Tim Tzouliadis

This is a bone-chilling account of the Americans who went to Russia in the 1930s looking for work during the Great Depression. All went well until Stalin's Purges began. The survivors were ignored by the US government, pawns in a larger political game during WW2 and the Cold War. Well written and a grim reminder of how the best laid plans can go very wrong.

The gulags devoured thousands of American lives. Restless spirits that answered ads in U. S. newspapers for work in Soviet Russia during the depths of the depression found themselves state-less and isolated once the purges started. Their total number is lost, but at the height of the migration (early 30s) more than 1000 Americans a week were arriving in Moscow, usually entire families. There were American schools, baseball leagues, and English newspapers in and around Moscow. Henry Ford sold show more an entire (obsolete and shutdown) factory to Stalin, who imported the Ford engineers and mechanics that were also soon abandoned to their sad fates.

A second wave of purges struck after the war, claiming most of the children and wives of those purged in the 30s. Thousands of Allied POWs found themselves under Soviet control in the aftermath of the war. A final wave of Americans arrived as Korean War POWs and shot down airmen, and likewise abandoned due to Cold War realpolitik.

In a book filled with terrible revelations, the worst to me is a an eyewitness account buried in a U. S. archive, of two shipwrecked WWII submarine crews that were picked up by Soviet tankers, and dispatched to the camps.

Much in the book comes from the memoirs of two Americans, both taken to Stalin's Russia as children by parents desperate for work, that not only survived their ordeals, but were able to eventually (in the 60s and 70s) return home. show less

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 show more of the nightmare of the secret police, nightly disappearances, famine gulags and torture that innocent people had to endure at the hands of a bizarre leader. I really felt the fear and the distrust of Russian citizens during this period of history throughout this book and while I have read quite a few books set around this time I had not realised so many American had been victims of Stalin's regime also.

There is much about this book that I would praise. It is extremely well researched and deals with a part of history that will educate and inform the reader and you know the information while harrowing and depressing is correct and the story brilliantly told. I learned a lot from this book and am so glad I read it.

A word of warning though the book reads like a history book as it is a very detailed piece of work and at times I did find it slow reading as there is a huge amount of information to digest but the book was a fantastic account of thousands of Americans who moved to the Soviet Union only to perish or be imprisoned in the harsh and cruel gulags. I had not been aware or read about this anywhere until I came across this book on Goodreads.

I really felt the book could have benefited with photographs of 1930s Russia and also a map of areas mentioned would have been so helpful as I think it is important to give the reader a better idea of the setting.

Overall a powerful historical read and a book that will stay with me for a long time. show less

Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal.