Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken tells of thousands of American socialists and Communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the thirties to find work and a workers' paradise. They were quickly disappointed. Adam Hothschild reviews the book in the London Times (TNC subscribers can read Stephen Schwarz's review from the September 2008 issue here):
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.
And it wasn't just Russia to whose siren call left-wing Yanks infatuated with proletarian dictatorship were inexorably drawn. In way, they commanded an odd respect; at least they put their money where their mouths were and picked up to go see socialism as it actually existed outside the cafes and salons of democratic cities. Bellow has a great set piece in his novella Mosby's Memoirs about a poor political innocent called Lustgarten, who moves to Yuglosavia hoping that Tito's alternative will be any alternative at all:
"They're asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they're building socialism. Oh, I know," he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, "you don't build socialism in one country, but it's no longer the same situation. And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love--the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur."
Bellow wastes no time in bringing down the other shoe. On the next page:
"To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.
"And what did they feed their foreign VIPs?"
And Lustgarten shyly bitter--the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby--said, "It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn't understand the deal. I thought we were invited as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate shit fried in rancid oil."
"Why didn't you run away?" asked Mosby.
"How? Where?"
"Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?"
"How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket."
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