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This is a an examination of those Americans who went to the Soviet
Union to live and work during the interwar period, and what became of them. Why they went, how many went, and whether they survived the experience. American attitudes, both private and public of the Soviet Union are also discussed.
Titlu original
American Workers in the Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars - MA Thesis
This is a an examination of those Americans who went to the Soviet
Union to live and work during the interwar period, and what became of them. Why they went, how many went, and whether they survived the experience. American attitudes, both private and public of the Soviet Union are also discussed.
This is a an examination of those Americans who went to the Soviet
Union to live and work during the interwar period, and what became of them. Why they went, how many went, and whether they survived the experience. American attitudes, both private and public of the Soviet Union are also discussed.
American Workers in The Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars:
From Dream to Disillusionment
THESIS Submitted to the College of Arts and Sciences of West Virginia University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of American History By Vincent E. Baker Morgantown West Virginia 1998 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Chapter I Introduction 3 Chapter II Who Went to Russia, and Why 5 Chapter III American Experiences in the U.S.S.R. 23 Chapter IV Fates of Individual Americans 51 Chapter V Conclusion 85 Bibliography 88 iii ABSTRACT AMERICAN WORKERS IN THE SOVIET UNION BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS: FROM DREAM TO DISILLUSIONMENT By Vincent E. Baker This is a an examination of those Americans who went to the Soviet Union to live and work during the interwar period, and what became of them. Why they went, how many went, and whether they survived the experience. American attitudes, both private and public of the Soviet Union are also discussed. 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Over the years many millions left their native lands for a new start in America. This flood of migrs, mainly from Europe, played a major role in the United States becoming one of the world's leading industrial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vast majority of migrs to the United States remained here, but there is a little- known exception to this rulethe small but extremely important movement of skilled American workers from the United States to the Soviet Union after World War I. The thin end of the wedge which evolved into this thesis was the potent autobiography of a man named Victor Herman, who went to the Soviet Union in 1931 and whose life and trials brought forth the points to be expanded below. Unfortunately, this flow of American workers to the Soviet Union, and the importance of the technology and know-how they brought with them, is barely mentioned in many histories of the Soviet Union or of interwar America. As historian Thomas Park Hughes commented in his book American Genesis: This intensive and large-scale transfer of technology, historically unprecedented, should be recognized as one of the major chapters in Soviet history, but it has been virtually forgotten in both the Soviet Union and United States. The former has denied its dependence on capitalism and the latter does not wish to boast of its contribution to the establishment of Soviet industrial power. 1 Hughes seems to be correct, as secondary works on both immigrants and the impact of the technological exchange between the two nations are quite scarce, and the facts of the above quotation are scarcely common knowledge today. Herman, who lived through the time Hughes analyzed, commented Not many people know about it, even today, so many years after it happened. 2
1 Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis - A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), 254. 2 Victor Herman, Coming Out of the Ice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 14. 2 The purpose of this thesis is to support my contention that few of the Americans who went to the Soviet Union found the workers paradise they expected, and even fewer were able to come home when their term of employment was over. Although there is not an overabundance of primary sources, I take heart from historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, who collaborated on a related subject, the American Communist Party, and who wrote that "The lack of primary research material has never hampered interest in the subject." 3 This thesis will help to bring together the fragmented tales, conflicting accounts and historical analyses of this troubled period.
3 Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement - Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 1. 3 CHAPTER TWO WHO WENT TO RUSSIA, AND WHY The decisions by American workers to leave home and work in the Soviet Union, some going alone, others uprooting their entire families, were made for a variety of reasons. In order to understand the motivations of those who went, it is necessary to consider briefly the social, political, and economic realities of the period between the two World Wars. Most Americans perceived bolshevism and the Soviet Union in a decidedly negative way immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution. Even before the Soviet Union was formed, American distrust of communist ideals was evident. In 1918 Secretary of State Robert Lansing commented that bolshevism was "subversive of the rights of man, and hostile to justice and liberty." 4 Moreover, the Allies condemned the Soviets for making a separate peace with Germany, which freed more than thirty German divisions for movement to the western front in that crucial spring of 1918. As the historian Peter Filene wrote, "The Bolsheviks' frankly avowed goal of withdrawing Russia from the war set most of the American public unhesitatingly against them." 5 Indeed, the Soviet decision to quit the war caused a severe reaction in the U.S., "Many Americans were under the impression that bolshevism was a plot by the hated German empire. . . The wartime image of bolshevism as a German covert operation lingered for years." 6 In addition, the Soviet Union's formation of the Third International as a "spearhead for a global proletarian revolution" further unnerved many Americans. 7 The Russian Revolution and burgeoning Communist movements in other European countries excited the American left- wing into strikes and an occasional bombing, which in turn intensified the reactionary Red
4 Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 6. 5 Peter Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), 21. 6 Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 27. 7 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 15. 4 Scare. The climate of tension and distrust in America was a holdover from the Great War, with the censoring activities of the Creel Committee and the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The paranoia extended to the state level, and as historian Melvyn Leffler noted, "Thirty-five states passed sedition laws, banned displays of red flags, and investigated radicals." 8 On the national level, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer instigated the notorious "Palmer raids" which resulted in the arrest and sometimes deportation of suspected communists. As Filene commented, the Soviet Union was both "a nation and a revolution, the combination always challenging American values." 9 In 1920 the new Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, set policy concerning the Soviet Union that would last until 1933. The United States refused to recognize the Bolsheviks, arguing that they were not representative of the will of the Russian people." 10 Even so, this policy did not ban all contact between the two nations. Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission, opened offices in New York City in 1919. 11 As Filene explained, "it was an official Soviet organization and because Russia had no embassy Amtorg naturally (though tacitly) added political and propaganda activities to its formal commercial duties." 12 Lenin established the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily softened the communist economic policies, and gave the impression to the rest of the world that the Soviet Union was malleable, and possibly open to capitalism. 13 Bearing this in mind, according to Leffler, "The U.S. government permitted private investment and trade, even while it frowned upon loans and eschewed recognition. 14 Leffler further demonstrates that "Anti-Bolshevism was institutionalized in the State Department. 15 In 1924 the Russian and East European
8 Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994) 14. 9 Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 63. 10 Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 16. 11 Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 90. 12 Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 114. 13 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 489. 14 Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 17. 15 Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 19. 5 sections were combined into the Division of Eastern European affairs and placed under Robert F. Kelley, who had no sympathy for the new Soviet regime. So the formal U.S. government position in the 1920s was somewhat schizophrenic. It did not like nor respect the Soviets, yet permitted Amtorg to operate and American firms to do business with the Soviets. Thus, from the time of the establishment of the U.S.S.R., there were informal but no formal communications between the two nations. This situation would not change until 1933, when a new administration under president Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized the Soviet Union. Recognition also caused a perception shift inside the Soviet Union, as noted by a U.S. engineer, The Soviet press made a remarkable sudden about face. . . Roosevelt was transformed from a Wall Street candidate, a hireling of a rotten, disinterested society to a humane liberal doing his best. 16 One of the most famous statements made about the Soviet Union during this period, a statement that embodies the conflicting emotions with which many Americans viewed the U.S.S.R., came from the writer Lincoln Steffens in July 1926. Returning from a visit to the Soviet Union, he claimed, "I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there; Russia will win out and it will save the world. That is my belief. But I don't want to live there." 17 The Soviets loathed capitalism but they were extremely pragmatic, for they saw the American system, then the most productive in the world, as the model for what they wanted to become. For example, in the Nation, reporter Marian Tyler wrote from Russia that "Gods live in heaven, and machines, as everyone knows, live in America. Of course, America is not considered heaven, politically almost the opposite, in fact; but there is an impression that when the god is transferred to Russia, heaven on earth will be accomplished." 18 The Soviets were fascinated with the managerial practices of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. Taylor had become famous for regulating the actions of workers to improve their
16 Michael Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: Memoirs of Zara Witkin 1932-1934. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 255. 17 Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 146. 18 Marian Tyler, "The American God in Russia" Nation, 12 January 1927, 37-38. 6 efficiency, and his system of scientific management is still widely known as "Taylorism." 19 Taylor once said, "in the past, the man has been first, in the future the system must be first." 20 This methodology held an obvious attraction for the Soviets, who were searching for the best way to convert an agrarian society into a modern, albeit centralized, industrial power. They believed that Taylorism provided the way by which the simple masses could be converted into competent and efficient workers in a modern factory setting. Henry Ford, whose plants the Soviets saw as the embodiment of Taylorism, was revered in the Soviet Union. The Soviet-based American reporter, Maurice Hindus, wrote for Outlook magazine that he had ". . . visited villages far from railroads, where I talked to illiterate peasants who did not know who Stalin was or Rykov or Bukharin, but who had heard of the man [i.e., Ford] who makes the 'iron horses.'" 21 Ford's 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work, had gone through four printings in the Soviet Union by 1925. 22 Taylor's system, combined with Ford's assembly-line that combined all plants and materials at a single site, the most famous being River Rouge, appealed strongly to the Soviets. The Soviet penchant for gigantic projects was demonstrated, for example, at Magnitogorsk, which employed some 40,000 laborers, and at the huge Dneprostroi dam. So the Soviet Union had a need for, and an interest in, American technology and skilled American workers. With this admiration for American know-how in mind, the Soviets set out to purchase American technology and to make the U.S.S.R. attractive to American workers. Of course, the European powers could have taken America's place in providing technology and technical experts, and many did get a slice of the Soviet pie, but American success was what the Soviets most wanted to copy and emulate. Joseph Stalin himself said "American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles. . .
19 Hughes, American Genesis, 188. 20 Hughes, American Genesis, 188. 21 Maurice Hindus, "Henry Ford Conquers Russia, Outlook, 29 June 1927, 280. 22 Hughes, American Genesis, 269. 7 The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism." 23 Unfortunately, the two sides had major misconceptions of each other. One migr to the Soviet Union, Margaret Wettlin, wrote that "I was in the unique position of being an integral part of two entirely different worlds, worlds that not only had no understanding of each other but had the most distorted conceptions. . . " 24 She further commented that: Narrow political prejudices blinded people to the fact that here were two nations similar in that at different times each had been the pioneer of a new way of life; and that here were two peoples similar in that both were born and bred in lands of vast expanses and untold resources. 25 At a dinner in Moscow an American worker, Victor Herman, met the famous General Mikhail Tukachevsky, who for all his rank, had some amazing misconceptions about conditions in America. Herman related that General Tukachevsky believed: Those who could drive could fly-at least in the States they could-because he figured everybody in the States had both an automobile and an airplane. . . The fellow thought that the entire U.S. was plastered with nothing but skyscrapers, every square foot. 26 This is a very telling anecdote, as American misconceptions of the U.S.S.R. were widely known, but the skewed views the other side held were rarely publicized. In order to bring American methods and ideals into Soviet manufacturing, the Soviets turned directly to the source. The mechanism they used was the trade mission Amtorg, mentioned earlier in this text. The head of Amtorg, Saul Bron, commented that the "Soviets. . . are fully awake to the value of American technology and individual skill." 27 Amtorg dealt with individual Americans workers and with corporations. On the individual level, the Soviets hoped to entice as many workers as they could to leave America. Initially, almost all interested and able parties who made inquiries to Amtorg were hired,
23 Hughes, American Genesis, 251. 24 Margaret Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1992), 114. 25 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 114. 26 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 59. 27 Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia; the Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners 1924 -1937 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 31. 8 regardless of their skills. The Soviet hope was that the presence of Americans would inspire Soviet workers and help raise Soviet factories to American levels of productivity. As the historian Sylvia Margulies commented in her book, Pilgrimage to Russia, these Americans were recruited to fill technological gaps as well as train future generations of Soviet engineers." 28 In the early days, Amtorg frequently promised not only to pay passage to the U.S.S.R., but to do so in part with U.S. currency, valuta, not the Soviet ruble. Amtorg also made large-scale purchases from major corporations. One was Amtorg's deal with Ford. The two sides signed a major contract in May of 1929 in which the Soviets agreed to purchase "$30 million worth of automobiles and parts before 1933 and Ford. . . agreed to furnish technical assistance until 1938" to help build and run an auto plant in Gorky. 29 This contract was in many ways a boon to Ford for it could to tap a potentially gigantic market for automobiles and also to get rid of older equipment from their plant at River Rouge. Historian Mira Wilkins wrote, "Since the company was going to substitute the V-8 for the Model A, it could send the Soviets much of the used equipment that would otherwise have been discarded." 30 And as Herman commented, that to Ford, It didnt matter what the politics were, it only mattered where the marketplace was. 31 The actual construction of the Gorky automobile plant was handled by the Austin Co. of Cleveland, Ohio. The owner, W.J. Austin, commented that by late 1931 the "Russians themselves will manufacture Ford cars and trucks under the supervision of Russian engineers and mechanics who will have been trained in the Ford factories." 32 Training was another aspect of the contract; while the Soviet plant was being built, Soviets would come to Detroit for training.
28 Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 23. 29 Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917- 1930, vol. 1, (Stanford: Stanford University, 1968), 246. 30 Mira Wilkins and Frank Ernest Hill, American Business Abroad (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 223. 31 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 14. 32 Frederick A. Van Fleet "Building a Ford Factory in Russia - an Interview with W.J. Austin," Review of Reviews, 83 January 1931, 45. 9 Of course, the Soviets were importing technology and experts in many fields other than automobile manufacturing. In July 1931 Business Week published a list of forty-four companies, such as RCA, General Electric, Ford, and Sperry Gyroscope, which had "technical assistance contracts" with the Soviet Union. 33 These and other firms had employees scattered throughout the Soviet Union, from Archangel to Irkutsk, working on products ranging from rubber to radios to fertilizer. The magnitude of Soviet purchases in the U.S. is difficult to estimate. Indeed, in July 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, Business Week stated that their statisticians could not figure out, and perhaps would never tabulate, the exact value of Soviet orders which have been brought to the U.S." 34 The Business Week article raises two interesting pointsfirst, the economic benefit to the U.S. of Soviet purchases was seen as being significant, and, second, Soviet business seemed good, even to such a conservative publication. The U.S. government saw Amtorg as a stand-in, in lieu of a formal Soviet Embassy. During that period of non-recognition, American citizens writing to the State Department asking for information about the Soviet Union were given Amtorgs address. 35 So for more than a decade relations between the two countries were conducted through such organizations as Amtorg, and occasionally through such neutral third countries as Switzerland. Several other organizations besides Amtorg fostered trade between the two nations. One was the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, based in New York City. According to Margulies, this group had the backing of the American Communist Party and was responsible for arranging passage for "thousands of Americans." 36 There was also an American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, founded by American businessmen and engineers, who needed aid in
33 "More Than 600 Americans Are Now Working for the Soviets," Business Week , 16 July 1930, 25. 34 "More than 600 Americans, 25. 35 Letter to George W. Johnson, File 361.11/17, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 36 Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 69. 10 dealing with the two governments. 37 The Chamber of Commerce also lobbied for American recognition of the Soviet Union. It is difficult to establish a firm number of people who went from the United States to the U.S.S.R. between the two World Wars. Many of the histories of this time period are confused and conflicting on American immigrants to the Soviet Union. In 1930 the State Department estimated that the total number of Americans in the U.S.S.R. was "between 700 and 1,000" 38 while a 1932 magazine article claimed that the number had "reached nearly 10,000." 39 These figures may reflect a large exodus in 1931, or they may reflect the general imprecision of the data. The confusion about numbers is also revealed by contemporary accounts from the Gorky plant. For example, the historian Nelson Lichtenstein reported that of the 32,000 workers at Gorky, the famous Reuther brothers were two of about "two hundred foreign workers, including about one hundred Americans." 40 Victor Reuther, in his memoirs The Brothers Reuther, stated that of these, "about thirty" were from the Ford Motor Company and "lived in the American Village." 41 However, Victor Herman states at that time there were hundreds of Americans in the American Village, so arriving at an accurate number is very difficult. 42 Perhaps the difference can be explained by the fact that the Reuthers did not arrive at Gorky until late 1933, and it is likely that some Americans had already fulfilled their contracts and gone home, or had been arrested. While an exact number of migrs would be very difficult to derive, one can state with certainty that the flow of Americans to the Soviet Union was a relatively small one, certainly not even close to the scale of what the U.S. experienced at the heights of European immigration.
37 Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 75. 38 Response to Letter of Inquiry of Mr. L. Kraus, File 361.11/4041, Record Group 59. 39 Ruth Kennell and Milly Bennett, "American Immigrants in Russia," 25 American Mercury April 1932, 464. 40 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 37. 41 Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 90. 42 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 89 11 However, most of those who went were in essence hand picked by the Soviets for specific knowledge or skills, and thus had the potential for major impact on the Soviet Union. Two major motivating factors impelled Americans to move to the U.S.S.R., ideology and work. The emphasis placed on each factor shifted over time, for conditions in the U.S. from 1930-1933 were vastly different than those from 1919-1923. Initially, there were the idealists, both white and black, who saw the Soviet Union as a new and appealing social order. In the early twenties, leftist whites wanted to go to the U.S.S.R. to see the great socialist experiment at work, while blacks were impressed with the Soviet claims of being a society free from racial prejudice. 43 Two very ideological views were written by authors who departed in 1932, in the midst of the Depression. The first originated from a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Margaret Wettlin, who stayed in the Soviet Union for almost fifty years. She explained her reasons for going and her initial affection for the Soviets: "I had come to the Soviet Union looking for a better design. . . And I liked the enthusiasm of the builders and their capacity for self-sacrifice in realizing their dream." 44 To Wettlin, it was not the physical conditions that were important, "What mattered was that every person was guaranteed the right to work, to have a vacation, and to be cared for when sick or old. These, for me, were the basic democratic rights." 45 A similar viewpoint was written by John Scott, author of the famous autobiography Behind the Urals, a very insightful look into the Magnitogorsk construction. His reasons for going to Russia were akin to Wettlin's, if more overtly critical of life in the West: Something seemed to be wrong with America. I began to read extensively about the Soviet Union, and gradually came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had found answers to at least some of the questions Americans were asking each other. I decided to go to Russia to work, study, and to lend a
43 Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro - Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1986). 44 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 52. 45 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 121. 12 hand in the construction of a society which seemed to be at least one step ahead of the American. 46 Scott's idealism is striking, obviously at odds with the materialistic U.S. of the Roaring Twenties in which he grew up: "I was going to be one of many who cared not to own a second pair of shoes, but who built blast furnaces which were their own. It was September, 1932, and I was twenty years old." 47 As the Roaring Twenties waned and the Great Depression tightened its grip on America, there was a decided shift in public opinion toward the U.S.S.R. The Soviet claims of guaranteed employment sounded sweet to those standing in American bread lines. As Filene wrote, the liberals "pointedly emphasized that there was no [Soviet] unemployment, and more important, that there was a purpose to the harsh conditions. . . Americans, on the other hand, were suffering simply because their system had broken down and their leaders did not know how to repair it. 48 The desperation of American workers is reflected by the fact that, as the Great Depression snowballed stateside, in 1931 Amtorg had "More than 100,000 appeals for immigration [from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R.] in eight months." 49 However, due to both hard currency and food shortages in the U.S.S.R, Soviet recruitment policy shifted. In earlier days, virtually any American was signed up. Now, the Soviets could afford to pick and choose from the ready supply of skilled workers and specialists. 50 No longer did Amtorg have to provide transportation or make other guarantees, as it had in the early twenties. By this time some Americans had already undergone the Soviet experience, and the reports of those who had returned were less than enthusiastic. However, their opinions did little to deter desperate American workers, and, as Albert Parry commented in Outlook in 1931, in response to queries about the U.S.S.R.:
46 John Scott, Behind the Urals (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942), 3. 47 Scott, Behind the Urals, 5. 48 Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 194. 49 Andrea Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their Experience and Their Legacy," International Labor and Working-Class History, Spring 1988, 41. 50 Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 41. 13 We warn them of hardships in Russia, but they eye us suspiciously and answer that no Russian hardships could possibly be worse than American unemployment, that work at limited rations is better than idleness in a soup line, that it is better to suffer for the good of the socialist ideal than for the greed of the capitalists. Above all, they want work. 51 An interesting sidebar is that the Soviet government did not want active American communists to emigrate. They believed that American communists could do more good by staying home and encouraging others to go. How much recruitment the American Communist Party did is unclear, especially as the Depression deepened and the reasons for going shifted more towards sheer economics. Communist Party member Fred Beal recorded the pithy comment of an unidentified American in 1931, who said to him, "Beal, I don't give a damn about politics. All I want is a job working around machines and three square meals a day." 52 Black Americans were often motivated to go to the U.S.S.R. by the dual inducements of work and lack of prejudice. Oliver Golden's granddaughter, Yelena Khanga, elaborated, "How could a college-educated black man find a job commensurate with his training, when millions of white men were out of work too?" 53 Golden, along with his wife and sixteen others, some of whom he persuaded to join him, sailed for Russia on November 7, 1931, on the S.S. Deutschland. 54 One man in the group, Joseph Roane, wrote that he went because "Amtorg was offering better pay for a month than a lot of people would make in a year during the Depression. Secondly, I was young and I wanted to see the world." 55 Robert Robinson, a black, was offered a contract in April of 1930 to work in the Soviet Union for a year at better than double his wages at Ford. At the time he was earning $140 a month, and was offered, "$259 a month, rent free living quarters, a maid, thirty days paid vacation a year, a car, free passage to and from Russia, and they would deposit $150 out of each
51 Albert Parry, "A Gold Rush to Moscow," Outlook, 15 July 1931, 331. 52 Fred E. Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Moscow 1933, 45. 53 Yelena Khanga and Susan Jacoby, Soul to Soul - A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 74. 54 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 73. 55 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 77. 14 month's paycheck in an American bank." 56 His decision to go was aided by his perception that "America is in the grip of a serious depression and I could be laid off any day at Ford. Judging by all the applicants in the outer room [at Amtorg], white Americans are lining up for this chance. Why not me, too?" 57 Another black, Homer Smith, claimed that "Russia was the only place I could go and escape color discrimination entirely." 58 Besides those people motivated by politics, economics, or race a small number went for other reasons. In 1919 a group of 249 were involuntarily deported from the United States to the U.S.S.R.. One was Emma Goldman, who had been arrested and deported for protesting World War I and survived to write a book critical of her experiences in the U.S.S.R.. 59 A few went on their own, seeking fame and fortune. One among this small group was John Littlepage, who went to the U.S.S.R. in the middle 1920s and wrote of his experiences in a book titled In Search of Soviet Gold. 60 When it suited their purposes, the Soviet government invited certain Americans to visit, and often treated these guests with special care. For example, Margaret Bourke-White, a renowned photographer, went in 1930 "to photograph the vast new industry which is being built under the Five Year Plan." 61 The Soviet government was impressed with her and her work, as: They consider the artist an important factor in the Five Year Plan, and the photographer the artist of the machine age. It is for the artist to stir the imagination of the people with the grandeur of the industrial program. Thus I had come to a country where an industrial photographer is accorded the rank of artist and prophet. 62
56 Robert Robinson, Black on Red My: 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, Ltd., 1988), 29. 57 Robinson, Black on Red, 29. 58 Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoir (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1964), 1. 59 Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), v. 60 John Littlepage and Demaree Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold (New York: Arno Press, 1970). 61 Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 12. 62 Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia, 42. 15 With this reception, and the desire for good publicity, she was given "papers [which] conferred the most astounding privileges. Inasmuch as I was commissioned by the Soviet Government to take these industrial photographs, all Soviet citizens that I called upon were requested to help me with my work." 63 Even so, she was glad to have followed the instructions of a U.S. journalist who had advised her to ". . . buy a cheap trunk and fill it with canned food. That is not advice. It is an order!" 64 Her travels took her through various textile and rolling mills, and through the huge dam, Dneprostroi, and Tractorstroi, the famous tractor plant. It seems exceptional that she was not only allowed to photograph such installations, but strongly encouraged to do so. At least it seems so in relation to the comments of a tourist, Harry Franck, traveling about five years later: The photography rules in the Soviet Union are puzzling to any one and burdensome to those of us who like to give concrete illustrations of our impressions and comments. You must not photograph a bridge, a railway train, a soldier or soldiers, or anything military or pertaining to aviation. . . You must not photograph a queue, particularly a bread-line, or anything that will give the outside world visual proof that your written observations on the low standard of living and kindred sore points with the Soviet authorities are true. 65 Of course, Bourke-White was showing only the positive aspects of the Soviet Union, and authorities examined her work before she left. Her purpose was to glorify Soviet industry, not reveal life on the street. Also, conditions between 1930 and 1935 were quite different. In 1935 the purges were underway, and Hitler had risen to power in Germany. Bourke-White left with a mixed opinion of Soviet Union, loving the people and progress but bemoaning the shortages she had found. But the majority of the migrs went to work, and their experiences were typified by the Herman family, which had left Detroit en route to Gorky in 1931. The autobiography, Coming Out of the Ice, written by Victor Herman, who was seventeen when his family went to Russia, is a very powerful work, and proved invaluable as a primary source in this study.
63 Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia, 74. 64 Bourke-White, Eyes On Russia, 31. 65 Harry A. Franck, A Vagabond in Sovietland - America's Perennial Rambler Goes Tourist (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935), 92. 16 Victor's father, Sam, "was a laborer, a Socialist, a unionist. My mother was these things too." 66 Sam had worked for Ford, but had been blacklisted for organizing unions in 1929. This status changed in 1930 when "He started doing something [at] Ford's. . . There were Russians at Ford's and he was helping the Americans talk to the Russians and the Russians talk to the Americans." 67 Sam, fluent in both languages, may have helped negotiate the contract between Ford and the Russians that was mentioned earlier. A number of Ford workers signed contracts to set up a Russian version of the famed River Rouge plant in Gorky. 68 Among these workers was Victor's father, and Victor recounted that Sam: Saw it that he was doing something for the good of the world. Making Russia strong meant making Socialism work, and that was for the good of everyone everywhere--because didn't that mean there would be more fairness for everyone and the good life for all? 69 In all, Herman notes that some 300 families from in and around Detroit were to go to Gorky. 70 In summary, some Americans went to the Soviet Union out of curiosity, some for adventure, some because they admired the ideals espoused (if not practiced) by the Soviet regime, but the vast majority went for that most basic of human needs, work and its rewards. As the next chapter will demonstrate, finding those rewards, fulfilling those dreams, was difficult indeed.
66 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 6. 67 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 14. 68 Hughes, American Genesis, 276. 69 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 14. 70 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 26. 17 CHAPTER THREE AMERICAN EXPERIENCES IN THE U.S.S.R. The information that potential migrs had about the Soviet Union was often inaccurate and incomplete, or it was disregarded by desperate people eager for productive employment. Therefore, it is appropriate now to examine conditions and policies within the Soviet Union and the realities that awaited Americans who went there between the great wars. As with American views of the Soviet Union, Soviet views on its American guests were subject to alteration over time. At first, when the U.S.S.R. was eager to establish modern industrial facilities and to create a skilled workforce, their policy was to recruit foreign workers actively. The value they placed on such workers was illustrated by William Henry Chamberlin, an American reporter in the U.S.S.R, who wrote that "It is one of the many amusing inconsistencies of Russian life that while the Soviet Government, in principle, is strongly opposed to any form of extraterritorial privileges, it actually concedes, in fact if not in name, an extraterritorial status to foreigners resident in the country. 71 This was at least true of those Americans who retained their U.S. passports. However, as Soviet paranoia of foreigners grew, the passport question became a critical issue. Once an American was in the Soviet Union, his or her citizenship status was closely monitored by the Soviet authorities. It was Soviet policy to regard any former Russian/Soviet citizen who returned to the Soviet Union as a citizen, regardless of any other citizenship the person might have acquired while abroad. Indeed, the only way for such an individual to lose Soviet citizenship was to "be allowed to renounce Soviet citizenship" by permission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R., according to
71 William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1934), 169. 18 U.S. State Department documents. 72 Therefore, any former citizen who returned was subject to Soviet laws, with no protection at all afforded by their American status, especially as the U.S. did not have an embassy there until 1933. Many migrs fell into this category, and historian Sylvia Margulies commented that many Russian-born American citizens went to work in the U.S.S.R. because of their . . . sentimental attachment. 73 Homesickness, especially when combined with the possibility that all the old abuses under the Czars had been swept away, and with Russia perhaps emerging as a fresh, powerful nation - it is easy to see how compelling a lure that combination could be. Certainly the State Department was aware of this policy on citizenship, as evidenced by Chief of Eastern European Affairs Robert Kelly who wrote in a January 1930 memo, "Persons formerly a Russian National. . . [are] considered by Soviet authorities as a citizen of Russia." 74 There is no way to tell how many immigrants knew these facts, but most likely they were unaware of them, unless they had asked precisely the right questions of Amtorg or the State Department before leaving America. Americans whose passports expired while in the Soviet Union before 1933 were at great risk, since there was no U.S. embassy in the U.S.S.R. at which to renew it. A returning American Finn, Wilho Kuust, who spent eighteen months in the U.S.S.R., told the State Department that it was "an accepted fact that any American who stayed in the U.S.S.R. would, if his passport expired, be obliged within a short time to become a Soviet citizen." 75 To do this was to invite disaster, and minimized the chances of ever returning to America. Those Americans who wished to extend their stay in the U.S.S.R. had to travel out of the country to renew their American passport, then reapply for Soviet visas in order to return. However, there was another way by which Americans could stay longer in the U.S.S.R., as
72 Memorandum to Sec. of State on Conditions in Soviet Union, File 361.00/4, Record Group 59. 73 Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 23. 74 Response to Letter of Inquiry of Mr. Kinsel, File 361.11/4034, Record Group 59. 75 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Kuust, File 861.5017/679, Record Group 59. 19 many did because of the continuing depression at home, and that was to exchange their American for a Soviet passport voluntarily. The Soviets kept a tight rein on their citizens indeed. Chamberlin commented on the difference vis a vis America and the Soviet Union: The unemployed American or Englishman who wants to go to Russia encounters no objection on the part of his own government. The Soviet Government, on the other hand, is most rigorous in holding its own citizens within the country, especially if it suspects that their sentiments are not enthusiastic. 76 And as time went by, and the great purges began to sweep the Soviet landscape, the importance of foreign workers lessened, so that even they, non-Soviet citizens, had difficulty leaving the country. The American workers selected to go to Russia naturally had high expectations, as American industry was eliminating skilled positions as fast it could, while the Soviet Union was expanding its industrial base. In general, however, the receptions and conditions the Americans found overseas were rarely what they expected. Because of their foreign status and skill level, while in Russia these workers had access to better food and housing than the natives. Even so, these were usually far below American standards. Victor Reuther commented that, "we got used to the diet, though each of us lost twenty pounds." 77 As Dr. William Robinson, a tourist, commented, "People cannot forever live like half-starved animals on the hope in that a few years everything will be better. A corpse is indifferent to improved conditions. 78 In November, 1932, Zara Witkin, an engineer, wrote that "Living conditions by this time
76 Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 195. 77 Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 94. 20 began to slide downward so rapidly that many foreigners found it intolerable to remain." 79 William Henry Chamberlin, the Christian Science Monitor reporter, wrote that the "Standard of living of the workers and employees declined to a point where many of them are on or below the living standards of British or American unemployed." 80 Peter Sutherland, a United Fruit Company worker, commented upon his return in 1930 that "Sanitation did not exist outside of Moscow and Leningrad." 81 New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote of a typhus outbreak in the Stalingrad Tractor Factory involving sixteen cases of typhoid among the American workers, two of whom died. 82 This problem apparently continued, for Ignatz Rusek, a U.S. engineer who returned in late 1931, told the State Department that "seven Americans have died from typhoid in the past two months." 83 Only the very highest level American overseers enjoyed a lifestyle equivalent to that in America. Two notable examples of this exception were Col. Hugh Cooper, who oversaw construction of the Dneprostroi dam, and the architect Albert Kahn, who designed over five hundred factories for the Soviets, including the auto works at Gorky and Tractorstroi at Stalingrad. 84
78 William J. Robinson, Soviet Russia As I Saw It - Its Accomplishments, Its Crimes and Stupidities (New York: The International Press, 1932), 156. 79 Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia, 124. 80 Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 7. 81 "Says Soviets Hold Americans Slaves," New York Times, 28 September 1930, sec 1, 20. 82 Walter Duranty, "Soviets Seek to Speed Tractor Production," New York Times, 7 November 1930, 9. 83 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Rusek, File 361.11/143, Record Group 59. 84 Grant Hildebrand, Designing for Industry: the Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1974), 129. Hughes, American Genesis, 266. 21 On first reaching Leningrad in 1920, Emma Goldman found the city "almost in ruins" peopled by "emaciated and frostbitten men, women, and children." 85 By contrast, she found Moscow to have "Life, motion, and movement." 86 This difference between the two cities was remarked on by the American reporter Harrison Salisbury in his book American in Russia. A Russian he met commented on Leningrad's lack of materials: They do not like us in Moscow, he said. We are the window on the West, yes? That is what Peter [the Great] said. Peter wanted a window on the west. But, perhaps, now a window is not wanted. Sometimes things can be seen from a window which it is better not to see. 87 In 1930 in Leningrad, Robert Robinson commented that, "I didn't see any jewelry at all. . . The clothing was so ill-fitting, they could hardly have looked worse in potato sacks." 88 Wandering through Leningrad, he found the "shelves were bare" and he "got the sense that Russia was a poor, struggling country." 89 When Margaret Wettlin reached Moscow a few years later, she noticed that "Jewelry was taboo. Jewelry was bourgeois. And by this time most of it had been exchanged for food coupons in the Torgsin (Foreign Trade) stores operating on a gold and foreign currency basis, for food was scarce in Moscow." 90 A tourist, Harry Franck, provided some interesting commentary, describing how "On the street true communism reigns, every man--and woman--for himself, and starvation catch[es] the hindmost." 91 On the never-ending queues for bread or any supplies, he noted that "The dead must give up their bread-cards before they can be buried. . . It seems rather a pity that Intourist [Soviet Tourist Agency] deprives its
85 Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 8. 86 Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 22. 87 Harrison Salisbury, An American in Russia (New York: Harper, 1955), 61. 88 Robinson, Black on Red, 38. 89 Robinson, Black on Red, 44. 90 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 8. 91 Franck, Vagabond, 59. 22 'guests' of the national experience of standing in line for their bread." 92 He also wondered about the government's claim that property was common to all; "Property comes first in the U.S.S.R. too, just as in capitalistic countries. If people die in accomplishing the building program laid out by the government, what matter, so long as the buildings are built?" 93 Even with these shortages, it was a time of expansion in the Soviet Union. Chamberlin reflectively wrote that: I have lived in the Soviet Union during one of its most dynamic periods, during the first years of its Iron Age, when a single year sometimes seemed to crowd in as many events as a decade of life in other countries. I have seen some of the greatest triumphs of the Iron Age in terms of steel and concrete and witnessed some of its greatest tragedies in terms of human beings. 94 Victor Herman's first impressions on arriving in 1931 were anything but positive, "Oh, I quickly got over my boy's anticipation of bears and lions and tigers. How could anything as colorful as those animals live in a land as drab as this? Only people could." 95 It is interesting how almost those exact same dreamy words were echoed, this time in a more positive manner, by a Quaker doctor, Harry Timbres, who came to Russia in 1936 to combat malaria, "The country is wild--forests, bears, wolves, wallaboos, and unicorns. Hotcha!" 96 Upon reaching Gorky, the Americans found living and working conditions were extremely primitive in comparison with life in Detroit. All the Americans lived in the "American Village [which] was situated two miles away from the factory -- a settlement of one and two-story buildings made out of wood, plywood, and mud." 97 The Herman family received a little more space than most did, with two rooms to their credit, as they contributed three workers to the plant.
92 Franck, Vagabond, 171. 93 Franck, Vagabond, 240. 94 Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 17. 95 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 37. 96 Harry and Rebecca Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia - A Quaker Family in Soviet Russia, (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1939), 42. 97 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 38. 23 There were certainly profound social differences between the two countries. With the Soviet ban on religion, formalizing relationships was much more casual than in America. The red tape the Soviet Union was famed for apparently did not apply to weddings and divorces, for John Scott wrote of his marriage to a Soviet woman: When our turn came, we signed our name in a registration book, I produced three rubles, and we received a rough wrapping paper which had been mimeographed into a marriage-license blank, which declared us man and wife until or unless either of us should go to some ZAGS (Bureau of Civil Acts) anywhere in the Soviet Union and pay three rubles for a divorce. 98 Franck seemed to admire the Soviet Union for its stance on sexual relations. He commented that: The Soviet Republic is a very materialistic civilization that faces facts without blushing. It openly recognizes the fact that boys and girls from their later teens onward take pleasure in sleeping together. Its attitude is Go ahead and have your fun. You will only be young once. If you want a child, all right. If not, it is your unalienable right to have an abortion, at the expense of the State. It makes no particular difference whether you are married or not; there are no bastards in the Soviet Union. 99 This statement is contradicted by what the Timbres (Quaker workers) found in 1936: The law abolishing abortions except in case of absolute danger to health and inherited disease has been issued. Russia is now like most other countries in that respect. . . There is little doubt that the majority of the people were in favor of it. 100 Of course, a year had passed between these two observations, and "A year or so is about as long as facts stay facts in present day Russia" as Franck cynically noted. 101 Even so, that does seem to be quite a swing in morality. However, Franck's cynicism remained intact as he wondered "Why [have] marriage at all? There is no illegitimacy in the U.S.S.R., not much of anything to inherit, no public opinion worth worrying about against irregular unions." 102 As religion was illegal, marriage was merely a matter of paperwork. Coming back to the Timbres' more recent observations, a young Russian male told them:
98 Scott, Behind the Urals, 124. 99 Franck, Vagabond, 135. 100 Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia, 20. 101 Franck, Vagabond, 17. 102 Franck, Vagabond, 68. 24 You just go to the ZAGS. . .,' Up to now either party can go alone to the bureau and get a divorce, and the notification will be sent to the absent member. But when the new Constitution goes into effect, both parties will have to appear together. 103 Reducing relationships to paperwork or no, the reporter Salisbury commented that: The plain truth was that the Party had never devised a means of replacing the church in those great hours of a man's life-birth, marriage, and death. The ZAGS office would never be a substitute for the marriage crowns of the Orthodox faith nor would the Party orator find words more comforting that the benediction of the priest. 104 Concerning religion, Chamberlin commented that, "It is ironically curious to see mystical tendencies of older religions reproducing themselves in the new faith of Communism." 105 This point is elaborated on by Franck: Substitution is always easier than elimination, and just as the early Christian Church substituted a new saint for an old pagan deity, usually on the same altar and with the same functions, so the likeness of Lenin seems to take the place of the outlawed ikon. 106 In the Soviet Union, unlike America at that time, many women worked outside the home. According to Scott, "In many jobs. . . where reliability, dexterity, and consistency were required. . . women largely replaced men in Magnitogorsk." 107 Victor Herman wrote that "There was nothing soft or light in those Russian girls I saw - and they did not want there to be. What they wanted was to work as a man worked, to dig a hole if he dug one, or lift a load if that's what he did." 108 Another major difference between the two countries was the absolute power of the Soviet state and the capricious way in which it treated its citizens under the law. While not every American immigrant was subjected to the Soviet prison camp system, sooner or later all
103 Timbres, We Didn't Ask Utopia, 91. 104 Salisbury, Russia's Iron Age, 304. 105 Chamberlin, Iron Age, 19. 106 Franck, Vagabond, 246. 107 Scott, Behind the Urals, 144. 108 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 67. 25 of the immigrants, and most of the tourists, learned of its existence, and feared it. Even the most casual observers noted the ubiquitous presence of the security forces that served the state and acted mainly to provide inmates for the camp system. The communists were not the first to imprison political enemies in Russia, as the Tsars had established that practice centuries before. The communists, however, substantially expanded the numbers of prisoners, and increased the utility such unfortunates could have for the state. The prison camps became not only places in which to house prisoners, but were in essence work units whose output, such as timber and ores, enriched the state. Perhaps the most famous work about the camps is Aleksandr Solzhenitysn's massive three-volume Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag details the overall history of prisons and camps, the evolution of the security services that maintained it, and tells the author's own story of his long imprisonment. The title itself is a central metaphor of the trilogy, archipelago, of course, meaning a scattering of islands, the title reflecting the scattering of prison islands within the mainland of the Soviet Union. His writing style is lively and evocative, and so is used here, but scholars dispute his figures. Details of the oppressive power of the State, and of the camp system, will be expanded later in this paper. The American workers who went to the Soviet Union certainly helped raise Soviet technological levels, but very few found working conditions satisfactory. Complaints about both bureaucratic red tape and factory floor inefficiency were prevalent in the American experience. Many Americans became frustrated with the lack of Soviet workmanship and cooperation, for many Soviet workers were ill-trained and ill-disposed to learn from their American mentors. The Soviet government was aware of these difficulties, and in the newspaper Za Industrialitatsiu reported that after three months of foreigners working there [at the Stalingrad Tractor Works] the "results [were] still negligible." 109
109 Letter from F.W.B. Coleman [Consular officer, Riga, Latvia] to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045, Record Group 59. 26 The Soviet government directly blamed the native factory workers for their lack of progress, noting that "The fundamental cause is a lack of ability and a lack of desire to work with the Americans." 110 Emma Goldman commented that "Russian workers resented the eagerness and intensity" of Americans. 111 She quoted Russian workers as saying, "Wait till you have starved as long as we. . . [then] we will see if you are so eager." 112 One positive Soviet voice came from an engineer at Magnitogorsk, who reported that Americans knew an awful lotdespite the fact they were in English. . . we preferred the American drawings to our Russian ones. 113 However, as an educated individual he was an exception in refraining from the contempt many of the common workers held. One especially useful source on American/Soviet worker relations was written by Fred Beal, an American Communist Party member who fled to the Soviet Union while out on bail for plotting to "overthrow the state of Michigan" in 1929. 114 He found productive work as a foreman in the Kharkov Tractor Plant. As Beal described the Soviets dilemma at his plant, there were not enough skilled natives to "raise the skill of 22,000 workers" so the "Soviet Government contracted for a number of foreign workers and specialists to bring their experiences and skill to the Soviet Union." 115 He reported the arrival of Americans in November 1930, of Czechs in July 1931, and Germans "from time to time." 116 Beal judged that of the three foreign groups "Americans are the most backward politically." 117 One gets the feeling that he personally would have gone anyway, trial or not, from his comment that the "Soviet factory is remolding the human race, foreign as well as Russian." 118
110 Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045, Record Group 59. 111 Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 39. 112 Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 39. 113 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 413. 114 Fred E. Beal. Proletarian Journey - New England Gastonia Moscow (New York: Hillman-Curl, Inc. 1937), 213. 115 Beal "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant," 16. 116 Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 16. 117 Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 44. 118 Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 17. 27 Communist ideologue or not, Beal recognized that life in the Soviet Union was not perfect. The Americans, and presumably the other foreign groups, expected that their expertise would be fully utilized, but that was not always the case. Beal related that the "'BRIZ' [Bureau of Worker's Inventions] was often one of the sore spots among foreigners." 119 The BRIZ was where workers could make suggestions, and be compensated for their ideas. A BRIZ report from April 1933 stated that "119 foreigners made 561 suggestions, 111 accepted, 109 to be looked over and acted upon; 341 rejected; 59,556 rubles economized. Premiums given - 7,966." 120 Obviously the workers believed that more of their suggestions had merit than they were compensated for. One can also speculate that jealousy may have arisen between the more technologically sophisticated foreign workers and the native workforce regarding the numbers of suggestions made. The lack of productive interaction among workers was commented upon in the newspaper Za Industrialitatsiu, which reported that "In the various departments and workshops of the plant the Americans very often worked quite isolated from the Russians. There were found zealots of Russian 'universalism' and 'omniscience', who openly preached the idea that the Americans were not at all necessary to the factory." 121 So it is clear that while the Soviet state eagerly sought skilled foreign workers, the productive integration of these workers on the shop floor was sorely lacking. While the relations between Soviet and American workers were often strained, the Soviet state sought and Soviet workers in general accepted American blacks with no open hostility. Unfortunately, there was a famous case of overt aggression between American workers of different races at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. There, a black machinist from Ford, Robert Robinson, could not escape the effects of American racism. He became a cause celebre at
119 Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 36. 120 Beal, "Foreign Workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant" 36. 121 Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045. 28 the plant, and, indeed, throughout the country after he was assaulted by two white American workers named Lewis (Louis) and Brown. According to Robinson, Brown threatened him, saying "You have twenty-four hours to leave this place, or you'll be sorry." 122 The two men then attacked him, and a furious fight ensued. 123 The attack was reported by New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who took his facts from the Soviet newspaper, Trud, "A reactionary group among the 300 American engineers and mechanics in the tractor plant [Stalingrad] beat up a Negro and threw him out of the mess hall for the unique reason that he is a Negro." 124 The Soviet police interviewed Robinson, but he was not politically astute. He later wrote that he "Had no idea the possibilities that this incident offered. . . I did not know what opportunity I, a black man, represented to the Soviets. 125 When he went to work the next day many of his comrades viewed him as a hero." 126 Four days after the incident there was a massive demonstration in front of the plant, with speeches against racism and a resolution "calling for punishment" passed by the roaring crowd. 127 The Soviet newspaper, Trud, gave the text of the resolution in which the Soviet workers stated, "We will not allow the ways of the 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." 128 A few days later some of the Americans at Stalingrad got on the bandwagon, as Pravda reported that the "Committee of American Colony. . . passed a resolution condemning the criminal acts." 129
122 Robinson, Black on Red, 66. 123 Robinson, Black on Red, 67. 124 Walter Duranty, "Americans Essay Color Bar in Soviet," New York Times, 10 August 1930, 9. 125 Robinson, Black on Red, 68. 126 Robinson, Black on Red, 68. 127 Robinson, Black on Red, 68. 128 Duranty, "Americans Essay Color Bar in Soviet," 9. 129 Letter from F.W.B. Coleman to Sec. Of State, File 361.11/4045, Record Group 59. 29 A week after the assault, a formal trial began. Robinson was displeased by this, but felt he had to cooperate with the Soviets else "they could ship me back home" to the Great Depression. 130 There was no jury at the trial, and the judge ordered both men deported immediately. An appeal to a higher court allowed Brown to finish his contract, but Louis was sent home. 131 After the trial, Robinson "was now an even greater hero to the Russians. I represented good conquering evil." 132 The historian Allison Blakely, in his book Russia and the Negro, stated that the Soviets used the incident like as another version of the infamous Moscow "show trials" to improve their standing in the eyes of the emerging African states, to "glorify the Soviet attitude against racism." 133 For his part, Robinson had no desire to be a hero as he wrote that he just "wanted to be productive, and it was also the best way to avoid getting trapped by social and political problems." 134 The most famous transfer of American technologythe recreation at Gorky of the Ford River Rouge facilitywas far from a major success. In fact, the Americans found the factory to be a shoddy version of its famous model, and Victor Herman assessed it as "pretty much a matter of chaos." 135 Hermans opinion was echoed by the brothers Reuther, who were "appalled at the chaos and inefficiency of the factory itself." 136 Despite the difficulties the Gorky production line, at a slow and laborious pace, eventually began to produce a limited number of cars and trucks. While Americans found this output laughable compared to Ford, the Soviets celebrated the results. So proud were they of their accomplishment that thirteen trucks and three cars produced by the plant were taken to Moscow for a parade, with one of the vehicles being driven by Victor Herman. Herman reported that "there was hardly even any cheering, people were so moved by what they saw. They wept
130 Robinson, Black on Red, 70. 131 Robinson, Black on Red, 68. 132 Robinson, Black on Red, 71. 133 Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 126. 134 Robinson, Black on Red, 75. 135 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 47. 136 Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man, 41. 30 openly--it seems incredible to me now--men and women crying to see the things that Russia had produced." 137 At a dinner afterwards, Stalin himself made a brief appearance and "ended by exhorting everyone to try harder, produce more, give it all you've got. I almost had to laugh. Did the man have any notion of what working in that plant was like?" 138 Not all the Americans at Gorky worked directly in the factory. Margaret Wettlin was there, and the job the Soviets gave her was not exactly what she had hoped for. She described the job she was given, as a teacher for the children of Ford engineers and workers there on contract. 139 She was initially disgruntled with the job, having preferred to be with and teach Soviets. She wrote, "I'm not really interested in meeting all these Americans. That's not what I came to Russia for." 140 With her inclination to avoid Americans, she spent as much time as she could befriending Soviets. She found "These men and their wives at Autozavod as true heroes." 141 Andrew Smith, one-time member of the American Communist Party, worked for a while in Russia. His experiences disenchanted him to the point where he wrote home to head of Slovak Workers Society that "You should warn every worker. . . not to come. 142 An example of what distressed him on the factory floor was the misapplication of Taylorism. For example, he noticed a Soviet lathe operator cutting a piece of steel ten millimeters at a time instead of five millimeters, which was a safe level for that machine. When Smith asked why the man was taking so deep a cut, the response was "How can I make my quota if I take a five millimeter cut? I must do this job in twenty minutes in order to meet requirements." 143 At that pace the man would succeed, but at the cost of ruining the machine very quickly.
137 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 51. 138 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 56. 139 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 6. 140 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 58. 141 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 71. 142 Andrew Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1936), 60. 143 Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker, 64. 31 The gold miner, John Littlepage, found his fellow employees unsettling at best, as Forced labor mixes up murderers, thieves, and other ordinary criminals with such groups as kulaks, whose offence was of a different nature. 144 As for the Soviet engineers, he found them limited by their government, noting that, as an American, I am not compelled or expected to do many of the things which Soviet engineers have to do, and which cut down their efficiency to a fraction. 145 The engineer, Zara Witkin, had a variety of working experiences. Interviewed by the State Department upon leaving the U.S.S.R. in 1933, it was noted that he "does not have a high opinion of the ordinary Soviet construction job." 146 While in the Soviet Union, he wrote home that "There was no precedent for rejection of poor workmanship, so accustomed had everyone become to bad quality and low standards." 147 Witkin got so fed up with the ineptitude that he went to work for the OGPU [i.e., the Secret Police] since, as he wrote, "They can get things done" insofar as far as acquiring supplies and better workers. 148 Negative comments about Soviet methods and habits were common in many State Department exit interviews. Jacob A. Munkens, who spent two years at the Moscow Tractorstroi stated "The pace. . . was terrific but characterized by lost motion to a great degree." 149 Louis Gephardt, who spent eighteen months abroad working for Koppers Construction Co., said that he believed that foreigners had unusual privileges and special treatment" and "have been full of complaints and exceedingly dissatisfied." 150 T.F. Collins, who spent three years as a miner in Armenia and Siberia "made the usual complaints about the inefficiency of the Russian mining
144 Littlepage, In Search of Soviet Gold, 81. 145 Littlepage, In Search of Soviet Gold, 215. 146 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Witkin, File 861.5017/737, Record Group 59. 147 Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia, 185. 148 Gelb, ed. An American Engineer in Stalins Russia, 240. 149 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Munkens, File 861.5017/148, Record Group 59. 150 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Gephardt, File 861.5017/569, Record Group 59. 32 administration, and their unwillingness to take responsibility." 151 On returning to America, Thomas J. Burke of Freyn Steel Mills commented of the Soviets that "The reason that they employ dumb men is that they are afraid of the smart ones." 152 Although the Soviet Union did manage to become an industrial power, it was at a slow pace and tremendous cost. William Henry Chamberlin quoted an American engineer as saying, "I don't believe any honest foreign engineer could do anything but laugh at the idea of this country ever really becoming industrialized." 153 The importation of American technology and workers by the Soviets was never the triumph that all parties had expected. The Americans found physical conditions, both at home and at work, far more primitive than in the United States, and their skills and work habits were seldom properly used on the shop floor. The Americans had to be very cautious, lest they endanger the native co-workers. As the engineer Walter Rukeyser wrote, Americans there have the responsibility of knowing that his every word, every gesture if adverse, may and usually does result in disaster to some Russian. 154 The slowness with which the Soviets Americanized their industrial base was probably the result of the vast cultural gap between the two nations. The Americans came from a highly-industrialized, extremely productive factory environment, while the Soviet workers and management were struggling to throw off the bonds of feudal serfdom. In retrospect, it is not surprising that progress was slow and costly. However, the bottom line was that the Americans did make a difference. New manufacturing facilities were established, and new ways of working were slowly diffused into the Soviet workforce and bureaucracy. And many of the facilities the Americans helped establish could serve both a civilian and a military purpose. Victor Reuther noted that the Gorky plant
151 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Collins, File 861.5017/333, Record Group 59. 152 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Burke, File 861.5017/333, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 153 Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 60. 154 Walter A. Rukeyser, Working for the Soviets; an American Engineer in Russia, (New York: Covici-Friede, 1932), 58. 33 was . . . . tooled and geared to produce tanks, gun carriages, airplane parts, and the like. 155 John Scott describes Magnitogorsk as being part of "The creation of a heavy industry base in the Urals and Siberia out of reach of any invader, and capable of supplying the country with arms and machines in immense quantities." 156 William Henry Chamberlin, while touring the country, made a similar observation, "From the military standpoint, therefore, these new factories, each of which, incidentally, possesses definite potential war utility, are almost impregnable and are secure against hostile air raids. 157 Scott wrote of the conditions of building these factories as being analogous to life in wartime, "The people have been sweating, shedding blood and tears. People were wounded and killed, women and children froze to death, millions starved, thousands were court-martialed and shot in the campaigns of collectivization and industrialization." 158 Thus, the factories that American industry and American labor helped establish gave the young Soviet state the ability to mass-produce the weapons of modern warfare. This manufacturing base, safe behind the Urals played an important role in the Soviet ability to withstand the German onslaught, and eventually turn the tide during World War II. While the impact of the Americans upon Soviet manufacturing was never as great as either side might have wished, the impact of the Soviet state upon Americans was, in many cases, devastating. The Americans had gone to the Soviet Union brimming with hope and enthusiasm, yet very few of them realized their dreams there, or even came close to doing so. The vast majority had their dreams quashed by a monolithic bureaucracy, a far cry from the communist and socialist ideals they had expected to find. And, ironically, it was the idealists who often found themselves in the deepest bind, for it was easy for the Soviets to talk them into giving up their foreign passports, after which they were "easy prey for the NKVD." 159
155 Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 102. 156 Scott, Behind the Urals, 63. 157 Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, 47. 158 Scott, Behind the Urals, 5. 159 Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 48. 34 It is true that many Americans went to the Soviet Union, worked productively for a term, usually one to three years, and then returned to the United States. That was what the workers expected when they had signed on with Amtorg. However, grim reality, in the form of the brutal purges that swept the country and affected both citizens and foreign nationals, was what many Americans faced in the Soviet Union. Here, finally, was the equality that the Soviet state trumpeted far and wide, the equality not of production and reward but rather of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, slave labor in the camps, or execution. After World War II began, hardly any Americans managed to leave the Soviet Union, even though the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact kept the Soviet Union out of the initial stages of the war. Only a few lucky Americans managed to survive in the Soviet Union until the war ended, and fewer still made it home after the war. The historian Andrea Graziosi commented that those foreigners who stayed past 1933-34, Americans and other nationalities alike, mostly "disappeared." 160 So oppressive did the Soviet state become that American workers at Gorky were told in 1934 that anyone writing a letter home, or receiving one from the States, would be sent to prison for ten years. 161 Government action could be swift and unexpected, as Khanga reported that of the group her grandfather came with, ". . . [any] non-Soviet citizen in the group was ordered to leave the country, sometimes on forty-eight hours notice, unless he was willing to give up his American citizenship on the spot." 162 Some of the men did go home, leaving behind Russian wives and children. Khanga states that "When the women tried to reestablish contact with their husbands in the United States, Soviet authorities told them the men had been arrested upon their return and died in American prisons." 163 Just as there are no reliable figures on the number of Americans who went to work in the Soviet Union, there are no firm numbers as to how many fell victim to the purges. However,
160 Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 47. 161 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 84. 162 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 91. 163 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 92. 35 historian Adam Hochschild has done some very useful work in this area. While in the KGB archives, he estimated that the KGB had files on several thousand Stalin-era American victims. 164 Of the few random files he was allowed to examine, it seemed that none of the prisoners was at all prominent but still the prison bureaucracy tracked them, one file being fifty- four pages long. 165 As the mills and mines came on line, and as Soviet paranoia increased under Stalin, the usefulness of the foreigners began to decline. At Magnitogorsk John Scott wrote that: Up until 1934-35 the Soviet workers were urged by consistent propaganda to learn from the foreigners; to master German and American technique. . . This was the background for the reaction which came with such force in 1936 and 1937, when foreigners were dismissed, demoted, publicly discredited, sent home, sometimes arrested. 166 The State Department had a very skewed view of what was happening to Americans inside the Soviet Union. Some of this blindness may be forgiven, since there was no U.S. Embassy there until 1933. There is a fascinating document written on October 20, 1933, from the newly established U.S. Embassy, which demonstrates the limitations on U.S. power in the Soviet Union, even with official relations established. Entitled "Memoranda on Problems Pertaining to Russian-American Relations" it pointed out that "No treaty principles have been devised which seriously limit the power of Soviet authorities to deal just about as they please with foreigners or travelers. . . [the American] specialists are useful, but nothing protects them" not even their own embassy! 167 The memorandum cynically concluded that "Foreigners will receive good treatment whenever it is to the political advantage of the Soviet State." 168 The Embassy was obviously aware that it was essentially powerless, but did not seem to realize all the strictures of the Soviet system. For example, in the February 28, 1935 Moscow
164 Adam Hochschild, Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (New York: Viking, 1994), 156. 165 Hochschild, Unquiet Ghost, 160. 166 Scott, Behind the Urals, 91. 167 Memoranda on Problems Pertaining to Russian-American Relations, File 861.5017/784, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 168 Memoranda on Problems Pertaining to Russian-American Relations, File 861.5017/784, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 36 Daily News, the Embassy printed an announcement that "All American citizens. . . are required to register their passports" at the Embassy. 169 This order, while seemingly reasonable, is nonsensical in light of the extreme difficulties in traveling within the U.S.S.R., given the poor infrastructure and the necessity of getting the bureaucracys permission in order to travel. On the other hand, the next few comments came from Loy Henderson, Charge d'affaires, Moscow in 1937, four years after formal relations had been established. In September 1937 he wrote to the Secretary of State that "Fortunately thus far during the purge, no American citizens have been arrested." 170 This statement is directly contradicted by the historian Roy Medvedev, who wrote that "Some specialists, who under various agreements during the first five year plan had come to the Soviet Union with their families, stayed on. In 1937-1938 many of them were arrested, as were members of their families." 171 However, Henderson did admit that "Position of foreigners in Soviet Union is becoming increasingly difficult as the result of a violent anti-foreigners campaign." 172 The precept of a Soviet state based on the ideal of all workers being empowered and equal was under assault from the very first days of the Revolution. Unfortunately, the power of the Soviet state, and the horror it subjected its people to, became the norm throughout society. As Solzhenitsyn commented, tell me--what bad is there that one cannot teach a nation? Or people? Or all humanity?" 173 Soviet citizens, indeed, anyone within their borders, could be arrested with no knowledge of the charges against them. They could be detained without habeas corpus, and they were often sentenced without a formal hearing. This capricious process served dual
169 Memorandum on Passport Registration, File 361.00/11, Record Group 59 National Archives, College Park, MD. 170 Letter to Sec. Of State from Loy Henderson File 361.00/19, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 171 Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge - The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 436. 172 Developments Affecting the Position of Foreigners in the Soviet Union, Letter to Sec. of State from Loy Henderson, File 361.00/11, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD. 173 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, vol. III-IV, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 562.. 37 functionsit gave the State absolute control over enemies real and perceived, and it made a large workforce instantly available for a long period of slave labor. A ten-year sentence was so common it was known as a tenner. Indeed, a bitter anecdote came from a prisoner talking with a guard - "What is your sentence?" asked the guard. "Twenty-five years." "What did you do?" "Nothing. I did nothing at all." "You are lying, prisoner; the sentence for nothing at all is ten years." 174 Not all prisoners were sent to the camps, for capital punishment was a viable, often- used option, "Thus many were shot--thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and are easily forgotten." 175 Who was going to protest the vast numbers of people who vanished? Drawing the attention of the secret police was a sure way to get oneself arrested. Robert Robinson feared arrest so much that he never put his pajamas on until after 4 A.M., lest he be taken away in his bedclothes. 176 Like New Deal America, the Soviets had their own "alphabet soup" of agencies that replaced one another in running the archipelago. In 1922 it was known as the GPU (State Political Administration), from 1922-1934 the OGPU (United State Political Administration), from 1934-1943 the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs), from 1943-1946 NKGB (People's Commissariat of State Security), from 1946-1953 the MGB (Soviet Secret Police), briefly in 1953 the MVD (Ministry of Interior), and then from 1953 to the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB (State Security Committee). 177 The initials changed, but the intent and power never wavered. In their accounts, some survivors gave initials incorrect for their time period, but such errors are irrelevant, as the agency was the same, no matter what the name.
174 Alexander Dolgun and Patrick Watson, An American in the Gulag - Alexander Dolgun's Story (U.S.A.: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1975), 287. 175 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 442. 176 Robinson, Black on Red, 119. 177 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 639. 38 Until recently, estimates of the number of prisoners held within the Gulag system at any one time have varied wildly, ranging from 3.5 to almost 20 million. 178 Each side has heatedly disputed the others numbers, with accusations of sloppy or incompetent scholarship being thrown about. 179 With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, scholars have started to gain access, and so begin analysis of, Soviet archival records of the Stalin era. The historian J. Arch Getty, with several colleagues working with records from the Main Camp Administration of the NKVD/MVS (Soviet Ministry of the Interior), calculated a camp population of 1.9 million prisoners for the year 1938, a number that seems more reliable than any other given to date. 180 Nearly 2 million prisoners, while not the 20 million of one estimate, is still a substantial slave labor force, and when one or a hundred prisoners died from shooting or overwork, the secret police stepped up the arrests to bring the numbers back to par. Indeed, the KGB often went beyond par, when in a zeal to meet quota, local enthusiasm outstripped demands of the central bureaucracy. 181 Everyone was liable to arrest, but especially intellectuals, or anyone who was not obviously part of the loyal Soviet proletariat. The state security apparatus certainly took advantage of technology. As soon as motor vehicles appeared on the streets, they were put to use other than delivering food. The secret police trucks were known as "Black Marias" and Solzhenitsyn recorded that they "appeared at the same time as the very first trucks on our still cobblestoned streets." 182 Even so, the authorities took the trouble to disguise the true purpose from the general population, for "written on the outside [was] "Bread" . . . "Meat". . . or, even, simply, "Drink Soviet Champagne!" 183 Solzhenitsyn described their interiors, some a "simple armored body or shell, an empty
178 J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years," American Historical Review, October 1993, 1021. 179 Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre- war Years," 1018. 180 Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre- war Years," 1022. 181 Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre- war Years," 1036. 182 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 528. 183 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 528. 39 enclosure. . . Or it might be boxed throughout: single closets that locked like cells along the right and left-hand walls, with a corridor in the middle for the turnkey." 184 Who was put into these lockers? The police added a word to the Russian lexicon to describe those unfortunates, zaklyuchennye, "prisoner" which was abbreviated to zak or zks. 185 The Black Marias handled the urban transport of prisoners, but the movement from camp to camp required other means. Solzhenitsyn continued his oceanic metaphor, "Great ports exist for this purpose--transit prisons; and smaller ports--camp transit points. Sealed steel ships also exist; railroad cars especially christened zak cars ("prisoner cars"). 186 He further states that, "The prisoners got used to calling this kind of railroad car a Stolypin car (after Piotr Stolypin, interior minister from 1906-1911) or, more simply, just a Stolypin." 187 The camps became a self-perpetuating system due to their economic and political convenience and the camp regime . . . assumed a total lack of publicity, assumed that no one would ever complain, no one would ever be released. . ." 188 Of course, upon release or escape, the prisoners were only free within the confines of the Soviet Union, not the world at large. Even when some managed to report what was truly happening to millions under Soviet control, as Solzhenitsyn himself did, he somberly noted that "Europe, of course, won't believe it. Not until Europe itself serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy magazines and can't get anything else into her head." 189 The American reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote of the camp system that: Here, if you would believe the propaganda, Soviet citizens were rehabilitating themselves and getting rid of any taint of criminality by honest, productive labor. And if any question should arise about their rehabilitation, a tommygunner was at hand to remove the doubts with a quick burst from his gun. 190
184 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 528. 185 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 491. 186 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 489. 187 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I-II, 491. 188 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. V-VII, 60. 189 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. III-IV, 302. 190 Salisbury, An American in Russia, 272. 40 Ironically, the security apparatus was seen by citizens as the one efficient branch of the Soviet bureaucracy. In 1931 an American tourist, Dr. William Robinson, asked an intellectual Communist if the GPU was becoming more tolerant, "The Gay-Pay-Oo," the man answered, is always at the height of its activity. It is the one institution in our beloved union that works day and night, never sleeps, and has never a day off. It is the only efficient institution we have. It is super-efficient. 191 The security apparatus was both all-powerful and whimsical. A black American worker heard a rumor that the NKVD was coming for him, so he went to them and said, "Arrest me if you think I'm an enemy of the people." The officer replied, "Comrade Golden, don't get so upset. We've already fulfilled the plan of arrests for your area. Go home and work in peace." 192 Upon arriving in the Soviet Union it is clear that few Americans got the reception that they were looking for. It was quickly evident that living standards were not even close to Americas, the oppressive atmosphere was a shock, and few Soviet workers welcomed them with open arms. Most knew that Soviet living conditions were not on a par with Americas, but few realized how pervasive and how permanent those shortages would be. The presence of the secret police, with the corollary fact that the American government had virtually no influence within the Soviet Union, was another rude shock. Even the more ideologically motivated people, such as Emma Goldman, Fred Beal, and Andrew Smith were disenchanted with the U.S.S.R. In light of these problems, that any Americans were able to significantly contribute to the Soviet industrialization efforts is a tribute to their skills and determination.
191 Robinson, Soviet Russia As I Saw It, 107. 192 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 91. 41 CHAPTER FOUR FATES OF INDIVIDUAL AMERICANS Obviously, the Americans who went to the Soviet Union, with the exception of the deportees, went voluntarily and with high hopes for a better life. A few realized their dreams, working productively, receiving decent wages, and coming home as scheduled when their terms of employment were over. But the harsh reality for many fell far short of their expectations, and tragedy was a common theme of their experiences. Many Americans who went to the Soviet Union never returned, and of those who returned fewer still left a written record of their experiences. However, those who did write created a vivid impressions of their lives abroad. Therefore, this chapter presents a detailed look at the experiences of several Americans in the Soviet Union, who were there for decades, as well as two group colonization efforts. It is through an examination of their lives and struggles, as reported in their own words, that the desperation of their situations becomes clear. Victor Herman: Herman was one of the few Americans to undergo a full range of experiences, both good and bad, in the Soviet Union, and who survived to tell the world what had happened to him. As a teenager, Herman had already been working for Ford in Detroit, as had his father and brother, and he could have stayed behind when his family went to the Soviet Union. However, he did not believe the choice was really his, thinking, "Who chooses for you? Or chose? My father chose for me--and because I loved him with all it was in me to love with, I let him." 193 The family sailed from New York to England on a ship called the Leviathan in September 1931. Victor Reuther seconded this account of the crossing, writing that "Ford's top production man, Frank Bennett, set sail on the Leviathan with forty Ford technicians" so this was likely the group with which the Hermans sailed. 194 Herman wrote of the crossing that:
193 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 1. 194 Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 93. 42 No! I did not feel that I was leaving America. No American really does. You feel it is a terrain that spreads out over your heart, and there really is no leaving it ever. That's not a thought a sixteen year old boy has. That's not a thing any American of any age ever bothers to raise to the level of thought. Not until you're an American who can't get back. It took five days to get to England. I wish it had taken five thousand. 195 Herman blossomed in the Soviet Union. As in Detroit with his father and brother, he worked at the Gorky auto plant, and participated in the triumphant parade through Moscow of cars and trucks produced at the plant. At the ceremonial dinner that followed the parade, he became acquainted with General Mikhail Tukachevsky, whose patronage made it possible for Herman to leave Gorky and get involved in sports, learning to fly and to parachute. It was in the field of jumps that Herman became famous, and it was the combination of that skill, and his own naivet, that led to his serving many years in the prison camps. For Herman, things seemed to be going splendidly, as "I was getting a bigger and bigger reputation [in parachute jumps]. . . I was someone who excelled--in this country I excelled." 196 He had become an expert at high-altitude parachute jumping, and managed to establish a world record for a free fall of 142 seconds. In order for his jump to receive international recognition, he had to complete and sign a form that provided details of the jump. One line of this form asked the nationality of the jumper, and Herman, naturally, entered American. Of course, the Soviet authorities wanted credit for the record, so they sent military, political, and NKVD people to the flying center to correct this error. They tore up the first application and asked him to fill out another, this time showing his nationality as U.S.S.R. Being young and cocky, and perhaps unheeding of the significance of the disappearances at Gorky, Herman again indicated that he was American. Nineteen years old, he felt invulnerable, and thought politics were irrelevant to him. The evidence he saw did not sink in, to his ultimate misfortune. At first, the consequences of his stubbornness seemed rather benign. He was expelled from the Highest Parachute Center in 1937, located near Moscow, and went back to live in
195 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 27. 196 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 46. 43 Gorky. He paid little attention to the parting words of the school's political commissar, Bikov, who screamed at him, "You are an enemy, Herman! Your kind does not belong here! All enemies are being weeded out!" 197 Back at the American Village following the dismissal, his father told him that "Out of hundreds [of Americans], twenty are here. The others all arrested, taken away-- who knows where?" 198 Herman related that: I could not get out again-at least no farther than Gorky. Those who tried did not get very far-and it went much worse for you if you tried. They shot you there, right where you stood, the enemy they had said you were thus incontestably proved. 199 Unable to return to America, since his father had turned in their American family passport for a Soviet passport, and barred from flying, Herman returned to work and athletics. But, on July 30, 1938, Herman was arrested. After being positively identified, he was put in a Black Maria, and confirms Solzhenitsyn's description, "There was a van, dark green, the same sort of van you'd see used all over for bread deliveries. . . [inside] there was a narrow aisle, and on either side was a rack of lockers. . . They pushed me in there." 200 As trucks were used as prisoner transport as soon as they appeared, and Gorky's Autozavod was a major plant, one wonders if Herman helped build the vehicle he was put in? He was taken to the Spets Korpus (Special Building) in Gorky, where he spent a year in Cell 39, "I made sixteen - sixteen men in that space, a space ten feet by five and a half feet, and to the ceiling eight feet or an inch or so higher." 201 As he entered Cell 39, he saw all the men with: Hands on their knees, their backs rigid, their faces all turned toward me. . . It was the position they sat in. . . I assumed the position - and, like them, directed my attention to the peephole and kept it there. It was how the day was passed. It was how the days were passed for one year. 202
197 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 94. 198 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 100. 199 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 101. 200 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 110. 201 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 115. 202 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 117. 44 The men were dead silent as noise would bring a guard and a beating. In the cell there was, "Over the door, very high up, just under the ceiling, a bulb, maybe twenty-five watts. It never went off." 203 There was also a primitive toilet, the Parasha, "the pot where the steaming mess from us was collected. . . and as spectacular as the smell from it always was, the gas that boiled up from the parasha it was a thousand hells worse with the lid off." 204 Lastly, set into the door, was the muzzle, the Namordnik, a little sliding board that covered the peephole. 205 Once every ten days, the men were taken out to the bathhouse to have their hair clipped and to shower. Their hair added "To the sea of hair that matted the floor, a mess of human growth of every texture and shade pressed by the men who walked there into something like a nightmare's idea of a carpet." 206 While they were in the showers, their clothing was run through the "Zharo Kamera, the toaster, meant to kill the lice and the crabs and the vermin that flourished on our bodies." 207 Although the cell was silent, Herman occasionally heard a tapping coming through the wall, "a kind of cadence always. . . not some random things moving through the walls." 208 He learned that this was a tap language, but the others in cell did not know the code. In the showers Herman found a chunk of soap that had hardened like stone, "But what good was soap [to tap with] until you knew the code, until you could understand tap language and use it to speak back? It was in the fifth week I began to figure it out." 209 The figuring out occupied the mind, and it beat dreading the future. The tap language worked in a grid, with the Russian alphabet split into six groups of five letters each. The first tap(s) indicated the group, while the second tap(s) gives the letter's place within the group. 210 With this primitive and laborious system men were able to communicate both fact and rumor from cell to cell.
203 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 115. 204 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 115. 205 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 115. 206 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 137. 207 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 139. 208 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 141. 209 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 142. 210 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 144. 45 Another exception to sitting in the "position" were the interrogations. Taken out in the middle of the night in a van, Herman was beaten and tortured by a man he knew only as Belov, who "Hurt me for fifty-five nights." 211 The beatings started the first night, and "He never hit me anywhere but in the kidneys. He would hit three times on the right side and then pause. And then he would hit three times on the left side and pause." 212 Always he made it back to the cell for the morning feeding, and "after fifteen mornings, they [cellmates] shared" breakfast. 213 Each man would save a bit of food for him, so he could have a second helping. Herman wondered, "What is it I should remember? Those fifty-five nights? Or the mornings when they shared?" 214 After fifty-five nights of "interrogation," Herman was hospitalized. After recovering from internal injuries from the constant beatings, he signed a paper to be used as evidence against another American. Recovering from his interrogation, but before his sentencing, he was put into a new, very different cell. In Cell 21 there were only nineteen men and much more space, "It was unbelievable, all this space." As he entered the cell, he saw "Laid out there on the floor just inside the door, where the Parasha would normally go, there was a perfectly clean white towel." 215 He carefully stepped around the towel, whereupon some of the prisoners accosted him, telling him to strip. Herman told them to "Go to Hell!" 216 Some others closed on him, intending to beat him. He hit first, recounting that "It was an easy performance. These men were not boxers-they were fighters. There is no match between the two." 217 After pummeling them, a third man approached him with a knife. Herman beat him to death, "I went at it and held him up, and it was like working the heavy bag, no resistance in it, just the dead weight. . . and when I pulled back from him he went to the floor in a crazy melting motion, a sack of grain with its
211 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 162. 212 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 60. 213 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 162. 214 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 162. 215 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 185. 216 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 186. 217 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 186. 46 bottom split open and the stuff running out." 218 After this performance, no one else tried to test his mettle. He soon learned more about the social order of the room. A man beckoned him over, and said to Herman, "I am the Atoman, the chief here-and you, fighter, what are you? A wolfblood, yes? One of us, yes?" 219 Herman learned that "To him, there were Urkas, wolfbloods, real persons. . . the world divided between those who committed the crimes of theft and murder and those others who didn't and therefore didn't matter at all." 220 Except for what he had just done, Herman was no criminal, but the Atoman told him, You are no Urka, but I say you are one. Hey fighter, hey Urka! Next time you wipe your feet on the towel, yes?" 221 Herman learned that the mans title, Atoman, came from Russian playing cards in which there are thirty-six cards in a deck. In the deck, there was only one ace, and he was the Atoman. 222 The Atoman taught him how to pass as a criminal, as the Urkas were used to terrorize the political prisoners. So through his physical prowess, Herman became "The one king to his ace. . . I stood my ground and looked around for more ground. It is what a wolfblood does." 223 Eventually he was taken from the cell, and was sentenced, never having seen judge or jury. An NKVD officer simply gave him a slip of paper with his name and the number ten written on it, which was his sentence, ten years in the labor camps. 224 He was first sent by Stolypin to Burepolom, a work camp. The policy there, as in all of the work camps, was that the prisoners had to fulfill their quota, known as a "norm," in order to eat. If they did not work, no food. If they fell short of their norm, they got less food. There were roughly 3,000 prisoners in Burepolom, which translates into "Stormbeaten." 225 Here he learned some of the other differences between Urkas and political prisoners. The camp NKVD chief, Bobrov, announced the rules, but all the incentives, such as writing and receiving letters or
218 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 189. 219 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 191. 220 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 191. 221 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 191. 222 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 190. 223 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 193. 224 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 201. 225 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 208. 47 watching movies did not apply to a political prisoner such as Herman. 226 Herman was assigned to Team 1, those who did hard physical labor. These were lumberjacks, who went into the woods surrounding the camp. His norm was to saw twenty cubic yards of wood a day to earn his bread. 227 This is truly amazing, for Solzhenitsyn reported that the average norm at Burepolom was merely nine cubic yards. 228 After a month in the main camp, he was then transferred to a subcamp, Nuksha 2. To him, Nuksha 2 "was not the easy life of the main camp. It was the beginning of the inferno." 229 There the work was harder, eighteen cubic yards of birch, "because that wood is difficult to work." The onset of winter made fulfilling that norm even harder, and the men were often out chopping and sawing by the light of bonfires. Even so, he was "Getting a pound and a half of bread a day-because my norm was large and I fulfilled it. . . but many men could not come near that plan, and they ate not so well at all." 230 The next summer, he was sent north on a six-day rail trip to Fosforitnaya, a phosphorous mining camp. The feeding times at Fosforitnaya were an adventure, to say the least. There was hot soup, but no bowls. So those who had hats had the soup poured into them, while Herman and others cupped the scalding liquid in their hands, "because what was the burning alongside the starving?" 231 The man ahead of him did not wipe all the soup from his face, and Herman saw him "lying on his back with both hands over his mouth. . . They [other prisoners] had bitten the man's lips to get at the smear of food still on them." 232 As he put it: It was bad in the phosphorous mine. It was bad in the forest. It was bad in the snow. The dogs were bad, the fear was bad, the sickness was bad, the slop they fed you, the times they beat you - it was all bad- and after a point, what is the use to measure? 233
226 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 213. 227 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 215. 228 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. III-IV, 199. 229 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 217. 230 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 218. 231 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 227. 232 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 227. 233 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 231. 48 Even so, he was not completely alone. The best friend he ever had in the camps was there, a Finnish-American named Albert "Red" Loon. Loon had come to Karelia, near Leningrad, to work in a paper mill. When arrested, "he had no beatings. . . they'd just arrested him back in Karelia and handed him a piece of paper that said Very Dangerous Person and had the number '3' marked on it" and shipped him off." 234 Historian Andrea Graziosi has written that of the American-Finns who moved to Karelia, "only those who kept their passports. . . were able to go back." 235 Those who remained "were either shot or sent to the camps" as evidently happened to Red Loon. 236 Unlike the quiet Herman, Loon had "wild impossible laughter a boisterous torch in the icy Arctic dark." 237 Herman credits Red with having saved his life, in both a "spiritual" and in a more evident sense that will be shown later. 238 One of Herman's most incredible experiences came when he and most of the other foreigners, eighteen in all, were marched into the forest and told that each man must load a sixty-ton railroad car with wood, at which point they would be fed. It seemed impossible, with the treeline being "a mile or more away!" 239 In front of the car he was to load was a cache of logs, part of a ramp on which to roll timber from the treeline in better weather. Using this wood he loaded the car, spacing the stacks of wood so the car appeared to be full. He did this without food, in three days. He was the only one to do the impossible. He wrote, "I had stood on the shoulders of luck, it's true. But I had to reach." 240 As punishment for his trick in loading the car, he spent a year in an isolator (solitary punishment cell). Beaten regularly, scarcely fed, he related that "I think I was very near death when they let me out of there." 241 To recover his strength, Herman began to eat rats. Using a trap that Loon had made for him, he caught the rats and ate them, usually raw. Of this, he wrote, "I liked rat. It was good.
234 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 240. 235 Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 49. 236 Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia," 49. 237 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 233. 238 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 240. 239 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 259. 240 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 264. 241 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 267. 49 Does this seem expressive of what those years did to me. . .? To this day I savor that taste on the tongue of my mind." 242 Surviving on rat and his own talents, the years passed, "I was doing time. Take whatever you are, and add ten." 243 The prisoners scarcely knew World War II was going on, but for poorer food, and bloody, recycled military uniforms. They also got a free day on both VE and VJ day. So, he served out his tenner sentence, and was released in October of 1948. Upon his release, he was not free to return to Gorky, let alone America. He was exiled to Siberia, specifically to the city of Krasnoyarsk. His parole officer gave him the job of coaching the local branch of Dynamo, the government sponsored sports team. Of this, Herman wrote "And think of the irony of it! After ten years suffering at the hands of the Secret Service and the Secret police and the NKVD, this man wanted me to get these people medals." 244 He accepted the position, what choice did he have? While coaching, he met and fell in love with a gymnast named Galina Galaktionova, whom he married in 1949. After the marriage, the NKVD threatened her for living with an exile and had her fired from her job. In response, Herman quit coaching for the NKVD, and went over to the civilian group, Spartak. He wrote of the civilians he instructed, that "Let them hit for me, and let me teach them how to do it so maximum damage is done. . . I admit it - every time those men hit, it was like another inch of revenge I exacted against everything I had been through." 245 After six months, his "Spartak boxing team won the district-wide competition. They had to beat my old Dynamo team to do it." 246 For refusing to come back to Dynamo after the NKVD ordered him back, Herman was again arrested in 1951. He alone was sent further north to the town of Yeniseysk, where punishment awaited him. He was to live out in the woods, the NKVD told him that "If I set foot
242 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 271. 243 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 246. 244 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 293. 245 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 302. 246 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 313. 50 in Yeniseysk, the penalty would be twenty years hard labor or twenty years prison." 247 On the advice of an old hermit, Herman built a chop-out, literally a cave hacked into the snow and permafrost, in which to survive the Siberian winter. He could trade wood that he chopped for food and other supplies. Galina, with their infant daughter, walked the sixty miles from Krasnoyarsk to join him under the ice. The chop-out was about "Ten by ten and five and a half feet deep, and I laid branches over the top. . . It was in the chop-out that she [Svetlana, his daughter] learned to walk - and then to talk." 248 They spent almost year there, under the ice. The food they got was "frozen cabbage and potatoes. When there was a chunk of milk, Galya would crack off a piece and Sveta would suck on it." 249 He told Sveta fairytales, some of America. She would ask "Two potatoes, Papa?" and he would answer, "Yes, my sweetheart, two potatoes. In the beautiful city of Detroit, everyone has a second potato." 250 Of this storytelling, he wrote that "It was unimaginable. It was the outer limit of magic, as far as a fairy tale dare go. Two potatoes. What could be more fantastic?" 251 After almost a full year in the chopout, he and his family were freed to live in Yeniseysk, where he coached a local boxing team, which beat both of his old teams from Krasnoyarsk. After that, the Krasnoyarsk Spartak team asked him back to coach, which he did. After two years of quietly living and working in Krasnoyarsk, in December 1955, he received a letter from the Moscow Military Tribunal, which read, "The Tribunal has reviewed your case, and finds that no case exists. As of the date of this letter, you are exonerated of all charges and are hereby informed that you are free of any and all restraint upon your person." 252 After receiving that letter, Herman applied for repatriation to the United States at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and:
247 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 322. 248 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 329. 249 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 330. 250 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 6. 251 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 6. 252 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 394. 51 They laughed in my face. . . Who in the world would take me for an American citizen, a fellow who had been so many years in the Soviet Union and who - here they actually laughed - had undergone experiences that so deeply involved him in things Russian? 253 He wrote to members of his extended family in America, telling them he was still alive, and asking for advice on how to get out. He followed the advice of an attorney cousin, Dave Herman, from New Orleans, who told him to stick to the motto "I am an American citizen and I want to return to America." 254 Herman and David eventually managed to have a brief meeting in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in 1968. There, Dave reassured Victor that he would be able to get home. 255 Perhaps Herman's stubborn nature slowed his exit, for when he first applied in 1968, the U.S. State Department responded, "Fine, you can emigrate to the U.S. as a Russian; I wrote back, no, I will be repatriated to the United States as an American." 256 So between this conviction and oceans of red tape, eight years passed. Then in 1976, David Herman, who dealt with the U.S. State Department wrote, "It is my understanding that your application to return to your homeland has been approved by both the government of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S." 257 Herman immediately went to the American Embassy to get his passport, and "All that time I felt as if I had the most ridiculous grin on my face. . . How long had my face been grave, stern, sullen?" 258 He flew from Moscow to New York and then moved back to Detroit, in February 1976. 259 It had taken eight years to cut through all the red tape to allow Herman to return. He acidly wrote that "when it comes to dodges and runarounds and equivocations, the Soviet bureaucracy can give cards and spades to any state on earth." 260 . Eventually his two
253 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 345. 254 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 347. 255 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 347. 256 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 349. 257 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 357. 258 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 361. 259 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 348. 260 Herman, Coming Out of the Ice., 349. 52 daughters were able to follow, but as of the time of publication of his book, his wife remained in the Soviet Union. 53 Robert Robinson: Robinson, the black machinist attacked by white Americans while in the Soviet Union, renewed his contract when his year was up, since "[I] knew that times were difficult for everybody in the U.S., and especially for blacks." 261 Partway through this year, the factory administration called a meeting of all the American workers in the plant. The group was afraid that perhaps their tasks were considered done, and they would be sent home. Instead, they were given thanks by the factory's Party Secretary, who was "grateful for the contribution you have all made to our nation's economic leap forward. You are all setting an outstanding example for the Russian worker." 262 This meeting also turned up the pressure for American involvement in overtly government activities. Robinson reported that, for those who chose to stay longer, the Soviet government now showed a definite interest in wanting them "Sovietized," encouraging them to "join the party, or place your children in the Pioneers [Young Communist group, similar to a political Boy Scouts]." 263 The result of these actions was to move Americans away from "separate, foreign specialist status, and into the mainstream of the Soviet factory life." 264 What the Soviets would gain by this is the lack of negative publicity, since those who stayed, as Margulies noted, could scarcely have disseminated a favorable image. 265 Robinson had planned to leave after his second contract expired, but he was persuaded by the director of the First State Ball Bearing Plant, M. Bodrov, to work there for a year. 266 He accepted this offer, and then took a six-week vacation to America in the summer of 1933. On
261 Robinson, Black on Red, 75. 262 Robinson, Black on Red, 77. 263 Robinson, Black on Red, 78. 264 Robinson, Black on Red, 78. 265 Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia, 110. 266 Robinson, Black on Red, 80. 54 leaving the Soviet Union he was "concerned. . . that a few fellow workers had suddenly left the factory without saying a word or even hinting that they would be leaving." 267 The purges had begun. Seeing his mother and eating home cooking in New York was fine, but the "face of the depression" in America left him "with a chill." 268 Returning to work in the Soviet Union, Robinson remained aloof from the Party's pressures, but unexpectedly his fellow workers elected him to the Moscow Soviet (city council) for a four-year term in December 1934. 269 His election opened him to charges of being a communist sympathizer when he returned home, yet he accepted the post, fearing revocation of his contract if he refused. He decided not to raise a fuss, but to return to America after his contract expired. 270 The election was critical in his life, for in response the State Department ordered him to return to America. Not willing to go at that time, Robinson "asked the Soviet authorities if I could become a Soviet citizen for now, but then return to the United States when I wanted to, and have the Soviets consider me an American citizen." 271 Although this arrangement seems both complicated and naive, the Soviets assured him it was possible and told him that it had been done for others. So he took up Soviet citizenship "at a time when disappearances were increasing but could not yet be considered epidemic." 272 He also wanted to stay because he had just been accepted into the Evening Institute of Mechanical Engineering in Moscow, and he wanted the education. 273 Looking back, Robinson reflected on the ill-timing of the election, and his decision to forsake American citizenship, since "At his [Kirov'spolitical leader assassinated in 1934] death the preferred status of foreign specialists ended overnight." 274 After the assassination, "A
267 Robinson, Black on Red, 82. 268 Robinson, Black on Red, 82. 269 Robinson, Black on Red, 97. 270 Robinson, Black on Red, 97. 271 Robinson, Black on Red, 112. 272 Robinson, Black on Red, 113. 273 Robinson, Black on Red, 111. 274 Robinson, Black on Red, 87. 55 day did not go by that I did not ask myself what kind of hell I had gotten into. No longer a U.S. citizen, I could not go home." 275 The announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in light of the anti-Nazi propaganda the government had been spewing, was a surprise to him. The reaction of the workers was negative, yet they figured Stalin knew more than they did. Robinson noted how from that time onwards, the propaganda changed from "Workers of the World Unite!" to "Love your country first and always." 276 Even though Stalin had signed the pact to preserve peace, he knew that war was coming, and reacted by promoting nationalism over party loyalty. When Germany did finally invade the U.S.S.R. on 22 June 1941, there was an interesting response from the Soviet people: Thousands of people-men, women, children, young and old, even party members-were flocking to church. There was no place left even to stand. One heard people crying, some asking God for forgiveness, others asking His intercession during a time of such great national peril. It became clear that twenty-four years of anti-religious propaganda had not extinguished from Russian hearts a sense of the reality of God. 277 At the time of the German invasion, Robinson related that of the foreigners, "When I began in 1932 there were 362 of us. Now a Hungarian and I were the only ones left." 278 He survived the war years, and noted how during the war the "purges stopped because everybody was needed to support the war effort." 279 After the war ended, he applied to visit his mother, but his request was denied. "Beginning in 1945, a year never went by without my filing an application." 280 Over twenty-seven years of filling out forms passed with no success, so he simply worked hard and tried to keep out of trouble with the KGB. Upon Stalin's death, he noted the intense reaction of the people, "Many called him Father Stalin; in a sense, their god had died." 281 He also talks about the stampede that occurred
275 Robinson, Black on Red, 118. 276 Robinson, Black on Red, 138. 277 Robinson, Black on Red, 145. 278 Robinson, Black on Red, 141. 279 Robinson, Black on Red, 198. 280 Robinson, Black on Red, 252. 281 Robinson, Black on Red, 265. 56 during Stalin's funeral, "Hundreds of people were crushed to death. . . This was not reported in the news or the radio." 282 Unlike some of the immigrants, Robinson never formed an attraction for a native of the opposite sex. He feared, perhaps correctly, that some of the attentions Soviet women paid him were for the purpose of setting him up for arrest by the KGB. He was also deeply religious, and so casual relationships held no appeal for him, "Attempts to form deep, lasting friendships with Russian women would in any case have been doomed. Soviet life is so regulated. I was not free, and neither were they." 283 In 1973 he was granted a visa to visit Uganda for forty-five days, and he never returned to the Soviet Union. Idi Amin, then ruler of Uganda, took a personal interest in Robinson, giving him a teaching position at Uganda Technical College. 284 He taught, and married Zylpha Mapp in December of 1976. 285 In 1978 they left for America, because Uganda was becoming dangerous, given its war with Tanzania. On December 9, 1986, having renounced his Soviet citizenship, he realized his "dream of forty years" to become "an American citizen once again." 286 Margaret Wettlin: Wettlin was the only American woman encountered in my research who went to Russia of her own free will instead of simply following a husband. After she returned to America in 1979, she wrote an autobiography entitled Fifty Russian Winters. A schoolteacher from Philadelphia, she had gone to the Soviet Union partly as a tourist, but hoped to find a way to stay there for longer. Reminiscing, she wrote: Forty-two years. I did not dream that so much time would elapse when I left New York on the S.S. Colombia in September 1932. In my bag were tickets for a month's tour of Soviet Russia, very little money, and a few letters of
282 Robinson, Black on Red, 265. 283 Robinson, Black on Red, 341. 284 Robinson, Black on Red, , 397. 285 Robinson, Black on Red, 411. 286 Robinson, Black on Red, 417. 57 introduction, for I harbored the hope of finding a job that would keep me in Russia for a year. 287 Her hope proved fruitful, for the Soviet government offered her a teaching position, but as was so typical of the Soviet way of operating, there was a catch, "I could not take it as a tourist. I had to leave the country and be invited back by the Soviet government; if they wanted me badly enough, they would issue me a worker's visa at a foreign consulate." 288 So, she temporarily left Russia for a brief stay in Finland, and eventually the paperwork came through. Another aspect of her initial stay in Moscow was that she met the man who would eventually become her husband, Andrei Efremoff, a theater director. 289 This meant she was happy to be living and working in the Soviet Union, at least at that point. She wrote that "I was lucky to have arrived in Russia at the tail end of a period of revolutionary fervor that lasted, with diminishing force, from 1917 to 1936 and was succeeded by one of such ignominy that it blotted out the memory of its vibrant antecedent." 290 Wettlin did not have to hand over her passport, and the marriage to a Soviet citizen did not carry any repercussions at that point, for in 1936 she was able to leave for a vacation in America with her infant. She wrote of the trip, "We rode from New York to Philadelphia over the new highway that vaults over the heads of towns and cities. . . I knew, oh so poignantly, that I was back in America. My heart slipped into it like a bolt into its socket." 291 This was no mere vacation, but also a lecture tour, speaking on her Soviet experiences. Regrettably, she recorded neither itinerary nor speeches. She returned to the Soviet Union, where Andrei greeted her with the stunning news that, "We're to live on a grander scale than ever before. Two rooms this time." 292 Around this time, she gave birth to a second child and was less than impressed with her medical treatment:
287 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 4. 288 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 5. 289 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 49. 290 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 13. 291 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 112. 292 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 118. 58 "The nurses tied me down and the lady surgeon gutted me as she would have gutted a chicken for broiling, only the chicken would have been dead and I was not quite." 293 She had accepted the country and more of its ideology than she had ever expected. Indeed, she willingly worked with the secret police. They wanted her to give information on foreigners that she knew. She wrote that, "I arrived home in a state of daze. And of exhilaration. I felt that I had been chosen, been distinguished, that in this terrible period of trial I was trusted." 294 Part of the reason she had not altered her citizenship earlier was that she had felt that she had done nothing to help the revolution, so why should she enjoy its benefits as a citizen? 295 This gave her the opportunity to help the revolution. Not a cloak-and-dagger agent, her task was simply to aid the secret police to understand those whose attitudes were not clear. 296 She commented that, "I would stoop to no artifice, I would be but a flawless mirror giving back the image, and if the image was that of an enemy, I would be proud to have caught it." 297 Her work had an impact, as the Russian wife of an American man on whom she was reporting was arrested, then released. As soon as she was released, the American husband, Herbert Habecht, was able to take "the family to America." 298 Regrettably, she provided no details as to how he managed to get out, as most Americans were unable to do so. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Wettlin commented that, "To most Soviet citizens the excitement of war. . . came almost as a relief from the purges. Here, at least, was a concrete enemy they could pit themselves against instead of an invisible enemy against whom no weapon could be leveled." 299 How awful life must have been, to welcome the onset of a major invasion! Her family, like thousands of others, was moved from place to place as the
293 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 131. 294 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 146. 295 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 144. 296 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 145. 297 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 146. 298 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 150. 299 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 150. 59 Germans advanced deeper and deeper. Of these journeys during the war she wrote that, The anti-foreigner sentiment cultivated at the time of the Stalin purges in 1937-1938 died a natural death after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invariable too was the question asked by anyone meeting me for the first time, When are we going to have that second front?" 300 Her family even made it all the way out to Siberia as the government shuffled evacuees from place to place. Of the conditions there she wrote that, "Until December the weather had been mild for Siberia. . . We had been buying milk at the market by the hunk; if what the milk lady offered was too big, she took an ax and chopped it up and you took your piece home wrapped in newspaper." 301 This is what Herman had done when living with his family in the chopout. At least there was no worry of milk spoiling. There were allowances made for the severity of the weather at the train stations. Rooms were set aside for mothers and children. Wettlin described one which was exceptionally good: The room occupied an entire wing of the station. . . It was warm and bright and cheerful. A kindergarten teacher supervised activities while mothers who had nothing to do until train time (which might be three hours or three days) sat in a corner comparing stories of evacuation. 302 In the spring of 1943 they returned to Moscow, to start rebuilding both their lives and the city. In 1944, the radio announcement of the D-Day invasion brought this reaction, "People laughed and slapped each other on the back and treated each other to cigarettes" and hoped that would signal a swift end to the war. 303 When Berlin fell she wrote, "What pride and jubilation filled every Russian heart! And what mourning. TWENTY MILLION DEAD. . . Each single one of those twenty million individuals was to himself as I am to myself. That is immeasurable. That is awesome." 304 A month after war's end, she passed by a church, and saw people who, "Stood in
300 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 188. 301 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 221. 302 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 221. 303 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 247. 304 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 253. 60 such closeness that they crossed themselves with difficulty. . . Heavy were the hearts of the people." 305 Postbellum, life slowly returned to normal. Wettlin got a job with the Press Department of VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries as a translator. It was not hard work, but "More and more the atmosphere was charged with distrust." 306 In the two years she worked there was a suicide and a pair of arrests by the KGB. After she left, Andrei was given a job to head the Russian Theater in Riga, the capital of Latvia. In Latvia the KGB sought her services again. Her task was to report on several friends she had made at her job. She lamented that "Had I sat quietly at home translating Gorky's novels I would not have made the social contacts that caused the security men to turn their eyes on me once again." 307 One subject was a teacher named Tamara, who had been a Young Communist when Latvia had been independent. Wettlin's report was this: I could report nothing but good of Tamara: her loyalty to communism sprang from a conviction for which she and her brother had paid heavily. But neither this nor my testimony in her favor saved Tamara and Joe from arrest in the early fifties when Andrei and I were back in Moscow. 308 The other individual she reported on, an American woman named Davis, deeply shocked Wettlin by going into hysterics from being constantly observed by the KGB. Wettlin wrote that, "My experience with Mrs. Davis made it clear that I must extricate myself from the machine." 309 After she returned to Moscow the KGB asked for her help a third time, which she denied them, with no apparent consequences. The family was together in Moscow when a momentous event occurred - the death of Stalin. "Did Stalin's death cause nationwide jubilation? Far from it. People were stunned. So consummately had they been hoodwinked that they could envision no future without the
305 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 254. 306 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 261. 307 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 266. 308 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 267. 309 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 273. 61 Helmsman." 310 Indeed, on the day of the funeral there was a stampede fatal to some of those trying to see the body, "People longed to set eyes on the mysterious, almost mystical, leader who never appeared in public except on the May first and November seventh holidays. . . Even in death Stalin was a killer." 311 Andrei began directing in Tashkent, but family life was growing strained. Both children had grown up and married, so they were three couples and an infant in three rooms. 312 Eventually, their children moved out, and in 1968 Andrei died. Margaret moved to a writer's colony outside Moscow, working on a biography of the playwright Ostrovsky when, "Suddenly one evening Adya [her son] came rushing up from the city with the news that my brother had arrived from the states. My brother Dan! I hadn't seen or communicated with him for over thirty years!" 313 He urged her to return, and she tentatively agreed. She somehow managed to visit America in 1974 and decided to move back. However, she did not leave for another five years, although the reason for the delay was not given in her account. She and her daughter and grandchild left together, but her son decided to remain behind. They were fortunate to get out when they did, for "Sure enough, hardly had Dasha, Fedya, and I left the country when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. . . and, bang, down came the Iron Curtain again." 314 A year later her son and his wife changed their mind, but "As soon as they sent in their application to emigrate both Adya and Lara were fired from their jobs and for the next seven years they were held in the country as refuseniks ." 315 Eventually they were all reunited here in America, living peacefully. Oliver Golden: The next work drawn from has an interesting origin indeed, a blending of family history and autobiography written by a descendant of American
310 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 285. 311 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 287. 312 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 302. 313 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 321. 314 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 323. 315 Wettlin, Fifty Russian Winters, 324. 62 migrs. The author, Yelena Khanga, is the granddaughter of American immigrants, but remained a Soviet citizen. The book recounts the exploits of her forebears, and she writes that, "I am descended from American idealists, black and white, who came to the new Soviet state in the 1930s with high hopes of building a more just society through communism." 316 Her grandfather, Oliver Golden, studied at the famous Tuskegee Institute. He became a member of the American Communist party, and finally went to Uzbekistan to aid the cotton industry there. Her grandmother, Bertha, was the offspring of Jewish-Polish immigrants to America. They met at a Communist Party meeting in 1927. Khanga firmly states that the move "was never meant to be permanent. My grandparents intended to return to the United States--they had signed ordinary work contracts with the Soviet government-but changed their minds after my mother was born in 1934." 317 Her grandfather's original reasons for emigrating were similar to the Hermans. Economics was certainly part of his reasons, but, like Sam Herman, he had political motives as well, being a member of the burgeoning American Communist Party. On November 7, 1931, Oliver Golden, along with his wife and sixteen others, some of whom he persuaded to come, sailed for Russia on the S.S. Deutschland. 318 The whole group was sent to Uzbekistan to help develop the cotton fields there. Being foreigners they were paid in hard currency, so they had better food and housing than the natives Golden was eventually transferred from Uzbekistan to the Institute of Irrigation and Mechanization in Tashkent. On July 19, 1934, Khanga's mother, Lily, was born in Tashkent. Yelena records that "This was the decisive event in my family's history; for, without a child, my grandparents would have returned to the United States in 1937. In spite of their hatred of racism
316 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 18. 317 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 19. 318 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 73. 63 at home, they considered themselves Americans." 319 Khanga further explained that her grandparents became Soviet citizens rather than expose a racially mixed child to America. 320 Their life was still one of relative ease, "Luxurious by Soviet standards, even without hot water. To have cold running water as well as separate kitchens and bathrooms was luxury enough." 321 Oliver Golden died in 1940, and the widowed Bertha Golden raised Lily, with the help of a Russian nanny, working all the while. She taught English at the Central Asian State University in Tashkent and occasionally worked as a radio announcer. 322 They remained in Tashkent throughout World War II, never being shifted about as the Wettlins were. Khanga's mother, Lily, grew up to be a fine tennis player, and got into the Moscow State University in 1952 where she studied African history. Getting a job at the Soviet African Institute, she met and married Abdullah Khanga, a Zanzibar leader studying there. 323 Yelena was born on May 1, 1962, and her father was killed in Africa in 1964. Khanga was raised by both her mother and grandmother, and commented that "there was nothing unusual about an all-female Russian household as her mothers generation lost so many men to the war. 324 Housing was cramped, with Khanga sharing a room with her grandmother, and the other room doubled as her mothers bedroom and study. 325 Her public education began at age three, where the kindergarten "featured a small shrine to Lenin." 326 The schools had only ten grades, but students went six days out of the week. Khanga went to a School No. 46, where English was taught. Although her grandmother was a loyal Soviet citizen, she still cared for America, which aggravated the growing Khanga, "You live in a world of ghosts. Nobody here cares what you think of civil rights in America." 327 Khanga seemingly
319 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 86. 320 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 86. 321 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 87 322 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 87. 323 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 111. 324 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 115. 325 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 118. 326 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 128. 327 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 133. 64 faced little discrimination due to skin color, but the taint of foreign connections was a much greater source of concern. Like her mother, she entered the Moscow State University, and went on to become a journalist. In 1987, she went to America in an exchange with the Christian Science Monitor. 328 While in America she experienced many of the everyday things that were still lacking in the Soviet Union, such as freedom to travel, fast food restaurants like McDonald's, and so on. She also met members of both sides of her family, and met Joseph Roane, the last surviving member of the party of sixteen who had gone over with her grandfather in 1931. She also learned a startling fact - that her mother, who had been born before her grandparents handed in their American passports, was considered by American law to be an American citizen, that "Parents may renounce their own citizenship, but cannot give up the citizenship of a minor child." 329 In 1992 Lily was able to come home to America, yet she still maintains a dual citizenship. In addition to those Americans who went to the Soviet Union under the terms of individual work contracts signed with Amtorg, and were spread throughout the country, there were two attempts made to establish major colonies of American industrial workers in the Soviet Union. One of these collectives was the ill-fated Kuzbas Colony. In an agreement with the Soviet government, Kuzbas was founded by labor leader Big Bill Haywood (then fleeing a U.S. jail sentence), Herbert Calvert, and a Dutchman, Sebald Rogers, in late 1921. The original intent was to create an autonomous colony in the Soviet Union. The city of Kemerovo was to be the for 6,000 Americans colonists. 330 While Haywood and Rutgers were hammering out the details with the Soviets, it was Calvert's task to begin recruiting. According to historian J.P. Morray, Calvert was supposed to
328 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 26. 329 Khanga, Soul to Soul, 300. 330 Martha Ann Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927" (Seminar Paper, College of St. Catherine, 1976), 1. 65 recruit 2,800 technical workers by early 1922, inked to two-year contracts. 331 To fulfill this task, the American Organization Committee for Kuzbas was founded January 2, 1922. 332 Presumably it published the prospectus "Kuzbas - An Opportunity for Engineers and Workers" which gave an overview of the plans the colony had, as well as an application to join. Surprisingly, the Soviets did not bankroll either transportation or life's necessities for the group, as they so often did for individuals at this time. The prospectus reports that each person must have "$100 worth of food. . . each should take as much clothing as possible." 333 It also related that the total cost would be "$300 per worker - $100 for food, $100 for tools, $100 for transport." 334 The pamphlet also assured prospective colonists that they would find "a practical plan. . . that has been formally approved by the heads of the Russian Government." 335 It also stated "Single women will also be considered, provided they are also independently qualified, physically fit and politically reliable." 336 An interesting part of the application was the pledge all prospective colonists had to sign, to "take into consideration the extreme nervousness of the hungry and exhausted peasants" which hinted that not all of the U.S.S.R. was enjoying an easy life, and that the colonists might not be warmly welcomed by the locals. 337 As economic conditions in the United States were not bad at the time and because the immigrants left few records, their reasons for going are murky. One historian commented that "After more than fifty years it is difficult to perceive accurately why these Americans and the hundreds that followed them decided to pull up stakes and head for a remote region called the Kuznetz Basin." 338
331 J.P. Morray, Project Kuzbas : American Workers in Siberia 1921-1926 (New York: International Publishers, 1983), 78. 332 Morray "Project Kuzbas," 78. 333 Prospectus, (New York: Room 303 110 West 40th Street), 1922, 23. Note No information as to who wrote it, whether individual or organization. 334 Prospectus, 24. 335 Prospectus, 2. 336 Prospectus, 22. 337 Prospectus, 32. 338 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 1. 66 The first Americans arrived in March 1922, a group of "sixty men and eight women who definitely expected both a warm welcome and decent housing. 339 As historian Martha Evans found, "All references are in agreement about one thing, that the Organization and settlers expected some housing awaiting them. 340 They spent their first nights in Kemerovo sleeping in railroad boxcars while they built temporary shelters during the day. To be sleeping in boxcars must have been a blow, as many families financed their trip by selling their homes and belongings, and so had nothing to return to, and no money on hand with which to pay passage home. 341 The Soviets already living and working in Kemerovo disliked the new arrivals, who put an additional strain on housing, food, and other resources. The Americans had expected to be "saviors of Russian industry" by virtue of the promise of autonomy given them. However, this promise proved false, Morray reporting that "opposition to an autonomous colony of foreign workers had proved to be subtle in Kemerovo and Moscow." 342 More bluntly, Evans stated "Russian management was reluctant to give up its position, considered soft by any standards, and were distrustful of the American presence." 343 The Americans also expected that their salaries would be in accordance with the profits they generated, and were rudely surprised when they were "divided into seventeen work categories, and would be paid under the same differential wage system as their Russian counterparts." 344 Even so, the colony became "an industrial success" to the Soviets. 345 However, it never came close to getting the 6,000 colonists the plan called for. Only a total of six hundred emigrated during the next two years. 346 Indeed, by then the early colonists had begun leaving. One who came home, Thomas Doyle, reported in 1923 that there "were many others who
339 Morray, Project Kuzbas, 113. 340 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 17. 341 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 1. 342 Morray, Project Kuzbas, 113. 343 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 27. 344 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 8. 345 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 31. 346 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 12. 67 wished to leave but could not because of the difficulties encountered in obtaining passage home, and fear of reprisal from the American government." 347 Indeed, as the Soviets continued to ignore American suggestions and complaints, more and more returned home to the U.S. Evans reported by 1928 that the "small number who had married natives and settled down in Russia were the only ones remaining in Kemerovo. . . There was little or no indication that the American colony had ever existed." 348 Another attempt at colonization was that made by American Finns in Soviet Karelia, almost a decade later. The Finns constituted the single largest ethnic group to go to the Soviet Union, and the historians Klehr and Haynes wrote that "Radicalism attracted proportionately more Finns than members of any other immigrant group; 20-30 percent of Finnish-Americans had some association with the Socialist, Wobbly, or Communist movements." 349 With these leftist ideals firmly entrenched, some 6,000 American and Canadian Finns emigrated to Karelia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 350 A Finn returning in mid-1933, interviewed by the State Department, put the number at 4,000 with about five or six hundred living in Petrozavodsk. 351 With such large numbers migrating, the Karelian experience generated perhaps more primary source material than any other geographic locale in the U.S.S.R. This shared experience and volume of information alone makes it worth examining. The Karelian movement was fostered by the U.S.-based, Soviet-backed Karelian Technical Help Organization, headquartered in New York City. The head of this group was a Finnish-American Communist party member, Oscar Corgan. One American-Finn, Emil Aho, reported to the State Department on his return that to go he had to be approved by Karelian Technical Help. 352 The Organization did not pay the settler's way, but handled the logistics of
347 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 25. 348 Evans, "Kuzbas Colony 1921-1927," 33. 349 Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 19. 350 Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 51. 351 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Salo, File 861.5017/689, Record Group 59. 352 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, File 861.5017/574, Record Group 59. 68 the trip. 353 Another returning Finn, Eino Latvala, cited his reasons for going as being "inspired at the instigation of Bolshevik agent" Oscar Corgan. 354 Contrary to Soviet policy, which encouraged American communists to stay at home, Corgan himself emigrated, taking his family along with him. His daughter, Mayme, managed to survive the ordeal, and in 1992 published an autobiography of her family's experiences, They Took My Father - A Story of Idealism and Betrayal. The Corgans reached Karelia, which is close to Finland, in April 1934. 355 Even though life was tough, it was easier than in Kuzbas. There was housing already waiting for them. Sevander noted that "We still had privileges and possessions that most natives could only dream about." 356 However, they had the misfortune to arrive in the midst of the purges, and in 1935 they were warned to leave by Yrjo Sirola, a high- ranking Finnish communist. Oscar Corgan ignored the warning, stating that "I brought hundreds of American-Finns over here, and I'm not leaving unless I can take all of them back with me." 357 For a time, all continued as usual; then, in November 1937, the OGPU arrested Oscar, and they "took our radio, our camera, Father's typewriter, all our papers and birth certificates from America." 358 To the family, the purge seemed utterly random, "They took my friend's fathers and sometimes my friend's mothers; they took shopkeepers and musicians and actors and workers and teachers and men who swept the streets. And no one knew why." 359 Sevander mentioned an interesting immigrant trait, that "As adopted Russians, we American Finns adopted that fear." 360 Even with the arrest of her father and other family friends, their dream
353 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, Feb. 16, 1933, File 861.5017/574, Record Group 59. 354 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Latvala, File 861.5017/620, Record Group 59. 355 Mayme Sevander with Laurie Hertzel, They Took My Father - A Story of Idealism and Betrayal (MN: Pfeifer-Hamilton, 1992), 47. 356 Sevander, They Took My Father, 49. 357 Sevander, They Took My Father, 54. 358 Sevander, They Took My Father, 75. 359 Sevander, They Took My Father, 78. 360 Sevander, They Took My Father, 99. 69 was still intact. Amazingly, they "still had faith in Stalin. . . that he had no knowledge." 361 They tried to find out what had happened to Oscar, how long his sentence was for, if it was not death. Indeed, the American-Finns had a euphemism for the death penalty, "viiden kopekoan tuoniio [five kopek sentence]" which was the cost of a bullet. 362 The Corgans were initially told that he was sentenced to ten years, but Oscar never returned. During the brief thaw under Khrushchev, they were told that he had died "of cancer" in 1940. 363 Even this was a lie, for in 1991 the government finally told Mayme that her father had been executed January 8, 1938. 364 The Corgan family stayed on, and their woes continued, for in 1938 the remnants of the family was exiled to Latushka on the Kern river with twenty-four hours notice. 365 Eventually Mayme grew up and married, ironically becoming an English-language teacher. A newly married couple, Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen, mentioned in their memoirs being screened by both Karelian Technical Aid and the American Communist Party, prior to emigrating. 366 They traveled with "what tools they had" and Lawrence enjoyed his work as a mechanic. Sylvia became a teacher, but was forced to give up her U.S. passport for a Soviet one, in order to do so. 367 As has been shown, giving up U.S. citizenship (or even identification as such) was often a prelude to disaster. The Hokkanens certainly noticed the effects of the purge, and applied for permission to leave in 1938. Surprisingly, permission was granted in December 1940, and in February 1941, they took a train across the breadth of the country to Vladivostok, sailing home on the President Taft on April 29, 1941. They got out of the country less than two months before Germany invaded, and reported that only one other family got out in that fashion. 368
361 Sevander, They Took My Father, 100. 362 Lawrence Hokkanen, Sylvia Hokkanen with Anita Middleton, Karelia: A Finnish- American Couple in Stalin's Russia (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1991), 82. 363 Sevander, They Took My Father, 175. 364 Sevander, They Took My Father, 184. 365 Sevander, They Took My Father, 108. 366 Hokkanen, Karelia, 9. 367 Hokkanen, Karelia, 73. 368 Hokkanen, Karelia, 105. 70 One returning Finn, Karl Salo, had an interesting perspective on the reasons so many went, and why they had yet to return to America. In July 1933 he told the State Department that "Although some of them were real Communists. . . that 90% of [American Finns] would return to the United States as soon as they thought they had a chance to get jobs again." 369 This statement rebuts the theory that most Finns went for political, not economic reasons. Of course, few were able to return when they wished, since in many cases, most of their money had gone to pay for the trip over and they could not make enough to return home. One returnee, Emil Aho, told State Department that conditions were so poor that all would return if they had the opportunity to do so." 370 Poor living conditions aside, the ideal of working and being accepted by the Soviets never materialized. Another returnee, identified by State only as "Mr. G." commented that there was "a great deal of strong resentment among the Karelian and Russian workers against the preferred treatment [of Americans]. . . especially as regards to food." He added that they "also resented. . . the new methods of work" that the migrants introduced. 371 According to historians Klehr and Haynes, "About 1,200 [of the 6,000!] chiefly those who retained American or Canadian citizenship, returned in disillusionment. Most of the rest disappeared into the Gulag labor camps." 372 These specific cases, of both individuals and groups, presented in this chapter constitute a continuum of misery. Whether singly or with compatriots, no one found the success they had hoped for. Americans got arrested, had friends or family taken away, or were the direct cause of others imprisonment! The Soviet government cynically used Americans whenever it could, forcing Herman to coach a KGB squad after his release from the gulags, pushing Robinson into the spotlight to gain what political edge it could from the attack on him. What choice did those men and unknown others have? Herman literally got a year under the ice for his disobedience, while Robinson was so terrified of arrest that he played along. As for the
369 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Salo, File 861.5017/689, Record Group 59. 370 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. Aho, File 861.5017/574, Record Group 59. 371 Memorandum of Interview with Mr. G, File 861.5017/727, Record Group 59. 372 Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 51. 71 colonization groups, all the effort they expended amounted to practically nothing, as scarcely a trace of their presence remained after the colonization efforts collapsed. Ironically it was the scattered industrial workers and engineers who seemed to have the greater influence upon Soviet growth. Those few who survived and wrote about their experiences presented a uniformly graphic and appalling view of life within the Soviet Union. Many more did not live, and that their silence is an equally telling indictment of life in the Soviet Union. 72 CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION The tragedy of American workers in the Soviet Union between the World Wars is, in one sense, a small one. Thousands of Americans died there, some from natural causes while they were prevented from returning, and many more as a result of direct actions taken by the Soviet state. This loss of life is insignificant compared to the extermination of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, or to the toll of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, scale means nothing to the individual victims of Soviet actions; to them, each life embodied tragedy. The Americans went in good faith, impelled either by admiration for a new social order or by the prospect of steady work at decent wages. They were willing participants in a venture that promised benefits to both host nation and guest workers; they ended, many of them, as helpless victims of an almost barbaric state. The same Soviet state that had actively recruited American workers became in time the instrument of their destruction, a paradox that must have been especially vexing to the Americans trapped there, heartbreakingly vulnerable to Soviet persecution. While it is nearly impossible to quantify the impact of American workers and American technology on the Soviet Union, it is clear that the transfer of technology was of marked benefit to the Soviets. The factories and production methods established with American assistance helped the Soviets survive and stem Nazi aggression and modernize their nation into a global rival of the United States. In retrospect, the unwritten motto which greeted most Americans as they entered the Soviet Union was what Dante saw as he entered hell, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. 373 For as time went by, it became apparent that they had no recourse against an oppressive
373 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Francis Cary (U.S.A.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1946), 11. 73 government that increasingly saw them as enemies, and their own government could do little to help them. By scarcely even raising its voice in protest, the U.S. government became a silent partner to the tragedy that was unfolding, perhaps not wishing to provoke the Soviets over a few relative unknowns. While it is true that the United States did not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, the reality is that even the establishment of an embassy in Moscow was of small value to Americans there. Many of the excesses of Soviet aggression against Americans took place in the late 1930s, well after diplomatic relations had been formalized. For example, a low-level employee at the American embassy in Moscow was arrested on the street and spent over two decades in the Gulags. The fact that the Soviets would take an American embassy employee in this way indicates how little they feared interference from the U.S. government. The first-hand reports of American survivors, the records of the State Department and KGB, and the writings of historians who have examined this period plainly show` that thousands of Americans were either executed or worked to death in the Gulags. That this was done with little or no protest or action by the U.S. government compounds the tragedy. True, appeals by the American government would have done little good, but it seems as if concerns not to aggravate the Soviet authorities overrode a fundamental duty to American citizens in distress. Washington chose to ignore their plight, perhaps husbanding its marginal strength for some other issue. It is the final irony in this sad chapter of history that most of the American workers who helped create a modern industrial base in the workers paradise were disillusioned or eliminated by the system they went to help. The words of the Roman historian Tacitus seem to apply to this modern scene, I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject 74 matter. 374 Tacituss comments seem to apply directly to the experiences of Americans in Russia between the two world wars. Whether we consider individuals or groups on contract, or hundreds of colonists trying to form productive communities, they almost all met the same end, varying only in degree frustration, despair, dissolution.
374 Moses Hadas, ed., Complete Works of Tacitus (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), 163. 75 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources: Archival Collections: United States. Department of State. Record Group 59. National Archives. College Park, MD. Books: Beal, Fred E. Proletarian Journey - New England Gastonia Moscow. New York: Hillman-Curl, Inc., 1937. Bourke-White, Margaret. Eyes on Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931. Chamberlin, William Henry. Russia's Iron Age. U.S.A.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1934. Darling, Jay N. Ding Goes to Russia. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1932. Dolgun, Alexander, and Patrick Watson. An American in the Gulag - Alexander Dolgun's Story. U.S.A.: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1975. Dreiser, Theodore. Dreiser Looks at Russia. New York: Horace and Liveright, 1928. Franck, Harry A. A Vagabond in Sovietland - America's Perennial Rambler Goes Tourist. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935. Fischer, Louis. Machines and Men in Russia. New York, H. Smith, 1932. Gelb, Michael, ed. 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(Studies in Soviet History and Society) Nick Lampert, Gábor T. Rittersporn (Eds.) - Stalinism - Its Nature and Aftermath - Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin (1992, Palgrave Macmillan UK)