The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (41 page)

At Yalta, both Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to repatriate “without exception and by force if necessary” all former Soviet prisoners of war, fugitive Soviet nationals, and fleeing citizens of satellite nations. It did not require much political acumen to predict what fate awaited these men once they were returned to the USSR. Stalin himself had publicly warned that “in Hitler’s camps there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors and we shall do away with them when the war is over.” But Churchill’s signature remained on the document that settled the fate of approximately two million Russian prisoners at the conference on the Black Sea. Churchill christened the retreat “the Riviera of Hades.”
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At Yalta, when Churchill asked for some lemon for his gin and tonics, he awoke the next morning to discover a lemon tree growing outside his palace window. Even this humble lemon tree concealed a private tragedy, which linked the forgotten Americans to this historic setting. Albert Troyer had been a citrus specialist, a graduate of the University of Nebraska, who arrived in the Soviet Union from his native Alabama in 1932, ready to take on the responsibility for revitalizing the moribund Soviet citrus industry. In the sunny climate by the Black Sea, Troyer had diligently crossed and grafted lemons for four years, until his arrest in 1936 and subsequent sentence to ten years in the Gulag. Eventually his wife’s parcels to him were returned, and Eva Troyer was informed that her husband had been “transferred to an undisclosed destination.” She had reported his arrest to the American embassy:
“My husband is an old man—71 years old. He has been a horticulturist practically all his life, with no definite political interests. He is essentially an idealist and an altruist. For fifteen years he taught agriculture in the Calhoun Colored School of Calhoun, Alabama . . . He believed his difficulties arose chiefly because of his inability to understand the Russian language.”
But no help was ever forthcoming for this humble lemon farmer from Alabama.
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RETURNING FROM YALTA, the USS
Quincy
stopped in Algiers to allow Harry Hopkins to be taken off on a stretcher and flown to the Mayo Clinic for treatment of the cancer that would take his life within the year. Another one of the president’s closest aides, General Edwin “Pa” Watson, was confined in an oxygen tent after collapsing from a heart attack, and would die en route. Roosevelt himself, according to an eyewitness, looked worn out. His college friend Alexander Kirk commented:
“This is really a ship of death and everyone responsible for encouraging that man to go to Yalta has done a disservice to the United States and ought to be shot.”
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Two months later, Henry Morgenthau visited the president at the Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia. The ever-faithful treasury secretary discovered Roosevelt “sitting in a chair with his feet up on a very large foot-stool with a card table drawn up over his legs. He was mixing cocktails.” When he saw Roosevelt’s face, Morgenthau was shocked, describing in his diary how the president 

 
The next day before lunch, Roosevelt was having his portrait painted by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a White Russian artist whose family had fled the Revolution. As Shoumatoff mixed her watercolors, she glanced up at the president, who was working on some government papers. The gray, drained look on his face had disappeared, and he seemed in good color, remarking, “We have fifteen minutes more to work.” As the cerebral hemorrhage struck, Franklin Roosevelt’s right hand passed over his forehead several times, his head bent forward in his chair, and he lost consciousness. Two hours after his collapse, at 3:35 P.M. on April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died.
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At 6:45 P.M. on the same day, Chief Justice Harlan Stone administered the oath of office to Vice President Truman. Harry Truman’s shock and surprise at the news was such that he forgot to raise his right hand when he repeated the oath of office with his left hand on the Bible. Chief Justice Stone had to quietly remind him of this obligation.
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Three months later, at their meeting at Potsdam in the ruins of Berlin, Stalin advised Truman that “a man must conserve his strength. President Roosevelt had a great sense of duty, but he did not save his strength. If he had, he would probably be alive today.”
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Given that it was Stalin himself who had twice summoned the ailing, wheelchair-bound president around the world to his very doorstep in rapid succession, it appeared that the Soviet dictator was having a private joke with himself.

But that seemed to be Stalin’s way. When Averell Harriman left Moscow, Stalin presented him with a gift of two horses that the American ambassador had admired in the newsreel of the Red Square victory parade. One of the horses was given with special thanks to the ambassador’s daughter, Kathleen Harriman. At Soviet state expense, the thoroughbreds were transported across the Atlantic—with an escort of a Russian vet, a jockey, and two grooms—to the Harriman family estate in New York. Upon their arrival, Kathleen Harriman was photographed standing beside a magnificent sixteen-hand bay stallion named Fact. The horse’s Russian documentation, bound in red leather and presented with the gift, revealed that Fact had been bred at the military farm of the First Cavalry Army. The stallion was the offspring of a sire named “Pharaoh” and a dam named “Liquidation.”
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20

“Release by the Green Procurator”

Varlam Shalamov,
Graphite
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Stalin declared Victory Day in the USSR to be May 9, 1945, exactly one day after the Allies. On the morning of May 10, a crowd of joyful Russians gathered outside the American embassy cheering the Stars and Stripes and refusing to move on. From the balcony, George Kennan made a short speech—“Congratulations on the day of Victory. All honor to the Soviet allies”—and the crowd remained on the street waving and cheering until evening. No spontaneous mass demonstration had taken place in Moscow since the Revolution. As George Kennan recalled: “not even a sparrow had fallen . . . for twenty seven years and now suddenly this!” It seemed that the suffering of the Russian people during the war, and their courage in withstanding the invasion, had also given rise to a certain boldness in its aftermath.
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In July 1945, a scene was reported by an American witness one night outside a restaurant in the center of Moscow. A Russian man and a woman were confronted by several policemen, including one plainclothes man who appeared to have a pistol in his hand. Astonishingly, the Russian civilian refused to be arrested and instead shouted in the street, “I served the whole war on the front. And where did you serve, eh? Where did you serve?” In his choice of language, the former Red Army soldier used the familiar form of the Russian “you,” signifying his contempt for the secret police. He then strode off down the street and was allowed to walk away.

Within the Soviet Union it was evident that the defeat of Nazi Germany contained the possibility for new liberties at home. If, therefore, the postwar period was rapidly transformed into a new prewar prelude, then this was never merely an accident of historical circumstance.
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WITHIN THE GULAG, the end of the Second World War made little difference, save for its continued expansion. New waves of prisoners began filling the camps in the summer of 1945, including the so-called
spetz
men, the Soviet prisoners of war whose fate had been sealed months earlier at Yalta. In the Allied-controlled prisoner-of-war camps of France and Germany, NKVD agents identified the men they wanted back. They handed out propaganda leaflets and posters showing a beautiful Russian woman stretching out her arms and saying, “Come home, dearest son, your motherland calls you.” After the propaganda was distributed, the NKVD agents read promises from the Soviet government that no prisoner of war would be prosecuted in his native land. Of course, they were universally disbelieved.
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During the postwar deportations, an estimated forty thousand Russians were hunted down in free France, with the assistance of the French police.
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In one example, French witnesses looked on as a Russian former prisoner of war, Nikolai Lapchinski, was beaten and dragged across the street into a waiting car by the agents of the NKVD. The inside of his safehouse apartment showed the aftermath of a desperate struggle. The walls were covered in blood, the furniture smashed, and a broken kitchen knife lay on the floor. The measure of violence revealing how their victim understood very well what was at stake.
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The captured Russians joined thousands of others in transit camps in the Soviet zone in eastern Germany. At Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and elsewhere, prisoners were once again clothed in the familiar striped pajamas the world knew so well.
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Among them was John Noble, a twenty-one-year-old American interned by the Germans and arrested by the Soviet police. As a prisoner-clerk at the Soviet jail at Munchenerplatz, John Noble learned of the guards’ “humane” method of execution. On execution days a prisoner was undressed and walked down a corridor. As he turned a corner, he was shot in the back of the head. At the end of the day the bodies were piled up, ready to be doused in gasoline and set alight.
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Five years after the end of the war, while still a prisoner in Buchenwald, John Noble learned there were prisoners who had suffered in this camp under the Nazi and the Soviet regimes. The bodies of thousands of prisoners who had been starved to death since the end of the war were taken out to the forest and buried in mass graves. In Sachsenhausen in the early 1990s, forensic investigators found 12,500 bodies buried in fifty mass graves around the camp, dating from its period as a Stalinist transit camp from 1945 to 1950.
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The surviving prisoners began the long journey east, transported into the Gulag on prison trains until they arrived in the dense and endless forest of barbed wire, watchtowers, searchlights, dogs, and guards that was the camp complex of Vorkuta. John Noble was given a black uniform with the number 1-E-241 sewn into the cloth and sent to work in the mines. When he arrived in October, the summer was over and the ground was already covered in snow. After work, Noble watched the prisoners gather the snow into blocks and build them up around the barracks in preparation for winter, when the temperatures in this Gulag center above the Arctic Circle fell to between forty-five and sixty-five degrees below zero. On a daily diet of approximately fourteen hundred calories, and performing heavy labor of pushing a two-ton car of slate through the mines, John Noble’s weight dropped to 95 pounds. Bones protruding, face gaunt, he joined the army of skeletal cadavers who universally weighed between 75 and 115 pounds. Almost all the prisoners had half their teeth missing through scurvy; they fell out while they were eating. John Noble was not due for release until the mid-1960s.
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Many other Americans were caught up in the mass deportations into the Gulag after the war. Mieczyslaw Rusinek was an American citizen born in Detroit and brought to Poland as an infant by his parents. Although Rusinek was issued with an American passport in 1940, he was arrested by the NKVD during their operations in Poland. On February 8, 1945, he was placed in a transport of 3,800 Polish men and women pressed into sealed wagons for the six-week journey east.
“About half the people died during the journey,”
Rusinek later wrote. In the camp
“we received to eat only nettle and some ivy and 400 grams of bread daily . . . Only 25% of our transport survived the camp.”
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A German woman, Marga Sochart, wrote to the American consulate in Bremen describing how she had been placed in a stock car containing ninety prisoners, where she had met a nineteen-year-old American citizen named Anneliese Thamm, captured by the NKVD with her mother in Elbing, West Prussia. Both Anneliese Thamm and her mother had been “beaten and raped by Russian troops,” and were then transported to a camp in Turkmenistan, where they
“performed hard labour, though inadequately fed . . . Of the 3500 inmates of the camp about 3000 died.”
Mrs. Thamm suffered continually from heart attacks and died in July 1945. Her daughter Anneliese died later that month. Marga Sochart wrote that
“Their bodies were stripped of their clothes and were buried in a common grave with 10 to 20 others in the cemetery.”
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THE GULAG COLLECTED prisoners from all over the world, including the United States. According to British and American military intelligence estimates, approximately one in ten soldiers fighting in the German army during the D-Day invasion of France was a former Soviet citizen, more than a million of whom had been enlisted.
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In encouraging these Russian troops to surrender in Normandy, the U.S. Army psychological warfare operatives had given these soldiers their assurances, in leaflets, that
“they would be sent to America for the duration and subsequently would not be required to return to Russia.”
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