The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (28 page)

When private pockets were exhausted, more radical solutions had to be found. In the Kremlin, Stalin ordered the translation into Russian of books on the Californian gold rush and summoned the pre-Revolutionary Bolshevik Alexander Serebrovsky to a meeting.
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In the past decade Serebrovsky had earned a reputation as “the Soviet Rockefeller” for returning the Caucasian oil fields to production after the Civil War. Now Stalin instructed him to repeat his success in the Soviet gold industry. Their plan was to duplicate American mining techniques; and exactly one week later, Alexander Serebrovsky was dispatched to Alaska.
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Described by Littlepage as “a medium-sized, inconspicuous man, smooth-shaven, with American clothes and an American air,” Serebrovsky posed as a humble “Professor of Mines” as he toured the Alaskan gold mines. He met Jack Littlepage in one of the first mines he visited, and was impressed by this tall, lean American mining engineer who worked alongside his miners and knew how to get the job done quickly. In Alaska, Serebrovsky was surprised by the lack of class distinction between the engineer and the miners. “Isn’t it the same way in Russia?” asked Littlepage. “It’s not that way yet,” Serebrovsky replied with some honesty.
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But when Serebrovsky inquired if he would like to work in Russia, Jack Littlepage had refused point-blank, stating bluntly that he “did not like Bolsheviks.” “You don’t like Bolsheviks? Well, what’s wrong with them?” wondered the astonished Serebrovsky, who had joined the Party in 1903. “They seem to have a habit of shooting people, especially engineers,” replied Littlepage, who even then had read the reports of show trials. But Serebrovsky was unfazed by what to him were the naïve misperceptions of the bourgeois press, and quietly sought to allay Littlepage’s fears: “Well, I am a Bolshevik, and have been one for many, many years. Do I look so dangerous?”
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In a Soviet propaganda pamphlet, Serebrovsky described the American engineer as “drawn to the Soviet Union by the grand scale of our construction work, the ideas of great Stalin, the chance to unfold his talents freely.” If the financial allure was left unstated, it was also clear that Serebrovsky was a sound judge of character. Jack Littlepage arrived in the Soviet Union on May 1, 1928, with his wife, Georgia, and their two young daughters. Quickly renamed Ivan Eduardovich, he soon learned to speak Russian and, with an indefatigable energy, “set about verifying calculations, designs, estimates, plans of work.” In the next six years, the USSR outstripped America in gold production figures and was ready to overtake the world’s number one producer, the British Empire, which controlled the vast gold wealth of South Africa.
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Jack Littlepage’s career as the deputy commissar of the Soviet Gold Trust was so successful that he was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and rewarded with a Soviet Ford Model A, one of the most prestigious gifts of the era. Publicly praised in an article in
Izvestiya,
Littlepage was sent back to the United States several times to recruit more engineers, “the beginning of the great American invasion” hired to oversee work in the Soviet gold mines. In those Depression years, there was never any shortage of willing recruits.
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On his way to Moscow via Berlin, one of the Soviet apparatchiks had taken a shine to Jack Littlepage and offered him some advice that he later remembered:
“He said I needn’t get worried if Russians working with me suddenly disappeared under what would seem to me to be mysterious circumstances. There wasn’t any other way to manage things at present, he told me, and I would find the police active in the mines and the mills. He told me I should take it that the police were helping rather than hindering my work, and not be bothered by them.”
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Although Jack Littlepage was never forced to take up Soviet citizenship or stripped of his American passport, he was required to turn a blind eye to the scenes he witnessed of Russian peasants driven from their homes and forced to work in the gold mines. Later he claimed to believe the confessions of the Bolshevik defendants in the show trials, and their wild accusations that “wreckers” and “saboteurs” were responsible for the lamentable performance of Soviet industry. In the midst of the repressions, Jack Littlepage continued to fulfill his role as a deputy commissar, advising Serebrovsky on the use of Alaskan-style prospecting parties working in twos and threes to scour the vast unexplored lands of the USSR in search of gold.
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IN 1932, A geological prospecting team made its way to the remote corner of northeastern Russia. It was, they said, a wasteland of such cold and darkness that it had never been permanently settled by man. In the valley of the Kolyma River, the prospectors discovered vast placer deposits of gold, often lying in nuggets close to the surface of the earth. But who would volunteer to work in this Godforsaken wasteland whose winter temperatures were colder and more extreme even than the North Pole’s? The answer, of course, was simple since, as Jack Littlepage himself had recognized elsewhere in the USSR,
“the secret police have an advantage over other Soviet organizations as they can always count on a steady supply of labour, no matter what kind of living conditions exist, where the given task has to be done.”
While Tsar Nicholas II had once made the decision that the conditions in Kolyma were too atrocious for human beings to live or work, Stalin never had such qualms.
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In exchange for the soft yellow metal, Stalin offered up the lives of legions of prisoners, safe in the knowledge that he possessed an almost inexhaustible supply. If, after all, Matvei Berman had consumed up to a quarter of a million lives in the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, how many more would the Kolyma gold be worth? A vast new Soviet enterprise was called into being, given the euphemistic title of the Far North Construction Trust and known by its Russian acronym as Dalstroi. The trust would control an area three million square kilometers in size, larger than western Europe, and the ships of the NKVD fleet were purchased at auction ready to deliver the labor force.
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The first waves of prisoners were marched under guard across the snow-fields. In Kolyma they were forced to build their own camps beside the newly prospected gold mines, and those who faltered or lagged behind were shot. These early camps were primitive affairs regularly cut off from the new city of Magadan by the ferocity of the winters. Supplies often failed, and when communications were restored—days, sometimes weeks, later—often there were no survivors left to continue. From the early years, it was said that only one in every hundred survived, and these “last of the Mohicans” reported watching Eduard Berzin, the first Dalstroi chief, travel along the main highway to inspect the mines in a Rolls-Royce that had once belonged to Lenin, the reward from Stalin for his success.
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From Dalstroi’s inception, Stalin kept close control over its operations, demanding regular updates, which required its top officials to report back personally to Moscow.
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The Politburo resolutions for Dalstroi were obscured by layers of official secrecy. Selected items from key reports were placed in special folders for “eyes only” secrecy, and relevant Party officials were allowed to read just one or two points from the whole report. Only Stalin and the highest levels of the NKVD hierarchy had knowledge of and responsibility for the whole enterprise, both in its creation and continued expansion in the annual prisoner transfers across the first “open water.”
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In his first two years, Eduard Berzin delivered the news that Dalstroi’s harvest of gold had leaped tenfold. In response, Stalin poured more and more prisoners into the wilderness, and the production rose still higher.
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But however much gold Berzin sent back to Moscow, it was still never enough. Above all, the gold plan must not just be fulfilled, it must be overfulfilled; and during the Terror, Stalin came to the conclusion that Berzin had been “coddling” his prisoners. The powerful Dalstroi chief was lured to a meeting with a visiting NKVD delegation in Magadan, who promised further medals but arrested him on the airfield. Flown in handcuffs to Moscow, Eduard Berzin was executed in a basement of the Lubyanka. The “Berzin affair” resulted in the execution of several thousand of the Dalstroi apparat. Collectively they were accused of a conspiracy to turn Kolyma into “the 49th state of the USA.”
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THE EFFECT ON his successors was predictably savage. In time, Berzin was replaced by a functionary named Pavlov and his deputy, Garanin, a thirty-nine-year-old NKVD colonel whose response to Moscow’s demands for gold made him notorious in the camps. Colonel Garanin personally oversaw the prisoners’ lineups when those who had not fulfilled their work quotas were ordered to step forward. The NKVD colonel then walked down the line personally, executing the “enemies of the people,” closely followed by two guards who took turns reloading his revolver.
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The prisoners’ corpses were then stacked up at the gates as a reminder to the rest. While executions continued throughout the Gulag, under Garanin, a camp named Serpantinnaya was constructed in the wilderness, several hundred kilometers west of Magadan. This camp became widely known as an extermination center. The weakest prisoners were transported there in trucks to be executed en masse. They were described by surviving prisoners as being “sent to the moon.”
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Less than a year into his reign, Garanin was himself arrested and shot as a Japanese spy. All his subordinates, from executioners to grave diggers, followed in the Kremlin’s methodical effort to conceal what had taken place. New Dalstroi functionaries arrived in 1938 and, like their predecessors, did not last long, since the exigencies of the Terror applied just as equally within Kolyma as every other region of the Soviet Union.
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Eventually an NKVD general, Ivan Nikishov, was appointed as the new Dalstroi chief, and a degree of stability was reestablished. Still in his forties, Nikishov had been promoted from his ruthless administration of the Terror in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
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A powerful man, he was selected for his pragmatic cruelty, which allowed him to steadily overfulfill the plan for gold. Quickly made a Soviet “hero of labor,” Nikishov pursued his given task with the grim fixation of a man who knew his life depended on it. In his ascendancy, Nikishov divorced his wife and married a pretty twenty-nine-year-old named Aleksandra Gridassova, well known to the female prisoners as the commandant of a Magadan women’s camp. Thanks to Nikishov’s patronage, Gridassova had risen through the Gulag hierarchy until she was responsible for the lives of thousands of female prisoners, who christened her “Catherine the Fourth” for the peremptory way she decided human destinies and the lavish lifestyle she created for herself and her husband in Kolyma.
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Together the couple occupied a country house to the northwest of Magadan, surrounded by luxury, with the usual retinue of chauffeurs, cooks, maids, and personal doctors provided for the Soviet elite. The couple organized their own “cultural brigade”: a slave theater of singers, actors, and ballerinas whose lives were saved from the mines in return for their performances. Gulag society, in the form of the camp commandants and their wives, attended Magadan’s Gorky Theatre to watch their gala performances, as the gaunt former stars struggled to reproduce past glories in costumes flown in from Moscow.
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Two decades after the Revolution, Lenin’s promise that the leaders of the Revolutionary state would “receive the same salary as an average worker” had long been forgotten. It was all as hopelessly naïve as another Leninist prediction, that under communism, gold would become “valueless,” used only for the building of public conveniences. Instead, millions of prisoners’ lives became subject to the regime of Dalstroi, forced into hard labor to maintain the steady supply of gold flown back to Moscow in the NKVD planes, and ready to be sold in the markets of the West. By the end of the 1930s, Dalstroi was producing annually more than eighty thousand kilograms of chemically pure gold, worth over one hundred million dollars at the price kept fixed by President Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau. It was precisely this gold that resuscitated the ailing Soviet economy and ultimately kept Stalin in power. And Stalin understood this economic imperative only too well.
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DALSTROI’S SUCCESSFUL OPERATION meant that Alexander Serebrovsky’s services were no longer quite so essential to the Soviet state. Calling Milchakov, Serebrovsky’s Russian deputy, into the Kremlin, Stalin explained that Serebrovsky had been “unmasked” by the NKVD as a “vicious enemy of the people,” responsible for the delivery of fifty million gold ingots to Trotsky. Milchakov was then ordered to shadow Serebrovsky until the moment arrived for him to be publicly denounced. The “Soviet Rockefeller” was executed soon, while Milchakov lasted only two months before he, too, was arrested.
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Politically tainted by his close friendship with Serebrovsky, Jack Littlepage found himself unable to work. Terrified Russian employees refused even to come near him, carrying as he did the double stain of his status as a foreigner and his friendship with an “enemy of the people.” Fortunately, either because Littlepage had carefully guarded his American passport or else had acquired the valuable reputation for keeping his mouth shut, the American engineer was allowed to leave Soviet Russia unhindered.
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On September 22, 1937, Littlepage called at the American embassy before his final departure. He told the diplomats that he had been asked to investigate alleged “wrecking activities” by Soviet industrial commissar Georgy Piatakov in various gold mines, and reported his conviction that “there had been deliberate wrecking in these mines and he was of the opinion that this wrecking had been ordered by Piatakov.” An American official described Littlepage’s rationale as being “somewhat vague,” but it appeared his real motive had been overlooked. Jack Littlepage was simply paying for his ticket home, and the safety of his life in America.
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