The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (46 page)

Quite predictably, the publication of Kravchenko’s book in the West was greeted by furious attacks from Soviet critics. The former prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky—whose career had risen from the show trials to presenting evidence at Nuremberg—now led the campaign to characterize life in the “reeducation camps” as an entirely “happy” experience.
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In a bid to smear Kravchenko’s reputation, the French communist magazine
Les Lettres Françaises
accused him of never having written the book at all. His authorship was an impossibility, their editorship alleged, since Kravchenko was, in fact, an illiterate.
Les Lettres Françaises
reassured the French public, and in particular the quarter of the electorate who had recently voted for the French Communist Party, that
I Chose Freedom
was, in fact, written by an American intelligence agent.
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In February 1949, Victor Kravchenko arrived at the Palais de Justice in Paris to fight a libel trial. Smoking a cigarette and flanked by lawyers, he strode to the top of the steps to make a statement to the press:
“I assure my friends and all my readers that I will do my best, with their moral help in order to show the truth during the trial and show to the world public opinion the horrors of Soviet reality.”
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At the so-called Trial of the Century, a succession of Kravchenko’s former colleagues were flown in from Moscow to testify against him. But the tactic backfired, since the world of Stalin transplanted to Paris scarcely made any sense at all. Without an all-embracing fear, it was impossible not to suppress a smile at the absurdity of the evidence. Victor Romanov, who had worked alongside Kravchenko in New York, now accused him of the cardinal sin of “forming impressions of America in a personal manner,” which brought wry amusement to the courtroom. Kravchenko’s ex-wife took the stand only for it to emerge that the NKVD had executed her father in 1937. One exchange in particular cut to the quick:

 
After two months of argument, the French high court handed a hollow victory to Kravchenko, with one-franc damages. The verdict was immediately headlined across the front pages around the world. But in spite of the overwhelming evidence, there remained a reluctance to believe or—to express this reaction more pointedly—an apparent
willingness to deny
the truth of what was still ongoing within the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the more brilliant intellectuals who dismissed Kravchenko, supported the communists in North Korea—“Any anti-Communist is a dog!”— and justified the use of terror as the “midwife of humanism.”
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Thus Sartre lent intellectual credence to voices such as Pierre Daix, the editor of
Les Lettres Françaises,
who wrote that “the camps of re-education of the Soviet Union are the achievement of the complete suppression of the exploitation of men by men,”
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or the French Communist Party leader, Maurice Thorez, who made a public speech in February 1949 declaring that if the Soviet army
“defending the cause of freedom and of socialism, should be brought to pursue the aggressors onto our soil, could the workers and people of France have any other attitude toward the Soviet army than have been that of the peoples of Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia?”
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Turned by such men, the wheels of justification ground black into white and, if need be, back into black again, depending upon the ideological vagaries of Moscow. And always hidden from view was the sight of a starved and bloodied prisoner, cowed, his teeth knocked out, his eyes swollen with fear, frantically confessing his guilt. Thus the celebrated words of Jean-Paul Sartre lent existential apology to the fists of torturers such as Belov, and provided moral comfort to listening ideologues and embryonic tyrants such as the Cambodian student named Saloth Sar, who joined the French Communist Party in Paris in the early 1950s and would become better known to the world as Brother Number One, or Pol Pot.
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Nor could Sartre possibly claim ignorance; he had only to step into any library and take down from the shelves André Gide’s account of his visit to Soviet Russia in 1936, whose publication had caused a sensation in France:
“The smallest protest, the least criticism is liable to the severest penalties, and in fact is immediately stifled. And I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.”
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Gide had been a communist when he arrived in Russia, and was predictably eviscerated by his former comrades upon his return to France. But his response to the Stalinist critics was unequivocal:

 
The truth to Gide was always more important than the consolations of ideology. He had seen through the deceptions of the French colonial authorities in the Congo, and simply reapplied the same instincts to the USSR.

But the most damning evidence came long after the fury of Kravchenko’s court case was over, when few people could remember the ferocious arguments his name had once evoked. As with so many other Russian defectors before him, no one had taken seriously Victor Kravchenko’s repeated claims that Soviet agents were trying to kill him. In 1966, his body was discovered in his Manhattan apartment. The gunshot wound, the authorities stated at the time, was self-inflicted.
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THE TRUTH, although it may be initially disbelieved, will always surface. During the postwar period, two more witnesses escaped to the West, both survivors of the Soviet camps. The first was Vladimir Petrov, formerly a Leningrad law student, whose 1935 arrest had consigned him to the Kolyma gold mines. Much like Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman, Petrov had survived his sentence by courage and repeated good fortune, the most essential prerequisite of all. At one point, he had been transferred to the eighth unit of the Shturmovoy mines, where the life expectancy was “less than a month,” and was saved by the intervention of a friend in the camp bureaucracy, who transferred him in time. Later on, Petrov attempted to escape Kolyma with two others, on homemade skis. After three days he turned back, realizing that only death rose up to meet him in that frozen wasteland.
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Vladimir Petrov’s case was unusual because he was released from Kolyma early on in the war, before the official order to keep all the “overtimers” had been introduced. Using the chaos of war to his advantage, Petrov returned to his mother’s village in the Ukraine, and then retreated west with the German armies, always conscious of the need to stay ahead of the NKVD. His refugee odyssey ended in America in 1947, where he settled and wrote several magazine articles describing the atrocities he had witnessed in Kolyma, later expanded into a book. The future Georgetown University professor’s literary efforts were received coolly by many within the intellectual establishment, who viewed his descriptions as little more than the cold war ravings of a Nazi sympathizer.
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There was, however, one famous American Progressive who was profoundly disturbed by the articles he read—so much so, in fact, that he sought an interview with their author. His name was Henry Wallace.

At this point, Wallace had already descended far down the glassy slide from political powerbroker to nonentity to pariah. Firing him from his Roosevelt appointment as secretary of commerce, President Truman scathingly described Wallace as “a pacifist, a dreamer who wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.”
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In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace ran against Truman as the leader of the Progressive Party. There was courage, at least, in his campaign in the Deep South, where he refused to stay in segregated hotels and slept instead in the homes of his black supporters. “Go back to Russia, you nigger lover” was regularly shouted back at him with all the raw hatred that prefigured physical violence.
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But ultimately, Wallace’s campaign self-destructed into failure, amid bitter accusations of Communist Party infiltration. Now a chastened man, he met with Vladimir Petrov in the fall of 1949 to talk to the Russian about his experiences in Kolyma. Strangely, the two men became friends, and Wallace publicly apologized for having allowed himself to be fooled by the Soviets.
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His belated apology was never enough to save him from his many enemies, as the once-shining liberal icon became firmly caught in the McCarthyite snare. Always under the surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover—whom Wallace had once derided as “our American Himmler”—the former vice president was now suspected of being a Soviet agent and of passing atomic secrets to the Russians. In closed testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, formerly the director of the Manhattan Project, accused Wallace of advocating the transfer of uranium to the Soviet Union during the war. The FBI, on behalf of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began investigating claims that Wallace had met “a subversive agent during the war with data on the atomic bomb.”
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In response, Wallace hired a lawyer and wrote to Albert Einstein, asking for a “powerful statement enlightening the public with regard to the utter insignificance of five hundred pounds of uranium oxide and five hundred pounds of uranium nitrate even for experimental purposes.”
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Wallace’s FBI file contained more than two thousand pages of accumulated surveillance, including details of the meetings he held with Molotov and Andrei Gromyko while planning his fateful journey to Kolyma. No evidence was ever brought against him in court, nor was Henry Wallace ever charged with any crime. But just as he was getting back up on his feet, another Kolyma survivor was about to kick him back down.

After concerted diplomatic pressure, the Swiss government had obtained an exit visa for Elinor Lipper, whose life had been saved by her job as a nurse in a Kolyma prison hospital. After sixteen years in the camps, and through the miracle of a Swiss citizenship by marriage, Elinor Lipper was placed in the hold of a Dalstroi ship with another woman prisoner and delivered from Magadan back to “the mainland.” During the return voyage, a group of criminals gang-raped her companion, and Elinor was forced to witness the violence unfolding in front of her. She was eight months’ pregnant at the time, and gave birth to a baby daughter in a transit camp on the mainland. Only a year later, with the continued intervention of the Swiss Red Cross, was she finally allowed to exit the Soviet Union.
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True to her promise to the executed camp doctors, Elinor Lipper published an account of the Kolyma camps to the disbelieving world in 1950. The following year, when Henry Wallace appeared before the Senate Internal Security Committee to answer questions about his vice-presidential visit to Kolyma, it was Elinor Lipper’s testimony that inflicted the very worst damage upon his reputation. In front of a row of hostile senators, Wallace was forced to listen to his behavior compared to that of an American visiting Auschwitz only to compliment the SS on their work. His public defense was simply that in 1944, “there was no way in which I could learn the full truth.” But this reply was not quite accurate. The evidence had been there, but Henry Wallace had chosen not to believe it.
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At his farm in South Salem, New York, Wallace began to receive hate mail.
“Shame on you, Henry Wallace, for letting Stalin make a sucker out of you. Mr. Wallace you owe those tortured millions something, you helped Stalin. Do something. Get going! Faster! Faster!”
Opinion polls rated him “the second least approved man in America,” just a few percentage points ahead of Lucky Luciano.
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In the panic of the time, a New York school board banned the book
Twenty Famous Americans
for its offending chapter on the country’s former vice president.
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As Henry Wallace’s reputation disintegrated, his colleague on the Kolyma trip, Professor Owen Lattimore, was accused by Joseph McCarthy of being Soviet Russia’s “top secret agent in the United States.” At the senatorial investigation, Professor Lattimore proved to be a ferociously determined opponent:
“I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party, I have never been affiliated with or associated with the Communist Party, I have never believed in the principles of Communism, nor subscribed nor advocated the Communist form of government either within the United States, in China, in the Far-East or anywhere in the world . . . I hope the Senator will in fact lay his machine-gun down. He is too reckless, careless and irresponsible to have a licence to use it.”
Joseph McCarthy sat with his thin black hair and bull figure, grimacing in response. The witness Louis Budenz testified that Owen Lattimore had belonged to a Communist Party cell, based on the information he had received from Moscow while working as the editor of the
Daily Worker
newspaper. There were many who discounted Budenz’s testimony as just another McCarthyite smear from a turncoat twisting to absolve himself of blame. Lattimore himself launched a waspish counterattack:
“Now gentlemen, I of course do not enjoy being vilified by anybody: even by the motley crew of crackpots, professional informers, hysterics and ex-Communists who McCarthy would have you believe represent sound Americanism.”
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Five years on, the final charges of perjury against Lattimore were dismissed, and he left America to take up an academic post in England. Unlike the remorseful Wallace, Owen Lattimore never apologized for his portrayal of their visit to Kolyma. Instead, he attacked the veracity of Elinor Lipper’s account, accusing her of being a McCarthyite pawn.
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