AMERICANS IN THE GULAG
The Times Literary Supplement
December 23, 2008
The little-known story of US citizens trying to escape the Depression
Adam Hochschild Mountainous Kolyma, only a few hundred miles west
of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During
Stalin’s rule, some 2 million prisoners were sent there to mine the
rich deposits of gold that lie beneath the rocky, frozen soil. In 1991,
when researching a book about how Russians were coming to terms with
the Stalin era, I travelled to the region to see some of the old
camps of Kolyma, legendary as the most deadly part of the gulag,
some of whose survivors I had interviewed. In a country beset by
shortages of building materials, all of the hundreds of former prison
camps accessible by truck had long since been stripped bare. The only
ones still standing were those no longer reached by usable roads,
and to see them you had to rent a helicopter.
I spent a full day being flown across this desolate territory, its
gravelly mountainsides streaked with snow even in June. We descended
into three of the old camps, finding rickety wooden guard towers, high
fences of rusted barbed wire, and, in one camp, an internal prison of
punishment cells. Its roof was gone, but thick stone walls still stood;
within them were small windows crossed both vertically and horizontally
by heavy bars, the intersections further cinched with thick iron
bands. At the end of the day in Kolyma, as shadows filled the hollows
like spreading ink,we flew back to the town where I was staying. I sat
in the helicopter cockpit between the two pilots. Beyond every jagged
ridge, it seemed, in every valley, were the ruins of another camp,
the wood blackened by decades of exposure, as if an angry giant’s
hand had scattered them across the harsh, bleak moonscape.
No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens met unnatural deaths
during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but
adding together those who were sentenced to death and shot, died in
manmade famines, or were worked to death in gulag camps like these,
authoritative estimates put the total at approximately 20 million. Like
the other great horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in
the same period, the Soviet story was one of mass deaths on an almost
unimaginable scale. But, unlike the Nazis, the Soviets, in their first
two decades in power, were partly sustained by great idealism on the
part of people all over the world who were fervently hoping for a more
just society. The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder
of this. For his account of the Stalin years and their aftermath is
seen through an unusual prism: the experience of tens of thousands
of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many
of them, like the Russians they lived among, fell vi ctim. Bits and
pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in survivors’
memoirs. But to my knowledge this is the first comprehensive history,
and a sad and fascinating one it is.
Like the thousands of Western Europeans who arrived in the same period,
these immigrants were driven by the Great Depression at home and the
belief that a better, fairer way of life existed in the USSR. A quarter
of the US labour force was unemployed, and millions of Americans
were standing in line at soup kitchens or living in "Hooverville"
shantytowns when they had lost their homes or farms. Was it not
possible to construct a more humane society than this? Of course it
was – and in Russia, apparently, they were doing it. Factories were
hiring – particularly skilled workers and engineers, who were being
offered what seemed to be lucrative contracts.
And these factories were said to have nursery schools, clinics,
libraries.
Although many of the American immigrants had been socialists or
Communists in the US, you didn’t have to be one to believe that
somewhere in the world someone had been able to build a more sensible
economy than the Depression-ridden American one. One of many intriguing
facts Tzouliadis has unearthed is that an English translation of
something originally written for Soviet schoolchildren, New Russia’s
Primer: The story of the Five-Year Plan, spent seven months on the
US 0bestseller list in 1931.
When the Soviet foreign trade agency advertised jobs for skilled
American workers in Russia that year, 100,000 Americans applied. 10,000
Ten thousand of them were hired; untold thousands more headed for the
country on tourist visas, hoping to find work when they got there. By
early 1932, the New York Times was reporting that up to 1,000a
thousand new Americans were arriving in Moscow each week – and that
the number was increasing. The Times correspondent,, Walter Duranty,
was a notorious fellow traveller and may have exaggerated; nonetheless,
that year the number climbed high enough for the English-language
weekly Moscow News to go daily. The Immigrants brought their children,
and soon there were English-medium schools in at least five Soviet
cities. For $40 million, Stalin bought 75,000 Model A sedans from
Henry Ford, plus an entire Ford factory – which, of course, required
expert technicians to run it, and so more Americans came.
With them, the newcomers brought baseball. Tzouliadis includes a
group photograph of smiling young American players at Gorky Park in
the summer of 1934, with the initials on their jerseys identifying
their teams: the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club and the Gorky Auto
Workers’ Club. Paul Robeson, who had been a star college athlete
before becoming a Communist and a famous singer, was named honorary
catcher of one of the teams. Other American baseball teams sprang up
everywhere from Kharkov in the Ukraine to Yerevan, Armenia. (A map
in this book would have helped, incidentally.) The motif of baseball
threads through The Forsaken, and some of its pages trace what happened
to the men who played that day in Gorky Park.
Baseball caught on with Russians, and they began joining the
American teams, or starting their own, although they considered
the practice of stealing bases somewhat capitalistic. Then suddenly
it was 1936, and the Great Purge had begun. Having already jailed,
shot or exiled all his real political opponents, a paranoid Stalin
now went after imaginary ones, in the process tapping a deep vein of
Russian xenophobia. Waves of mass arrests swept across the country,
with an estimated one out of every eight Soviet men, women and children
being seized in the space of half a dozen years. At the show trials of
high Communist Party officials, the charge was usually espionage for a
foreign power. And so foreigners, or anyone connected with foreigners,
were suspect. No more Russians joined the American baseball games. Very
soon, there was no more baseball.
>From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness,
we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced
confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners
to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan
and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story20of the Americans who
got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and
documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American
baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas
Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally
encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman
in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the
American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either
in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with
more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish
border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American
dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands;
if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR
at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.
The testimony of Herman and Sgovio has found its way into some
histories of the gulag. But Tzouliadis’s most unexpected contribution
is the sorry tale of how desperate pleas for help from captive
Americans, some smuggled out of prison, some made by family members
still at liberty who risked their lives by walking into the closely
watched US Eembassy, were ignored by diplomats in Moscow and officials
back in Washington. Tzouliadis has burrowed through hundreds of old
State Department correspondence files for this evidence, finding
even a wooden tag smuggled out of a camp with the words, in English,
"Save me please and all the others". Even though the conservative
Ambassador of tiny Austria was able to save the lives of more than
twenty Austrian left-wingers by sheltering them in his basement, US
officials, contemptuous of the Americans who had come to Russia out
of naive idealism, did virtually nothing. Yet they could have saved
many lives if they had tried, for Stalin was shrewd enough to want to
please a valued foreign trading partner. Again and again, the diplomats
turned aside those begging for help, generally with the excuse that
there was no proof that the prisoner involved was a US citizen. This
was literally often true, for when Americans arrived to work in the
Soviet Union, the Russians usually confiscated their passports – the
better to exert control, and also to acquire a stash of US passports
they could later doctor and use to send Soviet spies abroad.
Why were the officials so callous? For one thing, making too much
noise might get you expelled from what was, for a rising young Foreign
Service officer, a plum post. Beyond that, diplomats temperamentally
are seldom troublemakers; the exceptions, like Raoul Wallenberg
or Henry Morgenthau Sr, the US envoy to Turkey who did so much
to publicize the Armenian genocide, are rare. And finally, behind
those who played it safe at the US Embassy in Moscow in the lates
was another factor: their boss.
In the American practice of handing out ambassadorships to presidential
chums and campaign contributors, never was there a more ill-fated
choice than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s selection of Joseph E. Davies as
US Ambassador to Moscow in 1936. Davies knew nothing about Russia; he
had made a small fortune as a lawyer, defending corporations against
government tax collectors during the boom times of the 1920s. He had
then married the owner of a much larger fortune, the cereal heiress
Marjorie Merriweather Post, known for her array of extravagant homes,
one of which was the world’s largest private yacht, the three-masted
Sea Cloud, with a crew of sixty-two.
Davies "loved bigness", Justice Louis Brandeis once said, criticizing
him for his failures on a government commission that was supposed
to curb monopolies. In Stalin’s Russia, Davies found bigness that
satisfied him completely. To the horror of other diplomats, he attended
several of the Purge show trials and told the State Department that
justice had been done. It did not seem to bother him when Soviet
acquaintances vanished. One Russian diplomatic liaison officer had
taken Davies’s daughter and some friends out for dinner and dancing
when two men came to their table and tapped him on the shoulder. "He
was never seen again", Tzouliadis writes. Nor was Mrs Davies much
disturbed by any of this, even though, she said years later, from
their bedroom at the US Ambassador’s residence, she could sometimes
hear women and children screaming in adjacent apartment buildings as
men were arrested in the middle of the night. Her main interest was
in collecting art, jewellery and china that had once belonged to the
Russian aristocracy, something she was able to do on a lavish scale
as the government raised hard currency by selling off confiscated
collections.
In 1937, the peak year of Purge arrests, Davies managed to spend most
days of the year outside Russia, some of it cruising the Baltic on the
Sea Cloud, with his astonished Soviet secret police guards along as
his invited guests. At the end of his stay in Moscow, he was overjoyed
that Stalin granted him a two-hour audience, after the dictator had
refused to meet other Western ambassadors. "He is really a fine,
upstanding, great man!", Davies told an underling at the Eembassy. Of
all the foreign deniers and abettors who helped Stalin get away with
mass murder, this staunchly capitalist couple were certainly among
the strangest.
There is a later chapter to Tzouliadis’s story, for a second wave
of Americans entered Soviet prison camps – at least 2,800 of them,
according to one Russian document he cites – at the end of the Second
World War, as the Red Army overran POW camps in Germany, and a third,
sm aller wave as the Chinese turned over POWs captured in Korea. The
Russians refused to give back these men or even to acknowledge their
existence. With the Cold War now under way, the leverage that the US
had once had over the Soviet Union was lost, and more Americans met
their end amid snow and ice.
Tzouliadis apparently does not know Russian, but aside from a few odd
transliterations and an infelicity in his subtitle (the acronym gulag
refers to the entire network, not to an individual camp), this has not
limited his research. Soviet officials who dealt with Americans during
the 1930s are by now all dead, many of them Purge victims themselves;
and Russian archives, once briefly accessible in the early 1990s, are
again now mostly closed to foreign researchers. This is an American
as well as a Soviet story, and in telling it skilfully from a wide
variety of rarely used and mostly American sources, Tzouliadis has
etched a small piece of a great historical cataclysm and reminded
us of how Stalin’s regime devoured not just human lives but hopes,
dreams, trust. Those American baseball players who came to Russia
found themselves in a tragic game with no umpire – either in the
Kremlin or the US Eembassy. This book makes me wonder whether the
several mass-grave sites I saw in Russia – one full of earth-stained,
bullet-riddled skulls in central Siberia, and one of bones bleached
white under an electrical transmission tower on a foggy, wind-swept
hillside in Kolyma – might have contained any of my countrymen who
were once catchers, pitchers, or first basemen.