A grim account of the Americans who disappeared in the gulags

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, By Tim Tzouliadis Penguin, 436 pp., $29.95

It sounds like the start of a fairy tale gone horribly wrong, but then so much of this story does: Once upon a time, the idea of voluntarily moving to the Soviet Union didn't horrify, it was downright attractive. During the darkest phase of Herbert Hoover's presidency, when the Depression was hunkering down across America, the Soviet Union appeared to be a young country, bursting with optimism - and jobs. So thousands of Americans, some radiating with communist vigor, and most merely searching for opportunity, left the United States behind for a new life there.

The gruesome details of life in Stalin's Russia, and in the gulags that were his most lasting legacy, have been sifted through numerous times, most notably in Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" and Orlando Figes's "The Whisperers." While covering much of the same ground as those masterworks, British journalist Tim Tzouliadis's book brings the tragedy closer to home, offering the dreadful specter of Americans caught up in the death-lust of Stalin's Russia, and unable to escape. As a book whose subject is the irrevocably lost past, "The Forsaken" is padded with only semi-relevant asides and digressions. Those digressions, however, help us grasp the nightmare dystopia that swallowed the Americans without a trace. We may not learn precisely what happened to the vanished, but Tzouliadis brings us as close as possible.

The shift began with the best of intentions. Newly immigrated workers established English-language newspapers, made up uniforms for baseball teams (the Hammer and Sickles, and the Red Stars), and met regularly in Moscow's Gorky Park for games. The American idyll was short-lived. By the mid-1930s, American expats were discovering that their passports had been revoked, that the Soviets now regarded them as potential enemies, and that American diplomats were no longer interested in their fate. Many Americans - including Ford employees who had come to build a world-class automobile plant - found themselves in the farthest reaches of Siberia, mining for gold.

The book has numerous villains guilty of ideological bullheadedness, timidity, lackeyism, and general stupidity, with Tzouliadis singling out three for well-deserved abuse. The first is New York Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty. He won a Pulitzer Prize during the year that a state-caused famine killed 4.5 million to 8.5 million people, with well-turned remarks like this one: "The use of the word 'Famine' in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer absurdity. . . . Village markets are flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter at prices lower than in Moscow."

Second is actor Paul Robeson, who fled there because of American racism, but who was unwilling (or unable) to denounce Stalinism. Last, and assuredly not least, is Joseph Davies, American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. As secret-police trucks rumbled through the darkened city streets, and the sound of pistol shots served as a nightly soundtrack, Davies clung assiduously to his well-manicured naivete. Exchanging vodka toasts with Josef Stalin himself, Davies and his wife, heiress to the General Foods empire, spent much of their time on their yacht, or buying the blood-soaked art treasures of the former Russian aristocracy at bargain-basement prices.

All three men shared a painfully gullible optimism, an ingrained sense of the Soviet Union, and Stalin, as essentially benevolent. Those on the other side of the wall, abandoned to Stalin's worst, could not cling to such naivete. Thomas Sgovio was arrested in 1938, as was Victor Herman, whose father had brought his family east for a Ford job. Both were sent to gulags, and left there to die. Sgovio saved himself by drawing pictures of naked women for a camp guard, who kept him supplied with extra food and rest.

Wars and Soviet leaders came and went, but rumors of Americans trapped in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals remained. A 1992 joint commission was inconclusive, but the overwhelming likelihood was that the hundreds, if not thousands, of vanished Americans were long dead by the time the United States belatedly began to ask Russian leaders about "the men who were left behind." Some 75 years after the first Americans were imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the Soviet Union, it is simply too late to determine with any finality just what happened to the players on those long-ago baseball teams. All Tzouliadis can do, and does admirably, is open a door on the past, giving us an unbearably sad glimpse of the forsaken.

Saul Austerlitz is a regular contributor to the Globe.