The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (12 page)

The music may have accounted for Stalin’s evident good humor that night, as well as his open admiration for Roosevelt, and his assurances to Bullitt that he could see him “any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once.” As they left the mansion in the early hours, Stalin stopped the ambassador to ask, “Is there anything at all in the Soviet Union that you want? Anything?” The quick-thinking Philadelphian immediately requested seventeen acres of the Lenin Hills overlooking the Moskva River as the site for the construction of the first American embassy in the USSR in the style of Monticello. “You shall have it,” Stalin answered and, brushing aside Bullitt’s outstretched hand, took his head between his hands and kissed him. To the president, William Bullitt wrote, “I swallowed my astonishment, and, when he turned up his face for a return kiss, I delivered it.”
¹⁶

Ambassador Bullitt never lost his vision of a Monticello in Moscow, which, he once quipped, would have a quotation from Thomas Jefferson over the entrance: GOD FORBID THAT WE SHOULD LIVE FOR TWENTY YEARS WITHOUT A REVOLUTION.
¹⁷
He even obtained the necessary $1.2 million appropriation, which caused controversy in Congress but was justified on the grounds of the expected “Red trade offers.”
¹⁸
But Stalin never had any intention of giving up such valuable land in the center of Moscow, so the money was never used and Bullitt’s kiss was returned in vain. Had he only thought of it, the American ambassador might have asked instead for the release of the “captive Americans” seeking exit visas from the USSR—a gift far easier to extract from the drunken Soviet dictator than seventeen acres of prime Moscow real estate. But he did not, and if there were a few more opportunities to make such a request, they would all be squandered with the profligate expectation that such mistakes could later be corrected.

The new ambassador did, however, gain permission to import the first privately owned airplane into Soviet Russia, along with carte blanche to fly “wherever he wanted.” He also dispensed with the services of a chauffeur and took to driving his own sports roadster around the streets of Moscow. According to his secretary, Charlie Thayer, the handsome ambassador became very popular
“among the great mass because of his wonderful personality in crowds, his democratic leanings and his dashing ways . . . Often on the streets the urchins who know the car shout at him as he goes by ‘Your

health Comrade Bullitt’ which pleases him immensely.”
¹⁹
Even the news that Ambassador Bullitt had crashed his plane in a field outside Leningrad only added to his charisma. The plane had landed upside down and was chased after by Soviet officials expecting to prise out the body of a dead ambassador from the wreckage. Brushing himself down, William Bullitt climbed out of the airship completely unscathed “and received them as if we were quite in the habit of landing upside down.”
²⁰

In the autumn, Ambassador Bullitt escorted his ten-year-old daughter, Anne, to the Moscow Children’s Theater. Visiting Moscow from her boarding school in Europe, Anne Bullitt was a pretty little girl, with her mother Louise Bryant’s dark hair and her father’s calm gaze of self-possession. Together they met the theater’s founder and director, Natalya Satz, and enjoyed a performance of
The Negress and the Monkey,
a moral tale of an African woman searching for her beloved pet monkey kidnapped by a party of capitalist big-game hunters. The play, Natalya Satz explained, promoted “active sympathy for oppressed folks of far-off lands who, though their skins may be different, are human beings, experiencing the joys and sorrows of human beings.” Anne Bullitt then happily posed for a publicity photograph for Miss Satz and her new theater, while her father expressed his approval to the press: “Every time I visit the Children’s Theater I am more impressed by the profound understanding that Miss Satz possesses not only of the art of the theatre but also of the nature of children.”
²¹

In a letter, President Roosevelt had suggested to Bullitt that “it seems to me highly desirable that an effort should be made to provide the embassy and consular staffs with a certain amount of American recreation.”
²²
Pursuing the president’s idea, the ambassador wrote to A. G. Spalding and Bros. of New York, requesting the delivery of sports equipment to Moscow: a dozen baseballs, six bats, one catcher’s mask, two catcher’s mitts, sixteen gloves, one body protector, one set of bases, home plates, and shoes and uniforms for four teams.
²³
The handsome Bullitt easily charmed Betty Glan, the director of Gorky Park, into providing the American embassy with its very own baseball diamond in the park’s green acres.
²⁴
And so, with the president’s blessing, baseball in the Soviet Union took a further fragile hold, as the diplomats, just like the American emigrants before them, attempted to play their national sport and feel a little less sick for the home they had left behind.

The newness was scuffed off the Spalding baseball gear at the first embassy ball game, held on the Fourth of July, 1934. Unsurprisingly, the team of diplomats soundly thrashed the newspaper reporters, whose taste for late nights seen through empty vodka glasses was reflected in their athletic performance. The reporters lost 21-3, with Bullitt himself driving home the first run. “The Ambassador,” reported Harold Denny in
The New York Times,
“had a perfect batting average with five hits in five times at bat, and he actually made a double play unassisted. It was that kind of a game.” That night at Spaso House, the ambassador hosted a Fourth of July party for a few hundred American guests, with a Soviet jazz orchestra hired to belt out a welcoming rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Unfortunately the Russian musicians had borrowed their score from a phonograph disk on which several variations of the American national anthem were recorded. Bewildered by this unfamiliar degree of choice, they had naturally preferred the jazz version as the most authentically American. With hundreds of guests standing to attention, the Soviet orchestra blared out “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “saxophones crooning and an occasional bewildering ‘Hey nonny nonny and hotcha cha.’”
²⁵

The diplomatic baseball played in the Moscow summer evenings was captured on film by the visiting American documentary filmmaker Julian Bryan. Miraculously his rushes from Gorky Park survived, and the black-and-white images brought to life a game watched by crowds of small boys as the athletic figure of William Bullitt jogs up to the pitcher’s mound smiling and wearing a big white hat and gray flannel trousers. The ambassador pitches fairly fast, winding up and firing the ball down to a catcher standing with the proper protection behind home plate, while languid American women sip champagne and look on from deck chairs at the side of the field. This was the embassy crowd at play, quite literally a different league from the hard-edged competition of the American emigrants. Later on, the ambassador steps up to bat and strikes out as the spluttering film jump-cuts into another sequence, in which Bullitt attempts to teach some Russian boys and girls to hit and catch. They swipe and miss, learning that it is very easy to miss but so satisfying when the bat connects and the ball flies away into the air. It is a warm summer day; people are sipping their cocktails as the baseball equipment is stacked up for a photograph, the bats in a pyramid, the protector and the face mask at the front. Young men and women grin at the camera as a baseball is presented to a girl with smiles and handshakes.
²⁶

Since all forms of photography in the Soviet Union were subject to draconian censorship and interminable delay, Julian Bryan’s film left the country in the diplomatic bag to be edited and screened in American cinemas as part of
The March of Time
newsreel. On August 29, 1934, President Roosevelt wrote a congratulatory letter to Bullitt:
“It is grand about . . . the baseball. By the way, as an expert I want to compliment you again on your excellent Russian in that picture. All you need to do now is to swallow some lubricant just before starting to speak. It will give you the necessary speed-up!”
²⁷

Of course, there were a few mocking articles in the American press. John Lardner, in his column “From the Press Box,” wrote,

 
What the mockers never knew was that the clubs already existed, although the American emigrants’ fledgling baseball league and the diplomatic games belonged to two separate worlds. The Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club was formed from American electricians, steam fitters, linotype operators, machinists, and truck drivers, who played baseball to a level comparable with the average “industrial league” in the States, with a few of their players even described as having “semi-professional and professional experience.”
²⁹
It was possible that an occasional young American such as Arnold Preedin or Thomas Sgovio might have dropped in to play a game with the diplomatic corps. But it was equally true that the sons of radical metalworkers and machinists were unlikely to mix easily with their State Department peers, who were predominantly wealthy and Ivy League educated. Other than their nationality, they had little else in common. It was simply a case of money and class, and the separation both bring: twin social forms that applied just as distinctly in Moscow as any city back home.

 
 
AS IF TO highlight this very difference, the following year William Bullitt hosted an embassy ball themed on the “Arrival of Spring,” its size and sheer extravagance so typical of his character. For one night in April 1935, the ballroom of Spaso House was decorated in a color scheme of green, white, and gold—with green trees, white tulips, white goats with gilded horns, and white roosters in gold and glass cages. Since Moscow was still blanketed in snow, Charlie Thayer had telegraphed south to Odessa for birch trees to be flown up and placed under sun lamps, ready to burst into leaf. Lambs were ordered from a collective farm, but the Americans received sheep instead which had to be shampooed to rid them of their overpowering smell, only to be replaced by kid goats anyway. The director of Moscow Zoo agreed to loan the crazed Americans a bear cub, and took to calling up his co-conspirator, Irena Wiley, whenever a new animal was born: “Do you need a giraffe, a wolf, a baby llama?” Nothing was beyond the imagination of these Americans, if the zoo director took his cue from Mrs. Wiley’s idea to have the ballroom floor glassed over and the space filled with water and brightly colored tropical fish. It would make a sensational aquarium on which the ambassador’s guests could dance their hot American jazz.

Either practicality or an understandable uncertainty over Soviet glass manufacture spared the tropical fish, but not the rest of the zoo’s menagerie. As Ambassador Bullitt greeted his guests from the top of the stairs of Spaso House, the gilded bear cubs, kid goats, and cockerels encircled the floodlit ballroom. Around them a consignment of blooming white tulips, flown in from abroad, was made to sway in the breeze by means of a concealed electric fan. While imported champagne and delicacies were laid on to satisfy the tastes of the invited guests, whose social hierarchy ranked from Max Litvinov, the tubby Soviet foreign minister bursting out of his white tie and tails, all the way down to Mikhail Bulgakov, the penurious writer whose wife had nervously worried about what they might wear to the grand American ball. In the event, the guests’ costumes were hardly noticed amid the slides of flowers projected onto the ballroom walls and the vast nets glinting with gold powder that had been stretched across the ceiling from four marble pillars, creating a vast aviary for hundreds of chattering greenfinches on loan from Moscow Zoo.

Naturally the animals caused a sensation. The Soviet general Aleksandr Yegorov picked up a bear cub in his arms, only to have the bear redecorate his uniform. Yegorov left, cursing, but returned an hour later, newly resplendent, and stayed until dawn. Amid the laughter, another Red Army general, Semyon Budenny, folded his arms across his chest and started to dance Cossack style, his long waxed mustache glinting under the lights, while Ivy Litvinov, the wife of the foreign minister, clutched one of the kid goats to her chest, and Karl Radek, the editor of
Izvestiya,
attempted to pour champagne into the bear cub’s milk bottle. Amid the lights and general commotion, no one noticed that in the aviary above them the greenfinches were dying. When the jazz orchestra burst into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the birds had flown into a “heart-breaking” panic, crashing into the golden nets and getting tangled in their mesh. The fortunate few who managed to escape were trapped in the house for days.
³⁰

Quietly observing this celebration of American bravura, Mikhail Bulgakov would borrow a host of details for his novel
The Master and
Margarita,
whose scene from “Satan’s Ball” was bewitchingly similar to the real-life American affair down to the “green tailed parrots and white tulips” and an “unbearably loud jazz band.” Even one of Bullitt’s guests, Baron Boris Steiger, the unofficial liaison officer between the diplomatic community and the NKVD, became recast by Bulgakov as “Baron Meigel, employee of the Spectacles Commission in charge of acquainting foreigners with places of interest in the capital.” Mikhail Bulgakov would write his masterpiece during the height of the Terror over the next three years. But the novel’s principal theme of the devil’s reappearance in modern-day Moscow meant that it could never be published in Russia while Stalin was still alive. The analogy was far too blatant.
³¹