The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (38 page)

In the film, American cinema audiences watched their vice president picking and eating a crisp cucumber grown in the special greenhouses of the north, “as characteristic of Siberia as the hot dog is of America.” Henry Wallace smiles and grins at the camera, as happy as an Iowan farmer at harvest time. Later the American visitors are shown attending the village soviet of the “Red Dawn” collective farm, as Professor Lattimore tiptoes through the nuances of Stalinist democracy:
“A village Soviet in Siberia is a forum for open discussion like a town meeting in New England.”
And thus, with dismal conviction, Lattimore’s documentary transformed the scene of mass murder into possibly the saddest piece of American wartime propaganda. Its final reel ends with Colonel Kight, the pilot of the good plane
Polar Bear,
waving at the camera, and to the soundtrack of blaring trumpets, “the mighty C54 heads for the snowcapped mountains and distant capital of our Ally China.”
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AMID RUMORS CIRCULATING in Washington that he was about to be dumped from the ticket for Roosevelt’s fourth term, an anxious Henry Wallace arrived at the White House on July 10, 1944, bearing presidential gifts of an Uzbek robe and a set of Outer Mongolian stamps. At their meeting, Roosevelt cheerfully explained that while Wallace was his personal choice for the nomination, many of his visitors disagreed, and many looked upon him as a “Communist or worse.” However, the president understood that there was “no one more American, no one more of the American soil.” A few days later, Roosevelt explained that he was going to write a letter to Senator Sam Jackson of the Democratic National Committee, explaining that if he were a delegate at the convention he would vote for Wallace. And then Franklin Roosevelt turned on his full charm: “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.”
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The night of the vice-presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Wallace’s liberal supporters raised the roof for their man. There were tremendous ovations for Wallace, with placards waved proclaiming, THE PEOPLE WANT WALLACE, AND ROOSEVELT AND WALLACE, and WE WANT WALLACE! It was clear, however, that the Democratic Party bosses were following other instructions. Bob Hannegan and Mayor Ed Kelly approached Senator Jackson. “You’ve got to adjourn the convention,” Hannegan demanded. “The crowd’s too hot,” Jackson replied. “I can’t.” “You’re taking orders from me,” answered Hannegan, a hulking Irishman from St. Louis. “And I’m taking orders from the President.” Calls for adjournment were greeted by choruses of “No,” to which Senator Jackson promptly purred, “The ayes have it!” The following day, the Wallace supporters were kept out of the convention. They found themselves with the wrong kind of tickets, the top galleries were cleared, and speakers for Wallace had their microphones unexpectedly switched off.
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In a Gallup poll for the vice-presidential nomination taken four days earlier, Senator Harry Truman registered scarcely two points to Henry Wallace’s runaway sixty five-point lead.
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No one seemed to know too much about Harry Truman, save for the fact that he had risen up through “Boss” Tom Pendergast’s corrupt Kansas City machine. At the Chicago convention, the former sins of the “Senator from Pendergast” were charitably forgotten, and when the votes were counted, it was Harry Truman who won. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party bosses of the self-styled “conspiracy of the pure in heart” were delighted at their timely work. Years later, “Boss” Bob Hannegan told friends that his epitaph should read: “Here lies the man who kept Henry Wallace from becoming President of the United States.”

For the rest of his life, Henry Wallace would attempt to recover from the shock of what had been done to him in Chicago. Though he lost the presidency by a whisker, Wallace’s political nemesis had hardly begun. And as in an Aeschylean tragedy it would be ghosts—the ghosts of Kolyma—that would return to deal the former vice president his final blows.
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19

“To See Cruelty and Burn Not”

 
 
 
Days after Henry Wallace flew out of Russia, the prisoners in Kolyma were marched back to work as the watchtowers and searchlights rose above them once again. Later, Thomas Sgovio was asked by a Soviet supply officer to meet him at a warehouse. The building stood apart from the rest of the camp, its floor littered with American newspapers used to pack the Lend-Lease equipment. Shutting the door behind him, the NKVD officer handed Thomas a picture from a newspaper. “Don’t tell anyone I let you see these. I’m supposed to burn them, before I do, tell me what’s written here?” he asked, pointing to a picture of a fashion model in tights. Thomas replied that it was an advertisement. “And this?” the Russian asked, holding out another picture. “The same,” Thomas replied. “What the hell, your newspapers are full of advertisements!” As a reward for his translation, Thomas was allowed to read from a stack of American newspapers, at which point he discovered that the United States and Great Britain were fighting in an alliance with the USSR in World War II.
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For weeks after Wallace’s visit, Thomas became the butt of camp jokes, his presence greeted by taunts of “You Americans are really stupid.” There was hardly a single prisoner in Kolyma who had not heard of the vice president’s visit. And if the jokes themselves were insufficient reminder of the vice president’s folly, the camp commanders and their wives deepened the ridicule by dressing up in expensive American clothes. Attached to each item delivered to Kolyma was a handwritten tag with a message in English, and the name and address of a donor from the Californian branch of “the USA-USSR Friendship Society.” Thomas watched the Gulag officials’ wives fighting over the clothes in the warehouse to which they were delivered. It was concentration camp chic, the Rodeo Drive of the damned.
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The starvation of the Gulag prisoners never diminished throughout the war, despite the ships loaded with American food supplied to the USSR. One prisoner, who had the task of processing the dead, took Thomas Sgovio to a mortuary where the dead prisoners’ frozen hands were amputated before their meager bodies were taken away to be buried. The hands were kept on hooks until they thawed so that fingerprints could be taken for the camp files. In the mortuary the prisoner, named Vassya, explained how all the dead had to be properly accounted for—with their finger- and palm prints made on three sets of forms attached to their NKVD files. Thomas sensed that the man only wanted a witness for the duties he was forced to perform.
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It was at this time that Thomas Sgovio briefly met John Pass, another young American surviving in the Kolyma camps. Born in the Midwest, Pass had emigrated to the USSR as a child in the early 1930s with his family. He had been arrested in 1940 for possession of a copy of John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World.
The book had been banned in the Soviet Union because “it did not show the leading role of Stalin during the October Revolution.”
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In Reed’s account, it was Trotsky who appeared most often by Lenin’s side directing the events of 1917, and Stalin was hardly mentioned. Had the author still been alive in Soviet Russia, he would most certainly have been shot for such heresy: his body dumped facedown in a mass grave, not buried as a Revolutionary hero at the Kremlin Wall. Instead, it was his readers who were vicariously punished twenty years later. In Camp No. Seven, John Pass had survived thus far on a “function” as the English teacher to the commandant’s wife. But his friendship with Thomas Sgovio was brief. As was Kolyma’s transitory nature, Thomas would be transferred on again to a new camp, and never learned if Pass managed to survive.
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Toward the end of the war, Thomas was moved to a camp farther north, as Dalstroi expanded to make room for the new waves of prisoners arriving in the holds of the Gulag fleet. When he had first arrived, the so-called road of bones leading out of Magadan was already four hundred kilometers long. Seven years later, it stretched a thousand kilometers into the wilderness, and every extra meter was built on the lives of the weakest prisoners. From this main highway, countless tributaries ran off into the landscape, each leading to a network of mines and camps.
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As Kolyma expanded, the newspaper
Izvestiya
described how
“the total number of new names marked on the map of the region during the Dalstroi era exceeds ten thousand and includes all kinds of mining centers, gold fields, fishing villages, government farms, and so forth.”
In the Soviet press, the existence of the prisoners, of course, was never mentioned.
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Within this expanding world, with his original five-year sentence long since expired, Thomas Sgovio was kept as “an overtimer,” one of the prisoners “retained in the Corrective Labor Camps until Special Orders.” His latest camp was a twenty-kilometer forced march from the highway’s northern end. In “Camp Victory,” Thomas survived once again as a sign painter, lettering the production signs of the work brigades, along with their percentage targets and propaganda slogans— THE FATHERLAND DEMANDS METAL!—while every day the rest of the prisoners were marched out into the goldfields.
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MEANWHILE IN MOSCOW, a fresh crop of patriotic American war reporters flew in to write stories on the burgeoning American-Soviet alliance, or how Stalin’s “democracy” was—with a few minor indiscretions—so much like their own. Inevitably the reporters learned the awkward truth of the former existence of the American emigrants in Russia. But they mentioned them only in passing, almost as a historical curiosity, before moving on to the more pressing issues of the war.

Often the reporters hired the daughters of the American emigrants to work as bilingual assistants, since they themselves spoke little, if any, Russian. This was how the Associated Press chief, Eddy Gilmore, first encountered Lydia Kleingal, a young girl born in St. Louis whose family had left Missouri in search of work in Russia. Lydia’s father had already been shot, and soon she, too, was arrested in the midst of the wartime alliance. Not yet realizing the consequences of his actions, Gilmore then hired Alyce Alex, the daughter of a River Rouge autoworker who had left Detroit to build Soviet Fords in September 1931. Alyce was born in Brooklyn and had managed to keep hold of her American passport throughout her stay in Russia.
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In quick succession she, too, disappeared, but unlike her predecessor, Alyce managed to send Gilmore a note from her camp, pleading for his help. The message arrived a year later, in an envelope pushed under his door, with his name and address written in Russian. Eddy Gilmore recognized Alyce’s handwriting straightaway:
“Dear Mr. Gilmore, I’m at a camp near Kirov. Won’t you please ask the American Embassy to help me? Forever grateful, Alyce.”

The Associated Press reporter took the letter down to the American embassy on Mokhovaya Street and handed it to the same disinterested third secretary to whom he had first reported Alyce’s arrest. “You’ve been here long enough to know we can’t do anything,” the anonymous diplomat replied. And upon that judgment and with an indifferent shrug, the young girl from Brooklyn, New York, was left to fend for herself in the concentration camp of her country’s wartime ally.
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All the reporters heard one version or other of the American emigration to Russia during the early years of the Depression. In the account William White was told, the Americans had freely given up their passports and voluntarily acquired Soviet citizenship. In a wartime memoir, White wrote,
“Under any interpretation of international law they were indistinguishable from any other Soviet citizen, bound to their assigned jobs and with no hope of leaving.”
White discovered how the emigrants had once clamored at the doors of the American embassy begging for help. As the Soviet Union’s foreigners were transported into the Gulag,
“all trace of them was lost and no longer could they plead with their embassies in Moscow.”
Not having been in Soviet Russia long enough to understand their true narrative of deception, coercion, and arrest, White regarded the emigrants as the authors of their own misfortune, no longer in any true sense “American” or deserving of real sympathy.
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And yet some of the scattered families of the Americans still survived. During a Moscow air raid, the reporter Wallace Carroll woke up in a metro station next to a young woman who asked him, “What time is it?” in perfect American-accented English. Carroll described her as a “thin woman with deep lines under her eyes and a grey shawl over her head.” She was from Minnesota, one of the Finnish Americans who had arrived in 1934. “Yes, there were lots of us,” the young woman whispered, “but I am alone here now. They don’t trust us Finns. They send us to Siberia. That’s where they’ll send me, too.” Wallace Carroll christened them “Exiles in Utopia.”
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But rather than worry over their fate, the American reporters and diplomats whiled away their free evenings playing in a jazz band. The Kremlin Krows were named after the birds that flew around the Spasski Tower in the Kremlin, and featured George Kennan on guitar and Eddy Gilmore on drums, with assorted American clerks and military attachés filling in the other spots in the lineup. At night in wartime Moscow, the Kremlin Krows thumped out 1940s jazz favorites for the endless round of embassy parties, while their compatriots clung to their lives in the camps.
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ALL THE OLD faces were returning, including Ambassador Joseph Davies, who had arrived in Moscow in May 1943 on a mission to arrange the first meeting between Roosevelt and Stalin. The ambassador brought with him the perfect ideological olive branch in the form of a special print of the movie
Mission to Moscow
complete with Russian subtitles. At the White House, the president had passed Davies’ bestseller across the table to his guest, Jack Warner. “Jack, I see you’re in the army,” Roosevelt said, acknowledging Warner’s uniform. “As one officer to another, I suggest you do a film based on this book . . . Our people know almost nothing about the Soviet Union and the Russian people. What they do know is largely prejudiced and inaccurate. If we’re going to fight the war together, we need a more sympathetic understanding.” The Hollywood mogul had agreed to make the film there and then, without opening the book.
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