General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.

FDR and most of his New Deal staffers brought to the US Government a mild brand of socialism that most believe America needed in the 1930's to fix the economic woes brought on by the Great Depression. But many of these government officials, including Roosevelt himself, allowed their deep-seated socialist beliefs and the success of the New Deal to carry them too far to the left. Some, like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, went all the way to become Soviet agents. Others, like Harry Hopkins and Vice President Henry Wallace, stopped short of openly accepting Communism but became supporters and enablers of the Soviet Union and participants in its world-wide dissemination of propaganda and disinformation.

No review of "The Forsaken" would be complete without the story of FDR's decision to send Vice President Henry Wallace on a goodwill mission to the Soviet Union in mid-1944. Wallace was accompanied on this tour by Owen Lattimore, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who specialized in Chinese and Asian affairs, and was an outspoken supporter of Communism and the Soviet Union, and was instrumental in channeling US support to Mao Tse Tung's Communist forces in China. At the time of their tour, the Soviet Gulag was flourishing. The worst of the camps was in a region of Siberia known as Kolyma, which was an uninhabited area of extremes of climate and geography. Stalin established several camps in the Kolyma region to mine gold and other raw minerals. The starvation rations, extreme cold, harsh living conditions, and brutality of the KGB camp guards resulted in very short life spans for the unfortunate inmates. Kolyma was synonymous with a tortured and brutal death and the Gulag population regarded assignment to Kolyma as a simple death sentence.

Wallace and Lattimore spent several days of their 1944 Asian tour in the Kolyma camps, which the Soviets had converted for the visit into Potemkin villages complete with KGB agents brought in to pose as well-fed and happy camp workers. Wallace and Lattimore marveled at how well the camps were run and how happy and well adjusted were the inmates. Their Soviet hosts entertained them with concerts given by "inmate" orchestras. After the visit, to the astonished delight of the Soviets, Wallace and Lattimore reported their favorable observations to Roosevelt and the American public, while the real inhabitants of the Kolyma camps continued to suffer horrible deaths. Interestingly, after the war when the ruse was made public, Wallace apologized to the American people for having been duped by the Soviets. But that did not stop him from running for president of the United States in 1948 as a third-party candidate, with the surreptitious backing of the Communist Party of the USA.

All in all, "The Forsaken" brings an interesting new perspective to the sordid history of Soviet Communism and adds a uniquely American connection that is largely unknown. But the most important function of this excellent book is to bring to the world's attention the horrors of the Communist experiment in much the same way that Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror" (1968) and Martin Amis's "Koba The Dread" (2002) served to just tell the world what happened.

The Great Depression of the Twenties and the Thirties in the United Stated caused thousands of Americans to migrate to Russia.There they hoped their lot would be improved and saved.They came from many walks of life. However, in a very short period of time, not only would their lives change for the better;they would be sent to the Russian horror Gulags as a result of Stalin's decision to send there tens of millions.No one would be spared- not even those American citizens who honestly believed that Communism was the remedy to all their (financial) troubles.Many of them ended up as slaves in the gold mines of Kolyma.Others were executed or sent to corrective labour camps.After the demise of the Cold War did the truth of this forgotten episode of American history come out.
Tim Tzouliadis has written a masterfully- researched book. It is an original topic freshly investigated and was written by a great storyteller and historian.Basing his extensive research on American and definitely Russian archives,Tim shows the reader the extreme way American leaders and other well- known figures were duped by the Russian dictatorship of Stalin into thinking that Russia was some kind of paradise on earth, while the opposite happened.People like the singer Paul Robeson or the American Vice-President Wallace were convinced and seduced to believe the lies strewn along Russia in those horrible years.The true tragedy of those forsaken Americans was that nobody wanted to believe them or their stories or families ,while the American politicians and leaders did not care at all about them.The explanation for this behaviour seemed plausible:Stalin as an Ally of the West could not be bothered by such trifle things.The American embassy's obliviousness and the manipulations and machinations of the Stalin regime were other elements which helped magnify this tragedy.The State Department's indifference was appaling as well.
Some of these men and women escaped from the Soviet Union and managed to return to their homeland telling the author their horrible ordeal.They were baseball players and their physical fitness helped them survive and tell the rest of the world about their unbelievable tragedy.They have also depicted the monstrosities of a regime gone mad and totally paranoid which did not at all care whether thirty million Russians were expelled to the infamous Gulags.
This book should be a warning to those who tend to forget or want to make others forget.Collective amnesia-sometimes practiced by some politicians or statesmen- is the first sign of a country (or leadership) that does not care about its citizens.And it does not show any moral scruples.This is the main idea behind this wonderfully-written (and forgotten historical) episode.You will enjoy and treasure each page of it!!!