THE FORSAKEN
by Tim Tzouliadis,
Little Brown, 472pp
Reviewed: 10 January 2009
In the literature of holocaust and national shame, one recurrent theme is that atrocity by the powerful against the weak is passively accepted by those whose personal ideals and responsibilities would seem to require at least objection, if not intervention.
From Hamlet to Nuremberg to Guantanamo Bay, we are familiar with the many rationalizations for passivity and the cost paid by the unfortunate few. Many of us may find the issue in the microcosm of personal life even in complacent Australia.
Tim Tzouliadis, an Oxford-educated documentary maker for the UK’s Channel 4, has found a compelling hook and a rich vein of evidence in this horrifying study of the fate of several thousand American citizens caught in Stalin’s Russia during the years of the Great Terror.
Most of the Americans had gone to the USSR voluntarily in the 1930s, either as Communist idealists hoping to build a socialist new world order, or as contract “experts” fleeing the unemployment of the Great Depression in capitalist America. They ranged from artists and assembly-line workers to architects and engineers. Most sold up their belongings and took their families with them.
The largest group comprised several hundred Ford Motor Company employees hired to run the Soviet Ford car plant at Nizhni Novgorod.. In 1929, Henry Ford had sold the obsolete Model A assembly line from Detroit, which otherwise would have been scrapped, to the USSR for a colossal $40million dollars. At the time the USA did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and consequently no Embassy or Consulates to represent them.
For the first year or two, the “foreign experts” were given privileged treatment, feted in the Communist press, and encouraged to maintain their own identity through cultural and sporting activities. There was a brief Soviet infatuation with baseball.
Things went downhill rapidly. Most were tricked or bullied into giving up their American passports and acquiring Soviet ones, removing them and their families from any protection they could have expected when diplomatic relations were established in 1934. As Stalin’s internal terror campaigns escalated from 1936, the lost Americans became targets. Attempting to leave, or even expressing a desire to go home, became acts of treason earning death or deportation to the burgeoning Gulags, from where less than ten percent would ever return.
There are many appalling accounts of individual cases, culled from correspondence, from Soviet archives, from survivor accounts, and most sadly from the records of the US State Department and other official sources, almost all recording denial of assistance. Absurd confessions were extracted by torture, except where the Americans were caught up in Stalin’s quota system where body-count deadlines demanded prompt executions. They were a minor element of Stalin’s total death count of around twenty million.
Most chilling are the accounts of how these Americans were treated by other Americans. Many were denounced by fellow Americans in Russia – initially from the cadre of American Communists personally committed to the Soviet ideal, but increasingly by their own intimates. The system of terror proffered denunciation of others as the only ray of hope for relief from torture. Denunciation of close family or lovers was particularly relished by the interrogators of the Lubyanka, though most of the denouncers were executed anyway. Economic value as a slave labourer was the best hope of survival, although no guarantee.
Tzouliadis’ family background includes a wealthy Crimean ancestor who once employed the young Josef Stalin in one of his factories and later suffered the expropriation of his assets, so the author does not pretend any sympathy with Soviet ideals. However, the purpose of the book is clearly to point the finger at the American authorities, from the White House down to Moscow
Embassy receptionists, who failed to offer any assistance to the Americans in distress. President Roosevelt is portrayed as almost willfully blind to the character of Stalin and his regime, and as pathetically manipulated by Stalin and his agents, including several who worked at high levels within the US State Department. In conversation with Stalin, he is said to have observed that India’s post-colonial future might be best to develop “along Soviet lines”.
His Ambassador, businessman Joseph Davies, fostered three ambitions: to score a personal interview with Stalin (granted only in his last days in Moscow); to collect as much cultural loot from the old Russian aristocracy as his billionaire wife Majorie Post could afford; and to spend as little time as possible in Moscow. Davies consistently contradicted his professional diplomatic juniors with glowing reports of Stalin’s magnificent social, economic and cultural achievements.
A sorry train of hoodwinked appeasers followed right through into the 1950s. US Vice-President Henry Wallace spent a month on a tour of elaborately window-dressed Gulag sites and reported them to be inspiring pioneer settlements staffed by cheerful volunteers. US officials were widely despised in Russia for their gullibility.
In fact, much of the truth was provided the US Government, but deliberately concealed in the interest of “higher” concerns such as the wartime alliance against Hitler or some tempting trade deal. In the process, generous wartime supplies to Stalin (never paid for) were used to feed Gulag guards, and American prisoners saw new American machinery arriving for the mines in which most of those Americans knew they would die. American-built lend-lease ships transported the prisoners to the slave camps. The security police drove Ford cars and Studebaker trucks.
The book is timely in an era when “realism” is said to be the prevailing diplomatic ethic, when the KGB ethos again rules the Kremlin, and when abuse of power has seriously degraded the moral authority of governments claiming to be democratic.
It’s a gruelling read, meticulously sourced and researched with over 100 pages of citations and some chilling contemporary photographs. Not for those who prefer a rose-tinted world view, this book will confirm any conviction that civilization lies not in the mobilization of power over the people, but in the restraint of power by the people.