The Forsaken By Tim Tzouliadis Little, Brown, 472pp. £20 Comrade Jim: The Spy Who Played for Spartak By Jim Riordan Fourth Estate, 223pp. £14.99IN 1935, THE first US ambassador to the newly-formed Soviet Union, William Bullitt, hosted an "Arrival of Spring" bash for Moscow's glitterati. There were bear cubs borrowed from the local zoo and gilded, goats and cockerels, a jazz band. Present was a penurious Mikhail Bulgakov, who made of that night's mayhem a scene in The Magician and Margarita whereby Satan, reincarnated in 1930s Moscow, hosts a society ball.
An account of ambassador Bullit's party appears in Tim Tzouliadis's fascinating The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags, the story of American economic and ideological migrants to the USSR in the 1930s. Tzouliadis, a journalist and TV documentary-maker, has reconstructed largely from US and Russian state archives a history that has hitherto lain buried under administrative indifference and embarrassment.
Between the Wall Street Crash and the second World War, the USSR sold itself as a beacon of hope to the out-of-work and desperate of America's Great Depression. In 1931, a primer for Stalin's "Five-Year Plan" became an improbable US bestseller and the Soviet trade agency Amtorg reported over 100,000 emigration applications to its New York office.
In the hope of jobs and racial equality, they sold up whatever rickety farmsteads they possessed and were welcomed by a new nation keen to prove itself to the old world. Those were the days when Stalin fetishised all things from America. For a time his comrades, ever eager to please (and survive) by emulation, applauded its groups of "Negro" singers and queued to see its movies. By the summer of 1932 "Americanski beisbol" had been officially declared a national sport and an intercity league established.
Predictably, the rest of the story is mostly tragedy. Tzouliadis is understandably slow to nail down precise numbers. But it is estimated that, of the 17 million who perished for no good reason other than being thereabouts during the Terror borne of Stalin's paranoia, some 3,000 had been born in America.
Passports, taken, were never returned. Citizenships were revoked under duress and the US Embassy adopted a no-longer-our-problem policy. Families were sundered. Appeals from relatives fell on deaf administrative ears. Occasionally a visitor to Moscow reported being addressed unexpectedly by a familiar accent. Reports of Russian being spoken with an American drawl appeared in desperate letters home from the gold mines of the Siberian gulags.
Tzouliadis is especially unforgiving of the great who provided moral sponsorship in the West. Henry Ford, icon of capitalism, could not resist the money to set up assembly plants and saw his Model A become the preferred vehicle of arrest for the secret police. Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Moscow correspondent, euphemised concentration camps as "communes" and cruised the wee hours in his imported Buick, petrifying the natives with a siren the authorities had given him as a gift, and won the Pulitzer Prize.
The most damning portraits are of second US ambassador in Moscow Joseph Davies and Hollywood tenor Paul Robeson. Davies emerges from these pages as a society-fuelled dope who sat ringside at scripted show trials and briefed Roosevelt on the integrity of the Soviet judiciary.
Robeson befriended several performers who were subsequently arrested and tortured, but repeatedly refused to use his immense fame in the USSR to help them. "We all knew he was innocent," his son accused after one such case, "and you never said a word." Paul Robeson jnr remembers his father arguing that "a great and just cause 'legitimized' great injustices".
The gloom is lifted in part by Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio, whose extraordinary biographies are staggered throughout The Forsaken. Both Herman and Sgovio survived decades of imprisonment, torture and exile, in regions and camps where the vast majority of prisoners failed to survive one year. Both published memoirs and died relatively recently in obscurity in their American homes.
Tzouliadis writes fluently, with knowledge and intensity. At times, however, The Forsaken suffers from an obvious dearth of primary source material specific to its proposed topic.
By way of apparent filler, we veer too frequently off subject. Much of the latter half of the book concerns itself with those US servicemen held prisoner after the second World War, which seems a different narrative.
There is also too much historical contextualisation. Almost a whole chapter, for example, is given over to Stalin's demise. While Uncle Joe's last moments are sufficiently and satisfyingly gruesome to bear retelling, this and much else arrives to us in the present telling with the sense that it is already available from more detailed and authoritative sources.
One could argue that Tzouliadis misinterprets the very narrative he alone has painstakingly constructed. He makes this a story about the Soviet Union. The Stalinist methodology of fear and liquidation has been well documented. The real news here is the level of knowledge that surrounded the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. Davies, Duranty, Robeson, Ford, Roosevelt - they all knew, and they chose to connive (in the true sense of that word). The dispensability of human life in the face of diplomacy and gold is surely an authentic American tale.
That said, The Forsaken is a fine and important book, for which its author deserves our gratitude.
Jim Riordan suggests the same fate befell "maybe hundreds of British communists, induced to surrender their passports, who suffered in the purges". Comrade Jim is the otherwise mildly engaging memoir of a Portsmouth lad who trained as a spy and switched allegiance. For five years Riordan studied in Moscow's elite Higher Party School under the sponsorship of the British Communist Party.
The author emerges from these pages as an English equivalent of the eponymous hero of Woody Allen's Zelig. He is the face in the margins of history: schooled alongside Alan Bennett, DM Thomas and Dennis Potter; instructed by Khrushchev to prevent Khachaturian from "flicking the bottoms of passing Cuban waitresses"; pallbearer for Cambridge spy Donald Maclean.
At the core of Comrade Jim is Riordan's fleeting career (two starts) as burly centre-half for Spartak Moscow. Since publication, some doubt has been voiced about the veracity of Riordan's claims to have been the only Englishman ever to play Russian league football. To be fair, the author had pre-empted this in the book. None of his surviving teammates, he admits, recalls togging out beside "Yakov Eeordahnov" and there are no conclusive records of his presence on the pitch in the Lenin Stadium.
True or not, the 50 pages given to this episode are by far the best in the book, an absorbing account of the big time seen from within through the eyes of an enthusiastic amateur, laced with self-deprecation and vast quantities of vodka.
• Conor O'Callaghan is a poet who teaches part-time both at Sheffield Hallam University and at Wake Forest University in North Carolina