The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (5 page)

The Americans’ train left Moscow for Bolshevo at 10:15 A.M. Beforehand they had been informed that “all ball players must turn out for this game,” an instruction that sounded more like a warning than an invitation. No record survives of what took place that day on June 18, 1934, at Bolshevo, but their hosts must have been fairly impressed because the Dynamo Sports Club soon announced that they, too, would be preparing two baseball teams to play in the forthcoming Soviet league to compete against Arnold Preedin’s Foreign Workers’ Club and the other American teams.
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Dynamo had been founded a decade earlier by Felix Dzerzhinsky to provide rest and recreation to the Soviet secret police, known by its first Revolutionary acronym as “the Cheka”—“The Extraordinary Commission for the Combat of Counter-Revolution and Sabotage”—and later, through the course of the 1930s, by its ever-changing initials as the GPU, the OGPU, and the NKVD. A neutral observer might have confidently predicted that any game between the OGPU and these brash young Americans would have been intensely competitive, with national pride at stake and tempers frayed over close calls, stolen bases, and complex rules lost in translation on the baseball field. But the OGPU’s interest in baseball would prove to be short-lived. Only their connection with the baseball players would last.

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“Life Has Become More Joyful!”

Harold Denny
, The New York Times,
July 12, 1934
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The two Foreign Workers’ Club teams—the Hammer and Sickles and the Red Stars—continued their practice sessions in Gorky Park or at the Stalin stadium during the spring training of April 1935. The only problem they faced was the mischief of the Russian children who sneaked onto the grounds to watch them play. In one tied game, a foul ball was hit over the fence into left field, where a gang of little faces was watching intently. Straightaway the kids grabbed the ball and ran out of the stadium and into their backyard to start a game of “Americanski beisbol” of their own. It was left to the captain, Arnold Preedin, to chase after them and persuade this Moscow Little League to return their precious ball and let the Americans finish their game.
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By then the American baseball players had already gained their most celebrated team member. At the height of his fame, Paul Robeson arrived in Moscow to discuss acting roles with the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, and to give concerts in Moscow factories where he was cheered by the American emigrants who worked there.
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To the world’s press, the thirty-five-year-old American actor and singer announced his passionate enthusiasm for all he had seen:
“In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being—no color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington.”
Later Robeson revealed that his young son would start school in Moscow “so that the boy need not contend with discrimination because of color.” Paul Robeson, Jr., was duly enrolled at the elite Moscow academy whose pupils included Stalin’s daughter and Molotov’s son.
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On New Year’s Eve 1934, Paul Robeson had stepped into the party at the Foreign Workers’ Club on Hertzen Street, perhaps out of curiosity or simply because he was searching for somewhere to celebrate the New Year. In their club, the young Americans mobbed him as a hero of the progressive cause, and performed their initiation ceremony of throwing the six-foot-six-inch former All-American football star three times into the air. At the invitation of the baseball players in the crowd, Paul Robeson happily agreed to turn out for the Foreign Workers’ Club when he returned to Russia in the New Year. “I’ll be a catcher,” he laughed and crouched down low to show them he still had the moves from his days on the Rutgers team that had beaten Princeton. And on a promise made around midnight, the Foreign Workers’ Club baseball team gained an honorary new member, as Robeson and the young Americans raised their glasses and drank toasts: “To the New Year, the third of our Five-Year Plan.”
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“I was not prepared for the happiness I see on every face in Moscow,” Robeson told a reporter from the New York
Daily Worker
, “I was aware that there was no starvation here, but I was not prepared for the bounding life; the feeling of safety and abundance and freedom that I find here, wherever I turn. I was not prepared for the endless friendliness, which surrounded me from the moment I crossed the border.” When asked for a comment on the recent executions of “counter-revolutionary terrorists” announced in the Soviet press, Paul Robeson was frankly unconcerned:
“From what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot! It is the government’s duty to put down any opposition to this really free society with a firm hand . . . It is obvious that there is no terror here, that all the masses of every race are contented and support their government.”
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ONE OF THE new American baseball players to arrive in Moscow in the summer of 1935 was a nineteen-year-old from Buffalo, New York, with high cheekbones and brown eyes. Thomas Sgovio traveled with his mother and fifteen-year-old sister, Grace, to join his father, Joseph Sgovio, who had left America two years earlier. Sharing his father’s gregarious nature, Thomas made friends easily within the American community in Moscow, as he pursued his youthful ambition to become a fine artist. Perhaps one day he might see his work hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery, just across the river from the Kremlin, but in the meantime he waited patiently to be accepted into art school for the following year, and took evening classes in charcoal drawing to help build up his portfolio.
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His father had found a job working as a pipe-fitter in a Moscow factory, and gave lectures to Soviet factory clubs on the evils of American unemployment his family had been so lucky to leave behind.
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Joseph Sgovio had been an active American Communist Party member in Buffalo, and was comfortable delivering radical speeches. In Russia, the main difficulty these “political emigrants” faced was overcoming the skepticism of their audiences. No matter how bleak the American radicals painted the picture of their hardships back home, the Russian workers would take one look at their fine clothes and boots and not believe them. This political problem was directly addressed by Ben Thomas in a letter to the Soviet journal
Internatsionalny Mayak
, in which he admitted that Russian workers still believed that the Soviet press
“exaggerate conditions of workers in America. They often judge of the conditions according to the clothes of the American workmen who come here. I tried to explain to the workmen that the persons arriving . . . have still retained their clothes doing their best to present an ‘outward appearance’ because in America a man with worn clothes is viewed with suspicion and turned out.”
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What set the American emigrants apart was always their clothing, which was closely examined by Russian workers, who touched their jackets and suits with expressions of approval and offered escalating sums of rubles to buy them, quite literally, off their backs. This Russian mania for American dress would last throughout the history of the Soviet Union, but it was particularly pressing in the thirties, when both fashions and new materials were nonexistent.
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The best-dressed people on the streets of Russia’s cities were always foreigners, while the mass of ordinary citizens looked on enviously. And the Americans, in turn, could not help but notice that the Russian faces, if not quite starving, were at the very least a little hollow.
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Joseph Sgovio’s speeches provided his family with an extra food ration in the special stores, where they waited in line next to the German and Italian communists who had fled fascism for the sanctuary of the USSR.
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For some it came as a surprise that the system of Soviet food distribution was so heavily politicized. One American autoworker in Moscow reported six different types of stores selling items of varying quality to every class group.
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While others who had been in the Soviet Union much longer were no longer shocked on seeing as many as seventeen different categories of wage and food rations. The mockery of the early American arrivals—
“Workers of the World Unite, and then divide yourself into seventeen categories!”
—was entirely lost on the Bolsheviks.
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The most luxurious stores were exclusively reserved for the Bolshevik elites, and if a young American such as Thomas Sgovio did not know any better, he might have suspected that a new class of privileged had quickly arisen from the ashes of the old. A sharp-eyed witness might occasionally catch a glimpse of a commissar, or GPU officer, stepping out of a store reserved for one of his own kind, turning the corner of a Moscow street, and clutching a precious food package wrapped in brown paper. But the Americans could hardly criticize when they themselves formed one rung on this escalating hierarchy of privilege. All those who arrived on official Amtorg contracts, as well as the political emigrants, gained access to the special stores where scarce provisions could be bought in exchange for foreign currency. It was a gastronomic world above and beyond the subsistence tedium of black bread and soup reserved for ordinary Russian workers. Fortunately for the consciences of the Americans, Stalin himself had pronounced that strict equality—once the highest ideal of the Revolution—was now
“a piece of petty bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of socialists’ society organized on Marxian lines.”
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SOON AFTER HIS arrival in Moscow, Thomas Sgovio joined the Anglo-American Chorus, one of the cultural activities organized by the Foreign Workers’ Club. The chorus gave concerts with forty-five male and female voices singing a program of “Negro protest-songs and American cowboy tunes,” conducted by Gertrude Rady, formerly of Broadway.
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Very quickly these American singers were in great demand, invited to the Theater of People’s Art in Moscow, where they performed “Dis Cotton Want a Picking” to great applause from the discerning Russian audience.
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Their concert was filmed, and soon afterward Thomas Sgovio joined his friends in a Moscow cinema to watch their performance projected up on the silver screen at twenty-four frames per second. At that moment, they all must have felt as though they had really arrived.
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If only for a short while, the popularity of the Americans in Moscow was unrivaled. Everyone was keen to make friends with these optimistic, fun-loving, and well-dressed new arrivals, including the sons and daughters of the Bolshevik elite. Thomas had recently made friends with Marvin Volat, a young American emigrant who hailed from Buffalo, New York, and was studying the violin at the Moscow Conservatory. It was Marvin who invited Thomas to meet his new Russian girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old language student named Sara Berman. Riding the tram over to Sara’s apartment, on Lubyanka Square, Marvin chattered excitedly, “Just think! Her father is the chief of all the concentration camps in Russia! He knows Stalin real well.”
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As their crowded tram clanked slowly to their stop, Thomas Sgovio could hardly have considered the inadvertent warning that lay hidden in Marvin’s words. What earthly significance could the Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei—“the Labor Camps Directorate,” whose initials formed the acronym “Gulag”—have to a nineteen-year-old American art student? At the time, if either Matvei Berman or the Gulag meant anything at all, it was only as the faint reflection of the state propaganda which characterized the “camps” as the unfortunate necessity of the post-Revolutionary era, required for the “political re-education” of the remnants of the old Tsarist regime. Even Walter Duranty had agreed on the essentially benign nature of these “concentration labor camps.” Their purpose, Duranty had written in an article published on the front page of
The New York Times,
was to
“remove subversive individuals from their familiar milieu to a remote spot where their potentially harmful activities will be nullified—the Bolsheviki add kindly—‘where such misguided persons will be given a chance to regain by honest toil their lost citizenship

in the Socialist Fatherland.’”
Duranty’s best comparison was with the early American settlers of Virginia:
“Each concentration camp forms a sort of ‘commune’ where everyone lives comparatively free, not imprisoned, but compelled to work for the good of the community. They are fed and housed gratis and receive pay for their work . . . They are certainly not convicts in the American sense of the word.”
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Of course it was a strange coincidence that out of all the millions of young women in Russia, Thomas Sgovio’s friend Marvin Volat had chosen to romance the daughter of Matvei Berman, the Gulag chief recently awarded the Order of Lenin for the “glorious” construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal.
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But then it was equally surprising that two American teenagers should be riding a tram through 1930s Moscow toward the floodlit monolithic GPU headquarters on Lubyanka Square, whose blazing lights emitted a peculiar dark energy through the night. They had no idea, even then, that there were few Muscovites who would not make the necessary detour, of a few city streets left or right, to bypass Lubyanka Square.
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To make a little extra money on the side, Thomas was freelancing as a commercial artist at
Sovietland
—an English-language magazine published by the Soviet news agency TASS and intended as a cultural export for an English-speaking readership.
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With no apparent sense of irony, the magazine’s glossy pages were filled with articles such as “Abundance!” which described how Moscow’s department stores were now overflowing with supplies of food, not to mention gramophones, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and a cascade of consumer goods. New cafés were opening in Moscow where “payment was made by the honor system,” although in a period of universal shortages, exactly where such cafés were found no one was completely sure. But the magazine articles were pored over by readers in America who formed strong attachments from such slender means. The manufacture of certainty, it seemed, was the most successful export of the Five-Year Plan.
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