The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (6 page)

At the offices of
Sovietland,
Thomas Sgovio was introduced to Lucy Flaxman, who worked full-time on the magazine. Lucy was a pretty and rather lighthearted twenty-six-year-old from Boston, who had arrived in Russia a decade earlier with her family. Naturally she knew a wider circle of people in Moscow, and could help Thomas with his faltering Russian. Thomas’ first American girlfriend had returned home, so when Lucy Flaxman invited him to the prestigious “House of Writers” to dance the latest American crazes that were sweeping Moscow, he was only too happy to join her.
²⁵

Greater quantities of food were beginning to appear in the stores; if never in the quantities suggested by the
Sovietland
articles, then at least there was something to buy after years of acute hunger and terrible shortages. When people started talking of a new café that had recently opened up on Pushkin Square with music and dancing, it seemed as though the promised socialist “good times” were finally on their way. The Communist Party had long declared itself to be “dizzy with success,” and the official slogan of 1935 was Stalin’s own announcement that “Life has become better, comrades; Life has become more joyful!”
²⁶
It was seen everywhere across the USSR, the favorite catchphrase of a propaganda campaign announcing the arrival of socialism, the first step on the road to a fully communist society. “Life has become more joyful!” was the front-page headline in the Soviet press on New Year’s Eve, hung in banners over “People’s Parks” across the land, and celebrated in Red Army song. For a moment, then, it seemed as though enjoyment itself, for its own sake, had received an official Kremlin blessing: carnival balls, new sports, new foods, dancing, and jazz were all officially allowed, even encouraged.
²⁷

And so, as if obeying a stamped edict from on high, Thomas danced with Lucy Flaxman and their friends at the House of Writers, at the Metropol Hotel, and the Foreign Workers’ Club. The young Americans danced, played baseball, sang in choirs, acted in the Clifford Odets play
Waiting for Lefty,
fell in love with one another, and thanked their lucky stars that they had made the right decision to come to Soviet Russia. All of them were full of hope for the future, bursting with the can-do optimism of the young.
²⁸

4

“Fordizatsia”

 
 
 
Far from congregating in Moscow, the American emigrants had scattered all over the Soviet Union. Wherever there was work to be done, there seemed to be a lean and eager American happy to make the journey, willing to travel across the length and breadth of the USSR, from remote eastern cities such as Nizhni Tagil tucked away in the Ural Mountains, all the way south to the oil fields of Azerbaijan. By the early 1930s, there were English-language schools established for the children of American workers in Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kharkov, and Nizhni Novgorod.
²

Reports reached the
Moscow Daily News
of baseball teams organized in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and in the Ukraine, where the Americans working at the Kharkov tractor factory announced their desire to join the Soviet national league just as soon as their “bush leaguers” got a little better. The Kharkov Americans had been getting along so far with just one bat and two balls. The bat was all right, but the balls were “in bad condition after three seasons of mauling” and needed restitching after every game. They wrote that Russian workers were also joining in their sport; and some Americans who had never had the chance to play baseball back home were learning for the very first time in the USSR.
³

Did it strike them as strange that many of the Americans traveled to Russia only to find themselves working in brand-new Soviet factories built by the old capitalist titans of American industry? In the city of Nizhni Novgorod, 420 kilometers east of Moscow, the Ford Motor Company had constructed a giant auto plant on the empty Russian steppe. Despite a ferocious record of strikebreaking in Detroit, Henry Ford had been only too delighted to sell the Soviets the necessary industrial blueprints and machinery, together with seventy-five thousand “knocked-down” Ford Model A’s from the River Rouge plant. It was a deal sweetened by the guarantee of five years of technical assistance and the promise of American labor and know-how. The Soviet contract was worth a staggering forty million dollars, and lest we forget, these were 1930s millions, paid for in gold at the height of the Depression. No other firm in the United States, or even the world, conducted as much business with Joseph Stalin as the Ford Motor Company between 1929 and 1936. For above all men, Henry Ford—“the Sage of Dearborn”—understood very well that the power and allure of the automobile transcended ideology. The whole of mankind was in love with speed and, in that respect at least, the Bolsheviks were no different.
⁴

In fact the cult of “American mechanization” in Russia was as old as the Revolution. Lenin himself had been a passionate advocate of Ford’s methods of mass production, and Ford’s autobiography,
My Life and Work,
had long been a Soviet bestseller, going through four printings by 1925 alone. In remote Siberian villages, peasants who had not yet heard of Stalin knew all about Henry Ford; even his quip “You can have any color you like as long as it’s black” hinted at a very mordant Russian sense of humor. The Soviet press had long heralded the advent of “Fordism” as the slogan for their industrialization campaign.
⁵
But it was the motorcar in particular, and Ford’s role in its perfection, that set the standard for the modern age. The construction of a “Soviet Detroit,” therefore, was deemed essential to the Bolshevik cause. Henry Ford’s unpalatable hatred of trade unions, not to mention his vast capitalistic fortune, would have to be politely ignored as the Soviet ideologues embraced Ford as a secular saint holding the keys to a mechanical heaven.
⁶

In Detroit, the River Rouge plant was universally recognized as “the wonder of the industrial world.” The Rouge alone employed more than one hundred thousand men, in factories constantly fed by snaking wagons of coal and iron ore bearing the Ford logo on their side. Henry Ford owned the railroad, the river barges, the coal and iron ore mines, the glass and tire factories, even six million acres of Brazilian jungle bought for a rubber plantation named “Fordlandia.” All of which converged at the Rouge, the industrial epicenter that employed five thousand workers just to keep the factories spotlessly clean, scrubbing floors, emptying trash every two hours, cleaning windows, and endlessly repainting surfaces in the Ford colors of white and machine blue. There was no talking, no smoking, no more than fifteen minutes allowed for lunch breaks, and instant firings for the slightest infraction of the rules.
⁷
Industry at the Rouge was all-powerful, unceasing, and relentless: as one shift ended another began in the twenty-four-hour production schedule, the Ford workers pouring out of the factories, most wearing flat caps and carrying lunch pails, a few grinning for the whirling cameras of the “Ford Sociological Department,” which were recording them for the Ford Motor Company archives. For among his many eccentricities, Henry Ford was most consumed by his company’s much-vaunted history.

The Ford publicists boasted that the iron ore delivered at the River Rouge docks on Monday morning was transformed into a finished motorcar to be sold in a Ford customer dealership by Thursday night.
⁸
The simplicity, speed, and scale of the industrial operation was a miraculous achievement. It was also a uniquely American success, the pinnacle of mass production and the very starting point of modernity. In Dearborn, Michigan, was the distilled essence of the industrialized world, which every company around the world was so jealously striving to copy. By 1931, Henry Ford posed proudly for a photograph with his son Edsel, in front of the very first and his twenty-millionth car sold. No wonder Stalin gazed on so enviously, and sent his Russian emissaries to Detroit begging to learn how it was done.
⁹

For his part, “the Sage of Dearborn” could hardly suppress his delight at the prospect of being paid forty million dollars for the old Model A plant he had only been planning to scrap. From his point of view, it was simply too great a business opportunity to refuse, although Henry Ford was perfectly aware of the grim reputation of the Soviet state. The Ford Motor Company had been trying to break into the Russian market since before the Revolution. In the summer of 1926, Henry Ford had sent a party of five employees to investigate conditions in Soviet Russia and to explore the idea of building a factory there. The group was led by the American engineer Bredo Berghoff, who quickly discovered the existing Soviet industry languishing in a state of chaos. Their factories were burdened with endless workers’ committees, reluctant management, widespread smoking, trash on the floors, crude oil in gas tanks, machine parts manufactured to random thickness—an endless litany of industrial despair. It was soon obvious that while a vast market in automobiles lay waiting in Russia, the construction of a privately owned factory at Ford’s expense would be tantamount to economic suicide, liable at any moment to government seizure by the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps the most interesting section of Bredo Berghoff’s report was the considerations of personal safety in Russia, which the engineer was very anxious to reveal to Henry Ford. The new Soviet leader was mentioned only in passing, in a cursory nod toward the well-known prejudices of his boss:
“The government of the USSR is today, just as it was before Lenin’s death, controlled by one man, Comrade Stalin . . . an Asiatic whose iron control of Russia and the USSR befits his Name which means Steel. Stalin’s real name is Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, although he is said not to be of Jewish blood.”
What Berghoff subsequently made plain was the range of repressive methods employed by the contemporary Soviet state. In particular, he warned of the reputation of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared head of the Soviet secret police, who was
“considered responsible for the death of thousands upon thousands of people accused of not being in sympathy with Communist principles.”
As Berghoff underscored the dangers, he added a request of his own that reflected this fear:

 
In conclusion, Berghoff requested that the report be burned immediately after it was read. Instead, it lay buried in the Ford Archives in Dearborn, an unheeded warning of the violence that might await any American who ventured to Russia upon the business dealings of Henry Ford.
¹⁰

BREDO BERGHOFF’S PRESENTIMENTS of danger would prove to be well founded. But whereas Charles Sorensen, Ford’s production chief, was only too happy to drop the whole idea of the Russian venture completely, Henry Ford was never quite so easily deterred. With reports of Stalin extending courtship to the French auto giants Citroën and Peugeot, the prospect of losing the Russian market to an international business rival appeared more than Ford could bear.
¹¹
The reluctant Sorensen was instructed by his boss to negotiate with Stalin’s emissaries in Dearborn. If there could not be a wholly owned Ford factory in Soviet Russia, then perhaps a compromise might be reached? And so Charlie Sorensen attempted to explain the strange vocabulary of capitalist ownership to the Bolsheviks, like a Roman senator pressing table manners on the hungry Goths.
¹²

The startled American press quickly pounced upon the leaked news of these negotiations. In an article titled “Talk of Ford Favor Thrills Moscow,” Walter Duranty attempted to explain the developments to the puzzled readers of
The New York Times: “Ford means America and all that America has accomplished to make her a model and an ideal for this vast and backward country . . . Cheap mass production is a Soviet goal, more precious from the practical standpoint than world revolution—Ford in Soviet eyes is the arch-mogul of that achievement. ‘Fordizatsia’—‘Fordisation’—has become one of the ‘words of power’ with which Soviet orators spellbind auditors.”
¹³
In Dearborn, real progress was made with the arrival of Valery Mezhlauk, a highly intelligent Soviet industrial commissar who struck up a warm and unlikely friendship with Charlie Sorensen. The agreement between the Ford Motor Company and the Soviet Supreme Council of National Economy was signed on May 31, 1929, the forty-million-dollar deal completed in a mere seven pages of paperwork.
¹⁴
Henry Ford himself added his looping signature to the last page of the contract, and then happily posed to have his picture taken outside, standing between Valery Mezhlauk and Saul Bron, the Amtorg chief, as the photographers’ bulbs flashed amid a general purr of mutual satisfaction.
¹⁵

Two months after the agreement was signed, Charlie Sorensen was welcomed in the USSR as an industrial prince from the old New World. For his visit, Sorensen was provided with his own private railroad car, along with a personal chef, steward, and valet to cater to his every whim on his journey across Russia. A private yacht was chartered to sail him down the Volga to view the site outside Nizhni Novgorod chosen to become “the Soviet Detroit.”