The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (37 page)

Together they led their American guests down to the Magadan harbor, which Henry Wallace admired, noting how unusual it was for such a remote location to be able to berth three ships simultaneously. The
North Wind,
an American-built icebreaker, could be seen offshore. “We use it to keep the sea open for shipping,” Nikishov explained as they walked past lines of Studebaker trucks stored in Dalstroi warehouses. Henry Wallace discovered that his Soviet hosts were very appreciative of the American materials. The latest U.S. industrial machinery was clearly identifiable in the factories of Magadan, and Professor Lattimore, in particular, had no doubt about the warmth of Russian feeling for American aid. As they walked through one factory, they were greeted by ripples of “spontaneous” applause.
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The minutely calibrated deceptions would continue through the length of the visit as the American vice president was walked through a charade designed to conceal the true nature of what was taking place around him. Like a moving stage set, everything in Kolyma had been carefully managed for Wallace’s willing eyes. No beguiling detail was left untouched in the Soviet effort to convince Wallace that what lay before him was a vision of pioneers at work, not the reality of a network of death camps. The NKVD guards with their baying dogs had vanished, along with the skeletal prisoners. The watchtowers and searchlights had disappeared. Wondrous selections of food now filled the shops of Magadan. There were even greenhouses on show, built to provide “much-needed fruit and vegetables for the vitamin-starved miners of the Arctic.”
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Meanwhile any schemes that a surviving American prisoner, such as Thomas Sgovio, might have hatched for contacting their vice president were dashed by the unprecedented security. Barring the NKVD interpreters, no English speaker was allowed near Wallace’s party, and Sergei Goglidze seldom left his side. Judging by a character sketch in his diary, Wallace had grown quite fond of his company: “Goglidze is a very fine man, very efficient, gentle, and understanding with people.” Professor Lattimore’s notes went even further in their praise: “Quiet but humorous. Gentle, cultivated, yet obviously a man of great organizing and executive ability.” Ivan Nikishov the American professor compared to
“a top flight industrial or business management man. As somebody said, put him in Wall Street and in ten years he’d own half of General Electric.”
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With their NKVD escorts leading the way, the American visitors were launched on a twenty-five-day tour of Kolyma and Far East Russia. As they inspected a series of mines, collective farms, and factories, Henry Wallace was always ready to practice his rudimentary language skills on any terrified Russian who crossed his path. On one occasion Wallace’s restless energy led him ahead of the game. Breaking clear of his guardians, he hiked up a hillside in Magadan alone, only to be chased after by an irate NKVD major, who barked at him to “come down at once.” His host’s nervousness was justified. In Kolyma, no one could be sure what sights lay in store over the next ridge, or opened up from the side of a mountain as the earth shifted in the briefest of summers. About to take offense, the vice president was calmed by an interpreter’s assurance that what the major had actually said was “Dinner is ready.”
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Two days into the trip, Goglidze and Nikishov had sufficient confidence to lead Henry Wallace into a gold mine in the Kolyma Valley. Here the Americans were shown Lend-Lease shovels, and the huge Bucyrus-Erie machines with forty-foot cranes, which had been intended for earthmoving on the Eastern Front, not mining gold. The American vice president was introduced to a group of miners—“big husky young men who came out to the Far East from European Russia”—who told him how they had written to Comrade Stalin asking to be sent to the front, but Stalin had replied they were needed right there. Mister Adagin, their “union leader,” stepped forward and asked Henry Wallace to send “his best regards to American unionists.” Noting that the Russian miners had good clothing and plenty of rubles to spend, Wallace wrote in his diary that he
“could not help but wonder how much better off these people were than they had been under the Tsars.”
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For his part, Professor Lattimore seemed very pleased that these Russian gold miners were so obviously “very healthy, well-fed and strong; intelligent.” In his journal, the professor recorded with some satisfaction that the State Department lawyer in their company, John Hazard,
“had been led to expect from the literature on the subject, that they would all be kulaks and other forced labour.”
As the gold miners shook hands with the American vice president, Lattimore busily took photographs to illustrate the article he was writing for
National Geographic
magazine.
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Judging from their physical condition, these strong, healthy “miners” could only have been NKVD guards playing the part for the American visitors. Their smiles for Lattimore’s camera carried all the sincerity of successful con men, their eyes gleaming with cunning in the pale summer sunlight. While the persecutors took on the roles of the persecuted for a few hours, the real miners waited hidden in the shadows, worked close to death and clothed in American flour bags. Their faces would never grace the pages of the
National Geographic.

Later, still unsuspecting, Henry Wallace walked through the taiga with Ivan Nikishov. In his diary, Wallace wrote that Nikishov “gamboled out like a calf enjoying the wonderful air, the larches putting out their new leaves and the valley looked marvellous against the snow covered mountains, thirty miles away in every direction.”
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Kolyma’s physical beauty was often remembered in the memoirs of those prisoners who survived. The white nights of summer were adorned by the northern lights, flickering in violet and blue across the horizon. For the prisoners, the natural beauty of this wilderness served only as a reminder of the contrasting brutality of the camps all around; man’s contribution to the landscape being nothing more than the means of their suffering. Here in the camps of Far East Russia was “the common man” of the twentieth century, in extreme representation as a concentration camp prisoner and guard. All that was missing from the triptych was the third party, the bystander, in this case a naïve American visitor from Adair County, Iowa. Always at the end of the road lay the camp unseen—the hidden end point of this grand experiment in human evolution, the futile attempt at the perfectibility of mankind.
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HENRY WALLACE’S TOUR continued amid the elaborately choreographed deceptions. At a collective farm, the vice president had no idea of the confusion he caused with some harmless questions about pigs. According to Elinor Lipper, the girls tending the animals were actually NKVD clerical staff, handpicked to play the role normally filled by female prisoners. Never having been near pigs in their lives, the secretaries had no idea how to answer the former secretary of agriculture. Once again, an NKVD interpreter volunteered a vaguely plausible response, which left Wallace none the wiser.
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On another occasion, the Americans stopped to dig one of the many “victory” gardens in Magadan. Both Ivan Nikishov and Sergei Goglidze happily joined in the manual labor: “What a story the gardener will have to tell tomorrow,” Ivan Nikishov had joked.
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At night the Americans were entertained by a group of Russian singers and musicians whose depth of talent Henry Wallace found quite remarkable for such a remote place. When the Russian speaker John Hazard questioned Nikishov about the extraordinary professionalism of their theater, the Dalstroi chief became quite defensive: “We ought to have some very good people, for these are the exiles from Leningrad.”
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Earlier Nikishov had explained the need for entertainment in their town because in the winter “the men do not work outside when the weather is below forty degrees below zero.” Professor Lattimore heard someone remark how “high-grade entertainment just naturally seems to go with gold.”
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Of course, the truth was the artists all belonged to Nikishov’s “Cultural Brigade”—the former professional singers and musicians saved from the gold mines by their talent. When the applause ended, they were herded into trucks and returned to their imprisonment.
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Although Thomas Sgovio never witnessed their performance, later he met a former opera singer from Leningrad who explained how the Cultural Brigade had sung “Okay America-Soviet Union” as a welcoming overture. The NKVD had tried to teach them more English, but there had not been enough time. Naturally, all the singers in the Cultural Brigade who could actually speak English were not allowed to participate. The rest were forced to sign an oath promising to behave as “loyal Soviet patriots” in the presence of their American audience. One word or sign of their status as prisoners “would be considered an act of treason,” which, in case they needed reminding, carried “the supreme penalty.”
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Another evening’s entertainment was provided by a film screening at the Magadan theater. General Goglidze started the night with a documentary on the siege of Stalingrad, accompanied by serious-minded applause. Henry Wallace reciprocated with the Soviet premiere of the movie
North Star,
which he had brought with him in a print with Russian subtitles. On-screen was the Hollywood vision of life on a Soviet collective farm, complete with Ukrainian peasants dancing around a perfect set with pressed white shirts and flowers in their hair, playing balalaikas and accordions. The film was made by Sam Goldwyn as a favor to the president—with his son Elliott Roosevelt in charge of production. To say that it lightened the mood was an understatement. How could the NKVD generals not stifle their laughter? “It’s marvellous that Americans would produce such a picture about us,” proclaimed Mrs. Nikishov, as the vice president modestly insisted that what they had just seen was only “an artificial reality built for a film-set,” whereas the Soviet achievements in Kolyma were both real and substantial. “Hollywood built an entire village only to demolish it. Magadan’s not such a synthetic town. It has solid underpinnings,” said Henry Wallace.
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Filled with the evangelical fervor of someone who is sure because he has seen with his own eyes, Henry Wallace embarked on a series of speeches across Siberia using the Russian-language skills he had struggled so hard to master. In his booming midwestern accent, he addressed his assembled Russian audiences:
“Siberia used to mean to Americans frightful suffering and sorrow, convict-chains and exiles. For long generations Siberia remained thus without appreciable change. Then in this generation during the past fifteen years, all has been changed as though by magic. Siberia today is one of the world’s largest lands still open to pioneer settlers.”
His words were accepted as a propaganda coup by his grateful hosts, heavily featured in the Soviet press as an endorsement of their way of life. TASS reported more praise from Wallace in a speech made in Irkutsk:

 
At their parting in Magadan, the indebted Nikishov presented Wallace with two framed pictures of embroidered landscapes, a much-coveted item collected by the wives of the Kolyma elite. But even this simple gift carried the threat of revelation. When the American vice president innocently asked who had made them, Nikishov replied that he could not possibly know all the sewing women in the city. Later Wallace was told they were the work of Nikishov’s wife, Gridassova. The truth, according to Elinor Lipper, was that the embroideries were another by-product of the camp labor system. Female prisoners, often former nuns, received an additional ration in return for their needlework, which, because of their pitiful working conditions, ruined their eyesight. The American vice president left Soviet Russia with the landscapes in his luggage, having written an open letter of thanks to Comrade J. V. Stalin to express his “deep gratitude for the splendid cordial hospitality shown to me.”
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IN AN AMERICAN national radio broadcast, Henry Wallace had nothing but praise for his Russian hosts, eulogizing their “development” of Siberia and the patriotic spirit of the masses of “volunteers.” Millions of Americans read more about the vice president’s expedition in the December 1944 edition of
National Geographic
magazine. In his article, Professor Lattimore praised Nikishov and his wife’s “trained and sensitive interest in art and music” and their “deep sense of civic responsibility.” Pictured also were the “Far North’s Husky Miners” grinning at the camera, over the caption: “These men had volunteered for war, only to be ordered to stay at work because of Russia’s need for gold.”
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A short while afterward a documentary film was released by the Office of War Information using footage shot by Soviet cameramen.
Soviet and
Central Asia, America’s New Gateway to Asia
was written and edited by the ever-industrious Professor Lattimore, its script narrated in the excited baritone of 1940s newsreel:
“Never before had so important an American representative visited these little-known territories, the Soviet authorities threw everything open to him. Soviet cameramen made a continuous record of the journey. And OWI now presents to you this film made by our Soviet allies, about a journey through lands and among people destined to be better known to Americans in the years after the war.”