The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (31 page)

The older surviving children were taught songs: “I’m a little girl, I sing and I play. I haven’t seen Stalin but I love him each day.”
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On every orphanage wall was hung the same picture that could be seen all over the Soviet Union. It showed Stalin, “the Greatest Friend of Soviet Families,” holding a pretty little girl in his arms above the inscription THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN, FOR A HAPPY CHILDHOOD. The photograph became a ubiquitous image of Stalinism. Later it was discovered that the six-year-old girl’s father and mother had both been killed in the Terror.
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In Elinor Lipper’s hospital a group of prisoner-doctors attempted to keep a record of the crimes they had witnessed, so that future generations might at least be informed of what had taken place within the camps. But as so often happened—since every aspect of Soviet life was riddled with informers—their plan to create a historical archive was betrayed. The doctors judged to be ringleaders were shot, and the rest were given lengthy additions to their sentences. As one of the few survivors, Elinor Lipper resolved to commit to memory all she had seen, for the sake of those who lost their lives.
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SEVERAL THOUSAND KILOMETERS farther west, in central Russia, another surviving American, Victor Herman, was suffering equal hardships in a concentration camp named Burelopom, or “Stormbeaten.” Within the Gulag there was a policy of naming many camps after themes from nature— Mineral, Mountain, Oak, Steppe, Seashore, River, Lake, and Watershed— which belied their ferocity.
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Like the others, Victor Herman’s camp was encircled by a wooden stockade and guarded by watchtowers standing at diagonal corners. The actions of its commander had given Burelopom the justified reputation of a death camp.

Starvation here, too, was routine. The prisoners attempted to trap rats with sticks or pull up weeds to chew on their roots and supplement their meager ration. Every day they were marched out into the forest to cut down the surrounding birch, maple, and pine trees. During the winter, as the snow piled ever thicker, more and more prisoners fell short of their norms and, on punishment rations, died of starvation. The few who attempted to escape were either shot immediately or hunted down by dogs and returned to the camp. They were then placed in an isolator dug into the frozen ground into which the guards would throw water until the prisoners froze in the winter temperatures.
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Just as in Kolyma, Victor Herman witnessed scenes of extreme violence committed by the criminals, and condoned or encouraged by the guards. Often the violence was inflicted only out of boredom, almost casually, for “fun.” Across the Gulag, the criminals played a card game called “loser cuts,” in which a knife would be taken to the nose, ear, or head of a randomly selected victim. In the barracks, Victor Herman overheard them discussing the rules:
“See that one there—the bald one? His nose. The one with the scar over his eye and the limp? Him. His life.”
On another occasion, he witnessed the NKVD guards lead a gang of criminals out into a clearing of the forest to rape a transport of female prisoners newly arrived by train and still dressed in their summer clothes. A criminal leader who attacked a heavily pregnant woman was hacked to death in front of them all.
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It was then, as he struggled to survive in their midst, that Victor Herman became aware of the degenerative effect such violence was having upon his psyche. Worse yet, he was conscious of a vague feeling of “excitement” or “zest,” provoked by his exposure to this violence. In the camps, he felt an increasing sense of shame and wondered if something “evil” had not begun to grow inside him that caused him to stay silent, and the other political prisoners to keep away.
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After his torture in prison, anger was always very close to the surface. He had fought to gain a place on the upper bunk of the train during his transport, which protected him from being crushed with the other prisoners, some of whom had died before the train even left the station. Transferred on to a new camp from Burelopom, Victor fought again for a place nearest the stove, when the prisoners were forced to live in tents covered in Iceland moss.
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Soon they were shipped farther north to a place named Fosforitnaya, where he was ordered to cut down pine trees and punished for infractions by being sent to work in the phosphorus mine next to the camp. After only two or three days’ work in the mine, the weakest prisoners began to cough up blood and quickly died. Victor was sent to the phosphorus mine seven times, but on each occasion he survived his punishment and was returned to general labor cutting down trees.
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Transferred back to Burelopom, at hard-labor camp No. 231/1, he met other American emigrants from Detroit and elsewhere. Among them he befriended Albert “Red” Lonn, the former captain of the American baseball team of Petrozavodsk, the champions of 1934. All that was lost after Lonn’s arrest as a “Very Dangerous Person” and his three-year sentence in the camps. With him in Burelopom were others whose names Victor remembered as Benny Murrto, “Blackie” Pessonen, and Jim Domyano. Together they reminisced about the lives they had left behind in Detroit, and tried to encourage one another to survive. Albert Lonn’s warmth and good humor, in particular, helped to restore a feeling of humanity to Victor, which he knew he had lost in the violence of the camps. Albert told him also that the guards in Burelopom did not want the prisoners to survive. The Americans, therefore, never walked through the camp alone. They traveled in groups, armed with clubs, to ward off the criminals’ attacks.
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Victor Herman was briefly transferred to prison in Gorky, his presence required there by the unexplained machinations of the NKVD. On his return to Burelopom, he discovered that Benny Murrto had died. He was transferred once again to build another subcamp for the expanding numbers of prisoners. After a punishment in the camp isolator, his toes became frostbitten. The camp doctor removed the dead flesh with a pair of scissors, and Victor Herman was again sent out to work.
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None of the Americans surviving in the Soviet camps had any idea of the wider world around them. Transported to the remote outposts of a totalitarian state, they were cut off from the outside world, with no knowledge of the rapidly unfolding pace of world events. While public opinion in the West showed little concern for the existence of the millions in the Gulag camps, whose lives were reduced to a daily struggle to survive the greater purpose organized to kill them.

 
 
BY THE END of the decade, very few Americans could even remember the emigrants who had traveled to Russia at the Depression’s height. At the New York World’s Fair in 1939, few protested against the grand opening of the Soviet Pavilion or the party for a thousand VIP guests at which an orchestra alternately played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Internationale” for NBC’s new television cameras. Drawn by the fanfare and publicity, millions of American visitors flocked to see this lavishly expensive pavilion, which advertised the bold achievements of the Soviet Union to the world. Ordinary New Yorkers jostled into its entrance marked by twin columns of marble, each carved with the giant faces of Lenin and Stalin. Beneath Stalin’s profile was the inscription FOR THE USSR, SOCIALISM IS SOMETHING ALREADY ACHIEVED AND WON. Then they marveled at the life-size replica of the Mayakovsky Square metro station, and believed those words to be true.
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At the opening ceremony, Stalin’s regime received the enthusiastic endorsement of the popular mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, who delivered a warm welcoming speech in front of the microphones:

Outside the Soviet Pavilion, a 250-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of a heroic
Soviet Worker
had been constructed to serve as a landmark and tourist attraction. The statue was quickly christened “Big Joe” by New Yorkers, and held in its outstretched hand a five-pointed red star measuring ten feet in diameter. At night the red star was lit with the powerful brightness of a five-thousand-watt lamp. The Second World War had just recently begun, and across the Lagoon of Nations other pavilions, representing the independent democracies of Poland and the Baltic states, were consumed in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the cool night air of fall, “Big Joe” held the red Soviet star aloft high over the World’s Fair, shining out beyond the fields of Flushing Meadows and across the whole of old New York.
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16

June 22, 1941

Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
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The buildup to World War II changed Kolyma. By 1939, the system of repression in the Soviet Union was bursting at the seams. The NKVD was operating beyond capacity, gathering information faster than it could be used—one tenth of the population might possibly be arrested, but not half. And so, quite abruptly, the Terror was scaled back. Overnight, the orders of the NKVD were no longer approved by “the Commissar of State Security, Nikolai Yezhov.” Instead, a story appeared on the back page of
Pravda,
just a few lines to say that Yezhov had resigned, and immediately afterward his photograph disappeared from the public sphere.

At the closed military tribunal, the fallen commissar pleaded vainly for his life:
“I was always by nature unable to stand violence against my person. For that reason I wrote all sorts of rubbish . . . I was subjected to the severest beating.”
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Yezhov even attempted to defend himself:
“If they now accuse me of violating legality let them first of all ask that bitch Vyshinsky . . . He was the Union Procurator, not me. He had to take care of legality. By the way, Comrade
Stalin knew all about it.”
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Yezhov was shot as a “British spy,” since, during the period of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler, the spies of the Soviet Union had, with preternatural cunning, switched their allegiances from Nazi Germany to the “British imperialists.”

When the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew to Moscow to sign the pact, the Soviet chiefs of protocol realized late that there were no Nazi flags available to greet him, and in a panic they had to use stage props from an anti-Nazi propaganda film. As a Soviet military band played the unfamiliar “Horst Wessel Song” to welcome their guests, Gebhardt von Walther, an attendant German diplomat, whispered to his colleague, “Look how the Gestapo officers are shaking hands with their counterparts of the NKWD and how they are all smiling at each other. They’re obviously delighted finally to be able to collaborate.”
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At 2:00 A.M. on August 24, 1939, the pact was signed by Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, who had recently replaced Maxim Litvinov as the new and necessarily non-Jewish Soviet foreign minister. In the Kremlin ceremony, a delighted Stalin raised his glass in a toast: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer,” he said. “I should therefore like to drink to his health.”
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The official German photographer, Helmut Laux, snatched a picture of the Soviet dictator at that moment with his glass raised, which caused Stalin to suggest that it might not be wise to publish that particular photo. When Helmut Laux started to remove the film from his camera, Stalin waved him to stop: “I trust the word of a German,” he said. And thus, over champagne toasts in the early hours of the Kremlin morning, the Second World War had effectively begun.
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One week after their pact was signed, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland from the West. Two weeks later, on September 14, 1939, the Red Army occupied their predetermined portion of eastern Poland almost unnoticed. The cynical choreography of the division prompted Benito Mussolini’s observation: “Bolshevism is dead. In its place is a kind of Slavonic fascism.”
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In Moscow, a program of cultural exchange was organized to strengthen ties between the two totalitarian regimes, with Wagner’s Ring Cycle arranged for the Bolshoi Theatre, and German businessmen once again crowding the tables at the Metropol Hotel.
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Over Soviet radio, Foreign Minister Molotov broadcast lectures on the “progressive” nature of the Nazi regime, which had successfully eliminated unemployment with its autobahn construction projects. Fascism was now simply “a matter of taste.”
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In December 1939, an exchange of telegrams between Hitler and Stalin was published in the Soviet press: “
Mr Joseph Stalin, Moscow. Please accept my most sincere congratulations on your sixtieth birthday. I take this occasion to tender my best wishes. I wish you personally good health and a happy future of the people of the friendly Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler.”
To which Stalin politely answered:
“Herr Adolf Hitler, Head of the German State, Berlin. Please accept my appreciation of the congratulations and thanks for our good wishes with respect to the peoples of the Soviet Union. J. Stalin.”
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Such courtesies would, of course, soon be excised from Soviet history, along with every other trace of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During the war, even to mention its existence became punishable with a ten-year sentence under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. In such circumstances, people quickly lost their ability to remember.
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