The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (39 page)

On the evening of May 23, 1943, Stalin welcomed Joseph Davies with a Kremlin banquet in his honor. The Soviet banquets had continued throughout the war, with no concession made to the million Russians who were starving to death in the still-besieged city of Leningrad. The menu for Davies’ reception began with a choice of cold appetizers of “soft and pressed caviar, white salmon, pink salmon, herring with garnish, smoked shamaia, jellied sturgeon, cold suckling pig with horseradish, English roast beef with garnish, cold ham with lanspig, wild game and shefru in aspic, braised duck galantine, ‘Olivier’ and ‘Spring’ salads, fresh cucumbers, garden radishes, assorted cheeses, butter and toast.” The hot appetizers were listed as “champignon au gratin, and medallion of wild game poivrade,” followed by a main course of “soupe de poularde à la reine, pirogi pies, consommé, borsht, white salmon in white wine, roast veal with potatoes, roast turkey and chicken with lettuce, cauliflower, asparagus.” Then, finally, a dessert menu offered “strawberry parfait, ice cream, coffee, assorted cheeses, fruits, petit-fours, almonds, and liqueurs.”
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At the end of their dinner, Stalin abruptly got up from the table to announce that they would now all watch
Mission to Moscow
in the Kremlin cinema.
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According to Joseph Davies’ account, the film “caused a great deal of joking,” not least because of its dramatization of the lives of those watching in the elite audience. The inner circle of Stalin’s court were all present, including Beria, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Litvinov, Vyshinsky, and Molotov, who personally congratulated Davies on this high-budget Hollywood adaptation of his service in 1930s Moscow. The ambassador had been allowed to introduce the film with a monologue delivered directly to the camera, a picture of Marjorie hanging on the wall behind him:
“There was so much prejudice and misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, in which I partly shared, that I felt it was my duty to tell the truth . . . While I was in Russia I came to have a very high respect for the honesty of the Soviet leaders.”

The same Soviet leaders now watched a Stalinist version of the history of the Terror projected on the silver screen. Naturally the show trials were presented as a truthful account of real events: from explosions in Soviet factories to scenes of Nikolai Bukharin nefariously conspiring with the Japanese ambassador. On-screen, the actor Walter Huston, playing the part of Ambassador Davies, declared his undisputed opinion that “based on twenty years of trial practice, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions.” There was even a dramatic re-creation of Bukharin’s confession:
“One has only to weigh the wise leadership of the Soviet government against the sordid personal ambitions of those who would wish to betray it, to realize the monstrous-ness of our crimes.”

Joseph Stalin watched his own likeness quite unperturbed. As the credits rolled, he told Davies that he “liked Walter Huston particularly.” And with Stalin’s approval,
Mission to Moscow
was scheduled for distribution across the USSR. The simple fact that the paranoid totalitarian regime saw no apparent need for censorship tells us all we need know of the film’s historical accuracy and worth; its failings no more surprising than the fawning dedication Joseph Davies wrote in a copy of his book presented to Stalin:

 
Hidden away in the film, like an unconscious clue of self-incrimination, was the most fleeting allusion to the American emigrants, in whose fate both Stalin and Ambassador Davies had been so instrumental and so complicit. Almost in passing, as the briefest introduction to a scene set during the Terror, an embassy secretary walks into Davies’ office at Spaso House holding a sheaf of documents. “More applications for American passports, sir,” the secretary declares. “The pile’s getting bigger every day.” And Walter Huston, playing Ambassador Davies, replies, “It reminds me of animals scurrying for shelter from the storm.” As thanks for the film, Stalin awarded Joseph Davies the Order of Lenin.” The medal was presented by the show trial prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, who assured Davies that “the Soviets had no higher honor.”
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THE SUBJECT OF the Americans executed in the Terror, and those still imprisoned in the Gulag, became one of the unspoken taboos of the wartime alliance, although both the disappearance of the Americans and the deaths inflicted within the Gulag were known at the time in the highest levels of the American government. But of this sensitive issue, never a word was spoken publicly. Soon after the war, the acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, had sent cables to the American embassy in Moscow authorizing appeals to Stalin for the arrested Americans “solely on the grounds of international courtesy and for humanitarian reasons.” But no further action was taken, nor was the issue ever pressed.
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In Spaso House, Averell Harriman, the latest in a succession of wealthy American ambassadors, was not about to involve himself in a wartime confrontation over the fate of a few thousand of his not-quite-forgotten countrymen who, if they were alive at all, had been cast to the four corners of the USSR. Ambassador Harriman could scarcely save the few Americans who worked for him directly at the embassy. On March 24, 1944, he was informed of the Soviet request to discharge the embassy employees Theodore Okkonen, his wife, Freda, and their American-born son, Olav Okkonen. The Okkonen family were Finnish American emigrants who had arrived in the USSR in the early 1930s and found jobs at the American embassy. They were now accused of espionage “on behalf of Germany and Finland.”

Ambassador Harriman wrote to Washington that the Okkonen family had worked for the embassy as domestic staff for a number of years. Theodore and Freda “both were of simple type and mentality and it was difficult to believe that either would have the ability to engage in espionage.” Their son, Olav, was a 

 
In response to Harriman’s request for “comments or suggestions,” the State Department replied that
“experience . . . has demonstrated that in cases of this character the Soviet authorities directly concerned are inclined to be arbitrary and adamant in maintaining the validity of the charges and consequently the Foreign Office is usually powerless.”
All three members of the Okkonen family were then given up with scarcely a murmur of complaint.
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According to the memoirs of Harriman’s secretary Robert Meikeljohn, the phone in Spaso House practically never rang, and the ambassador stayed in bed most mornings, rarely getting dressed before midday unless he happened to be visited by one of the American military contingent passing through Moscow. In the afternoons, Harriman would sit in his comfortable armchair by a roaring fire, dictating memos so slowly that Meikeljohn could “usually steal a nap between words without him noticing.” Harriman would then go over these sentences, “changing words, phrases and paragraphs time after time till nobody but him has the slightest idea of what the end product is . . .” His staff detected that the ambassador took his lack of access to Stalin rather personally. There was a period in Harriman’s first winter when he “took to his bed with a sinus infection and didn’t get out for six weeks. He was obviously suffering some kind of psychosomatic trauma.”
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In the afternoons, a recuperated Harriman played badminton or skied with his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Kathleen, on slopes outside Moscow, nervously followed by one of his escort of four NKVD guardians. In the evenings, there was the usual round of diplomatic receptions to be attended either as guest or host. On January 30, 1944, for example, the American ambassador threw a party in honor of President Roosevelt’s sixty-second birthday whose long guest list included the highest-ranking officers from the NKVD, including Lieutenant-General P. V. Fitin, Major-General Ossipov, and of course Lavrenty Beria himself—if they could only drag themselves away from the burning lights of the Lubyanka to enjoy the American hospitality. As these parties continued, Robert Meikeljohn expressed, his increasing sense of unease in his diary:
“It is a strange country where an American Ambassador takes pride in having the head of the secret police, probably as big a murderer as Himmler, dine with him.”
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But, then, the incomprehension worked both ways. On one social outing, General John Deane, the head of the American military mission, was invited to Aragvis, a Moscow restaurant so exclusive and expensive that he had never been able to afford the prices. Over dinner, the NKVD major-general Ossipov gravely broke the news that a group of American oil engineers had been overheard discussing the forthcoming 1944 presidential election while working at a refinery in Azerbaijan. One of them, Ossipov confided darkly, had called Roosevelt “a son of a bitch who should be taken out and shot.” It seemed the NKVD general had delivered this intelligence with the expectation of a request for “special measures” to be made to protect the president from the conspiracy. It was left to General Deane to explain how “colorful language” was often used during the American electoral process.
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As the official hostess of Spaso House, the glamorous Kathleen Harriman noticed how the Red Army officers were very careful to keep their distance from the NKVD guests invited to the American receptions. Once, she saw an NKVD general standing apart from the rest of their group and politely invited him to join their table, where he was scrupulously ignored by two Russian air force generals. At the time, Kathleen Harriman reasoned that their silence was caused by “jealousy” of the NKVD’s power, not sensing the natural abhorrence for the executioner in their midst. It was precisely this naïveté that the NKVD chose to exploit, when the exposure of a new scene of mass murder threatened briefly to disturb the night-water of the American-Soviet alliance.
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IN JANUARY 1944, Kathleen Harriman was invited to visit a clearing in the Katyn Forest of Byelorussia, where the mass graves of several thousand Polish officers missing since 1940 had been discovered. At Katyn, half the Polish officer corps lay buried in pits alongside several hundred Polish doctors, university professors, and priests.
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The massacre had first been uncovered during the Nazi occupation, when Joseph Goebbels took full advantage of this propaganda coup to accuse Stalin of having ordered the killings. As World War II progressed, the Red Army had since recaptured the lost ground, and one year later, the Soviet propaganda machine now sought to convince the world that the Katyn massacre had, in fact, been a Nazi atrocity all along.

An international press corps was gathered to attend an official Soviet “Commission of Inquiry” at the site, and the ambassador’s daughter was selected as a prized witness, invited as a representative of the Office of War Information. Kathleen Harriman was driven into the Byelorussian forest in a Lend-Lease jeep. At the site of the murders, she gazed down into the pits and watched Red Army soldiers prising out the decomposing bodies, stacked in layers facedown and twelve deep. Standing next to the Associated Press journalist Homer Smith, Kathleen Harriman had “moaned and choked” at the stench of death.
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The Polish officers had all been shot in the back of the head. A few had broken jaws and bayonet wounds, evidence of a struggle at the end. At the forest site, the Soviet forensic scientists proceeded with their demonstration, whose purpose was to explain how all this was the work of the SS. Their lecture was a long and unconvincing affair, not least because the bodies had been removed from the graves dressed in heavy winter clothes. When a reporter asked why this was the case, given that they said the Germans had allegedly killed the Polish officers in August, there was a brief moment of confusion. After consultation, the Soviet investigators replied that the weather in Byelorussia was extremely variable in August: people often wore heavy winter clothing even at the height of summer.

However shallow, such explanations were enough to convince Kathleen Harriman. From Moscow, by confidential telegram, her father cabled President Roosevelt the news that his daughter could confirm that in
“all probability the massacre was perpetrated by the Germans.”
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IF THE AMERICAN government wished to continue to portray Stalin’s regime as worthy of the public’s wholehearted support, then the suppression of the NKVD’s culpability for the Katyn massacre became an essential part of the Allied war effort. All evidence to the contrary would have to be buried—just as the reports of the missing Americans had been buried—under a mountain of classified material, left to gather dust in the archives in secrecy until no one could remember why anymore and all the protagonists had long since left the stage.