12-5-08
In the Footsteps of a Forgotten Emigration - America, Russia and the Archaeology of Genocide
Historians/History
by Tim Tzouliadis
Mr. Tzouliadis is the author of The Forsaken, an account of the American emigration to Stalin’s Russia of the early 1930s – an exodus that fell into the interstices of Cold War history. This essay derives from a journey made across Russia earlier this year.
At the height of the Great Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners, waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty bound for Leningrad. They arrived in the “Workers Paradise” confident that they were leaving the miseries of unemployment and poverty behind them. Inevitably their optimism would prove to be short-lived.
Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival. Considered ideologically suspect by Stalin’s paranoid and totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror - and the American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and English-language schools where they once gathered, quickly vanished with them.
During the early years, in public, the Americans had learned to follow the Russian example, and never mention the words “GPU” or “NKVD” aloud. Instead they cracked jokes about the Soviet secret police as “the Four-Letter Boys” or “Phi Beta Kappa” or “the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Bolshevism” or any other whip-smart euphemism designed to confuse the listeners and informers who surrounded them. The bar at the Metropol Hotel had once been the weekly venue for an American party, where young couples danced around a circular fountain kept stocked with fish.
- See more at:
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/55970#sthash.Drfah4lf.dpuf
