The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (50 page)

Nothing was ever achieved at Geneva, if the issue was ever raised at all. Nor did President Eisenhower ever present the matter to the American public. As superpower summits came and went, the faint trace of the existence of those left behind in Russia was all but washed away. Outside national security circles, the Americans imprisoned in the Gulag hardly existed at all, nor were they likely to be officially recognized by the Soviet authorities, since their incarceration was, without doubt, a contravention of international law. Beyond the corridors of the State Department or Langley or the Pentagon, very few officials knew of their existence, or even suspected they might be there. In the United States, the families were told that their loved ones were dead or missing in action, presumed killed. As the Cold War settled into the quiet tension of mutually assured destruction—punctuated by violent proxy conflicts around the world—gradually the American officials responsible retired and died. And then, inevitably, the issue became lost with them.

Why quite so little was done to help these men and women is uncertain. The evidence of their existence may well have been deemed too sketchy or inconclusive, or perhaps a calculated decision was made that pursuing their fate would only have edged the superpowers still closer to nuclear confrontation, risking the lives of millions. All midlevel State Department inquiries were either denied or delayed by the Soviets, and there seems to have existed an unspoken willingness on both sides never to press or publicize the issue. That Western diplomats had a disturbing habit of turning away their gaze had already been proved in the case of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews at the end of the Second World War before his capture by the Soviet secret police. With Wallenberg imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the Swedish government immediately requested American diplomatic assistance to free him. From Moscow, on September 25, 1945, George Kennan sent a telegram addressed to the secretary of state:
“Soviet authorities pay little attention to our inquiries re welfare whereabouts American citizens in Soviet Union . . . They are particularly reticent in cases of person in hands of NKVD and if Wallenberg is alive it must be presumed that he is in custody of that organization which rarely pays even perfunctory heed to the normal demands of diplomatic practice. We consequently feel that any action here on our part on behalf of Wallenberg, a Swedish national, would serve no useful purpose.”
Later, Dag Hammarskjold, the UN secretary-general, expressed the same weariness more succinctly:
“I do not want to begin World War Three because of one missing person.”
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According to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, a retired Soviet NKVD agent, Raoul Wallenberg was held for two years in Lefortovo Prison and at the Lubyanka:

 
 
WHETHER MOTIVATED BY tempered disbelief, or the cynicism of realpolitik, a third generation of Americans were abandoned to their fate in the camps. How many can only be estimated, but their existence was incontrovertible. The Gulag lasted longer than any other system of concentration camps in modern history, and the Americans remained at the behest of one man. The NKVD reports returned to Stalin always began with the words:
“In accordance with your instructions . . .”
⁴⁶

In September 1952, Joseph Stalin and the Politburo held a meeting with Chou En-lai, and a party of Chinese communists, to discuss the ongoing war in Korea. According to the minutes of the meeting, preserved in the Russian state archives, Stalin had lectured Chou En-lai on the subject of prisoners of war, putting forward a “proposal” that “both sides temporarily withhold twenty percent of the prisoners-of-war.” Stalin’s explanation for this gambit was simple:
“Americans do not want to hand over all the prisoners-of-war. The Americans will keep some of them, intending to recruit them. It was like this with our prisoners-of-war: every day now we catch several [former] prisoners-of-war whom the Americans send to our country. They detain prisoners-of-war not because, as the Americans often claim, the prisoners say that they do not want to return, but in order to use the prisoners for espionage.”

When Chou En-lai asked for a letter he might take back to Mao, Stalin explained that “it is better to manage without a letter, that he sees that Chou En-lai is taking notes and that he trusts him fully.” Later when Chou En-lai asked for “instruction,” Stalin replied, “Instruction or advice?” The Chinese foreign minister’s answer was both deft and psychologically revealing:
“From
the point of view of Comrade Stalin, this is perhaps advice, but in its presentation it is instruction.”
In the early 1950s—well before the Sino-Soviet quarrels—if Stalin’s “advice” had called for the retention of 20 percent of UN prisoners of war during the Korean War, then to the Chinese such a “proposal” carried the sanctity of a commandment from the “Great Leader” of the Communist cause. It was Joseph Stalin, after all, who had armed the sixty Chinese divisions poured into the conflict in Korea.
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24

Smert Stalina Spaset Rossiiu

Sergei Eisenstein,
Ivan the Terrible, Part One
, 1944
¹
 
 
 

That Stalin could hold untold numbers of Allied servicemen hostage was unsurprising given his state of mind. By the early 1950s, the “cult of personality” had taken on a fervor and fanaticism seen only in the early stages of mass religious movements. Stalin, the former seminarian, had built a socialist religion with himself at its center: a god who demanded belief without rationale, obedience without a moment’s hesitation. That hundreds of millions of people—the entire populations of the Soviet Union, China, and the newly satellite nations of Eastern Europe—could have their lives controlled by one man, who had usurped the entire power of a world revolution, was too much for ordinary citizens to contemplate. Far easier and far safer, then, to believe. But their collective adulation only magnified and reinfected Stalin’s megalomania.
²

How else could one describe the actions of a leader who personally signed a Politburo order on July 2, 1951, authorizing thirty-three tons of copper to be used for the construction of a gigantic statue of himself, built beside the Volga-Don Canal, a project that killed thousands of its prisoner-laborers?
³
The colossal statue was built with an electric current running through its head, to prevent migratory birds from defacing the idol. The birds would land and be electrocuted, their feathered bodies falling to the ground in silent tribute to this Soviet Ozymandias, the shoemaker’s son from Gori, Georgia.
⁴

Viewed through the methodology of power, the personality cult had a calculated purpose. The psychological effect of Soviet “giganticism” was always intended to create a feeling of awe, which rendered the individual meaningless beneath the towering ubiquity of the Great Leader. The blind adulation of the cult leader erased the notion of the self as a free-thinking individual, and in its place created an acolyte. Twice a year, Stalin’s tiny arm would wave from Lenin’s mausoleum, and a million marchers roared their approval in regimented unison into the Moscow air.

Most disturbingly, the essence of Stalinism was never based on fear alone. There were millions who supported Stalin with genuine fervor—who had adapted themselves to the demands of the Soviet state. These were his willing volunteers, the Stalinists who chose to subjugate their judgment to the will of the Leader and the Party. If they must pay a personal sacrifice—in the peculiar denominations of a father, mother, brother, or sister—then so be it. They remained convinced that their cause would provide the ultimate justification for the Party’s excesses. To such steadfast disciples, Stalin represented the essence of a society that would never change, the security of an individual whose every choice has been taken away.

There were those who convinced themselves that Stalin’s actions were for the benefit of all. These apologists could not separate the unprecedented suffering of the Russian people during the Second World War— and the courage and sacrifice of the Russian soldiers in defeating the Nazi invasion—from the actions of the tyrant who ruled their state. This was always a strange paradox: for the love of Russia, to grant approval to the very man who had killed so many millions of their countrymen. Since of the myriad nationalities of the Soviet Union, it was the Russians themselves who suffered the most casualties to the regime. But, then, blind nationalism, like a distorting mirror at a fairground, bends the critical capacity of the beholder; and those who distinguish their personal identity by accident of geography will always, in a sense, remain vulnerable.

 
 
IN THE KREMLIN, the late-night banquets had descended into drunken farce, with Stalin forcing his henchmen into vodka-drinking contests, declaring, “Everyone must guess how many degrees below zero it is, and everyone will be punished by drinking as many glasses of vodka as the number of degrees he has guessed wrong!” The visiting Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas reported how Lavrenty Beria had once erred by three degrees, and then claimed afterward to have done so deliberately in order to drink more vodka. At one point Stalin left their table to put some music on a huge record player. He tried to dance but quickly became exhausted. “Age has crept on me and I am already an old man,” he said, looking around him to watch his companions’ reaction. “No, no, nonsense you look fine. You’re bearing up wonderfully. Yes, indeed, for your age . . .” The surviving Politburo members had grown wise to their master’s wiles. When Stalin put on his favorite record of an opera soprano accompanied by the howling and barking of dogs, the most powerful man in the world would listen and laugh, and the chorus of faces made pale by their nocturnal Kremlin hours would laugh along with him.
⁵

During a state visit Mikhail Kalinin, the aging figurehead president of the USSR, had asked Comrade Tito for a Yugoslav cigarette. “Don’t take any—those are capitalist cigarettes,” snapped Stalin. He watched Kalinin drop the offending cigarette through trembling fingers, and then began to laugh. “The expression on his face was like a satyr’s,” wrote Djilas. Kalinin’s wife had been arrested and was a prisoner in a Gulag camp, given the task of picking the nits out of the prisoners’ clothes at the camp bathhouse.
⁶

In 1949, Joseph Stalin again suggested at a Kremlin meeting that he was getting too tired for the job; perhaps it was time for someone else to step in to replace him? Immediately the protestations began: “No, no. In Georgia people lived to be a hundred and sixty!” Stalin wondered if perhaps the leaders of the Leningrad siege should replace him as premier and general secretary. The rest of the Politburo immediately chorused, “No, no, Comrade Stalin!” But when Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesensky hesitated, Stalin had them arrested. At the end of the show trial known as the “Leningrad Affair,” the former Soviet war heroes were draped in white shrouds and led out of the courtroom to be shot one hour later.
⁷

Once again the Soviet Union was enveloped in a tyrant’s fury. In a rare moment of candor, Stalin told Khrushchev, “I’m finished. I trust no one. Not even myself.”
⁸
On New Year’s Eve 1951, the former foreign minister Maxim Litvinov was killed in a car accident. According to the Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, a truck had been deliberately driven into Litvinov’s car as it rounded a bend in the road leading from his dacha. Stalin had met with the MVD department responsible for political assassinations and “instructed them personally.”
⁹

In June 1946, Maxim Litvinov had briefed Richard Hottelet, a correspondent for CBS, “to warn the western world that the Kremlin cannot be trusted and cannot be appeased.” Litvinov explained that each concession of Stalin’s demands would lead to “the West being faced, after a more or less short time, with the next set of demands.” Litvinov then went on to discuss the political consequences of Stalin’s death, thus ensuring he would never live to witness the event.
¹⁰

The assassination of Litvinov marked an intensification of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. In November 1952, Stalin ordered the arrest of the mainly Jewish Kremlin doctors, including his own physician, Vladimir Vinogradov, who had treated him for years. Stalin wrote his instructions on the interrogation report of one of the doctors: “Put them in handcuffs and beat them until they confess.”
¹¹
The order was accompanied with a threat to Semyen Ignatiev, the minister of state security: “If you don’t get the doctors’ confessions, you’ll find yourself shorter by a head.” When the confessions duly arrived, Stalin passed them around the Politburo. “You are like blind kittens,” he said. “What will happen without me? The country will perish because you don’t recognize enemies.”
¹²

In January 1953, an article was published in
Pravda
entitled “Assassins in White Coats.” The prose was a straightforward attack on Jewish doctors and, by extension, all Soviet Jews. It was written in Stalin’s own style, recognizable because every grammatical or spelling mistake was left uncorrected by the fearful editors. (According to his interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, for each one of Stalin’s errors, an impression was formed that “perhaps now we should write this word in this way.”)
¹³
The latest propaganda onslaught was filled with diatribes against the “disease of contamination” of the healthy Soviet body politic by these Jewish doctors. Those who had taken Russian names were identified in the press with their former Jewish surnames in brackets, lest there be any doubt.
¹⁴
Cartoonists depicted them in anti-Semitic caricatures, with the general hysteria reflected in the language of the charges:
“It has been established that all these killer-doctors, monsters in human form, tramping the holy banner of science and desecrating the honour of the man of science, were hired agents of foreign intelligence services . . . established by American intelligence services for the alleged purpose of providing material aid to Jews in other countries.”
¹⁵
In
Pravda,
it was announced that the trial of the Kremlin doctors would take place at the Hall of Columns on March 5, 1953.
¹⁶