The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

The older surviving children were taught songs: “I’m a little girl, I sing and I play. I haven’t seen Stalin but I love him each day.”44 On every orphanage wall was hung the same picture that could be seen all over the Soviet Union. It showed Stalin, “the Greatest Friend of Soviet Families,” holding a pretty little girl in his arms above the inscription THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR A HAPPY CHILDHOOD. The photograph became a ubiquitous image of Stalinism. Later it was discovered that the six-year-old girl’s father and mother had both been killed in the Terror.

The few who attempted to escape were either shot immediately or hunted down by dogs and returned to the camp. They were then placed in an isolator dug into the frozen ground into which the guards would throw water until the prisoners froze in the winter temperatures.48

On another occasion, he witnessed the NKVD guards lead a gang of criminals out into a clearing of the forest to rape a transport of female prisoners newly arrived by train and still dressed in their summer clothes.

Outside the Soviet Pavilion, a 250-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of a heroic Soviet Worker had been constructed to serve as a landmark and tourist attraction. The statue was quickly christened “Big Joe” by New Yorkers, and held in its outstretched hand a five-pointed red star measuring ten feet in diameter. At night the red star was lit with the powerful brightness of a five-thousand-watt lamp. The Second World War had just recently begun, and across the Lagoon of Nations other pavilions, representing the independent democracies of Poland and the Baltic states, were consumed in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the cool night air of fall, “Big Joe” held the red Soviet star aloft high over the World’s Fair, shining out beyond the fields of Flushing Meadows and across the whole of old New York.

One week after their pact was signed, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland from the West. Two weeks later, on September 14, 1939, the Red Army occupied their predetermined portion of eastern Poland almost unnoticed.

Over Soviet radio, Foreign Minister Molotov broadcast lectures on the “progressive” nature of the Nazi regime, which had successfully eliminated unemployment with its autobahn construction projects. Fascism was now simply “a matter of taste.”

In December 1939, an exchange of telegrams between Hitler and Stalin was published in the Soviet press: “Mr Joseph Stalin, Moscow. Please accept my most sincere congratulations on your sixtieth birthday. I take this occasion to tender my best wishes. I wish you personally good health and a happy future of the people of the friendly Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler.” To which Stalin politely answered: “Herr Adolf Hitler, Head of the German State, Berlin. Please accept my appreciation of the congratulations and thanks for our good wishes with respect to the peoples of the Soviet Union. J. Stalin.” 10 Such courtesies would, of course, soon be excised from Soviet history, along with every other trace of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During the war, even to mention its existence became punishable with a ten-year sentence under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code.

On June 18, 1940, after the collapse of France, Vyacheslav Molotov sent Adolf Hitler a message of praise via the German ambassador, Schulenburg, to express “the warmest congratulations of the Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Armed Forces.”12 Fulfilling his role as Hitler’s ally, Stalin authorized the export of the necessary raw materials required by the Nazi blitzkrieg. Through the course of 1940, Stalin delivered more than 700,000 tons of Russian oil to the victorious Nazi armies.

IN OCCUPIED POLAND, Red Army soldiers experienced a similar conflict between ideology and the outward expression of reality. “Comrade Colonel,” one soldier was reported to have asked, “didn’t we come to Poland to liberate our brothers, oppressed by landowners and capitalists? . . . A peasant has three or four horses, five or six cows, there is a bicycle in front of every house. Workers wear suits, hats—the same as a big Soviet director. There is something here that I don’t understand.”18 The Red Army soldiers of the Polish campaign brought back news of shops piled high with goods, a world without queues or ration cards, where the ordinary workers’ flats had running water and two taps: “You turn one tap and you get hot water; you turn another—it’s cold.” Poland was almost miraculous, as if communism had finally arrived in the very place it had never been attempted.19 Inevitably, the NKVD followed in the Red Army’s wake to clear the population of all “enemies of the people.” In this process, approximately 1.7 million Poles were arrested and transported east into the Soviet camps.

With the world’s attention focused on the fall of France, the Red Army occupied the formerly independent Baltic states almost unnoticed. Just as in Poland, the NKVD arrested the “enemies of the people” en masse. Approximately 1.2 million Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians were deported by train, and disappeared into the inexhaustible Gulag.23

Eighty percent of the Red Army command, from majors up, had already been killed by the NKVD. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister after Stalin’s death, later quoted a figure of eighty-two thousand executions.

Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin had disappeared from sight altogether, refusing to meet any of his staff between June 24 and July 2, 1941, a week that Khrushchev later claimed had been lost to a drinking binge.30 Stunned by the rapid German advances, and fully aware that his personal safety was at risk, Stalin retreated to his dacha outside Moscow.

In western Ukraine, villagers greeted the invading Nazi armies with the traditional Slavic gifts of bread and salt.

Moscow’s Jewish population was particularly conscious of the horror that awaited them if they were caught in the city.35 The Luftwaffe had recently dropped leaflets over Moscow with the words “Death to all Jews” written in heavy Teutonic typeface.

Appropriately enough, the evacuation train carrying Lenin’s body and the American diplomats had cars attached filled with prisoners—since even in moments of the highest crisis, the needs of the Gulag were met and the system of repression remained firmly intact.

Victor Abakumov— a protégé of the new secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria

Soon afterward, Isaiah Oggins was executed in Moscow by poison administered by an NKVD doctor named Grigory Mairanovsky. The official Soviet documentation recorded death due to “paralysis of the heart owing to acute sclerosis of the coronary artery with associated angiospams and papillary carcinoma of the urinary bladder.”

Of the seventy people packed into their train car, “not a single child arrived at destination, my three children died; their bodies were placed on the snow beside the car and the train moved on; that was their funeral.”

One significant difference was the lack of photographic evidence ever to emerge from the Gulag. Nor was this accidental, since photography within the wider Soviet Union, let alone the camps, was always one of the most heavily proscribed activities, guaranteed to lead to swift arrest unless overseen by the NKVD.

The question of freedom of religion, and what had happened to Russia’s missing clergy, had been candidly answered by Joseph Stalin himself, in an audience given to a visiting American delegation just a few years earlier: “The Party cannot remain neutral regarding the propagators of religious prejudices, with regard to reactionary clergy poisoning the minds of labouring masses. Have we annihilated the clergy? Yes, we have annihilated it. The trouble is that it is not yet completely liquidated.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev led a human rights commission, which concluded that two hundred thousand Russian clergy had been executed during the Stalinist period.

In Kolyma, Thomas Sgovio witnessed the arrival of enormous black, fifty-ton American Diamond trucks with trailers and iron sides, and five-ton Studebakers that could easily manage the unforgiving terrain. These American trucks were used to transport prisoners across the vast distances of Russian wilderness into the camps.

The bags could be turned into extra clothing to protect the prisoners from the extreme cold, a practice that spread rapidly through the camps of Kolyma. And thus the starving Gulag legions became clad in American flour bags, whose brand names ran across their emaciated bodies in irregular patterns, like a Cubist rendering of suffering.

Anticipating his death, Thomas tattooed his name on his hip so that if, years later, his body was ever discovered frozen in the ground, someone might at least know of his existence.

HUNGER HAD ALWAYS been a necessity of the Gulag, a calculated policy since it was understood that a starved man became more pliable, more passive, and more easily stunned into submission. Starvation turned the prisoners into automata, quite incapable of acts of conspiracy or resistance.

Out of calculated desperation, increasing numbers of prisoners chose self-mutilation in an attempt to be moved to lighter duties. At first they hacked off their fingers and toes; then they paid others to remove a whole leg or an arm, using either an axe or a detonator charge. The self-mutilators reasoned, and not without a certain terrible logic, that it was better to lose a limb than one’s life.

Stalin held an estimated “sixteen million” Russians imprisoned in such camps.

The minutely calibrated deceptions would continue through the length of the visit as the American vice president was walked through a charade designed to conceal the true nature of what was taking place around him. Like a moving stage set, everything in Kolyma had been carefully managed for Wallace’s willing eyes. No beguiling detail was left untouched in the Soviet effort to convince Wallace that what lay before him was a vision of pioneers at work, not the reality of a network of death camps. The NKVD guards with their baying dogs had vanished, along with the skeletal prisoners. The watchtowers and searchlights had disappeared. Wondrous selections of food now filled the shops of Magadan. There were even greenhouses on show, built to provide “much-needed fruit and vegetables for the vitamin-starved miners of the Arctic.”24

For weeks after Wallace’s visit, Thomas became the butt of camp jokes, his presence greeted by taunts of “You Americans are really stupid.” There was hardly a single prisoner in Kolyma who had not heard of the vice president’s visit. And if the jokes themselves were insufficient reminder of the vice president’s folly, the camp commanders and their wives deepened the ridicule by dressing up in expensive American clothes. Attached to each item delivered to Kolyma was a handwritten tag with a message in English, and the name and address of a donor from the Californian branch of “the USA-USSR Friendship Society.” Thomas watched the Gulag officials’ wives fighting over the clothes in the warehouse to which they were delivered. It was concentration camp chic, the Rodeo Drive of the damned.

One prisoner, who had the task of processing the dead, took Thomas Sgovio to a mortuary where the dead prisoners’ frozen hands were amputated before their meager bodies were taken away to be buried. The hands were kept on hooks until they thawed so that fingerprints could be taken for the camp files.

It was at this time that Thomas Sgovio briefly met John Pass, another young American surviving in the Kolyma camps. Born in the Midwest, Pass had emigrated to the USSR as a child in the early 1930s with his family. He had been arrested in 1940 for possession of a copy of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. The book had been banned in the Soviet Union because “it did not show the leading role of Stalin during the October Revolution.” 5 In Reed’s account, it was Trotsky who appeared most often by Lenin’s side directing the events of 1917, and Stalin was hardly mentioned.

In the account William White was told, the Americans had freely given up their passports and voluntarily acquired Soviet citizenship. In a wartime memoir, White wrote, “Under any interpretation of international law they were indistinguishable from any other Soviet citizen, bound to their assigned jobs and with no hope of leaving.” White discovered how the emigrants had once clamored at the doors of the American embassy begging for help. As the Soviet Union’s foreigners were transported into the Gulag, “all trace of them was lost and no longer could they plead with their embassies in Moscow.”

At the end of their dinner, Stalin abruptly got up from the table to announce that they would now all watch Mission to Moscow in the Kremlin cinema.17 According to Joseph Davies’ account, the film “caused a great deal of joking,” not least because of its dramatization of the lives of those watching in the elite audience. The inner circle of Stalin’s court were all present, including Beria, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Litvinov, Vyshinsky, and Molotov, who personally congratulated Davies on this high-budget Hollywood adaptation of his service in 1930s Moscow. The ambassador had been allowed to introduce the film with a monologue delivered directly to the camera, a picture of Marjorie hanging on the wall behind him: “There was so much prejudice and misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, in which I partly shared, that I felt it was my duty to tell the truth . . . While I was in Russia I came to have a very high respect for the honesty of the Soviet leaders.” The same Soviet leaders now watched a Stalinist version of the history of the Terror projected on the silver screen. Naturally the show trials were presented as a truthful account of real events: from explosions in Soviet factories to scenes of Nikolai Bukharin nefariously conspiring with the Japanese ambassador. On-screen, the actor Walter Huston, playing the part of Ambassador Davies, declared his undisputed opinion that “based on twenty years of trial practice, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions.” There was even a dra...

IF THE AMERICAN government wished to continue to portray Stalin’s regime as worthy of the public’s wholehearted support, then the suppression of the NKVD’s culpability for the Katyn massacre became an essential part of the Allied war effort.

In fact, President Roosevelt had already been fully briefed on the events that had taken place at Katyn Forest. On August 13, 1943, Roosevelt received a classified British intelligence report accompanied by a personal letter from Winston Churchill, which made it transparently clear that the Soviets were responsible for the mass murder. The details provided in the report were precise and unremitting. In its pages, Roosevelt learned how the Polish officers had scratched on the train wagons “Don’t believe that we are going home”; how their letters to their relatives had abruptly stopped in March 1940; how Katyn Forest had been a well-known killing ground of the NKVD, “used by the Bolsheviks in 1919 as a convenient place for the killing of many Tsarist officers”; how “if a man struggled, the executioner threw his coat over his head, tying it around his neck and leading him hooded to the pits edge—in many cases a body was found to be thus hooded and the coat to have been pierced by a bullet where it covered the base of the skull”; how the bullets penetrated the skulls from close range or with the muzzle pressed against the base of the neck; how the wounds were regular, as if fired by experienced hands; how the bodies had been stabbed with four-edged bayonets of Soviet issue. The report read as a letter of protest from its author, the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Owen O’Malley:

With the other interpreters, Berezhkov worked around the clock translating Roosevelt’s private conversations, since his living quarters were, of course, bugged by the NKVD.

The perspicacity of Churchill shone through the smoke and subterfuge of stateroom diplomacy. Unlike Roosevelt, Churchill never harbored any illusions over Soviet intentions, and he understood very well that Stalin made good on his threats.

Churchill then mentioned that Stalin had dealt with not just “a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.” At which point Stalin corrected him: “Ten millions.” When Churchill asked what had happened to this kulak class, Stalin confided, “Many of them agreed to come in with us. Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk . . . or further north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their laborers.” There was then a “considerable pause” while the British prime minister understood the significance of the destruction of approximately one eighth of the Russian population, judged to be part of this kulak class.

At Yalta, when Churchill asked for some lemon for his gin and tonics, he awoke the next morning to discover a lemon tree growing outside his palace window. Even this humble lemon tree concealed a private tragedy, which linked the forgotten Americans to this historic setting. Albert Troyer had been a citrus specialist, a graduate of the University of Nebraska, who arrived in the Soviet Union from his native Alabama in 1932, ready to take on the responsibility for revitalizing the moribund Soviet citrus industry. In the sunny climate by the Black Sea, Troyer had diligently crossed and grafted lemons for four years, until his arrest in 1936 and subsequent sentence to ten years in the Gulag. Eventually his wife’s parcels to him were returned, and Eva Troyer was informed that her husband had been “transferred to an undisclosed destination.”

During the postwar deportations, an estimated forty thousand Russians were hunted down in free France, with the assistance of the French police.5 In one example, French witnesses looked on as a Russian former prisoner of war, Nikolai Lapchinski, was beaten and dragged across the street into a waiting car by the agents of the NKVD.

The captured Russians joined thousands of others in transit camps in the Soviet zone in eastern Germany. At Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and elsewhere, prisoners were once again clothed in the familiar striped pajamas the world knew so well.7 Among them was John Noble, a twenty-one-year-old American interned by the Germans and arrested by the Soviet police. As a prisoner-clerk at the Soviet jail at Munchenerplatz, John Noble learned of the guards’ “humane” method of execution. On execution days a prisoner was undressed and walked down a corridor. As he turned a corner, he was shot in the back of the head. At the end of the day the bodies were piled up, ready to be doused in gasoline and set alight.8 Five years after the end of the war, while still a prisoner in Buchenwald, John Noble learned there were prisoners who had suffered in this camp under the Nazi and the Soviet regimes. The bodies of thousands of prisoners who had been starved to death since the end of the war were taken out to the forest and buried in mass graves. In Sachsenhausen in the early 1990s, forensic investigators found 12,500 bodies buried in fifty mass graves around the camp, dating from its period as a Stalinist transit camp from 1945 to 1950.

But whereas the mass of Gulag prisoners before the Second World War had been mainly civilian victims, unused to violence and preyed upon by the criminals, the spetz men were different. They arrived marked by the habits of war, and placed their trust in the gun, not Soviet propaganda. This made them especially dangerous.

Only the year before, three Russian pilots had escaped from a Nazi prison camp, seizing Luftwaffe planes and flying out of Germany to what they believed was the safety of Byelorussia.19 Far from being welcomed as heroes, the Russian pilots were arrested and sent to Kolyma. But in Alaska, Yanovsky reasoned, the Americans would not treat them like the NKVD. In the spring of 1946, the Yanovsky conspirators killed two guards, changed into their uniforms, and overpowered the whole guard block. Taking food, weapons, and ammunition, they drove a truck out of the camp. There were several military airports in the vicinity, and the men headed for the nearest one. When their truck ran out of fuel, they got out and ran across the taiga. All available NKVD troops in the heavily garrisoned area were sent after them. Adopting guerrilla tactics, the escapees split into two groups: a main group of eight, and a reconnaissance patrol of four, led by Yanovsky. The advance party soon encountered a unit of soldiers whose dogs had picked up their scent. Three of the men were cut down by rifle fire, and only Yanovsky escaped. The main group of eight was caught in a flanking movement by the NKVD. Pinned down by crossfire, the soldiers formed a circle and fought at each other’s side until their ammunition was exhausted and they were shot down. Only one of their group was captured, wounded but alive. He was taken to a camp hospital, where he was treated until he recovered, and then executed.

DESPERATION AT THEIR lengthened sentences led many prisoners to make individual escape attempts from Kolyma in the spring of 1946. “Release by the green procurator” almost invariably ended in failure, since there was nowhere to run to in that vast wilderness. The nearest human settlements were hundreds of kilometers away, and the local nomadic tribesmen were promised flour and vodka for every escapee they returned. The bounty was only rarely collected. Most escape attempts were quickly ended by experienced teams of “head hunters” who tracked the runners with dogs and planes, shooting their victims on sight. They dumped the bodies in the wasteland and amputated their hands for identification.22

All over the Soviet Union, from this tiny ice-bound settlement in Kolyma to the busy streets of Moscow, the public loudspeakers were barking a daily diatribe against America, “the warmonger and imperialist oppressor.” With bewildering speed, the United States was transformed from World War ally into Cold War foe.

On his second visit, Grace sent for a private doctor, who examined her father’s skeletal body and diagnosed a combination of the typical illnesses of a Gulag prisoner: dysentery, pellagra, malaria, and pneumonia. It was also very likely that he was suffering from tuberculosis, since he was coughing up blood. There was little more that could be done, and a short while afterward, Joseph Sgovio died with his family by his bedside, having begged their forgiveness for ever bringing them to the Soviet Union. At the very end, he held their hands: “Forgive me . . . goodbye.”

At the same time, the political atmosphere in the USSR was deteriorating steadily, with a new ideological campaign launched against the crime of “cosmopolitanism,” and all foreign influences “infecting” Soviet society.

As the Berlin Airlift threatened to escalate into World War Three, Stalin tightened his grip still further and a new wave of Terror broke across the Soviet Union. Within the American community, along with the survivors disappearing in the latest arrests, a second generation of American sons and daughters suddenly became vulnerable. They had survived the Terror because they were children at the time. But by 1949, this was no longer the case, and that year would become known as “the twin brother” of 1937.

While the machinery of the State Department considered how to act, Dora Gershonowitz was arrested. Although she was both an American citizen and an employee of the American embassy, little was done to protect her from her ordeal.

Like Dora, Alexander Dolgun was employed as a clerk at the American embassy. His father had brought him to Moscow as a seven-year-old boy, having signed up on a dollar contract to assemble Fords at the Stalin auto factory in 1933. Now aged twenty-two, Alexander Dolgun was stopped on a Moscow street by a secret police officer and bundled into the back of a car to be driven the short distance to the Lubyanka. His reaction was almost identical to his American predecessors ten years earlier: “What is all this about! Don’t you know you are dealing with a citizen of the United States of America!”