During the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of Americans left their homes and emigrated to the Soviet Union in search of a better life. They came from every walk of life (farmers, engineers, salesmen, cooks and clerks), but nearly all of them were from their country's 13m unemployed. Disillusioned with America, they placed their hopes in the “economic miracle” of Stalin's Five-Year Plan. At a time when the capitalist system appeared doomed, the USSR had growth and jobs. Perhaps they even thought that they would find a fairer, more humane society. People sold up everything to make the journey east. They believed they were departing for the “promised land”.

Many had been lured by the reports of fellow travellers such as Paul Robeson, or George Bernard Shaw, who returned from Russia in 1931 to broadcast a lecture on American national radio in which he portrayed the Soviet Union as the workers' only salvation; or by journalists such as Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, who praised Stalin's economic achievements but closed his eyes to the famine of 1932-34 and to the slavery of the Gulag labour camps.

By the mid-1930s, there were 15,000 American citizens living in the Soviet Union, enough to form a baseball league, with Sunday games in Gorky Park. Most were soon deprived of their US passports by the Soviet authorities, which thereby claimed them as their own, but they were never really accepted as “Soviet” and many were arrested as potential “spies” during the Great Terror of 1937- 38. They vanished into the Gulag.

Tim Tzouliadis tells their story. He has laboured hard in the US archives and has made the most of the few memoirs that were later written by those Americans who returned from the labour camps after Stalin's death in 1953. One memoirist, Thomas Sgovio, the son of a communist from Buffalo, who ended up in Kolyma, among the worst of Stalin's camps in northeast Siberia, later found out that he was sent there by his American girlfriend in Moscow, who had informed on him to save herself. Occasionally, there is a heartrending letter from a prisoner to relatives. George Sviridoff was just 16 when he was discovered as a stowaway on a steamer leaving Russia for America. He was trying to get home. Sentenced to 10 years in the camps in the far north, he wrote to his father in America: “Now Papa my fate is sealed. I have left you, lost my country, lost my freedom, lost all the delights of life...there remains only to lose in addition my head.”

Tzouliadis has not used the Comintern or Soviet archives, either one of which would have added vital information on the Soviet context to his narrative. Nor has he drawn from the Russian- language literature on Stalin's “national operations” in the 1930s and 1940s, through which not just Americans, but Poles, Finns, Chinese, Koreans and other nationalities, many of them economic immigrants, were arrested as “enemies”. Several hundred thousand Finns crossed the Soviet border in their hunt for work during the Depression, only to end up in Stalin's labour camps.

Without Russian sources, The Forsaken loses sight of its main subject, the lost Americans, once they land in the Soviet Union and disapppear into the Gulag. At this point, its focus shifts to the American diplomats and politicians who ignored the pleas of their families for help and, in effect, colluded with the Stalinist regime by allowing themselves to be deceived about the terror and the labour camps. Henrietta Speier of San Bernadino, California, wrote several times to the American embassy to find out what had happened to her son Edward, a metalworker from Detroit, who had apparently died of pneumonia on a prison train, according to a Soviet death certificate. “All I hoped was that my son had left a last letter or made a spoken last request to me his mother as most folks do when they become very ill,” she wrote. But she received no reply.

Tzouliadis tells the story of how the US diplomats were duped. JosephEDavies, Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow from 1936- 38, was entirely taken in by the show trials. His presence at them, publicised in the Soviet media, gave them “a veneer of legitimacy”, as Tzouliadis writes. There was a payoff for the ambassador's complicity. During his stay in Moscow, Davies and his wife were allowed to buy a huge amount of Russian art, jewellery and antique furniture, most of it expropriated from the victims of the terror and sold at discount prices by their executioners, the NKVD, in special commission shops.

In 1944, Henry A Wallace, Roosevelt's vice-president, visited the gold-mining labour camps of Kolyma as part of a grand initiative to invest American money in the Soviet Union. Wallace was completely fooled by the Potemkin Village specially arranged for his visit (with healthy, happy, singing prisoners played by guards and actors from a Cultural Brigade). The ambassador returned to Washington with nothing but praise for his NKVD hosts. In a radio broadcast, he argued that the labour camps were helping to “develop” Siberia on a “patriotic” and “voluntary” basis, much as the pioneer settlers had developed America.

It was only after 1945 that the American government began to wake up to the truth about the camps. Too many former prisoners had published memoirs in the West for it to be denied any more. The fellow travellers were publicly disgraced (Wallace and Robeson were cruelly humiliated during the McCarthy period). But there was no justice for the families of those Americans who had disappeared in the labour camps. A second generation was swept into the Gulag in the cold-war years, including captured American servicemen, and even at the end of the 1950s there were reported sightings of them in the camps. Many of their families are still waiting for basic information on their missing relatives.

The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis
Little, Brown £20 pp472 Buy the book at Books First £18.00 including free delivery

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