The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (11 page)

Meanwhile, Eugene Lyons’ colleague Walter Duranty returned from America with a shining new Buick. In December 1933, his young Russian chauffeur, Grisha, drove his master’s limousine around Moscow at maniacal speed, and Duranty had a special GPU horn fitted, which he took great delight in pressing as the terrified Muscovites leaped out of his way in panic. The horn on the Buick, Duranty later claimed, had been fitted through “fortuitous circumstance,” but his fellow American reporters suspected otherwise. Linton Wells took a ride in the Buick late one night on a drunken spree, when his pal Duranty decided it would be a good idea to pay a call on some Russian friends. According to Wells, they pulled up outside an apartment building well past midnight, and the chauffeur began honking the Buick’s horn to announce their arrival. Getting no response, Duranty and Wells stepped out of the car and rang the doorbell. Eventually a very frightened woman opened the door. “We thought . . .” the woman whispered and then fell into silence. Inside the apartment Linton Wells could faintly discern in the dim light
“a dozen men, women and children huddled together, almost paralysed with fear. On every hand were indications that frantic efforts had been made to conceal everything and anything which might be regarded by the dread secret police as unworthy of being in a true proletarian’s possession.”
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7

“The Arrival of Spring”

 
 
 
Even before the U.S. embassy had officially opened in Moscow, the first American diplomats were set upon by their fellow countrymen desperate to return home. The first secretary at the embassy, Loy Henderson, wrote that “these unfortunate people were importuning us in our hotel rooms.”
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Those American emigrants sought help to gather the paperwork they needed to leave the USSR, help for their friends who had been arrested, and proof of their status as American citizens to keep them safe from harm. And while 1934 was still very much a “honeymoon” period for the American diplomats in Russia, a time when they could move freely in Moscow as their governments warmed to each other, even in that first year of diplomatic representation there were Americans disappearing.

As soon as he arrived in Moscow, the mild-mannered Loy Henderson realized that the officials at the Soviet Foreign Ministry were terrified of their own secret police and powerless to intervene. A sixteen-year-old American girl called at the U.S. embassy to plead for help to return herself, her mother, and two younger sisters back home to the United States. According to Henderson, this nameless girl was “refused permission to visit the U.S. embassy again” by the Soviet authorities. The young girl and her sisters remained on Loy Henderson’s conscience as he wrote his memoirs several decades later. But she was not, by any means, an exceptional case.
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Working in the Consular Division of the embassy, the thirty-one-year-old diplomat Elbridge Durbrow came into daily contact with Americans seeking new passports. Forty-seven years later he recalled their existence almost in passing, during an interview given in his retirement. According to Durbrow, their original American passports had simply vanished:

 
Elbridge Durbrow called them “captive Americans”—too slight a variation on the reporters’ expression “captured Americans” to make a difference. Later Durbrow stated that he had helped five hundred to return home, in the days before their exit visas were stopped completely by the Soviets.
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It might seem strange that Durbrow was quite so tentative over what had happened, when the Soviet confiscation of American passports was so well known at the time. On April 5, 1934, a satirical article entitled “The Story of Two Passports Which Developed into No Passport at All” was published in the German-language newspaper
Rigasche Rundschau
. After noting that two hundred Americans had arrived at the U.S. embassy on the first day it opened, the German journalist proceeded to tell the story of an American engineer named William Smith—“or any other name”—who had accepted a working contract in the USSR. Soon Smith is accused of espionage by the GPU and, to clear his name, is required to demonstrate his loyalty by taking up Soviet citizenship: “He is told that he can be a Soviet citizen and remain an American. He will have two passports—a Soviet and an American passport.” William Smith’s American passport is then confiscated and 

 
The American embassy officials in Moscow not only read the startlingly accurate article, they had it translated and sent back to Washington.
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The difficulties of the ordinary American emigrants in Russia were worsened by the fact that so many were flat broke and could not afford the price of a ticket home. Those not officially recruited by Amtorg were being paid the same rate as Russian workers, between 80 and 110 rubles per month, 40 of which was spent on a place to sleep in a crowded room and the rest at the factory kitchen.
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Shipping firms such as the Hamburg Line, sensing perhaps the vulnerability of a captive market, were now charging $178 for passage back to New York, a full $60 more than the same journey in the opposite direction. For those Americans who had arrived on tourist visas and managed to find jobs working on an assembly line in Moscow or Gorky, it was an impossibly high price to pay.
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On May 11, 1934, the first U.S. ambassador to Russia, William Christian Bullitt, wrote to the State Department asking for a welfare committee to help destitute Americans return home:
“Most of the Americans in distressed circumstances still retain some sort of employment in the Soviet Union and despite the hardships they are encountering, are reluctant to return to the US for fear of being entirely destitute should they fail immediately to find employment . . . It is expected that many destitute Americans will appear in the future.”
The State Department passed the financial responsibility to the American Red Cross, which replied to Bullitt’s appeal with scant sympathy:
“The program of the Red Cross does not include relief for Americans abroad who find themselves in economic difficulties.”
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Meanwhile the State Department continued to receive numerous reports that Soviet authorities were issuing residence permits for shorter and shorter periods, forcing costly renewals unless the emigrants accepted Soviet citizenship, always given with the reassurance that their American citizenship would remain unaffected.
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Although aware of the coercion involved, and the variety of methods used to part the American emigrants from their passports, the State Department did little to help them, even in the glow of those early months when there was still an opportunity for negotiation. The American embassy officials struggled to have their questions answered by the labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy, and the “captive Americans” remained in stateless limbo as the weeks and months ticked away. There were only a few thousand of them in Russia. Overwhelmingly they were just ordinary people with little influence or access to the high circles of state. The Soviet apparatchiks guessed, quite correctly, that they would soon be forgotten.

 
 
INSTEAD THE AMERICAN diplomats occupied themselves coping with the shock of their entrance into Soviet life. The chargé d’affaires, John Wiley, wrote to the State Department asking for Moscow to be placed on a list of “unhealthful posts.” His seven-page letter listed the infectious diseases prevalent in Moscow that year: typhoid, malaria, smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, dysentery, and sixty-two reported cases of anthrax. “A number of doctors,” Wiley added, “including some who are believed to have accepted foreign currency for outside services, have disappeared within the past two months. The most competent dentist in Moscow disappeared two weeks ago when he was in the process of giving treatment to some members of the embassy. Members of the embassy who called on him in accordance with appointments found his doors secured with the seal of the OGPU.”
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Denied access to black market rubles by the high-minded prescription of Ambassador Bullitt, the young American diplomats and their wives busied themselves with the continual harassment of finding enough affordable food. At the foreigners’ food stores, the prices, starting at a dollar per egg and rising up to ten dollars for the whole chicken, were “like eating gold.”
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And when Irena Wiley discovered that their embassy food supplies had been delayed at the border, she had to rush out and buy a very expensive and very thin Russian cow to be killed and butchered for a reception that day. At the dinner table, her husband quipped, “You had better show our guests the horns, so that they’ll know it isn’t a horse.”
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Of course, none of these hardships made the slightest difference to the handsome, blue-eyed ambassador William Christian Bullitt, whose private income derived from a trust fund of his wealthy Philadelphian family. Still only in his early forties, Bullitt arrived in Moscow very much in sympathy with the Bolshevik experiment, regarding Stalin’s economic planning as not so very different from the ideas Roosevelt was attempting in Washington, if just a few shades of red darker than the New Deal palette. As the American ambassador settled into his official residence at Spaso House, the fine open rooms of the pre-Revolutionary mansion seemed to suit him and his little terrier, Pie-pie, very well. With great delight Bullitt wrote to his brother Orville that Pie-pie was “lording it” over all Moscow, since all the other pets in the city had disappeared after the chronic food shortages of the year or two before. Spaso House was described as one of the glories of the Tsarist era in the American press. The forty-room mansion, wrote one reporter, had belonged to Russia’s former sugar king, Tverkov, and “had a tragic history. It was completed just before the war and the owner lived in it only a short time before the revolution broke out. In the civil war he was shot just at the steps where Ambassador Bullitt’s car will draw up when he alights at his new home.”
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Unfazed by superstitious omens of bad luck, one of Ambassador Bullitt’s very first actions was to place a bouquet of red roses on the grave of his friend John Reed at the Kremlin Wall. The ambassador’s marriage to John Reed’s widow, Louise Bryant, had ended in bitter divorce just four years earlier, but this had not altered his affection for Reed. William Bullitt had attempted to buy a whole wreath for the grave of the American revolutionary, but this proved impossible in Moscow at the time. Even a dozen red roses tied together with wood shavings required the purchase of entire rose bushes, which, at the artificially high exchange rate, ended up costing the ambassador the princely sum of forty-eight dollars.
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But this political gesture did not pass unnoticed. Almost immediately, William Bullitt was invited to dinner at the mansion of the Soviet defense commissar, where he was introduced to Joseph Stalin. “
His eyes are curious,
” Bullitt wrote in a letter to Roosevelt, 

 
At Voroshilov’s mansion, Bullitt and Stalin became acquainted over the customarily lavish Soviet banquet, the food and wine judged by Bullitt to be of a quality that “no one in America would dare serve nowadays.” After ten vodka toasts, Maxim Litvinov slyly noticed that Bullitt had started only to sip from his glass and quickly informed him that “it was an insult not to drink to the bottom and that I must do so.” Another fifty toasts followed, which Bullitt survived thanking “God for the possession of a head impervious to any quantity of alcohol.” He wrote that Joseph Stalin drank toasts to the “American Army, the Navy, President and whole USA,” while Bullitt reciprocated with “the memory of Lenin and continued success of the Soviet Union.” Then an excited Stalin marched little Georgy Piatakov over to the piano and instructed him to play, standing behind the deputy commissar for heavy industry, squeezing his neck, as Piatakov “launched into a number of wild Russian dances” with a manic furiosity at the keyboard, spurred on by Stalin’s hands around his neck.