The Forsaken starts with a photograph of a baseball
team. The year is 1934, the image black and white: two rows of
young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms
around one another’s shoulders. They are all somewhere in their
late teens or twenties, in the peak of health. We know most, if
not all, of their names: Arthur Abolin, Walter Preeden, Victor
Herman, Eugene Peterson. They hail from ordinary working
families from across America—Detroit, Boston, New York, San
Francisco. Waiting in the sunshine, they look just like any other
baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their
uniforms.
These men and thousands of others, their wives, and
children were possibly the least heralded migration in American
history. Not surprising, maybe, since in a nation of immigrants
few care to remember the ones who leave behind the dream.
The exiles came from all walks of life. Within their ranks were
Communists, trade unionists, and radicals of the John Reed
school, but most were just ordinary citizens not overly concerned
were politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigrants:
the search for a better life. And to any one of the millions
of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, even the
harshest Moscow winter could sustain that promise.
Within four years of that June day in Gorky Park,
many of the young men in that photograph will be arrested and
along with them unaccounted numbers of their fellow countrymen.
As foreign victims of Stalin’s Terror, some will be executed
immediately in basement cells or at execution grounds outside
themain cities. Others will be sent to the “corrective labor”
camps, where they will be starved and worked to death, their
bodies buried in the snowy wasteland. Two of the baseball players
who survive and whose stories frame this remarkable work of
history will be inordinately lucky. This book is the story of these
mens’ lives—The Forsaken who lived and those who died.
The result of years of groundbreaking research in
American and Russian archives, The Forsaken is also the story
of the world inside Russia at the time of Terror: the glittering
obliviousness of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the duplicity of
the Soviet government in its dealings with Roosevelt, and the
terrible finality of the Gulag system. In the tradition of the finest
history chronicling genocide in the twentieth century, The
Forsaken offers new understanding of timeless questions of guilt
and innocence that continue to plague us today.
