The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (8 page)

In reality, Robert Robinson was a little panicked by his unexpected election. Fearing that he was already in well over his head, and not wishing to increase his indebtedness still further lest he never be able to return home, he refused Comrade Bulganin’s offer of a central Moscow flat, a dacha, and a car in exchange for playing a more active role in the propaganda campaign. And, in the end, his American passport would prove no guarantee of his return.
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MEANWHILE THE CITY of Nizhni Novgorod had been renamed in honor of the Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky, and its auto factory officially opened for full-scale production on January 1, 1932, with the usual fanfare of ceremonies and rhetoric:
“When we place the USSR at the wheel of an automobile, and a peasant on a tractor, let the venerable capitalists boasting of their ‘civilization’ try to reach us!”
The first Ford Model A’s began rolling off the assembly line beneath giant portraits of a disturbingly youthful-looking Joseph Stalin, his watchful gaze seemingly filled with satisfaction at the appropriation of one of the most famous brands of American industry. In the early days, the blue oval Ford badge was still stamped on the Soviet Model A’s, positioned next to the hammer and sickle and a five-pointed red star on the front grille. The new cars were proudly driven out of the factory decorated with banners in Russian demanding: FULFILL THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN! GIVE US SOVIET FORDS!
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Within weeks the entire assembly line had been shut down amid reports of wildcat strikes due to food shortages, and the Red Army having to be called in to “restore order.”
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After production restarted in May, it became clear that for all the imported expertise of their 750 American workers, the Soviet management had not yet grasped even the most basic principles of mass production. One American visitor watching the assembly line at Gorky noted a touring car, a closed car, a seven-passenger car, and a truck emerging one after the other. Henry Ford would simply have fired everyone in sight.
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Another Ford engineer just despaired:
“The Russians are a group of children playing with their first mechanical toys, they are smashing them, running them improperly, and generally making a mess of things.”
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Even the official Soviet production figure of just forty cars per day proved deeply suspect, since most of the cars emerged missing a fairly crucial element, spark plugs and steering wheels in particular. A thousand of these semi-cannibalized machines awaited delivery that first summer, before the Russian winter destroyed them. But at least the Five-Year Plan was a little closer to being fulfilled. The Plan called for cars; it did not stipulate whether they arrived with their steering wheels attached.

Inside the factory, the native Detroiter Walter Reuther watched a Russian worker use his sleeve to wipe off a die because there was no cloth available.
“Nichevo”
was the response as the acid burned through his coat. With the constant threat of Sheared and falling machinery operated by inexpert hands, the Soviet Ford factory was an extremely dangerous place to work.
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Young Russian women had to be persuaded to use tongs, not their hands, to remove material from the press. When an American worker tried to warn one woman, she only smiled and, with the air of professional impatience to a timid novice, replied, “Nichevo.”
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Fortunately a quick-thinking Ford engineer, Frank Bennett, was on hand when the wet paint on the Model A’s caught fire. If the paint drums stored next to the overheated ovens had caught light, the whole factory would have gone up in flames. But the drums were rolled out of the way just in time.

In Moscow, the “Stalin” auto factory had been built to assemble the seventy-five thousand knocked-down Fords shipped over from Detroit. The factory floors were still being laid when Frank Bennett arrived on an inspection tour. He noticed that the Russians did not use regular asphalt, which was immune to temperature fluctuations and was the accepted practice back home in Detroit. Instead they preferred a “low-grade concoction,” reinforced with broken bricks from old buildings. Walking through the factory, the American engineer kicked a piece of brick and realized that it had come from a church.
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As part of the atheist campaign, Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior had recently been dynamited to make way for Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets. The demolition was filmed by Soviet newsreel as evidence of the final triumph of the Bolsheviks, with Stalin’s functionary Lazar Kaganovich pictured standing on top of the ruins proclaiming, “Mother Russia is cast down.”
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In retrospect, the destruction of Christianity in Russia was a necessary precursor for all that followed. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, any element of civil society that might provide a countervailing voice to the authority of Joseph Stalin was being systematically destroyed, or turned into an acquiescent imitation of self-parody. The rubble from the Russian churches was salvaged to be used for factory floors, and the church bells removed to a giant smelting works outside Moscow. Here, in a mountain of ancient gold and silver, lay the silence that had descended upon Russia like the first fall of winter snow.
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SHORTLY AFTER HIS family’s arrival in the USSR, Sam Herman was sent to Moscow from Nizhni Novgorod as an official American representative of the Soviet Ninth Trade Union Congress. Scare stories of “Nizhny Defeat” were unwarranted, Sam Herman told the Soviet press, “Mistakes have been made, it’s true, but the plant has resumed operation.” With some justification he blamed setbacks on a shortage of essential tools “such as Yankee screw drivers” and “the inexperience of workers who never handled complex machinery before.” The Ninth Congress, Sam Herman pointed out, was
“the swellest Union convention ever witnessed, what impresses me about the Congress is the freedom with which workers criticize conditions in their plants. Could you imagine foreign workers scarcely employed a year at their trades elected to an AF of L. convention and actually stating opinions from the floor? In America this would be a pure fantasy. Yet here we are—a group of foreign delegates— three Americans and six Germans having the same rights as the rest.”
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On April 26, 1932,
Pravda
published the story of Joe Grondon under the headline “The Man Who Abandoned Detroit.” Sam Herman’s fellow union representative had been building Model A’s in Russia for the past four months, after fifteen years spent working at the Rouge. Joe Grondon made a passionate speech at the Ninth Congress describing how he had walked through a park in Dearborn before he left and had seen an American policeman haul seven bodies of homeless workers out of the river:

 
In Detroit, Joe Grondon told his Russian audience that “theft and murder were flourishing.” He had been mugged walking home from the plant, while unemployed autoworkers were living in an abandoned Detroit fish factory in the dirt and soot, and fed once a day on soup.
“I decided to spend the rest of my days in the USSR,”
said Grondon, who was fifty years old when he left the United States.
“I read in the bourgeois papers that the Bolsheviks are the enemies of culture and civilization. I came to the USSR and got employed as a foreman at the Nizhni Novgorod automobile plant . . . I see the enthusiasm of the workmen, I see their passionate desire to master new machinery . . . What an attitude they maintain towards me! How attentively they listen to every word I say!”
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It was always the political idealists like Joe Grondon and Sam Herman who had the hardest time adjusting to what they discovered in Russia, as they carried with them the seemingly irresistible hope that their situation would improve later that year, or the next, or the year after that, until it was all too late. Eighteen months after the union congress, Sam Herman’s name appeared once again in the Soviet press with another update on news from Nizhni Novgorod, the city now known as Gorky:

 
A convoy of the first thirty Ford cars and trucks built in the Gorky factory was ordered to be driven to Moscow for a propaganda display, a request that would have been easy enough to fulfill had there been sufficient workers who knew how to drive. But most of the Americans were too broke to afford a car back home, and very few Russians had learned to drive. So it fell to the Detroit teenager Victor Herman to get behind the wheel of a truck. On the journey to Moscow, Victor was amazed to watch the Soviet militia turn out Russian villagers to tread down the snow in front of their convoy, making his route a little easier. In Moscow the atmosphere for the parade was strangely intense. There was hardly any cheering; the Russians appeared so genuinely moved by what they saw. Victor watched men and women openly weep at the sight of the brand-new Ford trucks and cars “made in the USSR.” On the street his observation was broken only by the voice of an educated Russian woman who tugged at his sleeve and whispered to him in English, “Tell me why you do this. Why you help them, the Soviets?”
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But it was only later, too late, that he understood the bewilderment resting in her question.

Afterward, at the official reception in the Kremlin, Stalin himself made a rare appearance before the Gorky autoworkers. He was much shorter than Victor Herman had expected, with a pockmarked face and yellow eyes quite unlike those in his idealized portrait. In a brief speech, Stalin urged them all “to try harder, produce more, give it all you’ve got,” and was met by a familiar thunderous ovation. An awestruck American engineer named McCarthy leaned over and proudly told Victor that what they had just witnessed was “an honor to them all.” Looking around the Kremlin banqueting hall, Victor Herman noticed that all the waiters had the clear outlines of revolvers bulging out of their jackets.
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After Stalin’s speech, Victor Herman met a Red Army officer in his mid-forties with gray hair and an apparent sense of humor who introduced himself as “Tukhachevsky.” By this stage Victor’s Russian was fluent enough to ask the man if he was the son of the famous Civil War hero, to which the officer had only laughed and replied that he
was
Marshal Tukhachevsky. The Russian then questioned Victor on which airplanes he could fly, since he assumed that all Americans who could drive must be able to fly planes, too. When Victor insisted that this was not actually the case, Tukhachevsky laughed again and asked if perhaps the young American might like to learn. Naturally, the excited Detroit teenager handed him his address at the American village in Gorky, and Marshal Tukhachevsky promised that all would be arranged. And much to Victor’s surprise, his new benefactor kept his word.
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It turned out that Victor Herman was not only a gifted athlete but also a natural aviator, quickly graduating from flying planes to parachuting at an elite Moscow aviation academy. In September 1934, the nineteen-year-old Herman set the world freefall record, jumping from a plane at 24,000 feet and waiting 142 seconds before opening his parachute. From the ground, thirty thousand spectators watched him fall through the air holding the ripcord with his right hand and calmly eating an apple with his left. Victor later explained that he had been surprised to find the apple in his pocket—his pilot must have put it there for luck—and since apples were scarce at the time he thought he might as well eat it. His record, and the cool nerve he displayed in achieving it, turned him into another minor American celebrity of the Soviet emigration. The newspapers crowned Victor Herman “the Lindbergh of Russia,” while his story crossed the Atlantic into the pages of the
Detroit Evening Times
under the headline “Detroit Boy Wins Fame as ‘Lindy of Russia.’”
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It was only later that the trouble started. The paperwork had to be filled out to gain credit for the jump from the world aviation authorities, and in the box marked “nationality” Victor Herman had written “USA.” Officials suddenly appeared from all sides, representing the Communist Party, the Red Army, and the secret police. Questions were asked and arguments raged: “How could an American be allowed to jump from a Soviet plane, flown by a Soviet pilot, onto Soviet soil?” Fortunately a quick-thinking official thought of a cheap solution to their problem. A new set of forms was filled out, and Victor Herman was politely asked to please write “USSR” in the correct box. Full of a sense of his own invincibility, the naïve blue-eyed Detroit teenager picked up a pen, paused for a moment, and then wrote “USA.” And with those three letters young Victor Herman sealed his fate.
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6

“The Captured Americans”