America's darkest hour of Betrayal was during the Global Depression of the 1930's was written by Tim Tzouliadis entitled: "The Forsaken".

This book is about how America, during the Depression of the 1930's, and I quote from the book; "Lured American's to work in the Soviet Union. This is a POWERFUL book, as he researched for almost a decade, and how he obtained historical information through an American law; The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 in order for Tzouliadis to write this historically accurate book. The author wrote in detail how and why the American Government under Franklin D. Roosevelt, his Secretaries of the Treasury, Commerce, State, and the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union knew of the thousands of innocent American unemployed Trade Unionists plight, but ended in Gulag's throughout Siberia only to meet their deaths.

A must READ for those who seek the truth behind Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Joseph's Stalin's Five Year Plan.

The "Pen is Mightier than the Sword", and books bring knowledge in hopes that history will never be repeated.

"TO THINE OWNSELF BE TRUE" !

To be honest, I bought this book thinking it would be about a bunch of Americans who turned their backs on America simply because times were bad or because they had a political agenda. However, the writing of the book made me sympathetic with the many of the people the author wrote about and by the time I finished it I really did feel sorry for these Americans who were duped into entering the USSR and then siezed into the gulag system. And no punches are pulled as opportunities to intervene on Americans' behalfs are discussed, lost opportunities thanks to fellow travelers, bureaucrats and politicians. And not only are the depression-era workers a subject for the writer but also American servicemen captured during WWII, Korea and the Cold War. Someday I hope a reckoning is made and the files will be freely opened for us to know what happened to so many of these men and women.

This is the type of history book that I always look for; filling in a blank spot in knowledge, well-written and affecting. You can read the greater detail in other reviews, but the high-level story is the totalitarian savagery of the Soviet Union on almost everyone it could get its hands on. The second theme is the indifference and political expediency of the Roosevelt administration and its successors in not raising a finger to aid or protect any of the victims; in the immediate aftermath of WW2 it became a direct co-conspirator by shipping thousands of Russians to their deaths in the Soviet Gulag. There are also interesting tales of artists and newspaper reporters visiting from America who routinely chose to maintain their privileges in the Soviet Union at the expense of their American and Soviet friends dragged away in the middle of the night and never seen again. The moral of the story is that you should hope to be a person of compassion and principle rather than become the informer and the murderer; that could be difficult to do in a place like the Soviet Union.

To me, having never read The Gulag Archipelago, this book was a revelation. It's the absorbing story of American prisoners of the USSR and the indifference shown them by our government, particularly the state department. Most shocking to me, however, was his description of the gulag camps north of Magadan, where the prisoners were slowly starved while subjected to long days of labor in unearthly cold, 365 days a year, in the mines. It's hard to imagine a worse death. The Terror is also revealed in its wide scope, its cruelty and its arbitrariness.

Not too far from where I live is a small National Cemetery. Way in the back corner are a half dozen or so markers of World War II German POW's. Some of those German soldiers buried there committed suicide because at the end of World War II, the US Government was going to repatriate them back to the Soviet Union. You see, they came from a part of Ukraine, settled by Germans, under Catherine the Great, when the Germans invaded the USSR, they joined the German Army. They apparently also understood what awaited them in Stalin's Russia. This is just a side bar in the great history, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis. The author tells the story of what became of American nationals, who out of committment to communism, hunger during the depression, or just plain naivete emmigrated from the United States to the Soviet Union during the great depression. Out of tens of thousands of immigrants from the US to the USSR during the 1930s, very few lived to tell the tale of their experiences under the greatest terror conceived by any dictator. Stalin out of his own twisted paranoia had many of them executed or sentenced to the slow death of the Soviet Gulag's. But, more disturbing than that is the fact that the US Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, knew what Stalin was doing to US nationals, including downed American Pilots originally captured by the Germans or who crash landed in Soviet territory during our war with Japan, and quiety acquiesced to allowing them to be executed or imprisoned by the Soviets. So much for "Nothing to fear but fear itself." Unless of course your President, for lack of a better description admires and kisses up to a Soviet thug. The Author paints a clear picture of how the first American Ambassadors to the USSR were so enamored of Stalin the Soviet experiment they were willing to look the other way. It also paints a sad picture of how the Roosevelt administration contributed to the Soviet "Terror" by choosing to ignore it, only to be followed by the Truman administration's gullibility when it came to trusting Stalin and his regime. This book will hopefully open American eyes to just how not great FDR and give 'em hell Harry really did this nation an diservice when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union. As I mentioned earlier, there are side bars here, namely how the Soviet's used our lend lease materials, trucks, ships, etc. to feed the terror, namely transport people to the Gulags, and not fight the Germans. This is a well written history, but deeply disturbing because of the facts it reveals. This book is highly recommended if one wants to really understand how the United States government by its elected an appointed officials aided Stalin's terror against not only his own people, but foreigners too.

Like most books about Stalin and the Great Terror, The Forsaken is a troubling and unsettling endeavor. It awakens the conscience and has the unintended effect of making us grateful for the lives of privilege we now lead. Tim Tzouliadis is an excellent historian and his narrative is both vivid and scholarly. It's a tough balance to maintain, but this author succeeds in the spirit of Anthony Beevor (my favorite historian).

What I found most tragic was the fate of those GIs kidnapped from western Europe after the war. They spent the rest of their days in the GULAG digging out gold, uranium or mercury with their bare hands. Some of this made for tough reading but it is exquisitely told. Most of the forsaken made the mistake of traveling to the Soviet Union for work and handing over to the Russian government their documents which were then funneled to NKVD agents who made their way back to the United States. Without papers they became, in effect, Soviet citizens which left them with no protections once the state began to eat and destroy its own people during the Great Terror of the thirties. In this account we find that nearly 20 million people were arrested and soon found their way into the GULAG machine--if they were not executed in the basement of the Lubianka or upon a Katyn-like field first.

The Roosevelt Administration, particularly Ambassador Joseph Davies, were the secondary villains of this tale. All it would have taken, on their parts, to free the individuals (who were once full-fledged Americans) would have been for FDR to link lend/lease aid to the freeing of citizens. He declined to wield any stick and gave the USSR a bevy of riches while US ships made the evil of Kolyma possible. Roosevelt's confusion regarding Stalin was horrifying and the dictator's contempt for FDR was palpable. He played and manipulated our president with astonishing ease. I could go on and on about this work as it was absolutely superb. I do not know Tim Tzouliadis personally so am not biased in his favor but can honestly state that this was the best book I have read, thus far, in 2008.

I never knew that Stalin had such an easy job of butchering thousands of American citizens, it was like taking candy from a baby. The U.S Government did not lift a finger to save the ones who were there by will (the immigrants who went there as invited workers during the depression) to those who were not (their innocent children and subsequently POWs from WWII and the Korean War.)

After reading this book I now know not to count on the State Department for help if traveling abroad. I can't believe how stupid the American government was, and how idiotically it enabled Stalin to keep the Gulag rolling along.

The book is very readable, but it is not for the faint of heart. So much suffering and death is brought to mind, and that is not what most Americans want to know about. But even if you think of Stalin as some kind of aberration of those years in the 20 th century that seemed to give rise to so many murderous maniacs such as Hitler and Mao, don't think that this situation will never happen again. It probably caught the Soviet people unawares and by the time they realized that Stalin's Terror would leave no one untouched, it was too late to do anything about it.

It is estimated that somewhere around 26 million people died in Stalin's Terror, many perished under the harsh unlivable conditions they had to endure in the Gulag prison camps. Including continuous starvation and exposure to extreme sub artic temperatures while being forced to work at hard labor. These were actually concentration campls, no different than Hitler's.

But still the U.S Government's indifference to the deaths of its own citizens is what is the most mind boggling to me.

I was disappointed by this book. The subject is very interesting. I never knew about US citizens who had disappeared into the Gulag, so I picked up this book with enthusiasm. The early chapters are very good describing those Americans who went to the USSR with high hopes and beliefs. But then we lose sight of them, and the book becomes a rather moralizing history of the US diplomats and politicians who ignored their fate with long discourses on the evils of the Stalinist regime, which we know very well from better books, by Figes, Applebaum, etc.

Tzouliadis forces your eyes open, and relates a history most Americans never heard of. In some ways, it matches John McCain's terrible secrets about his actions as a POW, and his deliberate efforts to hide those still MIA. THOUSANDS of Americans, including WWII and Korea POWs were enslaved by Stalin, along with millions of Russians. Most died. Prior to 1941, the Russians themselves estimate that 8-15 MILLION perished. Having a US passport was no help. Through the 1950s, if an American sought help from our Embassy, they were ignored, and it would lead to his/her arrest. A terrible story, extremely well told. A must read. Tzouliadis' book has added a very important chapter to America's (& Russia's) history.

If you have not read any or much about the evil deeds that occurred in the USSR, especially in the days of Stalin, this would be a good book to purchase and read. Mr. Tzouliadis writes from a specific viewpoint and with understandable anger, while using the cases of Americans caught up in the Soviet experiment for the structure for his story.

For those who have already read a number of the many books on the Stalin era, this book may provide little additional information.

Those who think FDR was our greatest president need to come to terms with how he and some of his closest aides bent over backwards to be kindly to Joseph Stalin and his deadly regime.

I saw a review of this book in the Economist a few weeks ago, and it reminded me of a brief newspaper article I read in about 1996. It talked of thousands of US POWs who had disappeared after WW2, apparently kidnapped by the Russians. At the time I thought that was pretty big news given the uproar over the relatively small number of MIAs in Vietnam. It was just a cursory article, and when I asked around, no one seemed to know anything about it. When the Internet arrived I searched a bit, but didn't find anything much either. This review was the first time I'd seen the thing mentioned in 12 years, so I got the book immediately. It's really a brief (and in my opinion very well written) history of the gulags, with the American angle (both 30s emigrants and post-war pows) as a selling point, and as I didn't know much about the gulags either I found it fascinating from both ends. Moreover, as the reviewer from the Economist said, "the horrors of the Gulag ought to be as well known as Auschwitz, but they aren't". Hard to know if the scale of the atrocities or the general ignorance about them (notably with the Russian population now heading willingly back into a neo-Stalinist styled state) is more disturbing.

A great piece of forgotten history of thousands of American fools going to Russia in the 1930s to help out Russia & the great 'communist experiment'. It applies to today as we have the same kinds of 'liberals' in the US that simply don't want to see anything wrong in the Communist countres of today. China is STILL full of gulags but our liberals just love China. This book sticks out because these were AMERICANS that bought the 'big lie' hook line and sinker.
A statement by the American miners in 1931:
"We the members of the fifth group of miners (from America) which have been exploited by the bosses of America, and thrown out of work for our services into the 13,000,000 army of the unemployed have decided to leave that capitalist country and help the Soviet Union..."
And out of 75 of these miners only a few ever survived the gulags that they were sent to and ended up escaping their 'workers paradise'. They became instant citizens of the USSR when they set foot in Russia. Their American passports were immediately confiscated and these very US passports were then used to smuggle Soviet spies back into the US> Pres. Roosevelt continued to ignore anything bad about the USSR.
This is amazing stuff that certainly applies to current events all over the world.
GREAT book about a forgotten history. We need to know this stuff!

What I found most remarkable about this book was not that it contains revelations from newly-opened Soviet archives, but how much of it was based upon accounts which were published in the U.S. and U.K during the 1930s-50s, but largely ignored, in favor of Soviet apologetics by the likes of Walter Duranty in the New York Times; Joseph Davies in Hollywood, and even Owen Lattimore's account of Henry Wallace's trip with blinders to the Siberian gold mine gulag, in National Geographic!

I have read many books about Marxist-Leninism, its promises of equality and social justice and the enormous devastation and loss of life it caused whenever and wherever it took power. This book details the experiences of Americans who, during the depression, left the US to go to the Soviet Union and what they hoped would be a better life. What Stalin gave them was gulags, disillusionment and death, which is what communism also brought China, Cuba, Vietnam, Russia and Eastern Europe, Cambodia and many other countries. US liberals fought hard to promote Castro in his early days and the sandinistas in Nicaragua and still mourn the end of Allende in Chile. Anytime liberals hear the words "equality and social justice," they are overcome with emotion and good intentions. They should read this book and many more about where good intentions can lead. I was once a liberal. I no longer am.

An absolute page turner from beginning to end on a subject I was unfamiliar with. That being American citizens emigrating to the USSR.

Highly recommended.

It is as Solzhenitsyn predicted in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, 3:482; trans. Harry Willetts (New York: Harper and Row, 1978)). In this work, Tim Tzouliadis seeks to arouse an interest, to create an insight into the barbarities committed throughout the "socialist experiment" in Soviet Russia. Writing particularly to an American audience, Tzouliadis recounts the story of the lost thousands of American to the oppression of the Soviet state. Virtually unknown to Americans is that the existence of these thousands was well-known to U.S. government officials and journalists stationed in the Soviet Union during the 30's, 40's, 50's, and 60's, people who simply remained silent in the midst of their fellow-citizens' disappearance and murders.

This book is a primer on the brutality of the Communist regime. For those unfamiliar with this history, it is an introduction. For those who have read Anne Applebaum, Robert Conquest, Vassily Grossman, John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Elinor Lipper, the Medvedevs (Roy and Zhores), Richard Pipes, Edward Radzinsky, Varlam Shalamov, Vitaly Shentalinsky, Dmitri Volkogonov, and, of course, Alexander Solzhenitysn, the history is not new. But, the story of Americans who once played baseball in Gorky Park only to end up executed by the gun or hard labor in Siberia is news to most.

Particularly of interest is the author's revelation of the betrayal of their fellow-citizens by government officials at the very top of the U.S. government. While the identities of the likes of Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Dexter White, Paul Robeson, Joseph Davies and others is well-known to those familiar with the history of the era, Tzouliadis provides new insights by relying on more-recently divulged information to establish the extent of the betrayal of traditional American moral virtues.

The bones of the victims of Soviet repression cry out for acknowledgement of their torture and degradation, as well as condemnation and judgment of their persecutors. The victims of Communist deceit, it must be recognized, are us all. It is time for the full story to be told.

In addition to his simply telling this story, Tzouliadis offers a moral tale that is supremely relevant today: those with utopian ideals and a fractured understanding of human nature cannot be trusted to lead a nation.

Read this book; its style makes it an easy encounter; its disclosures make it essential reading for those who would be intelligently informed.

The Great Depression of the Twenties and the Thirties in the United Stated caused thousands of Americans to migrate to Russia.There they hoped their lot would be improved and saved.They came from many walks of life. However, in a very short period of time, not only would their lives change for the better;they would be sent to the Russian horror Gulags as a result of Stalin's decision to send there tens of millions.No one would be spared- not even those American citizens who honestly believed that Communism was the remedy to all their (financial) troubles.Many of them ended up as slaves in the gold mines of Kolyma.Others were executed or sent to corrective labour camps.After the demise of the Cold War did the truth of this forgotten episode of American history come out.
Tim Tzouliadis has written a masterfully- researched book. It is an original topic freshly investigated and was written by a great storyteller and historian.Basing his extensive research on American and definitely Russian archives,Tim shows the reader the extreme way American leaders and other well- known figures were duped by the Russian dictatorship of Stalin into thinking that Russia was some kind of paradise on earth, while the opposite happened.People like the singer Paul Robeson or the American Vice-President Wallace were convinced and seduced to believe the lies strewn along Russia in those horrible years.The true tragedy of those forsaken Americans was that nobody wanted to believe them or their stories or families ,while the American politicians and leaders did not care at all about them.The explanation for this behaviour seemed plausible:Stalin as an Ally of the West could not be bothered by such trifle things.The American embassy's obliviousness and the manipulations and machinations of the Stalin regime were other elements which helped magnify this tragedy.The State Department's indifference was appaling as well.
Some of these men and women escaped from the Soviet Union and managed to return to their homeland telling the author their horrible ordeal.They were baseball players and their physical fitness helped them survive and tell the rest of the world about their unbelievable tragedy.They have also depicted the monstrosities of a regime gone mad and totally paranoid which did not at all care whether thirty million Russians were expelled to the infamous Gulags.
This book should be a warning to those who tend to forget or want to make others forget.Collective amnesia-sometimes practiced by some politicians or statesmen- is the first sign of a country (or leadership) that does not care about its citizens.And it does not show any moral scruples.This is the main idea behind this wonderfully-written (and forgotten historical) episode.You will enjoy and treasure each page of it!!!

This book reflects a great amount of scholarship on the part of Mr Tzouliadis, he has done a remarkable job of research here to add to what is already known about the grim story of the gulags. This book is well written and engaging but it also is a fairly thorough survey of the literature on this general topic. I have discovered several good first hand sources that I did not realize existed.

This book also sheds a good amount of light on the question of why the conditions in Russia were so little known in the 1930s. Basically, once a person was inside Russia, censorship of their communication was full and these people had their passports confiscated by the Russian government so it was almost impossible to leave. The Russian government claimed that these American citizens had renounced their citizenships, resulting in the fact that the American state department was not able or very willing to help these poor people.

In addition it appears that the treaties with Russia establishing diplomatic relations were not thoroughly drafted with safeguards for the protection of American citizens in Russia. The Soviets exploited these loopholes extensively.

Mr Tzouliadis sketches in a number of missing pieces in the dynamics here. The Russian foreign ministry was deathly afraid of the NKVD, and so inquiries to the Russian foreign ministry were fruitless. The problem of helping these people could only have been addressed by the highest level of interaction meaning FDR to Stalin. However, unfortuanately one of FDR's key sources was Walter Duranty, one of the most famous newspaper reporters of his time and unfortuantely it appears that Mr Duranty was a very serious apoligist for Stalin at the very least, and quite possibly was an agent of the NKVD as some defectors have alleged. (the existence of these defectors was unknown to me) Hence, several of FDR's sources with respect the the reality inside the Soviet union were compromised. It also appears that bureaucratic lethargy played a role.

Mr Tzouliadis also sheds much light on the question of MIA's possibly being left behind in Asia. From reading this account it becomes pretty clear that American prisoners of war from World war two and Korea have been spirited into the Gulags. The reasons why this was desirable are not clear and Mr Tzouliadis does not engage in any wild speculation. It also becomes fairly clear that the Americans were far from alone in being pulled into the camps, it appears that many nationalities were present in the camps. It also appears that some other nations were perhaps more diligent in pursuing the release of their citizens.

In summary this is a sad tale, but one which fills in some important gaps in the overall story of the camps. It also clarifies why the reality of what was going on inside Russia in the 1930s was simply not known widely and unfortuantely this did lead to a good number of American emigres suffering horrendously and being trapped inside the abyss. I found some of the discussion of the state department behavior and Mr Duranty's writings and influence very interesting. The fact that nobody could get back out of Russia and that several of the most important information channels were tainted goes a long way to explaining why a better understanding of the realities of the Soviet Union under Stalin took so long to come to pass.

This is an excellent and very impressive book and it deserves a wide readership.

In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression squeezed the United States in its iron grip, a group of Americans who had seen the propaganda about the "workers' paradise" being built in the Soviet Union, traveled over to find a little piece of paradise for themselves. Almost immediately things began to go wrong - many found their passports stolen by Russian officials, or conveniently "lost." With courage and boundless optimism they began to work in this strange new land, even forming their own baseball teams. But, within four years their "paradise" turned into hell on earth, as the Soviet secret police began to arrest and murder civilians by the thousands. Their American citizenship did not protect them, it made them targets - and when all was said and done very few made it out alive!

This is truly a gripping book. The author does an excellent job of telling the story of the Soviet terror, which resulted in the deaths of so many innocent people, and of telling the story of the Americans who were helplessly caught up in it. I could not tear myself away, turning pages deep into the night, as I watched the horror blossom in front of me, bearing its heartbreaking, heartrending fruit.

This book is a searing indictment of communism, but it is also an indictment of the American government, which took absolutely no action to protect or aid the Americans who they knew were about to be brutalized and murdered. The depth of the Roosevelt administration's complicity is appalling, with the American ambassador even attending show trials and admiring Josef Stalin. The American press was well aware of just what was happening, but they took such small steps (if at all) to inform the public of just what really was happening.

Yeah, as you can tell, this is a very moving book. The author really draws you into the tragedy, and the lives of the people caught up in it. This book should be on everyone's reading list for 2008 - it is a book that should be read by generations to come. I give this book my highest recommendations.

My Dad told us kids the story of Russian soldiers on the front lines battling Germany during WW II. When an order was given to advance, any soldier that would not go quick enough or simply refused would be shot by his commander on the spot.

As a kid, I thought to myself, "Wow, those Russians were pretty tough". After reading The Forsaken, I think the Russian soldier hesitated because he couldn't decide if death or capture by the Nazi's was better than facing life in Russia.

The Forsaken tells the story of Stalinist paranoia from the point of view of Americans who were drawn to the Soviet Union for jobs in the workers paradise of communism. Interestingly, these immigrant Americans brought baseball to Russia and the sport actually started to become popular. But as Stalin began to `cleanse' his country, the dream of a better way of life faded. Through his political police, the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs), everyone was a suspected traitor and could be detained for any reason. From the early 1930's to Stalin's death in 1953 people were executed, tortured and imprisoned in forced work camps or Gulags. This period is known as "the Terror".

I picked up The Forsaken because of its focus on America during that period. I am so glad that I did. I had no idea of the sheer scale of the atrocities that were committed; it is estimated that ten percent of the Soviet population were affected. I also had no idea how ignorant the US was to this travesty. It is truly an eye opener. The forsaken is a powerful warning of government out of control and government out of touch.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Communism/Socialism became popular in America. At the same time, America was going through a serious economic depression. Russia began advertising about how wonderful things were there, actively seeking immigrants. Even Henry Ford set up an automobile factory in Russia during that time and sent many workers to Russia to teach the Soviets how to make cars. This is the premise of "The Forsaken," but it doesn't come close to describing the totality of this incredibly important book.

Addictively readable, you will learn many things about the Soviet Union, Stalin, President Roosevelt, Communism, the US State Department, Russians, torture, imprisonment, slavery, and human nature, among other things.

Before reading this book, intellectually I knew about Stalin, I knew that he made Hitler look like a kindly grandfather, but until I read this book, it didn't really hit home. We have pictures of Hitler's concentration camps, but Stalin didn't allow pictures. Stalin had his minions murder tens of thousands at a time for months and years on end, paying them very nice bonuses for their murderous work, and then in paranoia, would have others murder these very men to keep his evil work hidden. And then those would be killed. And on and on.

To give a tiny taste of information I didn't know that is in this book, on page 249: "In Buchenwald, ... there were prisoners who had suffered in this camp under the Nazi and the Soviet regimes." You see, if you were Russian and captured by the Nazis, when your countrymen liberated your camp, you weren't freed, you weren't welcomed home, you were either shot or imprisoned. You were a traitor to your country.

As someone who is primarily a fiction reader, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Truth really is stranger, and far more horrible.

Anne Applebaum in Gulag: A History discusses briefly the issue of foreigners in the Gulag. But she does not give us a figure as to how many were there. Elsewhere stories have popped up from time to time of notable American leftists who journeyed to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and disappeared into Stalin's system. This, finally, is a full account of these people and who they were and where they came from. The author attempts to claim that many of these people were 'ordinary' but this is probably far from the truth. Many of these people were beleivers in the Communist dream, as a time when Capitalism seemed to be failing during the Great Depression. There were also hard core subversives among them, true beleivers in the Stalinist ideology who were 'returning home' to fight for COmmunism. In the supreme irony many of these higher minded intellectuals who hated American, found that the USSR was capable of doing things ten times worse to them than the U.S would ever imagine doing to Communist radicals. THey were rounded up when they tried to have outbursts of free speech, they were beaten, raped and placed on trains to the East. Once there they were worked to death. Few survived. As foreigners they were especially suspect as Stalin's grip became even more paranoid. Americans were imprisoned along with many other people from all over the world who had come to experience the 'Socialist utopia'. These poor people were not the only one's taken in. The New York Times came to Russia in the period and wrote a glowing peice about the miracle of Stalin's Russia. It has taken 70 years for these stories to come to light. It is a pleasure to read this wonderful and important account of these lives who were shattered.

Seth J. Frantzman

I found this a captivating story. Told with a dark humor, it tells a story most Americans are probably completely unfamiliar with. It should be required reading. It serves as reminder that, even in a self-styled 'Modern Age' The State is capable of unleashing surreal horror upon all. Speaking for myself, I was only superficially knowledgeable about many of the details which Mr.Tzouliadis delves into. I walk away from the book feeling queasy, but enlightened.

Americans in particular should acquaint themselves with their Foreign Service in action, to serve as a warning. How would you like to have your life depend on the intervention of a self-absorbed Ivy League functionary? No wonder the American immigrants were essentially wiped out. When you become cast as an ideological enemy, your own countrymen can be counted upon to remain bystanders to the onset of calamity. Sort of like watching the early onset of AIDS in the 80s, or Hurricane Katrina.

As a Leftist, I am instinctively cautious when I see cited here sources such as Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes. These scholars are known among the left as writers with a Right-Leaning Ideological tendency. And from the notes, I see Mr.Tzouliadis makes liberal use of Conquest, in particular. Nevertheless the breadth of sources Mr.Tzouliadis delved through to produce this work is truly impressive.

I have asked myself how one can immerse oneself into the subject of Stalinist Terror and the Gulags without developing a McCarthy-esque mind. I am not sure it is possible. At the end of the work Mr.Tzouliadis briefly equates Stalinism as the natural outgrowth of Bolshevism and the communist experiment in general. This is a subject of some controversy among the left today. While some Philosophers, like Slavoj Zizek would equate Stalinism as a natural outgrowth of Bolshevism, I remain unconvinced of this. Somewhere between the aspirations of Bolshevism and Lenin's ideas, there was some sort of decisive break, from which Stalinism emerged. Rather than be a Stalinist Apologist, a leftist should take away from the twentieth century the understanding that the problem of the power of the State remains to be resolved. I think one can reasonably conclude that the Stalinist model of imposition of totalitarian political and social structure on the proletariat and intelligentsia results in the corrosion of production, not its development. Communism/socialism thus has to be rebuilt, with a new praxis. A task for a new century.

PS I note the lack of photos. Even so, I don't think photos would quite have captured the magnitude of the Events described.