The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (64 page)

1
Jean Améry,
At the Mind’s Limits,
trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta, 1999), 34.

2
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs, tapes courtesy of David Elkind, LiveWire Media, San Francisco; Thomas Sgovio NKVD file, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

3
Louis Fischer (ed.),
Thirteen Who Fled: Thirteen Essays by Refugees from Soviet Russia
(New York: Harper, 1949), 136; Thomas Sgovio,
Dear America
(Kenmore, N.Y.: Partners’ Press, 1979), 20.

4
Sgovio,
Dear America,
9-11.

5
The Challenge,
Bulletin of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labor Camps, October 1950, vol. 1, no. 2, (1950): 14.

6
Edvard Radzinsky,
Stalin: The First Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives,
transl. H. T. Willets (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 398.

7
Arthur Koestler,
The Yogi and the Commissar
(New York: Macmillan, 1946), 176.

8
Sgovio,
Dear America,
53.

9
Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
(London: Hutchinson, 1990), 288.

10
Victor Reuther, “Commitment and Betrayal: Foreign Workers at the Gorky Auto-Works,” ed. Paul T. Christensen (unpublished, 2004), 93.

11
Victor Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 154-58.

12
Robert Conquest,
Inside Stalin’s Secret Police
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 87.

13
Diane P. Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman (eds.),
Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation
(Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1997), 27.

14
Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice,
160-64.

15
Ibid., 172-75.

16
Ibid., 178-82.

17
Conquest,
The Great Terror,
125.

18
Alex Weissberg,
Conspiracy of Silence: An Account of Three Years’ Imprisonment by the GPU,
trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952), 305.

19
Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice,
185-89.

20
Ibid., 190-92.

21
Ibid., 200.

22
Feliks Lachman,
I Was a Gulag Prisoner, 1939-42
(London: Caldra, 1991), 29; Sgovio,
Dear America,
54, 132.

23
Roy Medvedev,
Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism,
trans. Colleen Taylor (London: Spokesman, 1976), 277.

24
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs, tapes courtesy of David Elkind, LiveWire Media, San Francisco.

25
Vitaly Shentalinsky,
The KGB’s Literary Archive: The Discovery and Ultimate Fate of Russia’s Suppressed Writers,
trans. John Crowfoot (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 192.

26
Michael Solomon, quoted in Robert Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
(London: Macmillan, 1978), 23.

27
Sgovio,
Dear America,
134-37

28
Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
25-27.

29
Michael Solomon,
Magadan
(Princeton, N.J.: Auerbach, 1971), 85.

30
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs; Sgovio,
Dear America,
138-39.

31
Aleksandr Gorbatov,
Years Off My Life: The Memoirs of a General of the Soviet Army
(London: Constable, 1964), 124.

32
Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag
(London: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 191-94.

33
Conquest,
Kolyma, The Arctic Death Camps,
35.

34
Martin J. Bollinger,
Stalin’s Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 1-5.

35
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

36
Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
36-37.

37
Mikhail Mikhaeev (dir.),
Kolyma,
documentary film, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.; Varlam Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales,
trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 46.

38
Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
17-19.

39
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

40
Bardach and Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man,
196.

41
Sgovio,
Dear America,
141-43.

42
Bardach and Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man,
195.

43
Stanislaw J. Kowalski,
Kolyma: The Land of Gold and Death
(online edition).

44
Walter Duranty,
The Kremlin and the People
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1942), 101.

45
October 10, 1937, MID 2070-2316, RG 165, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

46
Boris Souvarine,
Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1939), 669.

47
Sergo Mikoyan, son of Anastas Mikoyan,
Literaturnya gazeta,
Aug. 9, 1989, quoted in Conquest,
The Great Terror,
487; Adam Hochschild,
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
(New York: Viking, 1994), xi.

1
Lenin quoted in
Time
magazine, May 15, 1964.

2
John Morton Blum,
From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 69-70.

3
Fortune
magazine, March 24, 1934, The Presidential Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., (1933-1937)
,
FDR Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

4
John Morton Blum,
From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938,
467-73.

5
Joseph Davies letter to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., March 15, 1937, Moscow, from Joseph Davies,
Mission to Moscow
(London: Gollancz, 1942), 85.

6
Joseph Davies letter to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Aug. 12, 1937, from Davies,
Mission to Moscow,
143-44.

7
Harpo Marx, with Rowland Barber,
Harpo Speaks
(London: Gollancz, 1961), 322.

8
Eugene Lyons,
Assignment in Utopia
(London: Harrap, 1938), 249.

9
Walter Krivitsky,
I Was Stalin’s Agent
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939), 135.

10
Robert C. Williams,
Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 40.

11
Ibid., 181-84.

12
Ibid., 189.

13
Lyons,
Assignment in Utopia,
449.

14
John D. Littlepage, with Demaree Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 26-28.

15
Alexander P. Serebrovsky,
Soviet Gold
(Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1936), 2.

16
Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
4, 8.

17
John Littlepage, “Hunting Gold for Stalin,”
Saturday Evening Post,
Dec. 18, 1937; Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
7.

18
Serebrovsky,
Soviet Gold,
2, 17-24.

19
Dec. 16, 1935, article written by Serebrovsky, 861.6341/71, RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
60, 181.

20
Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
14.

21
Ibid., 119-20, 124-25.

22
Ibid., 81.

23
David J. Nordlander, “Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s,”
Slavic Review
57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 793.

24
Thomas Sgorio,
Dear America
(Kenmore, N.Y.: Partner’s Press, 1979), 159.

25
Nordlander, “Origins of a Gulag Capital,” 799.

26
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Moscow, RGASPI, fond 17, opis 166, delo 451, list 28.

27
Nordlander, “Origins of a Gulag Capital,” 808.

28
Ibid.; Silvester Mora,
Kolyma: Gold and Forced Labor in the USSR
(Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Foreign Affairs, 1949), 11.

29
Robert Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
(London: Macmillan, 1978), 54.

30
The Challenge,
Bulletin of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labor Camps, 1, no. 3 (Jan. 1951); Elinor Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
(London: Hollis and Carter, 1951), 106-7.

31
Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
57.

32
Nikishov was born in 1894, the son of a peasant. He joined the Communist Party in 1919, then followed this with a career in the NKVD, becoming NKVD chief of Azerbaijan during 1937 and 1938, before rising to Dalstroi chief in July 1943. He was retired in 1948. Memorial Society, Russian State Archive of the Sociopolitical History, State Archive of the Russian Federation; N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin,
Who Headed the NKVD, 1934-1941,
ed. N. G. Okhotin and A. B. Roginskii, (Moscow: 1999).

33
Mikhail Mikhaeev (dir.),
Kolyma,
documentary film, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.; Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
68-69; Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
110-11.

34
Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,
trans. Thomas P. Whitney, vol. 2 (London: Collins/Fontana, 1976), 480; Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps,
111.

35
J. Nordlander, “Magadan and the Economic History of Dalstroi in the 1930s,” from Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazerev (eds.),
The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag.
(Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), 119.

36
Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko,
The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny,
trans. George Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 172-75.

37
Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
132.

38
861.6341/90, RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

39
Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
306.

40
John Littlepage, “Hunting Gold for Stalin,”
Saturday Evening Post,
Dec. 18, 1937.

41
MID 2070-2347, RG 165, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

42
Anatol Krakowiecki, quoted in Stanislaw J. Kowalski,
Kolyma: The Land of Gold and Death,
www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/sjk/kolyma.html
, Jan. 31, 2008.

43
861.6341/56, RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

44
861.51, Soviet American Securities Corp., RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland;
New York Times,
March 17, 1935.

45
John Morton Blum,
From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 473.

46
April 11, 1937, The Presidential Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 1933-1939—FDR Library, Hyde Park, N. Y.; Trade General Review—Memo “Foreign Trade of the USSR in 1937,” Jan. 1939, 661.00/216, RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

47
Littlepage, with Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold,
269.

1
Sergei Esenin, quoted from Varlam Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales,
trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 109.

2
Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales,
quoted from Robert Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
(London: Macmillan, 1978), 52-54.

3
Michael Solomon,
Magadan
(Princeton, N.J.: Auerbach, 1971), 119.

4
Michael Solomon, quoted from Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
64.

5
David J. Nordlander, “Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s,”
Slavic Review 57,
no. 4 (Winter 1998): 804.

6
Joseph Berger,
Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph Berger
(London: Harvill, 1971), 122.

7
Thomas Sgovio,
Dear America
(Kenmore, N.Y.: Partners’ Press, 1979), 141-43.

8
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs, tapes courtesy of David Elkind, LiveWire Media, San Francisco.

9
Sgovio,
Dear America,
154.

10
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

11
New York Times,
Jan. 28, 1939; Records of the Consular Section, Moscow Embassy, 1940, Box 1, RG84, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

12
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

13
Meyer Galler and Harlan E. Marquess,
Soviet Prison Camp Speech: A Survivor’s Glossary
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 39.

14
The Challenge,
Bulletin of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labor Camps 1, no. 3 (January 1951).

15
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs; Thomas Sgovio drawings, Hoover Institute, Stanford, Calif.

16
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

17
Sgovio,
Dear America,
151.

18
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

19
Ibid.

20
Ibid.

21
Silvester Mora,
Kolyma: Gold and Forced Labor in the USSR
(Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Foreign Affairs, 1949), 18-19.

22
Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales,
29-30.

23
Elinor Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps,
trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Hollis and Carter, 1951), 238.

24
Antoni Ekart,
Vanished Without a Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia
(London: Parrish, 1954), 47.

25
Vladimir Petrov,
It Happens in Russia: Seven Years Forced Labour in the Siberian Goldfields
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951), 181.

26
Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag
(London: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 266.

27
Bernhard Roeder,
Katorga: An Aspect of Modern Slavery,
trans. Lionel Kochan (London: Heinemann, 1958), 6-7.

28
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

29
Bardach and Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man,
207.

30
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs; Sgovio,
Dear America,
161.

31
Mikhail Mikhaeev (dir.),
Kolyma,
documentary film, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

32
Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales,
121-22; Conquest,
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps,
79-80.

33
Sgovio,
Dear America,
165-68.

34
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs.

35
“Gulag Tattoos Decoded,” BBC, May 22, 2001.

36
Thomas Sgovio interview with George Kovacs; Sgovio,
Dear America,
171.

37
Ekart,
Vanished Without a Trace
, 53; Sgovio,
Dear America,
162.

38
Roy Medvedev,
Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism,
trans. Colleen Taylor (London: Spokesman, 1976), 280.

39
Sgovio,
Dear America,
194-95.

40
c.861.6362/48, RG 59, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

41
Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
231-39.

42
Eugenia Ginzburg,
Within the Whirlwind,
trans. Ian Boland (London: Collins/Harvill, 1981), 7-8.

43
Mikhail Mikhaeev (dir.),
Kolyma,
documentary film, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.; Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps,
120-22.

44
Ginzburg,
Within the Whirlwind,
217.

45
Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
(London: Hutchinson, 1990), 249.

46
Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps,
176-78.

47
Galina Ivanova,
Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System,
trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 55.

48
Bardach and Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man,
133; Victor Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 206-209, 218-19; Bardach and Gleeson,
Man Is Wolf to Man,
213.

49
Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice,
219-12.

50
Ibid., 222-23.

51
Ibid., 229-30.

52
Ibid., 224-31.

53
Mayme Sevander,
Red Exodus: Finnish-American Emigration to Russia
(Duluth, Minn.: Oscat, 1993), 168-70; Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice,
240-41.

54
Ibid., 169; Herman,
Coming Out of the Ice,
246-49.

55
May 17, 1939, Press Release from New York World’s Fair, Russia Subject Collection, Box 24, Files 1 and 2, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

56
Russia Subject Collection, Box 24, Files 1 and 2, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

57
“The Five-Pointed Ruby Star,” Russia Subject Collection, Box 24, Files 1 and 2, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.