The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (58 page)

After two terms of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, democracy in Russia exists only as a simulacrum—in the form required to maintain the pretense of its existence. Freedom of the press has long been silenced amid the ebb of murders of those Russian editors and journalists who refused to obey the rules of the new order. In such a political climate, the Russian government can no longer distance itself morally from the consequences of the 1917 Revolution. Nor can there ever be the national equivalent of a “truth and reconciliation commission,” since the relapse into state authoritarianism has already taken place.

When the most famous critic of the abuses of the Putin government, Anna Politkovskaya, was casually murdered in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, 2006, the Russian judiciary blamed the killing on a plot organized from abroad. While such absurd explanations have a historical familiarity, the murder could only be regarded as another repressive signal to silence the voices of dissent. In her book published two years earlier in the West, Politkovskaya had detailed the promotion of six thousand former KGB servicemen into “every conceivable nook and cranny in the power structure” of Russia:
“We dragged ourselves out of the USSR and into ‘The New Russia’ still infested with our Soviet bedbugs . . . Everyone is convinced that the Soviet Union has returned, and that it no longer matters what we think.”
She had then expressed her personal disregard for Vladimir Putin:
“In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a huge scale, to civil wars. I want no more of that. That is why I so dislike this typical Soviet Chekist as he struts down the red carpet in the Kremlin on his way to the throne of Russia.”
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None of which character evidence suggests that a Putin-controlled Russian government will ever voluntarily allow one of the Soviet Union’s more cynical exploits to see the light of day. Rather, it appears that the cause of the forsaken American servicemen will once again be sacrificed, now just as it was before, on the altar of the American-Russian relationship. While the families of the disappeared will be denied resolution, the fate of the missing American servicemen will be forgotten, and the current U.S. president will remain as silent as his predecessors—unless, of course, sufficient numbers of ordinary people seek justice for the missing.

27

“The Two Russias”

Alexander Blok,
“The Scythians”
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In Vladivostok, in Far East Russia—at the turn of this century—one of the last of the Liberty ships, the
Odessa,
sits rusting in harbor. Within weeks of her launch in 1942 from a slipway in Richmond, California, the 139-meter ship was being used by the NKVD to ferry three thousand female prisoners across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan. Sixty years later, the gift of American democracy to the Gulag fleet lies waiting to be sold to scrap metal dealers from South Korea—and then the final substantiation of the cruelty inflicted upon the men and women packed below her decks will be lost.
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Across the wilderness of Kolyma, the remaining evidence of the camps is gradually disappearing. Within the realm now long abandoned, the wooden watchtowers have slowly fallen to pieces. Only a few remain, as though awaiting the return of a familiar guard to climb the steps and, with the crack of a rifle shot, a cry to come echoing back across the zone. The camps that once swallowed men’s and women’s lives are slowly returning back into the desolate wilderness upon which they were built, their presence in the landscape marked by little more than the abandoned buildings and the rusted barbed wire that stubbornly refuses to yield. The perimeters of the zone that carried a life-and-death distinction have been rendered meaningless again, returned to the arbitrary by the death of an idea.

In the Kolyma summers the pathways and roads leading to the camps emerge briefly from the ice and snow. From the wasteland the entrances to the mines reveal themselves clearly as the evidence of man’s work. Black, perfectly rectangular holes appear in the sides of the mountains as though to warn of the horror that once lay within the darkness of the galleries. Beyond the broken-down fences, the aftermath of misery is strewn across the landscape: a heavy prison door swung free, a rusted padlock burst open, a pyramid of worn-out leather boots beside the human bones that emerge from the earth that cannot hold them. The human eye is constantly drawn to this debris: to an empty rusted iron bed on which only a guard had slept, or a collapsed barrack where the prisoners endured another night of cold and hunger. In an abandoned guards’ building in Butugychag, a map of the world dated July 19, 1952, is pinned to the wall. Next to the map is a photograph of Comrade Stalin. The prison bars of the isolator cell are still strong, although the doors and roof have collapsed. There are watchtowers still standing, with their crude ladders leading upward toward the sky. This is the abandoned archaeology of a forgotten genocide.
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The name
Butugychag
means “Death Valley” in the local Yakut language. From the population of fifty thousand at this particular camp, teenage prisoners from West Ukraine were selected to work four-hour shifts. The young men chosen for their “special” task had viewed it with pleasure in comparison to the ordeal of the regular fourteen-hour shifts in the mines. A survivor from Butugychag remembered how the selected groups had lasted just twenty days before they were sent to the treatment zone. At first the Ukrainian boys lost their hair in chunks, and then they started bleeding from their ears and nostrils, the first signs of radiation sickness. They were unaware that they had been drying, stirring, and baking the uraninite from the mine without any safeguards, their youth considered the property of the state.
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Only from the air does the taint of Dalstroi’s intelligence fully reveal itself. The landscape bears the evidence of the work that sent the men and women to their deaths. During the short weeks of summer the breadth of this terminal point of the Gulag is revealed, and we are left to imagine the numbers required to tear the scars across the land, to build the roads, to build the camps, to puncture the black holes into the sides of mountains in an endless forced pursuit of gold, or silver, or lead, or uranium. The same is true for every other terminal point of the Gulag across the wide space of the former Soviet Union. Within the archives there is a black-and-white photograph of an abandoned railway line built in the Far North, its sleepers buckled like a roller coaster and covered in arctic moss. The iron rails have long since rusted, useful only as evidence of the human labor that was consumed to lay them. On this forgotten line a train engine stands slowly rusting, another decoration to the futility and anguish and unattenuated cruelty of Stalinism.
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MANY OF THE current residents of Kolyma are the children and grandchildren of those who survived the camps. In Magadan, the youngest of the former prisoners live on into old age. Occasionally they meet and help their former guards, who have fallen into destitution. There coexists the uneasy consequence of Anna Akhmatova’s “two Russias”—the prisoners and their guards—whose fortunes have often been reversed by time. Very soon they will all be gone.

In the 1980s, the Soviet government began reworking the old mines of Kolyma in response to the rise in world gold prices. According to Wladyslaw Cieslewicz, a Polish mining expert who survived his sentence, the “bodies of the victims, usually preserved in the permafrost, are being caught daily on dragline buckets and bulldozer blades.”
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More than three hundred mass graves have been found thus far in Kolyma, and no one knows how many more remain. Many of the camps were so isolated, and their conditions so severe, that no one survived to remember where the prisoners were buried. But the bodies remain, perfectly preserved by the ice, and the principal evidence of this unpunished genocide lies waiting in the permafrost.
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It was a crime that lasted decades and required constant concealment by the state. Throughout the former USSR, the bodies of Stalin’s victims had a tendency to reveal themselves with stubborn regularity. In 1979, at Kolpashevo, the twisting river Ob overwhelmed the site of a former NKVD prison in the Tomsk region, four thousand kilometers east of Moscow. From the shifting riverbank thousands of corpses were released in a torrent into the water.
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Eight years earlier, in 1971, two Russian journalists on a journey to Dudinka, a Siberian town on the Yenisei River, which led to the Gulag center of Norilsk, recalled meeting an unexpectedly talkative riverboat captain:
“I made dozens of journeys, on the way out the holds were full and on the way back they empty. I’ve seen people, and I’ve seen what you’d call non-people.”
The island of Dikson lies five hundred kilometers farther north.
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Near Minsk, in Byelorussia, workers laying a gas pipeline through a pine forest discovered a mass grave dating from 1937 to 1941. The bodies were still clutching reading glasses, purses, children’s toys, medicines, and the host of random, everyday possessions that people take with them when they are seized.
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The mass graves at Kuropaty Forest were estimated by Memorial to contain 150,000 victims. At Bykovna, outside Kiev, another mass grave was found in which an estimated 200,000 victims of the Terror lay buried.
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In the Donetsk province, mass graves were discovered in Rutchenko fields containing 40,000 victims. On Golden Mountain, near Chelyabinsk, Memorial discovered a mass grave containing an estimated 300,000 victims. And so it continues, until we are rendered senseless by the numbers.
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Here too, in the catalogue of mass graves, is a connection with the American emigration. In 1997, Memorial located the site of a mass grave near Sandarmokh, in Karelia, one of four in the region. At this particular location 9,000 bodies were buried in trenches. The prisoners had been stripped to their underwear and shot on the edge of the pit with their hands and feet tied. The NKVD records revealed that in this particular mass grave were buried Oscar Corgan and at least 140 other Americans, born in Minnesota, Michigan, Washington, and San Francisco, who had arrived in Karelia to work as loggers, truck drivers, and mechanics. Among the victims was a young woman in her early twenties, listed as Helen Hill, born in Minnesota. According to the NKVD file, Helen Hill had been executed for the crime of having
“maintained contacts with relatives in the US. Collected information in favor of Finland’s intelligence service. Praised life in capitalist countries. Spoke of her intentions to cross the border creating a spirit of emigration in the workers.”
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Most of the mass graves were concealed beneath freshly planted forests or newly built factories or apartment buildings. Often access to the land of these “special zones” is still controlled by the Russian security services, and thus denied investigation by civic groups such as Memorial. In Moscow— where the crematoria were working overtime—the victims’ ashes were often scattered in the bottomless “Grave Number One” of the Donskoi Cemetery. In 1991, a monument was added to this site with the words
:
HERE LIE BURIED THE REMAINS OF THE INNOCENT TORTURED AND EXECUTED VICTIMS OF THE POLITICAL REPRESSIONS. MAY THEY NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
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THROUGH IT ALL, long after the rise and fall of the statues of Stalin, and Russia’s fitful emergence into the post-Soviet era, the embalmed corpse of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin remains in its red marble mausoleum in Red Square. The Russian state archives confirmed Lenin as the initiator of the use of terror by the Soviet state. On August 11, 1918, Lenin wrote to the party leaders in Penza giving instruction on how to deal with the peasants:

 
Here also was Lenin’s order for the “execution by firing squad” of the priests of Shuia, his instruction to Nikolai Krestinsky: “It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror,” and his admission in 1920: “We do not hesitate to shoot thousands of people.” Was it surprising, therefore, that Lenin, who began the process, gave way to Stalin, who accelerated the disappearance of millions? Stalin methodically and ruthlessly applied the same methods on a larger scale, but the rhetorical statement
“When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism”
was Lenin’s own. The consequences of Stalinism were, therefore, neither accident nor a “socialist aberration,” as Khrushchev sought to portray. The Terror was a historical continuity within a political system that glorified “Bolshevik ruthlessness” and denigrated the value of human life. In such a society, genocide was never a contingent aspect of this process. It was simply the casuistry of violence, the grim logic of an extermination process judged necessary to maintain absolute power.
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There have been bitter quarrels between the historians of Stalinism over the count of the dead. Scholars who rely on the official records from the Russian state archives arrive at counts in the single-figure millions. Those whose investigative evidence grants more credence to the insight of the survivors move substantially past ten million, toward twenty million victims. The truth is that no one can be sure. History was always propaganda for the Bolshevik state, and to place too much faith in the purely statistical evidence of the archives creates a modern danger of falling victim to a Potemkin village built from paper. It is to read the cause of death of “alimentary dystrophy,” without recourse to an accompanying vision of a human being worked and starved into a skeletal form—every bone in his body protruding, his teeth gone, his knees forming the thickest part of his leg, collapsing in the snow to die. It is to fall victim to the most insidious form of denial: that such a death is not murder.
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