The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

America's darkest hour of Betrayal was during the Global Depression of the 1930's was written by Tim Tzouliadis entitled: "The Forsaken".

This book is about how America, during the Depression of the 1930's, and I quote from the book; "Lured American's to work in the Soviet Union. This is a POWERFUL book, as he researched for almost a decade, and how he obtained historical information through an American law; The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 in order for Tzouliadis to write this historically accurate book. The author wrote in detail how and why the American Government under Franklin D. Roosevelt, his Secretaries of the Treasury, Commerce, State, and the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union knew of the thousands of innocent American unemployed Trade Unionists plight, but ended in Gulag's throughout Siberia only to meet their deaths.

A must READ for those who seek the truth behind Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Joseph's Stalin's Five Year Plan.

The "Pen is Mightier than the Sword", and books bring knowledge in hopes that history will never be repeated.

"TO THINE OWNSELF BE TRUE" !

To be honest, I bought this book thinking it would be about a bunch of Americans who turned their backs on America simply because times were bad or because they had a political agenda. However, the writing of the book made me sympathetic with the many of the people the author wrote about and by the time I finished it I really did feel sorry for these Americans who were duped into entering the USSR and then siezed into the gulag system. And no punches are pulled as opportunities to intervene on Americans' behalfs are discussed, lost opportunities thanks to fellow travelers, bureaucrats and politicians. And not only are the depression-era workers a subject for the writer but also American servicemen captured during WWII, Korea and the Cold War. Someday I hope a reckoning is made and the files will be freely opened for us to know what happened to so many of these men and women.

This is the type of history book that I always look for; filling in a blank spot in knowledge, well-written and affecting. You can read the greater detail in other reviews, but the high-level story is the totalitarian savagery of the Soviet Union on almost everyone it could get its hands on. The second theme is the indifference and political expediency of the Roosevelt administration and its successors in not raising a finger to aid or protect any of the victims; in the immediate aftermath of WW2 it became a direct co-conspirator by shipping thousands of Russians to their deaths in the Soviet Gulag. There are also interesting tales of artists and newspaper reporters visiting from America who routinely chose to maintain their privileges in the Soviet Union at the expense of their American and Soviet friends dragged away in the middle of the night and never seen again. The moral of the story is that you should hope to be a person of compassion and principle rather than become the informer and the murderer; that could be difficult to do in a place like the Soviet Union.

To me, having never read The Gulag Archipelago, this book was a revelation. It's the absorbing story of American prisoners of the USSR and the indifference shown them by our government, particularly the state department. Most shocking to me, however, was his description of the gulag camps north of Magadan, where the prisoners were slowly starved while subjected to long days of labor in unearthly cold, 365 days a year, in the mines. It's hard to imagine a worse death. The Terror is also revealed in its wide scope, its cruelty and its arbitrariness.

Not too far from where I live is a small National Cemetery. Way in the back corner are a half dozen or so markers of World War II German POW's. Some of those German soldiers buried there committed suicide because at the end of World War II, the US Government was going to repatriate them back to the Soviet Union. You see, they came from a part of Ukraine, settled by Germans, under Catherine the Great, when the Germans invaded the USSR, they joined the German Army. They apparently also understood what awaited them in Stalin's Russia. This is just a side bar in the great history, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. The author tells the story of what became of American nationals, who out of committment to communism, hunger during the depression, or just plain naivete emmigrated from the United States to the Soviet Union during the great depression. Out of tens of thousands of immigrants from the US to the USSR during the 1930s, very few lived to tell the tale of their experiences under the greatest terror conceived by any dictator. Stalin out of his own twisted paranoia had many of them executed or sentenced to the slow death of the Soviet Gulag's. But, more disturbing than that is the fact that the US Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, knew what Stalin was doing to US nationals, including downed American Pilots originally captured by the Germans or who crash landed in Soviet territory during our war with Japan, and quiety acquiesced to allowing them to be executed or imprisoned by the Soviets. So much for "Nothing to fear but fear itself." Unless of course your President, for lack of a better description admires and kisses up to a Soviet thug. The Author paints a clear picture of how the first American Ambassadors to the USSR were so enamored of Stalin the Soviet experiment they were willing to look the other way. It also paints a sad picture of how the Roosevelt administration contributed to the Soviet "Terror" by choosing to ignore it, only to be followed by the Truman administration's gullibility when it came to trusting Stalin and his regime. This book will hopefully open American eyes to just how not great FDR and give 'em hell Harry really did this nation an diservice when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union. As I mentioned earlier, there are side bars here, namely how the Soviet's used our lend lease materials, trucks, ships, etc. to feed the terror, namely transport people to the Gulags, and not fight the Germans. This is a well written history, but deeply disturbing because of the facts it reveals. This book is highly recommended if one wants to really understand how the United States government by its elected an appointed officials aided Stalin's terror against not only his own people, but foreigners too.