The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (59 page)

Estimates for the total population of the Gulag run as high as thirty million over its life span. The Soviet nuclear scientist turned dissident Andrei Sakharov estimated that between fifteen and twenty million people perished as victims of the Stalin era. Anastas Mikoyan, the Politburo survivor, wrote of a figure given to Khrushchev by the KGB that between January 1, 1935, and June 22, 1941, there were approximately twenty million arrests and eight million deaths.
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Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of a 1960 commission to investigate the death of Kirov, and herself a former camp prisoner, stated that as part of that commission she had seen a KGB report giving the figure of 19,840,000 people “repressed” between 1935 and 1941, of whom seven million were shot. The percentage of the “repressed” who subsequently died in the camps can only be guessed at.
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SHUFFLING AROUND THE pathways of his dacha settlement in Zhukovka, Moscow, his slab face lined by old age, Vyacheslav Molotov lived on undisturbed into the Gorbachev era. Stalin’s functionary-in-chief, who signed the death lists and arranged Soviet foreign policy with Hitler and then Roosevelt, now tapped his walking stick on the path to market to buy cabbages, checking first that he had not left the lights burning in his dacha.
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In retirement, the elderly Molotov was visited and interviewed by the Marxist historian Felix Chuev. In one of these discussions, Molotov revealed to Chuev that during the May Day celebration of 1953, Beria had whispered to him, “I did him!” as they stood next to each other on Lenin’s mausoleum. “I saved all of you!” Molotov took these words to mean that Beria was responsible for Stalin’s death.
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The former premier did not believe that Stalin died a natural death: “He wasn’t seriously ill. He was working steadily . . . And he remained very spry.”
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Later Molotov confessed that even as a very old man, Joseph Stalin regularly visited him in his dreams. He would find himself lost in a destroyed city, unable to find his way out, and then Stalin would appear before him to lead the way.
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Vyacheslav Molotov lived until the age of ninety-six, eventually dying on November 8, 1986. He was survived by his colleague in the administration of the Terror, Lazar Kaganovich, who lived until the age of ninety-seven, dying on July 25, 1991. It was just long enough for Kaganovich to watch the collapse of the Soviet Union unfold on his color television. “It’s a catastrophe” were the last words his maid heard him say.
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If they survived the Terror, most of those who signed the lists lived on into retirement untouched. Some of the former NKVD executioners suffered psychological breakdowns, perhaps a self-inflicted form of retribution. In 1982, the writer Yuri Druzhinikov interviewed Spirodon Kartashov, a seventy-nine-year-old former member of the Special Department of the Tavda District of the Ural OGPU. The aged Kartashov was living in conditions that “resembled a flophouse” but was nevertheless willing to talk openly about the methods he had once employed:

 
In his medical records, Druzhnikov discovered that Kartashov was suffering from “epilepsy aggravated by nervous exhaustion.” He was treated in a psychiatric hospital, where the doctors listened to his confessions about how he “ran the children through with a bayonet and trampled them on a horse.”
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DURING THE EARLY period of the Stalinist Terror, Bolshevik intellectuals spoke darkly of the violence of the French Revolution, not yet realizing their own Thermidor would be far worse. In the mid-nineteenth century the Russian writer Alexander Hertzen wrote of his fear of “Gengis Khan with a telegraph,” never suspecting that Stalin would belittle his premonition. In 1923, Vladimir Zazubrin wrote a novella called
The Chip
in which he described how 

 
For such dystopic speculations, Zazubrin was himself executed in the Terror of 1938.
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Now we may wait in turn for “Stalin with a retinal eye scanner” and peer darkly down avenues of our own destruction. Perhaps our historical awareness will protect us from the creation of future tragedies of an electronic age to rival those of our recent past, and fend off our capacity to believe in a delusion. In Moscow during the 1990s, a historical exhibition was presented by the Russian state archives. An old man peered over an original copy of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact very intently before announcing: “I heard about this, but I never believed it.” He then fainted over the cabinet and shattered the glass.
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The defining feature of the history of the Soviet Union, beyond which all else pales into insignificance, was the murder of millions of innocent citizens by the state. The Revolution began a process of imprisonment and killing that continued in virtually every country in which it was attempted. For while culturally distinct, the social experiment always reached a similar conclusion over the fate of those the regime had judged to be its “enemies.” The “Killing Fields” of Cambodia were not a “socialist abherration” of Pol Pot so much as the Stalinist principle applied to one third of the population. The Cambodia of the 1970s was not an anomaly. It was repetition. Even in 2008, the “corrective labor camps” still exist in North Korea and China. And yet the world shuts its eyes and looks away.

We know that mankind has always been capable of demonizing our fellow man. But where this cruelty comes from, this ability to kill en masse, defies explanation. The true nature of our humanity is a recurring argument, and one that occupied the minds of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment. In 1793, the philosopher Immanuel Kant reflected:
“It will be noted that the propensity to evil is here established (as regards actions) in the human being, even the best; and so it also must be if it is to be proved that the propensity to evil among human beings is universal, or, which amounts here to the same thing, that it is woven into human nature.”
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Beneath the veneer of our civilization lies the warning of Immanuel Kant.

28

Thomas Sgovio Redux

Osip Mandelstam,
“My Days Have Raced Past”
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After his return to America, Thomas Sgovio settled in Buffalo, the city in which he was born and raised. There he worked as a draftsman, lived a happily married life, and raised a family. In Buffalo he visited the Volat family to deliver the news that Marvin Volat had died in a camp in Kolyma. At the time, the family refused to believe him, and clung to the hope that Marvin might still be alive in Russia.
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During the day Thomas worked to support his family, but at night he labored on his memoir,
Dear America,
which was published in a very small print run and soon fell out of print. Undeterred, he gave lectures on his experience at the University of Buffalo, and used his artistic talent to draw illustrations of the scenes he had witnessed in Kolyma, which he donated to the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. And in this way, he kept the promise he had made to the prisoners in the camps. He let the world know of the suffering that had been inflicted upon them.
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Eventually Thomas Sgovio retired, settling to live quietly in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. There he grew old under the desert sun, as far from the climate he had escaped as it was possible to find. In Phoenix he lived a normal life, one of the last survivors of a forgotten emigration, his gray hair and worn body hiding the glinting miracle of his life—the most extraordinary history walking anonymously down a Phoenix sidewalk. His return defied every expectation.

In his retirement, Thomas was interviewed every once in a while by a local journalist or a documentary filmmaker who had learned of his existence through the Hoover Institution. Then the old man would come alive with a passionate advocacy that belied his years. As he spoke in a frantic rasp, his eyes would fill with tears and his lips stumble over his words in a struggle to articulate his experience, and a continued effort to justify the sacrifices of others who had kept him alive.
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Most dearly of all, Thomas wanted a younger generation to understand the terrible events that had taken place in Kolyma and across the Soviet Union. Although each explanation reawakened his trauma and caused him such obvious anguish, he willingly accepted his role as a historical witness of the Terror until the moment of his death. In fulfilling his perceived duty, this quiet American showed once again the evidence of the courage that had kept him alive.

In 1996, Thomas celebrated his eightieth birthday, an old age he had never expected to reach. His face was wrinkled, but his brown eyes still shone with the passion of a twenty-year-old baseball player. In 1995, he asked Chuck Hawley, a local journalist,
“Is that why God spared me ? To come back fifty years later and tell the story? I don’t know . . . We always said, if any of us survived, we would tell the world about Kolyma . . . I have kept my promise.”
Having kept his promise, he was at peace.
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Fate, however, had one final hand to play. That year, Thomas Sgovio was shown a copy of his NKVD file, recently released by the Yeltsin government. On page eighty, he learned the details of how Lucy Flaxman had informed on him. The file revealed that she had reported his comment that “Soviet power does not rest on the love of its subjects. It rests on fear.” Lucy had also passed on the information that Thomas was waiting for a war between the USSR and the United States because if America won, he might be free. In 1948, she added that she had seen a copy of
The Saturday Evening Post,
an “anti-Soviet” magazine, in his apartment.
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Sitting back in his armchair with the file, Thomas remarked to the journalist Alan Cullinson, who was interviewing him over the telephone: “She was not a very courageous person. It was a frightening time for everyone.”
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At least there were happier times to remember. Sitting in the living room of his home in Phoenix, Thomas Sgovio could recall the American baseball teams of Gorky Park. And if only for a moment in a daydream, his old legs returned to their youthful state, running around the bases on a summer afternoon.

The following year, on July 3, 1997, Thomas Sgovio died.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All memoirs from the survivors of the camps are invaluable, but I would like to acknowledge two books in particular as primary sources for this one: Thomas Sgovio’s
Dear America
and Victor Herman’s
Coming Out of the Ice.
I would encourage all interested readers to search out and read these authors’ firsthand accounts.

I would like to acknowledge the work of the journalist Alan Cullinson, who interviewed Thomas Sgovio and wrote a story on the American emigrants in his newspaper article “A Secret Revealed: Stalin’s Police Killed Americans” for the Associated Press in November 1997. I would also like to acknowledge the work of the writer Adam Hochschild, who wrote a feature on the same subject for
Mother Jones
magazine, and for his book
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.
I would like to recognize the work of the documentary filmmaker George Kovach, who interviewed Thomas Sgovio after a visit to Kolyma, and his colleague on the trip David Elkind, who were both very generous with their time in San Francisco and allowed me to view the rushes of their documentary film
The Camps of Magadan.
Most important, I would like to thank Mrs. Joanne Sgovio, who welcomed me to Arizona with a generous heart, shared her memories of her husband’s remarkable life, and kindly allowed me to view his personal archive.

I would like to acknowledge the importance of those authors and historians whose work was essential to my understanding of Soviet history—in particular, but not only, Anne Applebaum, Robert Conquest, Vassily Grossman, John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Elinor Lipper, Barry McLoughlin, Roy Medvedev, Zhores Medvedev, Richard Pipes, Edvard Radzinsky, Varlam Shalamov, Vitaly Shentalinsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Dmitri Volkogonov.

I would like to thank the following individuals who helped me in so many ways, both large and small, for which I remain very grateful: Mario Argueta, Ed Barnes, Gennadij Bourdiougov, Richard Boylan, Stephanie Brown, Evgeny Chen, Paul Christensen, Allie Clarke, Rowan Cope, Rodrigo Corral, Jane Day, Rob Dinsdale, Jenna Dolan, Suzanne Fowler, Francesca Frigerio, Mihaly Fulop, Claudia Fumo, Amy Garrett, Bruce Giffords, Ann Godoff, Ksenia Gonchar, Julian Granville, Emily Haines, Nick Harris, Marcella Hecker, Emma Hinton, Nicole Hughes, Iain Hunt, Samantha Jackson, Norman Kass, Jim Kates, Starling Lawrence, Katie Lewis, Rachel Lewis, Larry McDonald, Molly Malloy, William Massa, Caroline Metcalf, Nathalie Morse, Jörg Muth, Bobby Nayyar, Francesca and Mark Nelson-Smith, Timothy Nenninger, Tara O’Donoghue, Declan O’Reilly, Emma Parry, Gillian Peele, Tony Rose, Bobby Sgovio, Roman Shebalin, Linda Silverman, Linda Skolarus, Jake Smith-Bosanquet, Mia Sorgi, Zbigniew Stanczyk, Susan Strange, Stefan Turnbull, Lindsay Whalen, Andrea Wulf, Herbert Wulf, Sergei Zhurahlev.