The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (14 page)

Two days later, on the afternoon of December 3, Elbridge Durbrow invited the Soviet vice president of Intourist, George Andreytchine, into his apartment above the embassy to talk with Loy Henderson and John Wiley. Andreytchine appeared extremely distressed as he attempted to explain that the death of Kirov was an act of terror that
“could trigger acts of repression on the part of the Soviet regime that would make even the collectivization campaign of 1930 look mild.”
As an insider, George Andreytchine had the clearest understanding of the mechanics of Stalin’s power.
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His prediction proved correct, and he himself was one of those about to be arrested. From this point onward, the disappearances within Soviet society became ever more noticeable and, by their very abruptness, so much harder to conceal. At an American embassy bridge party, Irena Wiley’s partner, the Soviet diplomatic chief of protocol Florinski, was called to the telephone. He returned to their table smiling with the news that he would have to leave for just a few minutes but would return shortly, and would they please wait for him?
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Florinski never returned to finish his hand.

The only elliptical explanation for the disappearances was in a film playing in Moscow cinemas during the winter of 1936. The Hollywood feature
The Invisible Man,
based on the novel by H. G. Wells, had been dubbed into Russian and was advertised in the Soviet press:
“One stormy night an unknown, uncanny man, his eyes completely hidden by enormous black glasses, enters a rural English inn. The stranger removes his hat, then his glasses—and his
head disappears completely then his hands and feet, until nothing but terrifying emptiness remains where he has been standing . . .
”
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THE SOVIET UNION no longer teetered on the brink. The revolutionary state had already fallen into the abyss, pushed by the ministrations of the force whose name could not be mentioned. Above all else, the NKVD commanded fear, since their power over every citizen was beyond all justification. The time to leave Russia had long passed. Now the only hope for protection lay in obscurity, to hide far from people and abandon any position of responsibility or town of any size. The most astute unaccountably walked away from careers as industrial managers to become bricklayers, or abandoned their surgical duties to tend horses on a collective farm. Those who had read the signs in time slipped away to reappear, if they were lucky, among the community of Russian exiles in Paris or Nice. It was a time, in the words of the poet Alexander Blok, to be “quieter than water, lower than grass.” But by 1937, the Soviet borders were sealed tight. All opportunities for flight were exhausted, and what once was impending had now arrived.

Who in Soviet Russia dared speak out? Hardly a soul when the consequence was not a dissident’s imprisonment but immediate execution. Besides which, no medium for protest existed outside the state’s control. Among Russia’s intellectuals the clear-sighted had long recognized the murderous capacity of the Revolution. The father of modern psychology, Ivan Pavlov, was eighty-five years old on December 21, 1934. His experiments in behaviorism had earned him the Nobel Prize, and his international scientific reputation made him virtually untouchable. Following the mass arrests in Leningrad, Pavlov had written an angry letter to the USSR Council of People’s Commissars:
“You believe in vain in the all-world revolution . . . You disperse not revolution, but fascism with great success throughout the world . . . Fascism did not exist before your revolution . . . You are terror and violence . . . We are living now in the atmosphere of terror and violence . . . Am I alone in thinking and feeling this way? Have pity on the Motherland and us.”
When Ivan Pavlov died two years later, the NKVD had collected five volumes of informers’ denunciations against the figurehead of Soviet science.
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Russia’s only other living Nobel winner, Ivan Bunin, had collected the 1933 prize for literature in Stockholm as a stateless exile. Like Pavlov, Bunin had been aware of the violence of the Revolution from the very beginning. In March 1918, he asked a telephone operator to put him through to a literary magazine and instead was accidentally connected to a conversation within the Kremlin: “I have fifteen officers and Lieutenant Kaledin. What should I do with them?” The voice on the end of the line did not hesitate: “Shoot them right away.”
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Later Bunin received an order requiring the registration of “all bourgeois,” which prompted the question in his diary: “How is one to understand this?” His suspicions that their registration was the prelude to execution proved entirely correct. Fortunately Bunin managed to flee Russia into exile and saved his life. In his private diary he wrote:
“The ‘Great Russian Revolution’ is a thousand times more bestial, filthy and stupid than the vile original which it claims to copy because it exceeds—step by step, item for item, and in a horribly shameless and explicit way—the bloody melodrama that had played itself out in France . . .”
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The events of 1937 would transform his words into understatement.

In March 1937, Joseph Stalin made a speech to the Central Committee that was published across the Soviet Union, and signaled a further escalation of the Terror:

 
It was as if an angel of death had descended upon Russia, and the sound of its beating wings grew louder and louder as the months wore on. Only, this nocturnal visitor wore the uniform of the NKVD and, far from being one single entity, had arrived as an army of one third of a million. There was a saying in Moscow at the time: “Thieves, prostitutes and the NKVD work mainly at night.” The Russians learned very quickly that the peak calling hours for Stalin’s secret police were between one and five in the morning, when the “ravens,” the prison vans, began scouring the streets for “enemies of the people,” taking with them their families, their friends, and even simple acquaintances seized for “prophylactic purposes.” Each arrest sparked a new series of detentions in a chain reaction that rapidly developed a momentum of its own. So many people were being arrested that the black vans were painted with signs advertising “Bread” or “Meat” or even “Drink Soviet Champagne!” in a shallow effort not to alarm the frightened public.
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As the Terror picked up speed, to crack a joke, to show ironic hesitancy over state propaganda, or even to collect foreign stamps was enough to be judged an “enemy.” Mass indoctrination was broadcast from blaring loudspeakers put up on street corners. A simple mistake of a factory manager, the miscalculation of an engineer, a broadcaster’s choice of light-hearted music on the anniversary of Lenin’s death—all became evidence of an organized conspiracy of saboteurs operating in their midst. The Soviet public was encouraged to search for hidden fascist symbols and coded messages, and quickly found them disguised in seemingly innocent book illustrations or newspaper photographs. Denunciation boxes appeared in factories and on street corners, and were soon crammed to bursting with claims made against fellow citizens, the denouncers vainly believing that by accusing others they might somehow save themselves. In such a society, pure malice was given free rein. The secretary of Stalin’s henchman Lazar Kaganovich, for example, while typing out an arrest list, quietly added the name of her neighbor. When her neighbor was arrested, she moved into the apartment she had coveted.
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“Conciliators”—those citizens who advocated leniency toward the “enemies of the people”—were themselves arrested. “Failure to denounce” had become a crime, and there were provocateurs who made false statements just to report those who failed in their duty to the state. A fourteen-year-old boy who had informed on his peasant father for hoarding grain—and was then murdered by outraged neighbors—was turned into a Soviet national hero. “Pavlik Morozov” statues were commissioned for parks and squares across the Soviet Union, so many in fact, that the statue’s sculptor was killed in an accident caused by the state’s production demands. No one stopped to consider the irony, and who could believe the rumors that the fourteen-year-old informer had, in fact, been murdered by the NKVD, who executed thirty-seven of his village neighbors, including Morozov’s grandfather, grandmother, uncle, and cousin?
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Not only were Soviet schoolchildren expected to denounce the “enemies of the people,” they were also specifically instructed to inform on their parents, their teachers, and their friends. Young Pioneers, who accepted the new morality, eagerly embraced “socialist competitions,” with awards for those who could inform upon the greatest number of “enemies.” One homeless child of the 1930s, a waif named Voinov, remembered his teacher walking into their classroom one morning with a smile across her face. “Vasiliev is the pride of our school,” the teacher began. “He sets an example that should be followed. He’s only a boy, but he has proved that he is a responsible citizen of our country . . . With vigilance worthy of a real Bolshevik, Vasiliev has revealed and unmasked an enemy of the people. Of course, this is the duty of every Soviet citizen—you’re right. But Vasiliev did more. He has acted like a hero. He conquered family prejudices and denounced his own father!” Vasiliev sat in the classroom wearing a new suit, his reward for having reported seeing his father reading the banned works of Trotsky.
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Wise parents stopped talking when their children came home from school. When both parents were arrested, their children were sent to NKVD orphanages, where they learned the consequences of being the sons and daughters of “enemies of the people.” A future Soviet dissident, Yelena Bonner, remembered how her nine-year-old brother innocently accepted the guilt of their father, arrested in 1937. “Look what those enemies of the people are like,” he told his sister. “Some of them even pretend to be fathers.” Yelena Bonner’s father was shot, and her mother sent to the camps.
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Desperate to avoid the same fate, millions of Soviet citizens voted for death sentences in public demonstrations across the Soviet Union. The first generation of Bolsheviks responsible for the Revolution was almost entirely annihilated by Stalin. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who had led the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, was one of those given “the supreme measure of punishment.” Their executions removed the eyewitnesses of the origins of the Revolution, leaving a blank canvas upon which Stalin and his historians could paint any interpretation they desired. The recent past was erased and replaced with an alternate vision in which the primacy of Stalin emerged unchecked, shoulder to shoulder with Lenin throughout, directing the events of 1917. Any other interpretation—or even memory of the Revolution—became a secular heresy to be stamped out with ruthless and unyielding brutality. Thus, of the 1,966 people’s deputies of the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of “anti-Revolutionary crimes.” The so-called Congress of Victors had greeted Comrade Kirov’s speech with a little too much enthusiasm, thereby hastening both Kirov’s death and their own. And the execution of the Bolshevik cadres was merely the public face of a vast hidden realm of terror.
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During the summer of 1937, Stalin’s chief henchmen, Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Nikita Khrushchev, among others, were sent out to the provinces to oversee “the purge of the party and state apparatus.” Old slogans in the factories were replaced by stark warnings—“We shall destroy the enemies of the people, Comrades!”—and as the Soviet press and radio broadcast incessant reports of conspiracies against Stalin’s life, the NKVD adopted efficiency targets to speed their plan for arrests, confessions, and executions.
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In their eagerness to overfulfill their plan, the internal NKVD sections bickered with one another for promotion and reward. One department complained that another had preselected married men with children for interrogation who, as every agent knew, were the quickest to confess. The NKVD was expanding ever outward, recruiting and controlling an ever-larger network of informers, while the secret departments watched from within, and like a Russian doll, those departments had special sections to watch the watchers. These were the “special tasks” operatives, entrusted with hunting down the Russian agents and diplomats who had refused to come home from abroad. Assassination squads traveled across Europe and America to silence the defectors.
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IN MOSCOW a dwarflike apparatchik named Nikolai Yezhov had been promoted from the provinces and had risen rapidly to succeed the fallen commissar Henrikh Yagoda. Standing barely five feet tall, even when wearing the peaked cap of the NKVD, Yezhov scarcely came up to Stalin’s shoulder, and Stalin was himself a small man. Besides his stature, it was Yezhov’s eyes that caught people’s attention, “grey-green, fastening themselves upon his collocutor like gimlets, clever as the eyes of a cobra.”
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The gimlet-eyed Yezhov would visit Stalin at his Kremlin office or at “Dacha Number One,” outside Moscow. In Stalin’s official register of visitors, it was recorded that Yezhov spent several hours each day conferring with the Great Leader.
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