An examination of the citizen files in the Embassy reveals with stark clarity the force, deception and threats employed by the Soviet authorities in preventing many American citizens from maintaining their citizenship status . . . The files are full of pleas from desperate people who want to come to Moscow to explain their cases . . . Few of those who were persuaded by propaganda to leave America in times of Depression or on contracts signed with Amtorg . . . had any idea that they would be under great and sometimes irresistible pressure to part with their American citizenship and never be allowed to return to the United States.
To underscore his point, Roger Tyler highlighted the precarious existence of three young Americans—Dora Gershonowitz, Alexander Dolgun, and Isaac Elkowitz—who had all found temporary sanctuary working in clerical jobs at the American embassy. His report also cited the case of Lillian Boft, an American citizen brought to the Soviet Union as a child. Her sister Edith Boft had recently written to the embassy: “Lillian used to keep a diary, and wrote in it that she would kill herself if she could not get back to the United States. We didn’t believe her.” Tyler then added:
“The record shows that while on vacation in Odessa, she hanged herself.”
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George Kennan sent his letter with Tyler’s report to Washington, D.C., but the publicity he asked for failed to materialize. Instead, the material was classified as “Top Secret” and filed in the archives. Nor were the American diplomats in Moscow willing to break the silence without official sanction. Three months later, Kennan wrote another, much longer, telegram advocating the policy of “containment” in America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. The eight-thousand-word telegram was quickly passed around U.S. government circles, and the resulting publicity made Kennan internationally famous as a Cold War strategist. His earlier plea on behalf of the Americans trapped in the Soviet Union received no such publicity, and was soon forgotten, even by its author.
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21
The Second Generation
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.
George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Within the camps, the American survivors clung on, preoccupied with survival and waiting for a new turn of events. In theory, at least, all prisoners remained subject to the laws of the Soviet judicial system, which retained an arbitrary quality described by one survivor as “like playing chess with an orang-utan.”
1
In September 1946, eight and a half years into his five-year sentence, Thomas Sgovio was unexpectedly fingerprinted and asked to sign a warrant. As an “overtimer” he was informed that although he was not allowed to leave the Kolyma region, he could seek work among the free settlers shipped in to colonize the empty spaces of the North.
Now aged thirty, Thomas found a job drawing maps for a geological prospecting group. In the evenings he taught the geologists English, although his lessons grew less and less popular as the superpower relationship deteriorated. All over the Soviet Union, from this tiny ice-bound settlement in Kolyma to the busy streets of Moscow, the public loudspeakers were barking a daily diatribe against America, “the warmonger and imperialist oppressor.” With bewildering speed, the United States was transformed from World War ally into Cold War foe.
2
Nine months later, the hand of the “orang-utan” reached out to make another move. The petitions sent by his mother and sister in Moscow had finally reached the desk of a Soviet official willing to grant Thomas Sgovio permission to leave Kolyma. Once again without explanation, he was issued an internal passport authorizing leave for the “mainland.” Gathering his scant belongings in a knapsack, he hitched a ride south toward Magadan. On his arrival, he found the city filled with bewildered Japanese prisoners of war, who could make little sense of what was taking place around them.
3
One of the Japanese asked a former prisoner in pidgin Russian,
“Japanese soldiers walk down road, Russian soldiers guard. We understand—war! Russian ladies walk down road, Russian soldiers guard. We do not understand.”
And who could begin to explain the nature of Stalinism that had led the Russian women to this end?
4
In Magadan, Thomas bought his first apple in nine years and began the interminable bureaucratic battle to gather the necessary travel and identity papers required by an ex-prisoner to leave this closed zone. As the months wore on and his funds ran low, he started to despair but was helped by a Russian translator friend, who told him that there was another American living in Magadan and working as a free-citizen engineer. His name was Aisenstein, “perhaps he might be able to help?” Clutching the address on a slip of paper, Thomas Sgovio hurried down to the port ready for a reunion with his friend, who had been saved from starvation in the camp by his qualifications as an engineer. But Michael Aisenstein greeted him at the door stony-faced, and after a few cold questions and answers, Thomas left empty-handed. Many of the former prisoners were too fearful to risk even a conversation.
5
Instead, Thomas’ salvation came in the unexpected form of an alcoholic NKVD guard whom he ran into on the streets of Magadan. Lieutenant Vassilyev’s only words of English were “Hey, Thomas! Intelligence service!” First the NKVD lieutenant roared out his greeting, and then advised him to hurry down to the post office and send a telegram to Moscow. Thomas’ sister, Grace Sgovio, was by now an employee at the British embassy, and thanks to her intervention and the generosity of a British diplomat, she managed to wire her brother the necessary funds. Using this cash, Thomas bribed his way on board a flight leaving Magadan for Khabarovsk, the city six hundred kilometers north of Vladivostok. On the long train journey back to Moscow, his ragged clothes and knapsack made him instantly identifiable as a survivor from “over there.” But no one shunned him; instead the Russian travelers treated him like a long-lost brother. Almost everyone, it seemed, had lost a family member or friend to the Terror.
6
Exhausted by his journey, Thomas arrived to a joyous reception at his mother’s flat in Moscow. In the family’s shared room, his sister, Grace, played American records on their gramophone while they talked, since she assumed “the walls were listening.” When Thomas asked for news of their father, the mood turned more somber. Very calmly, Grace explained that after Joseph Sgovio’s arrest in 1937, no one had heard any news of his fate for the next ten years. Then, in January 1947, just three months earlier, she answered the door to a decrepit old man dressed in rags. Thinking he was just another one of Moscow’s beggars made homeless by the war, she had turned toward the kitchen to give him some food. Only when the figure whispered, “Grace, Grace is that you?” did she realize that this old man, too frightened to follow her into the hallway, was her father.
7
On the verge of collapse, Joseph Sgovio had summoned the strength to return to his family after ten years in the camps. Estranged from his wife, and without permission to remain in Moscow, he had left just ahead of a visit from the secret police. On a collective farm in Tashkent, he was hospitalized, but he managed to return once again to his family in Moscow. On his second visit, Grace sent for a private doctor, who examined her father’s skeletal body and diagnosed a combination of the typical illnesses of a Gulag prisoner: dysentery, pellagra, malaria, and pneumonia. It was also very likely that he was suffering from tuberculosis, since he was coughing up blood. There was little more that could be done, and a short while afterward, Joseph Sgovio died with his family by his bedside, having begged their forgiveness for ever bringing them to the Soviet Union. At the very end, he held their hands:
“Forgive me . . . goodbye.”
8
It was a condition not uncommon among the survivors of the camps. Some men could willfully cling on to life with stubborn tenacity. No matter how hard the circumstances, they defiantly survived, exhausting their bodies’ final reserves in an effort to see their families again. Once this end was achieved, they died very quickly. As Grace recounted her father’s death, the gramophone played the hit record that Thomas had brought with him from America—“Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.”
9
HAPPIER TIMES WERE to come. In the months after his return, Thomas was reunited with Lucy Flaxman, his former sweetheart, who was still living in Moscow, her family having survived the purges unharmed. In spite of the years that had passed since Thomas’ arrest, their romance was rekindled in long walks through the pine woods outside Moscow. But when Thomas asked her if she ever thought she might return to America, Lucy always had trouble answering. And she always asked him not to discuss the camps:
“I’m really very weak. If ever they arrest me and interrogate me about you—I’d honestly be able to answer I know nothing.”
10
Later, to lighten the mood, Lucy Flaxman told a joke going around Moscow at the time: “When you find yourself in the company of three be careful what you say! One of you is certainly a secret agent, if not two, perhaps all three!” Thomas warned her to be careful, since jokes could have disastrous consequences. But Lucy had only laughed and claimed he was exaggerating. “I’ve told them before. How come I was never arrested?” In reply, Thomas could only mumble an expression he had picked up in the camps:
“When it happens to you, you’ll know that it was true.”
11
As a former prisoner, Thomas was not allowed to live in Moscow, or any major city of the USSR. So he found work as a sign painter in the industrial town of Alexandrov, 120 kilometers northeast of Moscow. Months later, his romance with Lucy was moving closer to marriage. At the same time, the political atmosphere in the USSR was deteriorating steadily, with a new ideological campaign launched against the crime of “cosmopolitanism,” and all foreign influences “infecting” Soviet society.
If the latest antiforeigner campaign had been confined to plays ridiculing President Truman in the Soviet theater, the abandoned Americans might only have suffered another period of nervous apprehension. But Stalinist propaganda was seldom unaccompanied by repressive action. In 1948 and 1949, new articles were added to the Soviet criminal code banning “Praise of American Technology” and “Praise of American Democracy” as offenses carrying a sentence of twenty-five years.
12
Prisoners were no longer being released from the Gulag, and those who had been freed were being rearrested in alphabetical order. The survivors understood what was approaching. In truth they had never been free at all, their release was simply the interval between two arrests. Survivors like Thomas Sgovio were always destined to become future detainees, marking time until Stalin “felt hungry again.”
As the Berlin Airlift threatened to escalate into World War Three, Stalin tightened his grip still further and a new wave of Terror broke across the Soviet Union. Within the American community, along with the survivors disappearing in the latest arrests, a second generation of American sons and daughters suddenly became vulnerable. They had survived the Terror because they were children at the time. But by 1949, this was no longer the case, and that year would become known as “the twin brother” of 1937.
13
THE THREE AMERICANS mentioned by name in Roger Tyler’s report were still working as clerks or translators at the embassy in Moscow. Dora Gershonowitz had arrived in Russia as an eleven-year-old child, and had been trying to return to her birthplace in Paterson, New Jersey, since the age of fourteen. On December 18, 1945, she wrote a letter addressed to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes describing how
I was deemed expatriated as a result of my failure to return to the United States . . . I have done everything humanly possible to obtain a Soviet exit visa—have been refused several times. I have never discontinued my efforts to obtain a visa and as a result have been waiting one and a half years for an answer from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in order to be able to return to my native country . . . I am requesting your intervention on my behalf . . . I would not have turned for assistance to you if I were not desperate.
14
Letters such as Dora’s prompted Byrnes to telegram the Moscow embassy on May 23, 1946:
Long accumulation of unsolved cases has resulted in embarrassment to Dept in its communication with persons in US interested in American nationals in Soviet Union. Dept desires that discussions with Foreign Minister be on a plane of utmost frankness . . . Soviet authorities have since resumption of diplomatic relations molested and in numerous instances arrested American nationals who have called at the Embassy, some of whom have disappeared and Embassy has been unable to ascertain their whereabouts or fate . . . Dept is considering the disclosure of facts of this situation to American public.
15
While the machinery of the State Department considered how to act, Dora Gershonowitz was arrested. Although she was both an American citizen and an employee of the American embassy, little was done to protect her from her ordeal.
Eight years after her disappearance, in March 1956, a released German prisoner named Vera Kemnitz reported having seen her alive in Camp No. Nineteen at Potma, approximately 350 kilometers south of Nizhni Novgorod. Vera Kemnitz described Dora Gershonowitz as being of
“slight build, approximately one hundred pounds in weight, dark brown hair, brown eyes and she is suffering badly from the effects of tuberculosis.”
As proof of her identity, she had asked Kemnitz to remember the names of two diplomats she had worked with at the American embassy:
“Robert Tyler Jr, and Louis Hirschfeld, both US citizens.”
16