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The Forsaken
From the Great Depression to the Gulags - Hope and Betrayal in Stalin's Russia
- Author: Tim Tzouliadis
- Category: Non-fiction Current Affairs / Politics Narrative
- Publisher: Little, Brown (UK)/ Penguin (US)
- Pub date: 31 July 2008
- Length: 480 pages
About The Forsaken
Winner of the 2009 Longman/History Today Award
It is not often that a new page of history is written… a fine narrative, full of ironic, sometimes black humour; it is thoroughly researched, sympathetic to the victims and merciless to the perpetrators, and sketches in the now only too familiar background of lies and terror with deadly precision
– LITERARY REVIEW
Unfortunately, the forsaken are only likely to be remembered in the pages of his intriguing and compassionate book
– TELEGRAPH
A particularly vivid and harrowing account of what Stalin’s Terror meant to its victims
– GUARDIAN
[This] dismal story is told with great skill and indignation usually missing from Western accounts of communist Russia
– NEW YORK SUN
This is a powerful, important and highly readable book. The Gulag is no novelty, but Tzouliadis brilliantly links high politics to the torment of innocents, adding devastating detail
– OBSERVER
THE FORSAKEN tells the story of the tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s and then vanished, threaded around the gruelling experiences of the only two members of the American Baseball Team of Gorky Park who survived the gulags.
It starts with a photograph of a baseball team. Since the year is 1936, the photograph is in black and white: two rows of young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms around each other’s shoulders.
They look just like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms. They are the American Baseball Team of the People’s Recreation Park at Gorky, Moscow, most of whom will be dead within the next 18 months. They will not die in an accident, in a train or a plane crash. They will be murdered, one by one.
The two who survive will be inordinately lucky. They will come so close to death in such terrible circumstances that, at times, they may even have wished they had died with the rest of the team.
Firmly in line with the market’s mood, THE FORSAKEN is character-driven history, written from the ground up, and should therefore be bought by readers of all backgrounds and interests.
About the Author
Tim Tzouliadis was born in 1968 and studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. He has worked in television on current affairs and documentaries broadcast by Channel 4, BBC2, NBC and National Geographic. He discovered the story to THE FORSAKEN, set against the backdrop of the Russian gulags and the Jewish holocaust, while researching a film on the gulags.