American and Soviet workers at a baseball game in Gorky Park, 1934 – but early optimism soon evaporated under Stalin's Terror.
THE FORSAKEN – FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION TO THE GULAGS: HOPE AND BETRAYAL IN STALIN'S RUSSIA
BY TIM TZOULIADIS
Little, Brown, 472pp, £20
Review by ROGER COXIT'S A FUNNY THING, HINDSIGHT – it plays tricks on the mind. Kno
wing what we know now about relations between the USA and the USSR – the cold war, the space race, the decades of mutual animosity and suspicion – it is hard to imagine a time when thousands of American workers eagerly flocked to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in search of liberté, egalité, fraternité, steady jobs and enough food to feed their families. But that's exactly what happened during the dark days of the Great Depression.
In this spellbinding book, British writer and film-maker Tim Tzouliadis brings to life an aspect of Stalin's Terror that had been almost completely forgotten – the brutal, systematic extermination of these unlikely economic migrants from Pittsburgh and New York and Wichita, along with millions of other "enemies" of the Soviet state. As almost 100 pages of end notes attest, this is a painstakingly researched story – it must have taken the author several years to assemble all the necessary material – yet it is told with such panache that it doesn't feel the least bit dry or academic.
Perhaps realising that his tale will seem somewhat incredible to modern readers, Tzouliadis begins by highlighting the seriousness of the Depression that gripped the US in the 1930s. With some 13 million unemployed – roughly a quarter of the total workforce – he points out that "to the … newly dispossessed, the abject failure of capitalism was not a radical proposition so much as the straightforward evidence of their senses".
Compared to the misery of life in America, it's easy to see how Soviet Russia might have seemed like some sort of exotic utopia. Such was the interest in the Soviet experiment that in 1931 an English translation of New Russia's Primer: The Story of the Five Year Plan became a publishing phenomenon, topping bestseller lists for seven months.
But unemployed Americans were not merely dreaming of a better life in the USSR: they were actively pursuing it. Even Tzouliadis, with all his wealth of data and meticulous research, isn't prepared to hazard a guess at the total number who travelled east in search of improved conditions, but he does give clues to the scale of the migration. In the first eight months of 1931 alone, Amtorg – the Soviet trade agency based in New York – received more than 100,000 applications for emigration to the USSR, and some 10,000 of these applicants were hired. Countless others seem to have found alternative ways of sneaking themselves into Uncle Joe's promised land.
Harsh economic reality was obviously the main factor driving this mass movement of people (it was the first time in US history that more people were leaving the country than were arriving) but in many cases there was genuine idealism involved as well.
And, for a while at least, it seemed to these plucky pioneers that they had indeed become part of a society where everyone really was treated equally. Tzouliadis recounts one particularly moving story about a black American, Robert Robinson, who landed himself a plum job at a tractor factory in Stalingrad only to be racially abused by two white Americans on the banks of the Volga. When a fight broke out, Robinson more than held his own. Back home in the still segregated US, such behaviour could have seen him lynched, but when a witness reported what had happened, Robinson was hailed as a hero.
A demonstration was held and the Soviet newspaper Trud printed the text of the demonstrators' resolutions: "The Negro worker is our brother like the American worker. We castigate any who dares to destroy in the Soviet land the equality we have established for all proletarians of all nations."
Tzouliadis even describes how the Americans formed a baseball league when they first arrived, and how a baseball craze subsequently swept the nation. There is a beautiful description of how the first Russians to play, although hugely enthusiastic, were outraged by the "capitalist" practice of stealing bases.
In the end, of course, such early glimmers of hope only added to the tragedy of the slaughter that awaited the American settlers. As Stalin gradually increased the number of executions his NKVD (secret police) were expected to carry out, and the gulags drew more and more slave labourers to the frozen wastes of the north, so their numbers dwindled. Those who tried to escape back across the Atlantic discovered that their passports hadn't been "held" by state officials as they had believed, but confiscated and used to sneak spies into America; and, to the eternal shame of the American diplomats working in the country at the time, those who presented themselves at the American Embassy desperate for help were turned away – and then promptly picked up by groups of NKVD agents who loitered outside the building like vultures.
Tzouliadis lays much of the blame for this abandonment of the "Captive Americans", as they came to be known, at the door of Joseph Davis – a lawyer and a friend of President Roosevelt who somehow managed to land himself the job of Ambassador to the USSR even though he was clearly nowhere near qualified to do the job. His apparent ignorance of the entire situation, and the naïve way he almost hero-worshipped Stalin, leads Tzouliadis to conclude that he was simply an idiot, and based on the evidence here, it's hard to disagree.
There is, of course, the possibility – perhaps a little under-examined – that Davis was under strict instructions from Washington not to rock the boat and only played dumb in order to fulfil his brief. If that was the case, his must have been a haunted existence. So many of his actions were so monumentally stupid, however, and so totally crass (at the height of the Terror, he swanned off on his luxury yacht for months at a time) that it takes a stretch of the imagination to credit him with that much intelligence.
The greatest betrayal though, in the eyes of the captured Americans sent off to work in the gulags at least, was the way the American government showered the Russians with American food and equipment after they became allies in 1941. One American gulag prisoner broke down and wept on seeing his guards eating American-branded food while he was forced to survive by trapping and eating rats.
Tzouliadis also points out that, post-1941, many of the rickety ships used to transport slaves to the gulags were sent to the US to be re-fitted. He writes: "It was as if the Reich ministry had arranged to have their railway engines repaired in Philadelphia and then shipped back across the Atlantic to recommence their journeys to Auschwitz." The difference, of course, was that by helping the Russians in this way, the American government was speeding the demise of thousands of its own citizens.
The full article contains 1206 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
