The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

In December 1937, fifty-three members of a deaf-mutes association were arrested in Leningrad, and thirty-three were sentenced to death for conducting “conspiracies” in their private language.

Among the Polish community residing in the Soviet Union, 144,000 people were arrested, and of these 111,000 were executed. It beggared belief, but such was the power of the NKVD.

“Long Live the Brain, the Heart, the Strength of the Party and the Soviet peoples, our Beloved Leader and Teacher, Comrade Stalin!”

“undeserved terrible beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father himself. Since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there had arisen a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him. From his youth the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the goal toward which everything was aimed.”5

The yellowed sheets of paper in Arthur Talent’s NKVD file recorded his steadfast denial of the accusations thrown at him in the Lubyanka.

sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.”15

Fort-Whiteman had been severely beaten because he had failed to meet his work quota. In the camp, he had died of starvation, a broken man whose teeth had been knocked out.

Julius Hecker’s wife remained convinced that her husband’s arrest was just a terrible mistake, and she waited long years for his return.20 She never learned that just two and half months after his arrest, on April 28, 1938, Professor Julius Hecker confessed to being an American spy who had written his books merely to draw attention away from his espionage. Two hours after making this false confession, he was shot.

Later his father told him that of the hundreds of Americans who had come to work at the auto factory in Gorky, only twenty were left.24

Other records emerged that revealed how certain victims were forced to testify against their family members in so-called “confrontation interrogations.” In March 1938, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker named Victor Tyskewicz-Voskov confessed that his mother had been recruited into “espionage in favor of Germany.” Under extreme duress, Tyskewicz-Voskov denounced his mother to his interrogator as a “Trotskyist, inclined antagonistically against the Soviet power.” The NKVD officers then placed his forty-three-year-old mother in the same interrogation room while her son repeated his denunciation in front of her. His mother bravely confessed her own guilt while steadfastly refusing to implicate her son. They were both executed on June 7, 1938.

How they led their victims to the edge of the pit and held the standard-issue Nagan pistol to the back of their heads. How they pulled the trigger and watched the bodies crumple and fall into the hole in the earth. And then how they repeated the process over and again until, like every other Soviet worker, they had met their quota for the night’s work. At the end of their shift, Comrade S. and the dozen members of his squad would retire to their stone headquarters exhausted, to drink the liters of vodka specially allocated for the job at hand. Obviously their masters understood the traumatic effect the spetzrabota had on the minds of the executioners.

In the mornings at Butovo, the executioners heard the sound of the bulldozers covering over the mass graves, and the fresh graves being hollowed ready for the next night’s work.

Their work made them wealthy. Each NKVD executioner was paid special ruble bonuses for killing people in “the zones,” so much in fact that their increased salaries excited the envy of their NKVD colleagues not selected for this work. And the ruble bonuses mounted up as, night after night, the pits were filled and new ones were dug again the next morning.36 In the fields of Butovo, apple trees were planted over the dead. In Depository No. 7, at the Lubyanka, the NKVD entered their names into four hundred bound volumes. Each name was marked with a red pencil and the note “sentence carried out.” From these books, researchers later calculated that 85 percent of the dead were noncommunists, ordinary people who mostly came from the Russian peasantry.

Thomas Sgovio’s friend Marvin Volat was also arrested leaving the American embassy, on March 11, 1938. The violinist was accused of “counter-revolutionary activity” and espionage for foreign powers. His interrogation lasted two long months, but eventually Marvin confessed to having taken clandestine photographs at Moscow’s military airport. He was convicted and sentenced to hard labor in the camps. On the final page of his NKVD file, an official hastily recorded that Volat died in February 1939. None of his former Soviet friends could help him. His girlfriend, Sara Berman, was herself arrested, as a “CH-S,” a family member of “an enemy of the people.” Her father, Matvei Berman, the former Gulag chief, had already been executed on Stalin’s orders.

IN JANUARY 1937, the Davies entourage arrived in Moscow on a special train, waited on by a small army of footmen, secretaries, chauffeurs, a chef, a hairdresser, and a masseuse—making up sixteen servants in all, with an attendant mountain of luggage.

The show trials had a long and very checkered history in the Soviet Union. A decade earlier, when the trials were still in the process of being properly managed, there were obvious kinks in the mechanism, missteps in the elaborate choreography between prosecutor and defendant. These were the cases when the victim, expected only to confess, remained silent before shouting, “Comrades, how could I not sign?” and then tore off his shirt to reveal a tortured back “streaked with deep, purple bruises and swollen welts.”20 In past trials, brother had testified against brother, and a teenage son against his father, all anxious to profess their greater loyalty to the Soviet state: “I denounce my father as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolodoob.”

But still it seemed Joseph Davies could not grasp the essential idea that the entire legal proceedings were staged, an elaborate deceit played out after torture.

Most tellingly, he kept absolutely silent regarding the sounds that had kept his wife awake in their bedroom in Spaso House. Only years later, after their divorce, did Marjorie Merriweather Post reveal how she had listened to the NKVD vans pulling up outside the apartment houses that surrounded the Spaso House gardens. In the middle of the night, she had lain awake listening to the screams of families and children as the victims were taken away by the secret police. It had continued night after night. Like many other historical witnesses of the Terror, Marjorie Davies was also regularly awoken by the intermittent sound of gunfire. Once, when the noise of the guns interrupted her sleep, she turned to Joseph Davies to tell him, “I know perfectly well they are executing a lot of those people.” To which the American ambassador had replied soothingly, “Oh no, I think it’s blasting in the new part of the subway.”

“There is nobody in Russia, except the Government, who can cause people to disappear like that. The Soviet Union has no private gangsters who kidnap people and hold them for ransom . . . If the couple are alive today, they are in some dungeon in Lubyanka Prison.”

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.”

supine

Nor was there ever a shortage of men such as Belov, happy to don a new uniform and, in exchange for increased living space and food allowances, to torture these “enemies of the people.” A newly hired NKVD staff member earned between twelve and fifteen hundred rubles per month, roughly twice the income of a Soviet official with ten years’ experience, and that was excluding the potential bonuses for their “special work.”

After the fifteenth night, Victor began bleeding from his penis, his rectum, his nose, and his eyes. He was returned to his cell each morning at dawn. Eventually the cell “elder” pleaded with him to talk—“Save your life, American”—but Victor Herman stubbornly refused to confess to a crime he had not committed.

With sufficient beatings, a prisoner lost even the sense of his own self, which had been broken and replaced by only an overwhelming fear. New prisoners quickly learned the value of confessing their “crimes” and spitting out names. Their compliance often saved their lives.18 Some chose to incriminate everyone they knew, hoping vainly to overload the system of terror. Others attempted to name only the dead. But given time, even the toughest minds dissolved under the brutality of the conveyor.

vertiginous

After weeks of waiting, the prisoners were eventually marched down toward a fleet of ships waiting at anchor in the Vladivostok dockyard. The NKVD ships were old tramp steamers that once had names such as Commercial Quaker, Ripon, and Dallas, and had been bought up in America and Europe for rock-bottom prices after the Crash. The smoke-stacks of the Gulag fleet were painted in the blue of the NKVD, but the ships themselves were always at the very margins of seaworthiness. Already old and decrepit when they were bought, the fleet had since been corroded by the fierce weather, the sea salt, and the ice floes.28 Now Thomas Sgovio found himself being pushed down a steep and slippery wooden stairway into the filthy depths of the ship. It took a while for the prisoners’ eyes to adjust to the dim light of the lower decks, but looming out of the darkness was a scene that one survivor compared to a nightmarish vision by Francisco Goya.29 In the cavernous depths of each ship were crammed five or more levels of wooden bunks containing thousands of battered men and women from all over the Soviet Union who had been arrested. Thomas Sgovio was pressed into the human cargo of the steamer Indigirka, which ferried between three and five thousand other prisoners north across the Sea of Okhotsk into another world. He remembered the date of his transportation exactly. It was August 2, 1938, three years to the day since he had left New York Harbor on the deck of a passenger liner, waving goodb...

One ship, the Kim, set out from Vladivostok carrying three thousand prisoners. When the prisoners mutinied, starting a fire below deck, the guards simply flooded the hold and the prisoners arrived in Magadan frozen from hypothermia.33 Similarly, if one of the Gulag ships was caught in a storm or ran aground, its human cargo would be left to their fate as the guards attempted to save their own lives, firing shots at the prisoners to prevent their escape.

In Kolyma, the coldest temperatures on earth had been recorded at below minus sixty degrees centigrade.

Hung across the buildings and streets were red banners with slogans: GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST GENIUS OF MANKIND, and KOLYMA WELCOMES YOU!

According to a report from Mech, a Russian-language weekly published in Poland, the census declared a population total of 159 million, instead of the projected 176 million, amounting to 17 million people who had disappeared.45 The Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, who had access to the NKVD files, quoted the same statistical shortfall as 26 million.46

Years later a secret report ordered by Nikita Khrushchev revealed that between 1935 and 1941, the NKVD arrested more than 19 million citizens. Seven million of the arrested were shot straightaway. An unknown proportion of the rest perished later, by the many means there were to die in the concentration camps of the Gulag.

Strangely, it was only the consequence of their labor, never the circumstance of their disappearance, that caused alarm in the capital cities of the West.

While Tsar Nicholas II had once made the decision that the conditions in Kolyma were too atrocious for human beings to live or work, Stalin never had such qualms.22

But however much gold Berzin sent back to Moscow, it was still never enough. Above all, the gold plan must not just be fulfilled, it must be overfulfilled; and during the Terror, Stalin came to the conclusion that Berzin had been “coddling” his prisoners. The powerful Dalstroi chief was lured to a meeting with a visiting NKVD delegation in Magadan, who promised further medals but arrested him on the airfield. Flown in handcuffs to Moscow, Eduard Berzin was executed in a basement of the Lubyanka. The “Berzin affair” resulted in the execution of several thousand of the Dalstroi apparat. Collectively they were accused of a conspiracy to turn Kolyma into “the 49th state of the USA.”28

In time, Berzin was replaced by a functionary named Pavlov and his deputy, Garanin, a thirty-nine-year-old NKVD colonel whose response to Moscow’s demands for gold made him notorious in the camps. Colonel Garanin personally oversaw the prisoners’ lineups when those who had not fulfilled their work quotas were ordered to step forward. The NKVD colonel then walked down the line personally, executing the “enemies of the people,” closely followed by two guards who took turns reloading his revolver.29 The prisoners’ corpses were then stacked up at the gates as a reminder to the rest.

Less than a year into his reign, Garanin was himself arrested and shot as a Japanese spy. All his subordinates, from executioners to grave diggers, followed in the Kremlin’s methodical effort to conceal what had taken place.

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...

It was precisely this gold that resuscitated the ailing Soviet economy and ultimately kept Stalin in power. And Stalin understood this economic imperative only too well.35

Silence was a crime, refusal to work was a crime, to consider oneself innocent was a crime—“The Five-Year Plan is the law! Not to carry out the Plan is a crime!”

One NKVD “camp doctor” explained the situation to the prisoners in the starkest terms: “You are not brought here to live, but to suffer and die. If you live it means that you are guilty of two things: either you worked less than was assigned, or you ate more than your proper due.”

Within the bureaucracy of the Gulag, a human being became a mere abstraction, a biological machine stripped of all essential worth beyond his or her utility to the state.

Of course, Lev Inzhir’s privileged insights did nothing to help in the camps. Desperate to save his life and conceal his status from those who hunted down his kind, Inzhir became a camp informer and eventually fell victim to the system he had worked so hard to perpetuate. Then the Gulag’s former chief accountant was transformed into another statistic in a mortality column sent back to Moscow.

Sexual violence regularly occurred within the bathhouse walls, as the criminals abused the weakest and most vulnerable of the prisoners. Their visits were followed by a fight to retrieve their clothes. The strongest and most brutal grabbed first choice—and their bodies, better protected from the cold, became a little stronger—while the weakest were left with the most worn and fragile remainders from the pile, which only steepened the trajectory of their descent.

Overall, three quarters of the prisoners in Kolyma did not survive their first winter.

The larger men died first, since they needed the most food. Prisoners from the Baltic states, for example, died more quickly than Russians because they tended to be physically larger and needed more calories to sustain their work.22 The most susceptible to the cold and disease were the Central Asian prisoners.

Worse torments came from the criminals who preyed upon the political prisoners in the camps just as they had in the prisons and along their transport. Within the hierarchy of the Gulag, the criminals were favored by the guards with an ideological status above the “enemies of the people.” The criminals were thus encouraged to act as an internal killing machine.

Within the camps, these criminals were not just physically stronger; they hunted in packs and possessed few, if any, moral prohibitions to limit their violence.

The criminals’ tattoos carried an ever-present symbolism created to inspire fear in others. Skulls on fingers counted the number of murders committed, the spires of cathedrals or monasteries the number of years spent within the prison system.

In 1931, Alex Shopik had been one of a party of seventy-five American miners emigrating to the USSR from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the beginning of the decade, their stirring speeches had been reported in the newspaper Sovietskaya Sibir: “We the members of the fifth group of miners which have been exploited by the bosses of Amerika, and thrown out of work for our services into the thirteen million army of unemployed have decided to leave that capitalist country and help the Soviet Union . . . We, ourselves, have come to Soviet Russia not to sleep but to work and work with all our power to help and complete the Five Year Plan.”

Of the many women coerced into prostitution to save their lives in the camps, some became pregnant, but they were kept at work until their final month of pregnancy. The mothers were allowed to nurse their babies until they were nine months old, at which point the children’s heads would be shaved before they were transferred to the camp orphanage. Growing up in camp conditions, the children ran wild, unable to speak because they were hardly spoken to, communicating in grunts and howls.