The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

At 4:00 A.M. on March 13, 1938, Judge General Ulrich once again read out the defendants’ names, followed by a monotonous drone of death sentences: “To be shot, to be shot, to be shot, to be shot . . .” In the majority of cases their family members were also arrested and sent to the camps, the promises of leniency revealed as just another cruel deceit. Thus Bukharin’s young wife, Anna, was torn from her one-year-old child and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. To entertain his boss, Stalin’s bodyguard, Karl Pauker, re-enacted the moment when Bukharin was led away to his death kicking and screaming and clinging to the shoulders of his guards, shouting, “Please, somebody call Joseph Vissarionovich.” Watching Pauker’s impersonation, Stalin laughed uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face, until he had to wave to his bodyguard to stop. Later Pauker, too, was shot.16 From Mexico, the last survivor of the Revolution, a scornful Leon Trotsky, likened the proceedings in Moscow to the “witch-trials of the medieval inquisition.”