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The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

Tim Tzouliadis

4.29 · Rating details · 730 Ratings · 131 Reviews

A remarkable piece of forgotten history- the never-before-told story of Americans lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives, only to meet tragic ends

In 1934, a photograph was taken of a baseball team. These two rows of young men look like any group of American ballplayers, except perhaps for the Russian lettering on their jerseys. The players have lef

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Hardcover, 436 pages

Published July 17th 2008 by The Penguin Press (first published July 17th 2007)

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Feb 01, 2014 Dem rated it really liked it

Shelves: russian-history

The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is an important and tragic piece of history.

This is an extremely well researched book and tells the forgotten and relatively unknown story of families who emigrate to Russia from America during the era of the American Depression in the hope of a new life only to become victims of Stalin's terror during his 5 year plan in which millions of Russians and thousands of Americans are brutally interrogated and either assassinated or sent to Gulags in Siberia. We learn of ...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont rated it really liked it

The other Joads

Many people will be familiar with the story of the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the great epic of the Great Depression in America, or from the film of the same name directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Tom and his family are dirt poor ‘Okies’, who escape from Oklahoma’s ever expanding Dust Bowl, moving west to California in search of a better life. Instead they are met with hostility and exploitation.

The Joads were lucky. Th ...more

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Jul 09, 2009 Dan rated it it was amazing

My dad, when I was a kid, used to refer to Joseph Davies, America's 2nd Ambassador to the Soviet Union and native of our hometown, as a "communist." As I got older, I used to chalk this up to a latent McCarthyism within him, but Tzouliadis has helped me understand better something I think my dad knew about: American complicity with the rise of Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
Davies, among others, stands out in this book as the poster child for a quiet admiration held by many in the American government ...more

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Mar 27, 2009 Stefan rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, library-loan

The full title of this excellent book is "The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia". It's a very readable non-fiction account of the lives of the many Americans who emigrated to the USSR during the Great Depression. In the 1930's the US was going through an enormous economic decline and rampant unemployment. The USSR seemed attractive to many Americans: the country was stabilizing after the October Revolution, in the middle of what was considered a grand social experiment - the first The full title of this excellent book is "The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia". It's a very readable non-fiction account of the lives of the many Americans who emigrated to the USSR during the Great Depression. In the 1930's the US was going through an enormous economic decline and rampant unemployment. The USSR seemed attractive to many Americans: the country was stabilizing after the October Revolution, in the middle of what was considered a grand social experiment - the first communist country. This was exciting at the time - a young country that had just overthrown Tsarist rule and was trying a new, radical form of government. Thousands of Americans emigrated, searching for work and prosperity, feeling like the original American pioneers looking for fortune in an unknown land. They found work, brought over their families, started a prosperous immigrant society. Russia in the 30's even had baseball leagues and English language newspapers. Henry Ford did good business with Stalin and helped him set up an automobile construction plant, manned by American engineers and workers.
In the second half of the decade, the Stalin regime started becoming more paranoid, arresting and detaining some of the original revolutionaries in its drive to consolidate its power. This process would become completely unhinged as the years went by, leading to the arrest of hundreds of thousands of people --- including the American immigrants. Many of them ended up in the Gulag "corrective labor camps" - concentration camps in Northeast Russia, mainly there to mine gold and later uranium in the most horrible circumstances. The vast majority of the prisoners died within a few months of arrival, necessitating ever more new prisoners to keep the gold flowing. It's hard to wrap your mind around the amount of people who died in those camps.
Meanwhile, the American embassy in Moscow was completely ineffectual in trying to protect US citizens or get them released from the Gulag system. One American ambassador actively misinformed Roosevelt to protect his own lavish lifestyle. The fact that most of the immigrant Americans were forced to release their passports and take on Russian nationality didn't help. The end result is that thousands upon thousands of Americans were basically abandoned to their fate.
Even more heartbreaking is the fact that some of the prisoners who managed to survive the camps were released after the second World War, only to be re-arrested when the Cold War broke out in the years after WWII. "The Forsaken" details the entire period from the early 1930's through the post-Stalin years, and even deals with some of the problems researchers encountered in the post-Glasnost era when trying to access some of the historical records.
This is an excellent book, well-researched and, despite the subject matter, very readable. The author deftly combines the personal stories of the American immigrants with the history of the era. The book is informative and touching at the same time.

(One note: I had to find a second book to read because, after reading a few chapters of "The Forsaken" before bed, I had some really horrific nightmares - and this was even before I got to the more detailed descriptions of the Gulag camps. The book is very tasteful and never graphical, but it still affected me very strongly, so I read "The Forsaken" during the day only.) ...more

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Jul 22, 2015 Eugenia Vlasova rated it it was amazing

One of my friends once asked me, “Why do Russians want Stalin back? He was a mass murderer and killed Russians by the millions. Why do Russian people think he was a good ruler?” All I could say was, “Well, if I knew the answer, I would still live in Russia… I moved to Canada, because I can't justify those sentiments.” Then he continued: “Have you heard about the thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union to escape the Great Depression? And they vanished in the Gulag”. Never heard One of my friends once asked me, “Why do Russians want Stalin back? He was a mass murderer and killed Russians by the millions. Why do Russian people think he was a good ruler?” All I could say was, “Well, if I knew the answer, I would still live in Russia… I moved to Canada, because I can't justify those sentiments.” Then he continued: “Have you heard about the thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union to escape the Great Depression? And they vanished in the Gulag”. Never heard of. To follow-up our discussion he sent me a gift – a book titled The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.

I thought I knew quite a bit about Stalinism and the Gulag. I had read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov. My teacher of literature encouraged us, future humanities students, to learn as much as possible about the darkest chapters of the Russian history. My family suffered from the repressions, after all. Yet, the book proved how little did I know.

The Forsaken starts with the introduction of a few individuals who, among many others, left the USA for the Soviet Union lured by communist propaganda and driven by the desperation of the Great Depression. As one reviewer on Amazon said, “many saw the apparent failure of capitalism contrasted unfavorably with the apparent success of the 'Soviet experiment' and emigrated freely to join the new socialist state unaware of what the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' truly entailed.” History is like a panoramic picture – you can't make out too many details there or individual faces. But the bigger picture that historians usually strive to provide makes each particular life seem unimportant. Sometimes to comprehend the lessons of history, we need portraits. Tim Tzouliadis portrayed history through life stories of a few American expats, which makes the narration more powerful and gives a reader a fiction-like experience.

I read fast in both Russian and English, but it took me a few months to get through this book. I liked the writing style of Tim Tzouliadis, but what he wrote about was often overwhelmingly gloomy. I had to take a break after each dozen pages. Some episodes were particularly unbearable, so I took longer pauses. When I read about routine tortures or mass shootings “by quotas”, I literally felt the sour smell of blood.

Yet, the book is not about ultimate suffering or the incomprehensible cruelty of the Stalin's regime. It is not even about the Soviet Union. Not solely about it. It is about little people and great powers playing a great game. And, most importantly, about the justice that was denied to millions of innocent victims, among which are thousands (probably, hundreds thousands) of Americans. “At the end of the war, allied investigators found it difficult to comprehend how one million people could have been killed in a few acres of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka. Only after the downfall of the regime, and the arrival of the victorious Allied armies, could the enormity of the crime be revealed—and later, in Nuremberg, a measure of justice brought to bear. In the Soviet Union, there was never a victorious army to expose the consequences of Stalin’s rule; nor would there ever be a Nuremberg. Instead, the victims of Kolyma, and every other terminal point of the Gulag, remained concealed even as the killings continued unabated. In Kolyma, the rhetorical question Joseph Goebbels had asked in his diary actually came true: “For when we win who will question us on our methods?”, Tim Tzouliadis wrote.

If I had a chance to talk to Tim Tzouliadis, I would like to ask him a few questions. How did he manage to get through those archival documents, memoirs and other evidences of the terror (the bibliography section of the book is really impressive)? I know that the people who investigated crimes of the nazi regime often suffered from the nervous breakdowns. How did he find the strength to carry on? Did he try to get access to the Russian archives? Russian authorities still keep documents about Stalin's crimes classified, but some papers were unearthed during 1990s and early 2000s, this is how I managed to find the information about my family. Did he receive any feedback from Russian readers, and, perhaps, from descendants of those who kept the repression machine running? How did American readers react to this book? Though the author realistically estimated the chances for a Nuremberg for Stalin as very slim, nearly non-existent, is there any hope for a thorough investigation of what happened in the Soviet Union and was persistently ignored by the rest of the world for decades?

And, of course, I would like to thank the writer for his honest book. Your work is very important, Mr. Tzoudialis. ...more

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Nov 16, 2009 Elizabeth Scott rated it it was amazing

I knew I wanted to read this after all those books about Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons, and although it took me a while to find it (someone's TBR pile is, um, a little large), I did!

For some reason, probably because a Motel T is on the cover, I thought it was about Ford workers who moved to the USSR and disappeared during Stalin's decades-long Terror. But instead, Tzouliadias provides a comprehensive overview of the many Americans--some Communists committed to Stalin's cause, some si I knew I wanted to read this after all those books about Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons, and although it took me a while to find it (someone's TBR pile is, um, a little large), I did!

For some reason, probably because a Motel T is on the cover, I thought it was about Ford workers who moved to the USSR and disappeared during Stalin's decades-long Terror. But instead, Tzouliadias provides a comprehensive overview of the many Americans--some Communists committed to Stalin's cause, some simply seeking jobs during the Great Depression, and some who simply went with their families. There also were some Ford workers who went over when Henry Ford sold a factory that he was about to destroy to Stalin, and thus made is possible for the USSR to begin motor vehicle production.

In a horrifying twist, most of these first cars ended up in the fleet of the NKVD, the secret police of the time--or those who arrested, tortured, and ran the prison camps in which so many died during Stalin's mass murder of close to twenty million people. (Yes, twenty million)

Regardless as to why they went to the USSR, almost all of these Americans who went, even the die-hard Communists, soon found themselves rounded up and sent to one of the many camps where so many died--and although this book does focus on the Americans who moved to the USSR and died, Tzouliadis doesn't stint on discussing the effects of Stalin's brutal and mind-boggling cruelty on Russians as well as POWs in WW II, as well as the startlingly inept response those Americans who did try to get help from the US embassy or government received. (The descriptions of one of the US ambassadors at the time (along with most of his staff), made me feel sick to my stomach, as does the fact that so many documents about the Terror were classified for years by the US Government--I sure don't think as much of President Roosevelt as I used to after reading this book)

Overall, this book serves as a good introduction to Stalin's ferociously efficient and brutal murder of millions, with a particular focus on those Americans who died. For an even more in-depth look at the Terror as witnessed by those who suffered most--Russians--please read The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes, which is truly outstanding, and for a ferocious rebuttal of those who supported Stalin and turned a blind eye to what he was doing---and how his purges still remain mostly unnoticed by history, read Martin Amis's blistering Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. ...more

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Jul 23, 2011 Margaret Sankey rated it really liked it

This is the overlooked story of Americans, particularly African-Americans, who left tinderbox cities like Detroit in the 1920s to work in a Soviet-Ford joint plant. They taught the Russians baseball and some married Russians, and then they got sucked into the storm of purges and gulags after Lenin's death as western agents, or just disposable outsiders. One man's life is a catalog of catastrophe--burned out of his Detroit house, arrested as a spy in 1926, rehabilitiated to work as an engineer, a ...more

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Dec 08, 2009 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

One of the best, most important books I've ever read. It should be required reading in all US classrooms to explain why we fought the Cold War and why we continue to fight for freedom today. Many people, some avowed communists, some just looking for work ventured to the "Worker's Paradise" the USSR during the Great Depression most never to be seen of or heard from again, worked to death in Stalin's gulags. All but abandoned by the US, their story is truly important, and a vivid lesson as to why ...more

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Dec 10, 2009 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

This is a book that every American school student should read. It will show them that their government was complicit with the Soviet Union in the imprisonment, torture and murder of thousands of American citizens. There were many American service members who were captured in Korea during the Korean War who were sent into the Soviet Gulag system and never returned.

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Apr 17, 2010 Ted rated it really liked it

Reveals the fascinating and little-known phenomenon of Depression-era Americans moving to the Soviet Union and ending up trapped in a Stalinist hell. The author unearths the stories of these forgotten individuals, and lambastes the Americans who facilitated their tortures. Ambassador Joseph Davies actually proclaimed that Stalin's show trials were legitimate. Many Americans were arrested by the secret police literally right outside of the embassy, having been turned away after seeking help. Paul ...more

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Jul 01, 2009 Rick Hautala rated it it was amazing

Like the blurb says: "A remarkable piece of forgotten history ..." How thousandsof Americans were lured to the Soviet Union during the (first) GreatDepression and then how so many of them (including many Finns) were "disappeared" during Stalin's Terror ... Absolutely riveting story!

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Nov 14, 2009 Howard Olsen rated it it was amazing

An incredible book about Americans who found themselves caught up in the Soviet Gulag, a phenomenon that has largely been lost to history (although authors like Whittaker Chambers and IB Singer mentioned it). Hard as it might be to believe, thousands of American leftists moved to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, convinced it would be the vanguard of the future. Instead, they found a cruel, paranoid totalitarian state that would eventually arrest and kill them all. There are very few happy endin An incredible book about Americans who found themselves caught up in the Soviet Gulag, a phenomenon that has largely been lost to history (although authors like Whittaker Chambers and IB Singer mentioned it). Hard as it might be to believe, thousands of American leftists moved to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, convinced it would be the vanguard of the future. Instead, they found a cruel, paranoid totalitarian state that would eventually arrest and kill them all. There are very few happy endings in this book. If you weren't shot, you were shipped off to the camps for re-education, but the camps were set up to be killing machines. You were simply worked to death, thousands of miles from anyone who could help. Tzouliadis thoroughly traces the crimes of the Soviets, and his descriptions of the elements of the Stalinist Terror - from the late night arrests by the NKVD to the torture sessions in Lubynaka prison to the show trials to the brutal transportation to Siberia and beyond to the harrowing life of a slave laborer in the land of "social justice" - are masterful, not to mention harrowing; but special mention should be made for the American progressives who encouraged people to emigrate to the Soviet Union and then turned a blind eye when everyone they knew in Moscow was being arrested and "liquidated." There was Walter Duranty, the NY Times correspondent who never wrote a negative word during his years in Moscow. There was the US Ambassador Joseph Davies who wrote a memoir of his time in Moscow that was so obsequious the Soviet censors did not have to change a word. There was Paul Robeson, who literally sang songs to Stalin. And there was Henry Wallace - vice president in FDR's third term - who actually toured the Gulag (while in office!) and pronounced everything hunky-dory. All of these men would see their reputations destroyed during the McCarthy Era, which makes me think McCarthy may have been on to something. The connection between Stalinist Russia and certain elements of the American Left has never been presented more clearly or starkly. My only complaint, Tzouliadis refers to a number of photographs and documents that he viewed, but ... doesn't reproduce them in the book! This is one of the best books of the year, and highly recommended. ...more

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Nov 21, 2008 Cynthia rated it it was amazing

For those who want their history to be as fast-paced and fasciating as a best seller...

This is a story about a little-known group of emigrants - the thousands of Americans who travelled to the USSR in the 30's to escape the Depression and become part of the first Communist Revolution to build a new society. Although many went for ideological reasons, others went for the promise of guaranteed employment and a new life.

Tzouliadis details the saga of these Americans who became labeled as "Enemies o ...more

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Jan 19, 2009 Eric rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, modern-history, non-fiction, soviet-union, books-i-own

Excellent book. Well-written, good pacing, a nice mix of personal history and general history. The author is primarily concerned with Americans imprisoned by the Soviet gulag, which probably amounted to thousands of them over a several decades, if not tens of thousands. Many of those Americans unjustly imprisoned freely moved to Russia for work during the Great Depression. Most of them never came back. Other Americans include military personnel from WWII.

But the author also discusses the politi ...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Pam rated it it was amazing

This book chronicles a sad portion of American history: the fate of Americans who, desperate for work during the Great Depression, emigrated to the Soviet Union. Although they led productive lives in the beginning, eventually, they were forced to relinquish their American passports, and hundreds of them were among the 19 million + people imprisoned and/or the 7 million + people executed during Stalin's reign of terror. Sadly, sometimes through fear, sometimes through willful denial, and sometime ...more

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Dec 31, 2014 Ray rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a book about the great terror in Soviet Russia. It focuses on the fate of the thousands of Americans who emigrated to Russia in search of a better life during the depression of the 1930s. The emigrants were naïve in the extreme, and when Stalin unleashed his murderous purges they were liquidated. Few survived to tell the tale.

What is sickening is that the US Government did next to nothing to help its erstwhile citizens. Many of the functionaries dealing with the increasingly desperate pl ...more

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Mar 05, 2010 FiveBooks rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fivebooks-on-communism-in-america

Professor Harvey Klehr has chosen to discuss Tim Tzouliadis’s The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia , on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject - Communism in America, saying that:

"This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed..."

The full interview is available here: http:// ...more

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Aug 14, 2009 Thomas Clark rated it it was amazing

This book was an eye-opener for me. I was amazed that nearly 10,000 depression-era autoworkers became expatriates to Stalin's Russia, following political idealism in order to establish automotive plants and worker communities in the Soviet Union, yet becoming political pawns completely abandoned by the U.S. as nearly all were consumed by Stalin's gulags. This is the most fascinating book I've read in years, with remarkable parallels to modern political-industrial situations.

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Nov 05, 2009 Molly Southwick rated it it was amazing

So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons...So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed.
Andrei Sinyavsky, On Socialist Realism.

This book was eye opening as was this quote, which sheds a TRUE light on socialism.

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Nov 20, 2017 Carlos Contente rated it did not like it

DNF- I hate to admit it, but the writing in this book was simply too poor to be enjoyable. The research is there and the subject matter definitely has the potential to be turned into a fascinating book- this, unfortunately, is not that book. Tzouliadis writes in broad, general statements, instead of utilizing individual tales to tell the overall story of the men and women who left their lives behind in Depression-era America to begin anew in Soviet Russia. Very disappointing.

I will; however, st ...more

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May 20, 2018 Alexandra Popoff rated it it was amazing

This fascinating book tells about three generations of Americans in the Gulag. I was impressed with the author's original archival research and courage in speaking out about uncomfortable facts, e.g., failure by the American government to rescue thousands of their own citizens. Some naive Americans went to the USSR during the Depression in the 1930s, in search of jobs; others, the Allied soldiers and officers were captured by the Nazis during WWII and, upon the liberation of the Nazi camps, were ...more

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Aug 14, 2015 Amanda rated it it was ok · review of another edition

So, I'm one of the handful of people on Goodreads to review The Forsaken unfavorably. I'm obviously missing something, because the book received glowing acclaim and it covers one of my favorite topics, yet it was a chore to finish. Don't get me wrong – objectively, I understand the high praise. Tzouliadis has the gift of "showing not telling" and evinces many of the Soviet system's hypocrisies by retelling apparently insignificant anecdotes. But did it have to be so tedious?

There's a lot of rich ...more

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Jan 28, 2014 Linda rated it it was amazing

Oh my gosh! This is a heavily documented book telling of the well-concealed history of the fate of thousands of American families who were lured Eastward, to Russia, during the Great Depression. Henry Ford set up shop there and that industry, along with many others, brought jobless Americans eagerly anticipating a good job at the least, and an Utopian Society at the most in this new order under the mighty Joseph Stalin. (Stalin actually ran adds in American newspapers enticing people to come to ...more

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May 07, 2015 Mary rated it it was amazing

I can't recommend this book highly enough. For as much as we think we may know or be aware of regaring the Stalinist period (which was so long and so deadly), lovers of freedom are going to feel the heartbreak of the fate that awaited the sincerely optimistic and forward-looking Americans who believed that the way forward for mankind was to build the "workers' paradise". What is tragic is that they and their ideals were betrayed by the very place that they believed would uphold freedom. The clas ...more

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Mar 22, 2015 Linnaea rated it it was amazing

Shelves: cool-non-fiction, could-not-put-down, history

This book was amazing. It is a history book about the thousands of Americans who immigrated to the USSR during the great depression and what happened to them along with the blind eyes of the American government. These people were viewed as "flotsam and jetsam" and were unimportant in WW2 or the beginnings of the cold war, not that many had survived the Terror of the late 1930's. Tzouliadis' book covers from the beginnings of the depression to the end of the USSR with a high focus on the area bet ...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Aaron rated it it was amazing

Anyone who tries to defend the policies and history of Trotsky, Lenin, or Stalin has no credibility and doesn't know what they are talking about. Trust me, I've done my homework on these things. Don't believe me--take a look at my reading list. Soviet Communism is just like the modern day Republican Party--it had principles that aren't practical, it was full of illusions and broken dreams, it was full of talking heads like Glen Beck, Rush Bimbaugh, and inevitably Soviet Communism led to a crisis ...more

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Apr 08, 2011 Stephanie rated it really liked it

4.5
This should be required reading! I did not learn about this in any of my history classes, but most likely because it hasn't been known -- or rather accepted -- until recently. I knew Stalin was evil; I just didn't understand the depth and breadth of it until reading this book. It was difficult to read at times and very difficult to understand how this could have happened. Hitler and his concentration camps killed 6 million people. Stalin and his gulag "labor camps" killed nearly 3 times that ...more

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Aug 14, 2016 Ossian rated it it was amazing

This story deserves to be better known. It is a story of thousands of Americans - misguided or driven to despair by the Depression - who went to Russia in the 1930s, most of them to perish in the Soviet prisons and concentration camps while American diplomats, journalists and government officials looked the other way.

It's a heartbreaking story: these people had no Schindler, no Raoul Wallenberg. In fact, I didn't know, or had forgotten, that Wallenberg, after saving thousands of Jews from the Ho ...more

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Sep 20, 2013 Mike Gabor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: cold-war

This is one of the most disturbing books I've read in quite awhile. Thousands of Americans emigrated to the Soviet Union during the Depression in order to find work. Starting in the 1930's and continuing for over twenty years, they and millions of Russians were either executed or sent off into the gulag. Basically, American officials who were aware of this stood by and did nothing to help their fellow countrymen. Not only were the immigrants sent off but American POW's liberated by Russian troop ...more

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Jul 04, 2017 Annie rated it it was amazing

The Forsaken: The American Emigration to Soviet Russia, by Tim Tzouliadis, is one of the saddest books I've read in a long time. Tzouliadis uncovered a forgotten migration and wrote this moving account of these Americans' story. It's easy to scoff at its premise; after all, we have the hindsight of history to prove us right. During the depths of the Great Depression, a group of several thousand Americans bought into the Soviets' propaganda that there were jobs and opportunities in the Soviet Uni ...more

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