 | |
| 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.
In the first 8 months of 1931, a Soviet trade agency in New York advertised 6,000 positions and received more than 100,000 applications. 10,000 Americans were hired in 1931, part of the official "organized emigration". [1] [2] [3] [4]
In February 1931, Walter Duranty, a Soviet propaganda officer embedded in 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 Soviet citizens. Some were executed. Others were sent to "corrective labor" camps in the Gulag where they were worked to death. [8]
As documented by Tzouliadis, they were essentially abandoned by the U.S. government and its diplomats in Moscow. [9]
The book was praised for bringing public awareness to American emigration to the Soviet Union in the wake of the great depression [10] [1] and the presence of American citizens in the Gulag system. [11] [12] Reviewers found the life stories of individuals in the Soviet Union to be engaging and well-told. [13] [10] [14] The book's style has been described as "journalistic", [15] like a movie script, [11] or compared to Robert Conquest and Ann Applebaum's Gulag. [10]
Marshall describes the book as repeating outdated Cold War-era historiography. She critiques the book's strong reliance on American sources, including unreliable McCarthy-era ones, while failing to utilize the Russian archives and recent research. [10] Tzouliadis doesn't know the Russian language, but did commission Russian speakers to do interviews and archival work in Russia. [13]
In the book, Tzouliadis expresses passionate indignation against American public figures and government officials who he feels should have acted to support and defend their compatriots in the Soviet Union. [14] [16] [17] Marshall asserted that Tzouliadis' animosity toward the Roosevelt administration overcame his analysis, sweepingly denigrating every official without exception, and offering a confusingly alleging the administration was "simultaneously naive, hopelessly corrupt, and infiltrated". [10]
Reviewers found the book unfocused, covering personal stories of Americans in the Soviet Union, Soviet-American government relations, the history of the Soviet Union, and American public figures who spoke well of the Soviet Union. [10] [16] [17] Only the first of these topics was done well. [10] [16] Marshall says "his treatment of the Soviet-American bilateral relationship... never rises above a grim caricature of reality". [10] The book was regarded as lacking in nuance. [16] [10]
by the mid-1930s around 10,000 American citizens responded to Soviet-paid "help wanted" ads in US newspapers.
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The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
Walter Duranty was an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1917–1923).
John Scott (1912–1976) was an American writer. He spent about a decade in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1941. His best-known book, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, is a memoir of that experience. The bulk of his career was as a journalist, book author, and editor with Time Life.
The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, implemented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of socialism in one country. Leon Trotsky had delivered a joint report to the April Plenum of the Central Committee in 1926 which proposed a program for national industrialisation and the replacement of annual plans with five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority which was controlled by the troika and derided by Stalin at the time. Stalin's version of the five-year plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Major causes include: the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of hunger across the Soviet Union.
Holodomor denial is the claim that the Holodomor, a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing its scale and significance.
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.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
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 foreign recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
Ivan Fyodorovich Nikishov was a Soviet NKVD Lieutenant General and director of Dalstroy.
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.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is a 2002 non-fiction book by British writer Martin Amis.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Victor Herman was a Jewish-American who spent 18 years as a Soviet prisoner in the Gulags of Siberia. At 16 years of age, his family went to work in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s but met tragic fates during the Stalin purges.
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991 such as statements from emigres and other informants.
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