The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (18 page)

In the mornings at Butovo, the executioners heard the sound of the bulldozers covering over the mass graves, and the fresh graves being hollowed ready for the next night’s work. In their stone house they washed their hands and faces, removing the inevitable back-spray of blood, and doused themselves in cheap eau de cologne, once again provided by their masters, who seemed to have thought of everything and who understood that the smell of death clings to those who administer it. Although they were allocated leather aprons and gloves and hats to protect their uniforms from the spattered gore of blood and skull and brain, the men found it was impossible to stay clean.
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Judging from the undisturbed recollections of Comrade S., the NKVD guards remained convinced they were not murderers but righteous executioners sanctioned by their state. With prolonged ideological training, their moral sense became disguised and distorted by euphemism. The brigade was enforcing the “supreme penalty for social defence,” or administering the “nine-gram ration.” Words such as
liquidation
or
repression
inadequately concealed the simple act of murder. While numbed by the repetitiveness of their “special work,” the executioners became as passionless as slaughtermen, too busy for introspection. Their
spetzrabota
did not end for many years; it kept arriving until it was hardly special any longer, just monotonous in its routine.
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There was, however, one unexpected consequence to their lives. Their work made them wealthy. Each NKVD executioner was paid special ruble bonuses for killing people in “the zones,” so much in fact that their increased salaries excited the envy of their NKVD colleagues not selected for this work. And the ruble bonuses mounted up as, night after night, the pits were filled and new ones were dug again the next morning.
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In the fields of Butovo, apple trees were planted over the dead. In Depository No. 7, at the Lubyanka, the NKVD entered their names into four hundred bound volumes. Each name was marked with a red pencil and the note “sentence carried out.” From these books, researchers later calculated that 85 percent of the dead were noncommunists, ordinary people who mostly came from the Russian peasantry. Given the scale of the genocide, the fate of the Americans was scarcely a matter of significance. The statistical evidence had no regard for the captain of the Moscow Foreign Workers’ baseball team, Arnold Preedin, or his brother, Walter Preedin, from Boston, Massachusetts, who lay buried in an apple orchard twenty-seven kilometers south of Moscow.
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VIRTUALLY EVERY DAY in Moscow, Thomas Sgovio heard the news of the arrest of friends such as Arnold Preedin and his family. At the Foreign Workers’ Club on Hertzen Street, the Americans shrank away from one another in fear before deserting the building completely. Soon the premises were shut down, along with virtually every other institution associated with the world beyond the borders of the USSR, including the Anglo-American school, whose teachers were now accused of running a “spy center.” After his father, Joseph, was arrested, Thomas Sgovio quite naturally panicked. Not knowing where else to turn, he approached the only place he thought might possibly help a twenty-one-year-old from Buffalo, New York, thousands of miles from home. Like many others before him, Thomas Sgovio walked into the sanctuary of the American embassy on Mokhovaya Street.
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At the time, virtually every embassy in Moscow was besieged by desperate men and women attempting to flee the USSR. As well as Americans, there were thousands of other foreigners—Italians, French, Spanish, Greeks, Austrians, Germans—all in a similar position of realizing too late what a terrible mistake they had made in emigrating to Soviet Russia. And while it was obvious that the Russian public had no protection whatsoever from the ferocity of the NKVD, collectively the foreigners still clung to the hope that their governments might save them.

The staff at the American embassy were inundated with requests for help, but this still did not explain their slow, and strangely ambivalent, response. In fear for their lives, American emigrants were turned away by their diplomats, often on the flimsiest of grounds. Those who had lost their passports to the coercive schemes of the NKVD were told that they would have to be subject to lengthy periods of investigation, when it was obvious there was no time to lose. Those whose passports had lapsed were refused new ones often on the grounds that they lacked the necessary photographs or the two-dollar fee at a time when possession of foreign currency was a criminal offense in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, lurking outside the embassy gates, the NKVD agents were waiting for the emigrants to emerge. Many American citizens were arrested in this way, on the pavement just yards from the embassy. Alexander Gelver, a twenty-four-year-old from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was one of those picked up outside. He was executed on New Year’s Day 1938.
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Thomas Sgovio’s friend Marvin Volat was also arrested leaving the American embassy, on March 11, 1938. The violinist was accused of “counter-revolutionary activity” and espionage for foreign powers. His interrogation lasted two long months, but eventually Marvin confessed to having taken clandestine photographs at Moscow’s military airport. He was convicted and sentenced to hard labor in the camps. On the final page of his NKVD file, an official hastily recorded that Volat died in February 1939. None of his former Soviet friends could help him. His girlfriend, Sara Berman, was herself arrested, as a “CH-S,” a family member of “an enemy of the people.” Her father, Matvei Berman, the former Gulag chief, had already been executed on Stalin’s orders.
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Ten days after his friend Marvin’s arrest, on March 21, 1938, Thomas Sgovio walked into the American embassy. The midday emptiness of the waiting room surprised him. On his first visit, the room had been crowded with people waiting patiently to be seen. This time Thomas was told once again that the officials were reviewing his case and that he should return in a week or so. No one warned him that his appeals and repeated visits were only placing his life in greater danger. Instead, ever hopeful and respectful of their advice, Thomas Sgovio left the American embassy at 1:15 P.M., and was immediately arrested by the NKVD on Sverdlov Square. That afternoon it was his turn to be pushed into the back of a black Soviet Ford Model A and begin the short journey that ended in the Lubyanka. He was twenty-one years old and had been in the Soviet Union just two and a half years.
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INSIDE THE EMBASSY OFFICES, the American diplomats had known about these disappearances at least as early as April 4, 1934, when Henry Maiwin, had visited to register his American passport and subsequently vanished. In a memo dispatched to Washington, D.C., a diplomat wrote that
“persons living in Mr. Maiwin’s apartment house advised an inquirer that Mr. Maiwin had been arrested by the OGPU and shot.”
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A year later, on February 16, 1935, the chargé d’affaires, John Wiley, had reported the Soviet surveillance of U.S. passport and registration applicants, before stating dryly:
“If American
citizens can disappear in the Soviet union without leaving a trace, the ability of the Embassy to extend protection to such citizens becomes distinctly impaired.”
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It is not certain what lay behind the diplomats’ reaction. Perhaps they viewed these American exiles with disdain, as men and women who had turned their backs on their country and were now suffering the consequences. Perhaps the State Department was unwilling to countenance the return to the United States of those they saw as economic misfits and political radicals of varying leftist stripe, whom they could scarcely have regretted to see leave. While serving in the American consulate in Berlin in February 1931, George Kennan had written a memo on “the status of American communists” living in the USSR:
“The question naturally arises as to whether they should be allowed to retain their American passports and citizenship . . . It is evident that American citizens become to a certain extent naturalized as soon as they step on Soviet soil.”
Kennan had then advocated the use of delay as the best procedure to follow:
“If anyone is to take the initiative in getting this matter cleared up, it would apparently have to be Consular officers in the field, who could either submit reports on expatriation or hold up the renewal of passports in cases of this sort . . . Outside of new legislation, at any rate, this is the only possible means I can see of bringing about the legal expatriation of those whose moral expatriation has long since been a fact.”
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Whether or not his advice was put into practice at the American embassy in Moscow at the height of the Terror we do not know. But it was certainly true that the American diplomatic staff found themselves having to explain to the visitors who had lost their American passports and their citizenship that the process was irreversible. The Soviets had simply claimed them as their own, and there was very little countervailing desire to question their judgment.
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In Moscow, the American diplomats understood very well that low-level negotiation with the Soviet Foreign Ministry was entirely useless, given the fact that the entire Commissariat was petrified of the NKVD and were themselves frequent victims of the Terror. Clearly more forceful intervention was required at the very highest levels of government. Had the diplomats been willing, action might still have been taken, and the lives of the American emigrants might well have been saved.

But what was abundantly clear was that if this was about to happen, the “captured Americans” needed a heroically protective figure to intervene on their behalf—someone with the courage of Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg—someone willing to lend sanctuary, to hand out passports, to speak to the president, and to kick up a very loud and very public fuss in a time of peril. Someone, in short, who might hold a protective hand over them when their lives were so evidently endangered.

What they got, instead, was Ambassador Joseph Davies.

10

“A Dispassionate Observer”

 
 
Joseph Davies was a liberal lawyer who had married an heiress and thereby ascended into the rarefied world of America’s multimillionaires. As legal counsel to the General Foods empire, Davies had been invited to a dinner party of mainly anti-Roosevelt businessmen, hosted by the company’s owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Their romance began when Davies launched into a passionate attack on the “Liberty League” guests present at the table, whose conversation was spent running down Roosevelt as a man who had betrayed his class. The New Deal, retorted an indignant Davies, had not only rescued millions of unemployed American families from hunger but also saved the nation from the threat of imminent revolution: “Where would your millions be then?” The speech overwhelmed his glamorous hostess, who swiftly got up from her chair and, paying no attention whatsoever to her startled guests, walked over to Davies and kissed him: “That’s what I’ve been wanting to say to this crowd!”
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Marjorie Merriweather Post was well known to the American press as “the Lady Bountiful of Hell’s Kitchen,” for gifting seven hundred free meals every day to the destitute women and children of New York. Her press critics sniped that this was merely good public relations for a fortune that had survived the Crash unscathed, her generosity being well within her means, especially given that the food business was notoriously Depression-proof. Each time one of 130 million Americans consumed an array of General Foods products—Instant Postum, Post Toasties, Sanka Coffee, Grape-Nuts, Log Cabin Syrup, Swans Down Cake Mix, Jell-O, Minute Tapioca, Calumet Baking Powder, Baker’s Chocolate, Maxwell House Coffee, or any of the Birds Eye frozen foods—Marjorie became a few cents richer.
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The profits of her brand-laden business financed one of the most lavish lifestyles in America. Luxury mansions on manicured estates scattered from Palm Beach to the Adirondacks were periodically filled with vast parties featuring “elephants from Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus, and cooch dancers.” The twenties had been a sparkling decade to be very rich, and it took a while for the hosts and their guests to realize that their gilded era of conspicuous consumption was gone. From the German shipyards of Kiel, a 357-foot yacht,
Sea Cloud,
was commissioned and launched in 1931 as one of the final unwitting tributes to a decade of excess.
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As the Depression’s woes became fully apparent, Marjorie and her second husband spent long expanses of the year aboard the world’s largest privately owned yacht, with its immaculately uniformed crew of seventy in attendance. It was, all conceded, so much easier to enjoy life on the high seas than back home, where the backwash of poverty left a guilty aftertaste, no matter how many mothers and children were being fed in Hell’s Kitchen.
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A year after their fateful dinner party, Joseph Davies married Marjorie Merriweather Post, both bride and groom having divorced their respective spouses—in Davies’ case, his wife of thirty-three years. Details of their wedding—Marjorie’s third—were supposed to be secret but, of course, were leaked to a press eager for tales of high living in those Depression years. The wedding was reported to have cost one hundred thousand dollars, nearly five thousand of which was spent on chrysanthemums, dyed blush pink to match the bride’s dress, and an enormous three-hundred-pound wedding cake, which, one reporter calculated, worked out at seven dollars per slice. If the cost was scandalous, the indignation of the press soon trailed off in the wake of the
Sea Cloud
as the couple honeymooned on a cruise through the Bahamas, and Joseph Davies contemplated his elevation to a lifestyle immune from the misfortunes of the Depression. For a man rumored to have lost much of his own personal fortune in the Crash, it must have come as some relief.
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