The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (16 page)

 
 
FEARFUL IN THE midst of the mass arrests, waiting anxiously for salvation, were the foreigners of the Soviet Union. Most bewildered of all were the Americans, coming as they did from a nation with no history of state terror. No longer the welcomed guests of the Revolution who arrived to help “build socialism,” the foreigners were now regarded as potential spies plotting its destruction. Officially, from Stalin himself, they had received the mark of Cain:

 
After such well-publicized pronouncements, all foreigners became a special target, with Moscow’s embassies recast as hostile outposts to be watched over with all the suspicion that a notoriously paranoid organization could devote. Orders were given that these “potential intelligence bases” of “enemy states” be placed under continuous observation. Every foreigner entering and leaving the embassy buildings who did not possess cast-iron diplomatic or journalistic credentials became subject to investigation.
⁴⁵

Aping their bosses in Moscow, the regional NKVD were, if anything, even fiercer in their witch hunts against the foreigners. The Krasnoyarsk NKVD chief, Sobolev, proclaimed enthusiastically,
“All these Poles, Koreans, Latvians, Germans etc should be beaten, these are all mercenary nations, subject to termination . . . All nations should be caught, forced to their knees, and exterminated like mad dogs.”
The term “mad dog” had become an essential element of Soviet lexicography, the choice of language reflecting a dehumanizing process that facilitated the destruction of their victims. Among the Polish community residing in the Soviet Union, 144,000 people were arrested, and of these 111,000 were executed. It beggared belief, but such was the power of the NKVD.
⁴⁶

All communication with foreigners became dangerous, and ordinary Russian citizens shrank away from them in fear. Propaganda posters depicted a Nazi spy choosing which mask to wear, the choice of labels communicating the hierarchy of suspicion: “Foreign specialist,” “Tourist,” “Writer,” and “Victim of Fascism.” Viewing such posters, the American emigrants must have realized they were suddenly very vulnerable as they waited, transfixed by the events taking place around them. For most, the Terror was impossible to understand; it was easier to believe in the guilt of the arrested than to contemplate the notion that the Soviet state was now intent upon their destruction. Some Americans found solace in the recently published “Stalin Constitution,” which guaranteed that
“the citizens of the USSR are ensured
inviolability of the person. No one may be subject to arrest except by decision of a court or with the sanction of a state prosecutor.”
But fate made a mockery of their hope, as the authors of Stalin’s so-called Bill of Rights were themselves arrested.
⁴⁷

The direst warning had stared them directly in the face. The year before, Nikolai Yezhov’s appointment as the people’s commissar for the NKVD had been announced with a banner headline in the
Moscow Daily News.
On the front page, his photograph had gazed out at the American readers. Picking up the newspaper that day, did they really believe Yezhov’s “grey-green gimlet eyes” would miss them?

9

Anna Akhmatova,
“To Death”
¹
 
 
 

With every passing week, Stalin’s portrait had multiplied. His gaze was there whichever way the Americans turned, a constant reminder of their powerlessness. Uncannily in an atheistic state, Stalin’s image had acquired a sacramental quality, demanding the very greatest reverence from his subjects. Nothing could be placed over it, the slightest fun could not be made of it, nor could it be even accidentally tarnished—not that any sane person would ever dream of committing such an offense. Most disturbing of all were the portraits of Stalin held aloft in crowds, emerging in successive waves of marching acolytes, watched over by the same face looking down in approval from surrounding buildings. At the Tushino air fête, a crowd of half a million spectators gathered under a slow procession of hot-air balloons carrying monumental fifty-by-thirty-foot photographs of Stalin and the Politburo, moving gently across the summer sky.
“Long Live the Brain, the Heart, the Strength of the Party and the Soviet peoples, our Beloved Leader and Teacher, Comrade Stalin!”
²

It was Stalin who personally instructed the NKVD to torture their prisoners to extract confessions, writing “Beat, beat!” next to his victims’ names. When Khrushchev visited Yezhov in his Central Committee office during the Terror, he noticed bloodstains on the front and cuffs of Yezhov’s shirt. Catching his gaze, Yezhov replied, “One might be proud of such spots, for it was the blood of the enemies of the Revolution.” By now, Stalin had nicknamed his favorite commissar “Ezhevichka” (“the little bramble”) and entrusted him with order No. 00447, to “put an end, once and for all” to anti-Soviet elements within society.
³

At the height of the Terror, Stalin promised:
“We shall annihilate every one of these enemies, even if he is an Old Bolshevik. We shall annihilate him and his relatives, his family. Anyone who in deed or in thought, yes, in thought, attacks the unity of the socialist state will be mercilessly crushed by us. We shall exterminate all enemies to the very last man, and also their families and relatives!”
⁴
Naturally there were those who privately speculated on the mental health of Stalin, this small man, rather thin and quite frail, whose jacket hung off him and whose face was pockmarked by smallpox scars and had grown deathly pale from his nocturnal schedule. They questioned whether Stalin had not descended into a psychopathic paranoia concealed by a functioning intelligence. A childhood friend, Ioseb Iremashvili, later wrote that
“undeserved terrible beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father himself. Since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there had arisen a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him. From his youth the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the goal toward which everything was aimed.”
⁵

There were many who believed Stalin was insane, such was the scale and senselessness of his wrath. The Dearborn negotiator Valery Mezhlauk wrote to his brother, who was organizing a Soviet exhibition in Paris, that Stalin was ill from “acute” paranoia. What other explanation could there be? To infer that Stalin was deliberately scything through every class of Soviet society to maintain an absolute and critical hold on power seemed either fantastical or diabolical in its cruelty. Such a conclusion went beyond the deductive logic of even a highly intelligent Bolshevik Party member such as Mezhlauk. To have reached this political conclusion would have required the realization of his own impending death, and that of his brother’s also.
⁶

Even by speculating on Stalin’s mental health, Mezhlauk was guilty of “thought crime,” a very real transgression in a state that demanded both the appearance and actuality of capitulation. The Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz later described the rationale of their guardians:
“The enemy, in a potential form, will always be there; the only friend will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 per cent. If he accepts only 99 per cent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for from that remaining 1 per cent a new church can rise.”
⁷
In the mind of Stalin, the killings had become a necessity for the entrenchment of power. And the “captured Americans”—although only a negligible fraction of a percentage of the population of the USSR—were as subject to the mechanics of Soviet power as any of those around them, perhaps even more so, since every American emigrant carried with them the threat of revelation to the outside world.

 
 
ARTHUR TALENT ARRIVED in Moscow in the 1920s as a seven-year-old child with his family from Boston. The shy boy was a gifted violinist who won a place at the prestigious Moscow Conservatory to study music. As a young man, Talent offered a room in his family’s apartment to John Goode, the brother-in-law of Paul Robeson, and received as a gift a brand-new suit from America. In the political atmosphere of the day, even such a simple exchange could condemn both parties. On January 28, 1938, Arthur Talent was arrested by the NKVD, and the young violinist vanished.

In the late 1990s, transcripts of his interrogation were released by the Russian security services. The yellowed sheets of paper in Arthur Talent’s NKVD file recorded his steadfast denial of the accusations thrown at him in the Lubyanka. His interrogation ended abruptly, only to be resumed thirty-eight days later, when Talent began a full “confession” to an NKVD agent named Salov. The methods used to change Talent’s mind were commonplace, the transcript failing to convey the mechanical cadences of an exhausted victim who prefers death over that which he has just endured: “You are arrested and accused of espionage activities in the USSR in favour of a foreign state. Do you plead guilty?” “Yes! I plead guilty of being involved in espionage in favour of Latvia. After thirty-eight days of denial, I have decided to tell the inquest the whole truth.”

Arthur Talent confessed that Paul Robeson’s wife, Eslanda, had brought him the American suit during a previous visit to Moscow, at the request of her brother, John Goode, who was staying at his apartment, which had become a “centre for foreign espionage.” Talent confirmed that John Goode was an “agent of a foreign state,” and the suit was proof of payment for his espionage. Pressed for more information and the names of his accomplices, Arthur Talent proceeded to denounce his friends involved in his “crimes,” including Jim Abolin and his two sons, who played on the Moscow Foreign Workers’ baseball team. A slip of paper inserted at the end of the file then revealed that Arthur Talent was then taken from his prison cell and driven to the countryside outside Moscow. At the execution grounds at Butovo on June 7, 1938, he was shot. He was twenty-one years old.
⁸

On May 10, 1936, Paul Robeson had given an interview to Ben Davis, Jr., of the
Sunday Worker
describing a visit he had made to the apartment of his brother-in-law John Goode:
“While in the Soviet Union I made it a point to visit some of the workers’ homes . . . and I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings, apartments, with nurseries containing the most modern equipment for their children. Besides they were still building. I certainly wish the workers in this country—and especially the Negroes in Harlem and the South—had such places to stay in. I visited the home of my brother-in-law, his apartment had plenty of light, fresh air and space. Believe me he is

very happy.”
John Goode was a mechanic and bus driver living in Moscow whose existence Robeson was careful to publicize.
⁹
What the American singer never mentioned in any interview was how he had helped to engineer Goode’s escape from Russia at the end of his concert tour. His brother-in-law fled with just one suitcase to add credence to their story that he was taking just a short vacation outside the USSR. And by means of this subterfuge, John Goode’s life was saved from the NKVD decree of February 19, 1938, ordering his arrest.
¹⁰
But if any of the young American baseball players of Moscow were hoping for similar intercession by Robeson on their behalf, they were to wait in vain. There is no record of any statement made by the honorary catcher of the Moscow Foreign Workers’ baseball team in support of his young American friends. Nor did Robeson make any attempt to denounce the Terror, which he knew was taking place within the Soviet Union. The most famous bass voice in world music had fallen unaccountably silent.

In February 1937, as the Stalin constitution was being ratified, Paul Robeson returned to Russia for a concert tour with the Moscow State Philharmonic. At a performance at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the audience suddenly stood and began to cheer furiously. Joseph Stalin was standing in a box on the right, smiling and applauding. Later Robeson described his feelings:
“I remember the tears began to quietly flow and I too smiled and waved.
Here was clearly a man who seemed to embrace all. So kindly—I can never forget that warm feeling of kindliness and also a feeling of sureness. Here was one who was wise and good—the world and especially the socialist world was fortunate indeed to have his daily guidance. I lifted high my son Pauli to wave to this world leader, and his leader.”
¹¹

That summer, Eslanda Robeson visited the American Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis at the Hotel Lux in Moscow. When she asked Dennis if they should keep Paul Robeson, Jr., at school in Moscow, his advice was straightforward: “If you do so, I urge that you make it publicly well-known, and be sure the practical arrangements are such that you can take him home whenever you wish.” Eugene Dennis was speaking from experience; he had been forced to leave his son behind in Moscow when he first left the USSR. Tim Dennis was eight years old and could not speak English at all—although both his parents were American—and when the couple left Moscow again, he was raised in a Soviet state orphanage.
¹²
Heeding Dennis’ advice, the Robesons took their son with them on a summer vacation with the family of Oliver Golden, a black American cotton specialist who had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1931 with his wife, Bertha, and settled in Tashkent. Oliver Golden spoke Russian with a Mississippi accent, and joked about returning home “when elephants roost in the trees.”