The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

In the Lubyanka, Alexander Dolgun’s MGB interrogator took evident pleasure in ridiculing an American letter of protest written on his behalf: “Fuck your embassy. That’s all you are going to hear from them. That’s the end of it. That’s all they are good for. You are going to be here for the rest of your life, do you understand that?”19 Transferred to the notorious Lefortovo Prison, Dolgun was put on the “conveyor” and placed in an isolation cell painted black. Severe physical abuse continued for nine months, as his interrogators attempted to force his confession to an alleged espionage plot while screaming at him, “The State fucks you, you stupid son of a bitch.” As the starvation and torture continued, Dolgun’s hair fell out and his weight dropped to less than ninety pounds. By early 1950, when his condition had degenerated to the point where he could hardly walk, he was sentenced to twenty-five years at the Gulag camp of Dzhezkazgan, in the deserts of Kazakhstan.20

and sang a song in Yiddish at a Moscow concert in a coded protest against the ongoing persecution of Soviet Jewry.34 But Robeson refused Pfeffer’s request to speak out publicly upon his return to the United States. Instead, Robeson rejected the rumors of mass arrests as anti-Soviet propaganda, and refused to denounce Stalin’s methods although he had met the victims personally. To a reporter from Soviet Russia Today, Robeson denied also the reports of a purge against the Jews in Soviet Russia, stating that he had “met Jewish people all over the place . . . I heard no word about it.”

Three years later, in August 1952, Yitzhak Pfeffer was executed along with four other Jewish writers and poets, and ten other leading Jewish cultural and scientific figures, all falsely convicted of espionage during their wartime membership in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. One after another, they were taken down to a basement cell of the Lubyanka Prison and shot.37

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the more brilliant intellectuals who dismissed Kravchenko, supported the communists in North Korea—“Any anti-Communist is a dog!”— and justified the use of terror as the “midwife of humanism.

Thus the celebrated words of Jean-Paul Sartre lent existential apology to the fists of torturers such as Belov, and provided moral comfort to listening ideologues and embryonic tyrants such as the Cambodian student named Saloth Sar, who joined the French Communist Party in Paris in the early 1950s and would become better known to the world as Brother Number One, or Pol Pot.14 Nor could Sartre possibly claim ignorance; he had only to step into any library and take down from the shelves André Gide’s account of his visit to Soviet Russia in 1936, whose publication had caused a sensation in France: “The smallest protest, the least criticism is liable to the severest penalties, and in fact is immediately stifled. And I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.”

The truth to Gide was always more important than the consolations of ideology. He had seen through the deceptions of the French colonial authorities in the Congo, and simply reapplied the same instincts to the USSR. But the most damning evidence came long after the fury of Kravchenko’s court case was over, when few people could remember the ferocious arguments his name had once evoked. As with so many other Russian defectors before him, no one had taken seriously Victor Kravchenko’s repeated claims that Soviet agents were trying to kill him. In 1966, his body was discovered in his Manhattan apartment. The gunshot wound, the authorities stated at the time, was self-inflicted.

At this point, Wallace had already descended far down the glassy slide from political powerbroker to nonentity to pariah. Firing him from his Roosevelt appointment as secretary of commerce, President Truman scathingly described Wallace as “a pacifist, a dreamer who wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.”

Now a chastened man, he met with Vladimir Petrov in the fall of 1949 to talk to the Russian about his experiences in Kolyma. Strangely, the two men became friends, and Wallace publicly apologized for having allowed himself to be fooled by the Soviets.

True to her promise to the executed camp doctors, Elinor Lipper published an account of the Kolyma camps to the disbelieving world in 1950. The following year, when Henry Wallace appeared before the Senate Internal Security Committee to answer questions about his vice-presidential visit to Kolyma, it was Elinor Lipper’s testimony that inflicted the very worst damage upon his reputation. In front of a row of hostile senators, Wallace was forced to listen to his behavior compared to that of an American visiting Auschwitz only to compliment the SS on their work. His public defense was simply that in 1944, “there was no way in which I could learn the full truth.” But this reply was not quite accurate. The evidence had been there, but Henry Wallace had chosen not to believe it.26 At his farm in South Salem, New York, Wallace began to receive hate mail. “Shame on you, Henry Wallace, for letting Stalin make a sucker out of you. Mr. Wallace you owe those tortured millions something, you helped Stalin. Do something. Get going! Faster! Faster!” Opinion polls rated him “the second least approved man in America,” just a few percentage points ahead of Lucky Luciano.

Five years on, the final charges of perjury against Lattimore were dismissed, and he left America to take up an academic post in England. Unlike the remorseful Wallace, Owen Lattimore never apologized for his portrayal of their visit to Kolyma. Instead, he attacked the veracity of Elinor Lipper’s account, accusing her of being a McCarthyite pawn.30 IN 1995, IT was publicly disclosed that the FBI had secretly collected coded telegrams sent from the Soviet consulate in New York during the Second World War. The so-called Venona Project only began decoding these cables in 1946, when resources became available. The messages revealed not only the extent of the Soviet spies’ penetration of the Manhattan Project, but also the Soviet recruitment of American espionage agents from the very highest reaches of government. Less than half of the Soviet code names were ever discovered as named individuals, but among them, 349 American agents were revealed to be working for Stalin. Given that only a small percentage of the Soviet cables were ever decoded, the actual number of agents was likely to be higher.

Also named by Chambers in 1939 was Henry Morgenthau’s assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White, whose career in government would continue for another decade. White’s influence over American foreign policy was considerable, including his recommendation of a ten-billion-dollar loan to Stalin, and his authorship of the “Morgenthau Plan,” advocating the partition and deindustrialization of Germany after the war. Eventually White was promoted to become the director of the International Monetary Fund. In August 1948, days after denying espionage in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Harry Dexter White suffered a heart attack and died.34

The Soviet plane was one of a regular series of flights carrying identical cargos of diplomatic suitcases out of Great Falls airport. The following month, according to Jordan’s testimony, Harry Hopkins had telephoned to authorize a shipment of uranium to the USSR “off the records” but sent through the channels of the Lend-Lease program.39

In the face of Major Jordan’s evidence, Hopkins’ friends defended him, claiming he had not “the faintest understanding of the Manhattan Project, and didn’t know the difference between uranium and a geranium.”41 Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky reveal how he had attended a lecture at the Lubyanka given by Iskhak Akhmerov, the controller of Soviet intelligence in America during the war. To his KGB colleagues, Akhmerov identified the “most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” as Harry Hopkins.42 At Potsdam, when President Truman revealed to Stalin the secret of the atomic bomb, the Soviet dictator took what was surely intended as a surprise with the calm shrug of old news. Both Churchill and Truman suspected that Stalin had failed to understand the true significance of what he had just been told, since he expressed no curiosity and asked no further questions. It did not occur to either of them that the reason for this unnatural lack of inquisitiveness was simply that Stalin had no questions left to ask. The NKVD had successfully delivered the secrets of the Manhattan Project, with “atomic spies” from a number of sources passing a steady flow of scientific data from the United States back to Moscow.

German survivor described what happened next: “Most of these Russians were immediately clubbed to death with crowbars, the rest finally shot with pistols. This took place in front of all men.”

Shocked at the fate of Russia’s former allies, Benjamin Dodon began writing his memoirs. Like many survivors of the camps, he wrote with little expectation of ever being published, the manuscript destined only for the desk drawer. Although he did not realize it at the time, Dodon’s would prove to be one of a large number of eyewitness accounts documenting the existence of American servicemen held captive in the Gulag from the end of World War II through the course of the Cold War.

WEEKS BEFORE HE DIED, Franklin Roosevelt made repeated personal requests to Stalin to allow the U.S. Army Air Forces permission to evacuate sick and wounded American prisoners of war from Poland. On March 17, 1945, Roosevelt telegrammed once again: “I have information that I consider positive and reliable that there are a very considerable number of sick and injured Americans in hospitals in Poland . . . This government has done everything to meet each of your requests. I now request you to meet mine in this particular matter.” Roosevelt’s appeals for the evacuation were consistently refused by Stalin; the Soviet dictator claiming, with cynical disingenuity, that he lacked sufficient authority:

In his memoirs, Major General John Deane, the head of the military mission in Moscow, wrote that American prisoners “are spoils of war, won by the Soviets. They may be robbed, starved and abused—and no one has the right to question such treatment.”

Of the 93,000 German soldiers marched through Moscow in a propaganda display after the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, only 6,000 returned home.12 What had happened to the remaining German prisoners of war was clear. They had been subjected to the accelerated mortality of the “corrective labor camps.”

Not that the mechanism of the Gulag was ever mindful of ideology or nationality. Among the millions in the camps were representatives of virtually every nation on earth: Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Romanians, British, Poles, Norwegians—the list was endless. Spanish soldiers from Franco’s fascist Blue Division were transported into the same system that imprisoned hundreds of Spanish communists who had fled to Russia in the wake of their country’s Civil War. The children of these Spanish refugees were consigned to the same fate.

From April 1943 until December 1947, Kloose was interned in a “silence camp” among prisoners of all nationalities, who were forced to work the mercury mines in the South Ural Mountains. Because of his poor physical condition, Kloose was assigned an office job, where he worked with the camp files listing the prisoners by nationality. In this particular camp, Kloose recalled there were 2,800 Germans, 460 Italian soldiers, 210 French, 24 British, and 6 Americans, the last two groups listed in the records as “intelligence officers.” The Americans had all arrived in the camp between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946. “None of the prisoners are supposed to be discharged and they are not authorized any connection with the outside world,” said Kloose. “Mortality is very high.”19

Other survivors brought similar fragments of information to be entered into the files. They spoke of an American consular secretary from a Balkan country named “Peters” who had been kidnapped from a steamer after the war. An American civilian employee of the Moscow embassy named “Brown” who liked to talk about classical music and the operas he had seen in New York City. An American sergeant named “Henry P” who spoke “broken German” and had “three nearly destroyed chevrons” still recognizable on his uniform.”22 Or a U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier named “Joe Miller,” from Chicago, shot down over Berlin in 1945, who a former German prisoner explained was a “staunch believer in democracy” and had been “severely beaten and starved by the Soviets” before being sent to the Karaganda Gulag, where he was “very weak physically and was suffering from malnutrition.”23

AFTER THE FIRST Soviet atomic bomb was successfully tested, on August 29, 1949, a succession of events quickly unfolded that led the world to the brink of nuclear war. According to Gavril Korotkov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, Kim Il-Sung secretly visited Moscow in February 1950 to inform Stalin that North Korea was not yet ready to launch an invasion of the South. Stalin’s response to the North Korean dictator was straightforward: “They were ready to start the fighting and couldn’t wait.” Kim Il-Sung was then sent out of Stalin’s Kremlin office to “think it over.” Four months later, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean armies, supplied with Soviet arms and air support, launched their invasion.24 Over the course of the next three years, the Korean War took the lives of approximately two and a half million soldiers and civilians, including more than thirty-six thousand American servicemen and -women, with approximately eight thousand listed as missing in action or unaccounted for.25 During the conflict, Americans fought Russians directly in combat for the first time since the Russian Civil War in 1919. Although neither side could admit this fact openly, the American pilots recognized the faces of Russian pilots wearing Chinese uniforms, flying MiG fighter planes in the skies over Korea. In the heat of combat, the instruction to issue commands only in Chinese was quickly forgotten, as Russian swearing could be clearly heard over the airwaves.26

The defense of Korea is part of the world-wide effort of all the free nations to maintain freedom. It has shown free men that if they stand together, and pool their strength, Communist aggression cannot succeed.29

Two years earlier, in March 1954, the employees of a German import-export firm discovered a tag wrapped in a bundle of hides exported from the Soviet Union. The tag was a wooden rectangle about five centimeters long by three centimeters wide, with a round hole drilled in one end, similar to those used by the Gulag authorities to identify the bodies of the dead prisoners. The wooden tag was taken as evidence to the local police station, who reported it to the U.S. Army headquarters in Heidelberg. In tiny letters on both sides of the tag, a desperate plea had been written in English: “I AM IN JAIL IN RUSSIA. GO TO THE NEAREST POLICE STATION AND REPORT IT. MATTER OF DEAD OR LIVE. SAVE ME PLEASE AND ALL THE OTHERS. KRISTIAN HJALTSON.” Rather than forming a banner headline in newspapers across the Free World, the discovered message was sent directly to the State Department, where an anonymous official placed the tag in an envelope marked “confidential,” and this small artifact of Cold War history disappeared into the archives. There it lay, waiting to be rediscovered, long decades after Kristian Hjaltson’s life had ended.

Outside national security circles, the Americans imprisoned in the Gulag hardly existed at all, nor were they likely to be officially recognized by the Soviet authorities, since their incarceration was, without doubt, a contravention of international law.

According to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, a retired Soviet NKVD agent, Raoul Wallenberg was held for two years in Lefortovo Prison and at the Lubyanka: My best estimate is that Wallenberg was killed by Maironovsky, who was ordered to inject him with poison under the guise of medical treatment . . . One of the reasons I believe Wallenberg was poisoned is that his body was cremated without an autopsy, under the direct order of Minister of Security Abakumov . . . The regulations were that those executed under special government decisions were cremated without autopsy at the Donskoi cemetery crematorium and their ashes buried in a common grave.45

Stalin, the former seminarian, had built a socialist religion with himself at its center: a god who demanded belief without rationale, obedience without a moment’s hesitation.

How else could one describe the actions of a leader who personally signed a Politburo order on July 2, 1951, authorizing thirty-three tons of copper to be used for the construction of a gigantic statue of himself, built beside the Volga-Don Canal, a project that killed thousands of its prisoner-laborers?3 The colossal statue was built with an electric current running through its head, to prevent migratory birds from defacing the idol. The birds would land and be electrocuted, their feathered bodies falling to the ground in silent tribute to this Soviet Ozymandias, the shoemaker’s son from Gori, Georgia.4 Viewed through the methodology of power, the personality cult had a calculated purpose. The psychological effect of Soviet “giganticism” was always intended to create a feeling of awe, which rendered the individual meaningless beneath the towering ubiquity of the Great Leader.

To such steadfast disciples, Stalin represented the essence of a society that would never change, the security of an individual whose every choice has been taken away.

In 1949, Joseph Stalin again suggested at a Kremlin meeting that he was getting too tired for the job; perhaps it was time for someone else to step in to replace him? Immediately the protestations began: “No, no. In Georgia people lived to be a hundred and sixty!” Stalin wondered if perhaps the leaders of the Leningrad siege should replace him as premier and general secretary. The rest of the Politburo immediately chorused, “No, no, Comrade Stalin!” But when Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesensky hesitated, Stalin had them arrested. At the end of the show trial known as the “Leningrad Affair,” the former Soviet war heroes were draped in white shrouds and led out of the courtroom to be shot one hour later.

In June 1946, Maxim Litvinov had briefed Richard Hottelet, a correspondent for CBS, “to warn the western world that the Kremlin cannot be trusted and cannot be appeased.” Litvinov explained that each concession of Stalin’s demands would lead to “the West being faced, after a more or less short time, with the next set of demands.” Litvinov then went on to discuss the political consequences of Stalin’s death, thus ensuring he would never live to witness the event.

In January 1953, an article was published in Pravda entitled “Assassins in White Coats.” The prose was a straightforward attack on Jewish doctors and, by extension, all Soviet Jews. It was written in Stalin’s own style, recognizable because every grammatical or spelling mistake was left uncorrected by the fearful editors. (According to his interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, for each one of Stalin’s errors, an impression was formed that “perhaps now we should write this word in this way.”)13 The latest propaganda onslaught was filled with diatribes against the “disease of contamination” of the healthy Soviet body politic by these Jewish doctors. Those who had taken Russian names were identified in the press with their former Jewish surnames in brackets, lest there be any doubt.14 Cartoonists depicted them in anti-Semitic caricatures, with the general hysteria reflected in the language of the charges: “It has been established that all these killer-doctors, monsters in human form, tramping the holy banner of science and desecrating the honour of the man of science, were hired agents of foreign intelligence services . . . established by American intelligence services for the alleged purpose of providing material aid to Jews in other countries.” 15 In Pravda, it was announced that the trial of the Kremlin doctors would take place at the Hall of Columns on March 5, 1953.16

In the early 1930s there had once been a joke that “SSSR”—the Russian initials for the Soviet state—stood for Smert Stalina Spaset Rossiiu (“Stalin’s death will save Russia”).

And when the news reached them that Stalin had been taken ill, many prisoners openly prayed, “May the devil take his soul today!” One old man fell to his knees in the water of a mine. “Thank God someone still looks out for the wretched.”

It was easy to believe in the immortality of evil, to forget that every dictator must eventually die. Although even from beyond the grave, Stalin would demand a final sacrifice. Rows of trucks had been placed around the building as a security barrier, and as the crowds surged, people began to be crushed against them. Eyewitnesses reported that hundreds were killed, screaming, “Save Me! Save Me!” as they were pressed and trampled underfoot.29 The Moscow morgues were filled to overflowing, although there was never any public record of this disaster published in the Soviet media.

At a Central Committee meeting in July 1953, Khrushchev delivered a speech in front of a shocked Beria, accusing him of crimes against the state. In a carefully planned maneuver, a buzzer was pressed under the table and ten armed men burst into the room, seizing the most feared man in the Soviet Union. Apparently spontaneously, a Politburo bodyguard then stepped forward to inform them that Beria had raped his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. It was a common accusation made against the secret police chief, who was known to cruise the streets of Moscow in his armored limousine looking for young girls to abduct. Four decades later, the workmen at the site of Beria’s former mansion at No. 28 Kacholovna Street—now the Tunisian embassy—discovered a dozen skeletons buried in the grounds.

According to General Ivan Konev, who presided over the trial, Beria “flung himself about the courtroom weeping and begging for mercy.”

Then the MVD troops started shooting in a massacre which began at three o’clock in the morning and continued for the next five hours. When the fighting was over, a secret police officer who had been seen shooting more than two dozen prisoners with his revolver placed knives in the hands of the dead, ready for a photographer to record the pictures of these “gangsters.”

From his exile in the remote wilderness, Victor Herman returned with his family to the city of Krasnoyarsk to resume his career as a boxing coach.45 Thomas Sgovio took the train, for a second time, back to his mother and sister in Moscow.

“Please remember that of the nineteen years my brother has lived in the Soviet Union, sixteen of them have been in prison.”46