The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (44 page)

Like Dora, Alexander Dolgun was employed as a clerk at the American embassy. His father had brought him to Moscow as a seven-year-old boy, having signed up on a dollar contract to assemble Fords at the Stalin auto factory in 1933. Now aged twenty-two, Alexander Dolgun was stopped on a Moscow street by a secret police officer and bundled into the back of a car to be driven the short distance to the Lubyanka. His reaction was almost identical to his American predecessors ten years earlier:
“What is all this about! Don’t you know you are dealing with a citizen of the United States of America!”
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After the official embassy requests to visit Dolgun in prison were refused, there seems to have been a collective bureaucratic shrug. From New York, Dolgun’s sister wrote frantic appeals to her senator, and received a reply from an assistant secretary of state that “every feasible means will be employed to ascertain Mr. Dolgun’s status.” But a short while afterward, a minor official from the embassy wrote back suggesting that it would “be useful” if they were authorized to dispose of some of her brother’s belongings “by giving them to needy persons.” On an internal note, another diplomat had handwritten, “Do you remember him?”
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In the Lubyanka, Alexander Dolgun’s MGB interrogator took evident pleasure in ridiculing an American letter of protest written on his behalf: “Fuck your embassy. That’s all you are going to hear from them. That’s the end of it. That’s all they are good for. You are going to be here for the rest of your life, do you understand that?”
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Transferred to the notorious Lefortovo Prison, Dolgun was put on the “conveyor” and placed in an isolation cell painted black. Severe physical abuse continued for nine months, as his interrogators attempted to force his confession to an alleged espionage plot while screaming at him, “The State fucks you, you stupid son of a bitch.” As the starvation and torture continued, Dolgun’s hair fell out and his weight dropped to less than ninety pounds. By early 1950, when his condition had degenerated to the point where he could hardly walk, he was sentenced to twenty-five years at the Gulag camp of Dzhezkazgan, in the deserts of Kazakhstan.
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On his arrival at the camp, the American embassy clerk was distracted by the sound of an orchestra drifting out from inside the gates of the concentration camp. The gates opened and an army of skeletal prisoners marched out in lines of five, wearing black jackets with white numbers, looking straight ahead and keeping time to the march. The camp’s ragged orchestra consisted of a tuba, a trumpet, a drum, an accordion, and a violin. Dolgun noticed how “the eyes of the brass players looked profoundly hollow over their puffed cheeks.” The new prisoners were then forced to undergo a selection: those who still had flesh on their buttocks were sent directly to the mines. Given his already starved condition, Dolgun was chosen for outdoor construction work breaking stones, and was thus denied an early death. Later, a Latvian prisoner-doctor chose to train him as medical orderly in exchange for English lessons. And by the shelter of this “function,” Alexander Dolgun’s life was saved from the mechanism of a camp that killed one third of its population every year.
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Who then could blame a very frightened Isaac Elkowitz when he refused even to leave the safety of the American embassy at all? Like the others, the twenty-year-old Ike had been vainly attempting to gain an exit visa back to New York, his former home and place of birth. His family had tried to leave the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, but his parents had been killed during the war, and Ike found himself in an orphanage with his sister. During this period he lost his sister, too, and having nowhere else to turn, he traveled to the American embassy in Moscow, where he found temporary sanctuary in his work as a telephone operator.

Denied permanent asylum in the embassy building, he was called up for Soviet military service. Weeks later, he was arrested and held in Lefortovo Prison, still wearing a Red Army uniform but with its insignia torn off. Ike Elkowitz was then accused of “having betrayed his homeland,” an offense that carried a twenty-five-year sentence or “the supreme measure of social justice.” He briefly recounted his story to another prisoner who had survived Lefortovo and later remembered his existence. But no one knew what happened to Ike Elkowitz after his imprisonment.
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The three Americans mentioned by name in Roger Tyler’s report ought to have been among the safest of the American emigrants’ children, not just because all three worked at the American embassy. Official records were kept of their identities, and their disappearances were immediately noticed and reported. If the safest could not be saved, then what hope had the rest of the American survivors? In Moscow, the American diplomatic officials no longer wrote individual replies to the requests sent by their relatives from back home. Instead, they sent out form responses to those asking for help for their loved ones who had disappeared:
“The embassy regrets, that due to the great number of welfare and whereabouts enquiries received and the inability of the Consular Section to increase the staff to handle them because of the housing and office space shortage, a form letter must be used in reply to your letter.”

Privately, in a secret memorandum dated January 12, 1949, an American diplomatic official admitted the embassy’s failure to protect:
“With the exception of the period preceding the War of 1812, perhaps never have so many American citizens been subjected to comparable discriminations, threats, police interrogations, and administrative punishments, all for no greater offence than that of attempting to assert their American citizenship and depart from a country whose regime they abhor more strenuously than many of their more fortunate fellow citizens residing in the United States.”
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The latest U.S. ambassador, Walter Bedell Smith, did put forward a proposal to exchange the “estimated two thousand Americans being held in the Soviet Union” for the remaining Russian former prisoners of war in the American zone of West Germany. But as they always did, the Soviets blocked the scheme, and this faint hope soon came to nothing.
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THOMAS SGOVIO KNEW personally many of the Americans who disappeared at this time. His friend Sam Freedman was arrested and executed. Before her arrest, Dora Gershonowitz had visited Thomas with her mother, and he had told her the little he knew of the fate of her father, Abe Gershonowitz, a mechanic from New Jersey, who had shared a cell with Thomas in 1938, and later died in the camps.
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Lucy Abolin, the former Young Pioneer at the Anglo-American school, was another one of the postwar American victims. She had already lost most of her family in the Terror of 1937 and 1938: her two brothers from the American baseball team and her father. During the Second World War, the American embassy had attempted to hire Lucy as a telephone operator. Ambassador William Standley had telegrammed Washington describing how Lucy Abolin had told him
“her position has been made very difficult and that she has been ordered to stop seeing her American friends and forbidden to come to the Embassy. Her application to renounce her Soviet citizenship has never been approved. Please instruct what action, if any, Department desires taken on her behalf.”
A five-word reply had come back from Secretary Cordell Hull:
“Subject: Lucy Abolin. No intervention.”
By 1949, Lucy Abolin was old enough to be arrested by the secret police. That year, Thomas Sgovio learned that she had been sent to the camps.
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Like the others, Thomas understood that his own arrest was fast approaching. But whenever he voiced his increasing concern to Lucy Flaxman, she would always reassure him that he had nothing to worry about— everything would be fine. Although this was obviously untrue, Lucy projected such optimism that eventually Thomas became angry. One evening in his room in Alexandrov, Thomas persisted with his questions, sensing that she knew something more, until Lucy broke down in tears:
“All right, I’ll tell you, promise you’ll never tell . . . They’ll give me twenty five years.”
And then she confessed that she was an informer for the secret police.
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It had happened, she explained, after she had first applied for an exit visa to return to the United States, some two years earlier. Within days of her refusal, she was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka. There, the MGB agents had sworn at her and demanded to know if she was really “a loyal Soviet citizen.” When Lucy replied that she was, her interrogator responded that she would have to prove it by “cooperating” with them. At first she refused, but they threatened her with deportation and degradation in the camps. Thoroughly frightened, Lucy Flaxman agreed to do as they asked, and was instructed to begin work straightaway. Assigned the code name “Nora,” she was ordered to inform on other Americans in Moscow, and to report to the secret police once a week at the Moscow Hotel and private apartments located around the city. Tearfully, Lucy explained to Thomas that they had never asked if he was loyal, and that she had always praised him anyhow. The secret police knew all about their relationship. She was sure he would be safe.
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What Lucy Flaxman experienced was common among those Americans left “untouched” by the attentions of the Cheka, and allowed to live outside “the zone.” Margaret Wettlin had been a teacher at the Anglo-American school in Nizhni Novgorod before facing a similar recruitment at the Lubyanka. Her fate, and that of others, was to join an alternate existence offered to a small number of the American emigrants who escaped execution or imprisonment.
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In Margaret Wettlin’s case, the new career of the young schoolteacher from Rhode Island was accompanied by a rapid rise in her fortunes, as she moved from teaching to broadcasting the news in English on Radio Moscow.

Of course, the most valuable benefit was also the simplest: by informing on others, they saved themselves. Only later, as the years wore on, did Margaret Wettlin realize she had became part of “an enormous, impersonal, diabolical machine.” Once she had informed on a “Mrs. Davis,” an American communist who foolishly mentioned that she hated Stalin. After Mrs. Davis disappeared, Margaret Wettlin abruptly understood “the evil of it, and that I was supporting evil.” There were others who perceived the stark moral choice straightaway and refused the coercions of the secret police— preferring instead to suffer the consequences. But they were always very few, and seldom, if ever, lived to tell their stories.
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Three days after Lucy Flaxman’s sudden confession, Thomas Sgovio was once again arrested.

 
 
FROM HIS PRISON CELL, Thomas heard the miraculous sound of a familiar bass voice singing in English, broadcast over a loudspeaker. In 1949, Paul Robeson was giving a concert in Moscow, preserving the myth of freedom of expression in a nation whose lips had been “sewn shut” with fear.
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While every other American artist was excoriated in the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign, Robeson alone remained untouchable—that year the Soviets had named the highest mountain peak in the republic of Kirghizia in his honor. And with such exalted status came other privileges not normally paid to an ordinary visitor. On his arrival in Moscow, Paul Robeson asked to meet two Russian friends he had met in America during his wartime support for the Jewish Anti-Fascist League.

In the summer of 1943, at New York City Hall, the poet Yitzhak Pfeffer and the actor Solomon Mikhoels had been honored by Fiorello La Guardia, the New York City mayor, who brushed interpreters aside and spoke to the Soviet cultural ambassadors in Yiddish. On July 8, 1943, at a mass rally at the Polo Grounds, forty-seven thousand New Yorkers gathered to welcome them—
“Sholom Aleichem, Brothers!”
—in a show of solidarity between American and Soviet Jewry, with entertainment provided by Eddie Cantor, Larry Adler, and Paul Robeson.
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Six years later, in Moscow, Robeson was told that his Russian friends were both away on holiday. When the American singer insisted, the poet Pfeffer was eventually found and arrived to meet him in his hotel room. Their meeting was uncannily similar to the one Robeson had had with Ignaty Kazakov, a decade earlier, before Kazakov’s show trial and execution. But on this occasion, Yitzhak Pfeffer arrived at the Hotel Moskva alone and dressed in a suit, although obviously in great distress. Knowing their hotel room was bugged, Pfeffer resorted to sign language and handwritten notes in an attempt to answer Robeson’s questions. The actor Solomon Mikhoels, Pfeffer explained, had been “murdered on Stalin’s order,” and Pfeffer was himself imprisoned in the Lubyanka. When Robeson asked what would happen to him, the Jewish poet was unequivocal:
“They’re going to kill us. When you return to America, you must speak out and save us.”
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In an interview, Paul Robeson, Jr., explained that afterward, his father had written a letter to Stalin on Pfeffer’s behalf, and sang a song in Yiddish at a Moscow concert in a coded protest against the ongoing persecution of Soviet Jewry.
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But Robeson refused Pfeffer’s request to speak out publicly upon his return to the United States. Instead, Robeson rejected the rumors of mass arrests as anti-Soviet propaganda, and refused to denounce Stalin’s methods although he had met the victims personally. To a reporter from
Soviet Russia Today,
Robeson denied also the reports of a purge against the Jews in Soviet Russia, stating that he had
“met Jewish people all over the place . . . I heard no word about it.”
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At the beginning of the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign, Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov had publicly promised:
“Since it is quite natural to punish failure in industrial production; how much more serious is ideological failure in cultural production. Consequently the punishment of literary and artistic offenders has to be most severe.”
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Three years later, in August 1952, Yitzhak Pfeffer was executed along with four other Jewish writers and poets, and ten other leading Jewish cultural and scientific figures, all falsely convicted of espionage during their wartime membership in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. One after another, they were taken down to a basement cell of the Lubyanka Prison and shot.
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