This book by Tim Tzouliadis gave me at least a partial answer to my puzzlement over the years why some Americans were taken in by Soviet propaganda and some were even willing to serve as Soviet spies. I hadn’t known before reading the book that thousands of Americans immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to escape the oppression of the Great Depression and to take part in the “Worker’s Paradise.” They are described as being mostly ordinary citizens in search of what they had been told was a better life. Many entire families immigrated. The early years seem to have gone more or less well for most of them. By the late 1930s most of them had been arrested and shot or died in the Gulags. Very few managed to escape back to America.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected President in a landslide and began to launch the New Deal. He said in his inaugural address that “The moneychangers have fled from their high seats in the temple…,” and “The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” The author observed Americans couldn’t be blamed for being drawn to Russia if the President could make such a speech without being called a “Red.” Moscow-based New York Times reporter Walter Duranty wrote in early 1931 of “…the greatest wave of immigration in modern history…” One writer observed that “broke Americans” unable to afford transportation to Russia could wait for winter and “…walk from Alaska to Siberia over the ice of the Bering Straits…” George Bernard Shaw broadcast a lecture after visiting the USSR saying Americans should want to go to Russia to escape “…our bankrupt Capitalism…” There were as many as 150 Americans arriving in Moscow a day by the end of 1931. Anna Louise Strong, a progressive friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and frequent visitor to Moscow, was giving glowing reports about Soviet progress to FDR.
American immigrants to the USSR evidently were treated well in the early days. New schools were built to teach their children about Lenin and the evils of Capitalism. The students called their teachers “Comrade.” The young men formed baseball teams, and the sport fascinated the Russians who began forming their own teams. Ominously, one game played by the Americans was against members of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police. Soon after a New York Times article announced the OPGU had been abolished and the NKVD formed, “…celebrated here today as a demonstration that the Soviet Union had…cast off methods by which the regime heretofore had stamped out enemies” (revealing they knew the truth). Paul Robeson, an American black actor and singer, apparently didn’t agree with the article. He was quoted as saying, “I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it (the USSR) ought to be shot!” When the “Terror” began and millions were executed or sent to disappearing into the Gulags or by execution, He would say, “…sometimes great injustices must be inflicted on the minority when the majority is the pursuit of a great and just cause.”
Robeson and many others ignored the millions of Ukrainians systematically being starved to death. There is a story of a traveler passing through Soviet Central Asia who asks about what he thinks are logs alongside the road. His chauffeur laughed and told him “Those aren’t logs. This road leads out of the Soviet Union to countries where you can have food…Thousands of peasants…try to get out of Russia. Most of them are too weak to make it.” Walter Duranty, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his reports in the New York Times about how admirably well things were going in Russia would write that there was no Ukrainian famine and that, “The use of the word ‘Famine’ in connection with the North Caucasus is a sheer absurdity….There are plump babies in the nurseries…Village markets are overflowing…” An American who had seen the dead from the famine and escaped back to the United States under a false identity “…could only find one newspaper willing to print his account of the famine that claimed an estimated five million lives.” The newspaper was the Jewish Daily Forward of New York, and his story was published in Yiddish. (I consider that Duranty and The New York Times were accessories to the murder of millions of Russians for publishing obviously false articles.)
Walter Duranty also wrote that the Gulags were where “…misguided persons will be given a chance to regain by honest toil their lost citizenship in the Socialist Fatherland.” He also wrote an astonishingly incredible description of the Gulags. “Each concentration camp forms a sort of ‘commune’ where everyone lives comparatively free, not imprisoned…fed and housed gratis and receive pay for their work.” Of course Duranty and articles were valuable beyond description to Stalin. Duranty lived a life of luxury in Moscow with all the perks of wealth while millions of Russians were being executed or starved. His perks included the company of beautiful young women who were descendents of the former aristocracy. “It was Duranty, more than any other individual, who persuaded Franklin Roosevelt of the wisdom of granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government.”
It is interesting that Stalin admired the accomplishments of Henry Ford, the ardent Capitalist, and he signed a contract with Ford to construct a new automobile production factory in the Soviet Union. An American construction company began building the factory in 1930, and it was completed in less than two years. Several hundred U.S. autoworkers immigrated to work in the plant. Most if not all of the Americans would eventually disappear, and the plant did not operate efficiently.
Americans began to be arrested on a large scale when the Terror began, and the new U.S. embassy in Moscow was inundated by Americans desperate to return home. Ambassador William Bullitt got along well with Stalin early on, but issued a frank warning about the Soviet Union as he was leaving. He described “…communism as a militant faith determined to produce world revolution and the ‘liquidation’ (murder) of all non-believers…all battle, murder, and sudden death, all the spies, exiles, and firing squads are justified.” People were arrested, given short trials, and executed (the executioners called the shot to the back of the head the “nine gram ration”). People were charged as “enemies of the Revolution.” Some were accused of being “conciliators,” for advocating leniency. Some were found guilty of “failure to denounce” others. Family members of those accused were arrested simply for being family members. The first generation of Bolsheviks was nearly eliminated. Of the 1966 people’s deputies of the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of “anti-Revolutionary crimes.” Only fifty of the seven hundred writers who had attended the First Congress of Soviet Writers would survive. Quotas for executions were sent to regional districts, and names were randomly selected from phone books to fill the quotas. A loud knock late at night on an apartment door would trigger a multitude of gunshots signaling suicides in adjacent apartments.
The NKVD watched the American embassy and arrested Americans who had gone there for help but were sent away. Embassy officials had known about the “disappearances” as early as April 1934, but never reversed their lack of assistance to those seeking to return to the U.S. The author speculates, “Perhaps they viewed these American exiles with distain, as men and women who had turned their backs on their country and were now suffering the consequences. Perhaps the State Department was unwilling to countenance the return to the United States of those they saw as economic misfits and political radicals of varying leftists stripe…”
The Americans desperate to escape the Soviet Union needed someone “…who might hold a protective hand over them…What they got instead was Ambassador Joseph Davies.” I will call the descriptions of Davies and his actions despicable on the scale of Walter Duranty, and “despicable” is undoubtedly too mild a descriptor. Davies was rewarded with the ambassadorship for the contributions he and wife made to the Roosevelt reelection campaign and for his Progressive credentials. He attended a show trial on his second day in Moscow, and astonished reporters by declaring the trials to be fair. One of those being tried was the former Soviet industrial commissar, George Piatakov, who had been tortured for thirty-three days before he finally confessed and offered to execute all those being tried, including his wife. Davies cabled Roosevelt that “…the confessions bore the hallmarks of credibility.” Davies was able to overlook the fact that many of the senior Soviet officials he entertained with lavish dinners disappeared into the jaws of the Terror’s execution machine. Davies told the American media, “A wonderful and stimulating experiment is taking place in the Soviet Union…” He and his wife were regularly awoken by the intermittent sound of gunfire night after night. His wife told him “I know perfectly well they are executing a lot of those people.” Davies responded, “Oh no, I think it is blasting in the new part of the subway.” Davies had soon transferred from the embassy to the 357 foot Sea Cloud yacht, perhaps to escape the sounds of the nightly executions or to avoid the constant appeals from desperate Americans wanting to escape.
The descriptions of how the torture used to extract “confessions” made me wonder how humans could possibly subject other humans to such inhuman tortures. It was said the Soviets “could force the stones to talk.” One man who surprised everyone when he denied the accusations in his show trial was removed and later frantically begged for conviction. The torture was so severe that his back was described to be “like a single wound.” Davies predictably continued his contention that it was a fair trial. He wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, that “…sufficient crimes…were established by the proof and beyond a reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.” A possible explanation for his naïve behavior was that Roosevelt had instructed him his main mission in Moscow was to win the confidence of Stalin.
Davies wrote a bestselling book titled Mission to Moscow that was published in 1941. It was retiled Submission to Moscow by the diplomats who served under him. Hollywood would make a high budget film based on the book, and Stalin approved it for distribution throughout the USSR. Davies wasn’t the only American official who failed to help desperate American’s. J. K. Huddle was the State Department’s “inspector of posts,” said the Americans seeking help “…represent merely flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life.” (Emphasis added) (There will be more to follow in parts II and III of this review.)