The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 9 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 simultane- ously struggles with challenges includ- ing a revanchist Russia, nuclear pro- liferation, global warming, global pov- erty/trade imbalances, and racial/eth- nic conflicts. Nor, despite Farr’s argu- ments, 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 Jour- nal. Among many other assignments, he was an editor for the first State De- partment International Religious Free- dom report. Workers’ Paradise Lost The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia Tim Tzouliadis, Penguin Press, 2008, $29.95, hardcover, 436 pages. R EVIEWED BY M ARKO V ELIKONJA The Forsaken: An American Tra- gedy 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 emi- grated to the Soviet Union during the early 1930s, where they were largely abandoned by their own government. At first welcomed and inmany cases re- cruited to work in Soviet mines and fac- tories, these Americans and other Westerners who had emigrated in- creasingly began to be viewed with sus- picion. 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 be- came clear how endangered they were. While the first U.S. ambassador, Will- iamBullitt, 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 at- tempted to assist a jailed U.S. citizen. Davies’ approach was apparently not popular with many of his subordi-