Reddit reviews The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia
We found 9 Reddit comments about The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Ehh...it happened in the Great Depression when several thousand Americans went to the Soviet Russia (yes really) to escape economic or racial hardships.
It's pretty well documented.
This is a tough topic to discuss without delving into conspiracy theories. The problem of which is that they're difficult to prove.
For example: Tim Tzouliadis wrote a book called The Forsaken which was about the emigration of thousands of Americans to the Soviet Union during the height of the Depression. Many of these Americans bought into the hype that things in the Soviet Union were going amazingly well. Food was cheap, jobs were plentiful, people had homes to live in. Many Black Americans also went over because they wanted to embrace the supposed racial equality that the communists espoused. So many Americans emigrated over that Russian cities had baseball teams that played against one another.
Henry Ford even worked with the Russians to build a factory there to build Ford automobiles. For a time, things were going well for Americans in the USSR. The Soviets accepted them as brothers and sisters in socialism. That was until the Purges happened. The Americans in the USSR had their passports confiscated, they were denied protection by the US Embassy, and they were all sent out to Siberia to mine gold in what can be considered to be "death camps". President FDR and his predecessors were aware of this, but did nothing. To them, these Americans who renounced their nation and abandoned it were themselves abandoned to the Soviets.
The big thing here is the confiscated passports. The KGB (technically the NKVD at the time) supposedly confiscated them all and then used them to ship spies back to the US with a singular goal in mind: to infiltrate the United States of America. There were thousands of these people, all with stolen US passports, trained to infiltrate various academic, political, and industrial institutions to form the backbone of the spy network that would plague the United States for decades.
The "Conspiracy" part of this is that these agents worked with domestic Communist and Socialist types to bring about a plan to influence America over time by taking control of the newspapers and the educational systems to push their socialist message. Does any proof of this exist? No. But this is the nature of most conspiracies. With great influence in the media and education, these folks could easily work within these liberal organizations and hide their true motivations. To be fair, there isn't much for them to organize as these institutions tended to be quite progressive under normal conditions, but this is simply great cover to push their agenda on generations of Americans.
In addition to Solzhenitsyn, I would recommend the book The Forsaken which is about Americans volunteering to build socialism in the Soviet Union.
That is absolutely not true at all.
There's too much to excerpt but a significant portion of that book goes into the ability of people "to see cruelty, and burn not", because it's always seen as real socialism until the bodies stack up too high to be denied anymore. And the bodies were already stacking up.
Some of the POW camps in Germany were liberated by the Red Army, which sent many of the US POWs on rail cars to work in the Gulag.
This was a subtopic in an excellent book by Tim Tzouliadis about Americans who went to the USSR and never came back. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia
There were already a bunch of Americans who "fled" to Russia and it worked out pretty well for them.
There are many stories in Russian about this. But you should probably find a Timotheos Tsuladis book on this topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Forsaken-American-Tragedy-Stalins-Russia/dp/0143115421
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The Forsaken It's about what happened to Americans who emigrated to Russia during the 1930s. Mostly they died in gulags. A good read.