The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

One American autoworker in Moscow reported six different types of stores selling items of varying quality to every class group.13 While others who had been in the Soviet Union much longer were no longer shocked on seeing as many as seventeen different categories of wage and food rations. The mockery of the early American arrivals—“Workers of the World Unite, and then divide yourself into seventeen categories!”—was entirely lost on the Bolsheviks.14 The most luxurious stores were exclusively reserved for the Bolshevik elites, and if a young American such as Thomas Sgovio did not know any better, he might have suspected that a new class of privileged had quickly arisen from the ashes of the old.