The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

After weeks of waiting, the prisoners were eventually marched down toward a fleet of ships waiting at anchor in the Vladivostok dockyard. The NKVD ships were old tramp steamers that once had names such as Commercial Quaker, Ripon, and Dallas, and had been bought up in America and Europe for rock-bottom prices after the Crash. The smoke-stacks of the Gulag fleet were painted in the blue of the NKVD, but the ships themselves were always at the very margins of seaworthiness. Already old and decrepit when they were bought, the fleet had since been corroded by the fierce weather, the sea salt, and the ice floes.28 Now Thomas Sgovio found himself being pushed down a steep and slippery wooden stairway into the filthy depths of the ship. It took a while for the prisoners’ eyes to adjust to the dim light of the lower decks, but looming out of the darkness was a scene that one survivor compared to a nightmarish vision by Francisco Goya.29 In the cavernous depths of each ship were crammed five or more levels of wooden bunks containing thousands of battered men and women from all over the Soviet Union who had been arrested. Thomas Sgovio was pressed into the human cargo of the steamer Indigirka, which ferried between three and five thousand other prisoners north across the Sea of Okhotsk into another world. He remembered the date of his transportation exactly. It was August 2, 1938, three years to the day since he had left New York Harbor on the deck of a passenger liner, waving goodb...