Posted on 08/03/2008 8:23:45 PM PDT by forkinsocket
This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag. In Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken" (Penguin Press, 436 pages, $29.95), their dismal story is told with great skill and indignation usually missing from Western accounts of communist Russia.
They came to Russia full of enthusiasm, bringing with them baseball and jazz, and eager to acclimatize. Russians found it difficult to believe the Americans' tales of woe when they saw their clothes, luxurious by Russian standards. And the migrants were themselves quite unprepared for the poverty and lawlessness which characterized life under Stalin, and in many if not most cases decided to leave. They soon learned, however, that when they surrendered their American passports upon stepping on Soviet soil (passports which were then used by Soviet agents in America), they had become, automatically, Soviet citizens. Protests and appeals to the American authorities qualified the émigrés in Moscow's eyes as troublemakers and led to their arrests, followed by confinement in concentration camps.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Read,”Alexander Dolgun’s Story” the son of one of these Americans, he ended up spending 15 years in the camps...
My momma always said, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Is this subscription only? I can’t get anything but the front page.
bookmark for later.
They didn’t call lefties useful idiots for nothing.
bump for later
Huh I checked & it just started redirecting to the front page. I tried to google for another link to it but I only find people linking to the same page...which now redirects. Maybe it will be restored tomorrow.
-ccm
Review: 'The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia' by Tim Tzouliadis
See my previous post.
Thanks
Sounds like these were the original Darwin Award winners.
Bump for later Monday reading.
Sounds like they wanted change. Stalin gave them more change than they wanted. Now we have a generation that wants to bring change here rather than seeking it in some communist workers paradise.
Bump
for later
Interesting that lastnight we were looking at this book, and this AM we find that Solzhenitsyn has died. A true giant, a man responsible for mugging more Liberals than perhaps any other person.
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