The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (10 page)

In the midst of the intrigue, Walter Duranty never missed the party. Duranty had lost half his leg in a train wreck and could not dance, but he sat instead at his favorite table always “romancing some dame.”
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While the wits at the Metropol bar dreamed up plans for a population exchange between America and Russia. The Russians would bring to the United States their literature, art, and music, and within a decade destroy American industry. The Americans would arrive in Russia and, in that decade, build up a fully functioning economy. Then they could both go home again. It would take the Russians another ten years to wreck their economy, and the Americans the same time to rebuild theirs, thus providing jobs and culture for all. Zara Witkin, a Californian engineer, even had the beginning of a show tune:

 
Occasionally a genuine American jazz band materialized in Moscow, and then, according to one witness,
“the tide turned, and the boys put on some real American cloggin’, the house broke out in a roar, and I heard a woman back

of me saying ‘Marvellous, truly marvellous.’”
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For a moment then, with the blaring jazz and thunderous applause, the stamping feet and swinging arms, the pretty young women in expensive dresses and the handsome men in black tie—if only for a moment—it must have felt as though the Depression had never really arrived and the Roaring Twenties roared on, in one of Jay Gatsby’s parties switched to snowy Moscow just for the thrill. And the rich American engineers and reporters who gathered at the Metropol Hotel bar to spend their dollars and savor the attention of Russian girls so much more attractive than their company deserved only had to put up with the occasional inconvenience, the occasional episode in the night to add to a vicious hangover and a very large check. From the early 1930s, the rich Americans who shared their apartment buildings with the Soviet elite were already starting to be woken in the night by a pounding on their door from the GPU and a command barked in Russian, “Open! Open!” They would answer bleary-eyed in dressing gowns at five A.M., only to discover that their wild-eyed night visitors had come to the wrong apartment:
“What do you mean coming around here at this hour waking people up? I am an American.
”
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It was an experience that was becoming increasingly common with each passing month, and those Americans who judged themselves to be immune from the threat were wrong. A few would be caught in the exit as they rushed for the doors. Their time was drawing ever closer, looming toward them with every passing week of the Metropol party, from out of the fog of the vodka, the girls, and the blaring jazz.

 
 
IT WAS Walter Duranty, more than any other individual, who persuaded Franklin Roosevelt of the wisdom of granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government. Even before the inauguration, Duranty spent long hours briefing the president-elect on “the Soviet experiment,” elaborating on a theme he had first outlined in
The New York Times
of how
“the word ‘Bolshevik’ has lost much of its former mystery and terror over here . . . Such a concept of bolshevism as applied to the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics today is a trifle old-fashioned, to say the least.”
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In the midst of a Soviet famine that was killing millions with calculated ruthlessness, the United States chose to make friendly overtures to Joseph Stalin. And President Roosevelt, while doubtless aware of the rumors of the famine, was either blind or inured to the scale of the horror, thanks in no small measure to Duranty.

In November 1933, the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, crossed the Atlantic in the royal suite of the passenger liner
Berengaria,
ready to negotiate the terms for the American recognition. As the
Berengaria
steamed into New York Harbor, Litvinov asked the captain to steer the ship closer to the Statue of Liberty. Standing beside him at the rail was Walter Duranty, who wrote in
The New York Times
that the Soviet foreign minister admired the Statue of Liberty “no less than the New York skyline.”
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The
Times
reporter then assured the American public that the continued accounts of the Ukrainian famine were nothing but
“an eleventh-hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair.”
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The tubby Soviet foreign minister, meanwhile, ensured himself a warm welcome at the White House by arriving with a complete collection of Soviet stamps issued since 1917, his personal gift for the philatelist president.
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After sixteen years as a pariah nation, the Soviet state once derided by the former secretary of state Bainbridge Colby as “illegal, irresponsible and without doubt impermanent” was now on the brink of legitimacy.
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It was the American business community, in particular, who urged the president to help their firms export their way out of the Depression. For his part, Maxim Litvinov played the role of piper, forecasting more than one billion dollars of future trade orders, to mesmerize the two thousand American corporations already selling a shopping list of industrial equipment into the Soviet market. A cartoon published in national newspapers summed up their case: “Starving in the Midst of Plenty” showed a very gaunt and hungry-looking Uncle Sam sitting next to the fat turkey of Russian trade.
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Stepping off the
Berengaria
—having traveled on the same crossing as Maxim Litvinov, albeit in steerage class—was William Gedritis, an American teenager from Chicago. Gedritis was followed shortly afterward by his friend and co-worker in Russia, the fugitive American trade unionist Fred Beal, who was escaping the Soviet Union under a false identity. Sent by the Communist Party to work with the American emigrants at the Kharkov tractor plant, Beal had seen firsthand the foreigners of Kharkov under siege from Ukrainians desperate for food. The Americans, in particular, were known to be generous, and the locals knocked on their doors to beg for scraps, or fought one another for the privilege of raking through the Americans’ garbage. The foreigners’ food stores were protected by armed guards, but the starving populace still attempted to break into them at night. In the autumn of 1932, seeking a respite from the grinding desperation of city life, Fred Beal had taken an unsupervised trip out into the Ukrainian countryside. Walking through fields he stumbled upon fresh graves marked with crosses, and unburied bodies decomposing into the earth. As he continued walking, he noticed the starving Ukrainian peasants running away from him, evidently mistaking him for the GPU.

Around six months later, in the spring of 1933, Beal had made a second trip, this time to a Ukrainian collective farm, near the village of Chekhuyev, and walked several miles east. Here the atmosphere was thick with the cloying smell of death, hunger, and despair. By the side of the road, the Massachusetts-born trade unionist came across a dead horse still harnessed to its wagon, and a dead man holding its reins in his hands. Walking into an empty village, Beal looked into a peasant hut and saw a dead man still sitting by a stove: “His back was against the wall, he was rigid and staring straight at us with his faraway dead eyes.” On one village door someone had written: GOD BLESS THOSE WHO ENTER HERE, MAY THEY NEVER SUFFER AS WE HAVE. Inside the house, two men and a child lay dead beside the family icon. On his return to America, for all his radical contacts, Fred Beal could find only one newspaper willing to print his account of the famine that had claimed an estimated five million lives. The socialist
Jewish Daily Forward
of New York published his testimony in Yiddish.
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DURING THE BUILDUP to the U.S.-Soviet recognition agreement, as the State Department officials busied themselves in Washington, they became aware of the pressing need to protect the American citizens who had already left to work in the USSR. Loy Henderson—soon to become the first secretary at the Moscow embassy—later recalled how reports had been gathered as early as 1932 of the sudden and mysterious disappearance of American nationals in Russia. According to Henderson, some of the missing Americans had served sentences in Siberia and been allowed to leave; but others remained unaccounted for, even as Litvinov was in discussions with Roosevelt at the White House.
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The day before their agreement was signed, Franklin Roosevelt exchanged a series of official letters with the Soviet foreign minister. With a cigarette burning in its ebony holder, tilted up at a jaunty angle, and an ever-present smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, America’s great optimist began:

The letter continued, listing the presidential expectation of the rights of American citizens living in Russia:

 
 
Perhaps Maxim Litvinov smiled when he read these words, and naturally he agreed wholeheartedly to every one of Roosevelt’s demands, knowing as he did that the Soviet judicial process tended to conclude in only the swiftest extraction of confessions. The GPU, they said in Russia, “could force the stones to talk.”
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At the official ceremony held at the White House on November 17, 1933, the United States recognized the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And in the subsequent press conference, President Roosevelt publicly reiterated to the two hundred gathered news reporters the guarantees he had gained for the protection of the American citizens living in the USSR. Even at the time, George Kennan, a young Russian speaker at the State Department who would soon arrive in Moscow, noted that the provisions of the agreement were inadequate. Among its many oversights, an American consul was not specifically entitled to visit with an American prisoner alone without the presence of the Soviet secret police. But in spite of his warnings urging more stringent safeguards, such flaws had been left unchanged in the final draft.
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The president had sought to convey the impression of vigilance when, in reality, the safeguards would prove unenforceable—and in the end they were unenforced.

AFTERWARD, AT THE celebratory banquet at the Waldorf Astoria, when Walter Duranty’s name was announced, in the words of
The New Yorker
correspondent, “the only really prolonged pandemonium was evoked . . . One got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.”
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In this crowd there was only passionate agreement with Duranty’s confidence in the new era of diplomatic friendship and cooperation between the United States and Soviet Russia. The American guests stood and cheered the so-called King of Reporters, who told them that the methods of terror no longer existed in the modern USSR.
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Of course, every one of the American reporters in Moscow knew otherwise. Eugene Lyons had visited a Moscow theater where the Russian comedian Vladimir Khenkin was performing his famous monologue.
“One night,”
Khenkin said,
“I heard a vigorous knock at the door. So I took my little suitcase and went to open the door . . .”
The Russian audience roared with laughter in a sudden release of nervous energy and mutual recognition of their fear. They understood very well that the “former” people were disappearing, and realized immediately that the “little suitcase” was the symbol of their departure. People had already begun packing these little suitcases in expectation, filling them with a change of clothes, something to stay warm, something to eat perhaps on the long journey to God knows where.
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In retrospect, the clues were all around them even then, if only they had the eyes to see and the sense to understand their significance. Adorning the walls of Soviet buildings in the early 1930s was one particularly uncanny propaganda poster. The image showed a large open eye watching over a work camp, above the slogan GPU—THE UNBLINKING EYE OF THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP.
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After several years in Russia, Eugene Lyons had become attuned to the low-frequency hum of the GPU, the soft burr of executions announced daily on Soviet radio and in the newspapers. His was a slow-dawning comprehension of an approaching catastrophe. In the morning, Lyons would count out the death sentences handed out to the so-called enemies of Progress—the reactionary amalgam of wreckers, saboteurs, aristocrats, priests, businessmen, former White Army officers—the list was endless.
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At night, stumbling back from their parties more often than not the worse for wear, the American reporters had begun to notice strange new vehicles driving through the empty streets of Moscow that looked like moving vans from back home, except they had ventilation holes cut into their roofs. Late one night on his way home, Lyons had rung the bell of his courtyard gate and woken the concierge, who was dozing. “I thought it was the wagon again,” the sleepy-eyed man complained. “Almost every night they come for somebody.”
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