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From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
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Subject: New book: Alex Marshall reviews The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis (War
in History)

The Forsaken. From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in
Stalin's Russia. By Tim Tzouliadis. Little, Brown. 2008.  472 pp. £20.00
boards. ISBN 978 0 316 72724 2.    

Alex Marshall, War in History 2009 16 (4)      

Tim Tzouliadis, in exploring the potentially fascinating subject of American
emigration to the Soviet Union, has ended up producing a curiously
old-fashioned and unsatisfactory book - one not dissimilar in style to the
much older work of Robert Conquest, or Ann Applebaum's  more recent Gulag. 

Part of the problem lies with the source base that  Tzouliadis uses: though
his publishers praise the 'rigorous' effort behind this 'colossal
achievement', vanishingly little work appears to  have been done in the
Russian archives. Part of the problem, however,  also lies in the writing
style, and Tzouliadis's persistent deafness to more  recent research which
would grant his work much greater nuance.  What we have instead is a
reheated compilation of Cold War-era historiography,  memoirs (Thomas
Sgovio, unsurprisingly, features prominently),  newspaper reports, and
American embassy briefings, prone  to speculation and occasionally grotesque
inaccuracy.  

The subject matter that Tzouliadis is dealing with in the book is  little
known - namely, how thousands of American workers, disillusioned  by the
Wall Street Crash, fled in droves to find work in the  Soviet Union, and how
thereafter many of them disappeared into the  1937-38 purges and Second
World War. The narrative line, however,  is weakened by Tzouliadis's
uncertainty as to what he wants to focus  on - Soviet-American relations at
the bilateral governmental level, the  personal stories of those Americans
who disappeared, or the history of  the Soviet Union itself during this
period. Consequently, his treatment  of the Soviet-American bilateral
relationship, for example, never rises  above a grim caricature of reality,
in which arguably the greatest political  administration in
twentieth-century American history is tarred as  simultaneously naive,
hopelessly corrupt, and infi ltrated.  Following an interpretation of events
increasingly popular in  Republican circles which despise the 'liberal
establishment' in recent  years, Tzouliadis spares no effort to tar almost
every member of  Roosevelt's New Deal administration as Soviet stooges or
naive cretins.  Figures such as Walter Durranty, FDR himself, Sumner Welles,
Harry  Hopkins, Ambassador Harriman, and Vice President Henry Wallace are
persistently ridiculed and mocked, with Roosevelt damned for always
possessing the ability to 'hide the truth, if need be, even from himself'
(p. 244), even as the unsubstantiated slur is also levelled that Stalin both
held Roosevelt in contempt and in some way deliberately overstrained  him to
accelerate his eventual demise (p. 247). Ambassador Harriman,  meanwhile, is
apparently to be despised for 'sitting in a comfortable  armchair beside a
roaring fire' in the American Embassy in Moscow  (p. 236), while newspaper
reports from 1949 are also dredged up to  imply that Sumner Welles's
apparent suicide bid was linked to Soviet  blackmail attempts (pp. 284-85).
Similarly, McCarthy-era sources and  the unreliable testimony of Oleg
Gordievsky are recycled to repeat the  old canard that Harry Hopkins was a
diehard Soviet agent (pp. 285-86).  Nowhere is the context of the global war
against fascism being coordinated  at this time given serious treatment, nor
is the more recent  historiography by the likes of Geoffrey Roberts,
pointing to genuine  Soviet desire to maintain the wartime Grand Alliance in
the postwar  era, given any airing.  

Tzouliadis is similarly tone-deaf towards more informed historiography  on
events in the Soviet Union itself. The death of Kirov in 1934  is treated
Robert Conquest-style as a Stalinist conspiracy, despite the persistent
failure to turn up any conclusive evidence - as if the exhaust ive  work of
J. Arch Getty on the subject of the pace and shape of the  purges, which
Tzouliadis in fact cites, had never been written (p.78).  Tzouliadis is
perhaps unsurprisingly therefore also totally unable to exercise any
judgement or analysis on the scale or nature of the purges,  citing without
challenge contemporary claims that 'seven thousand'  people were being
arrested every day in 1934 (p. 79), and dully recycling  the wartime
conversation where Stalin supposedly acknowledged  that collectivization
cost the lives of 10 million people (pp. 244-45).  The Ukrainian famine is
likewise treated by Tzouliadis in a curiously  old-fashioned manner as a
deliberate genocide, despite an abundance  of evidence and careful research
in more recent years by the likes  of Stephen Wheatcroft and I.E. Zelenin
reaching almost the polar opposite  conclusion - even as these latter
scholars also never deny  the catastrophic loss of life involved (in
Ukraine, closer in reality to  3.5 million than the 5 million cited on p.
329 by Tzouliadis).  

Tzouliadis's agenda to blacken both the Roosevelt administration  and that
of Soviet communism (the latter would scarcely seem necessary,  but the
author seizes every opportunity to both muddy the statistics  and tar Lenin
as the model for Stalin's eventual massive crimes)  is regrettable, not
least because his book in fact works best as a story  about everyday
individuals. The life stories of Thomas Sgovio and  Victor Herman, two of
the 'ordinary' Americans at the centre of this  hurricane of events, would
make a fascinating book in their own right,  and this book truly comes alive
only through their experiences. By  both ambitiously overstretching in
scope, and simultaneously failing  to integrate the more nuanced data and
studies produced since 1991,  Tzouliadis has therefore unfortunately ended
up producing a curiously  uneven and unsound work. 

Alex Marshall    
University of Glasgow 

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