Timotheos Tzouladis is the author of “The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia.” A graduate of Oxford, he subsequently pursued a career as a documentary filmmaker and television journalist whose work has appeared on NBC and National Geographic television.

Question: How did you learn about this topic and what made you decide to research it further?

Tzouliadis: I was working on a documentary film, and this was in 2002, so six years ago. And I thought that in my opinion the criminality of Nazi totalitarism had been well understood, well researched and well covered in the kind of public consciousness, especially here in Europe and also in the United States. But relatively, Stalinism, communist totalitarian regime, hasn’t received the same degree of inquiry perhaps. Yes there have been Solzhenitsyn and so on, my personal feeling was that there was more to explore, and it was relatively under-researched, and so I was looking for a way to tell that story, to tell that huge narrative in human terms, so one could understand the degree of suffering involved. I began to research the Stalinist period, within that I came across this notion that during the Great Depression many nationalities, not just Americans, had been attracted to the Soviet Union, some for political reasons, some just for economic opportunistic reasons, and amongst those many nationalities was the story of the Americans. And I saw a picture of American baseball teams playing in the Gorky Park in Moscow. And that for me was absolutely extraordinary, absolutely fascinating that these people had been there, had been attempting to recreate something of their own culture, within Gorky Park in the early 1930s. And so that for me was a way in to tell the broader story of Stalinism, as well as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the pre-Cold War period, which I personally found absolutely fascinating.

Question: It’s a little known fact that baseball was played in the Soviet Union during that period. Can you talk a bit more about it because it’s very interesting?

Tzouliadis: Absolutely! Wherever the Americans went, because they weren’t just in Moscow, the communities in Gorky, now known as Nizhniy Novgorod, up in Karelia, Ukraine, Nizhniy Tagil and Magnitogorsk, whenever colonies of Americans found work, they set up baseball teams and they taught their Russian coworkers to play. There was a beginning of a league, and this was all endorsed by the Soviet sporting authorities who wanted to use baseball as a Russian national sport, and that to me was absolutely fascinating. And there were some Americans who started a newspaper, The Moscow Daily News, and they had their baseball scores printed in the newspaper every week, as well as scores from the United States, so they could follow what was happening to the other baseball teams within Russia. And of course as soon as the terror took hold, all of the baseball players were arrested, and it was airbrushed out of Soviet history, the fact that there had been this kind of desire to make an American sport into a Soviet sport. And that to me was a sad story.

Question: In your best estimate how many Americans left the United States during the 1930’s and immigrated to the Soviet Union?

Tzouliadis: The numbers vary depending on the source. I would say that between 6000 and 10,000 left in the early 1930’s, the exodus continued but it was at its very peak in 1931. In 1931, we know that Amtorg the Soviet trade agency in New York advertised that 6000 jobs needed filling in Russia, and they received 100,000 American applications to their offices in Manhattan, and that was just in 1931. I think in total, roughly 10,000 Americans went to Russia, but there was nobody in the United States or Russia making a statistical analysis, and many Americans arrived who weren’t part of an official exodus, they just left on tours, and they were told that all you needed was a tourist visa, and once you arrived in Moscow you will be given a job. So Amtorg didn’t invite them, they just arrived of their own accord. So I would have to say that the final figure was somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000.

Question: Why did these Americans leave the United States?

Tzouliadis: That’s very important because that was a question I was often asked by people, and by Americans especially when I was researching the book in Washington, D.C. and Detroit. Why would someone go, it seems like such a crazy idea? But that mindset ignores the conditions at that time, the degree of poverty in the United States at the very peak of the depression in 1931 was absolutely astonishing, and it surprised me. A quarter of the work force was unemployed. I don’t know what percentage of Americans worked in agriculture; I think it was between twenty and twenty five percent who worked on the land. The American farmers were absolutely in a catastrophic state from the depression, they were earning next to nothing from the land. Not only in the cities were the factories being shut down, but also in the farms they were out of work.

The degree of poverty in America at that time was astonishing. The consensus of opinion, even among the bright thinking people, was that this was the collapse of capitalism. The depression, the poverty inflicted on people, the unemployment. People without anywhere to live were living in shantytowns in every single American city. So this all seemed like a collective proof that capitalism was collapsing and that socialism would inevitably replace it in a Marxist notion of history. And that was very much a conceptual opinion in the early 1930s. So why did people leave? Well, if they were offered a chance at a job that wouldn’t be taken away from them, their children would be given free education, they would receive free health care and there was a degree of security promised to them when there were absolutely no jobs to be had in the United States - many of them would be given free passes to Russia - that appeared to be an attractive prospect at the time, and that’s probably why 100,000 people made applications for these jobs.

There were intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw who had been to Russia, came back and bought time for a lecture on American National Radio, saying that this was the future, this is the answer to our terrible unemployment. Walter Duranty, who was the chief Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, was writing in a similar vein. Some people just wanted to believe that a place in the world existed where a working man would have a fair go, and they were blinded by their own desire. It was a time when more Americans were leaving the United States than were arriving, and that was taking place for the very first time in American history.

Question: Why did the Soviet Union accept them?

Tzouliadis: Many of them had skills, either from factories in Detroit or other skilled labor. Stalin was industrializing the Soviet Union. It was the first Five Year Plan, and there were these grand schemes of buying American factories from people like Henry Ford and creating a new Soviet automobile industry from scratch. They literarily bought the factories from Detroit and started to build the Soviet Model A cars. So they needed American labor to be working in these factories, because they had the knowhow and they were there to teach the Russians how to build cars. They had 700 to 800 Americans working in a factory in Nizhniy Novgorod, and the same thing took place in the tractor factory in Stalingrad. That was the reason why they were invited, for their skills to help build socialism. Of course, once they had got there and they taught what they had to teach, these skills became less important and so they became dispensable.  

Question: Can you talk a little about the role that Henry Ford played in Stalin’s industrialization plan?

Tzouliadis: High Soviet officials were arriving in Detroit to do a deal with Henry Ford for millions of dollars. I think it was 40 million dollars between 1929 and 1936 to export this American technology. It’s a little known fact that Henry Ford, who had such an iconic role in the industrialization of the United States, also had this kind of hidden history in dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union. And that was another one of those discoveries where you think well, that was just astonishing. The fact that the model A Ford was coming off the assembly lines in Russia with a huge portrait of a very young looking Joseph Stalin hanging in the background, one can only imagine the kind of uneasiness that those two images created next to each other.

Question: What happened to these Americans?  

Tzouliadis: The foreign nationalities within Russia most often had their passports revoked. American passports were used by the Soviet authorities, and sometimes their identities had been used for espionage, other people would travel using the American passports back into the United States, and that was a scheme devised by the NKVD. Of the people who arrived in the early 1930’s some managed to get back to America, if they were quick enough, if they shouted and screamed and had enough money saved to pay for the return trip, because that was very important. Because many of them, if not the majority, arrived almost penniless, and they were told that once they got to Russia they would be given jobs and housing and they didn’t need any savings to get back, so they bought a one way ticket. And then they discover that to return, they had to produce somewhere between $60 and $150 to give to the shipping line, and of course none of them had it. And the first American ambassador William C. Bullitt, wrote to the State Department saying that there are Americans here and often they are penniless, can we do something to help them? That request was passed on to the Red Cross, and the Red Cross said that it was not the business of the Red Cross to be helping destitute Americans, that was in 1934.

If they couldn’t get out in the early 1930’s when the degree of oppression was relatively less, by 1937-1938 that was the peak of the terror and the Americans were being arrested. Quite often they would walk into the American Embassy and then be snatched by the NKVD outside the embassy, because the embassies were viewed by paranoid regime as being the centers for espionage and so on. Of the ones who were arrested there seemed to be two consequences, either they were questioned and executed fairly quickly, within months if not weeks, or they were sent to the camps. They were packed into a train carriage and then shipped off to the very remotest parts of the Soviet Union. In the case of Thomas Sgovio, he was shipped all the way to Magadan in Far East Russia, and the train journey took twenty eight days. Once they arrived in Vladivostok they were pushed in to steamships operated by the NKVD, shipped for two weeks to Magadan, which I visited in the summer and it seemed like it was the most remote city in Russia. There they were sent into the mines to mine gold. The winter temperatures there can fall to minus 40 degrees and below, with insufficient clothing and food, it was just a physiological inevitability that they would die very quickly. Thomas Sgovio survived because he managed to find a job outside the regular labor, he was an artist and he used his artistic skill to paint propaganda signs. He survived miraculously but his weight had dropped to about 90 pounds at one point, and he tattooed his name on his body so in case his body was found, someone would know. Victor Herman is another case of an American who survived the camps because he was incredibly strong and had a very ferocious desire to live. But these were the exceptions, the majority died.

Of course the gulag authorities in Moscow understood very clearly that the mortality rates were such that the system needed constant replenishment and so that became a cause of the terror as well as the consequence. And so it became a self-perpetuating mechanism because the prisoners were constantly dying because the mortality rate was so high, that so many others had to be arrested to take their place. And there was a Gulag accountant who worked at Lubyanka, who was himself arrested and who told another prisoner who managed to survive, how the prisoners were viewed as just another factor of production. The were so many shocking aspects of the whole story about the Americans in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but that to me was one of the most shocking. There seems to be in the West an idea that what happened in Russia wasn’t genocide, but from the perspective I gained from the research, it was clearly a genocidal policy because they understood the fact that millions of prisoners were dying within these camps. These deaths were clearly thought through and had been decided by the highest authorities within the NKVD and monitored by Stalin.

Another interesting fact was that during the Second World War, during the period of alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the steamships used by the NKVD were brought across the Pacific to be refitted in the shipyards in California and Washington, and then they were brought back to pick up prisoners often on their next journey. That to me was a really shocking discovery. Also, the gold mined by the prisoners in Kolyma was shipped to the United States to the Federal Reserve and was bough by Henry Morgenthau who had meetings with Oumansky and made decisions about what to do with the Soviet gold. I discovered in the archives that Morgenthau knew exactly how the gold was being mined. He knew that the gold was mined by forced labor, but that fact was ignored for reasons that only he can recount.

Question: Did the survivors stay in the Soviet Union or did they manage to return to the United States?

Tzouliadis: Out of the thousands who left, a handful made it back and wrote memoirs in the 1970’s. A few more returned during Glasnost after 1985. There is one case of an American who came back to Chicago, and everything had changed in Chicago because he left during the 1930s and now he was an old man. Reading about this man, it felt like a Rip Van Winkle story. For him it was as if 50 years had just vanished, and he was still speaking in the speech patterns and the slang of the 1930’s.

These immigrants who left in the 1930’s and also the American serviceman who were swallowed up into the Gulags after the Second World War and after the Korean War, were very much the individual victims of the Soviet system, as well as the victims of the America-Soviet superpower rivalry. The fact that so little was done on behalf of these people, and how often their cause was ignored… The U.S.-Soviet relationship was top secret for decades, and it’s only recently that we have been able to go into the archives and learn about their fate.

Question: Can you talk more about why the United States wasn’t able to come to their aid?

Tzouliadis: There were a number of reasons. To begin, they were seen by the people within the State Department as somehow deserving of their own fate. They have left America for either political or economic reasons, and were seen as suspicious, leftists or radicals in one form or another. Therefore they somehow seemed less deserving of a political intervention. This is ubiquitous in the early 1930s. There was one letter written by George Kennan who said that the American communists had expatriated themselves of their nationality the moment they set foot in Russia. The State Department officials knew very well that these people were being arrested when they left the embassy, and still very little was done about it. Sometimes a new diplomat would arrive and say, is there something we can do? Can we try and help these people? These were often low-level diplomats.

The first American Ambassador to the Soviet Union was William Bullitt. When Bullitt arrived in Russia in 1934 he was very much in sympathy with the whole Bolshevik experiment, he saw it as being just a few shades of darker red than the New Deal. That was his view when he first arrived in Russia, of course that changed radically by 1936 when so many of his Russian friends had been arrested. By the time he left, he was absolutely disgusted with this whole experiment. He attempted to have money given to these American immigrants so they could return to the Untied States. So at least he made an attempt to do something about it.

For Joseph Davis, who replaced him in 1937, his primary objective was to establish a political relationship with Joseph Stalin, and he didn’t want to do anything at all that would rock the boat and decrease his chances of meeting with Stalin and establishing an American-Soviet political relationship. So the notion was that it was not worth upsetting Joseph Stalin to save the lives of these American immigrants who had no voice and no political power anyway, who were appearing at the embassy asking for passports, or were stopping his chauffeur in the street when he was driving around in his Packard with its embassy plates and American flag. So Joseph Davis was under the impression that he had to choose between Stalin’s friendship and these immigrants, and he made his decision, which in my mind I think was ethically the wrong thing to do, because these people lost their lives. Had there been someone at the highest level with a desire to save these people, then it is quite likely that they could have been saved. The Austrian Ambassador at the time established direct intervention to save Austrian immigrants that were in Moscow, and he hid twenty of them in the basement of the Austrian Embassy at the peak of the terror. Joseph Davis had no interest in performing an equivalent act of salvation.

Later, during the American and Soviet alliance, the highest chance of successful intervention in 1941 was when Harry Hopkins arrived in Moscow. It would have been very easy to do a deal at that time, but these people were just not very high on the agenda. It was sometimes discussed in the internal memos within the State Department, but somehow there was insufficient political will to follow through. After the end of the Second World War, we got into the Cold War, when brokering a deal became absolutely impossible. 

It’s interesting to note that these Americans were not only arrested in the 1930s during the Great Terror, they were also being arrested during the height of the American-Soviet alliance. There was the case of Averell Harriman, who was the American Ambassador to Russia during the war. He had his staff, a family of American immigrants who were working in the embassy, were suddenly arrested by the Soviet regime and accused of espionage. Harriman immediately wrote to Washington, D.C. asking what should we do to try and save these people? The reply was, well there is very little we can do. It’s almost like a collective shrug of the shoulders and negation of responsibility.

Question: What was the most surprising thing you learned from your research?

Tzouliadis: Before I started this research, I felt that I had some degree of understanding of what had happened in Russia during the Stalinist period, 1930s through the 1950s. I felt like I had some kind of understanding, but to be honest I realized that I had no understanding, no real depth and perspective of the degree of human suffering involved. One can read memoirs of people who were in the camps and who survived the camps, read letters that are in the archives from people who were searching for what had happened to their relatives - in so many of these cases you feel almost like a secondary feeling of trauma decades after the event. One can’t help but have the feeling of immense sorrow and immense compassion for the suffering that these people went through.

During my archival research I occasionally came across photographs. In the American archives in College Park in Maryland there was an American officer of Polish descent, who had met the Polish survivors of the camps who had gathered in Tehran, Iran, who were allowed to leave. He took pictures of children who were starved, the children were like skeletons and they were looking into the camera with those blank eyes and he wrote in his report that these children are very likely to die and there is nothing we can do to save them. And at that moment I felt like it was too much, because you can understand rationally what had happened, but it’s when you see the pictures of the people who had survived the camps - and they were very rare in comparison to what happened in Nazi Germany where the consequences of totalitarianism were very clear when the allied armies came in and it was all filmed. In the Soviet camps, no photography was ever allowed, so it was only this kind of secondary form of documentation by taking pictures of the victims, and these pictures were in the archives and they had been stamped secret, for whatever reason, during the war. And that, for me, was perhaps the lowest moment but also the most insightful, because it gave a very clear meaning to what Stalinism was actually all about. The order was given in Moscow, and this was the end of the chain that the people who were giving the instructions never actually saw.