The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (23 page)

 
His case in particular sparked a moment of compassion from the State Department officials. On June 1, 1938, George Kennan wrote a lengthy note, attached to Sviridoff’s case file:

 
George Kennan’s belated recognition of the coercion used to strip Americans of their citizenship and his idea of publicizing their existence was, in retrospect, their only hope for salvation. But no such publicity was ever attempted, and Kennan was unwilling to act alone. Just like the others, he remained silent.

12

“Submission to Moscow”

 
 
 
As the Terror worsened, Joseph Davies wrote steadily more bizarre cables to the State Department: “The secret police is the personal agency of Stalin and the party. It is in the saddle and riding hard! The new head of the organization, Ezhov, is comparatively a young man. He is constantly seen with Stalin and is regarded as one of the strongest men in the government. His effectiveness and ability are greatly respected . . .” At the twentieth-anniversary celebrations for the Revolution, Davies had watched Yezhov—“a man of very short stature almost a dwarf but with a very fine head and face”—standing constantly close to Stalin, “whispering and joking with him.”
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By the spring of 1938, the ambassador’s diplomatic staff in Moscow were reporting the daily arrests and disappearances of friends and their relatives. One member of Davies’ staff witnessed “a struggling unfortunate being arrested and torn from his eleven-year-old child on the street in front of the adjoining apartment house at 3:30 A.M.”
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In March, as Charlie Ciliberti waited for Ambassador Davies, the chauffer watched the NKVD struggling to pull a fourteen-year-old boy into their car. The boy refused to go quietly, and a silently sympathetic crowd of Muscovites gathered to watch the scene. When the American ambassador unexpectedly appeared, as if by a miraculous force the NKVD released the boy immediately. It was proof that the ambassador had the power to save lives, if only by his presence. But Joseph Davies deigned to use this power only by accident, and never by design.
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Instead, that same month, Davies attended the last of the Moscow show trials. Sitting once again at the very front of the court, on this occasion the ambassador knew personally many of the famous names sitting in the defendant’s box just ten feet away. Among them was Dr. Pletnev, the Kremlin cardiologist who had treated him several times in Moscow. In his diary, Davies wrote that he found it difficult to look at Pletnev, “for fear our eyes would meet. They faced death and were in a desperate and hopeless plight.”
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Beside Pletnev in the defendant’s box sat Arkady Rosengoltz, the former commissar for foreign trade who had entertained Davies and his family in his mansion as the two men spent long days negotiating the Soviet debt. During the trial, Rosengoltz was mocked by the prosecutor, Vyshinsky, because his wife was discovered to have sewn into his jacket a copy of the Ninety-first Psalm.
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During the Great War, Russian soldiers had carried excerpts of the psalm either in an amulet or sewn into a piece of their clothing to offer protection from the bullets and shells. Twenty years later, Stalin’s prisoners were repeating the old traditions of Mother Russia:

 
In the courtroom for a special report, Walter Duranty noticed, high above the judge’s table, a space resembling a window which was screened so that nothing could be seen through it, bar the occasional lighting of a match or the glow of a cigarette. In this small room overlooking the courtroom, Duranty wrote that Stalin sat watching the enactment of the confessions his NKVD interrogators had so carefully scripted.
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This third show trial was even more fantastic than its predecessors. First up onto the witness stand was Nikolai Bukharin. Once described by Lenin as “the most able man in the Party,” he was now accused of plotting the murder of both Lenin and Stalin, of conspiracy to return capitalism to the USSR, and of having worked for British and German imperialists since 1921.
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Preserved in the Russian state archives is a letter Bukharin wrote to Stalin on March 13, 1938, from his prison cell, pleading for his life:

 
The Party’s former ideologue ought to have known the futility of asking for “proletarian generosity” from a man so dedicated to “proletarian ruthlessness.” Bukharin had devoted his entire life to the ends of the Bolsheviks. He once told William Bullitt that on the ninety-first day of the Revolution, Lenin had wrapped his arms around him and said, “Isn’t it wonderful? We have lasted ninety-one days, one day longer than the French Commune!” Now Bukharin poured out his confession to the court and waited for his sentence to be announced, like a carpenter who has labored furiously day and night only to step back and realize he has constructed his own gallows.
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Beside him in court sat Henrikh Yagoda, the once-feared GPU chief who had persecuted the Soviet regime’s enemies mercilessly throughout a long and very bloody career. Now Yagoda confessed to a conspiracy with Trotsky, and of having masterminded espionage for Germany all along. Yagoda also claimed responsibility for the assassination of Kirov, the murder of the writer Maxim Gorky, and a plot to kill his successor, Yezhov, by redecorating his office with poisonous paint. Awaiting trial in his prison cell, Yagoda joked of his sudden belief in the existence of God. “It’s very simple,” he told his guard. “I deserved nothing but gratitude from Stalin for my loyal service. I had earned the severest punishment from God, however, since I broke his commandments a thousand times. Now look where I am—and decide for yourself whether God exists . . .”
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Only one of the old Bolsheviks, Nikolai Krestinsky, was willing to disrupt the smooth flow of confessions. As deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Krestinsky had accepted the diplomatic credentials of Joseph Davies on his arrival in Russia. Now Krestinsky astounded the court by announcing he was “not guilty” of all charges. The consternation forced the presiding judge, Vassily Ulrich, to call for an immediate adjournment. The following day, normality returned as Krestinsky requested to change his plea to guilty:
“Yesterday, under the influence of a momentary strong feeling of false shame caused by the atmosphere of the prisoners’ dock and the painful impression created by the reading of the indictment, aggravated by my poor state of health, I could not bring myself to speak the truth, could not bring myself to say that I was guilty. And, instead of saying—yes, I am guilty. I replied almost mechanically—no, I am not guilty.”
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A friend who had known him before the Revolution commented at the time, “You know they must have done something awful to Krestinsky because I simply didn’t recognize him on the second day. Even his voice was somehow different.”
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Later it was discovered that Krestinsky had been severely tortured and admitted into Butyrskaya Prison hospital for treatment to his back, which was described as “like a single wound.”
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Privately the defendants were reminded of the methods to be used against them if the “correct” testimony was not received in court. Their fate, therefore, depended not only on what they said but
how
they said it. Thus when Judge Ulrich gave Bukharin the veiled hint that he was defending himself, Bukharin responded frantically,
“This is not my defence. It is my self-accusation! I have not said a single word in my defence!”
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His subsequent confession was abject:
“I am responsible as one of the leaders and not merely as a cog . . . I do not want to minimise my guilt, I want to aggravate it.”
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As the old Bolsheviks reeled off their crimes in self-abasement, the sweat poured from their faces in front of the blinding klieg lights dazzling the courtroom for the newsreel cameras of the world’s press.

At 4:00 A.M. on March 13, 1938, Judge General Ulrich once again read out the defendants’ names, followed by a monotonous drone of death sentences:
“To be shot, to be shot, to be shot, to be shot . . .”
In the majority of cases their family members were also arrested and sent to the camps, the promises of leniency revealed as just another cruel deceit. Thus Bukharin’s young wife, Anna, was torn from her one-year-old child and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. To entertain his boss, Stalin’s bodyguard, Karl Pauker, re-enacted the moment when Bukharin was led away to his death kicking and screaming and clinging to the shoulders of his guards, shouting, “Please, somebody call Joseph Vissarionovich.” Watching Pauker’s impersonation, Stalin laughed uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face, until he had to wave to his bodyguard to stop. Later Pauker, too, was shot.
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From Mexico, the last survivor of the Revolution, a scornful Leon Trotsky, likened the proceedings in Moscow to the “witch-trials of the medieval inquisition.” Stalin’s most famous living enemy had already noted that “Krupskaya once said in 1927 that if Lenin were alive he would probably be in a Stalinist prison.”
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Now Trotsky set to work destroying the credibility of the trial:
“The whole Communist Political Bureau and almost the whole Communist Committee of the heroic period of the Revolution, except for Stalin, are proclaimed agents of the restoration of capitalism. Who will believe this?”
Within three years Trotsky, too, would be murdered by the “special tasks” agents of the NKVD, but not before his rhetorical question was answered. The one man willing to believe every word was sitting at the very front of the court.
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From Moscow, Ambassador Joseph Davies wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull:
“After daily observation of the witnesses, their manner of testifying, the unconscious corroborations which developed . . . it is my opinion so far as the political defendants are concerned sufficient crimes under Soviet law . . . were established by the proof and beyond a reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.”
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No other American diplomat working under Davies shared his view. His diplomatic aide Charlie Thayer summed up their consensus in his diary entry for March 2, 1938: “I have this moment heard the indictment on the Bukharin trial read over the radio. A more incredible document I could hardly have imagined. Gulliver’s Travels sounds in comparison like a scientific exposition of Euclid . . . The Russian may be naïf, but this is too much for a dog to believe.”
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CONSIDERING THE AMBASSADOR’S reaction to the trial, it was unsurprising that Davies did so little to help the American emigrants being arrested in Russia. But while run-of-the-mill emigrants lacked sufficient influence to bypass the ranks of embassy officials, the ambassador did occasionally receive one of the more highly placed of the exiles. Shortly after the end of the Bukharin trial, he sat down for a meeting with Tamara Aisenstein, a naturalized American artist whose husband had signed on as an engineer for the Soviet Oil Trust before he was arrested. As an enthusiastic art collector, Joseph Davies might have sympathized with the fate of Tamara Aisenstein, whose paintings of Californian landscapes had recently been exhibited at the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists. Her West Coast impressionism had only attracted the hostility of Soviet art critics, the hypervigilant guardians of Stalin’s socialist realism:
“We are faced with a naive, slightly lady-like art with a clear and even deliberate bent towards infantilism . . . They lack life, they are not pervaded with a sense of reality, nor warmed with the breath of living man.”
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Sitting in his office, Ambassador Davies patiently explained to Mrs. Aisenstein that since both she and her husband had received Soviet citizenship, they were no longer entitled to his protection. And, like many others before her, she was forced to leave the embassy empty-handed.
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She, too, was arrested shortly afterward, and little more was said on the matter. Only Monroe Deutsch, the provost of the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a letter, in vain, to Secretary of State Hull asking for intervention on behalf of his former student, who was
“well known to many engineers in the region and his artist wife Tamara, who had left behind many good friends in California.”
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