The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (42 page)

At Fort Dix, New Jersey, a riot broke out when Russian prisoners of war discovered they were about to be repatriated. Tear gas and rifle fire were required before the prisoners were finally clubbed into submission. Three men were found hanged in their barracks, and several others were hospitalized with self-inflicted injuries.
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From Camp Rupert, Idaho, eleven hundred Russians were dispatched onto ships leaving from the West Coast. Once again, three men attempted to commit suicide, and two bodies were later found floating in the water.
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The British authorities resorted to deceptions of their own. One captured Cossack battle group was given Allied uniforms and promised that ninety thousand men would be allowed to serve in the British army. The Cossacks were asked to turn in their weapons before being given a standard-issue supply. Once disarmed, they were handed over to the NKVD. Knowing their likely fate, the Russian prisoners of war physically resisted their embarkation onto the trains. Since the NKVD lacked the necessary manpower and could not yet shoot the prisoners on the spot, it was left to the American and British military police, using tear gas and baton charges, to club them aboard. In one, not untypical, group of three hundred Russians, nine men hanged themselves, one stabbed himself to death, and twenty others preferred hospitalization with self-inflicted injuries rather than risk being sent back to the Soviet Union.
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A British witness watched a disembarkation of former Russian prisoners of war in the northern port of Murmansk that lasted four and half hours. The sick prisoners, those with broken legs, the amputees, the dying, and the failed suicides were
“marched or dragged into a warehouse fifty yards from the ship and after a lapse of fifteen minutes, automatic fire was heard coming from the warehouse; twenty minutes later a covered lorry drove out of the warehouse and headed towards the town. Later I had a chance to glance into the warehouse when no one was around and found the cobbled floor stained dark in several places around the sides and the walls badly chipped for about five feet up.”
The executioners were Russian youths with automatic rifles, between fourteen and sixteen years old.
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In the Soviet Union, many of the Russian prisoners of war who had enlisted in General Andrei Vlassov’s “Russian Liberation Movement” were executed as traitors. The rest of the
spetz
men—mainly ordinary Russian prisoners of war guilty of nothing other than having been captured in battle—were handed twenty-five-year sentences and transported to the harshest, and most remote, camps. But whereas the mass of Gulag prisoners before the Second World War had been mainly civilian victims, unused to violence and preyed upon by the criminals, the
spetz
men were different. They arrived marked by the habits of war, and placed their trust in the gun, not Soviet propaganda. This made them especially dangerous.

 
 
VARLAM SHALAMOV would later describe the fate of Lieutenant Yanovsky, a Red Army officer and former prisoner of war in a Germany that refused the Vlassov emissaries’ invitation to fight against the Soviet Union. Instead Yanovsky had managed to escape a Nazi camp and make his way back across enemy lines to his own side. He was immediately arrested by the NKVD and handed a twenty-five-year sentence. Eventually Yanovsky was transported to Kolyma, where one glance at his fellow prisoners convinced him they had been delivered to their deaths. Resolving to save himself once again, he spent the winter of 1945 planning one of the few armed conspiracies in the history of the Kolyma Gulag.

His fellow conspirators learned the information required to make their operation successful: the guard duty, the location of the munitions stores, the geography beyond the wire. According to Shalamov’s account, Lieutenant Yanovsky spoke to many men who refused to join the escape, but no one betrayed him, and twelve agreed to risk their lives for the chance of freedom. Their plan was to overpower the guards, steal a truck, and head off into the taiga toward the nearest military airport, where they would hijack a plane to Alaska. Nor was this scheme quite so far-fetched as it might at first have appeared. Its very audacity worked in its favor. Only the year before, three Russian pilots had escaped from a Nazi prison camp, seizing Luftwaffe planes and flying out of Germany to what they believed was the safety of Byelorussia.
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Far from being welcomed as heroes, the Russian pilots were arrested and sent to Kolyma. But in Alaska, Yanovsky reasoned, the Americans would not treat them like the NKVD.

In the spring of 1946, the Yanovsky conspirators killed two guards, changed into their uniforms, and overpowered the whole guard block. Taking food, weapons, and ammunition, they drove a truck out of the camp. There were several military airports in the vicinity, and the men headed for the nearest one. When their truck ran out of fuel, they got out and ran across the taiga. All available NKVD troops in the heavily garrisoned area were sent after them. Adopting guerrilla tactics, the escapees split into two groups: a main group of eight, and a reconnaissance patrol of four, led by Yanovsky. The advance party soon encountered a unit of soldiers whose dogs had picked up their scent. Three of the men were cut down by rifle fire, and only Yanovsky escaped. The main group of eight was caught in a flanking movement by the NKVD. Pinned down by crossfire, the soldiers formed a circle and fought at each other’s side until their ammunition was exhausted and they were shot down. Only one of their group was captured, wounded but alive. He was taken to a camp hospital, where he was treated until he recovered, and then executed.

Perhaps, before he was killed, the wounded escapee gained grim satisfaction from the camp doctors’ assumption that the World War Three had broken off, so numerous were the NKVD casualties. And it might have comforted the lone Russian to learn that despite every effort, Lieutenant Yanovsky’s body had not been found. The Russian lieutenant had promised his men liberty, and had delivered, if only for a few precious hours spent running across the taiga. The conspirators had expected nothing more, and no one in the camp questioned their choice.
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Thomas Sgovio personally witnessed what happened to the
spetz
men in the Kolyma camps. Kept shackled with no names, only numbers, on their backs, they were subjected to the very worst conditions of food and labor. Very few survived their sentence—for most, the maximum life expectancy was two years.
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DESPERATION AT THEIR lengthened sentences led many prisoners to make individual escape attempts from Kolyma in the spring of 1946. “Release by the green procurator” almost invariably ended in failure, since there was nowhere to run to in that vast wilderness. The nearest human settlements were hundreds of kilometers away, and the local nomadic tribesmen were promised flour and vodka for every escapee they returned. The bounty was only rarely collected. Most escape attempts were quickly ended by experienced teams of “head hunters” who tracked the runners with dogs and planes, shooting their victims on sight. They dumped the bodies in the wasteland and amputated their hands for identification.
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Early on in his sentence, Thomas Sgovio had heard that two criminals, named Prosolov and Novikov, were planning an escape and were looking for a third person to join their party. All the experienced prisoners wisely refused, but eventually a new arrival was persuaded to join them. The young man could hardly have realized that the criminals were merely planning to use him as a food source. Somewhere along the way they killed their victim. Both men were then hunted down and shot by the guards.
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And yet for all the overwhelming odds against them, there were still a few individuals who managed to escape the Gulag. In the chaos at the end of the war, a few “captive Americans” turned up in Moscow in ones or twos, always furtive and clearly desperate. At the Associated Press offices in the Metropol Hotel, the American reporter Homer Smith answered a call from a man asking for Eddy Gilmore. Since the bureau chief was away, and knowing that the Metropol was closely watched, Homer Smith suggested a meeting at the Moscow post office. There he met a “heavy set, sallow-complexioned man” whose hands were “calloused as a stevedore’s.” Together they took the metro train to Sokolniki Park, in northeast Moscow, and sitting on a park bench, “K.” told Smith his story.

The American was a former union activist from California who had arrived in Soviet Russia as “political immigrant” in 1930. Soon afterward his criticism of Stalin’s regime had led to his arrest and deportation to Kolyma. Having survived fourteen years in the Gulag, K. explained that he had escaped from a prison train on a transfer in the Urals, and six weeks later arrived in Moscow. In the city he had acquired false identity papers, and was hidden in the basement of a Russian widow who had lost her husband during the Terror. Then in Sokolniki Park, K. attempted to describe to Smith the conditions he had witnessed in Kolyma—“the inhumanity, brutality and horrors of life.”

Two days later, K. met Smith again, this time in Gorky Park. He asked Smith if he would be willing to drive him into the American embassy. Homer Smith refused but gave him the name of a friend who might be able to help. Later Smith heard that the Californian unionist had stayed in the American embassy basement for a week, where he was interviewed and given new clothes. K. was not, however, granted asylum and his escape from the USSR remained his own initiative. Two attempts to cross into Romania and Finland both ended in failure. Weeks later, K. met Smith for the last time, with a plan to cross the Polish border. Once again Homer Smith chose not to become involved, claiming that he was unsure if the Californian was the “real thing” or an NKVD agent. In the circumstances, Smith’s caution was understandable. Before he was hired by Gilmore at the Associated Press, Homer Smith had been just another American emigrant like K., who had arrived in the early 1930s to work at the Moscow post office. His press accreditation offered him a measure of protection, but he must have known of the disappearances of Lydia Kleingal and Alyce Alex.
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OFTEN AMERICAN FUGITIVES such as K. encountered the same diplomats who had failed to protect them several years earlier. After his return to Moscow to maintain his Russian-language skills, Elbridge Durbrow was presented with the case of Nathan Coalman, “a man claiming to be American citizen,” who called at the American embassy on October 26, 1945. In a telegram to the State Department, Elbridge Durbrow wrote that Nathan Coalman
“was at his rope’s end . . . He stated that if we could not assist him or give him asylum in Embassy we should turn him over to police in order that we would know that the police had him and furthermore that the police would be cognizant of the fact that we knew of his case. He was persuaded to leave the premises but in all probability will return within a day or two for a
final answer . . . If he calls again and demands asylum he will be refused unless Department feels otherwise.”

Three days later, just as predicted, Nathan Coalman returned to the American embassy and was once again persuaded to leave.
“If possible,”
Durbrow wrote,
“urgently request reply to his citizenship status since if impossible to try to protect him as American citizen I see no alternative but to turn him over to the authorities if he shows up here again.”
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Durbrow’s telegram was the last official trace of the existence of Nathan Coalman. In the USSR, it was only a question of time before a problem like Coalman disappeared. And while Joseph Stalin urgently coveted the return of every national back into the Soviet orbit “without exception,” the same could not be said for the new administration of Harry S. Truman.

Like Durbrow, George Kennan had been posted back to the American embassy in Moscow. On November 14, 1945, as minister-counselor, he wrote to the new secretary of state, James Byrnes, “transmitting a report on Soviet Treatment of American citizens.” In his letter, Kennan described the fate of hundreds of Americans caught “between the Soviet and American worlds,” whose treatment could be “little different if our country were in a state of war with the Soviet Union.” Kennan’s letter showed a level of concern largely absent in the decade before the war:

 
Once again, Kennan suggested that the whole hidden issue of the American emigrants should be presented openly:
“If we were to find means to state frankly to the American public what the situation is with which we are faced in this respect . . . I would recommend that this particular compartment of Russian-American relations, which has long remained so
dark and so replete with uncertainty and unpleasantness, be given its airing and illumination.”
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Attached to Kennan’s letter was a report from Roger Tyler, Jr., the second secretary at the Moscow embassy and the head of the Consular section. Tyler’s report contained the first admission of the diplomats’ earlier hostility toward the American emigrants:
“It cannot be denied that during the years where there were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Soviet Russia, a general feeling existed that any one who came to the Soviet Union was a damned Bolshevik and deserved what he got.”
Tyler then continued: