The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (45 page)

Nor did Paul Robeson attempt intervention on behalf of the American emigrants. When Robert Robinson first tried to enlist Robeson’s help, he was met with suspicion from one of Robeson’s entourage:
“What do you think you are doing, Robinson, running away from here? You must stay right where you are. You belong here for the good of the cause. Or maybe you’re trying to tarnish Paul’s reputation, by getting him involved in your attempt to leave. That is all I have to say to you. You may go now!”
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Two years later, perhaps disbelieving that his message ever got through, Robinson appealed directly to Eslanda Robeson for help with an exit visa for Ethiopia. Robeson’s wife listened and then explained the situation firmly on her husband’s behalf:
“We have thought about your request, and he has decided that he cannot help you. You see, we do not really know you well enough, to know what is in your mind. Suppose he were to help you leave, and then when you arrived in Ethiopia, you decided to turn anti-Soviet. We would find ourselves in trouble with the authorities here.”
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BY CURIOUS COINCIDENCE, another sympathetic American celebrity, the writer John Steinbeck, had chosen to visit the Soviet Union just two years before Paul Robeson. For his many readers, Steinbeck wrote an account of his Russian tour of 1947, surveying the aftermath of World War II in the company of the Magnum photographer Robert Capa.
A Russian Journal
was, for the most part, simple reportage made in the company of his Intourist guides. John Steinbeck’s published journal was only indirectly political, when he highlighted the overwhelming nature of Stalin’s personality cult:

Even Intourist could not conceal the fearful atmosphere that permeated Stalin’s Russia at the time. Privately Steinbeck renounced any political sympathies he might once have shared with the Bolsheviks.
The Grapes of Wrath
had been published eight years earlier, in 1939, its pages filled with the high notes of 1930s radicalism:
“Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution . . . If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know.”
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One long, lean decade after the Crash, the American public recognized the hard choices of the Depression years, and bought Steinbeck’s novel by the million. To Steinbeck’s readers, Tom Joad was always a kind of hero, a tarnished hero maybe, but a hero nevertheless.
“ ‘A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re paying twenty-five!’ . . . ‘Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines. I ain’t a son-of-a-bitch, but if that’s what a red is—why, I want thirty cents an hour. Ever’body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we’re all reds.’ ”
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Eight years later, John Steinbeck’s factual description of the “monster portraits” of Joseph Stalin made him persona non grata in the USSR.

By the time of Paul Robeson’s concert tour, Steinbeck revealed in a letter to a friend how far his political views had changed:

 
The creator of the Joads was converted to an unflinching anticommunism he would hold for the rest of his life. It was a common enough journey among those who had seen the truth firsthand in the USSR, and lived to report their experience. Only the American emigrants in Soviet Russia were seldom so lucky. Their Damascene conversion arrived too late, and without the protecting cloak of international celebrity. It came at midnight in the back of a prison van, or after their first beating in a basement cell of Lefortovo Prison, or pressed down in the hold of a slave ship on the Sea of Okhotsk, or balanced at the edge of an execution pit in Butovo. And there was no one to write their collective story, or even to wonder what had happened to these real-life emigrants whose destination had been Russia, not California. Theirs was a Depression migration altogether more epic in its scope and more transgressive in its revelations of human nature than fiction could ever allow. In Soviet Russia, a free spirit like Tom Joad would have been dragged into a cell and beaten unconscious for weeks on end, until all the defiance had been knocked out of him and he mumbled a false confession through broken teeth. And then his father, grandfather, uncle, and brothers would have been taken away to be shot, and his mother and sisters would have disappeared into the camps of the Far North. But there never was a Steinbeck to write the story of the Preedens, or the Abolins, or the Gershonowitzes, or the Hermans, or the Sgovios, or the many others like them.

 
 
THE SURVIVING AMERICANS in Russia never learned that back home the Depression poverty had been eclipsed by the full employment generated in the buildup to World War II, and the golden economic boom that followed over the course of the next three decades. In Moscow, the American reporter William White had noticed that few people living inside this carefully controlled world had any real notion of what life was like outside the USSR. They were told over and over again that capitalism was on the brink of collapse, and the state’s propaganda was carefully edited to reflect that view. Only very occasionally did the clunking machinery of monolithic censorship make an inadvertent error. During the war, William White happened to watch a Soviet newsreel which featured the Detroit race riots. On the Moscow cinema screen the Russian audience watched a close-up of a black American getting beaten by the Detroit city police. The effect on the audience was, according to our American witness, immediate and “electric.” In the darkness of the cinema, the Russians jumped to their feet. “Look,” someone cried, “at that wonderful pair of shoes the Negro is wearing!”
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Convicted of “intention to betray the Fatherland,” Thomas Sgovio was again marched from his cell onto another prison train to be transported to a lumber camp in central Russia. In a camp at Boguchanni, the rearrested were told that although they were “not considered prisoners . . . any attempt to escape would result in a twenty-five-year sentence.” Thomas was then sent out to work chopping down trees in the never-ending forest, his isolation broken only by occasional reminders of the outside world. In Boguchanni the prisoners were allowed to watch old black-and-white American movies confiscated by the Red Army from the ruins of Berlin. At night, in the darkness of the Russian forest, Thomas Sgovio watched James Cagney dubbed into German with Russian subtitles, and Henry Fonda playing the part of Tom Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath.
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As the cult of Stalin loomed ever larger, no one could possibly have imagined that this lost tribe of Americans had ever existed, let alone had once played baseball in Gorky Park.

 
 
SIMILAR CIRCUMSTANCES FACED another American survivor, the Detroit-born Victor Herman, who had served out his ten-year sentence in the camps of Burelopom to be freed in October 1948.
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From his camp, Victor was exiled by railroad car to Krasnoyarsk, the city in central Siberia north of the Mongolian border. There he found a job coaching athletics and teaching the Siberians to box. In the brief space between arrests, he fell in love for the first time and married a Russian gymnast. Together the couple started a family of their own, and for three brief years Victor Herman lived the semblance of a normal life.

His fleeting happiness was ended by his arrest in the summer of 1951. Nine months later, Victor was arrested again, doubly suspect as an American and a Jew at the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. After his second arrest, he was sentenced into exile hundreds of kilometers farther north in the wilderness, where he was ordered to live a prescribed distance away from the nearest village settlement and forced to cut a house for himself out of the permafrost. There he lived alone until he was eventually joined by his wife and one-year-old daughter, who walked through a snowstorm to reach him. The Herman family survived by selling wood to passing villagers.
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To pass the time, Victor Herman would tell Russian fairy tales to his daughter, and also stories from his life in old Detroit. These stories would always begin the same way: “Once upon a time there was a place called America . . .” Until eventually his little girl—perhaps sensing her father’s homesickness and the change in the tone of his voice when he spoke of home—no longer asked to hear the fairy tales. Instead she would chirp, “Tell America, Papa, tell America . . .”
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22

Awakening

Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism,
1951
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Of the millions incarcerated in the Soviet camps, very few had managed to escape and publish their stories in the West. After the war it seemed their potential audience had already grown weary of narratives of violence and human suffering. The existing horrors were more than enough— the clear confirmation that the Allied nations had been fighting a justified war against a manifest evil as represented by the vérité of the black-and-white newsreels from the Nazi camps. The most terrible crime of modern civilization was more than sufficient. To add a concurrent notion of a Soviet genocide, and one from within the wartime alliance, was perhaps too much to bear. And so, although reports had begun to emerge, to begin with at least, they were disregarded. If public opinion in the West found the accounts difficult to accept, then this, too, was understandable in many ways. There seems to be a natural human instinct to turn one’s face away from suffering. Few had believed the scale of the reports from Poland or, in the early stages of the Holocaust, had dismissed them as “atrocity tales.” How much more incomprehensible, then, that a society predicated on the equality and fraternity of mankind could commit a crime even remotely equivalent?

From Stalin’s realm emerged no newsreels or photography, just the fragments of witness statements illustrated by drawings from memory by those who had escaped. Swaths of public opinion suspected the vehemence of these survivors; their claims against Stalin and the USSR could all too easily be characterized as “hysterical anticommunism,” prone to exaggeration, bursting with fanatical damnation, susceptible to a host of suspicious criteria that rendered their statements inaccurate, if not completely false. After the onset of the Cold War, Western intellectuals began to wonder if such voices were not merely serving a darker purpose, concocting useful anti-Soviet propaganda to justify the pregnant wishes of Langley or the Pentagon, and reinforce the spending requirements of America’s rapidly escalating defense budgets. Skeptical of the truth that was emerging from the Soviet Union, there were many who fell into the trap of denial.

In France, a court case that centered on just such evidence was attracting international publicity. Victor Kravchenko had been a Soviet Lend-Lease official who defected in 1944, while stationed in New York. At the time, the Soviet embassy had tried hard to force Kravchenko’s extradition as a wartime “deserter,” and had engaged the willing intervention of Ambassador Joseph Davies to its cause. What followed was the farce of the FBI having to call up Kravchenko anonymously to tip him off that “the heat was on” from the State Department, and warn him that he should “carefully hide himself.” But Kravchenko’s English was not yet up to such head-spinning machinations, and the FBI agent had to repeat the whole conversation to a friend, who took the appropriate evasive action on Kravchenko’s behalf.
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Joseph Davies, meanwhile, appealed directly to the president and secretary of state to have Kravchenko sent back to Russia. The moral issue of Kravchenko’s inevitable execution was elegantly sidestepped by Harry Hopkins, who argued that if he was returned, no one would
know
what happened to him.
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Only President Roosevelt had sensed a fast-approaching political calamity: “Will you tell Joe that I cannot do this?” he instructed his secretary, and the defector’s life was spared.
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Why the Soviet diplomatic machine went to such lengths to have him extradited was revealed when Kravchenko published his autobiography,
I Chose Freedom,
after the war. The book was a factual account of the crimes of Stalin, seen through the eyes of a midlevel Soviet industrial manager. Its pages contained detailed eyewitness descriptions of the Ukrainian famine—
“little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces”
—the mass arrests and disappearances of the Terror, the Gulag labor delivered to the factories that Kravchenko had once managed:
“Their unsmiling silence was more terrible than their raggedness, filth and physical degradation. They went about their work like people doomed, too pathetic to examine their surroundings or to commune with the free workers near them.”
One prisoner in particular haunted Kravchenko. His face
“was of pasty gray hue and looked like a death mask. A raw gash, purple with congealed blood, zigzagged from one temple almost to his chin.”
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From his privileged position within the Soviet industrial elite, Kravchenko reported that there were fifteen million such prisoners kept in Gulag camps by Stalin, and more recently, closer to twenty million.
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