The Forsaken

"This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of them had gone there to work. Others had been taken by their parents who had wanted to help build socialism. And many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed. Tzouliadis oriented his book around a number of young American boys who organised baseball teams in Moscow and who used to play in the local parks. And he traces the fate of what happened to those young baseball players. No, they didn’t. Many American diplomats thought, well these people are communists, and left them to their fates. But, even if the government had tried to intervene, it is not clear they would have been very successful. So it’s a sad chapter in America’s Communist history which is beautifully written and wonderfully researched."

"I’m sure this will be of interest to a Western audience. Its subject is those former American citizens who were made to give up American citizenship in exchange for Soviet citizenship. There’s this group of people who arrived from America which consisted of two types. The first were people who came for ideological reasons, who had socialist or communist views and who wanted to take part in the construction of socialism. These people, of course, quite willingly took Soviet citizenship and gave up their American passports. But the second group were victims of the Great Depression who came to Russia to find jobs and support their families. For them it was different. The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily, and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy. They intervened in one or two cases, but they didn’t acknowledge that they were aware of it happening on a large scale. Tzouliadis did a lot of work here, or at least he did a lot of work through researchers. A lot of it comes from the former Party archives, and also some of it from the regional archives – also people’s personal archives. Yes, and he probably judged it wiser to turn a blind eye to what was really happening. Of course, everybody now is incredulous, that Russians were shooting dozens of Americans and sending them to labour camps. But this really was the case. Well, to be honest, I think many foreign authors exaggerate the scale of changes in the Russian archives. All of them give researchers exactly the same material as they did in the early 90s, with the exception of the former KGB archive, which even in the early 90s did not give permission to everybody. Maybe a few more people were allowed then than now, but I think it’s normal for a secret service archive not to welcome all-comers. They see themselves as successors of the Soviet Union and they keep these archives classified. I can see the reasons. I heard about a British researcher recently trying to get access to the MI5 and MI6 archives and he was denied."