The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (4 page)

Still the enthusiasm of the Russian youth was obvious to all, and the Soviet sports apparatchiks took quick notice of baseball’s immediate popularity. Soon, they declared, the game would be played on a “Union-wide scale,” with the newly arrived Americans asked to volunteer as coaches. Orders would be placed to manufacture the necessary equipment, and the complicated rules would be translated into simple Russian for workers to learn. If there were still remote parts of the USSR where American workers had not yet emigrated, then “baseball will be taught by movies.” And as the Soviet press dutifully praised the “grace and complexity” of America’s national sport, official admiration was inevitably reflected in the state propaganda. At the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow, the headline of the factory newspaper exhorted Russian workers to “Play the New Game of Baseball!”
¹³

 
 
THE AMERICAN EMIGRANTS brought with them enough children for an Anglo-American school to be set up in Moscow, with 125 pupils on the register by November 1932, three quarters of them born in the United States. Over the next three years, the numbers of pupils rose still further, and very soon the Anglo-American school was forced to move into larger premises, at School Number 24 on Great Vuysovsky Street. Naturally the children were delighted by their new environment, enjoying a new woodwork shop, science labs, a music room, gymnasium, and dining hall in space they never had before. The model pupils spoke approvingly of the progressive methods of their American teachers, who talked to them “as friends” and “not like bosses back home.”
¹⁴

Inevitably the American students’ lessons were very different from those they were accustomed to back home, since the children were taught a Soviet curriculum that stressed the reasons
why
their parents had fled the capitalist crisis in the United States to join the forward march of Soviet Russia. It might, at first, seem startling that the classroom walls were decorated with brightly colored pictures of Marx, Lenin, and of course Comrade Stalin gazing down benevolently on the pupils as they chattered away in English and the Russian they had picked up with effortless speed. And the Russian textbooks used by the school made for some interesting reading at home:
“Is Henry Ford a capitalist? Yes Henry Ford is a capitalist. Was Lenin a great man? Yes Lenin was a great man . . . Is the Soviet Government a better form of Government than the American? The American form is better than other forms of Government but not better than the Soviet form.”
¹⁵

Unsurprisingly many of the American engineers, in particular, complained that their children were turning out just a little too “Red.” The indoctrination of their education was incessant, its effect magnified by the prevailing ideology of the Soviet state. An Associated Press reporter, Charlie Nutter, was somewhat disturbed when his young son, Jimmy, who had consistently refused to utter a single word, broke his silence one day by pointing a chubby finger at the picture on the front page of the newspaper. “Eta Stalin!” little Jimmy Nutter had gurgled in Russian with a smile, to the horror of his father, who immediately announced, “We’re going home! I’m going to raise my kid to be an American!”
¹⁶

For all the strangeness of their education, the pupils were still just normal American kids who happened to attend a school in Moscow. Their favorite books listed in the lending records of the school library were unexceptional: the three most popular were all by Jack London—
The Call of the Wild, The Son of the Wolf,
and
White Fang.
In fourth place was
David Copperfield,
followed by more London and Dickens before Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Only far down the list, in sixteenth place, was there anything remotely ideological in Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
, just above John Reed’s famous account of the Russian Revolution,
Ten Days That Shook the World
,
¹⁷
at that time the bible of the American left.

Nevertheless, the Americans’ school, just like their baseball teams, was a focus of intense Russian curiosity. A young cub reporter, Kamionski, visited the school to write a story for
Moscow Pioneer.
In his article, Kamionski described both the children and their schoolteacher in suitably epic terms:

 
From young Kamionski we learn that the American children addressed their teachers as “Comrade,” that they studied collectively and wore the red ties of the Komsomol. More importantly, the cub reporter Kamionski also revealed how Soviet schoolchildren were taught to view the historical inevitability of their World Revolution:
“The man who goes up to the second floor not only crosses the Atlantic, he comes into a peculiar country, the America of the future.”
¹⁸
Eventually all American first graders would patiently study their Marxism-Leninism. Until then there was School Number 24.

And in this startling vision of the “America of the future” we learn of the existence of a radical new method of discipline. On January 6, 1933, a group of delinquent American students, all aged between eleven and twelve, were brought for a trial before a court of their peers, charged with “petty thievery and attempts to disorganize the school.” After two and a half hours of careful cross-examination, the culprits were discovered to be suffering from “poor home conditions,” and one of them was motherless—all mitigating factors in their favor. Nevertheless, the American child-prosecutors of the court noted the existence of “a definite anti-social group” within their fold, and suspensions soon followed in this junior version of a show trial. It was a curious anticipation of what was to come.
¹⁹

The blond president of the school’s “Anglo-American Pioneers” was a confident thirteen-year-old named Lucy Abolin, whose father had found a job as a metalworker in Moscow. Lucy Abolin was a serious but pretty girl who wore a red handkerchief tied around her neck and helped to organize the school plays that year: a production of
Tom Sawyer
in English and Gogol’s
Inspector-General
for the children who could already speak Russian. Undoubtedly Lucy loved her new school and the responsibilities she was given. “Even in America I was the leader of a dramatic circle,” she told a reporter from the
Moscow Daily News.
Some of the other American children found it hard to adjust, but not Lucy, who had arrived two years earlier with her parents and brothers from Boston:
“Sometimes they are shy, sometimes just individualistic and find it hard to take part in group activities. We make friends with them, though, and they soon get over it. They see for themselves the difference between the Pioneers and the other children and they usually want to join.”
And then this calm, self-possessed young girl, who already regarded “individualism” as something of a character flaw, cheerfully explained how
“the Pioneers are so much more disciplined and more organized. If a boy or girl keeps on giving trouble, we take their red ties away from them and that means a lot.”
Lucy Abolin was evidently happy and popular, and she no doubt basked in the limelight of her two elder brothers, Arthur and Carl Abolin, both regular starters on the Moscow Foreign Workers’ baseball team.
²⁰

 
 
OVER THREE SEASONS, baseball mania in the USSR had given rise to an emergent national league. In June 1934, the first intercity game was played between the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club and the Gorky Autoworkers team, who arrived at the Moscow train station weighed down with the brand-new bats they had finished making in their factory just three days earlier. On this occasion Walter Preedin caught the eye playing in left field and hitting the ball all over the park, while his brother, Arnold Preedin, struck out the Gorky batters with metronome-like efficiency. On their home field, the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club won the game easily, 16-5, packing off their rivals back to the assembly lines of Gorky. The American autoworkers grouched about the trouble they had finding a place to stay in crowded Moscow, and the fact that their game had not been properly advertised so the crowd was still only a couple of hundred. Their letters of complaint provoked a critical editorial in the
Moscow Daily News: “If baseball is to be rapidly popularised, as it deserves to be, such shortcomings must not be repeated, particularly as the Council of Physical Culture is considering the possibility of organizing this summer a six-city league and an All-Union tournament. Such a contest would be a tremendous encouragement to the American youth in the Soviet Union.”
²¹

Two hundred fifty miles north of Leningrad, the Americans of Petrozavodsk had already organized four baseball teams in their city. Hundreds of American teenagers had emigrated with their Finnish American parents to this remote region beside the Russian-Finnish border. Amid the lakes of Karelia, baseball thrived despite the lack of a stadium or very much in the way of equipment. Here the baseball players had one bat between them in a very tired condition and had recently lost three precious balls into the river. The American baseball players had written home for new bats and balls, and one of their recruits, Alvar Valimaa, asked the
Moscow Daily News
if the newspaper could print the results of their local league each week with the batting averages of the ten best players. If baseball was all about statistics then in Soviet Russia it would surely thrive, as Hank Makawski hinted in a letter from Gorky:
“The fellows simply eat up baseball news from America, so you can be assured they are far more interested in baseball in the Soviet Union, where they themselves participate and are acquainted with the other teams.”
²²

In July 1934, one month after beating Gorky, the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club left on an eight-day tour of Karelia. In Petrozavodsk, their first game was broadcast live over Soviet radio, with play-by-play coverage in English and Russian. This time the match was heavily publicized by newspaper and poster advertisements all over the city, and attracted a crowd of two thousand fans who turned out to support their local team. The Karelian captain was Albert “Red” Lonn, a young baseball fanatic from Detroit, who had emigrated to Russia with his most treasured possession: a baseball signed by his hero, Babe Ruth. In their two games, the Karelian Americans thrashed the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club, 12-7 and 12-2, with the big-city visitors excusing their poor performance with complaints of injuries and the loss of their two best players to harvest time at the American collective farm.
²³

Their arguments were settled one month later in August, when Albert Lonn’s team traveled down to Moscow for a return match at the Stalin stadium, just across the street from Gorky Park. This time the American lumberjacks and ski builders from Karelia scored six runs in the eighth inning to win 14-9, in a thrilling game in which the sports reporter from the
Moscow Daily News
wrote that the crowd had started shouting, “We want baseball” (meaning they wanted a national league) and noted that “only hot dogs and pop were missing from a genuine American scene.” In a letter published in their newspaper, the captain of the Moscow team, Arnold Preedin, publicly thanked these “genuine fourteen carat rabid fans” for turning out in support, and graciously acknowledged that Albert Lonn’s team deserved to be crowned “the USSR champions of 1934.” Then the handsome Arnold Preedin—who in his photographs was usually pictured grinning beneath his mop of light-brown curly hair—promised them “the sweetest trimming they ever got in their lives in 1935.” It would be the year hot dogs first went on sale in the streets of Moscow, another idea brought over by an enterprising American emigrant.
²⁴

Meanwhile, in an effort to popularize their sport, the American baseball teams had already played exhibition games for the Red Army and during the halftime interval of the USSR-Turkey soccer match in front of a cheering crowd of twenty-five thousand Russian spectators. In the summer of 1934, even the Dynamo Sports Club of the Soviet secret police showed an interest in learning the fashionable new sport. In June, the Foreign Workers’ Club was invited to stage another exhibition game at Bolshevo, the model prison camp built for the rehabilitation of young criminal delinquents in parkland outside Moscow.
²⁵

Three years earlier, George Bernard Shaw had visited Bolshevo as part of his Soviet tour, and had been assured that this idyllic setting surrounded by trees and gardens was a typical example of a Soviet “corrective labor camp.” The camp’s buildings were finely constructed of wood and brick, and inside the dormitories were orderly lines of beds with clean white sheets and sparkling washrooms. Young delinquents, orphaned by revolution and civil war, worked quietly at their chosen trades of metalwork or carpentry or engineering, and the boys never studied for more than six hours a day. Others simply concentrated on their schoolwork in bright classrooms with a gymnasium and auditorium attached. It was a prototype of the Soviet criminal-justice system, a progressive showpiece for any Western intellectual, businessman, or trade unionist who cared to visit this camp with no guards, where the gates were open and doors unlocked.
²⁶