In January 1937, Joseph Davies, a liberal lawyer who had married into a fortune, became ambassador and lived in grotesque luxury in the middle of a starving country, accumulating works of art, completely ignoring the tyranny and suffering all around him. But the opening of an embassy in Moscow did little to help the captive Americans. Duranty played a significant role in the US official recognition of the USSR in 1933, just as the Great Terror was being unleashed. The American press in Russia, including the notorious Walter Duranty, did not want to cross the party line and few warnings were ever published. Passports were confiscated and they were told they had become Soviet citizens. Soon after arrival, the disillusioned Americans who wanted to go home found it was not so easy.

In his acknowledgements, he fairly urges us to read them for ourselves.īut The Forsaken also shows evidence of considerable archival research too. Much of the book, inevitably, is a more general history of Stalinism, the Great Terror and the gulags, drawing upon the original work of Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and others, but he has organised his narrative with considerable skill, retaining his focus on the plight of these immigrants into the living hell that was the USSR, the dupes in the West who encouraged them and the US officials who failed to help them.Ĭompared with the enormous tragedy of the Russian people under Communism, this history is no more than a footnote - but it is a particularly poignant and revealing one, Tzouliadis has relied quite heavily on two memoirs by members of the 1930s baseball teams who survived the prison camps, Dear America by Thomas Sgovio and Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life by Victor Herman (both 1979). Tim Tzouliadis, a documentary-maker whose first book this is, tells the dreadful story of what happened to these deceived emigrants with eloquence and indignation. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.