The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

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

The Russians had to fight for a few square meters of living space, huddled together in single rooms shared by two or three families. The discomforts, they were told, were temporary. When the new socialist cities were built, there would be space enough for everyone. In the meantime they would have to make do.

Only far down the list, in sixteenth place, was there anything remotely ideological in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, just above John Reed’s famous account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World,17 at that time the bible of the American left.

One American autoworker in Moscow reported six different types of stores selling items of varying quality to every class group.13 While others who had been in the Soviet Union much longer were no longer shocked on seeing as many as seventeen different categories of wage and food rations. The mockery of the early American arrivals—“Workers of the World Unite, and then divide yourself into seventeen categories!”—was entirely lost on the Bolsheviks.14 The most luxurious stores were exclusively reserved for the Bolshevik elites, and if a young American such as Thomas Sgovio did not know any better, he might have suspected that a new class of privileged had quickly arisen from the ashes of the old.

Fortunately for the consciences of the Americans, Stalin himself had pronounced that strict equality—once the highest ideal of the Revolution—was now “a piece of petty bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of socialists’ society organized on Marxian lines.”15

“Each concentration camp forms a sort of ‘commune’ where everyone lives comparatively free, not imprisoned, but compelled to work for the good of the community. They are fed and housed gratis and receive pay for their work . . . They are certainly not convicts in the American sense of the word.”20 Of course it was a strange coincidence that out of all the millions of young women in Russia, Thomas Sgovio’s friend Marvin Volat had chosen to romance the daughter of Matvei Berman, the Gulag chief recently awarded the Order of Lenin for the “glorious” construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal.

Sovietland—an English-language magazine published by the Soviet news agency TASS and intended as a cultural export for an English-speaking readership.23 With no apparent sense of irony, the magazine’s glossy pages were filled with articles such as “Abundance!” which described how Moscow’s department stores were now overflowing with supplies of food, not to mention gramophones, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and a cascade of consumer goods. New cafés were opening in Moscow where “payment was made by the honor system,” although in a period of universal shortages, exactly where such cafés were found no one was completely sure.

No other firm in the United States, or even the world, conducted as much business with Joseph Stalin as the Ford Motor Company between 1929 and 1936. For above all men, Henry Ford—“the Sage of Dearborn”—understood very well that the power and allure of the automobile transcended ideology. The whole of mankind was in love with speed and, in that respect at least, the Bolsheviks were no different.4

Henry Ford’s unpalatable hatred of trade unions, not to mention his vast capitalistic fortune, would have to be politely ignored as the Soviet ideologues embraced Ford as a secular saint holding the keys to a mechanical heaven.

Henry Ford owned the railroad, the river barges, the coal and iron ore mines, the glass and tire factories, even six million acres of Brazilian jungle bought for a rubber plantation named “Fordlandia.” All of which converged at the Rouge, the industrial epicenter that employed five thousand workers just to keep the factories spotlessly clean, scrubbing floors, emptying trash every two hours, cleaning windows, and endlessly repainting surfaces in the Ford colors of white and machine blue. There was no talking, no smoking, no more than fifteen minutes allowed for lunch breaks, and instant firings for the slightest infraction of the rules.

The Ford Motor Company had been trying to break into the Russian market since before the Revolution. In the summer of 1926, Henry Ford had sent a party of five employees to investigate conditions in Soviet Russia and to explore the idea of building a factory there. The group was led by the American engineer Bredo Berghoff, who quickly discovered the existing Soviet industry languishing in a state of chaos. Their factories were burdened with endless workers’ committees, reluctant management, widespread smoking, trash on the floors, crude oil in gas tanks, machine parts manufactured to random thickness—an endless litany of industrial despair. It was soon obvious that while a vast market in automobiles lay waiting in Russia, the construction of a privately owned factory at Ford’s expense would be tantamount to economic suicide, liable at any moment to government seizure by the Bolsheviks.

In particular, he warned of the reputation of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared head of the Soviet secret police, who was “considered responsible for the death of thousands upon thousands of people accused of not being in sympathy with Communist principles.”

In such conditions, despite all the obstacles, eventually a “workers’ city” was built beside the car factory, with rows of three-story apartment houses specifically designed by their Bolshevik architects without individual kitchens, since in the new Soviet era all cooking would take place in communal factory kitchens, signaling the “death blow” to domestic bourgeois drudgery.

Small wonder, then, that American emigrants such as Fort-Whiteman wanted so passionately to believe that a place in the world existed where man’s essential brotherhood blinded him to differences of color. In the USSR, he thought he had found it. How then could Lovett Fort-Whiteman ever have foreseen that by being deported back to the United States for their assault, Lewis and Brown would have their lives saved, while he, by staying on, would have his own condemned?

He noticed that the Russians did not use regular asphalt, which was immune to temperature fluctuations and was the accepted practice back home in Detroit. Instead they preferred a “low-grade concoction,” reinforced with broken bricks from old buildings. Walking through the factory, the American engineer kicked a piece of brick and realized that it had come from a church.21 As part of the atheist campaign, Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior had recently been dynamited to make way for Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets. The demolition was filmed by Soviet newsreel as evidence of the final triumph of the Bolsheviks, with Stalin’s functionary Lazar Kaganovich pictured standing on top of the ruins proclaiming, “Mother Russia is cast down.”22 In retrospect, the destruction of Christianity in Russia was a necessary precursor for all that followed. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, any element of civil society that might provide a countervailing voice to the authority of Joseph Stalin was being systematically destroyed, or turned into an acquiescent imitation of self-parody. The rubble from the Russian churches was salvaged to be used for factory floors, and the church bells removed to a giant smelting works outside Moscow.

Afterward, at the official reception in the Kremlin, Stalin himself made a rare appearance before the Gorky autoworkers. He was much shorter than Victor Herman had expected, with a pockmarked face and yellow eyes quite unlike those in his idealized portrait.

It was only later that the trouble started. The paperwork had to be filled out to gain credit for the jump from the world aviation authorities, and in the box marked “nationality” Victor Herman had written “USA.” Officials suddenly appeared from all sides, representing the Communist Party, the Red Army, and the secret police. Questions were asked and arguments raged: “How could an American be allowed to jump from a Soviet plane, flown by a Soviet pilot, onto Soviet soil?” Fortunately a quick-thinking official thought of a cheap solution to their problem. A new set of forms was filled out, and Victor Herman was politely asked to please write “USSR” in the correct box. Full of a sense of his own invincibility, the naïve blue-eyed Detroit teenager picked up a pen, paused for a moment, and then wrote “USA.” And with those three letters young Victor Herman sealed his fate.31

The slogan “The Five Year Plan in Four Years” was advanced, and the magic symbols “5-in-4” and “2 + 2 = 5” were posted and shouted throughout the land. The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me at once bold and preposterous—the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyperbole, perverse optimism . . . a slogan born in premature success tobogganing toward horror.

“American passports are stolen at every opportunity, as they can be sold to the Soviet government at a good price. Passports thus obtained by confiscation or theft are used for fraudulent entry of communists into the United States. The photograph is removed and a photograph of the communist user is substituted, who enters the United States under the name of the former owner. Counterfeit passports have also been used for the same purpose to some extent, but the genuine passport, altered as described, is greatly preferred.”4 Only a hopeless idealist—or the most blundering detective—could have failed to deduce that once an American passport was stolen and reused, the true holder of that passport would become a rather inconvenient witness to an inelegant identity fraud.

Nor were the American reporters in Moscow ever likely to risk exposing the story, since their professional existence in Russia depended on the approval of the Soviet authorities, who censored their stories for the slightest transgression of the Bolshevik party line. The reporters understood very well that if they wrote anything remotely critical, they would be instantly harassed, have their visas revoked, and shortly afterward be declared “hostile” to the Soviet Union and expelled.

In Turkestan, Calder was chauffeured across a desert during a snowstorm. Through the car window, he noticed that the side of the road was lined with a continuous pile of logs, covered by the drifting snow. The logs had not been stacked correctly; often his chauffeur had to stop the car and move them over to the side of the road. When Calder asked where all the wood had come from in a desert region, the chauffeur had burst out laughing: “Those aren’t logs. This road leads out of the Soviet Union to countries where you can have food by merely going into a restaurant. Thousands of peasants . . . try to get out of Russia. Most of them are too weak to make it.”

Walter Duranty was given a two-week head start, presumably as a form of payback for being the most vociferous champion of the nonexistence of the starving millions. In a New York Times report titled “Abundance Found In North Caucasus,” Duranty wrote, “The use of the word ‘Famine’ in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer absurdity. There a bumper crop is being harvested as fast as tractors, horses, oxen, men, women, and children can work . . . There are plump babies in the nurseries or gardens of the collectives . . . Village markets are flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter at prices lower than in Moscow.” 10 But Walter Duranty’s private remarks were very different from his published story. To British diplomats in Moscow he admitted “that Ukraine has been bled white . . . It was quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”

The celebrated Walter Duranty was fêted by the American literary establishment. Awarded the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his outstanding reporting from Soviet Russia and rumored to be one of the highest-paid foreign correspondents in the world, Duranty lived a life of unrivaled comfort in Moscow.

In public the Americans learned to follow the Russian example, and never mentioned the initials GPU or NKVD out loud. Instead they joked about the “Four-Letter Boys” or the “YMCA” or “Phi Beta Kappa” or “the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Bolshevism” or any other whip-smart euphemism that might confuse the listening waiters, secretaries, and assorted informers of every stripe who surrounded them in the Metropol bar.16

By the side of the road, the Massachusetts-born trade unionist came across a dead horse still harnessed to its wagon, and a dead man holding its reins in his hands.

On one village door someone had written: GOD BLESS THOSE WHO ENTER HERE, MAY THEY NEVER SUFFER AS WE HAVE. Inside the house, two men and a child lay dead beside the family icon.

Adorning the walls of Soviet buildings in the early 1930s was one particularly uncanny propaganda poster. The image showed a large open eye watching over a work camp, above the slogan GPU—THE UNBLINKING EYE OF THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP.

Ambassador Bullitt never lost his vision of a Monticello in Moscow, which, he once quipped, would have a quotation from Thomas Jefferson over the entrance: GOD FORBID THAT WE SHOULD LIVE FOR TWENTY YEARS WITHOUT A REVOLUTION.17 He even obtained the necessary $1.2 million appropriation, which caused controversy in Congress but was justified on the grounds of the expected “Red trade offers.”18 But Stalin never had any intention of giving up such valuable land in the center of Moscow, so the money was never used and Bullitt’s kiss was returned in vain.

Together they met the theater’s founder and director, Natalya Satz, and enjoyed a performance of The Negress and the Monkey, a moral tale of an African woman searching for her beloved pet monkey kidnapped by a party of capitalist big-game hunters.

The problem of relations with the Government of the Soviet Union is . . . a subordinate part of the problem presented by communism as a militant faith determined to produce world revolution and the “liquidation” (that is to say murder) of all non-believers. There is no doubt whatsoever that all orthodox communist parties in all countries, including the United States, believe in mass murder . . . The final argument of the believing communist is invariably that all battle, murder, and sudden death, all the spies, exiles and firing squads are justified.

“I went to Russia,” Chamberlin later wrote, “believing that the Soviet system might represent the most hopeful answer to the problems raised by the World War and the subsequent economic crisis. I left convinced that the absolutist Soviet state . . . is a power of darkness and of evil with few parallels in history . . . Murder is a habit, even more with states than with individuals.”

“It must be remembered also that the radio hour is not only an opportunity for enjoyment and recreation, but can also be a powerful weapon in the greatest of all battles, the struggle for a classless socialist society.”

On December 1, 1934, in an empty corridor of a Leningrad office building, a waiting assassin stepped out and shot the party boss Sergei Kirov at point-blank range. Although Kirov had been Stalin’s personal friend, subsequent evidence pointed toward the premeditated assassination of a political rival. The day after the assassination, Stalin boarded a train to Leningrad, and “retaliatory” violence quickly followed in his wake. Kirov’s principal bodyguard was summoned to appear before Stalin, but arrived dead at an NKVD hospital, having been thrown from a moving truck. Stalin himself, meanwhile, interrogated the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, asking why he had killed Kirov. According to one witness, “Nikolaev answered that he killed Comrade Kirov on the instruction of a person employed by the Cheka, and at this pointed to the men from the Cheka sitting in the room . . . ‘They forced me to do it.’ The NKVD agent then knocked Nikolaev to the floor with a blow to the head, and he was removed.” 2 The assassin Nikolaev was tried and executed, and the NKVD officers in Leningrad were arrested and sent to the camps, where they would later be shot. In a subsequent show trial, the NKVD chief, Henrikh Yagoda, was charged with organizing Kirov’s murder as part of a “Trotskyite conspiracy.”3 But in truth, the Kirov assassination was only ever a pretext for what was to come.

Afterward Steiger revealed that every day “seven thousand” people were being arrested and “exiled” to the Arctic Circle or Central Asia.4

The father of modern psychology, Ivan Pavlov, was eighty-five years old on December 21, 1934. His experiments in behaviorism had earned him the Nobel Prize, and his international scientific reputation made him virtually untouchable. Following the mass arrests in Leningrad, Pavlov had written an angry letter to the USSR Council of People’s Commissars: “You believe in vain in the all-world revolution . . . You disperse not revolution, but fascism with great success throughout the world . . . Fascism did not exist before your revolution . . . You are terror and violence . . . We are living now in the atmosphere of terror and violence . . . Am I alone in thinking and feeling this way? Have pity on the Motherland and us.” When Ivan Pavlov died two years later, the NKVD had collected five volumes of informers’ denunciations against the figurehead of Soviet science.8

In March 1937, Joseph Stalin made a speech to the Central Committee that was published across the Soviet Union, and signaled a further escalation of the Terror: The sabotage and diversionist work has reached to a greater or lesser extent, all or practically all our organizations . . . Soviet power has conquered only one sixth of the world and five sixths of the world are in the hands of capitalist states . . . As long as our capitalist encirclement remains, we will always have saboteurs, diversionists, and spies . . . The real saboteur must from time to time show evidence of success in his work, for that is the only way in which he can keep his job as a saboteur . . . We shall have to extirpate those persons, grind them down without stopping, without flagging, for they are the enemies of the working class, they are traitors to our homeland!

So many people were being arrested that the black vans were painted with signs advertising “Bread” or “Meat” or even “Drink Soviet Champagne!” in a shallow effort not to alarm the frightened public.12 As the Terror picked up speed, to crack a joke, to show ironic hesitancy over state propaganda, or even to collect foreign stamps was enough to be judged an “enemy.” Mass indoctrination was broadcast from blaring loudspeakers put up on street corners. A simple mistake of a factory manager, the miscalculation of an engineer, a broadcaster’s choice of light-hearted music on the anniversary of Lenin’s death—all became evidence of an organized conspiracy of saboteurs operating in their midst. The Soviet public was encouraged to search for hidden fascist symbols and coded messages, and quickly found them disguised in seemingly innocent book illustrations or newspaper photographs. Denunciation boxes appeared in factories and on street corners, and were soon crammed to bursting with claims made against fellow citizens, the denouncers vainly believing that by accusing others they might somehow save themselves. In such a society, pure malice was given free rein. The secretary of Stalin’s henchman Lazar Kaganovich, for example, while typing out an arrest list, quietly added the name of her neighbor. When her neighbor was arrested, she moved into the apartment she had coveted.13

A fourteen-year-old boy who had informed on his peasant father for hoarding grain—and was then murdered by outraged neighbors—was turned into a Soviet national hero. “Pavlik Morozov” statues were commissioned for parks and squares across the Soviet Union, so many in fact, that the statue’s sculptor was killed in an accident caused by the state’s production demands. No one stopped to consider the irony, and who could believe the rumors that the fourteen-year-old informer had, in fact, been murdered by the NKVD, who executed thirty-seven of his village neighbors, including Morozov’s grandfather, grandmother, uncle, and cousin?14 Not only were Soviet schoolchildren expected to denounce the “enemies of the people,” they were also specifically instructed to inform on their parents, their teachers, and their friends.

Wise parents stopped talking when their children came home from school. When both parents were arrested, their children were sent to NKVD orphanages, where they learned the consequences of being the sons and daughters of “enemies of the people.” A future Soviet dissident, Yelena Bonner, remembered how her nine-year-old brother innocently accepted the guilt of their father, arrested in 1937. “Look what those enemies of the people are like,” he told his sister. “Some of them even pretend to be fathers.” Yelena Bonner’s father was shot, and her mother sent to the camps.16

The first generation of Bolsheviks responsible for the Revolution was almost entirely annihilated by Stalin. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who had led the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, was one of those given “the supreme measure of punishment.” Their executions removed the eyewitnesses of the origins of the Revolution, leaving a blank canvas upon which Stalin and his historians could paint any interpretation they desired.

During the summer of 1937, Stalin’s chief henchmen, Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Nikita Khrushchev, among others, were sent out to the provinces to oversee “the purge of the party and state apparatus.”

One department complained that another had preselected married men with children for interrogation who, as every agent knew, were the quickest to confess.

IN MOSCOW a dwarflike apparatchik named Nikolai Yezhov had been promoted from the provinces and had risen rapidly to succeed the fallen commissar Henrikh Yagoda. Standing barely five feet tall, even when wearing the peaked cap of the NKVD, Yezhov scarcely came up to Stalin’s shoulder, and Stalin was himself a small man.

Together they worked on the lists of those about to be destroyed. In the Lubyanka, Yezhov would create the lists of names, which Stalin would read and sign, and afterward watch a movie for relaxation. At one Central Committee meeting, Stalin presented lists for Molotov, Kaganovich, and Georgy Malenkov to cosign that sentenced 230,000 people to their executions. During 1937 and 1938, Yezhov faithfully brought Stalin 383 lists for his examination.22 Unlike Hitler, the Soviet dictator never had any qualms about adding his personal signature to genocide, scanning thousands of names into the night, occasionally marking off a famous writer, such as Boris Pasternak, as “not to be touched.”

By the autumn of 1937, the pressure to achieve arrests was so great that the NKVD interrogators began picking out names from the telephone directory.30 THE VICTIMS WERE killed with a shot to the back of the head. From a mass grave at Vinnytsia in the Ukraine, 9,432 bodies were taken for examination, of whom two thirds had required a second shot to end their lives.

At Kuropaty the executions continued for four and a half years, as pit after pit was dug and filled with bodies. Just as in the Ukraine, around the execution grounds, the NKVD had built a fence ten feet high. This time the local villagers heard the pleas of the victims echoing across the night air. Even in the final stages of the Terror, when the Nazis were bombing Minsk in July 1941, the executions continued, and by the outbreak of World War II, a quarter of a million people lay buried in one of eight killing fields located around Minsk.34

Years later, Stevens could still not rid himself of the screams of hysteria as a young mother was torn away from her two-month-old baby and she and her husband were dragged down into the van waiting for them on the street below.

And thus, ironically, Soviet Russia became transformed into a nation of fearful individualists, their eyes flicking across and then swiftly away, as each citizen reminded himself not to speak unless it was strictly necessary, to remain silent at all times, except when silence itself gave cause for suspicion.

Of the seven hundred writers who had attended the First Congress of Soviet Writers three years earlier, only fifty survived the Terror.

It was reported that a knock on the door of an NKVD residential building in central Moscow triggered a multitude of gunshots within adjacent apartments. Others threw themselves from the top-floor windows in a rash of suicides, their bodies hurtling to the ground in full view of passersby. Rumors of the news spread rapidly over Moscow, panicking the population still further.42