The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (7 page)

At a truck factory in Moscow, Sorensen’s arrival struck him as having made a “good excuse for a holiday.” All semblance of work stopped, and to his surprise, Sorensen heard shouts of “Hello Charlie!” and “Charlie, how are you?” from former Ford employees greeting their old boss with an easy familiarity they would never have dared back home. Sorensen recognized some familiar faces from the Rouge, and noted that the Russians employed these Americans as “experts,” whereas back home they had been regular assembly-line Joes. At one point during his three days of negotiation in the Kremlin with Soviet industrial commissars, Sorensen was surprised to be greeted by another small, unnervingly familiar figure gliding past their table. “Allo Sharley,” Joseph Stalin had murmured.
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Back in Detroit, bearing a parting gift of a silver jewelry box that had once belonged to Catherine the Great, Charlie Sorensen told Henry Ford that he would like to return to Russia to review the work they had set in motion. Ford’s reaction, Sorenson later remembered, had been adamantly opposed:
“Charlie don’t you do it! They need a man like you. If you went over there, you would never come out again. Don’t take that chance!”
If Ford’s production chief could not be risked twice, no one seemed overly concerned for the safety of the company’s present and former employees who would travel to Russia to assemble the Soviet Model A’s.
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THE YEAR THE contract was signed, Ford’s chauffeur pulled up outside the modest Detroit home of Sam Herman, an autoworker and naturalized American born in the Ukraine. Over afternoon tea, Ford easily convinced this spellbound employee that he should act as an interpreter for the Soviet deal. Sam Herman’s youngest son, Victor, had sat in the room too overawed to interrupt their conversation. A teenage boy soon to become one of the American baseball players on the Gorky team, at the time Victor Herman was still just an athletic Detroit kid with pale blue eyes and a knack for getting into fights in their working-class neighborhood. On Ironwood Street, the local toughs had thrown stones at the windows of the Herman family house because they were Jews, and Victor had learned to box to defend himself. When his father announced that the family would travel to Russia on a three-year contract to build cars, Victor had been only too delighted at the prospect of an adventure. He trailed along as his father helped persuade three hundred Detroit families to emigrate to the new “American village” being built two miles outside the Ford factory in Nizhni Novgorod.
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Officially Victor Herman’s father was now an employee of the Soviet trust “Autostroi,” although while he worked with the Russians at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, he was issued with a Ford badge, No. H-9824, on July 9, 1931, for which he had to sign an official waiver for any claims for damage or loss to his person. The Ford badge allowed Sam Herman entrance onto the premises of the Ford Motor Company, and it stated in his contract that he would have to pay a five-dollar fine if the badge was lost.
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Perhaps assured by this implicit moral covenant with Henry Ford, the Herman family emigrated on the passenger ship
Leviathan,
which sailed out of New York Harbor on September 26, 1931.
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Several hundred American autoworkers and their families arrived in Nizhni Novgorod during the course of that year to join the crowds of that ancient Russian city with its blue onion-domed churches and muddy streets.

On a curve of the Volga River, at the junction of its tributary the Oka, where once there had been nothing but wheat fields and forests of dark fir trees, in less than two years a giant auto factory had risen from the Russian steppe.
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An American construction company working under Ford supervision had begun the work in August 1930, and the factory was finished by November 1931. Given that half of the labor force was made up of Russian women equipped only with wheelbarrows and long-handled shovels, its completion was almost a miracle. Five thousand horse-drawn wagons had been used to move the building materials and heavy machinery, since there was a desperate shortage of trucks. Even the efficiency of these horses, the American construction engineers complained, was “catastrophically reduced by the low supply norms of oats.”
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During the winter in that part of central Russia, the temperatures almost always fell below minus twenty degrees, and the ice on the Oka River froze at least four feet thick.
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In such conditions, despite all the obstacles, eventually a “workers’ city” was built beside the car factory, with rows of three-story apartment houses specifically designed by their Bolshevik architects
without
individual kitchens, since in the new Soviet era all cooking would take place in communal factory kitchens, signaling the “death blow” to domestic bourgeois drudgery.
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The architects had adorned their workers’ city with all the conveniences of the model state: a cafeteria, a nursery, public baths, a “palace of culture,” and, of course, a crematorium.
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It was, in every sense, a political showpiece of Joseph Stalin, to be heralded in Soviet propaganda as “Detroit without Ford,” whose “masters are the working class, not capitalist kings.”
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The American workers simply christened their new home “the Russian Fordville” or “Nizhni New York,” a faintly familiar copy of the River Rouge plant dropped down into the Russian wilderness.
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And when the Americans arrived to work at their brand-new auto factory, they could see from the distance the giant sign that read FORD.
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5

“The Lindbergh of Russia”

 
 
 
For a while, at least, Stalin loved to buy American. Considerations of practicality were all but subsumed by the desire for symbolic achievement, with each new scheme designed to surpass the scale of the American original, and rechristened “the Soviet Detroit” or “the Soviet Gary” or “the Soviet Muscle Shoals.” On Henry Ford’s recommendation, the Detroit architect Albert Kahn designed the auto factory at Nizhni Novgorod and now opened an office in Moscow staffed with twenty-five architects, all working nonstop to put up 521 new Soviet factories in quick succession.
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In the early thirties, Stalin’s Russia was being rapidly industrialized according to an American design. It was a strange coalescence of interests that would soon be consigned by both parties into the dark interstices of history.

One thousand kilometers south of Nizhni Novgorod, along the course of the Volga River, several hundred Americans had found jobs working at the mammoth tractor factory built by Albert Kahn at Stalingrad. If living conditions were initially somewhat primitive, their deprivations were offset by feelings of solidarity, job security, and higher pay. Robert Robinson was one of the lucky ones offered a contract that almost doubled his existing wage. Working for Ford’s in Detroit, he had earned $140 a month, whereas in the Soviet Union he was offered $250 a month, rent-free living quarters, a maid, thirty days’ paid vacation a year, a car, free passage to and from Russia, and the promise that $150 of each month’s paycheck would be deposited in an American bank. It was too good an opportunity to miss, especially since Robinson knew he might be laid off any day from his job at the Rouge.
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When Robinson arrived at the address advertised in the Detroit newspapers, there was already a crowd of people hoping for the same chance.
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Vast swaths of workers were being laid off in those Depression years, when wages at Ford’s were almost halved from seven to four dollars a day, while the “speed-up” was in full effect and becoming unendurable. By October 1932, the Ford workforce had been cut to just fifteen thousand men, and within months the entire River Rouge operation would be shut down completely.
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The mass redundancies in Detroit were greeted with evident delight in front-page headlines in the Soviet press: “Soviet Union Will Ask Fired Ford Men to Work Here.”
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Robert Robinson was just twenty-three years old when he left Detroit, and he considered himself fortunate.

So it was bitterly ironic that as a black American who emigrated to work in Russia, Robinson encountered racism only from his white American co-workers. Arriving in Stalingrad, Robinson refused to take their casual threats seriously until, just two weeks into his contract, he was stopped by two Americans named Lewis and Brown, who first racially abused him and then threatened: “You have twenty-four hours to leave this place or you’ll be sorry.” On the banks of the Volga, a fight broke out in which Robert Robinson gave back as good as he got.
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Back home in the United States, such retaliatory violence might easily have led to Robinson’s being hunted down the next day. In Stalingrad, however, a Russian witness reported the ugly confrontation, and when Robinson turned up for work at the factory the next day, the Russian workers treated him as a hero. Four days later a well-organized demonstration took place outside the factory gates, with speeches condemning racism and calling for the punishment of Lewis and Brown. The Soviet newspaper
Trud
published the text of their resolutions:
“We will not allow the ways of bourgeois America in the U.S.S.R. The Negro worker is our brother like the American worker. We castigate any who dares to destroy in the Soviet land the equality we have established for all proletarians of all nations.”
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The Alabaman Herbert Lewis was locked up in a Stalingrad prison awaiting trial. His arrest, observed the visiting American reporter William Henry Chamberlin, seemed only to strengthen the “racial chauvinism” of the three hundred other Americans working at the tractor factory. Chamberlin described a conversation he had with a “middle-aged mechanic, of the type, who probably earned fifty or sixty dollars a week before the Depression, regularly voted the Republican ticket and belonged to the Methodist church.” This nameless mechanic had organized an American committee to free Lewis. “You know, brother,” he said, “it’s been most humiliating for us, as Americans, to hear a lot of furriners get up and jabber about how our government was no good and how we couldn’t make laws to suit ourselves. And what they’re trying to do with this trial is to force on us something no white American will stand for: social equality with the colored race.”

The mechanic then showed Chamberlin a letter written on a sheet of paper, which Lewis had signed. The apology expressed his regret to “the ladies of the American colony, to the workers of Russia, and to the workers of the whole world,” part of the plea bargain struck to avoid a Soviet prison sentence. When Chamberlin asked about a line in the note that had been heavily crossed out, the Republican mechanic explained, “That was a direct apology to the nigger. We crossed that out.”
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Taking into account the fact that the defendants had been “inoculated with racial enmity by the capitalistic system of the exploitation of the lower races,” the Stalingrad district court sentenced Lewis and Brown to expulsion from the Soviet Union as a substitute for “the term of ten years for deprivation of liberty.”
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The court case turned Robert Robinson into a minor celebrity in Russia and America also, where his story was quickly picked up by the press. For Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the teacher at the Anglo-American school in Moscow and co-founder of the American Negro Labor Congress, Robinson’s case must have seemed the fulfillment of the great ideal of color-blind justice. In the country Fort-Whiteman had left behind, black Americans were the last to be hired and the first to be fired, denied membership by the majority of white trade unions, thoroughly segregated, and regularly the victims of racially motivated violence. In 1933, twenty-four black Americans were lynched in the United States, a practice that would continue with stubborn regularity for the next three decades.

Small wonder, then, that American emigrants such as Fort-Whiteman wanted so passionately to believe that a place in the world existed where man’s essential brotherhood blinded him to differences of color. In the USSR, he thought he had found it. How then could Lovett Fort-Whiteman ever have foreseen that by being deported back to the United States for their assault, Lewis and Brown would have their lives saved, while he, by staying on, would have his own condemned?

 
 
HERBERT LEWIS SPENT a month in jail, and nine days on trial, before returning to America. In an interview he gave to the
Chicago Tribune,
the Alabaman mechanic painted a grim picture of the living conditions for the 450 Americans (including 80 women and children) who he claimed were being “held captive by Reds” in Stalingrad. Lewis stated that all of them were anxious to leave but were being refused exit visas and, meanwhile, were falling sick to “typhoid, typhus, dysentery and scurvy.” Two Americans had already died and many others were seriously ill. Their communications with the outside world were heavily censored, and they had barely one hundred dollars between all of them. The American money, which was supposed to have been paid into their Detroit bank accounts, had never materialized, and they quickly discovered that their ruble salaries were virtually worthless.
“They were not there because they were Reds,”
Lewis told the
Tribune, “they were there for the jobs, the salaries from $306 to $500 monthly.”
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Robert Robinson was never physically attacked again in Stalingrad. In the summer of 1933, he returned home to New York to visit his mother in Harlem. In the trough of the Depression, the poverty and misery on the streets of Harlem were unrelenting, and Robinson discovered also that as a result of the publicity from his court case, he had been blacklisted by Ford’s from all work in Detroit. Unable to find a job, Robinson returned to work at a ball-bearing factory in Moscow.
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The following year, at a factory meeting on December 10, 1934, he was unexpectedly nominated to the Moscow Soviet. Once again the Soviet newspapers fêted him as an example of how a black American, unwanted and persecuted back home, could be raised to the status of a big-city politician owing to the progressive nature of the Soviet state. Unanimously “elected” with rising Communist Party apparatchiks such as Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Robinson’s unlikely rise was featured in
Time
magazine of Christmas Eve 1934. The magazine ran a photograph of the shy and studious-looking Robinson above the caption “The Coal Black Protégé of Joseph Stalin.” According to
Time
’s editorial:
“Possession of a US passport is the sine qua non for Negroes whom the Soviet Government is training as Communist dynamite.
Reason: they must be able to get home as bona fide US citizens to do any good when the hoped-for explosion of US Revolution comes.”
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