The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (25 page)

In a memo copied into Nousiainen’s file and sent on to Washington, D.C., Loy Henderson expressed a certain weariness and attempted to excuse the embassy’s inaction:

 
The snatched arrests of American nationals outside the embassy had been taking place for the past four years, and yet each new case was treated as if it were the first. Later, two more American exiles, Henry Webb and Bruno Wuori, were stopped outside the embassy building—but, for unknown reasons, were released. They then returned inside to “point out their interrogators to members of the Embassy staff as being the two plain clothes individuals whose custom it was to loiter or stand in front of a shop window between the Hotel National and the Embassy building within approximately forty paces of the entrance to the Consular Section.” By December 1938, an unnamed American embassy official, presumably a recent arrival, typed another note to Washington:
“Formerly there was a steady and considerable volume of correspondence between the Embassy and Americans of dual nationality, most of whom are young, in connection with their efforts to renounce Soviet citizenship, but during last year there has been a noticeable decline in this class of correspondence, which the Embassy is at a loss to explain . . .”
⁴²

 
 
ON HIS RETURN to the White House, Joseph Davies gave a full briefing to President Roosevelt on his lengthy conversation with Stalin. At the Soviet embassy in Washington, Davies explained to Konstantin Oumansky—the former censor turned diplomat—how Roosevelt had questioned him closely and he had described Stalin as “a sage, simple man, who can look ahead and combine dignity with affability.” For his part, Oumansky wrote back to Moscow that Joseph Davies had told him that he “took all measures to stop the campaign on the Rubens case organized by officials from the American Embassy in Moscow in his absence without any pressure from Washington.”
⁴³
It seemed the American ambassador was apologizing for the attempted intervention on behalf of Ruth Rubens in Butyrskaya Prison.

Despite an intense lobbying campaign, Franklin Roosevelt passed Joseph Davies over for the promised Berlin ambassadorial post, with the tactful excuse that to appoint someone of his “high profile” might send the Nazis the wrong message. The world travels of the “freshman ambassador” had already prompted a skeptical reaction in the American press, and the president was acutely sensitive to bad public relations and obviously wary of a repeat performance in Berlin. As a consolation, Joseph Davies was appointed ambassador to Belgium, where the potential for damage was obviously more limited. After brief service in Brussels, Davies turned his attention to writing
Mission to Moscow
, a memoir of his diplomatic service in Russia, full of praise for Stalin’s tough-minded ability to protect himself from internal threat.

Quickly retitled “Submission to Moscow” by the diplomats who had served under him, Davies’ book was published in 1941 just as America entered into a wartime alliance with Stalin. For an American public still reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor, the book provided welcome reassurance that their democracy was in alliance with a fair-minded and trustworthy Soviet leader as characterized by Davies, rather than the ruthless and genocidal dictator already responsible for the deaths of millions.
Mission to Moscow
became a runaway international success, selling seven hundred thousand copies in the United States alone, and topping the bestseller lists in the thirteen languages into which it was translated. On the flyleaf of the personal copy he kept at his bedside, President Roosevelt wrote the words “This book will last.” Buoyed by the success of the president’s favorite memoir, Joseph Davies returned to his wife’s Florida estate at Mar-A-Lago to recuperate. For the Americans he had left behind in Russia, life was to follow a very different course.

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After his arrest outside the American embassy, Thomas Sgovio was escorted to a Moscow militia precinct before being placed in a Soviet Ford and driven the short distance to the Lubyanka. Almost immediately an NKVD officer began the interrogation: “Tell us of your espionage activities. We know you are a spy. You have to tell us.” Usually the arrested prisoners were met with a cascade of blows but Thomas was not beaten perhaps because early on in the interrogation he admitted to being homesick. His words were written into his NKVD file as a confession:
“When I came to the USSR everything was so strange and I felt hostile to the Soviet system so I decided to return to America which is my real homeland.”
²

Later Thomas was taken to Taganka Prison for processing. Here the prisoners were fingerprinted, photographed, and strip-searched. Barbers cropped their heads with clippers and shaved their bodies; buttons were cut off, belts and shoestrings confiscated, pockets turned inside out, and those with gold teeth were taken to the prison dentist. Then the arrested prisoners were pressed into the already desperately overcrowded cells. There were 165 men in Thomas’ cell in Taganka Prison—so many they could barely shuffle their feet.
³
In the midst of this ordeal, when Thomas heard the piercing screams of the men and women inside the jail, he still did not fully understand what was taking place around him. A fellow prisoner had to explain that the unearthly noise was simply some poor soul being beaten. Even then, Thomas’ reaction was one of naïve amazement. He was not yet willing to believe that a person could be tortured within the Soviet prison system.
⁴

The prisoners were beaten by teams of NKVD interrogators working in shifts, who kept their victims awake for nights on end until they signed the confessions placed before them. Usually the more fantastic the charges, the greater the ferocity required in a system known by prisoners and guards alike as “the conveyor.” In the memoirs of the survivors, there were many examples of those driven mad under the strain of their ordeal. A tortured Red Army officer, Colonel Vikhorev, asked his interrogator, “Tell me, this counterrevolutionary organization of which I am a member—does it really exist?”
⁵
A member of the Communist Party of Palestine, Ephraim Leszinsky, was beaten so savagely to force him to confess the names of his accomplices that he broke down in tears in his cell, banging his head against the wall and shouting, “What’s that other name I’ve forgotten? What’s that other name I’ve forgotten?”
⁶
Often the final outcome of the conveyor was mental breakdown. Lucien Blit, a Jewish Bundist, recorded the outburst of a powerfully built peasant from Kolno, who awoke the entire cell to tell them he was Jesus Christ and that it was time they took him down from the cross. His screaming lasted for five days.
⁷

In Taganka, Thomas Sgovio’s cellmates included Harry Jaffe, the tenor from the Anglo-American chorus, and Michael Aisenstein, the naturalized American engineer from California whose artist wife had attempted personal intervention with Ambassador Davies. The oil engineer explained that he had been arrested after an informer had denounced his unwise comment that “in America the unemployed were better off than Soviet engineers.”
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IN THE CITY OF GORKY—420 kilometers east of Moscow—between “fifty and seventy bodies” were removed each day from the NKVD headquarters on Vorobievka Street. According to one survivor, a prisoner was nominated to whitewash the cell walls to remove the names left behind by the dead. The desire to leave some trace of their existence appeared to have been a common impulse among those who sensed the end was fast approaching.
⁹
At night in Gorky, screams were heard emerging from the NKVD prison courtyard—
“No. Don’t shoot, Comrades! Don’t shoot me, I have done
nothing wrong!”
—followed by the crack of a gunshot, a brief silence, and then another shot to make sure.
¹⁰

Inside this building, another surviving American was taken from his prison cell for interrogation. Victor Herman was confronted by the figure of a swaying, slightly drunk NKVD guard who introduced himself as “Citizen Belov” and then demanded, “You will tell me about your counter-revolutionary activities. I will hear every one!” When Victor failed to respond, the heavyset interrogator ordered him to turn around and face the wall. Then Belov began to punch the twenty-three-year-old Detroiter with steady blows to his kidneys.
¹¹

Torture was a legally sanctioned method of inquisition in the USSR. Stalin had issued an explicit instruction for the long-standing practice on January 20, 1938:
“Physical pressure in NKVD practice is permissible . . . Physical pressure should still be used obligatorily, as an exception applicable to known and obstinate enemies of the people, as a method both justifiable and appropriate.”
Many NKVD interrogators framed these words on their desks to act as a continuing threat when they grew physically tired from beating the prisoners.
¹²
Nor was there ever a shortage of men such as Belov, happy to don a new uniform and, in exchange for increased living space and food allowances, to torture these “enemies of the people.” A newly hired NKVD staff member earned between twelve and fifteen hundred rubles per month, roughly twice the income of a Soviet official with ten years’ experience, and that was excluding the potential bonuses for their “special work.”
¹³

The moral boundaries had been redrawn some two decades earlier. The arrested were no longer to be regarded as fully human, worthy of compassion. Instead, they were recategorized as something “other,” outside the fold of “progressive” humanity, whose excision could only benefit the construction of a classless, socialist society. Within this totalitarian underworld, an enthusiasm to inflict physical violence upon such “enemies” was regarded as a cherished character trait by an organization that elevated the psychotic to the heroic, and fêted their most successful. This was the NKVD’s heralded “revolutionary instinct” with teeth barred, which turned a brutal interrogator like Belov into a local celebrity—the generator of corpses collected every day from the building on Vorobievka Street.

Each night, Belov would punch Victor Herman’s back three times on his right side, and then again on the left. He would pause, pacing himself by stopping to drink a beer or whiskey, before starting up again with steady deliberation. Shortly after midnight, Belov would begin and he would continue until dawn. On the first night, Victor Herman managed to stay on his feet, but on the second night he fell, and every night thereafter. On the eleventh night, Belov pressed his fingertips across the length of Victor’s back, in a macabre impersonation of a medical doctor, asking his victim where it hurt. Victor remained silent but when he flinched, Belov sensed he had found his mark. After the fifteenth night, Victor began bleeding from his penis, his rectum, his nose, and his eyes. He was returned to his cell each morning at dawn. Eventually the cell “elder” pleaded with him to talk—“Save your life, American”—but Victor Herman stubbornly refused to confess to a crime he had not committed.
¹⁴

On the fifty-third night of his torture, he was told he would be released if he only signed a list of names. When Victor refused again, he was taken to a basement cell and beaten by a gang of men with clubs. The next morning he was coughing up clots of blood, and the following night he was beaten again and told he was going to be killed. Losing consciousness, Victor was woken by the sensation and smell of his leg being burned to bring him back around. On the fifty-fifth night, believing that he was about to die and knowing that he might never get the chance again, Victor Herman spat in Belov’s face. He woke up in the prison hospital.
¹⁵

 
 
LYING BESIDE HIM in the hospital ward was a prisoner named Romanoff, who had also emigrated from Detroit to work in the Soviet Ford factory. Romanoff was in a terrible state but seemed oddly cheerful; he said he would soon be released and then find a way to return home to Detroit. When Victor asked how this was possible, Romanoff told him that he had signed a confession denouncing McCarthy, an engineer at the auto factory, as an American spy. The following night, Romanoff died in the hospital of internal injuries. And at this point, convinced that he, too, would soon be beaten to death, Victor Herman signed the confession placed before him. He was immediately returned to his crowded holding cell, where he recognized another American from the auto factory, a man named Janssen, lying prostrate on the concrete floor with blood bubbling from his mouth. A few hours later, Janssen’s body was removed from the cell.
¹⁶

A Polish prisoner, Z. Stypulkowski, detailed the psychological effect of torture by the NKVD:
“After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger
and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton—his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state he is often convinced he is guilty.”
¹⁷
With sufficient beatings, a prisoner lost even the sense of his own self, which had been broken and replaced by only an overwhelming fear. New prisoners quickly learned the value of confessing their “crimes” and spitting out names. Their compliance often saved their lives.
¹⁸
Some chose to incriminate everyone they knew, hoping vainly to overload the system of terror. Others attempted to name only the dead. But given time, even the toughest minds dissolved under the brutality of the conveyor. Under extreme duress, it was easier to consider oneself a Trotskyite spy working for Germany or Japan than to keep hold of your own past. In such circumstances the mind gently protects the body from that which it can no longer endure.