The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (36 page)

 
 
IN KOLYMA, Thomas Sgovio’s original five-year sentence had long expired, but he clung to the faint hope that if he could survive another day or another week, he might perhaps be unexpectedly transferred or reprieved. Every prisoner’s life depended on such fragile glimmers of hope, on rumors of change or of people arriving from far-off places who might bring intervention or respite.

In the spring of 1944, another rumor swept the camps of Far East Russia. The Soviet Union, it was whispered, was preparing to cede Kolyma to the Americans, in return for the Lend-Lease aid. The sale of vast swathes of frozen wasteland was, after all, an old Russian tradition. Had not Tsar Alexander II traded Alaska to the United States in the nineteenth century? The Tsar had also freed the Russian serfs, two years before President Lincoln freed the American slaves. Perhaps this, too, was an omen of freedom? And the Kolyma prisoners noticed other strange changes taking place in their midst. Another rumor began to circulate, as the wooden watchtowers lining the access roads to Magadan were dismantled and thousands of starving prisoners marched out of the city—the vice president of the United States of America was arriving on a visit to Kolyma. And this time, as fantastic as it seemed, the rumor was true. The American vice president was on his way.
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18

An American Vice President in the Heart of Darkness

Ferdinand Lassalle,
Franz von Sickingen
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As a politician, Henry Wallace was never quite of this world. In the early days of the New Deal, the former secretary of agriculture had devised a scheme to raise farm prices by ordering farmers’ crops to be plowed under and their livestock slaughtered. To his critics, the wastefulness of the cure only magnified the Depression misery of American farmers. In cabinet, Secretary Wallace read long-winded statements on agricultural economics, whose every sentence seemed to end in a question. Even the president found it hard not to mock him: “That is very nice Henry. Now suppose you write the answer to all your own questions.”
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After two New Deal presidencies, the native Iowan’s manner was still viewed with some unease by his colleagues. But Roosevelt gifted Henry Wallace the vice-presidential nomination in 1940, as a reward for his loyalty and hard work.
“Henry’s a good man to have around if something happened to the President”
was Roosevelt’s public justification, which provoked the fury of southern Democrats, for whom Wallace’s union ties and early denunciation of racial segregation branded him a high-risk deputy for the third term. “They’ll go for Wallace or I won’t run” had been Roosevelt’s laconic riposte.
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After Roosevelt’s third election triumph, Henry Wallace inherited the vice presidency from John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, the Texan Democrat who had first deemed the office as “not worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
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Whatever influence Wallace was supposed to wield behind the scenes in the Senate was lost after he ordered the removal of Cactus Jack’s bourbon bar and urinal from the vice-presidential office. As a teetotaler and fitness fanatic, Wallace attempted to cajole the senators into taking up paddleball, boxing, and rowing. Unfortunately few shared his advanced views on the value of exercise, preferring hot baths and rubdowns in the Senate gym. Very soon they stopped dropping by the office at all.
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In the circumstances, it hardly mattered. Henry Wallace was destined to hold the vice-presidency during the most critical period of modern history. After the outbreak of World War II, his oratory made him internationally famous as he delivered speech after speech on his favored theme of “the Century of the Common Man.” Even before Pearl Harbor, Wallace had been unafraid to issue unpopular warnings that “civilization was burning,” and that America would soon have to defend herself against Nazi aggression. The tall Iowan, with his high forehead and the strained eyes of a prophet, took upon himself the role of passionate interventionist in a war in which, the opinion polls revealed, a substantial majority of Americans were happy not to be involved.
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Throughout the course of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, as Luftwaffe bombs rained down on London in the Blitz, left-wing protesters kept up peace vigils advocating America’s nonintervention in this “imperialist war.” Outside the White House, advocates like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger sang protest songs declaring that their government meant to have American boys “plowed under” just as Wallace had done with the farmers’ hogs:

 
The day after the invasion of the Soviet Union, this chorus ended as abruptly as a needle lifted from a record. The same voices were now united in favor of immediate intervention. But Roosevelt’s attempts to mobilize support for a Soviet Lend-Lease program were still faced with continued conservative opposition in Congress. An obscure Democratic senator from Missouri, Harry Truman, pithily endorsed the majority, isolationist position:
“If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia; if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many of each other as possible.”
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The national hero Charles Lindbergh had become the leader of the “America First” campaign. On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in which he identified a coalition of “warmongers” hastening America into the conflict—the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews.
“Instead of agitating for war,”
Lindbergh warned ominously,
“the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”
His audience responded with a standing ovation. Only former president Herbert Hoover advised Lindbergh that the speech was a mistake, in particular his statement that the Jews were responsible for the war. When Lindbergh insisted that what he said had been “moderate and true,” Hoover answered, “When you had been in politics long enough you learn not to say things just because they are true.”
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STEERING A COURSE through the isolationism and prejudices of the left and right, Henry Wallace championed America’s intervention in the war, and lent his considerable support to the Soviet cause. Addressing a Russian Aid rally at Madison Square Garden, the American vice president announced his belief that the American and Russian revolutions were both part of
“the march of freedom of the past 150 years. It is no accident that Americans and Russians like each other when they get acquainted. Both peoples know their future is greater than their past. Both hate sham.”
Nor was Wallace content to leave his support merely at the level of progressive rhetoric. Evidently something more substantial was required.
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In May 1942, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, arrived on a clandestine mission to the United States. At the White House, a moment of comedy ensued when the American valets unpacking Molotov’s suitcase discovered a large hunk of black bread, some Russian sausage, and a revolver. Eleanor Roosevelt wondered quizzically if “Mr. Molotov evidently thought he might have to defend himself, and also that he might be hungry.”
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While the White House press reporters were informed that Molotov was traveling under the pseudonym “Mr. Brown” and were asked to observe a news blackout for the duration of the visit. Apart from an obviously facetious question asked by one of the reporters—“Why not Mr. Red?”—no one was at all disturbed that Stalin’s henchman-in-chief, who had signed the death lists throughout the course of the Terror as well as the pact with Hitler, was now an official guest at the White House. He was placed in the bedroom next to Harry Hopkins’.
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Over dinner, Roosevelt attempted to loosen Molotov’s tongue by plying him with brandy and champagne cocktails. Obviously this was a strategy doomed to failure, since a Soviet apparatchik forced to binge-drink liters of vodka by Stalin would obviously find the president’s “Haitian libations” as pleasant as a summer’s walk in Gorky Park. When Roosevelt informed him that Lend-Lease shipments might have to fall to cover the Allied second front, Molotov had looked at the president with disapproval: “The Second Front will be stronger if the First Front stood fast.” But such minor differences caused no lasting damage, and did nothing to prevent Roosevelt from raising his glass in a toast to the health of Joseph Stalin.
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For his part, Henry Wallace met with Molotov in Washington to discuss his idea for a grand project in the spirit of the New Deal. Ever the visionary, Wallace spoke passionately of an international public-works program that would symbolize the bond between their two great nations, and bring them still closer together. What Wallace had in mind was a great “highway and airway” stretching west from Chicago, over and across Alaska to Siberia, and onward to Moscow. The hard-boiled Molotov—who had arrived in America to obtain increased Lend-Lease shipments and an immediate second front in Europe, not to listen to wild schemes of highways in the sky—nevertheless quickly agreed, and extended an invitation to the American vice president to visit his embattled country. In preparation for which a delighted Wallace began taking Russian lessons.
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On April 21, 1944, Henry Wallace issued a press release describing his hopes for his trip to the “Wild East” of Russia, where “the common men of the world will fill up the vacant spots as they try to attain a fuller and deeper life by harnessing nature. This is the kind of job with which our fathers and grandfathers were fully familiar.” In Siberia he “expected to feel that grandeur that comes when men wisely work with nature.”
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The journey had been carefully planned at the White House, with President Roosevelt’s enthusiastic approval—
“Oh you must go, I think you ought to see a lot of Siberia.”
In the midst of World War II, the American vice president was resolved to travel to the place he envisaged as the Russian starting point for his great highway. Unbeknownst to Wallace, the land already had its own, darkly tragic, purpose. Unable to sustain human life, it was being used by Stalin to end it. It was Kolyma.
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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is well documented. On May 23, 1944, Henry Wallace climbed the steps of a silver Skymaster plane waiting at a military airport in Alaska and set out on the short flight over the Bering Strait. Traveling with him on the plane, and documenting their journey, was Professor Owen Lattimore from the Office of War Information, one of America’s most gifted Orientalists, who maintained a keen interest in Soviet affairs. Professor Lattimore’s published views on the Moscow show trials made interesting reading. In Lattimore’s opinion the trials had given
“the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever he finds himself being victimized by ‘someone in the Party’ or ‘someone in the Government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.”
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Coincidentally, the pilot of the plane, Colonel Richard Kight, had also flown Wendell Willkie on the Russian leg of his world tour just the year before. In an article for
Reader’s Digest
magazine, the defeated Republican presidential candidate had hinted darkly at the presence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union, to which his party had been refused access. It was one of several warnings that Henry Wallace might have heeded before he left. Over dinner at the British embassy, Sir Oliver Lyttelton had warned him that Stalin held an estimated “sixteen million” Russians imprisoned in such camps. In his diary, Wallace’s reaction to this news was openly skeptical, noting that
“the figure seemed to be quite fantastic and Lyttelton’s motives seemed to be so obvious that I did not question his statement.”
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Henry Wallace landed at the airport in Magadan as the highest-ranking American politician ever to visit the USSR. He was greeted with an official banquet of welcome hosted by General Sergei Goglidze—formerly the people’s commissar for internal affairs in Georgia during the Terror and now the NKVD “plenipotentiary” for the whole of Far East Russia.
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The American vice president appeared completely uninformed of his host’s grim reputation, and was impressed only by the fact that Goglidze was known to be an “intimate friend” of Stalin’s. Nor was Wallace overly concerned that the Americans were surrounded at all times by officials of the NKVD. In his diary Wallace described his guardians as “old soldiers with blue tops on their caps. Everybody treated them with great respect.”
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Sergei Goglidze introduced Wallace to plain “Mister” Ivan Nikishov, the Dalstroi “director,” who had mysteriously lost the rank of an NKVD general and donned a gray civilian suit. “Magadan was founded by volunteers from all over the Soviet Union,” Nikishov explained, and helpfully characterized Dalstroi as “a combination of the TVA and Hudson’s Bay Company.” Without batting an eyelash, Nikishov boasted that they “employed” some three hundred thousand men in more than one thousand mining operations across Kolyma. The walls of his office were lined with the minerals these “employees” spent their lives extracting: samples of lead, tin, uranium, and, of course, gold.
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Standing in front of this display, Nikishov and Goglidze presented a uniquely convincing NKVD double act. Between them, the two high-ranking NKVD administrators were personally responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Stalin’s victims, in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and now Kolyma. But their capacity for mass murder was hidden beneath an affable demeanor, as Nikishov was filled with loquacious enthusiasm for his American audience, and Goglidze teased his colleague’s officiousness:
“He runs everything around here. With Dalstroi’s resources he’s a millionaire!”
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