The Forgotten American Emigrants to the USSR
Published 30 months ago
Tim Tzouliadis' new book The Forsaken remembers the thousands of people who exchanged poverty for tyranny
- Text by Ned Beauman
The Forsaken,
the new book by 40-year-old British documentary-maker Tim Tzouliadis,
tells the story of thousands of Americans who fled the Great Depression
for the false promise of prosperity in Stalin's Russia. Through
official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews, Tzouliadis
reconstructs the lives of these ill-fated men, women and children,
exposing the complacency of American diplomats and journalists in the
face of terrible abuses by the Soviet regime.
Dazed Digital: In his review
of your book in the Literary Review, Donald Rayfield writes that "It is
not often that a new page of history is written." Do you think this is
a new page?
Tim Tzouliadis: These people did fall into one
of those crevasses of history. When the Cold War began in the 1940s,
the Soviets didn't want it publicised that so Americans had come over
or that so many American industrialists had helped with the
industrialisation of the Soviet Union. And it was also an embarrassment
to the American government that all these Americans were trapped in
Russia and that the State Department had manifestly failed to save
them. So these people were ignored by both sides – they were victims of
international politics as well as Stalinism. It's a forgotten chapter
of twentieth century history, and yet the story tells you so much about
the United States as a country, and about Americans as emigrants as
opposed to immigrants, and about Stalinism.
DD: How was it researching the book?
TT: It was
a really long process. There were so many different aspects and
different protagonists. A lot of the material was in the American
archives in Washington DC, which holds the State Department archives.
And there were also the transcripts of the NKVD confessional interviews
that had been released in the early 90s, although they've since been
closed again. The former Soviet archive has minutes of things like
Henry Ford's emissary to Joseph Stalin: the emissary says, "Henry Ford
would love to work with you again," and Joseph Stalin says, "Well, if
I'd been born in America I probably would have been a businessman
myself."
And the American archives were also fascinating because
they have all this material that had been kept secret. For instance,
one woman wrote a letter saying, "I managed to escape the Soviet Union
but I was in a camp for a while and there was a guy there who's dying
to get back to America." She enclosed a little bit of dried black bread
that she said was from Russia and wrote, "This is what we had to eat."
And the piece of bread is still sitting there in an envelope in the
archives 70 years later. Another guy had been in a camp where the
prisoners had to pack hides into crates which were then sent directly
to the West, and he'd written on a wooden tag, "I'm in a camp in
Russia, please help me", and signed his name. And they found this in
Germany and delivered it to the American embassy. And the tag was sent
to the State Department and put in this archive.
DD: Were the emigrants stupid to go to Russia expecting to be well-treated?
TT: No.
Looking back on it now, of course we know more about the true nature of
Stalinism. But you have to remember that in 1931 the whole of western
capitalism seemed to collapsing – and that wasn't the left wing point
of view, that was the moderate point of view. 25% of the United States
was out of a job, and the stock market had crashed so far that it would
take 30 years to come back to 1929 levels. You had people queuing up
for bread and living in coke ovens.
And then if you read in an
American newspaper that in Russia they're opening up factories every
day, that the workers are going to given great standards and great
wages, that you won't be exploited, you'll work shorter hours, you'll
free medicine, free schooling for your children… it would have sounded
perfect. And at the same time there were respected Western
intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw who were appearing on American
radio programmes to say "Russia is the future, other countries will
soon follow their model." I could see myself in that position saying,
"Well, OK, I'll go for a year or two and find out."
DD: On the subject of Western intellectuals: in books like
Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, the argument has been made that years of
apologism for Stalin have put a permanent stain on the reputation of
the Left. What do you think?
TT: A terrible, shocking
misjudgement was made about the true nature of Stalinism and the Soviet
Union: this wasn't a workers' state, this was a totalitarian state
where millions of people were killed in concentration camps. And among
the left in every country there were people who saw through it all and
said "It's not a utopia." George Orwell was among them, and in France
there was Camus. But there were other people like Sartre who continued
to apologise for Stalin, and said "The terror is exaggerated by critics
of communism." Well, people do get things wrong and people do make
mistakes. But no everything is clear now, there is no longer an
argument, and when you get it wrong you have to hold up your hands and
say, "I was wrong." Some people did that and some didn't.
Hopefully,
though, we won't make the same mistakes in the future. Whether it's
Russia or China, their policies today are a modern version of
totalitarianism. It shouldn't matter if you're a liberal or a
conservative, this is off the scale – it's just wrong to have a state
where there is no democratic opposition whatsoever.
The Forsaken is out now from Little Brown.
