The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Joads of Russia

  Chapter 2 - Baseball in Gorky Park

  Chapter 3 - “Life Has Become More Joyful!”

  Chapter 4 - “Fordizatsia”

  Chapter 5 - “The Lindbergh of Russia”

  Chapter 6 - “The Captured Americans”

  Chapter 7 - “The Arrival of Spring”

  Chapter 8 - The Terror, the Terror

  Chapter 9 - Spetzrabota

  Chapter 10 - “A Dispassionate Observer”

  Chapter 11 - “SendViewsofNewYork”

  Chapter 12 - “Submission to Moscow”

  Chapter 13 - Kolyma Znaczit Smert

  Chapter 14 - The Soviet Gold Rush

  Chapter 15 - “Our Selfless Labor Will Restore Us to the Family of Workers”

  Chapter 16 - June 22, 1941

  Chapter 17 - The American Brands of a Soviet Genocide

  Chapter 18 - An American Vice President in the Heart of Darkness

  Chapter 19 - “To See Cruelty and Burn Not”

  Chapter 20 - “Release by the Green Procurator”

  Chapter 21 - The Second Generation

  Chapter 22 - Awakening

  Chapter 23 - “Citizen of the United States of America, Allied Officer Dale”

  Chapter 24 - Smert Stalina Spaset Rossiiu

  Chapter 25 - Freedom and Deceit

  Chapter 26 - The Truth at Last

  Chapter 27 - “The Two Russias”

  Chapter 28 - Thomas Sgovio Redux

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  About the Author

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  First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,

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  Copyright © T. Tzouliadis Limited, 2008

  All rights reserved.

  Page 398 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tzouliadis, Tim.

  The forsaken : an American tragedy in Stalin’s Russia / Tim Tzouliadis.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-594-20168-4

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  For the innocent who lost their lives,

  of every nationality

  1

  The Joads of Russia

  There is much to say about Soviet Russia. It is a new world to explore,

  Americans know almost nothing about it. But the story filters through, and

  it rouses heroism. As long as the Red Flag waves over the Kremlin, there

  is hope in the world. There is something in the air of Soviet Russia that

  throbbed in the air of Pericles’ Athens; the England of Shakespeare; the

  France of Danton; the America of Walt Whitman . . . This is the first man

  learning in agony and joy how to think. Where else is there hope in the

  world?

  New Masses, November 1926

  Their story begins with a photograph of a baseball team. The year is 1934, the picture is in black and white. Two rows of young men pose for the camera: one standing, the other crouching down with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They are all somewhere in their late teens or early twenties, in the peak of health. They appear to be the best of friends. We know many, if not all, of their names: Arnold Preedin, Arthur Abolin, Eugene Peterson, Leo Feinstein, Victor Herman, Leo Herman, Benny Grondon . . . The names themselves are unremarkable, since none of them are celebrities nor the sons or grand-sons of the famous. They come from ordinary working families from across America—from Detroit, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and the Midwest. Waiting in the sunshine, they look much like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms.1

  At first glance they might appear to be one team, but in actual fact there are two. On this occasion we can tell from their uniforms that the Foreign Workers’ Club of Moscow is playing against the Autoworkers’ Club from the nearby city of Gorky. But perhaps such details are unimportant, since many of the American baseball players in the photograph will soon be dead. They will not die in an accident, in a train, or in a plane crash. They will be the witnesses to, and the victims of, the most sustained campaign of state terror in modern history.

  The few baseball players who survive will be inordinately lucky. But they will come so close to death and endure such terrible circumstances that they, too, at times, may wish they had lost their lives with the rest of their team. Only at that moment, as the camera shutter clicks in the warm summer air of Gorky Park, none of the American baseball players has any idea of their likely fate. Their smiles betray not the slightest inkling.

  IT WAS THE least-heralded migration in American history. Unsurprising perhaps, since in a nation of immigrants, no one cares to remember the ones who left the dream behind—these forgotten exiles who stood with their families on the wooden decks of passenger liners, watching the Statue of Liberty fade into the distance as they left New York bound for Leningrad. A cross section of America, they came from all walks of life: professors, engineers, factory workers, teachers, artists, doctors, even farmers, all mixed together on the passenger ships. They left to join the Five-Year Plan of Soviet Russia, lured by the prospect of work at the height of the Great Depression. Qualified engineers on well-paid contracts jostled beside unemployed workers chasing jobs in Soviet factories, and starry-eyed fellow travelers whose luggage was bursting with the heavy tomes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Within their ranks were American communists, trade unionists, and other assorted radicals of the John Reed school, but most were ordinary citizens not overly concerned by politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigra
nts: the search for a better life for their children and themselves. And in the eagerness of their departure, no wise eyes strained to foresee the chronicle of violence that lay in store in Russia, as the bronze-and-steel propellers labored relentlessly across the gray-green ocean water toward Europe.

  In the early 1930s, it must have felt as though America, caught in the clutches of the Great Depression, could not or would not keep her half of the social contract. There were more people out of work in the United States, both actually and proportionately, than in any other nation on earth. Thirteen million unemployed represented a quarter of the workforce in an age when, in most families, only the men held jobs. Now those millions stood on bread lines and queued up at soup kitchens waiting for their next meal. A ragged army of hoboes had taken to the highways and railroads of the continent in their search for work. Half the country was on the move, and not just the likes of Tom Joad driving to California in their Model A’s. To these people, the Great Depression’s newly dispossessed, the abject failure of capitalism was not such a radical proposition so much as the straightforward evidence of their senses. They saw it, and smelled it, whichever way they turned.

  The New York Times published a story on the new city that had risen next to Wall Street as a symbolic rival to the financial center of the Western world: “Campfires glowed last night in the Westside jungles. The jungle, bounded by Spring, West, Clarkson and Washington streets, looks, with its mounds of brick and its desolation like a shell-pocked village in France . . . Battered chimneys rise out of holes in the ground, where the unemployed have dug in for the winter. Shacks made of packing cases, old tin, dirty cement blocks, beams, tar paper, stand on some of the brick mounds, others are in the brick hollows.”2 These brand-new Hoovervilles, built of corrugated iron and salvaged brick, had risen suddenly in every major American city and struck many as a warning of a civilization dividing into alternate landscapes—as if competing visions of penury and plenty were being processed over one another, and the figures in the foreground were no longer sure to which their lives belonged or to which they now were heading. Almost overnight, pinstripes and spats had been replaced by worn-out denim and a sullen look, as the ranks of unemployed attempted to stay alive selling shoeshines or apples for a nickel apiece, competing with the countless others who had the same idea. On city sidewalks of America, the veterans of the Great War sold their decorations for valor won on the battlefields of France and Belgium. The going rate was one dollar and fifty cents.

  In movie theaters, the newsreel pictures showed Franciscan friars doling out silver nickels to the homeless for a bed or a meal. Crowds of men stood smoking, their hats pulled down low over their eyes, waiting patiently to receive their solitary coin, tipping their hats as they walked past. It was an endless queue, and an anonymous haunted man who tries to cut in gets pushed back to the end of the line. The camera catches him in the act and preserves his despair forever, like a—the Sisyphus of old New York. In Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the destitute were living inside coke ovens shut down by the crisis. Men with their entire families were living there inside. Kids with nothing looked curiously into the inquiring cameras, some with unnaturally stern faces, others with the shy grins of children for whom this was all still just fun and who had no idea quite how desperate their fathers had become. In Harrisburg, a ragged army of unemployed stormed the state capitol demanding relief funds, while articles in the mainstream press carried portentous headlines warning of “the Prospect of Violent Revolution in the United States.”3

  Amid the enforced idleness, the bank failures, the sourness, and the blatant discontent, a bitter rage swept through the streets of American cities while the shock was still raw and the people angry enough to get out onto the streets. An international unemployment day was announced, and hundreds of thousands marched through New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and the industrial heartlands. The general feeling of unease was impossible to resist; of disgust at the overwhelming power of money, which divided men from one another and added a layer of shame onto the hurt of what it already felt like to be absolutely poor. Reinforcing this nationwide shift toward radicalism—the sudden lurch of the entire political consensus to the left—was the growing awareness that all this unemployment and extreme hardship were ultimately unnecessary. The collective misery was simply the result of laissez-faire capitalism gone wild, the maniacal exuberance of Wall Street financiers who had stoked an express train until it careened off the tracks, leaving others to pick up the pieces of the wreck while the guilty fled the scene.4

  Elected by a landslide, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address to a radio audience of sixty million listeners, roughly half the country, eager to learn of a plan for a way out of the crisis:

  The rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous moneychangers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men . . . A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment . . . The moneychangers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.5

  But many Americans no longer owned a radio to hear their president’s calm words of reassurance. Such luxuries had long since been traded in for cash, along with the rest of their possessions. Thousands more had already left, choosing to chance their luck elsewhere and take a gamble on reports they read in newspapers of how Soviet Russia alone still had economic growth and jobs, and was planning a society that placed working-men at its very center, no longer merely the peripheral casualties of other men’s greed. Searching for alternatives, for avenues of escape, they studied the glowing accounts of new factories being built in Russia, surrounded by trees and flowers, with cafeterias and libraries for their workers, nurseries for the children, and even swimming pools, for crying out loud! At that moment, American curiosity to learn about the Soviet experiment was all-consuming. An English translation of New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan had become the unlikely publishing phenomenon of 1931, an American bestseller for seven months and one of the highest selling nonfiction titles of the past decade.6 Its simple explanations, written originally for Russian schoolchildren, were read and reread by an American public searching for answers beyond the deadened reach of another decade of “rugged individualism.” In the midst of Depression misery, who could not be attracted to the book’s shared vision of future happiness and social progress?

  All this will be written about us a few decades hence. He will work less and yet accomplish more. During seven hours in the factory he will do what now requires eleven and a half hours . . . Instead of dark, gloomy shops with dim, yellow lamps there will be light, clean halls with great windows and beautiful tile doors. Not the lungs of men, but powerful ventilators will suck in and swallow the dirt, dust, and shavings of the factories . . . Socialism is no longer a myth, a phantasy of mind . . . We ourselves are building it . . . And this better life will not come as a miracle: we ourselves must create it. But to create it we need knowledge: we need strong hands, yes, but we need strong minds too . . . Here it is—your Five-Year Plan.7

  And who could blame those Americans, motivated as much by economic necessity as their own idealism, who gratefully accepted Joseph Stalin’s open invitation to work in the Soviet Union? Skilled workers could even have their passage paid to the land where all unemployment had been officially declared extinct. They saw themselves as the pioneers of a new frontier, moving slowly from west to east, lured not just by the idea of security in hard times but also by the simple temptations of adequacy: of three square meals a day, a decent job, a roof over their heads, a doct
or for the children, and the knowledge that it all could not be taken away at the click of someone’s fingers or the chatter of the stock ticker.8

  They left it to the social philosophers to speculate on the value of secure and decently paid employment to an individual’s notion of identity or self-worth; let alone “the pursuit of happiness,” a phrase that provoked a certain mocking tone when spoken from beneath the corrugated roof of a brick shack. And if the president of the United States could talk to the nation of the flight of the moneychangers from the temple without being called a “Red,” then presumably these American exiles could hold a similar view as they were drawn east to Russia like a beacon, a flickering flame in the white night of the Depression.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving. And as the cutting edge of poverty sharpened their determination, the desire to join this forgotten exodus turned, as the saying goes, from a trickle to a flood. In the first eight months of 1931 alone, Amtorg—the Soviet trade agency based in New York—received more than one hundred thousand American applications for emigration to the USSR. Such was the overwhelming response to their newspaper advertisements publicizing just six thousand jobs for skilled workers in Russia.9 At the Amtorg offices in Manhattan, crowds of workers jammed the corridors with their wives, children, and pets, pleading for a passage out to this “promised land.” Ten thousand optimistic Americans were hired that year, part of the official “organized emigration,” who received their good news with glee closer to lottery winners than economic migrants.

  A business reporter was sent down to the unofficial Soviet embassy at 261 Fifth Avenue to look through one morning’s applications. The occupations listed for those answering this “Soviet call for Yankee skill” included “barbers, plumbers, painters, cooks, clerical workers, service-station operators, electricians, carpenters, aviators, engineers, salesmen, printers, chemists, shoemakers, librarians, teachers, auto-mechanics, dentists, and one funeral director.” The would-be emigrants hailed from virtually every state of the union, and their principal reasons for leaving that they wrote on their job applications, were: “1. Unemployment, 2. Disgust with conditions here, 3. Interest in Soviet experiment.”10