The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (34 page)

Almost as an afterthought, tucked in a folder at the very end of the report, Szymanski enclosed a series of black-and-white photographs taken of the starved Polish children in the hospitals of Tehran. It was the pictures of these children, even more than the written accounts of their suffering, that conveyed the immediate truth of what was then taking place within the Gulag camps. Here was possibly the first photographic evidence of the consequences of Stalinism on the human body. The Polish children gazed back at the camera lens unaware of their unexpected reprieve. Their tiny bodies were only skin and bone, and their bulging eyes stared out in lifeless accusation.
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Of the 1.7 million Poles deported into Soviet Russia, only 400,000 returned and were saved. What happened to the rest—the remaining 1.3 million who simply disappeared—was revealed in the eyes of the child who was spared.

A Polish survivor of the Soviet camps, Antoni Ekart, wrote in a memoir that the
“deliberate NKVD policy of undernourishment makes it difficult to regard the majority of the camps, especially those in the North and the so-called Penal Settlements, as being in any way different from the German concentration camps with their crematoria and gas chambers. The death rate is the same.”
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One significant difference was the lack of photographic evidence ever to emerge from the Gulag. Nor was this accidental, since photography within the wider Soviet Union, let alone the camps, was always one of the most heavily proscribed activities, guaranteed to lead to swift arrest unless overseen by the NKVD. And without the photographic evidence of their victims, the essential inhumanity of the Soviet camps could never fully enter into the Western public’s consciousness, where such issues were open to judgment. Later the written evidence from the survivors might be understood intellectually, and their drawings and sketches from memory acknowledged. But as was undoubtedly true in Nuremberg, it was only the photographic evidence that elicited true comprehension from all parties, irrespective of their politics. We trust, it seems, only with our eyes.
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It might, therefore, appear criminally unjust that such rare evidence gathered in the early stages of the war was judged too politically sensitive ever to see the light of day. Lieutenant-Colonel Szymanski’s report, and its photographs, were classified as “secret” and buried away in an archive in Washington, D.C.—“This document contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the meaning of the Espionage Laws, Title 18, U.S.C., Sections 793 and 794. The transmission or the revelation of its contents in any manner to an unauthorized person is prohibited by law.” And thus its revelations were safely hidden from the public gaze by the moral exigencies of the American-Soviet alliance.

With much of European Russia occupied, and Leningrad and Stalingrad under siege, it was perhaps difficult to rationalize how Stalin was prepared to use valuable men and scarce resources to keep millions more imprisoned. But this would be to overlook the fact that in Soviet Russia, just as in Nazi Germany, the consequences of totalitarianism accelerated in the shadow of World War II. In Kolyma, General Nikishov’s principal difficulty was managing the shortage of materials he required to keep his vast operation running. Remarkably, his predicament was solved by the intervention of the United States government.

17

The American Brands of a Soviet Genocide

Andrei Sinyavsky,
On Socialist Realism
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One month after the invasion of Russia, in July 1941, Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins, flew into Moscow. A key policy maker of the New Deal, the hollow-faced Hopkins was described by one Democratic Party rival as having “a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity . . . to make a muleskinner jealous.”
²
In the Kremlin he was welcomed with open arms by Joseph Stalin.

The Soviet leader now declared President Roosevelt the “best friend of the world’s down-trodden,” and was asking for American troops to be sent to Russia to fight alongside the Red Army under their own chain of command. It was a project involving up to thirty Allied divisions, which Winston Churchill described as “a delusion,” not least because in the summer of 1941 most military intelligence experts were predicting an imminent and total Soviet collapse. Even Roosevelt’s cabinet members were making private bets on whether the cities of Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa would all fall before September 1, 1941.
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For Hopkins’ visit, Stalin ordered the portraits of Marx and Engels to be taken down and replaced by two large paintings of Mikhail Kutuzov and Alexander Suvorov, the traditional Russian military heroes of the pre-Revolutionary age.
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The gambit appeared to work very well: “It is ridiculous to think of Stalin as a Communist,” Hopkins reported back home. “He’s a Russian nationalist.” In an American magazine article, Hopkins went still further in his praise:
“He talked as he knew his troops were shooting— straight and hard . . . an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, stout baggy trousers, and snug-fitting blouse. He wore no ornament, military or civilian. He’s built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle. He’s about five feet six, about a hundred and ninety pounds. His hands are huge, as hard as his mind. His voice is harsh but ever under control.”
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Harry Hopkins returned with a list of Soviet military requirements and a glowing impression of the Soviet dictator who had spoken so sincerely of “the necessity of there being a minimum moral standard between nations.”
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In response, Henry Morgenthau noted in his diary, President Roosevelt “went to town in a way I have never heard him go to town before. He was terrific. He said he didn’t want to hear what was on order, he said he wanted to hear only what was on the water.” Attempting to gain swift congressional approval for Lend-Lease aid to Russia, Roosevelt set out to persuade the American public that Stalin’s regime was at the forefront of “peace and democracy in the world.” At a White House press conference, the American president even ventured to claim there was freedom of religion in the Soviet Union:
“As I think I suggested a week or two ago, some of you might find it useful to read Article 124 of the Constitution of Russia,”
Roosevelt patiently explained to the White House press corps. When a reporter interrupted to ask him what it said, the president amiably continued:
“Well, I haven’t learned it by heart sufficiently to quote—I might be off a little bit, but anyway: freedom of conscience . . . freedom of religion. Freedom equally to use propaganda against religion, which is essentially what the rule is in this country; only, we don’t put it quite the same way.”

In the aftermath of the controversial press conference, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was immediately instructed to wire Moscow with the request that the president wanted from the “highest authorities of Soviet government some statement which can be sent to the press in this country” to confirm the truth of what he had just said. Stalin, of course, was only too happy to oblige.
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In Moscow, the celebrated American photographer Margaret Bourke-White was given permission to take pictures of overflowing congregations in Russian churches. The images were rushed into publication for a book titled
Russia at War,
with her husband, Erskine Caldwell, responsible for the unconvincing copy:
“The Protestant Churches had gained much with the coming of the Soviet regime and they were quick to recognize it . . . The coming of Bolshevism meant for them a chance to worship in peace, unaided by the Government, but unpersecuted by it.”

Inside the Kremlin, Margaret Bourke-White was given rare permission to photograph Stalin himself. Unnerved by her proximity to absolute power, Bourke-White appeared to have fallen headlong into the Leni Riefenstahl school of totalitarian devotion, dressing up especially for the occasion in a pair of red shoes with a red bow in her hair. Later she described their meeting:
“I thought he had the strongest face I had ever seen. When I dropped to my knees to get a low camera angle he began to laugh. And when he pressed his interpreter into work, changing flash bulbs and holding reflectors for me, he chuckled.”
Afterward, as Bourke-White packed away her photography equipment, she noticed Stalin’s expression had changed.
“When the smile ended, it was as though a veil had been drawn over his features. Again he looked as if he had been turned into granite, and I went away thinking that this was the strongest, most determined face I had ever seen.”
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In the Kremlin, Stalin smoked his favorite brands of American cigarettes—the Camels, Chesterfields, and Lucky Strikes delivered as a courtesy by the American embassy along with his regular consignment of Hollywood movies. During their small talk, Margaret Bourke-White never mentioned the names of her Russian friends in government, who had helped her on her previous visits to Russia a decade earlier. They had all since vanished, and the American visitors understood that it was impolite to mention the missing. From 1938, their diplomats had coached them on the correct etiquette of silence.
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Had there been the slightest desire, the State Department need only have consulted their files to correct the president’s claim, and confirm the truth that Russian priests of every denomination had been among the first to be arrested and killed in the atheist campaigns. Some of the victims were personally known to the American diplomats in Moscow. In November 1936, the Reverend Strekh, a Lutheran evangelist pastor who risked his life to minister to the American embassy, was arrested on the same day he was supposed to perform a marriage ceremony for the American vice consul in Moscow.
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The following year, Loy Henderson reported that Monsignor Frison, the apostolic administrator of the Crimea, “the last Catholic bishop remaining in the USSR,” had been shot on June 27, 1937.
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For years, the State Department had been sent correspondence from Americans asking for intervention on behalf of the persecuted Russian clergy. A recent example was a letter sent on July 29, 1941, from Pastor Alfred Anderson of the Salem Lutheran Church of Brooklyn, New York:
“Dear Mr. President . . . Kindly have Mr. Hopkins inquire of ‘Comrade Stalin’ where the 40 theological students of a few years ago in the Lutheran Seminary in Moscow are today . . . Also where the 318 Lutheran pastors of that date are. We know some were shot, some sent into the woods as slaves, but where are the rest? Their blood cries up to heaven.”
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Other letters had asked for protection for missing American clergymen in Russia; for example, from M. A. Matthew of the First Presbyterian Church of Seattle, Washington:
“My Dear Brother—I am writing you in behalf of Rev. John S. Voronaeff and his wife, Katherine Voronaeff, American citizens who have been imprisoned in Russia. Rev. Voronaeff preached here for years, had a church in this city . . . That infernal, hell bound country of Russia has no right to imprison American citizens. Will you see that these two good people are released at once?”
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The question of freedom of religion, and what had happened to Russia’s missing clergy, had been candidly answered by Joseph Stalin himself, in an audience given to a visiting American delegation just a few years earlier:
“The Party cannot remain neutral regarding the propagators of religious prejudices, with regard to reactionary clergy poisoning the minds of labouring masses. Have we annihilated the clergy? Yes, we have annihilated it. The trouble is that it is not yet completely liquidated.”
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When Stalin made statements using verbs such as
annihilate
or
liquidate,
the result was always organized violence on a mass scale. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev led a human rights commission, which concluded that two hundred thousand Russian clergy had been executed during the Stalinist period.
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WHILE WINSTON CHURCHILL all but bankrupted the Bank of England to pay for American arms, Soviet Lend-Lease was funded on generous credit terms destined never to be repaid. “I think it is a mistake at this time to bother Stalin with any financial arrangements and take his mind off the war,” Henry Morgenthau told Hopkins in October 1941. “It would make him think we are nothing but a bunch of Yankee traitors trying to squeeze the last drop out of him. Do you feel or does the President feel that because the English paid down so much cash that we have to get so much gold from the Russians?”
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During the course of the war, the United States shipped fifteen million tons of materials to the Soviet Union, valued at eleven billion dollars, less than half of which were munitions. An endless supply of American equipment began arriving at the wharves of Magadan, and at any other Soviet port with open water. Naturally, the American cargo was unloaded by Gulag labor.
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The master of the SS
City of Omaha,
Captain J. S. Schulz, spent ten months trapped in the new port of Molotovsk, thirty-five kilometers west of Archangel, penned in by ice and German bombing. The port, named after the Soviet foreign minister, had three concentration camps attached, and the Gulag prisoners who unloaded the American ships were starved to the point where they risked eating the raw flour spilled onto the decks, although they knew the penalty for such behavior was death. In his report, Captain Schulz wrote that the Soviet authorities
“were very careless about life over there. It means nothing. If a convict steps out of line—any small thing at all— they kill him.”
When the scrapings of the ship’s garbage was taken away in trucks to be fed to pigs, Captain Schultz watched one prisoner “rummaging in a garbage-filled truck and, upon refusing to leave when warned by a soldier, was bayoneted and shot.” Another Gulag prisoner was killed on the
City of Omaha
’s deck, and was left lying there until the American crew objected and the body was taken away. In his report, Captain Schultz noted the Soviet prisoners were worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and included young women just seventeen years old.
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