The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (17 page)

During their vacation at an elite rest home on the Black Sea, the ten-year-old Paul Robeson, Jr., explained to his father how the parents of his Moscow school friends were being arrested. The children of the Bolshevik elite had learned to walk outside into the playground if they wanted to talk about their parents, for fear of their conversations being recorded. Paul Robeson, Jr., then recounted how he had stood with his friend Misha watching the return of the Soviet hero-explorers from their North Pole expedition. As they stood watching the propaganda parade, Misha explained that the light ash falling from the sky
“came from the crematoria in the cellars of prisoners where the firing squads were working overtime.”
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In the face of such revelations, it was unsurprising that the Robesons’ Black Sea holiday was marred by arguments. Oliver Golden’s daughter remembered how her father and Paul Robeson had been locked in “heated political discussions.”
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Given that both were dedicated communists, it was uncertain who was defending the status quo, but it transpired also that Robeson had been unable to find any of the Russian friends he had made on his earlier visits. Returning to Moscow in August 1937, Robeson asked to meet Ignaty Kazakov, a doctor and Shakespeare scholar who had made friends with his young son. Although warned that Kazakov had already disappeared, Robeson insisted, and quite unexpectedly the Russian doctor telephoned to invite him to lunch at the Metropol Hotel. Arriving with two “translators” as his escort, Kazakov sat down for a two-hour lunch as if nothing was wrong. Only at the end of the meal, when the doctor announced that he must return to his medical institute, did he manage to whisper “Thank you” into Robeson’s ear.

Six months later, Ignaty Kazakov’s name appeared as one of the defendants at a Moscow show trial, accused of having used his medical clinic for political assassinations. His guilty verdict and swift execution prompted an argument between Paul Robeson and his young son, who had since been moved to the Soviet diplomatic school in London. With a child’s instinct for justice, Paul Robeson, Jr., understood very well that the charges had been fabricated, and he accused his father of inaction: “We all knew he was innocent, and you never said a word.” In his memoirs, Paul Robeson, Jr., wrote that a few days later his father had explained how
“sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.”
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After their vacation, Oliver Golden returned to the “House of the Foreign Specialists” in Tashkent, only to discover his neighbor’s apartment door was sealed with red wax. Concerned friends told Golden that while he was away the NKVD had arrived in the night to arrest him. As a dutiful communist, the American cotton specialist immediately took himself down to the NKVD headquarters. “You came for me,” he said boldly. “Arrest me if you think I’m an enemy of the people.” Then something remarkable happened. The NKVD officer in charge advised him to calm down: “Comrade Golden, don’t get so upset. We’ve already fulfilled the plans of arrests for your area. Go home and work in peace.” And by this stroke of good fortune, Oliver Golden lived another three years. According to his granddaughter, he died of heart and kidney failure in the land of his dreams.
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LOVETT FORT-WHITEMAN disappeared soon after applying for permission to return home to the United States. His exit visa was refused, and the former teacher at the Anglo-American school, born in Dallas and educated at the Tuskegee Institute, was denounced as a “counterrevolutionary” by a lawyer from the Communist Party of the United States. Three weeks later Fort-Whiteman was arrested and sent to a “corrective labor camp” in Kazakhstan. In Moscow, Robert Robinson heard more news from a Russian friend who had returned from the same camp. According to this witness, Fort-Whiteman had been severely beaten because he had failed to meet his work quota. In the camp, he had died of starvation, a broken man whose teeth had been knocked out.
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It was difficult to comprehend how such a robust figure, so physically strong and an avid boxer, could have died so quickly. But the truth of the sighting was confirmed when Fort-Whiteman’s NKVD file was discovered in the late 1990s. The NKVD recorded the date of his death as January 13, 1939, at the age of forty-four. The fingerprints taken from his corpse were still attached to the back of his file.
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Sympathy for the Soviet cause was no guarantee of safety; instead it attracted suspicion. The Reverend Julius Hecker, for example, was a Methodist academic from Columbia University who published several books defending communism before moving to Russia with his American wife and three young daughters to teach philosophy at Moscow University. According to the American embassy, in earlier summers, when Moscow was crowded with tourists, Julius Hecker had made “speeches almost daily to the visitors on the subject of religious tolerance in the Soviet Union.”
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His daughter Marcella Hecker remembered the day the NKVD came to take her father away. “He was asleep in a little room which I occupy now,” she said. “Although my mother opened the door very, very quietly, Father must have had some terrible dream, because he woke up at once with a jerk, and immediately understood everything. They bore him away and we never saw him again.” Julius Hecker’s wife remained convinced that her husband’s arrest was just a terrible mistake, and she waited long years for his return.
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She never learned that just two and half months after his arrest, on April 28, 1938, Professor Julius Hecker confessed to being an American spy who had written his books merely to draw attention away from his espionage. Two hours after making this false confession, he was shot.
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There were those—the majority—who waited in the night like Julius Hecker. Only a very few sought sanctuary with friends, hidden away in attics like Soviet Anne Franks. But in the communal apartments of overcrowded cities, it was almost impossible to hide. Some fugitives moved cities and kept on running, hoping to buy false papers and new identities, and keep one step ahead of the overburdened NKVD. There were always more than enough “enemies” to arrest who remained in their apartments, paralyzed by fear. But it was difficult to flee if you were a foreigner, let alone an American, whose particular Russian accent automatically attracted attention, and thus suspicion. And those who left the cities to live in remote villages, or who arrived at a new construction site in search of work, only came under the scrutiny of fresh pairs of NKVD eyes eagerly scanning residence lists in search of names.
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In 1937, Victor Herman, “the Lindbergh of Russia,” was expelled from his elite parachute academy outside Moscow, stung by the taunts of the school’s political commissar: “You are an enemy, Herman! Your kind does not belong here! All enemies are being weeded out!”
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Now in his early twenties, when Victor took the train back to the Ford auto factory in Gorky, he discovered the once-lively American village had become deserted. Recognizing two Americans in the cafeteria, he was shocked to realize they were too fearful to say hello. When he questioned his father, Sam Herman instinctively looked over his shoulder before whispering,
“Leave here with your sister . . . Take Miriam and return to Moscow. You are to go straight to the American consulate there. You will tell them you wish to go home immediately. I want you to promise me, Vickie, you will not leave that building until they send you and your sister home.”
Later his father told him that of the hundreds of Americans who had come to work at the auto factory in Gorky, only twenty were left.
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The American workers had been disappearing from the auto factory for some time. Joe Grondon, the former Ford employee and trade unionist made briefly famous by
Pravda
as “The Man Who Abandoned Detroit,” had been arrested at home in the American village some two years earlier. From State Department records we know that his son, Benjamin Grondon, reported his father’s disappearance to the American embassy on May 6, 1935.
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What happened to Benjamin Grondon, who had played as an outfielder on the Gorky baseball team, we do not know. But during the intervening period, virtually every Russian engineer who had any connection with Detroit was arrested. An anonymous American engineer who visited the Gorky car plant during the Terror discovered that the production cost of each Soviet automobile was around “twenty thousand dollars.” The latest engineers were all “high school graduates,” with virtually no one aged over thirty left working in the factory.
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On October 7, 1937,
Pravda
ran an article accusing the Gorky automobile plant of “shameful” work. The machinery installed by “wreckers” had become worn out due to “carelessness and insufficient care”; while expensive technology bought from abroad had not been used at all for “fear that if improperly installed the machinery might not function.” If it was obvious that the Soviet Detroit was nowhere near as productive as Henry Ford’s, then clearly “wreckers” must be to blame. Valery Mezhlauk and Saul Bron— the two Russians photographed on either side of Henry Ford after signing the Amtorg contract in Dearborn—were both arrested and summarily executed. Sergei Dyakanov, the director of the Gorky plant whose photograph Henry Ford had once generously signed “from the American Ford to the Soviet Ford,” was arrested and shot in the Lubyanka on the day of his trial. In Dyakanov’s NKVD file, his interrogator, Lieutenant Shevilyov, noted that he had carried out the sentence personally.
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In such circumstances, any promise Victor Herman made to his father in the American village was impossible to keep. Those who tried to escape Gorky could not get far. The NKVD were everywhere, constantly checking identity papers, and someone like Victor never really stood a chance. He was arrested on July 20, 1938, bundled into the back of a Ford Model A. Like the others, the bewildered Victor Herman attempted to protest his innocence:
“I am an American! You will pay for this! This is kidnapping! You cannot do this to an American!”
But the NKVD lieutenant remained impassive, watching his victim with detached bemusement before nodding toward some pedestrians staring at them from the street:
“Look, Lindbergh of Russia, the people are applauding.”
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In Russia, the Americans were carried away in the very cars they had left Detroit to build. For Henry Ford’s contract, signed in Dearborn, had supplied the NKVD with their entire fleet, missing only the uniformed drivers and the blue stars on the windscreens.
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THROUGH THE COURSE of 1937 and 1938, Americans such as Victor Herman began to disappear, one after another. Many of the arrested were shot not long afterward, often with their fathers, who had brought them to the USSR. After their denunciation, the baseball players from Boston, Arthur Abolin and his younger brother, Carl, were both arrested and executed with their father, James Abolin, in 1938. Their mother died later, in a concentration camp. Only their younger sister, Lucy Abolin—the precocious drama student of the Anglo-American school—was left untouched.
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Other records emerged that revealed how certain victims were forced to testify against their family members in so-called “confrontation interrogations.” In March 1938, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker named Victor Tyskewicz-Voskov confessed that his mother had been recruited into “espionage in favor of Germany.” Under extreme duress, Tyskewicz-Voskov denounced his mother to his interrogator as a “Trotskyist, inclined antagonistically against the Soviet power.” The NKVD officers then placed his forty-three-year-old mother in the same interrogation room while her son repeated his denunciation in front of her. His mother bravely confessed her own guilt while steadfastly refusing to implicate her son. They were both executed on June 7, 1938.
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In the killing fields of Butovo, twenty-seven kilometers south of Moscow, the depressions in the ground later revealed themselves in aerial photography. The mass graves ran for up to half a kilometer at a time. Nor was there anything particularly unique about Butovo. Within the Soviet Union such “zones” were differentiated only by their location. Orders sent from Moscow were applied uniformly throughout the USSR, from the Polish border across one sixth of the surface of the earth to the Pacific Ocean. If the NKVD were instructed that 250,000 people should fill one of the eight mass graves in Byelorussia, then a similar ratio was applied to every other Soviet republic, and every regional district of Russia, too, including the Moscow region itself. At Butovo, exactly the same procedure was followed by the NKVD brigades as elsewhere.
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In the 1990s, a Russian society for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims located within the files of KGB pensioners a “Comrade S.,” the first
komendant
of an NKVD execution squad who was willing to be interviewed for the historical record. Comrade S. happily discussed his
spetzrabota
— the so-called special work—which he had performed with his team of a dozen executioners during the
Yezhovchina,
the days of Yezhov. Comrade S. remembered how his unit had waited in a stone house on the edge of the killing fields while their prisoners’ files were checked. How they led their victims to the edge of the pit and held the standard-issue Nagan pistol to the back of their heads. How they pulled the trigger and watched the bodies crumple and fall into the hole in the earth. And then how they repeated the process over and again until, like every other Soviet worker, they had met their quota for the night’s work. At the end of their shift, Comrade S. and the dozen members of his squad would retire to their stone headquarters exhausted, to drink the liters of vodka specially allocated for the job at hand. Obviously their masters understood the traumatic effect the
spetzrabota
had on the minds of the executioners. The vodka salved their consciences as the dawn rose over Moscow, and a new day began for the city’s fear-filled inhabitants.
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