The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (32 page)

As Norway and France fell before the Nazi blitzkrieg, and with London bombed relentlessly through the Blitz, Stalin lifted not one finger in support of the Western democracies. Even the notion of Soviet assistance was absurd, as the Red Army invaded Finland in the so-called Winter War of December 1939. On June 18, 1940, after the collapse of France, Vyacheslav Molotov sent Adolf Hitler a message of praise via the German ambassador, Schulenburg, to express
“the warmest congratulations of the Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Armed Forces.”
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Fulfilling his role as Hitler’s ally, Stalin authorized the export of the necessary raw materials required by the Nazi blitzkrieg. Through the course of 1940, Stalin delivered more than 700,000 tons of Russian oil to the victorious Nazi armies. Traveling west across the Soviet-German frontier, alongside cargos of iron ore and wheat, was also a hidden trade in human beings. Since, as one of the conditions of their pact, Adolf Hitler had demanded that which Franklin Roosevelt scarcely knew existed; the return of his nationals from the USSR.
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Those Germans and Austrian nationals still alive in Soviet prisons or camps were ordered to be sent back to the Reich. Thus the Austrian communist Franz Koritschoner, who had been arrested in Kiev in 1936 and tortured into an abject confession by the NKVD—
“I stand as a criminal before Soviet power. I request nothing more than to be shot as soon as possible as a criminal. My many years of service to the Communist cause are not grounds for mercy”
—was delivered into the arms of the Gestapo.
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Margarete Buber, the wife of a German communist, was removed from the brutal Karaganda Gulag and returned to Moscow for questioning:
“Has your health suffered in
any way during your stay in the reformatory camp?” “Good heavens, no. What a question!”
The NKVD kept her until her hair grew out and she had put on sufficient weight for her return to Germany, since in the words of another survivor: “They don’t want to hand over a band of skeletons; it would look bad.”
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At Brest-Litovsk, Margarete Buber watched as the SS and the NKVD exchanged salutes and pleasantries while the latest consignment of fifty prisoners was exchanged over a bridge. Photographs were taken of the Soviet and Nazi secret police socializing in their respective uniforms over a triumphal archway decorated with both a swastika and the hammer and sickle, next to the ubiquitous portrait of Stalin.
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Along with the German prisoners, the NKVD handed the SS their official documentation, presumably as some form of professional courtesy. Virtually all the German prisoners were avowed anti-Nazis destined to be transported directly into Hitler’s concentration camps. Franz Koritschoner was murdered at Auschwitz in June 1941. Margarete Buber was consigned to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, where she found herself shunned by those German communists who had never been to Russia. They accused her of spreading lies about Stalin and the Soviet Union.
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IN OCCUPIED POLAND, Red Army soldiers experienced a similar conflict between ideology and the outward expression of reality. “Comrade Colonel,” one soldier was reported to have asked, “didn’t we come to Poland to liberate our brothers, oppressed by landowners and capitalists? . . . A peasant has three or four horses, five or six cows, there is a bicycle in front of every house. Workers wear suits, hats—the same as a big Soviet director. There is something here that I don’t understand.”
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The Red Army soldiers of the Polish campaign brought back news of shops piled high with goods, a world without queues or ration cards, where the ordinary workers’ flats had running water and two taps: “You turn one tap and you get hot water; you turn another—it’s cold.” Poland was almost miraculous, as if communism had finally arrived in the very place it had never been attempted.
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Inevitably, the NKVD followed in the Red Army’s wake to clear the population of all “enemies of the people.” In this process, approximately 1.7 million Poles were arrested and transported east into the Soviet camps.
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The Polish families were separated, the men from the women and children, although the NKVD did not inform them at the outset, in order to avoid needless hysteria and consequent delay. Rather, they were told to pack their toiletries separately, since they would be led to separate places for a sanitary inspection.
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The Poles were then pressed and shut into crowded cattle cars, to be tormented by thirst and cold during the long journey to the terminal points of the Gulag. At Kotlas, in the northern Russian province of Archangel, the trains traveled slowly for ten days across a landscape of barbed wire and watchtowers. A Polish survivor recounted how twelve railroad tracks conjoined at the end of the line, each one occupied by a prison train disgorging thousands upon thousands of frail human beings, their faces blue with cold, shivering in temperatures well below freezing. This mass of humanity was then divided by the tall figures of the NKVD officers wearing long coats, black leather boots, and guns.
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With the world’s attention focused on the fall of France, the Red Army occupied the formerly independent Baltic states almost unnoticed. Just as in Poland, the NKVD arrested the “enemies of the people” en masse. Approximately 1.2 million Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians were deported by train, and disappeared into the inexhaustible Gulag.
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What serious hope did President Roosevelt have when he asked his acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, to negotiate with Soviet ambassador Konstantin Oumansky in Washington? The president’s intention was to persuade Stalin to withdraw from his alliance with Hitler, which Roosevelt lightheartedly described as “Stalin’s Mugwump policy.”
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As Sumner Welles sat down to barter with Oumansky, the lives of the Americans in Russia depended on the negotiating skills of this childhood friend of Roosevelt’s, like him a product of Groton and Harvard. When Oumansky asked for American engineers to be sent to Russia to provide technical assistance for the manufacture of high-octane aviation fuel, Sumner Welles refused the request:
“So long as American citizens were not given freedom of movement and were not allowed at will to appear at the American Embassy at Moscow, this Government did not feel that it could afford to facilitate the visits of American citizens to the Soviet Union by the issuance to them of passports.”

His statement showed that, at the very least, the acting secretary of state was aware of the American emigrants’ continued existence in Russia. For his part, Oumansky cynically wondered if these citizens “really were Americans at all” and answered that he would have to report back to Moscow.
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But whereas Adolf Hitler had successfully managed to retrieve his nationals from Russia only to have them killed out of “motiveless malignity,” neither Sumner Welles nor Franklin Roosevelt was willing, or even attempted, to force the diplomatic issue any further.

 
 
ALTHOUGH HE WAS warned by American and British intelligence for several months beforehand, the Nazi invasion of June 22, 1941, appeared to take Stalin completely by surprise. It was left to Molotov to break the news to the public over the radio:

 
For the Red Army officers who had survived the Terror, the outbreak of war represented their best hope of salvation. Eighty percent of the Red Army command, from majors up, had already been killed by the NKVD. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister after Stalin’s death, later quoted a figure of eighty-two thousand executions. It was, said Malinovsky, as if a crystal vase containing their most experienced commanders had been wantonly smashed, and “on the eve of the war, we found ourselves decapitated.”
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For the Russian officers who survived the Terror, the Second World War would prove to be a safer experience. Fewer would die on the Eastern Front, the greatest theater of conflict in modern history, than had been already killed by the NKVD. Thus Konstantin Rokossovsky, a future marshal of the Soviet Union and defense minister of Poland, was flown back from Kolyma ready to resume his military career with his teeth kicked out. In the Kremlin, Stalin questioned him: “Konstantin Konstantinovich, did they beat you up there?” “They did, Comrade Stalin,” replied Rokossovsky.
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For ordinary citizens, the outbreak of war was a breathing space in Russia, a time of relative freedom after the overwhelming fear that had dominated their lives before. Foreigners discovered Muscovites to have become peculiarly more cheerful upon hearing the news of war. The visiting American writer Erskine Caldwell wrote: “On face after face smiles broke out, plainly indicating genuine happiness that at last they would give full vent to their long-pent-up emotions.”
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Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin had disappeared from sight altogether, refusing to meet any of his staff between June 24 and July 2, 1941, a week that Khrushchev later claimed had been lost to a drinking binge.
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Stunned by the rapid German advances, and fully aware that his personal safety was at risk, Stalin retreated to his dacha outside Moscow. When Politburo members arrived to visit, he shrank away from them in fear, his voice becoming tense as if he expected to be arrested. “What have you come for?” Stalin asked. The loyal functionaries replied that they wished to create a State Committee for Defense with Stalin at its head.
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It took until July 3, 1941, for Stalin to finally address the nation for the first time in three years. His radio speech was made at 6:00 A.M. without any forewarning, just a statement that loudspeakers should be left on at that time. The reason for the strange scheduling, the visiting American journalist Alice-Leone Moats learned, was that Stalin spoke Russian with a thick Georgian accent, “like an Italian waiter in an American movie speaks English.” When the Great Leader sipped his water, the clink of the glass was heard from Moscow to Vladivostok:
“Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Red Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends! . . .”
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In western Ukraine, villagers greeted the invading Nazi armies with the traditional Slavic gifts of bread and salt. The older peasants touched the black crosses on the German tanks in awe, naïvely believing them to be emissaries of Christ.
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Statues of Stalin were pulled down and beaten furiously with pickaxes, and when Soviet planes were shot down, the villagers laughed and clapped their hands, announcing that Stalin’s regime would soon fall.
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The Ukrainian famine had taken place just eight years earlier, followed by a vengeful and very bloody Terror. Millions of Ukrainian lives had been already lost to Stalin. Perhaps if a father watches his children starve to death in his arms, he might welcome the devil himself.

In Moscow the chimneys of the offices of the Soviet government billowed with smoke, as the records of the NKVD, the Foreign Ministry, and the Prosecutor’s Office were burned, destroying the evidence of their crimes. In October 1941, the first snows settling in Moscow were “sooty with burnt paper.” As the German armies advanced to the very outskirts of the city, witnesses saw Communist Party members committing the ultimate sacrilege of tearing up their Party cards and flushing away the pieces into the sewers. Others just tossed the cards into the street, with their names and pictures safely scratched off. The pieces littered the Moscow pavements. The action was both a measure of people’s fear and an assessment of the likelihood of Moscow’s fall, amid well-founded rumors that brigades of the SS were executing Communist Party officials. Moscow’s Jewish population was particularly conscious of the horror that awaited them if they were caught in the city.
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The Luftwaffe had recently dropped leaflets over Moscow with the words “Death to all Jews” written in heavy Teutonic typeface. Underneath was the information that the leaflet should be kept as a guarantee of safe conduct to the German side.
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That summer Moscow was lit up with antiaircraft fire shooting red, green, and orange tracers into the night sky. The defense of the city against the Luftwaffe was deafening as shrapnel rained down over rooftops and city streets.
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The Soviet commissariats were evacuated, and the most famous buildings and bridges in Moscow were all mined with explosives. During the night, the embalmed body of Lenin—the most sacred relic of the atheist state—was removed from its marble mausoleum in Red Square. Vladimir Ilyich was evacuated on the same train to Kuibyshev as the American diplomatic corps and reporters.
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Earlier that day, on October 15, 1941, the Americans had gathered in the courtyard of Spaso House amid the noise of approaching gunfire. A thousand-pound German bomb had recently blown out the Spaso House windows, and now a Russian chauffeur was taking bets on whether Nazi tanks had already entered Moscow.
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It was during the diplomatic evacuation that many of the confidential files of the American embassy in Moscow were destroyed, and much of the history of the American emigration to the USSR was lost.
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Appropriately enough, the evacuation train carrying Lenin’s body and the American diplomats had cars attached filled with prisoners—since even in moments of the highest crisis, the needs of the Gulag were met and the system of repression remained firmly intact. When the American diplomats reached the safety of Kuibyshev, their NKVD minders stood out even more conspicuously in this closed city on the banks of the Volga. Eight hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow, the same faces patroled the relocated buildings of the foreign embassies in case anyone should have the foolish idea that the normal rules no longer applied.
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