John Lloyd, the former Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times, had an interesting dispatch this past weekend about the unknown fate of numerous American prisoners in Stalinist Russia.

Cold-shouldered By John Lloyd When, in 1992, I travelled to the far northern Russian city of Vorkuta – established as the administration centre for a vast hinterland of labour camps – I met a young Polish diplomat. He was on a mission to unearth the files of the many thousands of Poles who had been imprisoned there. As we talked in a café, I noticed an old man hovering a little way away, clearly wanting to communicate but torn between eagerness and fear. Finally, he plunged towards my acquaintance, explained that he had heard his compatriot’s Polish accent, and that he had been a zek, or convict, and stayed on. That many Poles had been seized from their eastern territories which the Soviets occupied after the Nazi Soviet pact was well-known. That Americans – three generations of them – had been inmates of the Soviet death camps, much less. In The Forsaken, Tim Tzouliadis’ clear, strong narrative discloses the terrible fates which awaited those – committed communists and apolitical innocents alike – who wandered into the Soviet sphere. Most never re-emerged.