The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (13 page)

Like its fictional counterpart, the American ball continued through the night and was interrupted only at daybreak, when the gold-painted cockerels began to crow inside Spaso House. The animal noises were drowned out by the jazz band, which kept on playing relentlessly since none of the gathered guests showed the slightest desire to leave, dancing as if half-aware they would never have this chance again. It was nine o’clock in the morning before the last party lovers were shepherded away into their waiting limousines.

Rumors of Bullitt’s extravaganza quickly traveled around the world. One gossip column in the American press called it “the swellest party Moscow has seen since the Revolution.” The piece was spotted by the eagle-eyed Roosevelt, who had it clipped and sent in the diplomatic mail to his ambassador.
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LESS THAN A year after Ambassador Bullitt hosted the ball, the Terror had begun. He wrote to his friend R. Walton Moore, the assistant secretary of state:

During his brief tenure in Moscow, Bullitt’s Russian friends had already begun to disappear. Natalya Satz, the director of the Moscow Children’s Theater, had been arrested, as had Betty Glan, the director of Gorky Park. Satz was imprisoned as a “wife of a traitor to the motherland.” In her “corrective labor” camp, the Children’s Theater director fell ill with typhus and became so exhausted that, according to a fellow prisoner, she “resembled a puny little girl, though her head was gray.”
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Their disappearances rid William Bullitt of all trace of his romantic preconceptions of the Revolution. In his final dispatch to the State Department, dated April 20, 1936, the ambassador issued a frank warning:

 
At the State Department offices in Washington, Bullitt’s sudden hostility might well have seemed exaggerated. Unless witnessed personally, the scale of what was taking place in Russia was difficult to comprehend. In June 1936, on his way to the American diplomats’ rented dacha outside Moscow, Elbridge Durbrow watched a train of fifty cars “loaded down with prisoners, men, women and children together, coming out of Moscow.”
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No one knew who these people were or their destination, but the prison trains had been seen in operation for several years now by American witnesses from all over Russia. Some, such as the young American writer Ellery Walter, sensed their significance straightaway and took the trouble to report them: “I counted 13 trains, each with 2000 men and women and children bound for Siberia.”
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Others, such as the American engineer Bredo Berghoff, had chanced upon a prison train while searching for his trunk along a railroad yard. Through the narrow, steel-barred windows, Berghoff could see young men whose eyes stared back at him from the darkness.
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Packed with several thousand human beings, each train was destined to travel hundreds, and often thousands, of stifling kilometers to its hidden end point. The system of repression was kept secret, but it had grown so vast that there were continual gaps in the fabric of its concealment. The American witnesses had seen the suffering of those trapped within the carriages, and in an exchange of looks, their fearful eyes carried their own message.

William Bullitt was far from alone in realizing the truth of what was taking place around him. One of the American reporters, William Henry Chamberlin, left at the same time in the early summer of 1936.
“I went to Russia,”
Chamberlin later wrote,
“believing that the Soviet system might represent the most hopeful answer to the problems raised by the World War and the subsequent economic crisis. I left convinced that the absolutist Soviet state . . . is a power of darkness and of evil with few parallels in history . . . Murder is a habit, even more with states than with individuals.”
³⁹
Perhaps it was not accurate to say that the Terror had begun then. In truth it had been in existence for many years. But Bullitt’s departure did coincide with a vast expansion and
acceleration
of the process, as if what once had been mere habit had now been transformed into an overwhelming compulsion and an inexorable desire.

 
 
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Bullitt’s departure from Moscow, in October 1936, a small party of young American diplomats sat listening to a radio broadcast of the World Series. Late into the night, they gathered in the study of their absent ambassador to eat hot dogs and follow the sixth game of an all-New York contest between the Yankees and the Giants at the Polo Grounds on West 155th Street. The radio commentary over the airwaves to Moscow was uncannily clear that night: the diplomats could hear the ball as it was struck, the roar of the crowd from the bleachers, and the fizzing words of the announcer as he called out the names of Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, from six thousand miles away in New York. Every now and then, through the crackle and the pop, came a moment of crystal clarity—a New Yorker shouting, “Robber, robber! Kill the umpire! Fan him out!” or a salesman crying, “Peanuts, popcorn, chewing gum and candy.”
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It was unlikely that any of the “captive Americans” living in Russia had a radio capable of picking up the World Series. In any event, by October 1936, listening to a foreign-language radio station in Moscow would have given cause for suspicion among their neighbors in the communal apartments in which they lived. All trace of baseball’s fragile existence in the USSR was disappearing from the stage. A few practice games had been played earlier that summer, but there was an edginess about it all, as if the American players began to sense the danger of sticking their heads above the parapet of ideological conformity. “Where are the old baseball enthusiasts and why have they not been coming around to practice sessions?” a
Moscow Daily News
reporter asked in an article written that year. “Nothing has been heard in Moscow from cities such as Petrozavodsk, Gorky and Leningrad this season.”

The first baseball game of the Moscow season was played in July 1936, when the Red Stars beat the Hammer and Sickle team 4-3 in a game at the Lokomotiv Stadium. The Moscow team captain, Arnold Preedin, hit the only home run in the sixth inning, and Thomas Sgovio hit a triple in the seventh to lend strength to the batting lineup of the Foreign Workers’ team.
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But just one month later, in August 1936, the first of the great show trials opened in Moscow. At the trial of the “Trotskyite-Zinovyevite Terrorist Center,” the prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, jumped to his feet in a furious rage at the defendants, angrily demanding that “these rabid dogs must be shot to the last one.”
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And suddenly baseball in Soviet Russia seemed so evidently strange, so anomalous, so utterly divorced from the terrible events taking place all around them that it became a danger to its participants.

Even Gorky Park, for all its popularity and millions of visitors, had fallen uncannily silent. The atmosphere had puzzled the visiting American literary critic Edmund Wilson, who walked among these strangely silent crowds. When Wilson mentioned the silence, there was a long pause before his female Russian companion whispered an explanation in French:
“C’est que tout le monde a très peur.”
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Amid this general, ever-increasing fear, baseball stopped being discussed or reported in the press, and very soon was no longer played. The Soviet Union’s newest national sport simply vanished from the stage, the taint of its association with capitalism judged too overpowering for the harshness of a paranoid ideology. And the American baseball players also began to disappear one by one, their photographs fading into sepia—as if they had never been real human beings at all, just phantoms of a passing age. Baseball in Gorky Park had lasted just a few brief summers, which had come and gone so quickly. And very soon all trace of its existence was removed from life in Soviet Russia, and all that would remain were a few still photographs in black and white, and some long-forgotten newsreel buried in a dusty archive of the Library of Congress.

THERE WERE STILL a few English-language programs broadcast on Soviet radio for the American emigrants, but their propaganda was growing ever more hectoring:
“It must be remembered also that the radio hour is not only an opportunity for enjoyment and recreation, but can also be a powerful weapon in the greatest of all battles, the struggle for a classless socialist society.”
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At the radio center in Moscow, a few American contributors gamely discussed in English, “How shall we spend our holidays this summer? Shall we go to a Rest Home or Sanatorium? Or travel on our own? Shall we go to the North to the Arctic or to the South, the Caucasus or the Black Sea?”
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But their stilted conversations had developed an element of staged unreality, like the vast Stars and Stripes hauled up in front of the American embassy on Mokhovaya Street facing the Kremlin, with its implicit promise of guardianship over the lives of the American emigrants.
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The previous year, the American embassy had requested, through the pages of the
Moscow Daily News,
that all Americans in the USSR should come into the building to register their passports. A list, they said, was being compiled so that the diplomats might know their whereabouts and
“in order that protection might be extended in the event that such an occasion should arise.”
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In retrospect, it seems that the American diplomats, at least, were well aware of what was about to happen. By the summer of 1936, sufficient numbers of their friends and acquaintances had already disappeared. Loy Henderson, for one, observed the growing uneasiness among the Russian members of the staff within the building. In August, he found one employee “hunched over her typewriter sobbing.”
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It was not even three years since the U.S.-Soviet recognition agreement had been signed, when
Time
magazine wrote that “President Roosevelt cast the cloak of his popularity over Dictator Stalin.”
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In exchange for a long list of unfulfilled promises and the lure of a trade bonanza that never arrived, a moral legitimacy had been granted to Joseph Stalin that he would continue to flaunt through the very worst of the Terror. And through it all the Stars and Stripes would float in the breeze opposite the Kremlin, although Ambassador Bullitt had long since departed in disgust, and the diplomatic staff he left behind in Moscow had been “pared to the bone.”
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The Bolsheviks had once described the American radicals as
“poputshiki”—
“fellow travelers”—whose path coincided with theirs for a certain distance until the time came when they would have to part.
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And although, in theory, there was still an institution to protect the welfare of the American emigrants, in practice the Stars and Stripes on Mokhovaya Street, rather than being a source of their salvation, became instead the cause of their death.

8

The Terror, the Terror

Anonymous
¹
 
 

On December 1, 1934, in an empty corridor of a Leningrad office 
building, a waiting assassin stepped out and shot the party boss Sergei Kirov at point-blank range. Although Kirov had been Stalin’s personal friend, subsequent evidence pointed toward the premeditated assassination of a political rival. The day after the assassination, Stalin boarded a train to Leningrad, and “retaliatory” violence quickly followed in his wake. Kirov’s principal bodyguard was summoned to appear before Stalin, but arrived dead at an NKVD hospital, having been thrown from a moving truck. Stalin himself, meanwhile, interrogated the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, asking why he had killed Kirov. According to one witness,
“Nikolaev answered that he killed Comrade Kirov on the instruction of a person employed by the Cheka, and at this pointed to the men from the Cheka sitting in the room . . . ‘They forced me to do it.’ The NKVD agent then knocked Nikolaev to the floor with a blow to the head, and he was removed.”
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The assassin Nikolaev was tried and executed, and the NKVD officers in Leningrad were arrested and sent to the camps, where they would later be shot. In a subsequent show trial, the NKVD chief, Henrikh Yagoda, was charged with organizing Kirov’s murder as part of a “Trotskyite conspiracy.”
³
But in truth, the Kirov assassination was only ever a pretext for what was to come.

The night of Kirov’s murder, a reception was held at the American embassy, attended by the usual gathering of the Soviet elite. Irena Wiley was talking to Karl Radek, the editor of
Izvestiya,
when a Russian interrupted their conversation to whisper in Radek’s ear. On hearing the news, Irena watched the color drain from Radek’s face as he leaned against the wall in shock. Immediately Radek made his excuses and left, and within minutes every Russian at the party had disappeared without a word of goodbye. That night John and Irena Wiley were visited by their friend the diplomatic liaison officer Baron Boris Steiger. “Take it very seriously,” said Steiger, explaining the reason for the mass departure. Afterward Steiger revealed that every day “seven thousand” people were being arrested and “exiled” to the Arctic Circle or Central Asia.
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