The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

In his ascendancy, Nikishov divorced his wife and married a pretty twenty-nine-year-old named Aleksandra Gridassova, well known to the female prisoners as the commandant of a Magadan women’s camp. Thanks to Nikishov’s patronage, Gridassova had risen through the Gulag hierarchy until she was responsible for the lives of thousands of female prisoners, who christened her “Catherine the Fourth” for the peremptory way she decided human destinies and the lavish lifestyle she created for herself and her husband in Kolyma.33 Together the couple occupied a country house to the northwest of Magadan, surrounded by luxury, with the usual retinue of chauffeurs, cooks, maids, and personal doctors provided for the Soviet elite. The couple organized their own “cultural brigade”: a slave theater of singers, actors, and ballerinas whose lives were saved from the mines in return for their performances. Gulag society, in the form of the camp commandants and their wives, attended Magadan’s Gorky Theatre to watch their gala performances, as the gaunt former stars struggled to reproduce past glories in costumes flown in from Moscow.34 Two decades after the Revolution, Lenin’s promise that the leaders of the Revolutionary state would “receive the same salary as an average worker” had long been forgotten. It was all as hopelessly naïve as another Leninist prediction, that under communism, gold would become “valueless,” used only for the building of public conveniences. Instead, millions of prisone...