The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (56 page)

Three years into the investigation, Dmitri Volkogonov, already suffering from cancer, died of a heart attack. His Russian successors, meanwhile, denied all knowledge of the so-called “Volkogonov plan” or even the document outlining its existence, and the investigation’s progress inevitably became mired in bureaucratic intransigence. As the decade wore on, Task Force Russia turned into a weather vane for the changing fortunes of the Russian-American relationship, veering from guarded cooperation to complete breakdown, depending on the political circumstance of the day. When American F-16s bombed the former Yugoslavia in 1997, for example, Task Force Russia was shut down completely and its investigators expelled, in a rerun of an old-fashioned Cold War spy drama.
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It soon became apparent that the wheels of bureaucracy turned as slowly in the new Russia as they had ever done in the past. Nor was the culture of secrecy vastly different, since the former Soviet officialdom below the highest ranks had survived completely intact. The KGB changed its name to the “new Russian” FSB, but this was a not-uncommon gambit for the organization, and the faces within the offices at the Lubyanka remained unchanged, the officials overwhelmingly reluctant to offer American investigators full, or even partial, access to their archives. Privately, many on the American side conceded, there was a growing preference for the investigation to wither and die for lack of access to documentary materials.

Such views were candidly expressed in declassified American policy documents:
“What started out as a dictatorship can also end up as a dictatorship . . . The Russians with whom we must deal sense instinctively that, sooner or later, the boot may come down on any neck that has been extended, dirtied their hands with the POW issue.”
The Russian security forces 

 
Such analysis appeared uncannily accurate when President Yeltsin ordered Stalin’s personal archives to remain closed for forty years.
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It quickly became apparent that old views lived on in the new Russia. In the wake of national publicity over the search for missing American pilots, a letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Anatolij Dokuchaev was published in the newspaper
Red Star
in February 1993:

 
In the former Soviet days, carefully phrased letters from members of the public were often used as a signal for changes in the party line. The subtext could be construed as a repetition of the Soviet reflex, which carried with it the undercurrent of threat, which had begun to reemerge even then. Yuri Smirnov, a Russian parliament member and head of a subcommittee on POW/ MIA affairs, stated that he had been warned: “You’re working too hard on the subject and should back off.” Mail sent by Gulag survivors to the Joint Commission offices disappeared or was intercepted. Other witnesses who came forward were warned off by anonymous visitors and, quite naturally, became reluctant to go public.
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And yet, for all the limitations of the process, documents were discovered in the Russian state archives that—the U.S. investigators stated in their joint meetings—referred to
“American POWS in Soviet camps during 1946
and 1947 in a seemingly matter of fact way.”
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From the State Archives of the Russian Federation, one document referred to “2,836 Americans” held in the Komi Republic, in the far north of European Russia. These Americans belonged to a larger group of foreigners kept as prisoners during the early 1950s. The response of the Russian side to such information was always skeptical. At their joint meetings, a view was proposed that perhaps these prisoners had been deemed Americans as part of a “criminal fabrication,” and then a familiar question was raised:
“Are any of these 2,836 Americans mentioned in this document American citizens in the traditional sense of the term? . . . Such a possibility cannot be excluded.”
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Searching for corroborative evidence, the American investigators re-examined their own archives. From thousands of boxes of information, the “Wringer” reports of the early 1950s were unearthed, and the evidence of the sightings of Americans by German and Polish survivors was presented to the Russian side. One report retrieved from a German lieutenant described the Gulag camp of Atkars, five hundred miles southeast of Moscow, where between “three and five hundred” Americans were being held in June 1945. All had citizenship papers and had been interned first by the Germans during the war, before being captured by the Russians. Half of the group had been forced to hand over their identity papers, but the German witness had seen camp files with one column headed “Citizenship” filled with at least ten to twenty “USAs” written by the camp inmates.
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Another German prisoner of war, interviewed in 1947, reported “130 US Navy personnel” held in the Gulag camp at Kashgar. The German witness stated that these men were the survivors of two American submarines sunk in the Pacific, who had been picked up by a Russian tanker. The Americans had arrived in Kashgar in July and August 1944, and had then been isolated, with the German prisoners only becoming aware of their presence after the Americans had thrown notes to them over the fence. When the Germans left in July 1946, around thirty of these Americans were already dead. Five decades later, the search for their existence led nowhere, and the American investigators’ requests for access to the Soviet secret police archives was consistently stonewalled. Amid claims, counterclaims, and denials, the work of the Russian-American commission continued through the 1990s.
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Meanwhile, other national organizations searching for their missing citizens in Russia appeared to be achieving better results. The Association Edouard Kalifat—named after a missing French prisoner of war and dedicated to tracing the hundreds of French nationals who vanished in the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War—found a fresh source of information in the St. Petersburg Medical and Military Archive. Searching through the sixty million files held on patients treated in combat, the French investigators discovered that, far from dying in battle as they had been told, many French servicemen had been imprisoned in Gulag camps. With the KGB archives still sealed, the St. Petersburg medical archive held the promise of a uniquely useful resource. But when the Americans knocked on the door, they were politely told that the archive was undergoing “restoration,” and were turned away. On another occasion, while investigating reports of “six or seven” U.S. prisoners of war held in a camp in Tambov, the American investigators interviewed a Russian archivist, Yuri Dulensky, who confided that many records had been destroyed “for unknown reasons.” The camp archives had been “cleaned up” over the years by their administrators, fearing retribution.
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OVER THE COURSE of the 1990s, the relatives of missing American servicemen had grown weary at the interminable delays. A coalition of families based in Roanoke, Virginia, issued a press release: “Promises can evolve into action taken, or they can deteriorate into lip service. We are waiting with growing impatience to see some leadership.” Some families expressed their view that the Joint Commission was, in their words, “nothing but a front office, bent on managing a potentially explosive issue” to the least harm for America’s political relationship with Russia. Harried by such criticism, the U.S. investigators continued their search across the former Soviet Union, traveling to the remote locations of former prisons and camps where prisoner lists were sampled for known names under variations of Russian transliteration. Appeals for information were broadcast on Russian radio and television, and limited access was negotiated with the archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, navy, and coast guard.
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Public appeals made in the newly independent Baltic states brought forward several former Gulag prisoners who remembered Americans imprisoned with them in their camps. One Latvian survivor spoke of a pilot named
“Jimmy Braiton or Baker . . . 180 cm tall with dark eyes, and a limp which required him to walk with a cane.”
Another witness reported the existence of an American pilot imprisoned in Norilsk in 1949,
“called Tim or Tom,
although that was not his real name. The pilot was 175-180 cm tall; handsome with dark hair . . . After being implicated in a plot to steal a plane in the spring of 1949, Tim/Tom disappeared.”
In the Tallinn City Museum, a notebook was discovered filled with prisoners’ portraits. One picture carried a dedication in English “for Good memories,” dated October 2, 1952. Over the man’s face the artist had written the word
Yankee
in Estonian.
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A portrait or artifact always carried a tangible feeling of presence. In April 1995, another Gulag survivor handed in a ring that he said had belonged to an American pilot, Captain Oliver Rom, who was born in 1923, a native of Minnesota, and had been shot down over Germany and subsequently imprisoned in a Gulag camp in Karelia. It was reported that Captain Rom had been shot by a guard in December 1958, some five years after Stalin’s death.
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IN RESPONSE TO a newspaper advertisement, a Russian citizen named Yury Khorshunov wrote a letter from Nizhneudinsk, in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, addressed to the American embassy in Moscow, “fulfilling the will of my late mother.” The author explained that his mother had worked as a conductor on the railways after the war. In March 1946, Mrs. Khorshunov was employed servicing the trains delivering prisoners to the camps of Far East Russia. Eight prisoners had died on that particular section of the journey, and their bodies were unloaded from the prison train and placed on a sledge for burial. As Mrs. Khorshunov was returning home from her shift, the driver of the burial sledge stopped to ask her “what he was supposed to do, since one of the dead prisoners seemed to breathe, and putting a live person into a grave did not correspond to Christian traditions.” Faced with a choice, Mrs. Khorshunov elected to bring this prisoner back home with her.

Over the next three days the man began to speak a language Mrs. Khorshunov could not understand. All she could grasp was that the prisoner pointed a finger to himself and said “American.” Then he asked for a paper and pencil, and with difficulty drew a picture of a “falling aircraft, three human figures, and then poles with barbed wire.” In another picture, the American prisoner drew several-storied buildings and repeated the word “Kanifol.” He also told Mrs. Khorshunov his name. His Christian name was “Fred,” and his surname, she remembered, sounded like “Collins.”

Perhaps because she had lost two brothers in 1937, Mrs. Khorshunov felt both a heightened sense of compassion for her patient and an awareness that there was nowhere she could turn to for help. One week later, “Fred Collins” died, and the Khorshunov family dug a grave and buried him, along with his few possessions: a small book and a badge or medal hidden in the sole of his boot. For many years, Mrs. Khorshunov tended this unmarked grave, and her son, too, followed her there sometimes. Decades later, fulfilling his duty to the American prisoner, Yuri Khorshunov sat down to write his letter to the investigators:
“There may be nonsense in my writing to you, since one human life is really nothing for such a great country like yours, though the relatives of that man may still be waiting for some information about him. If you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them.”
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Other Russian witnesses emerged with evidence gained from within the Soviet state. Vladimir Trotsenko, for example, had once been a Soviet army sergeant assigned to the aviation transport regiment of the Ninty-ninth Soviet Airborne Division. In November 1951, Trotsenko broke his leg in a parachute training accident and was sent to an air force hospital in the small town of Staraya Sysoyovka, northeast of Vladivostok. Due to bed scarcity, Trotsenko was taken to a separate facility on the second floor. There he was placed in a room next to four prisoners, whose door was latticed with metal bars. A guard was posted outside, but whenever this private needed a break, he asked Trotsenko “to keep an eye on the Americans.”

According to his testimony, although Trotsenko could not speak English, he managed to communicate with the four Americans using sign language. The prisoners were convalescing in bandages and plaster casts, and their treatment was periodically interrupted by an interrogation by a visiting Soviet captain, who, on one occasion, pulled out the round medallion hanging around each man’s neck to confirm his identity. Trotsenko remembered that one of the American pilots, who had his right arm in a cast, would slowly repeat, “America—San Francisco, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago,” indicating the home city of each of his fellow patients. He also pointed to a crewman in a body cast and “would make cradling motions with his arms, indicating that the man had left two small children back home.” The American had blue eyes and light-colored hair, was around six feet tall, and was from Cleveland. A fifth American had died and was buried in the hospital cemetery.