The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

At Yalta, when Churchill asked for some lemon for his gin and tonics, he awoke the next morning to discover a lemon tree growing outside his palace window. Even this humble lemon tree concealed a private tragedy, which linked the forgotten Americans to this historic setting. Albert Troyer had been a citrus specialist, a graduate of the University of Nebraska, who arrived in the Soviet Union from his native Alabama in 1932, ready to take on the responsibility for revitalizing the moribund Soviet citrus industry. In the sunny climate by the Black Sea, Troyer had diligently crossed and grafted lemons for four years, until his arrest in 1936 and subsequent sentence to ten years in the Gulag. Eventually his wife’s parcels to him were returned, and Eva Troyer was informed that her husband had been “transferred to an undisclosed destination.”