Author | Tim Tzouliadis |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Penguin Books |
Publication date | June 30, 2009 |
Media type | Print (Softcover) |
Pages | 448 |
ISBN | 978-0143115427 |
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a 2008 book published by Penguin Books. It tells the story of thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The vast majority of these Americans were executed or sent to the Gulag by Joseph Stalin's government.[ citation needed ]
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 2 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]
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The Gulag was the government agency which was in charge of the Soviet network of forced-labour camps which was set up by order of Vladimir Lenin. It reached its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag to refer to all forced-labour camps which existed in the Soviet Union, including camps which existed in the post-Stalin era. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as by NKVD troikas or by other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognised as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.
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Kolyma is a region located in the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered by Russians until 1926. Today the region consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.
Walter Duranty was a Liverpool born Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921).
Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel was a Jewish Bolshevik and member of the Cheka Soviet secret police. Frenkel is best known for his role in the organisation of work in the Gulag, starting from the forced labor camp of the Solovetsky Islands, which is recognised as one of the earliest sites of the Gulag.
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The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, created by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of Socialism in One Country. The plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.
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Eduard Petrovich Berzin, born in Latvia, was a soldier and Chekist, but is remembered primarily for setting up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of forced-labour camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners died. It was considered to be the most brutal of all the Gulag regions.
Denial of the Holodomor is the claim that the 1932–1933 Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing the scale and significance of the famine. Official Soviet propaganda denied the famine and suppressed information about it from its very beginning until the 1980s. It was also circulated by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including The New York Times' Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the man-made famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. According to Robert Conquest, it was the first major instance in which Soviet authorities adopted the Big Lie propaganda technique in order to sway world opinion, and it was followed by similar campaigns with regard to the Moscow Trials and the denial of the existence of the Gulag labor camp system.
Thomas Sgovio was an American artist, ex-Communist, and former inmate of a Soviet Union GULAG camp in Kolyma. His father was an Italian American communist, deported by the US authorities to the USSR because of his political activities.
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John Dickinson "Jack" Littlepage was an American mining engineer. He was born in Gresham, Oregon on September 14, 1894. Littlepage was employed in the USSR from 1928 to 1937, becoming Deputy Commissar of the USSR's Gold Trust in the 1930s. He is one of the recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
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Robert Nathaniel Robinson was a Jamaican-born toolmaker who worked in the auto industry in the United States. At the age of 23, he was recruited to work in the Soviet Union. Shortly after his arrival in Stalingrad, Robinson was racially assaulted by two white American workers, both of whom were subsequently arrested, tried and expelled from the Soviet Union with great publicity.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
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