The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

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First published in 2008 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © T. Tzouliadis Limited, 2008

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Page 398 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tzouliadis, Tim.
The forsaken : an American tragedy in Stalin’s Russia / Tim Tzouliadis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-594-20168-4

 
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For the innocent who lost their lives,
 
of every nationality

1

The Joads of Russia

New Masses,
November 1926

 
 
 
Their story begins with a photograph of a baseball team. The year is 1934, the picture is in black and white. Two rows of young men pose for the camera: one standing, the other crouching down with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They are all somewhere in their late teens or early twenties, in the peak of health. They appear to be the best of friends. We know many, if not all, of their names: Arnold Preedin, Arthur Abolin, Eugene Peterson, Leo Feinstein, Victor Herman, Leo Herman, Benny Grondon . . . The names themselves are unremarkable, since none of them are celebrities nor the sons or grand-sons of the famous. They come from ordinary working families from across America—from Detroit, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and the Midwest. Waiting in the sunshine, they look much like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms.
¹

At first glance they might appear to be one team, but in actual fact there are two. On this occasion we can tell from their uniforms that the Foreign Workers’ Club of Moscow is playing against the Autoworkers’ Club from the nearby city of Gorky. But perhaps such details are unimportant, since many of the American baseball players in the photograph will soon be dead. They will not die in an accident, in a train, or in a plane crash. They will be the witnesses to, and the victims of, the most sustained campaign of state terror in modern history.

The few baseball players who survive will be inordinately lucky. But they will come so close to death and endure such terrible circumstances that they, too, at times, may wish they had lost their lives with the rest of their team. Only at that moment, as the camera shutter clicks in the warm summer air of Gorky Park, none of the American baseball players has any idea of their likely fate. Their smiles betray not the slightest inkling.

 
 
IT WAS THE least-heralded migration in American history. Unsurprising perhaps, since in a nation of immigrants, no one cares to remember the ones who left the dream behind—these forgotten exiles who stood with their families on the wooden decks of passenger liners, watching the Statue of Liberty fade into the distance as they left New York bound for Leningrad. A cross section of America, they came from all walks of life: professors, engineers, factory workers, teachers, artists, doctors, even farmers, all mixed together on the passenger ships. They left to join the Five-Year Plan of Soviet Russia, lured by the prospect of work at the height of the Great Depression. Qualified engineers on well-paid contracts jostled beside unemployed workers chasing jobs in Soviet factories, and starry-eyed fellow travelers whose luggage was bursting with the heavy tomes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Within their ranks were American communists, trade unionists, and other assorted radicals of the John Reed school, but most were ordinary citizens not overly concerned by politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigrants: the search for a better life for their children and themselves. And in the eagerness of their departure, no wise eyes strained to foresee the chronicle of violence that lay in store in Russia, as the bronze-and-steel propellers labored relentlessly across the gray-green ocean water toward Europe.

In the early 1930s, it must have felt as though America, caught in the clutches of the Great Depression, could not or would not keep her half of the social contract. There were more people out of work in the United States, both actually and proportionately, than in any other nation on earth. Thirteen million unemployed represented a quarter of the workforce in an age when, in most families, only the men held jobs. Now those millions stood on bread lines and queued up at soup kitchens waiting for their next meal. A ragged army of hoboes had taken to the highways and railroads of the continent in their search for work. Half the country was on the move, and not just the likes of Tom Joad driving to California in their Model A’s. To these people, the Great Depression’s newly dispossessed, the abject failure of capitalism was not such a radical proposition so much as the straightforward evidence of their senses. They saw it, and smelled it, whichever way they turned.

The New York Times
published a story on the new city that had risen next to Wall Street as a symbolic rival to the financial center of the Western world:
“Campfires glowed last night in the Westside jungles. The jungle, bounded by Spring, West, Clarkson and Washington streets, looks, with its mounds of brick and its desolation like a shell-pocked village in France . . . Battered chimneys rise out of holes in the ground, where the unemployed have dug in for the winter. Shacks made of packing cases, old tin, dirty cement blocks, beams, tar paper, stand on some of the brick mounds, others are in the brick hollows.”
²
These brand-new Hoovervilles, built of corrugated iron and salvaged brick, had risen suddenly in every major American city and struck many as a warning of a civilization dividing into alternate landscapes—as if competing visions of penury and plenty were being processed over one another, and the figures in the foreground were no longer sure to which their lives belonged or to which they now were heading. Almost overnight, pinstripes and spats had been replaced by worn-out denim and a sullen look, as the ranks of unemployed attempted to stay alive selling shoeshines or apples for a nickel apiece, competing with the countless others who had the same idea. On city sidewalks of America, the veterans of the Great War sold their decorations for valor won on the battlefields of France and Belgium. The going rate was one dollar and fifty cents.

In movie theaters, the newsreel pictures showed Franciscan friars doling out silver nickels to the homeless for a bed or a meal. Crowds of men stood smoking, their hats pulled down low over their eyes, waiting patiently to receive their solitary coin, tipping their hats as they walked past. It was an endless queue, and an anonymous haunted man who tries to cut in gets pushed back to the end of the line. The camera catches him in the act and preserves his despair forever, like a—the Sisyphus of old New York. In Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the destitute were living inside coke ovens shut down by the crisis. Men with their entire families were living there inside. Kids with nothing looked curiously into the inquiring cameras, some with unnaturally stern faces, others with the shy grins of children for whom this was all still just fun and who had no idea quite how desperate their fathers had become. In Harrisburg, a ragged army of unemployed stormed the state capitol demanding relief funds, while articles in the mainstream press carried portentous headlines warning of “the Prospect of Violent Revolution in the United States.”
³

Amid the enforced idleness, the bank failures, the sourness, and the blatant discontent, a bitter rage swept through the streets of American cities while the shock was still raw and the people angry enough to get out onto the streets. An international unemployment day was announced, and hundreds of thousands marched through New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and the industrial heartlands. The general feeling of unease was impossible to resist; of disgust at the overwhelming power of money, which divided men from one another and added a layer of shame onto the hurt of what it already felt like to be absolutely poor. Reinforcing this nationwide shift toward radicalism—the sudden lurch of the entire political consensus to the left—was the growing awareness that all this unemployment and extreme hardship were ultimately unnecessary. The collective misery was simply the result of laissez-faire capitalism gone wild, the maniacal exuberance of Wall Street financiers who had stoked an express train until it careened off the tracks, leaving others to pick up the pieces of the wreck while the guilty fled the scene.
⁴