The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (40 page)

In fact, President Roosevelt had already been fully briefed on the events that had taken place at Katyn Forest. On August 13, 1943, Roosevelt received a classified British intelligence report accompanied by a personal letter from Winston Churchill, which made it transparently clear that the Soviets were responsible for the mass murder. The details provided in the report were precise and unremitting. In its pages, Roosevelt learned how the Polish officers had scratched on the train wagons “Don’t believe that we are going home”; how their letters to their relatives had abruptly stopped in March 1940; how Katyn Forest had been a well-known killing ground of the NKVD, “used by the Bolsheviks in 1919 as a convenient place for the killing of many Tsarist officers”; how “if a man struggled, the executioner threw his coat over his head, tying it around his neck and leading him hooded to the pits edge—in many cases a body was found to be thus hooded and the coat to have been pierced by a bullet where it covered the base of the skull”; how the bullets penetrated the skulls from close range or with the muzzle pressed against the base of the neck; how the wounds were regular, as if fired by experienced hands; how the bodies had been stabbed with four-edged bayonets of Soviet issue. The report read as a letter of protest from its author, the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Owen O’Malley:

 
The truth of O’Malley’s observations was later found in the Soviet archives. On March 5, 1940, a top-secret NKVD memo had been sent from Beria to Stalin:

 
Across the first page of the memorandum was scrawled Stalin’s signature, followed by those of his Politburo functionaries—Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, and the votes of Kalinin and Kaganovich added by the recorder in the margin:
“For.”
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In terms of the history of the Soviet secret police, Katyn was a standard operation that happened to have been discovered. But the threat of exposure never materialized from the White House. Instead, Owen O’Malley’s report was locked away in Roosevelt’s “safe files,” never to see the light of day until years later. And its pages revealed two further pieces of incriminating information. The first was that the American president encouraged Henry Wallace to visit Kolyma, even after the region had been clearly identified as another place of execution of Poles in the USSR. The second was that President Roosevelt was fully aware of Stalin’s capability for mass murder, even as he was making preparations to meet him. But no one, it seemed, believed in the curse of St. Paul at the dawn of the atomic age.

AT THE WHITE House, when William Bullitt tried to warn Roosevelt about Stalin’s true intent, the president lost patience with him.
“Bill, I don’t dispute your facts, they are accurate,”
Roosevelt replied.
“I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
Bullitt purposefully reminded the president that “when he talked of noblesse oblige he was not speaking of the Duke of Norfolk but of a Caucasian bandit whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass.” But Roosevelt had heard enough: “It’s my responsibility and not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.”
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(Like most leaders, Roosevelt preferred the company of those whose views he shared, notwithstanding his affection, at the time, for Bullitt. In the last week of November 1941, Roosevelt had warned his first ambassador to Soviet Russia against traveling across the Pacific: “I am expecting the Japs to attack any time now, probably within the next three or four days.”)
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At Tehran on November 28, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt met Joseph Stalin for the first time with only interpreters present. “I am glad to see you,” said Roosevelt, “I have tried for a long time to bring this about.” For security reasons, the American president was housed in the compound of the Soviet embassy, pushed into and out of buildings by his valet on a system of ramps, and lifted in and out of cars while Secret Service agents kept him surrounded.
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In their long conversations Roosevelt happily discussed issues ranging from the future of India—“The best solution,” Roosevelt said, “would be reform from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet Line”—to the future liberty of Poland, a political question that Roosevelt reminded Stalin had domestic political considerations, since there were “six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction, and as a practical man he would not wish to lose their vote.” Stressing the need for free elections in the once-independent Baltic states, Roosevelt agreed that he “personally was confident that the people would vote to join the Soviet Union.”
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For his part, Stalin’s contempt for the perceived weakness he saw in Roosevelt was revealed at the end of a morning session in Tehran. Roosevelt genially announced to the conference table, “Now we can adjourn and let’s go have some lunch.” After everyone got to his feet, the Soviet interpreter Valentin Berezhkov heard Stalin mockingly remark: “Some will walk and some will ride.” When Berezhkov asked if this comment should be translated, Stalin answered, “Niet.”
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With the other interpreters, Berezhkov worked around the clock translating Roosevelt’s private conversations, since his living quarters were, of course, bugged by the NKVD. These conversations were not hostile in the slightest, so much so that Berezhkov wondered if perhaps Roosevelt was speaking not only to his American aides but also to the microphones.
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Later at Yalta, a perplexed Stalin would ask: “What do you think? Do they know that we are listening to them? . . . It’s bizarre. They say everything in the fullest detail.”
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At Tehran, the most revealing conversation was made quite openly, over dinner on November 29, 1943. Stalin twice proposed that after the war in Germany “at least 50,000 and perhaps 100,000 of the German Commanding Staff must be physically liquidated.” Franklin Roosevelt, evidently believing that the Soviet leader was joking, suggested that only “forty-nine thousand” should be killed. While Winston Churchill got up from the table and left the room in disgust. “I was deeply angered,” Churchill later wrote. “I would rather, I said, be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.” Both Churchill and Roosevelt had read Owen O’Malley’s report of the Katyn Massacre just three months earlier.
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AFTER HIS RETURN from Tehran, the president broadcast a fireside chat to the nation:
“To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that ‘I got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people— very well indeed.”
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Nor was this simply a public façade designed to reassure the American public. In her memoirs, Eleanor Roosevelt confided that her husband had been
“impressed by the strength of Stalin’s personality. On his return he was always careful in describing him to mention that he was short and thick-set and powerful . . . He also said that his control over the people of
his country was unquestionably due to their trust in him and their confidence that he had their good at heart.”
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Just over a year later, the ailing American president was once again lifted “into automobile, to ship, to shore and to aircraft” to travel around the world for a second meeting with Stalin, at the soviet leader’s summer retreat on the Black Sea. In the newsreel pictures taken at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Roosevelt appeared pale and very drawn, struggling to summon his customary bright smile for the cameras. At their photo call, the three most powerful men in the world sat on a simple bench with their aides gathered behind them. In the newsreel, on a whim Stalin gets up to shake Churchill’s hand, and for a moment, Franklin Roosevelt is left sitting on the bench alone, wearing a black cloak fastened at his throat with a chain, looking around him forlorn and somewhat confused.
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Inside the Livadia Palace, Joseph Stalin raised a glass to his Allies:
“I am talking, as an old man; that is why I am talking so much . . . In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other. Perhaps this is naïve? Experienced diplomatists may say, ‘Why should I not deceive my ally?’ But I as a naïve man think it best not to deceive my ally even if he is a fool. Possibly our alliance is so firm just because we do not deceive each other, or is it because it is not so easy to deceive each other? I propose a toast to the firmness of our Three Power Alliance.”
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Leaving us to wonder if such elegant rhetoric—such deceiving words on the nature of deception—was even necessary given Roosevelt’s deteriorating health and his belief in “noblesse oblige.” At their very first session in Yalta, Roosevelt announced that “the United States would take all reasonable steps to preserve peace, but not at the expense of keeping a large army in Europe, three thousand miles away from home. The American occupation would therefore be limited to two years.” Churchill described the statement as “momentous.”
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What hope had Eastern Europe, or even Poland, whose liberty had been the very starting point of the war? When Roosevelt asked Stalin how soon it would be possible to hold elections in Poland, Stalin crisply replied, “Within a month,” and the American president appeared to believe him. “The elections,” Roosevelt emphasized to Stalin, “must be above criticism, like Caesar’s wife. I want some kind of assurance to give to the world, and I don’t want anybody to be able to question their purity.”
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In private telegrams to Churchill, Roosevelt often referred to Stalin as “UJ,” or “Uncle Joe,” with an avuncular affection that he clearly wanted others to share. It was a fantasy that Roosevelt continued to believe in almost to the very end. On his return from Yalta, the president described Stalin’s character to his assembled cabinet as having “something in his being apart from this revolutionist Bolshevik thing.” Warming to his theme, Roosevelt suggested that Stalin’s early training as a priest meant that “something entered into his nature, of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.” Perhaps Roosevelt wished to cling to the notion of their wartime alliance as morally unambiguous: a straightforward triumph of good over evil as scripted by the Office of War Information. Perhaps Roosevelt wanted to conceal from himself and others the bitter similarities between the two totalitarian dictatorships. Perhaps Roosevelt genuinely believed the views of his closest advisers, the publicly expressed enthusiasms of Joseph Davies, Sumner Welles, Henry Wallace, and Harry Hopkins. We do not know, since the American president always reserved the ability to hide the truth, if need be, even from himself.

Winston Churchill, at least, recognized the reality behind the façade. At the Livadia Palace in Yalta, when the British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr raised his glass in a toast to Lavrenty Beria, “the protector of our bodies,” it was Churchill who growled back at him, “No, no, Archie. None of that.” The perspicacity of Churchill shone through the smoke and subterfuge of stateroom diplomacy. Unlike Roosevelt, Churchill never harbored any illusions over Soviet intentions, and he understood very well that Stalin made good on his threats.

Two years earlier, in August 1942, Churchill had visited Stalin in Moscow to discuss the delay of the second front. During their late-night conversation, Churchill asked if the strains of the Second World War were any worse than during the collectivization period a decade earlier. “Oh no,” Stalin replied. “The collective farm policy was a terrible struggle.” Churchill then mentioned that Stalin had dealt with not just “a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.” At which point Stalin corrected him: “Ten millions.” When Churchill asked what had happened to this kulak class, Stalin confided,
“Many of them agreed to come in with us. Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk . . . or further north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their laborers.”
There was then a “considerable pause” while the British prime minister understood the significance of the destruction of approximately one eighth of the Russian population, judged to be part of this kulak class.
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