The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (19 page)

While the gossip columnists who wondered what exactly the groom had brought to their union, aside from his evident love and persuasive oratory, had underestimated the consolations of the world of politics. For Joseph Davies had remained a personal friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s from their days working together in the Wilson administration. When Davies’ own political career stalled in a failed Wisconsin Senate campaign, he clung to the coattails of an altogether more successful politician. And since both Davies and his new wife were very generous contributors to Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign, there was an outstanding favor to be returned. So when the president was casting around for a sympathetic progressive to appoint as the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union, naturally he turned to his good friend Joe. It was a very suitable wedding gift, said the press, for the woman who had everything. And the title “ambassadress” lent official recognition of an elevated status far above the mere ordinariness of uncommon wealth.

It did not seem to matter that Joseph Davies had no previous diplomatic experience, nor that he spoke not one word of Russian. All Roosevelt required was a friend whom he could trust “to be his eyes and ears on the ground.” Leaving for Moscow, the new ambassador was by no means overawed. He told the press that his mission was to “counter prejudice and misinformation,” and that his mind was ready for “dispassionate observation.” In retrospect, it was difficult to imagine a worse choice to send to Soviet Russia at any time, least of all at the very height of the Terror.

 
 
IN JANUARY 1937, the Davies entourage arrived in Moscow on a special train, waited on by a small army of footmen, secretaries, chauffeurs, a chef, a hairdresser, and a masseuse—making up sixteen servants in all, with an attendant mountain of luggage. Stepping off the train dressed for the Russian winter in a thick fur hat, immaculately tailored coat, and gold-topped cane, Joseph Davies glanced around for the first secretary of the embassy, Loy Henderson, who recognized the ambassador’s “flashing, probing eyes,” and noted his fine clothes. Marjorie Davies, the secretary observed, was almost fifty years old but looked “exceptionally young” and “not travel worn in the least.”
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The scene at the railway station was chaotic. The Moscow police had cordoned off the entire square, and the station was crowded with Soviet apparatchiks, American diplomatic staff, and a kaleidoscope of dignitaries from foreign embassies who had turned out to greet the new American ambassador. Fighting for space in the crowd were photographers from the Soviet and American press, popping flashbulbs, while their newsreel colleagues worked under lights—with the whole circus shepherded by the NKVD. The Russian cameramen paid special attention to the gold-braided American flag attached to the left-side fender of the ambassador’s waiting limousine.

From behind the wheel of the enormous twelve-cylinder Packard shipped over from America, the ambassador’s chauffeur, Charlie Ciliberti, watched them photographing the Stars and Stripes from every angle. He also noticed how the couple’s designated Soviet fixer, Philip Bender, barked orders in Russian to the station porters, who leaped to his every command with puzzling speed. In New York, Ciliberti concluded, someone like Bender “would probably have had his ears slapped down” for taking such a tone. But in Moscow, the home of the workingman, the situation appeared very different.
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Here Philip Bender fairly exuded authority and parted crowds by showing a card in his hand to the Moscow militia, who sprang into action. Loy Henderson often felt that it was Bender rather than the American ambassador whom the Moscow police were attempting to help.
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Emerging from the press frenzy, Ambassador Davies and his wife were driven slowly away from the station. The ambassador had brought with him a home movie camera, which one of the passengers used to film through the window of the Packard as it cruised along the snow-laden streets of Moscow. Caught on film were the ordinary citizens of the city wrapped up in black overcoats as they ran out in front of the limousine, chasing after trams hooked up to electric cables running overhead.
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For a crowded metropolis, Moscow was unusually quiet. The streets were teeming with people but strangely empty of cars, and the majority of traffic consisted of overcrowded trams or horses and carts, with just the occasional truck or car, whose engine noise was muffled by the snow packed down on the roads. The atmosphere was like living in a silent movie, of mute monochromatic figures silhouetted against the snow.
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Their chauffeur drove the American couple the short distance to their new home at Spaso House. The grand mansion with its black railings and garden covered in snow had an outwardly unwelcoming appearance, but inside the ambassadorial residence had been extensively remodeled with furnishings and furniture imported from the United States. An interior decorator, Harry Benson, had been dispatched several months earlier to raise the mansion to the level accustomed to by Marjorie Davies, and in a frantic burst of activity, the tired building was transformed with all the urgent taste a multimillion-dollar fortune can command. A crystal chandelier, said to be insured for ten thousand dollars—which took two men several days to shine—was suspended within the central dome of the ballroom, forty feet high.
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On a tour of the finished project, Elizabeth Hampel, the wife of a military attaché from St. Louis, marveled at “oil paintings in bathrooms and gold rimmed glasses and cut crystal bottles and too much of everything that was too expensive.”
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In the basement, a Belgian electrical engineer had installed the twenty-five deep freezers required for two box cars of American frozen food shipped ahead to Russia. Steaks, fowl, wild game, and exotic fruit and vegetables were all now on the daily menu, with four hundred quarts of frozen cream specially imported to soothe the ambassador’s troublesome stomach. News of the couple’s “desert-island” food supply was soon leaked to the press, irritating the Soviet censors with its presumption that there was no decent food to be had in Moscow, and adding to the rolling Davies news story. The publicity only worsened when, within days of their arrival, the freezers shorted out the Spaso House generator, causing a catastrophic melt. The idea of American appetites overwhelming the Soviet electricity supply became an irresistible target for mockery.
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On the couple’s first afternoon in Moscow, Charlie Ciliberti had driven the Packard to Red Square, and the ambassador and Mrs. Davies got out to stretch their legs around the Kremlin. From the railway station they were followed, and when the ambassador stepped out of the car, two men walked behind him at a distance. From that moment onward, if the ambassador ever came close to anyone who looked as though he might engage him in conversation, the lurking NKVD escort cut in very quickly. They would remain at his heels throughout his stay in Russia. Officially assigned for the ambassador’s personal protection, the Soviet secret police would equally ensure that no one else came near. It would not, however, prevent them from trying.
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JUST TWO DAYS after his arrival, Joseph Davies attended the second of the great Moscow show trials, the major international news story of the day. Whereas the majority of Stalin’s victims were stealthily eradicated, the most famous Bolsheviks were periodically tried in a Soviet court of law. Pleased by his timely arrival, the new ambassador assiduously attended the six-day trial, with George Kennan whispering a simultaneous translation beside him in court. They sat together at the very front of the Hall of Columns, once a ballroom of the Tsarist aristocracy, whose high ceilings and faded blue walls lent an atmosphere of decaying splendor to the proceedings. The courtroom was filled with four hundred spectators, with the defendants placed in an adjacent box guarded by four soldiers standing at attention, their rifles resting on the floor. Recording the scene were the microphones of the radio broadcasters, and the lights and cameras of the photographers from the world’s press.
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The American ambassador’s highly visible attendance in court was heavily publicized in the Soviet media, his presence lending a veneer of legitimacy to the proceedings, which Stalin so clearly craved.
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The German diplomatic corps had notably stayed away en masse, and according to his secretary, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, was full of “indignation and bewilderment” at Joseph Davies’ prominent place in the courtroom. It was, he said, as if Davies viewed the show trials “as innocently as the dances held in the nobleman’s ballroom in the Tsarist era.”
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Quite unaware that he had managed to concede the moral high ground to the diplomatic representatives of Nazi Germany, at lunch Ambassador Davies asked George Kennan to run off for some sandwiches, while he turned to chat with the boys from the American press. The publicity-hungry ambassador courted the newspapers at all times, and perhaps realized that he could stand to use a little help with some background material.
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The show trials had a long and very checkered history in the Soviet Union. A decade earlier, when the trials were still in the process of being properly managed, there were obvious kinks in the mechanism, missteps in the elaborate choreography between prosecutor and defendant. These were the cases when the victim, expected only to confess, remained silent before shouting, “Comrades, how could I not sign?” and then tore off his shirt to reveal a tortured back “streaked with deep, purple bruises and swollen welts.”
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In past trials, brother had testified against brother, and a teenage son against his father, all anxious to profess their greater loyalty to the Soviet state:
“I denounce my father as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolodoob.”
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The teenager’s confession was published in the morning edition of
Pravda,
and wise readers understood very well its beckoning subtext of implicit threat.

In previous prosecutorial fiascos, defendants had supposedly met with people already dead, in places, such as the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, that turned out to have been demolished some twenty years earlier. The French president Raymond Poincaré, one of the accused Russian spies’ alleged controllers, had very derisively responded that “there must be rather gullible people in Moscow, if some actually believe or believed those fairy tales.” And the obvious question was “Why have a prosecutor at all?” The ashen-faced defendants were always so free with their confessions, talking their lives away in fantastical conspiracies led by Raymond Poincaré or Winston Churchill or Lawrence of Arabia or whichever other unlikely foreigner was cast as the mastermind of the Revolution’s evident ills.
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Even in the current trial, mistakes had crept into the most carefully planned testimony. The newcomer Joseph Davies looked on as the piano-playing former Soviet industrial commissar, Georgy Piatakov, was accused of having met Leon Trotsky at an airfield in Oslo. The trembling Piatakov resembled, according to one witness, “not Piatakov but his shadow, a skeleton with his teeth knocked out.”
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Such was the fate of the Bolshevik once described by Lenin as “unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability.” Piatakov had been tortured for thirty-three days, before he was broken and ready to appear before the show trial. According to Yezhov’s report to Stalin, during his interrogation Piatakov volunteered to act as a prosecutor, asking that “they allow him personally to shoot all those sentenced to be shot in the upcoming trial, including his former wife.” But Stalin had refused the request, commenting only that it would turn the trial into “a comedy.”
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For the next six days, Ambassador Davies listened to the confessions of the defendants. During one intermission, he turned to an English journalist, Alfred Cholerton of
The Daily Telegraph,
to ask his opinion of the trial. Cholerton answered that the Soviet Union seemed to move only through convulsions, and that this, being the latest, was the most violent of all. When Davies insisted, “No, no, I am quite serious, I would like your opinion of this trial,” the incredulous Cholerton replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I believe everything but the facts.”
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Another reporter, from the Austrian newspaper
Neue Freie Presse,
wrote a more straightforward summary of the atmosphere in court:
“No analogy from modern European history is aroused in western brains when hearing of this deathly tragedy of marionettes. It is necessary to go far back, to the Middle Ages, if one wants to find a similar fervent longing for execution, a similar tired ‘only quickly, only quickly the end.’ ”
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But still it seemed Joseph Davies could not grasp the essential idea that the entire legal proceedings were staged, an elaborate deceit played out after torture. This obvious notion seemed too fantastic, despite the prompt retort from the Norwegian government stating that the airfield cited in the supposed Trotsky-Piatakov meeting had been closed at the time to all civilian traffic.
“To have assumed that this proceeding was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction,”
wrote Davies back to Washington,
“would be to presuppose the creative genius of a Shakespeare and the genius of a Belasco in stage production.”
The clever Cholerton might have done better to quote Macbeth to the ambassador, so ever appropriate for Stalin’s Russia: “By the clock ’tis day, / and yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.”
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In the early hours of a January morning, two hundred thousand factory workers from Moscow’s night shift gathered in Red Square in a “spontaneous demonstration” to demand death sentences for the accused. The crowd was addressed by the forty-year-old Nikita Khrushchev:
“The enemy of mankind, the mad dog, the murderer Trotsky is a faithful ally of the fascists—the instigators of a World War . . . The Trotskyite reptiles have been crushed. But this must not lull our vigilance . . . Long live the leader of the world proletariat, the perpetrator of the cause of Lenin—Comrade Stalin!”
In minus twenty-seven degrees centigrade, the crowd roared back their approval, each person careful to display a frenzied enthusiasm to his neighbor.
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The death sentences demanded by the prosecutor, Vyshinsky, were handed down to all but four of the defendants. The
Izvestiya
editor Karl Radek was given a notional ten-year sentence, only to be murdered in jail. Perhaps it was vengeance for Radek’s veiled irony during the trial: “For nothing at all, just for the sake of Trotsky’s beautiful eyes—the country was to return to capitalism.”
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