F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

B O O K S
“special interest pleading.” Farr is
thoughtful and analytic, but sees the
world as essentially reflecting a single
problem. He gives no indication he is
aware that U.S. diplomacy simultaneously
struggles with challenges including
a revanchist Russia, nuclear proliferation,
global warming, global poverty/trade
imbalances, and racial/ethnic
conflicts. Nor, despite Farr’s arguments,
is it obvious that a religious
rather than a “realist” reading of these
problems will generate positive results
for U.S. foreign policy.
David T. Jones is a retired Senior FSO
and a frequent contributor to the Journal.
Among many other assignments,
he was an editor for the first State Department
International Religious Freedom
report.
Workers’ Paradise
Lost
The Forsaken: An American
Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia
Tim Tzouliadis, Penguin Press, 2008,
$29.95, hardcover, 436 pages.
REVIEWED BY MARKO VELIKONJA
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy
in Stalin’s Russia is a beautifully
written and thoroughly researched, but
wrenching, account of the fate of the
thousands of U.S. citizens who emigrated
to the Soviet Union during the
early 1930s, where they were largely
abandoned by their own government.
At first welcomed and in many cases recruited
to work in Soviet mines and factories,
these Americans and other
Westerners who had emigrated increasingly
began to be viewed with suspicion.
Most were ultimately executed
or sent to the gulags.
Author Tim Tzouliadis focuses on
how the U.S. State Department — and
in particular the second ambassador to
the USSR, Joseph Davies — turned a
blind eye to the Great Terror, failing to
take any meaningful measures to assist
American expatriates even after it became
clear how endangered they were.
While the first U.S. ambassador, William
Bullitt, was ultimately disabused of
any illusions about the Stalinist regime,
Davies always attempted to please his
hosts, even going so far as apologizing
after some U.S. diplomats had attempted
to assist a jailed U.S. citizen.
Davies’ approach was apparently
not popular with many of his subordi-
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