The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

IN OCCUPIED POLAND, Red Army soldiers experienced a similar conflict between ideology and the outward expression of reality. “Comrade Colonel,” one soldier was reported to have asked, “didn’t we come to Poland to liberate our brothers, oppressed by landowners and capitalists? . . . A peasant has three or four horses, five or six cows, there is a bicycle in front of every house. Workers wear suits, hats—the same as a big Soviet director. There is something here that I don’t understand.”18 The Red Army soldiers of the Polish campaign brought back news of shops piled high with goods, a world without queues or ration cards, where the ordinary workers’ flats had running water and two taps: “You turn one tap and you get hot water; you turn another—it’s cold.” Poland was almost miraculous, as if communism had finally arrived in the very place it had never been attempted.19 Inevitably, the NKVD followed in the Red Army’s wake to clear the population of all “enemies of the people.” In this process, approximately 1.7 million Poles were arrested and transported east into the Soviet camps.