The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (9 page)

Eugene Lyons, American reporter in Moscow
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Those Americans who found it hard to settle in Russia soon began to discover quite how difficult it was to leave. In Moscow, one Californian machinist with two children was curtly informed by the authorities that he was considered a Soviet citizen. His family was allowed an exit visa only after more than a year of protests and pressure from the American reporters who threatened to bypass Soviet censorship by mailing their dispatches to London and then have them cabled on to the States. Very quickly, the Californian’s passport was returned, and he was allowed to leave with his family. More usually, the Americans who arrived in Russia had their passports confiscated, and those whose initial fervor had quickly dimmed soon discovered they were on their own. In 1933, the United States still had no diplomatic presence in the Soviet Union, and after a while the American reporters simply shrugged their shoulders and offered not much more than sympathy. Privately they had already coined a name for these people: they became known as “captured Americans.”
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The American press corps in Russia—Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin, Ralph Barnes, Linton Wells, and Eugene Lyons, among others—were strangely reluctant to cover the story of the missing American passports, although it was a widely known practice at the time. In Gorky, the “foreigners’ bureau” at the auto factory was notorious for attempting to persuade their American workers to take up Soviet citizenship, offering the lure of better food and housing, coupled with the threat of having to leave Russia at short notice. One group who had arrived in December 1931 were simply instructed to hand over their passports for registration which, they were told, would be returned to them when they left. The American autoworkers were then given registration forms to fill out, and abruptly informed that they had all become Soviet citizens. According to one witness, there was an ardent American communist who worked in the bureau named Sophie Talmy, who “was responsible for causing many American citizens to apply unwittingly for and acquire Soviet citizenship.”
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After Herbert Lewis’ expulsion from Stalingrad, both
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
carried a report from Peter Sutherland, a forty-four-year-old engineer from San Diego, on the “enslavement” of Americans in the USSR by the confiscation of their passports, which Sutherland claimed were then used to slip communist agitators into the United States “in the guise of returning American citizens.” Several men Sutherland had known personally in Russia had simply vanished. Meanwhile, an American military intelligence report sent from the Berlin embassy to Washington, D.C., cited evidence “confirmed by an authoritative source” that
“American passports are stolen at every opportunity, as they can be sold to the Soviet government at a good price. Passports thus obtained by confiscation or theft are used for fraudulent entry of communists into the United States. The photograph is removed and a photograph of the communist user is substituted, who enters the United States under the name of the former owner. Counterfeit passports have also been used for the same purpose to some extent, but the genuine passport, altered as described, is greatly preferred.”
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Only a hopeless idealist—or the most blundering detective—could have failed to deduce that once an American passport was stolen and reused, the true holder of that passport would become a rather inconvenient witness to an inelegant identity fraud. But the Berlin intelligence report was kept classified; and no one thought to warn the Joads still on their way to Russia.

Nor were the American reporters in Moscow ever likely to risk exposing the story, since their professional existence in Russia depended on the approval of the Soviet authorities, who censored their stories for the slightest transgression of the Bolshevik party line. The reporters understood very well that if they wrote anything remotely critical, they would be instantly harassed, have their visas revoked, and shortly afterward be declared “hostile” to the Soviet Union and expelled. Over time, most of the foreign press in Moscow became gradually browbeaten into repeating the themes their Soviet censors wished the American public to read. Consequently news from the USSR acquired an Alice in Wonderland quality, as prescribed by the Soviet censor-in-chief, Konstantin Oumansky, a young, multilingual, gold-toothed apparatchik.
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And for their part, realizing that it was pointless to write anything that would be censored anyway, the American reporters began to lose all measure of their critical faculties, lapsing into a stupefying form of self-censorship. If the story of the “captured Americans” trapped in the USSR failed to register in the public consciousness back home, it was therefore hardly surprising. Especially when one considers how easily Konstantin Oumansky orchestrated the concealment of a far greater crime being committed at the time.

 
 
IN MARCH 1933, in response to the widespread rumors of a terrible famine in the Ukraine, Walter Duranty wrote an article for
The New York Times
entitled “Russians Hungry But Not Starving.” Very carefully Duranty explained that reports of “mass famine casualties” in the Ukraine “were somewhat hasty.” Duranty himself was anxious to reveal the truth:

Anyone who crossed paths with the travelers returning from Soviet famine areas understood very well the consequences of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Jack Calder, the tall, pipe-smoking American engineer who had built the tractor factory at Stalingrad, would sit at the bar of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow telling anyone who would listen the story of his recent trip through Soviet Central Asia. In Turkestan, Calder was chauffeured across a desert during a snowstorm. Through the car window, he noticed that the side of the road was lined with a continuous pile of logs, covered by the drifting snow. The logs had not been stacked correctly; often his chauffeur had to stop the car and move them over to the side of the road. When Calder asked where all the wood had come from in a desert region, the chauffeur had burst out laughing:
“Those aren’t logs. This road leads out of the Soviet Union to countries where you can have food by merely going into a restaurant. Thousands of peasants . . . try to get out of Russia. Most of them are too weak to make it.”
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In Moscow, Jack Calder was celebrated as the American engineer “Carter” in the Soviet play
Tempo
, and, according to his contract in the Russian state archives, was earning a tax-free salary of ten thousand dollars per year, with all the perks of his position. But neither celebrity nor riches was sufficient compensation for the sights he had witnessed in Turkestan. Haunted by the dead, Calder packed his bags and returned home.
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Although other American engineers brought back similar eyewitness accounts of the terrible famine in the Ukraine—one described how Soviet border guards were opening fire on “thousands” of Ukrainian peasants attempting to cross the frozen Dniester River at night—by their own admission, the American reporters were more anxious to cover the forthcoming trial of a group of British engineers accused of espionage. Late one night in a Moscow hotel room, a Faustian bargain was struck between Oumansky and the American press corps as to how they would cover the state-induced famine. Years later, Eugene Lyons, the United Press correspondent, confessed his own complicity in the deal:
“We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases . . . The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski, Oumansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the morning hours.”
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By September 1933, when the famine was over, the American press corps was finally granted permission to travel into southern Russia and the Ukraine. Walter Duranty was given a two-week head start, presumably as a form of payback for being the most vociferous champion of the nonexistence of the starving millions. In a
New York Times
report titled “Abundance Found In North Caucasus,” Duranty wrote,
“The use of the word ‘Famine’ in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer absurdity. There a bumper crop is being harvested as fast as tractors, horses, oxen, men, women, and children can work . . . There are plump babies in the nurseries or gardens of the collectives . . . Village markets are flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter at prices lower than in Moscow.”
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But Walter Duranty’s private remarks were very different from his published story. To British diplomats in Moscow he admitted
“that Ukraine has been bled white . . . It was quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”
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Perhaps, as an Englishman, he felt more at ease, and inclined to be honest, in the British embassy overlooking the Moskva River.

The celebrated Walter Duranty was fêted by the American literary establishment. Awarded the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his outstanding reporting from Soviet Russia and rumored to be one of the highest-paid foreign correspondents in the world, Duranty lived a life of unrivaled comfort in Moscow. With the success of his journalism, his household expanded to include a fact-hunting American assistant; an elderly Russian cook; a young Russian house-maid; Grisha, his chauffeur; and Katya, his beautiful assistant, who for a while “ran the whole show” and bore him a son.
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Together they lived in large apartment with four or five rooms—an unheard-of living space in the desperately overcrowded city—with their own bathroom and a kitchen outfitted with an electric refrigerator brought over from America, another luxury “almost unique” in Moscow. His many guests noticed also, on prominent display in the bookcase of his living room, a signed photograph of Joseph Stalin.
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At home, Walter Duranty would drink cocktails and make witty asides to his constant flow of visitors, while dictating effortless copy on the Five-Year Plan for his American readership. And in the evening, the whole party moved on to the Metropol Hotel, where the fun really began.
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All the rich Americans in Moscow would gravitate to the Metropol, with its long, shining mahogany bar and jazz band blaring out syncopated rhythms, Soviet style.
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Couples danced, working their way around a circular fountain kept stocked with fish in the middle of the dance floor. Diners were encouraged to select their supper, at which point a net would be deftly flourished by the waiter, the fish caught and cooked and brought to their table. It was all part of the theater, along with the Russian girls who walked through the dining room selling multicolored balloons at five rubles apiece. Their customers would tie on a paper streamer, set it alight, and watch the balloon float upward—if it reached the ceiling intact, there would be another burst of raucous applause. Who said you couldn’t have fun in Moscow? The crowd at the Metropol was always “a riot,” amid the jazz and dancing and the waiters babbling away in the languages of the rich visitors passing through town. And then there was always the frisson of intrigue provided by the GPU and the Bolshevik apparatchiks, who were the only locals who could afford the prices. In public the Americans learned to follow the Russian example, and never mentioned the initials GPU or NKVD out loud. Instead they joked about the “Four-Letter Boys” or the “YMCA” or “Phi Beta Kappa” or “the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Bolshevism” or any other whip-smart euphemism that might confuse the listening waiters, secretaries, and assorted informers of every stripe who surrounded them in the Metropol bar.
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The wealthy Americans—the industrial engineers, businessmen, reporters, and tourists—quickly discovered that tipping, too, while officially abolished, was still very much in favor among the waiters themselves and ensured a stampede of service as soon as they sat down.
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Their party at the Metropol became a weekly event to which everyone turned out, and the dancing would carry on until six in the morning, with the lonely Americans looking forward to the company of the sleek Russian girls who hung around the bar. All the Metropol Hotel girls were “swell dancers” and just happened to speak English, French, and German.
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They were always beautifully turned out with immaculate hair and makeup, and fashionable dresses impossible to come by at the time. Of course, it was widely known that these girls were handpicked by the GPU for their looks and ability to speak foreign languages. Almost without exception, they came from the former Russian aristocracy, the luckless generation of Anna Karenina’s granddaughters made victims of the Revolution. As “class enemies,” the Metropol girls would disappear with heartrending regularity, only to be replaced by more of their kind. The rule among the Americans was “not to get too attached,” and to help things along, they drank up the Metropol whiskey, cognac, and beer on sale at the better class of Chicago speakeasy prices. Vodka was, of course, cheaper, and, for the more or less permanent resident, the drink of choice since the effect was quicker. The Russian vodka quickly drowned out the memory of the ever-changing faces of the Metropol beauties, and allowed “everyone to have a swell time anyway,” as the photographer Jimmy Abbe put it.
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