The Forsaken

THE FORSAKEN: From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia

By TIM TZOULIADIS

Abacus, 2009, 472 pp, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In the 1930s Depression, for the first time in US history, more people were leaving America than arriving. They were going to Soviet Russia, writes Tim Tzouliadis in The Forsaken, to escape the mass layoffs, short-time, speed-ups, 25% unemployment and economic misery resulting from “the maniacal exuberance of Wall Street financiers”. What they found, instead of economic security, was ‘The Terror’, Stalin’s murderous repression of millions of socialists and ordinary citizens.

In the first eight months of 1931, Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency in New York, received 100,000 applications for emigration to the Soviet Union in response to their advertisement for 6,000 skilled jobs. In the slipstream of this official exodus were many more who got to Russia any way they could. They were driven mostly by economic need but many also felt an ideological pull to what they saw as the world’s first socialist state.

They found work but soon it was to become the work of the forced labour camps run by the Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei (Labour Camps Directorate), whose initials formed the acronym, Gulag. As Stalin consolidated his grip on power, and indulged a crude nationalist suspicion of anyone from the capitalist world as spies for enemy states, the attentions of the secret police upon the Americans in Russia escalated.

The assassination in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, head of the Leningrad party branch, was falsely pinned by Stalin on the anti-Stalinist Bolshevik opposition and opportunistically seized as a pretext to accelerate and widen the Terror. The first of the staged Moscow Show Trials of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ opened in 1936, where prominent Bolsheviks, broken by torture, were subject to humiliating forced ‘confessions’ to fantastical conspiracies and executed, sent into internal exile or to the Gulag.

“The first generation of Bolsheviks responsible for the Revolution was almost entirely annihilated by Stalin”, writes Tzouliadis. This physical removal of the leaders of the 1917 revolution allowed Stalin to rewrite history in his favour from minor participant to the Revolution’s co-equal with Lenin and allowed him to act as the apostolic bearer of the socialist project whilst undertaking a vast program of repression and rule through fear.

As Tzouliadis notes of Stalin’s Terror, the “execution of Bolshevik cadres was merely the public face of a vast hidden realm of terror”, with many millions arrested, to be shot straight away or to perish cruelly from the brutality, hard labour, starvation and sub-zero temperatures of the Gulag. The victims came from Russia, Poland (partitioned between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia), the occupied Baltic states, and from Germany and Italy (their anti-fascist and communist refugees) and other Western countries including the US.

The socialist credentials of the foreign ‘political emigrants’ made them a bigger target. Joseph Sgovio, a US Communist Party activist, died after spending ten years in the Gulag. The Reverend Julius Hecker, a socialist who was teaching philosophy at Moscow University, ‘confessed’ to being a spy and was shot. John Pass from the American Midwest was arrested for possession of a copy of Ten Days That Shook The World, the classic book by the US socialist journalist, John Reed, which had been banned by Stalin because it didn’t show Stalin in his fictitious ‘leading’ role in the Revolution.

The Americans were stunned by each stage of the terror conveyor belt – arrest, torture (in the secret police headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square), prison, and the Gulag labour camps. Not all Americans travelled this path – some were coerced into becoming informers, offering up names of other Americans to save themselves.

Washington was reluctant to help its citizens, especially the political radicals and communists. The Second Secretary at the American Embassy in Moscow noted that ‘a general feeling existed that anyone who came to the Soviet Union was a damned Bolshevik and deserved what he got’. George Kennan (an Embassy official later to become famous as an anti-communist Cold War strategist) reported to the State Department that the Soviets saw the American victims as ‘mostly little people’ who will ‘not normally be able to make their voices heard in the councils of the United States Government’ and were therefore ‘unimportant to us’. They had Washington’s attitude right.

The first US Ambassador, Joseph Davies, a millionaire lawyer rewarded with the diplomatic post by President Roosevelt as a favour to his friend for a large 1936 election campaign contribution, set the low standards. Two days after his arrival, Davies attended the second of the Moscow Show Trials, cabling Roosevelt that the confessions had all the ‘hallmarks of credibility', and after most of the sixty Red Army high commanders who had been invited soon after to dinner at the Embassy had been shot after closed trials, Davies confirmed another ‘definite conspiracy in the making’. Davies was to receive the Order of Lenin from Stalin for his services to the Terror.

The many Americans who desperately besieged the Embassy seeking to return to the US were often arrested on the streets outside the Embassy, denied sanctuary in it or not given asylum. During the temporary wartime alliance between the US and the Soviet Union after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941, the US State Department became even more reluctant to help its citizens despite having significant economic leverage through its program of ‘Lend-Lease’ aid. Some of this aid - Studebaker trucks, industrial machinery and canned food – found its way to the labour camps such as Kolyma where American prisoners slaved and died mining the gold that was sold by the Stalinist regime in the markets of the West.

With Stalin’s death in 1953 came uprisings and strikes by labour camp prisoners, which, although met with executions, hastened the closure of the camps. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Kruschev, ordered the release of millions of prisoners from 1954 before declaring a general amnesty in 1956 as part of his (limited) de-Stalinisation.

Tzouliadis’ book presents an often compelling narrative of violence and suffering, and offers further valuable documentary evidence of the degradations of Stalinism as played out on its American victims, but the rare forays into analysis by Tzouliadis never rise above a casual anti-communism. The Gulag, Tzouliadis asserts, was “the hidden endpoint” of the Bolsheviks’ “grand experiment in human evolution, the futile attempt at the perfectibility of mankind”. Lenin was “the initiator of the use of terror by the Soviet state”, he adds, and the Terror was the “grim logic” and inevitable outcome that linked Lenin with Stalin and, for good measure, Pol Pot, in the nightmare of socialism.

What this fable of Marxist Original Sin ignores is that Stalinism represented a break with the democratic vision and egalitarian ideals of history’s first socialist revolution. For Tzouliadis, however, Stalin was a bona fide Marxist whose ruthlessness made him the most successful of a bunch of rival Bolshevik monsters.

Nowhere does Tzouliadis broach any explanation of Stalinism as the political expression of the bureaucracy in a putative workers’ state whose working class had been physically and politically weakened through years of imperialist war, invasion, civil war and famine in a backward country, isolated from salvation through socialist revolution in the developed west. The social roots of Stalinism lay in that privileged national bureaucracy, not in proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Stalinism was a negation, not a continuation, of socialism.

Although Tzouliadis’ book is not a socialist analysis of Stalinism, it does, inadvertently, show that it was socialism, as personified in the persecuted American socialists and union activists in Russia, that was utterly betrayed by Stalinism.