From Depression To Gulags

By Patrick Appel

Orlando Figes reviews Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken, a book about depression-era Americans who moved to Russia in hope of a better life:

By the mid-1930s, there were 15,000 American citizens living in the Soviet Union, enough to form a baseball league, with Sunday games in Gorky Park. Most were soon deprived of their US passports by the Soviet authorities, which thereby claimed them as their own, but they were never really accepted as “Soviet” and many were arrested as potential “spies” during the Great Terror of 1937- 38. They vanished into the Gulag.