Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed.
Your next book is about Americans in Russia, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.
This is a fairly recent book which is wonderful and very depressing. It is an account of a large number of Americans who were living in Russia in the 1930s. Many of them had gone there to work. Others had been taken by their parents who had wanted to help build socialism. And many of these people were caught up in the purge trials and hundreds of them were killed. Tzouliadis oriented his book around a number of young American boys who organised baseball teams in Moscow and who used to play in the local parks. And he traces the fate of what happened to those young baseball players.
And the sad thing is the US government did nothing to help them.
No, they didn’t. Many American diplomats thought, well these people are communists, and left them to their fates. But, even if the government had tried to intervene, it is not clear they would have been very successful. So it’s a sad chapter in America’s Communist history which is beautifully written and wonderfully researched.
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Harvey Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement and on Soviet espionage in America. He has received a number of awards, including Emory’s Thomas Jefferson Award in 1999. He was recently nominated to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
What about The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis?
I’m sure this will be of interest to a Western audience. Its subject is those former American citizens who were made to give up American citizenship in exchange for Soviet citizenship.
How were they made to do it?
Well, there’s this group of people who arrived from America which consisted of two types. The first were people who came for ideological reasons, who had socialist or communist views and who wanted to take part in the construction of socialism. These people, of course, quite willingly took Soviet citizenship and gave up their American passports. But the second group were victims of the Great Depression who came to Russia to find jobs and support their families. For them it was different. The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily, and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.
Was there no attempt by America to intervene on their behalf?
They intervened in one or two cases, but they didn’t acknowledge that they were aware of it happening on a large scale.
Where does the information for this book come from?
Well, Tzouliadis did a lot of work here, or at least he did a lot of work through researchers. A lot of it comes from the former Party archives, and also some of it from the regional archives – also people’s personal archives.
The American ambassador at this time was William Bullitt, wasn’t it? Who had come to Russia very much in sympathy with the Soviet regime.
Yes, and he probably judged it wiser to turn a blind eye to what was really happening. Of course, everybody now is incredulous, that Russians were shooting dozens of Americans and sending them to labour camps. But this really was the case.
The Russian state archives were opened to foreigners in 1991. Since then you’ve helped research several books by Western authors, including Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. Have you found that gaining access to the archives has become more difficult since the early days of democracy in Russia?
Well, to be honest, I think many foreign authors exaggerate the scale of changes in the Russian archives. All of them give researchers exactly the same material as they did in the early 90s, with the exception of the former KGB archive, which even in the early 90s did not give permission to everybody. Maybe a few more people were allowed then than now, but I think it’s normal for a secret service archive not to welcome all-comers.
I suppose in the West the prejudice is that the former Soviet Union and the present Russian Federation are different countries with different flags and that there is no reason for modern Russia to protect its past.
Well, they see themselves as successors of the Soviet and they keep these archives classified. I can see the reasons. I heard about a British researcher recently trying to get access to the MI5 and MI6 archives and he was denied.
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Dr Lyubov Vinogradova was born in Moscow in 1973. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Academy and later defending a PhD in microbiology, she took a second degree in foreign languages, choosing English and German. In 1995 she was introduced to Antony Beevor and helped him research Stalingrad. Since then she has worked on many other research projects with Antony Beevor and other English-speaking writers and also her own projects. She is the co-author (together with Anthony Beevor) of A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army. She says American victims of the Great Depression came to Russia to find jobs and support their families in the 1920 and 30s. ‘The Soviet authorities used all sorts of tricks to get them to take up citizenship. They were told that they had to hand over their American passports temporarily and they never saw them again. And then they lost any rights that American citizens have or legal grounds to be protected. It was a great tragedy.’
