The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (22 page)

A letter from Mrs. Hilma Oja of 1999 Madison Avenue, New York, dated October 24, 1938, provided evidence of hundreds of Americans in the same position:

 
An insurance salesman, B. Jaffe, wrote to the State Department on May 2, 1938, asking for assistance for his brother Harry Jaffe, who had lived in Russia since 1933, working for the
Moscow News
before becoming an English teacher. Harry Jaffe had written home every two weeks until February 1938, when his correspondence abruptly stopped.
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This was surely the same Harry Jaffe who had sung the tenor solos beside Thomas Sgovio in the Anglo-American chorus. The father of another one of Thomas’ friends, Abraham Volat of 458 East Ferry Street, Buffalo, New York, wrote a handwritten letter addressed to the American secretary of state:

 
Eleven days later, Abraham Volat received a terse reply from the State Department: “Since your son no longer has the status of an American citizen, this Department is unable to take any steps to which may assist in the obtaining of information with respect to him.”
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Another father, Yakim Dubin of 233 Tenth Street, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, wrote asking for help for his son Ivan, who had called at the American embassy on March 1, 1938, to apply for a passport and had been told that he was missing the necessary photographs and to come back when he had them. His father had called in at his congressman’s office excited because he had discovered the address of Ivan’s concentration camp in Russia. Now, apparently, the State Department could do something.
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But no concerted action was ever taken on their behalf at the State Department in Washington, or at the American embassy in Moscow, or from the presidential office at the White House. Instead there was just an uncomfortable silence, and these missing men and women and their children were simply left to their fate. In 1937, at the height of the Terror, Ambassador Joseph Davies contrived to remain outside Russia for precisely 199 days of the year, either at home in the United States, touring Europe, or cruising the Baltic on his yacht. Anywhere save the very place his presence was so urgently required.
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ONLY RARELY DID the news of the arrest of an American in Russia ever make it into the newspapers back home. Joseph Davies was away in December 1937 when an American reporter told embassy officials of the sudden disappearance of his neighbor Donald Robinson from the National Hotel, the building adjacent to the American embassy. When Angus Ward and Loy Henderson knocked on the door of Room 333, Donald Robinson’s wife told them that her husband had fallen sick and been taken to a hospital, where he was being kept in an “iron lung.” The American diplomats returned to the hotel room the following day, only to discover that Ruth Robinson had also vanished.

On this occasion, news of the couple’s mysterious disappearance bypassed Soviet censors to become a sensational crime story in the American national press. The mystery deepened when a State Department investigation revealed that the American passports issued to Donald and Ruth Robinson had been obtained in the United States by fraud. The Soviet newspapers, meanwhile, denounced the couple as “American Trotskyite spies,” the news of which prompted Max Schactman, a friend of Trotsky’s, to reply acidly:
“There is nobody in Russia, except the Government, who can cause people to disappear like that. The Soviet Union has no private gangsters who kidnap people and hold them for ransom . . . If the couple are alive today, they are in some dungeon in Lubyanka Prison.”
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In her passport photograph, Ruth Robinson gave the impression of a very attractive, confident woman in her late twenties, with hazel eyes and light brown hair styled in a fashionable bob. Loy Henderson, who had met her briefly in her hotel room, wrote to the secretary of state that her “speech and gestures were those of an American woman who has lived for the most part in native American environments and who has had at least a secondary education. She did not appear to be Jewish.” Quite why Henderson chose to speculate upon her religion was less surprising—given the anti-Semitism of many within the State Department at the time—than the subsequent FBI discovery that Donald Robinson was, in fact, a Latvian communist whose real name was Adolph Rubens. It was confirmed, however, that his wife was indeed an American citizen, and Ruth Rubens’ only mistake appeared to have been marrying a man who had used her for his own ends. On December 28, 1937, Constance Boerger was interviewed by the FBI, and positively identified her younger sister, Ruth, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She told the investigators that her sister had left behind a daughter in America. On December 30, 1937, the New York
Daily News
printed a photograph of Ruth Delight Rubens, aged seven, with her dog Brownie, taken at her grandparents’ home in Miami, Florida.

In Moscow, because of the publicity their disappearances had received in the United States, the American embassy officials were finally moved into action, and pressed to be allowed to visit Ruth Rubens, who everyone knew was being held in custody by the NKVD. After a lengthy delay, the Soviets bowed to pressure and gave unprecedented access to Ruth Rubens, held captive in Moscow’s notorious Butyrskaya Prison.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of February 10, 1938, Loy Henderson was driven into the prison. A huge sliding iron door, operated by heavy machinery, opened slowly to allow his car into the courtyard. The first secretary was then escorted down a maze of corridors into an interrogation room, where he was introduced to Major Yamnitsky of the NKVD. A bell was rung, and Ruth Rubens suddenly appeared, led under guard into the room dressed in a “simple woollen American house-dress with low neck and long sleeves.” The twenty-nine-year-old American prisoner, wrote Henderson in his report, was
“under complete domination of Major Yamnitsky . . . who insisted that English questions and answers be translated into Russian.”
Loy Henderson then described how Ruth Rubens had 

 
When Loy Henderson asked if he might offer her a cigarette, the NKVD major snapped, that “there was no reason why Mrs. Rubens should be given a cigarette.”

Their interview lasted forty-five minutes, at least half of which was spent translating the questions and answers into Russian for the benefit of Major Yamnitsky. Ruth Rubens confirmed that she was born in Philadelphia on May 27, 1908, and explained that her husband had given her the passport in the name of Robinson:
“I know my husband has committed a serious crime against the Soviet Union and I feel that the Soviet authorities are justified in their actions against me. I quite understand their reasons for holding me. I am grateful for your offer of assistance, but I request you not to try to help me. I intend to stick to my husband.”
At this point, Loy Henderson asked if she had any children, and showed her the picture of Ruth Delight cut from the New York
Daily News.
The little girl’s mother looked at the picture, and tears welled in her eyes as she confirmed that this was indeed her daughter. Their interview continued rather abjectly—
“Do you have an attorney?” “Not yet.” “Do you desire the services of an attorney?” “No.”
—until Major Yamnitsky decided he had heard enough, and rang the bell again, which brought the armed guard back into the room. At this point, Henderson wrote,
“Mrs. Rubens stood up, and at signal from Major Y turned a right-about-face and marched out with the guard without a word of farewell and without even a backward glance.”
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DURING HIS DEBRIEFING in America, the Soviet defector General Walter Krivitsky revealed to the FBI that when Stalin was first told of the procedure for American naturalization and citizenship, his reaction had been one of delight: “Wonderful—send a thousand men to America at once and let them sit there.” Krivitsky also confirmed that Adolph Rubens had been “sent to the US to get genuine American passports which could be used with no alteration preferably, or with merely a change of photograph if alteration were required. He said that prior to the adoption of the new style passport by this Department it had been possible to manufacture in Moscow the passports needed, taking apart genuine passports, washing the pages, and making up new ones to suit their needs. They found it impossible to remove the covers and take apart the present style passport without the operation leaving noticeable marks.” As well as explaining the mystery of the couple’s disappearance in Moscow, Krivitsky provided further corroborative testimony as to why the NKVD had been so keen to confiscate the passports of the American emigrants.
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But it seemed that few people were willing to take Krivitsky’s statements seriously, or his frequent complaints that Soviet agents had been tracking him for the past two years in New York. In December 1939, Krivitsky telephoned Loy Henderson “very alarmed for fear that attempts upon his life might be made immediately.” Henderson’s response was to advise him to call the New York City Police Department. On December 10, 1941, the body of Walter Krivitsky was discovered lying in pool of blood in a room at the Bellevue Hotel in Washington, D.C. A bullet from a thirty-eight-caliber revolver had passed into his right temple. An alleged suicide note was found at the scene, but one month before his death, Krivitsky had told a friend: “Don’t you ever believe that I will be a suicide. They have shot everybody else and they are going to shoot me.”
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ACCORDING TO LOY HENDERSON’S memoirs, “the Soviets never once informed American diplomatic or consular officers of the arrest of an American citizen within time limits. Usually we learned of the arrest through letters received from the US, through persons in the Soviet Union acquainted with the person under arrest, or from a person who had met the arrested man in prison.”
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Occasionally a press article was brought to the attention of an American diplomat, and the relevant clipping would be attached to an existing or newly created file. By this means, the State Department learned of the imprisonment of George Sviridoff, “a sixteen or seventeen-year-old fair-haired boy” who had been discovered as a stowaway on the steamer
Kim,
leaving the USSR bound for the United States. For the “crime” of attempting to exit the Soviet Union illegally, the American teenager was sentenced to ten years’ “corrective labor.”

Remarkably, and almost uniquely in the case of George Sviridoff, two handwritten letters sent from his concentration camp reached his father in America, most likely via an intermediary living in Russia. His father had then passed these letters on to the State Department in an effort to impress upon them the severity of his son’s ordeal. The first letter was dated July 10, 1936:

 
A year later a second letter arrived from Vorkuta, the Gulag epicenter, located above the Arctic Circle in northern Siberia. The second letter was dated July 17, 1937: