The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (2 page)

Elected by a landslide, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address to a radio audience of sixty million listeners, roughly half the country, eager to learn of a plan for a way out of the crisis:

 
But many Americans no longer owned a radio to hear their president’s calm words of reassurance. Such luxuries had long since been traded in for cash, along with the rest of their possessions. Thousands more had already left, choosing to chance their luck elsewhere and take a gamble on reports they read in newspapers of how Soviet Russia alone still had economic growth and jobs, and was planning a society that placed working-men at its very center, no longer merely the peripheral casualties of other men’s greed. Searching for alternatives, for avenues of escape, they studied the glowing accounts of new factories being built in Russia, surrounded by trees and flowers, with cafeterias and libraries for their workers, nurseries for the children, and even swimming pools, for crying out loud! At that moment, American curiosity to learn about the Soviet experiment was all-consuming. An English translation of
New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan
had become the unlikely publishing phenomenon of 1931, an American bestseller for seven months and one of the highest selling nonfiction titles of the past decade.
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Its simple explanations, written originally for Russian schoolchildren, were read and reread by an American public searching for answers beyond the deadened reach of another decade of “rugged individualism.” In the midst of Depression misery, who could not be attracted to the book’s shared vision of future happiness and social progress?

And who could blame those Americans, motivated as much by economic necessity as their own idealism, who gratefully accepted Joseph Stalin’s open invitation to work in the Soviet Union? Skilled workers could even have their passage paid to the land where all unemployment had been officially declared extinct. They saw themselves as the pioneers of a new frontier, moving slowly from west to east, lured not just by the idea of security in hard times but also by the simple temptations of adequacy: of three square meals a day, a decent job, a roof over their heads, a doctor for the children, and the knowledge that it all could not be taken away at the click of someone’s fingers or the chatter of the stock ticker.
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They left it to the social philosophers to speculate on the value of secure and decently paid employment to an individual’s notion of identity or self-worth; let alone “the pursuit of happiness,” a phrase that provoked a certain mocking tone when spoken from beneath the corrugated roof of a brick shack. And if the president of the United States could talk to the nation of the flight of the moneychangers from the temple without being called a “Red,” then presumably these American exiles could hold a similar view as they were drawn east to Russia like a beacon, a flickering flame in the white night of the Depression.

 
 
FOR THE FIRST TIME in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving. And as the cutting edge of poverty sharpened their determination, the desire to join this forgotten exodus turned, as the saying goes, from a trickle to a flood. In the first eight months of 1931 alone, Amtorg—the Soviet trade agency based in New York—received more than
one hundred thousand
American applications for emigration to the USSR. Such was the overwhelming response to their newspaper advertisements publicizing just six thousand jobs for skilled workers in Russia.
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At the Amtorg offices in Manhattan, crowds of workers jammed the corridors with their wives, children, and pets, pleading for a passage out to this “promised land.” Ten thousand optimistic Americans were hired that year, part of the official “organized emigration,” who received their good news with glee closer to lottery winners than economic migrants.

A business reporter was sent down to the unofficial Soviet embassy at 261 Fifth Avenue to look through one morning’s applications. The occupations listed for those answering this “Soviet call for Yankee skill” included
“barbers, plumbers, painters, cooks, clerical workers, service-station operators, electricians, carpenters, aviators, engineers, salesmen, printers, chemists, shoemakers, librarians, teachers, auto-mechanics, dentists, and one funeral director.”
The would-be emigrants hailed from virtually every state of the union, and their principal reasons for leaving that they wrote on their job applications, were:
“1. Unemployment, 2. Disgust with conditions here, 3. Interest in Soviet experiment.”
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Following in the slipstream of this official organized exodus were unknown numbers of uncounted Americans, the waifs and strays of the economic times, who chose to dispense with bureaucracy and travel to Russia as tourists, ready to hunt down jobs just as soon as they arrived. The Soviet travel agency, Intourist, was happy to sell them one-way tickets with their tourist visas, while the sales agents of the shipping companies were telling all comers that Americans could find jobs in Russia whether they spoke the language or not. All they needed was enough money for their first week, which was as long as it took to find work.
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Already there were so many Americans writing to their government for information about work in Russia that as of May 1931, the Department of Commerce began replying to their letters with an official form response entitled “Employment for Americans in Soviet Russia.” The Commerce Department’s civil servants first told them what they already knew:
“At the present time a number of Soviet industrial organizations, operating through the Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York, are engaging American engineers and technicians in large numbers to work in Soviet Russia . . .”
Then followed a catalogue of sensible advice concerning Soviet contracts and housing, along with some cautious insights into family life:
“It is not considered wise for wives and children to accompany the individual, if it is possible for them to be left. The strangeness of language, conditions and habits affects American women unfavourably, and the absence of educational facilities is a serious loss for children of school age . . .”
Their government’s advice was widely ignored—more often than not the American emigrants took their wives and children with them. Where were they going to leave them? The children, they reasoned, would find schools when they arrived.
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Other would-be emigrants addressed their letters directly to the State Department. Harry Dalhart, for example, wrote as the president of “the Soviet Emigration Society” of Wichita, Kansas. In his letter, Dalhart explained that his organization had 342 members “all under forty years of age. Ninety two are overseas world war veterans: all native born Americans.” The Kansan society sought advice concerning their emigration to Russia “as a group.” Others intended to leave as enterprising individuals with an eye for the main chance. One resident of Denham, Indiana, wrote to the State Department offering his “house, a lot, a truck, and a few household articles” he wished to trade with the government in exchange for his passage to Russia.
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On February 4, 1931, in the pages of
The New York Times,
“the greatest wave of immigration in modern history” was being forecast by Walter Duranty, the celebrated Moscow-based reporter:
“The Soviet Union will witness in the next few years an immigration flood comparable to the influx into the United States in the decade before the World War . . . It is only the beginning as yet of this movement, and the first swallows of the coming migration are scarce—but it has begun and will have to be reckoned with in the future.”
Although the American exodus was as yet only in the thousands, Walter Duranty was confidently predicting that the Soviets would be welcoming two million a year in the not-too-distant future, with Cunard and the other shipping companies “queuing up” for the passenger business. The American autoworkers who had recently established themselves in Russia would soon be advising their friends to follow:
“When the day comes that foreign workers here may write home and say, ‘Things are pretty good here, why don’t you come along? There are jobs for everybody and plenty to eat. Russia is not so bad a place in which to live and there are no lay-offs or short time and you get all that is coming to you’ . . . Then immigration to the Soviet Union will begin to rival the flood that poured into America. At the present rate of progress that day is not far distant.”
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The article in the nation’s most prestigious newspaper only hastened the deluge of American letters and visits to any Russian institution that might be willing to offer some assistance and advice. A San Franciscan mechanic wrote to a newspaper in Moscow, asking if he ought to change his name “before hand to a Russian name with that ovitch or -itsky ending.” Others wondered if they needed relatives or friends in Russia to testify to their good character, supposing that the old rules of Ellis Island might somehow be reapplied by Russian immigration control. From Shenandoah, Virginia, a journalist reported that “a group of miners is being formed to go to Russia with their picks and drills and any other machinery that they have enough to buy.” And this news prompted a host of inquiries from depressed mining regions across the United States. One group asked if it was true that the Soviets were going to send a ship to
“rescue all the miners from their American misery, and would the metalworkers or the textile-workers be next?”
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At the docks of New York Harbor, groups of jobless men shared the shipping page of
The New York Herald Tribune,
which published the dates of freighters leaving for Leningrad and Odessa. Word was passed around that those who could not afford the price of a ticket could work their passage or stow away in one of the many crates of American machinery heading in the same direction. A dockside reporter described the zeal of a Milwaukee emigrant with the inspired idea that the
“mass transportation of ‘broke’ Americans to Russia would be best solved by a winter walk from Alaska to Siberia over the ice of the Bering Straits—‘Just like Jules Verne described, just like Jules Verne!’”
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Of course, the news of this sudden emigration from the world’s wealthiest country was pounced upon by the Soviet press as evidence, not only of their own success, but that history was on their side. In an article entitled “Moscow the Magnet,” the Russian journalist Boris Pilnyak recounted the story of a car journey through the Rocky Mountains in Arizona. One night some American miners had helped him repair his car and gathered around the campfire to listen to him talk of life in the USSR. Three years later, in Moscow, the doorbell rang and “a broad-shouldered man of about forty dressed in American working clothes entered. He smiled gaily and stretched his big hand over the threshold. ‘You don’t recognize me?’ he boomed. ‘Remember Arizona, that night by the gold mines? Your hand comrade . . . I’m in Moscow!’ ”
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No one knew how many American workers arrived on a wing and a prayer like this Arizonan gold miner, having scraped enough money for a tourist visa or slept third class or stowaway class. Unaccounted for in any records of state, they rated only a passing mention in a Soviet press article, a social phenomenon embodied by the nameless curiosity of a forty-year-old miner with a broad smile, a firm handshake, and an overwhelming willingness to believe these grand accounts of Revolution.

If the Soviet emigration was not
the
most adventurous solution to the nation’s Depression woes, it stretched the imagination to consider a bolder remedy. One group of American families sold their worldly goods to buy machinery for a collective farm they were moving to outside Moscow. Another party of sixteen emigrants from San Francisco pooled their cash to buy tractors for the Portland Commune near Kiev. Between them they handed over their dollar savings, their tools, and a Lincoln automobile. Others donated their entire life savings to the state, supposing that they would no longer need money in the new Russia.
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On October 11, 1931, George Bernard Shaw returned from Russia to broadcast a persuasive lecture on American national radio. Using the power of mass communication, the world’s self-styled “most successful playwright since Shakespeare” was only too delighted to share his thoughts on the Soviet experiment and demolish the myths that surrounded the world’s first socialist state: