The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (53 page)

Some prisoners suffered the cruelty of losing the ability to make choices, and had to request that choices be made for them, anxious to get only what they were given, since they were unable to cope with any expression of individual identity or desire. Their sense of self no longer existed. Some did not want to leave the camps at all. If they could, they would have chosen to remain within the zone. Such psychological conditions fell within a whole range of experience. But there was one, very revealing, phenomenon reported among the survivors of the Kolyma camps in particular: they hated the sight of gold.
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FOR SOME OF those whose actions had consigned these people to the camps, the return of the “ghosts” was too much to bear. Alexander Fadeyev had once been a famous writer whose novel
The Young Guard
sold more than three million copies in the USSR. As the secretary of the Writers’ Union, Fadeyev had also signed the arrest lists of his fellow writers. A long-term alcoholic, at first he had tried drunkenly to befriend his former victims who survived. Then, quite suddenly, Alexander Fadeyev stopped drinking and wrote a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The suicide note was retained by the KGB, but its contents were clear from Fadeyev’s bitter complaints: “I thought I was guarding a temple, and it turned out to be a latrine.” And then he shot himself.
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Like Fadeyev, Ivan Nikishov, the former Dalstroi chief and deceiver of an American vice president, had lapsed into alcoholism. After the war, anonymous reports were sent to Moscow informing on the “unworthy behaviour of the head of Dalstroi, Comrade Nikishov.” An MVD investigation in Magadan revealed the widespread abuse of state funds, and lavish drinking and debauchery on the part of Nikishov and his wife: “Nikishov and Gridassova organize binges on board the ships that arrive from America; afterwards, absolutely drunken Nikishov is being carried into his car in sight of all the personnel of the harbour.” The secret police report described the “hand-kissing and sexual degeneracy” of Gridassova, and likened the atmosphere to a royal court: “Presents from America were not distributed among those who needed them; instead, they were given to Gridassova.”
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In 1956, the disgraced Nikishov died in a bath, apparently another suicide. He, too, left a note of self-justification:
“Yezhov and Beria demanded to fulfil the plan of gold production by any cost: ‘Do not be sorry for prisoners. You will receive workers always when steamers can bring them’ . . . I do not feel guilty . . . I was only an executor. Here are the copies of Yezhov’s and Beria’s orders. I kept them because I knew that I might be asked.”
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THAT YEAR, Alexander Dolgun, the former clerk of the American embassy, was finally released from the camps, eight years after his arrest on a Moscow street. His freedom was, of course, only relative, since he was warned that if he ever attempted to leave the USSR, his punishment would be a life sentence in a closed prison. He discovered that his mother had also been arrested, after she had asked for news of her son. Meeting her again in Moscow, Alexander Dolgun was shocked that she looked twenty years older than her actual age; her fingernails were “twisted and torn, and her temples and forehead were scarred.” Like many prisoners, Mrs. Dolgun had suffered a severe mental breakdown in response to her torture, and was subsequently placed in a Soviet psychiatric institution. Twice a week, Dolgun visited his mother in the hospital, where she would reminisce about her life in New York and her sister living in New Jersey. Once, Dolgun was approached by a hospital psychiatrist who explained that his mother was suffering from severe paranoia combined with the most intricate delusions:
“She has told me the most vivid stories about living in New York City. Can you believe that? She describes the streets and the buildings with such clarity that I find myself believing her. I have seldom seen such an advanced case. I am sorry to have to tell you that she is very, very far gone into a world of her own making.”
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At the American embassy, Alexander Dolgun was invited to collect some money that he was owed. Accompanied by a KGB escort, he was offered a thousand dollars in back pay and asked how he would like to receive the money. When Dolgun requested to be paid in rubles, his only counsel came from his KGB minder, who advised him that he should not have changed the currency since “you could buy a lot with a thousand dollars in Moscow.” An embassy official told Dolgun that his belongings were stored in a warehouse but that it would take some time to find them. His reaction to this news was muted: “But all the time I was running the consular file section, the records were in excellent shape.”
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In 1956 there were still Americans imprisoned in camps who were forced to write to friends abroad in code. One letter was sent from “Vincent W.,” who substituted the word
uncle
for the American embassy in Moscow, and
aunt
for the Soviet secret police:
“I can tell you that I received from my uncle a letter from Moscow; he writes very nicely, he did not give me up, I am considered their son.”
After Vincent W.’s release from the camp, he wrote again:
“I was not permitted to see the uncle, the aunt herself talked to me for four hours . . . Please speak with my uncle who lives with you.”
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In September 1956, Alyce Alex was still appealing to the American ambassador from her prison camp, by means of a letter delivered by hand:
“I am in camp seven years without any help what so ever. I have tried to get in contact with my friends and relatives in the States and so far have had no luck. I wonder if you will be so kind as to help me . . . Please help me.”
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On August 10, 1956, State Department officials met with the American Red Cross to ask the organization to “bring up the question of the release of American citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union.” Mr. Ellsworth Bunker, the president of the American Red Cross, replied that
“the Red Cross delegation had given careful consideration to this problem and had decided that it would be best to avoid raising the question which would be considered by the Soviets as a political issue.”
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The attitude of the American Red Cross had remained unchanged since the Terror. Ten years earlier, a British inquiry for intervention on behalf of a missing legal adviser had received the following reply from Ralph Hubbell, the Red Cross director:
“We have made it a practice, if not a policy, however, not to make inquiries about those whom we know are political prisoners; those arrested by the Soviet police; those we know are domiciled in NKVD camps . . . In our opinion, inquiries about persons in this category would tend to be a source of annoyance, if not embarrassment.”
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AFTER MIDNIGHT ON February 25, 1956, at the final day of the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev unexpectedly announced that the proceedings would continue in a closed session. A summons was issued to the Communist Party delegates staying in nearby hotels, and within half an hour the congress hall was full. Then Khrushchev stepped up to the podium and, without warning, launched into a four-hour speech listing Stalin’s crimes against “socialist legality” and the Communist Party. The delegates listened in silence, their shock interrupted only by the occasional expression of astonishment and indignation.
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In his so-called Secret Speech, Khrushchev acknowledged for the first time the catalogue of “mass arrests and deportations,” “cruel and inhuman tortures,” and the lists that Stalin signed condemning “thousands of honest and innocent Communists.” The new Soviet leader mentioned several innocent parties by name, and attributed personal responsibility to Stalin for their deaths. At a stroke, the principal charges made against Stalin, so ferociously denied for so long, were suddenly accepted as truths by his successor. As Khrushchev candidly admitted to his audience,
“Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious. We know this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: ‘Why are your eyes so shifty today?’ or ‘Why are you turning so much today and avoiding looking at me directly in the eyes?’”
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An American writer described perfectly the shock of Stalin’s former followers as they listened to Khrushchev’s speech: “In the eyes of a Communist, it was as if St. Paul, suddenly and without warning, had bitterly charged Christ with depravity and deceit.”
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Of course, Khrushchev’s candor went only so far. The issue that could never be addressed by the new general secretary was that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not only the victim but also the institution that had allowed a judicially sanctioned genocide to occur. In terms of responsibility, the Communist Party had actively encouraged, and continually excused, the actions of its leader. Untold numbers of fanatical believers had pursued Stalin’s will through conviction, not just fear, and one of those had been Khrushchev himself. So if the “Secret Speech” stunned its audience, it left a great deal else unsaid. The camps themselves were never mentioned, and while Khrushchev alluded to the “illegal” execution of “thousands” of communists, he could never fully acknowledge the death of millions of innocent victims of the Terror.

After the speech, Khrushchev cautiously remarked that “we must not carry out a St. Bartholomew’s Massacre,” and explained how bringing to account all those who had participated in Stalin’s crimes would have incarcerated more people than had just been released. His own passionate speeches in defense of the Terror were erased from the record, just as he made certain to conceal his personal role in the mass arrests in Moscow and the Ukraine during 1937 and 1938. According to Semyon Vilensky, a Gulag survivor and the head of a support group for its victims, thousands of documents were burned during the Khrushchev regime, as “people wanted to eliminate the traces of their crimes.”
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To admit openly the enormity of the crimes against humanity, let alone the lies concealing it, would surely have sounded the death knell of the Soviet Union, and privately Nikita Khrushchev himself worried lest the “thaw” turn into a flood that might wash the regime away.
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Instead of openness, Stalin’s inheritors—the willing Stalinists of the past—chose at first a partial revelation, and then to continue what Boris Pasternak described as “the inhuman power of the lie.”
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In the following months, new death certificates were delivered to the families of the victims. The causes of death were entirely fictional and yet medically plausible: dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart attacks—the list was endless. Oscar Corgan had once been a leading organizer of the Finnish American emigration to Karelia, before his arrest and disappearance during the Terror. After Corgan’s posthumous rehabilitation under Khrushchev, his family was issued a death certificate that stated that Corgan had died of stomach cancer on July 18, 1940, the place of death unknown. Decades later the family received a second certificate, somewhat closer to the truth: Oscar Corgan had been shot on January 9, 1938, the place of his execution still unknown. The “inhuman power of the lie” was a function of the Soviet regime regardless of its leadership.
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AFTER HIS RELEASE, Thomas Sgovio bought a ticket to a Moscow cinema, where a documentary on Kolyma was about to be screened. Ten minutes into the film, Thomas began to feel unwell, unable to cope with the images he saw on-screen. The film showed pictures of beautiful pine-covered hills, of Yakut villagers herding reindeer as the narrator praised “the heroic deeds of the Komsomol” in opening up these new Soviet lands. The emaciated prisoners, the frozen corpses, the guard dogs, and the watchtowers had all been quietly erased from the official record of Soviet history.

Watching the documentary pushed Thomas toward the realization that applying for an American passport to leave the USSR was too much to hope for, even in the heady days of the Khrushchev “thaw.” Instead, he used his father’s ancestry to obtain an Italian passport and an exit visa. Eventually, in 1960, he was permitted to leave Moscow on an Aeroflot plane bound for Italy, and from there he traveled on to New York. After years of exile, most of which had been spent as a prisoner, he had finally returned home. When Thomas Sgovio left the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was battling the Great Depression. Upon his return, John F. Kennedy was promising a “New Frontier.” A quarter of a century had passed.
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By strange coincidence, Nikita Khrushchev arrived in America not long before Thomas Sgovio’s homecoming. It was the first visit of a Soviet leader to the United States, and Khrushchev remained in ebullient humor throughout, confidently declaring, “Your grandchildren will live under communism.” In New York, Khrushchev explained how the “conical shape of A-bomb waves made tall buildings situated even at great distances from ground zero more vulnerable to destruction.” When he confided that the Soviets were building not more than “four or five” stories high, an American aide remarked that perhaps soon they would “all live underground.”

Unfazed by the shadow of Armageddon, Khrushchev appeared to enjoy the United States very much, and took the evident economic prosperity in his stride, ready with a quick-fired answer for every eventuality. The American automobiles, he reluctantly admitted, were “impressive,” but in the Soviet Union they were setting up large rent-a-car garages for people to use collectively rather than creating all this wasteful individual ownership. And Khrushchev reminded American businessmen that in earlier days, trade between their countries was “rather extensive and that Ford, for example, had found it profitable to deal with the USSR.”
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In San Francisco, Khrushchev was greeted by cheering crowds and his warmest reception yet. A lone dissenting voice came from the leadership of the United Auto Workers union. Walter and Victor Reuther were among a party of American trade unionists invited to a reception at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. When Victor Reuther greeted the Soviet leader in Russian quite naturally, questions were asked, with Reuther explaining that he had spent the years of 1934 and 1935 with his brother working at the Gorky Automotive Works “named in honor of Molotov. Is it still called that?” “Niet,” snapped Khrushchev. The Reuther brothers had managed to leave Russia in 1935, but there had been disappearances even then, and they never believed the official explanation that the Americans had left voluntarily. For his part, Khrushchev reacted to their criticism with predicable ill temper. Later, at a summit meeting in Vienna, he told President Kennedy, “We hanged the likes of Reuther in Russia in 1917.”
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