The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (24 page)

If Davies’ conscience troubled him, there is no evidence to suggest so. Above all else, the ambassador sought to avoid even the slightest appearance of conflict with the Soviet authorities. He left complete responsibility for the protection of American citizens to his staff. If pressed by the State Department, according to Loy Henderson, he would talk to Foreign Minister Litvinov “in an apologetic manner as though he were asking a personal favour.”
²⁴
According to Maxim Litvinov’s official diary, at one particular lunch party Joseph Davies
did
politely ask about an arrested American citizen, whom he requested to be released and expelled
“if possible.”
But Litvinov had simply sidestepped the issue, explaining that he was leaving Moscow soon, and requesting that Davies address the matter to the “Third Western Division of the Soviet Foreign Affairs”—the usual bureaucratic dead end for American diplomatic inquiries. In an internal memorandum drafted to his Soviet colleagues, Litvinov added,
“I see no need for explanations with the NKVD. The Ambassador named the prisoners, but I cannot recall them.”
²⁵

Clearly Maxim Litvinov had not the slightest desire to entangle himself in the affairs of the NKVD, especially when he was in fear for his own life. From 1937 onward, the Soviet foreign minister slept with a revolver next to his bed, “so that if the bell rang in the night, he would not have to live through the consequences.” But unlike Litvinov, Ambassador Joseph Davies could never claim his life was in danger. Only at the very end of his Moscow posting did the puzzled first secretary, Loy Henderson, understand the real reason for the American ambassador’s curiously supine behavior. But by then it was already all too late.
²⁶

 
 
AT THE BEGINNING of one of the hottest Russian summers in living memory, on June 5, 1938, Ambassador Joseph Davies was summoned to the Kremlin to exchange diplomatic farewells with Maxim Litvinov on the eve of his departure from the USSR. When Joseph Stalin unexpectedly walked into the room, a meeting took place that Davies later described as causing “nothing short of a sensation in the Diplomatic Corps.” For the past several years, Stalin had consistently refused to meet the ambassadors of even the great powers.
²⁷
Through the course of the Terror, the Soviet leader had grown ever more reclusive, appearing in public only rarely, for May Day or the anniversary of the Revolution, when he would stand and wave from Lenin’s Mausoleum, above the roar of the crowd below.

Catching sight of the almost mythic figure of Stalin walking toward him, Joseph Davies leaped to his feet and began an off-the-cuff speech describing how he had “heard it said that history would record Stalin as a greater builder than Peter the Great or Catherine.” Davies then explained how honored he was to meet “the man who had built for the practical benefit of common men.” Well used to such sycophancy, Stalin showed no surprise at the unctuous flattery pouring from the mouth of American ambassador. Instead he preferred to talk business, asking what was holding up Soviet arms purchases from the United States; and why, when he was offering one hundred million dollars in cash, were the Americans so reluctant to sell them their latest battleships? Soviet representatives were locked in their thirteenth month of negotiations with navy officials in Washington, although Roosevelt himself had already approved the deal. Ambassador Davies duly promised to expedite matters, and the two men continued a two-hour discussion ranging from the political situation in Europe to the personality of Franklin Roosevelt.
²⁸

Returning to his office at Spaso House, Joseph Davies was unable to contain his joy, telling Henderson, “I have seen him; I have finally had a talk with him; he is really a fine, upstanding, great man!” Loy Henderson later described how the ambassador confided that “this was one of the great days of his life, that the President had instructed him that his main mission in Moscow was to win the confidence of Stalin, to be able to talk over Soviet-American relations frankly and personally with Stalin, that he had been striving ever since his arrival in Moscow to carry out this mission, and that just on the eve of his departure he had finally succeeded.”
²⁹
After the meeting, in a letter to his daughter, Davies wrote that Stalin
“gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him . . .”
³⁰

On their departure from Russia, once again the diplomatic corps turned out to see the American couple off from Moscow’s Belorussky Station. A delighted Marjorie Davies was presented with the parting gift of a pair of vases from the Sheremetev Palace, and just before the train departed, the Soviet chief of protocol, Vladimir Barkov, rushed up to the ambassador and handed him a silver frame with four red stars embossed in its corners, holding an autographed photograph of Joseph Stalin.
³¹
The gift gave Davies an opportunity to write Stalin a gushing letter of thanks:

 
True to his word, Joseph Davies kept the signed photograph of Joseph Stalin in its silver frame on prominent display in his library for years to come. It was an inadvertent reminder of the lives he had not saved and of the man who had killed them.
³³

 
 
FACED WITH SIMILAR circumstances, other diplomats behaved very differently. Dr. Heinrich Pacher-Theinburg served as the Austrian ambassador to Moscow through the worst period of the Terror. During the summer and autumn of 1937, small groups of Austrian emigrants had sought refuge at their embassy as they attempted to escape the predations of the NKVD. The conservative and aristocratic Pacher-Theinburg was faced with a stark choice over the fate of these Austrian asylum seekers, whose left-wing politics he plainly did not share. Like his American contemporaries, Pacher-Theinburg clearly understood that all foreigners were being methodically arrested in Stalin’s Russia, often immediately after they left their embassy buildings. Like the Americans, too, he was fully aware of the consequences of NKVD arrest: the reports circulating Moscow of torture, concentration camps, and executions were impossible to avoid. Unlike his American counterparts, however, Ambassador Pacher-Theinburg felt sufficiently compelled to save the lives of his fellow Austrians by offering them shelter in the basement of the Austrian embassy.

Just feeding these refugees during the months of their confinement stretched the resources of Pacher-Theinburg to their very limit. Quite predictably, the Soviet authorities did their utmost to obstruct this small ark of salvation from the Terror. But fearful of an international scandal, the regime eventually allowed this lucky group of refugees a negotiated exit from the Soviet Union under Pacher-Theinburg’s protection. According to Loy Henderson, the Austrian ambassador saved the lives of between twenty and thirty young men in this way. He had little opportunity to do more. By March 1938, Hitler’s Anschluss had deprived Pacher-Theinburg of a country to represent. The Austrian diplomat returned to Vienna with his family and to severe financial hardship. For rare individuals, the choices they made in response to the crimes of totalitarianism were relatively simple. There was no other acceptable moral alternative.
³⁴

For their part, the American embassy staff did attempt to keep a list of Americans in the USSR. But given the disinclination of the NKVD to inform the embassy whenever they arrested another American emigrant, unless the diplomats learned of the disappearance from a relative in the United States or through a personal friend of the victim contacting the embassy, they remained none the wiser. Even the starting point for their list was wrong, since there was no record of the majority of Americans who had arrived at the beginning of the Depression, in the preceding three years before the embassy opened. Instead, the diplomats resorted to advertising in the pages of the
Moscow Daily News
to gain a clearer picture of the numbers. And although they gathered sheets and sheets of American names, many of which they subsequently marked with a cross or an asterisk to signify their arrest, the project remained fraught with error.
³⁵
Neither Thomas Sgovio nor any member of the Sgovio family, for example, ever appeared on the American embassy list, although Thomas had visited the embassy at least twice before his arrest. The American embassy list—unlike Oskar Schindler’s four years later—became a source of self-deception rather than salvation.

In April 1937, during one of Joseph Davies’ lengthy absences, Ambassador J. K. Huddle visited the Moscow embassy in his role as the State Department’s inspector of posts. In his official report, Huddle wrote that he discovered the embassy in a state of considerable disarray:
“When I arrived I must regretfully state that morale was almost at the breaking point . . . The embassy in Moscow is afflicted with a tenseness, a nervousness, an apprehension of the unseen—a victim as is everything and everyone else in Moscow of the OGPU. Members of the staff and their families have been arrested and held temporarily on numbers of occasions, American members, even officers . . .”
³⁶

Among his recommendations, Huddle criticized even the creation of this fragmentary list of Americans on the grounds of sheer wastefulness:

 
As well as substantially underestimating the number of American emigrants in Russia, Ambassador Huddle regarded this “flotsam and jetsam” as valuable only in terms of a footnote for the State Department files. With bureaucratic detachment, Huddle acknowledged there might be cases of “intense human interest and such a case report might be of later historic value.” As an example, he quoted the letter of a “lad born in Ohio in 1918,” who had written to the embassy for assistance on January 15, 1937. The unnamed nineteen-year-old boy was obviously desperate:

 
What happened to this nineteen-year-old Ohioan, Huddle never recorded, nor was the government inspector moved to action. As one of the “flotsam and jetsam” in Russia, it appeared this American teenager’s life held no significance to the government of the United States.
³⁷

Alexander Kirk was the senior diplomat left in Moscow after Joseph Davies’ departure. In the summer of 1938, Kirk wrote to Secretary of State Hull, informing him of the disappearance of further “former Americans” after they had visited the Moscow embassy. Elmer John Nousiainen, an American passport holder from Daisytown, Pennsylvania, had arrived at the embassy on July 18, 1938, with news of mass arrests of the American emigrants in Petrozavodsk. Directly from this eyewitness, the diplomats learned how “hundreds of families have been broken up and the morale of the inhabitants completely broken.” In the preceding fortnight, two hundred Americans had been arrested when the NKVD launched an “industrialization drive.” The majority were young men taken in the night. Elmer John Nousiainen gave chilling details in his statement to the diplomats:
“No cause is given. The sons are not even allowed to say good-bye to their mothers; the apartments are always searched; all things foreign are taken by the authorities . . . The young people are afraid to go home. Several girls have been arrested. One in the last stages of pregnancy was left behind with the warning that ‘her case would be settled later.’ The city’s ski factory, which had once employed 160 Americans, was shut down and all its workers rounded up after local communists accused ‘all foreign-born persons of being spies, wreckers, saboteurs.’ ”
³⁸

Elmer John Nousiainen was twenty-two years old at the time, his biography that of a typical American emigrant to the USSR. In Pennsylvania during the Depression, his father was a miner put out on the dole. The family had sold their home and packed up their belongings in search of work in Russia.
³⁹
After delivering his report on the Terror in Karelia, Elmer John Nousiainen was permitted to leave the American embassy building in Moscow. No attempt was made to warn him, to hide him, or even to delay his departure. Outside on Mokhovaya street, the twenty-two-year-old Pennsylvanian was arrested by the NKVD.
⁴⁰