The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (3 page)

 
The sensational lecture was printed in full in
The New York Times
, and judging by the publicity it generated, George Bernard Shaw must have convinced many more Americans to emigrate or, at the very least, quelled the fears of those still making up their minds. It was plain from his assurances that Shaw, like so many intellectuals of the era, placed implicit faith in the motives of Joseph Stalin and gladly lent him his seal of approval. While the American emigrants themselves, believing they must find social justice somewhere on God’s earth and persuaded by that hope, were willing to travel halfway around the world to join what was universally described as “the greatest social experiment in the history of mankind.”

Few paused to distinguish whether they were being pulled by an ideology or pushed by their need. Nor were these Americans merely a confederacy of political fanatics, hopeless idealists, or naïve adventurers. Theirs was a reaction to the actuality and future threat of poverty, and to understand them we must place ourselves momentarily in a similar position of unknowing: when the idea of the Soviet Revolution was still filled with hope, and only the most perspicacious could discern the truth that lay beneath that promise. It was an era when the political system of communism had yet to be fully tested, just as once upon a time democracy, too, had presented an equally radical affront to conservative opinion.

And so, as perhaps the least significant but most culturally enlightening consequence of this forgotten migration, there happened to be American baseball teams playing in Gorky Park in the very heart of Moscow; when its green acres were still known by its first Revolutionary name as the “Central Park of Culture and Rest.” But maybe it was not so surprising after all. Immigrants have always brought their sports with them.

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Baseball in Gorky Park

Boris Agapov,
Za Industrializatsiu,
November 7, 1931
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Every day in Moscow between twenty and one hundred fifty new American arrivals stepped down from their trains onto the platform of Belorussky Station. In early November 1931,
The Washington Post
reported the arrival of groups of miners from coal pits in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Illinois, and the metal shafts of Michigan, Utah, and Montana. Steelworkers traveled from the shut-down mills in Pittsburgh and Gary to work alongside American carpenters, bricklayers, machinists, and railroad men.
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And no one could predict who might turn up next. There might be forty more miners with their wives and children from Pennsylvania, or eighteen Swedish American lumber jacks from the Pacific Coast, or a couple of plumbers from Peru, Indiana, or a party of fourteen shoemakers from Los Angeles. As soon as the Americans left the train station, they made their way down to the Intourist offices on Theater Square to demand work—often to the astonishment of the Russian officials concerned. “Barbers! We’ve got plenty!”

One party of three hundred American miners on their way to Leninsk in Siberia managed to have their passports “misplaced” by a clerk, which created a storm of protest from their nervous wives. Half the group turned straight back home; the rest stayed. But for all the chaos of their arrival, two American reporters in Moscow, Ruth Kennell and Milly Bennett, understood their choices very well:
“Yet there are Americans who would rather have jobs in a land where poverty is general and hope is boundless—even standing in long lines to receive the food they pay for—than be idle in a land of plenty and despair.”
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By the winter of 1931, sufficient numbers had arrived for a weekly English-language newspaper to be established in Moscow, with the aim of reporting the “truth about what the Soviet government is trying to do.” Staffed by young American journalists keen to salute the progress of the Five-Year Plan,
The Moscow News
was the ramshackle brainchild of its editor, Anna Louise Strong, a redoubtable progressive and personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. On her trips back to the United States, Strong was an occasional guest at the White House, where the ever-curious president would pepper her with questions about Soviet Russia. How, Roosevelt asked, could Stalin afford to
buy
all those factories?
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In Moscow the new arrivals gave cheerful interviews to their newspaper, along the lines of “I’d rather be here than in the soup line in New York.” Some cracked wise about the social facilities they had heard were part of every factory worker’s life—“Where’s the golf course?”—while others were more serious. “It’s hard to imagine conditions in the States if you haven’t seen them,” wrote a Chicago woman. “Public parks are crowded with sleeping unemployed lying on spread-out newspapers . . . A grocery store was broken into and robbed during the night.”
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Letters arrived at the
Moscow News
’ offices on Strastnoi Boulevard from Americans searching for work. An ex-Follies dancer enclosed a photograph with her height and weight asking if she could be of any use to the Five-Year Plan. A Denver miner described how his wages in Colorado had been cut to thirty-five cents per ton, which, after the company deductions for rent and groceries, left the miners with precisely nothing:
“Give us a chance to come to the Soviet Union. We are willing to work hard; to endure hardships, if need be. Here we have hardships, hunger too and no hope. Over there, you are building for tomorrow. Let us come and help. We will be satisfied with bread and carrots.”
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Very soon the sheer number of unemployed Americans turning up in Moscow was sufficient to create a headache for the Soviet authorities. In
The New York Times
of March 14, 1932, Walter Duranty described the number of new arrivals as still “relatively small—say 1000 a week at the outside. But it is on the increase.”
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The American reporters in Moscow were continually stumbling upon some poor lost soul worked down to his last dime, with nowhere to live, hoping to start life over in Russia, perhaps with a kid in tow, cap pulled down firmly over his eyes. Many had traveled completely of their own devices—they were neither qualified mechanics nor skilled workers on Amtorg contracts— and the Soviet government was completely unprepared for this sudden influx of tourists planning to stay and work, as in some latter-day Klondike rush to the land of zero unemployment. Soon an official edict was issued that in the future all tourists
must
carry a round-trip ticket and would no longer be given jobs, simply because there was not enough space to house them all. Moscow and all the major Russian cities were already horrendously overcrowded. The Russians had to fight for a few square meters of living space, huddled together in single rooms shared by two or three families. The discomforts, they were told, were temporary. When the new socialist cities were built, there would be space enough for everyone. In the meantime they would have to make do.
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Meanwhile, the newspaper offices on Strastnoi Boulevard served as a social center for the Americans, who organized Russian-language courses for the new arrivals, and English-language programs on Soviet radio, as well as educational excursions, boat trips, and of course a little music and dancing. On the evening of October 21, 1931, the
Moscow News
celebrated its first birthday with a party for three hundred guests crowded into the Foreign Workers’ Club on Hertzen Street. Amid the usual speeches and high-flown rhetoric, the occasion was lent a touch of Bolshevik celebrity by a statement read out Nikolai Bukharin. The diminutive revolutionary, who had once been one of Lenin’s closest friends, now welcomed the Americans to the USSR:
“To build up a new world is the highest joy for man. We greet everyone who is unafraid of difficulties and assists the Soviet Union!”
And then, after midnight, a jazz band struck up and the guests danced away until the early hours. Did Bukharin stay for the American jazz? It was hard to resist the idea of Lenin’s ideologue—the author of
The ABC of Communism
—skipping his dainty feet to the rhythm of saxophone and drums.
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Two weeks later, on November 7, 1931, one million Russians marched through Red Square for the fourteenth anniversary of the Revolution celebrations. Lost in this tide of humanity, the sixty staffers of the
Moscow
News
joined a party of American autoworkers who had recently found jobs at an assembly plant in Moscow. The children marched in front of their fathers, shouting “Long Live the American Pioneer Groups,” as they held up their banners in English, the Roman lettering strangely anomalous amid the long red streamers and bold Cyrillic propaganda slogans proclaiming the dawn of the Marxist-Leninist age.
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Six months later, the Americans marched again for the May Day parade of 1932, those who did not yet understand Russian clustered around the ones who could translate, and cheering their approval in English. “Language did not matter. We were united by bonds closer than those of speech,” one of the marchers told a reporter. When the crowd passed into Red Square, the tall figure of the writer Maxim Gorky waved his hat and they cheered again. “Where is Stalin? Isn’t Stalin there?” asked a young American wearing a red tie in solidarity. “Sure there he is standing just on Gorky’s right—see in the brown coat and brown cap, he’s saluting now. And there’s Molotov and Kaganovitch beside them.” And then the crowd swept on past the cathedral of St. Basil, and out of Red Square, until they merged with the million others on the embankment of the Moskva River.
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THEY PLAYED BASEBALL almost as soon as they arrived. When the Moscow weather was fine enough, the young Americans formed their own teams and sprinted around the bases in Gorky Park on their free days and evenings through the short Russian summers—as though they craved to keep at least one strand of the familiar in their creation of this brave new world. There were at least two American teams playing in Moscow that year. The Foreign Workers’ Club competed against a team from the Stalin Auto Plant, the autoworkers taking a break from the assembly line to run the bases while curious Russians turned out to watch the sudden appearance of this strange new sport and their lively practice sessions in the park. In May 1932, the Foreign Workers’ Club made an announcement in the pages of the
Moscow Daily News
(the newspaper was, by now, a daily title) that they were moving their whole summer program to the park:
“Baseball players who have suits, gloves, and other baseball paraphernalia are requested to bring same to the club, as these things have never been made here.”

All summer long, the young Americans sauntered down to the park every other evening to play baseball. And as their shadows lengthened in the evening light, the numbers of Russian spectators grew ever larger, all striving to get a little closer to the action. The sight of the Americans sliding into bases and the dust flying over their bodies must have only added to the excitement. “Niet out! Niet! Niet!” Some of the Russian spectators took to crowding around the bases, in spite of warnings that they might be hurt by bat or ball. Warnings that, we may assume, were met by friendly shrugs and smiles. “Nichevo”—“It doesn’t matter”—and the game continued.

In the summer of 1932, the Soviet Supreme Council of Physical Culture announced its decision to introduce baseball to the Soviet Union as a “national sport,” part of a program to foster athletic competitions in which the citizens of the first socialist state might effortlessly excel. The Supreme Council admitted they had studied the feasibility of adopting American football as well as baseball in Russia but, upon careful consideration, football had been rejected as “too rough.” Baseball, on the other hand, had a much gentler appeal. The American Foreign Workers’ Club soon began coaching a team of young Russians at Moscow’s Tomsky Stadium. A sports reporter from the
Moscow Daily News
was dispatched to cover their first game, and wrote that the Russians could “slam the ball all over the park” and throw just as well as the Americans but “catching the ball was their weakness.” The Russian players were also let down by not fully understanding the rules for stealing bases, evidently even a little indignant that such a plainly capitalistic aberration of “Americanski beisbol” should ever be allowed in the USSR.
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