The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (21 page)

Nikolay Gumilyov
, “Heaven”
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Joseph Davies returned to Moscow via London, where the ambassador and his wife had been invited to the coronation of George VI. At the Coronation Ball, the ambassador noted that Marjorie “created a sensation,” with her jewels and white satin gown outshining even the maharajas and European aristocracy gathered at Buckingham Palace. Outside, the crowd had started to cheer Marjorie when she waved to a child, accidentally mistaking her for the princess of a monarchy as yet undeclared.
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In London, Davies’ thoughts on the Moscow show trials gave the skeptical Winston Churchill a “completely new concept of the situation.” This English understatement was taken at face value by the delighted ambassador, who embarked on a leisurely tour of European capitals before eventually returning to his post in Moscow on June 24, 1937.
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His diplomatic staff had spent the intervening weeks investigating Soviet attempts to bug the embassy and the ambassador’s residence. Below stairs in Spaso House, the Russian servants ate at separate tables from the Americans, officially because the two groups could not understand each other, but there was also a certain strangeness among the Russians, who often spoke better English than they let on and seemed to live in fear of an employee named Sam Lieberman.
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Strange wiring had recently been discovered in Spaso House, artfully concealed yet comically betrayed by a pile of fresh cigarette butts found next to a hiding place in the attic. A trap was set to catch the chain-smoking spy with trip threads running across the attic attached to an alarm. But each morning the young American diplomats discovered the threads cut and the power to the alarm switched off, until eventually their cat-and-mouse game ended when they stayed up all night to catch Sam Lieberman red-handed, emerging from the attic. Lieberman admitted everything quite brazenly but received only a reprimand.
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The day after his return to Moscow, Ambassador Davies declared all their efforts a complete waste of time. There was “nothing to hide” from the Kremlin.
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Instead, Davies treated the prevalence of microphones hidden all over the embassy and Spaso Houses as a source of his own amusement. At the British embassy, the ambassador had met a Welsh military attaché, and for fun they conspired privately to speak the language of Davies’ grandparents over the telephone. Not long after their conversation began, all the phone circuits were cut, and a short while later rumors began circulating the diplomatic community that America and Great Britain were engaging in war plans. Conversations had been heard in an “American Indian language” that no one in Moscow could translate.
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WHILE DRIVING THE ambassador around Moscow, wherever his chauffeur Charlie Ciliberti parked the shining Packard, a crowd of Russians would immediately stop and gather around. Ciliberti understood people’s natural curiosity but winced at the fingerprints smeared over the car’s immaculate body and windows. Children especially felt compelled to touch the beautiful American machine, whose wing mirrors were constantly being twisted by mischief makers trying to catch sight of their own reflection. Tired of having to shine the expanse of bodywork at almost every stop, when one of the mirrors and a door handle went missing, Ciliberti sought the counsel of his Russian chauffeur friends. They advised him to adopt the practice of the Soviet elite, whose luxury cars were protected by an electric current, which gave curious hands a nasty shock. Using a battery, coil, and plumb, Ciliberti engineered a similar system for the Packard, and very soon when he was parked on Moscow’s city streets no one dared come too close.
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Only the American emigrants were drawn almost irresistibly to the beautiful electrified limousine—just as they had been drawn into the embassy on Mokhovya Street. The gold-braided Stars and Stripes flown from the fender of the Packard, and the car’s familiar New York license plate, carried a similar promise of salvation.
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In June 1937, a harassed Ciliberti was parked on Stoleshnikov Pereulok, waiting for the ambassador to emerge from his latest shopping trip. Their NKVD escort was somewhere in the vicinity but not especially close that day, and Ciliberti happened to meet another American on the street, and the two stood idly chatting as the Moscow crowds milled around them. Quite unexpectedly, in the midst of their conversation, Ciliberti noticed a blond girl standing close by, watching them intently and smiling as if she understood every word they were saying. Glancing around, Ciliberti asked the girl in Russian if she spoke English. “I was born in Cleveland,” she replied dead pan.

Unaware of the extent of the emigration, and having no sense of the number of young Americans, just like this blond eavesdropper, who were trapped in the Soviet Union, Charlie Ciliberti and his friend stood on the street quite amazed. When they asked, the girl told them that she had been brought to Russia by her parents six years earlier, when she was fifteen. But just as she started her story, Ambassador Davies reappeared quite suddenly, and Ciliberti had to jump back into the Packard to drive him on to his next destination.

The American chauffeur was thirty-one years old when he arrived in Moscow by way of New Jersey. A handsome man personally chosen by Marjorie Davies—whose appreciation for beauty appeared to extend to her employees— Ciliberti revealed his intelligence when he voluntarily chose to study Russian during his evenings off, and quickly acquired a conversational ability that neither the ambassador nor his wife ever came close to matching. Perhaps in a 1930s novel, the bright working-class chauffeur from Jersey City might have defied authority and leaped to the rescue of this young girl from Cleveland, driving her back into the safety of the American embassy. And Ciliberti did meet the girl again, either by accident or because the Packard was so easy to spot, on the same street a week later. But this was reality, not fiction.

At their second meeting, Ciliberti learned only that she was a twenty-one-year-old American citizen, and he did nothing more than advise her to present herself at the embassy chancery. Recalling the episode in a memoir published nine years later, Ciliberti revealed an unapologetic indifference toward the fate of the girl whose name he did not recall:

 
Later Ciliberti wrote that he did not want to go “out on a limb” in case the girl was a “phony.” Not wishing to risk his job, he chose to do nothing at all for the Cleveland girl, who must have known the risk she was talking by meeting him twice on the street but would have calculated that it was less dangerous than walking into the embassy.
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Given his status and close relationship with the ambassador and his wife, Ciliberti had sufficient authority to protect her life if he chose. But either he was unwilling or, persuaded by his uncertainty, Charlie Ciliberti elected to remain safe and warm in the fur-lined American coat bought for him by Marjorie Davies. He never saw the girl again.

Rather than risk the antagonism of the NKVD escort, Ciliberti chose instead to win their friendship. At first he tried bribing them with cartons of Camel cigarettes, or by slowing down when their tailing car stalled, to allow them time to catch up with the Packard. Later he worked out a system of warning blasts on the horn to give the NKVD enough time to warm up their unreliable Soviet Ford engine before departure. In return, Ciliberti received a nightly ride back to his hotel from the NKVD, after he had dropped off the ambassador at Spaso House.
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Soon Ciliberti was supplying the NKVD agents with gifts from America—they asked for contraceptives in particular—and as a consequence of this favor swapping, he remained untouched when virtually every other Davies family servant was arrested on the streets of Moscow during the course of the year.
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Agar Lindstrom, Marjorie’s hulking Swedish masseur, was picked up in broad daylight soon after leaving the Italian embassy, where he had gone to give a massage to the Italian ambassador’s wife. The brawny Swede refused to go quietly, and a mighty struggle ensued, until the secret police were persuaded to drive Lindstrom back into the American embassy.
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Perhaps it was because Ciliberti was never arrested that he had so little sympathy for the “captured Americans.” “They made their bed, let them sleep on it” was his attitude, which ultimately was much the same as that of Ambassador Davies, who shrugged his shoulders and politely sighed that there was nothing to be done.
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SHORTLY AFTER THEIR return to Moscow, Joseph Davies and his wife embarked on a summer cruise around the Baltic. Before he ordered the
Sea Cloud
to be sailed to Leningrad, Davies had first consulted with Maxim Litvinov to check whether such a defiant expression of American capitalism might offend the Soviets. His question had only made the jovial foreign minister laugh. “Why of course not, Davies. We respect and trust you even though you differ from us in political ideology.” The ambassador’s next question revealed the full extent of his naïveté of the first principles of this totalitarian state: “Now then, Litvinov, I want to ask you a still more delicate question. Do you think that it might possibly be blown up in the harbor by one of your Bolsheviks?” Once again, Maxim Litvinov struggled to hide his amusement: “Davies, it will be safer in the harbor of Leningrad than in the harbor of New York . . . Our police force are more efficient.”
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In his journal Joseph Davies wrote that he had smiled at Litvinov, who smiled back, “for he knew that I had seen their visits in the night to take heads of family into custody never to be seen again.” But in public Davies gave not the slightest hint of his knowledge or disapproval at the time. That summer the
Sea Cloud
motored out of Leningrad harbor on a Baltic cruise, escorted through the minefield by a naval vessel of the secret police. The ambassador then very politely invited his NKVD guardians aboard to watch Hollywood movies in the ship’s cinema. After a long discussion and “much amazement,” the men in the pale blue caps accepted his invitation.
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Charlie Ciliberti, meanwhile, was left behind in Leningrad with Philip Bender. Picking up a telegram at the Hotel Europa, Ciliberti accidentally walked through the wrong door into a room where twenty men and women were studiously bent over desks writing screeds on pads of paper. Among them he recognized the Russian woman who had been their guide in Leningrad. When Cilberti asked Bender what it was he had just seen, Bender only smiled. “What do you think?” he said. “She is probably writing up everything we said today,” Ciliberti answered. And Philip Bender, who had spent his youth working as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in San Francisco, and had long exhausted his life’s given supply of irony, merely replied, “Charlie, you catch on quickly.”
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It was the normal course of events in Soviet Russia. The longer an American stayed, the more likely this painted world was to reveal itself. Although there were obvious exceptions to the rule—most notably the ambassador, now happily watching movies aboard the
Sea Cloud
with his friends from the NKVD. The summer weather was so blissful and the sea air so bracing that Joseph Davies declared the
Sea Cloud
would become “his floating embassy” in Russia. Presumably by doing so, he would avoid any more unwelcome confrontations on the street.
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WHILE DAVIES CRUISED the Baltic on his yacht, letters continued to “pour in” at the American embassy in Moscow, and the State Department in Washington, from anxious relatives across the United States searching for their missing loved ones in Russia. These letters would carry on arriving through the course of 1937 and 1938, and intermittently thereafter for the next two decades.
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Some were sent by Americans who had been freed from the camps in the early thirties and managed to return home. Emma Popper, for example, wrote on behalf of Timothy Belakoff, whom she described as an American passport holder who had arrived to work in Russia as an engineer on an Amtorg contract in 1931, only to be arrested shortly afterward. She had met Belakoff in a prison hospital, suffering from malnutrition and in a “worsening” state of health. In her letter, sent from New York, Emma Popper enclosed a small piece of black bread, which she said she had brought back with her from her Gulag camp as evidence of how little they were given to eat. A State Department official read her letter, filed it, then placed the morsel of Russian bread into an envelope, where it remained, dried and preserved in the archives for the next seventy years, a strange relic of the lost American emigration to Stalin’s Russia.
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Some of the correspondents had lost their entire families. Mrs. Edythe Habacon of the Bronx, New York, wrote asking for news of her parents, brother, and sister, all missing in Russia. Her brother and sister, named Carl and Sirkka Hakanen, she wrote, were born in Boston and had simply disappeared. Another letter came from Lillian Burton, of Detroit, seeking help on behalf of her father, Paul Burton:
“I am writing concerning the disappearance of my father from his home in Russia . . . I am sure my dad would not willingly
stop writing to us . . . Therefore I am trying to locate him as I feel something is wrong. Can you help me find my father?”
Sarah Dansky’s brother was searching for his sister, who had volunteered to work in Russian hospitals as a doctor before vanishing: “On account of late purges in that country, we feel that she may have met with foul play.” Bennett Cooper of Wilmington, Delaware, wrote on behalf of his brother John Cooper, an American engineer whose regular correspondence had ended abruptly: “It is unlike him to forget or neglect.” Bennett Cooper’s reply from the State Department was typical of the official reaction to such letters:
“Since Mr. Cooper no longer has the status of an American citizen, this Department is unable to take any steps which may assist in the obtaining of information with respect to him.”
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