The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (29 page)

On the train out of Russia, Littlepage wore his Order of the Red Banner of Labor prominently displayed on his jacket, evidently anticipating last-minute difficulties. But the only reaction came from a Polish customs official on the other side of the border, who saw the medal and snapped, “Take that thing off.”
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In a series of articles for
The Saturday Evening Post,
Littlepage described how
“the Far Eastern gold rush continues. An army of intrepid men and women push ever farther into the unexplored wastes of Eastern Siberia, Yakutia, and Kazakstan. Prospectors work in blinding blizzards and tropical heat, and penetrate into districts which man may never have seen before.”
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Only later, in secrecy, would Littlepage answer questions from the American War Department. Marking a map of the Soviet Union, he wrote the number one in a circle over Kolyma, and informed the intelligence officer that here was
“the richest gold field in the world from which the gold can be produced by placer mining without refining process . . . Twice as much can be obtained from this one field alone as we are now getting from all of Alaska.”
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In neither case did he mention the existence of legions of prisoners marched out into the frozen wasteland to extract the gold. Dumped from the hulls of the slave ships, the prisoners’ lives would soon be exhausted. When their bodies became useless for the mines, the last iota of strength was squeezed from them in road-building tasks before the end claimed them falling down by the side of the road, or from the bullet of a gun. Into this infernal world had fallen Thomas Sgovio, just one of the millions of prisoners whose lives would be governed by the unremitting demands of Dalstroi.
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MEANWHILE, in his offices at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., Henry Morgenthau had long been aware that the Soviet gold was mined by “forced labor.” If Jack Littlepage stayed largely silent about the horrors he encountered, other American mining engineers had been more forthcoming in their reports. As early as 1932, Raymond Vandervoort had briefed a State Department officer in Berlin:

 
By the late 1930s, Raymond Vandervoort’s estimate of the annual mortality rate had become a distant memory long surpassed. And through all those years—as the Gulag casualties mounted by orders of magnitude—Soviet gold bonds were offered for sale as a guaranteed investment to the American public, freely advertised in the financial pages of
The New York Times: “Facts and Figures prove the economic growth of the Soviet Union . . . a series of accomplishments unparalleled in the history of modern nations . . . the second largest producer of gold in the world.”
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Nor did Henry Morgenthau have any intention of antagonizing Stalin when upbraiding the Soviet diplomats on their gold sales. It was simply a question of commerce, not morality, as the treasury secretary made clear when he assured Oumansky that “the methods they used were of no interest to the American government.” All the pragmatic Morgenthau wished for was the markets to function smoothly. In pursuit of this end, he suggested the formation of a direct liaison committee between the Soviet State Bank and the American Federal Reserve, to facilitate the sale and transit of Soviet gold to the United States.
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In 1937, Konstantin Oumansky was invited to Morgenthau’s Washington home and complimented on “the finesse of the refining of the Russian bars,” which Morgenthau recognized as “second only to American” in purity and weight accuracy. The Soviets had sent sixty million dollars’ worth of gold to America just in the past month, to be sold at the guaranteed price of thirty-five dollars an ounce. The glimmering bars of chemically pure yellow metal arrived stamped with the emblem of the hammer and sickle.
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Had Henry Morgenthau considered his actions more carefully, he might have concluded that he was actively facilitating the deaths of countless innocent men and women and, as we shall later discover, children, too, by allowing the gold mined by Soviet prisoners in Arctic temperatures to be transferred to the federal deposit in the blue hills of Kentucky. We can be fairly certain, however, that the treasury secretary did not see that far along his particular chain of moral responsibility, and rested peacefully at night, ready for his early morning meetings with the president.
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15

“Our Selfless Labor Will Restore Us to the Family of Workers”

 
 
In Kolyma, Thomas Sgovio awoke each day in a realm of suffering at the cruelest margin of human existence. Death was all around: for saying the work was too harsh, for not responding to the orders of a guard, for remaining silent when a crowd of prisoners shouted, “Long Live Stalin.” Silence was a crime, refusal to work was a crime, to consider oneself innocent was a crime—“The Five-Year Plan is the law! Not to carry out the Plan is a crime!”
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Next to gold, human life was an ill-valued commodity that Dalstroi only suffered to support. Orders came down to carry out executions at the slightest slowdown, with individual camp commandants given a free hand to take whatever measures they considered necessary to maintain the supply.
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One NKVD “camp doctor” explained the situation to the prisoners in the starkest terms:
“You are not brought here to live, but to suffer and die. If you live it means that you are guilty of two things: either you worked less than was assigned, or you ate more than your proper due.”
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As the operations of Dalstroi consumed the prisoners’ lives, it created the continual need for their replacement. This, too, was a predetermined and carefully calculated policy, since the Plan for gold included a measure for the consumption of life. With remorseless logic, the labor force was to be replenished in proportion to the projected mortality rate, which was one target that never fell below the norm. Lev Inzhir had once been the chief accountant of the Gulag before he was himself arrested. To a fellow prisoner, Inzhir revealed how he had monitored the flow of life through the camps from his offices at the Lubyanka in Moscow. The daily accountancy was dominated by two headings: “Arrivals” and “Deaths,” and it seemed to Inzhir that the whole of the Soviet Union was about to be absorbed into these two columns. With his colleagues in the upper echelons of the NKVD, the accountant discussed how they might steady the ever-rising death rate, and instructions were sent from the Center to the individual camp commandants. Although it was impossible to investigate thousands of deaths per day, a maximum permitted rate was agreed, and as long as the mortality did not exceed this norm then it was deemed to be acceptable. Instructions arrived from the NKVD headquarters specifying that the Dalstroi prisoners were to be delivered to Magadan “completely healthy,” not as physical wrecks, worn half-dead by the corrosive regime of prison, train, holding camp, and ship.
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Within the bureaucracy of the Gulag, a human being became a mere abstraction, a biological machine stripped of all essential worth beyond his or her utility to the state. The logical consequence of such thinking was that the numbers of casualties within this grand “social experiment” ceased to bear any meaning to the camp administrators. Each incremental zero in a column of statistics required only the necessary dispassionate Bolshevik logic to proceed on to the next. And all regulatory agreements between the Moscow administrators and the camp officials were always made to ensure the efficiency of the mechanism, which, in their eyes, was ultimately the most important value. Once the mortality was set at the agreed rate, the hands of the mechanism were left to turn, and millions of lives were eventually consumed without conscience or respite, over the next two decades. Thus the deaths of the Gulag’s victims became the cause as well as the effect of Stalin’s mass repressions. Viewed from the methodology of power, the mechanism had become self-perpetuating.

Of course, Lev Inzhir’s privileged insights did nothing to help in the camps. Desperate to save his life and conceal his status from those who hunted down his kind, Inzhir became a camp informer and eventually fell victim to the system he had worked so hard to perpetuate. Then the Gulag’s former chief accountant was transformed into another statistic in a mortality column sent back to Moscow.
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FROM THE MAGADAN transit camp, Thomas Sgovio was transported by truck four hundred kilometers north and force-marched another seven kilometers to the Razvedchik goldfield.
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On arrival at their camp, the new prisoners were immediately sent out to work between fourteen and eighteen hours per day, the first twelve hours at the goldfields and the remainder spent digging infrastructure projects.
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They arrived in the midst of the “Garanin days” during the winter of 1938, when lists of names were read out after roll call throughout the Kolyma camps and thousands were sentenced to be shot. Colonel Garanin himself visited Razvedchik only once. Entering the camp barracks, he discovered two criminal prisoners refusing to work, and shot them both on the spot.
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For many, the shock of arrival was too great. Such men suffered an immediate psychological collapse, which led quickly to their deaths. After the first day in Camp Razvedchik, one of the Americans slashed his wrists with a razor blade. The victim was Harry Jaffe, the tenor who had once stood next to Thomas Sgovio singing solos in the Anglo-American chorus in Moscow. For the others, Jaffe’s suicide strengthened their awareness that they had been abandoned to their fate, since his brother was rumored to be a committee member of the American Communist Party. If any of the Americans had a chance of being rescued, it was he.
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A short while after Jaffe’s death, on January 28, 1939,
The New York Times
carried an article, “American in Russia Believed Arrested.” The report stated only that Harry Jaffe of New Jersey, a former employee of the
Moscow News,
“is believed by persons who knew him to have been arrested a year or more ago.” Later, Senator James Slattery wrote to the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow in response to a letter from the seventy-eight-year-old Rachel Jaffe of Chicago, seeking news of her son, “who had volunteered for service in the US Navy during the World War.” From Moscow, Angus Ward answered that Harry Jaffe had expatriated himself, and advised his relatives to “address themselves to the Soviet embassy in Washington.”
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The prisoners who wanted to live were forced to mine the Kolyma gold, pushing vast wheelbarrows filled with earth up runners into the sluices to be washed. Officially they were allocated three days’ rest per month, but such measures were universally disregarded by the authorities. All prisoners were worked every day of the year—if they lasted a year—knowing that to refuse would be the end of their ordeal.
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Intellectuals who expressed doubt over their capacity for hard labor were mocked by the criminals:
“Don’t worry, here they’ll give you a twenty-kilogram ‘pencil’ [a crowbar], and you can ‘write’ in the quarry.”
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From the old-timers, the new arrivals learned that it was impossible to survive on the meager food they were given. Each prisoner received a ration based upon the work completed. But the calories used up in fulfilling, or overfulfilling, the “norm” were always greater than those in the food itself. Similarly, falling below the 60 percent “norm” resulted in a penalty ration, which accelerated the process of starvation. Thus the prisoners learned the course of action that would preserve their strength for as long as possible, or kill them the most slowly. Even achieving this 60 percent “norm,” their labor stripped first the fat from their bodies and then burned up their muscles, too, until nothing was left but skin and bones. It was a physiological certainty that hard labor combined with starvation and subzero temperatures would only end in their death.
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From breaking the ground with picks and pushing the endless wheelbarrows filled with frozen earth, the prisoners’ hands became grotesquely misshapen into blackened claws, which ached through the night as they tried to sleep. At dawn, Thomas Sgovio would wake up unable to open his fingers and try to summon the strength of will to survive another day. His youth and good health were important factors in his favor, but such qualities alone were insufficient defense—both disappeared very quickly with every march out of the wooden stockade of the camp into the goldfields, under the sign over the gates that read LABOR IN THE USSR IS A MATTER OF HONOR, COURAGE AND HEROISM.
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Although he was not brought up in a religious family, Thomas Sgovio began to pray. In the midst of despair and with no hope of human intervention, he prayed with all the faith of someone who, until then, had none.
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With nothing left to lose, he prayed for his life as he swung his pick into the frozen earth. And through prayer, Thomas discovered a stubborn streak within himself, which presupposed that the worse his ordeal became, the stronger would be his resolve to live—so that if, by some miracle, he ever returned to America, he could at least tell his father’s friends what life was really like in “the workers’ paradise.”
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