Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

One portrait in the memoirs is of Serge’s friend Adolf Joffe. A Russian Jew, Joffe was a revolutionary whose desire to change the world was matched by a deep, free-ranging curiosity about it. He read widely, and as an exile in Vienna before the First World War, underwent psychoanalysis by Freud’s disciple Alfred Adler. From a wealthy family, he donated his entire inheritance to the revolutionary movement. Originally trained as a doctor, he “reminded one,” wrote Serge, “of a wise physician . . . who had been summoned to the bedside of a dying patient.” After the Revolution, Joffe became a Soviet diplomat. In 1927, he returned to Moscow from his post as ambassador to Japan, seriously ill and in despair at the repressive direction the regime had taken. As an act of protest, he committed suicide.

  Serge came to Joffe’s apartment and helped organize the procession that, despite harassment from the authorities, accompanied his body to the Novodevichy cemetery. Even the most pessimistic of the mourners could not have imagined that theirs was to be the last antigovernment demonstration permitted in Moscow for the next sixty years.

  In 1991, sixty-four years after Joffe’s death, a friend and I go to see his daughter Nadezhda at her apartment in Moscow. Stalin had wiped out his opponents and their family members with such thoroughness that it is amazing to find one of them still alive. Nadezhda Joffe had spent some two decades of her life in prison camps and internal exile. A vibrant, gray-haired woman of eighty-five, she may be the last person alive in Russia who had once known Victor Serge. As the spring sun streams through her window, we spend a morning talking about him and her father and the Russia that might have been if people like them had prevailed. Just before we leave, she tells us a story.

  A descendant of the Decembrists [reformer aristocrats who rebelled against the tsar in the 1820s] sees a crowd demonstrating in the street and she sends her daughter outside: “Masha! Go and see what’s going on.”

  Masha returns and says, “Lots of people are out on the street.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They’re demanding that no one should be rich.”

  “That’s strange,” says the woman. “My grandfather went out onto the street and demanded that no one should be poor.”

  The artist in Victor Serge would have liked this parable, I think. And the idealist in him would have liked its hint of the path not taken, of a revolution leading to a gentler society and not to one drenched in blood. He would have been in the grandfather’s crowd and not the later one. In his life he saw both types of crowds—humans at their best and at their worst—and left us a record of the world he knew in a voice of rare integrity.

  • • •

  One last visit, this one in 2002, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Outside the open door, bursts of lush green vegetation climb everywhere; sunlight reflects dazzlingly from whitewashed walls. Inside, this one-room building seems almost the size of a small gymnasium. The ceiling is dotted with more than a dozen skylights. Oil paintings lean against the walls; a table is piled high with black-and-white prints; and to one side is a large, old-fashioned, iron printmaking machine, with a big wheel that must be turned by hand. At the far end of the room, against the back wall, is a work in progress, a giant canvas more than twenty feet high, a symphony of brilliant colors.

  This is the studio of Vlady Kibalchich, Victor Serge’s son, now eighty-one. A spry, sturdy man with a warm face bisected by a wide gray mustache, he wears a belted Russian peasant’s blouse and a flat Russian cap such as Lenin has in photographs. Depending on who comes in and out of the studio this morning, he speaks in Russian, French, or Spanish. Among the books on shelves at the side of the room are volumes by his father, in many languages and editions, and from time to time as we talk, he goes over and retrieves one to make a point. Vlady was born in revolutionary Petrograd in 1920 and was dandled as a baby on Lenin’s knee. He shared the first twenty-seven years of his life with his father: hunger, the arrests of family and friends, exile in Orenburg and western Europe, and then the final, last-minute voyage to Mexico. Like his father, Vlady has had troubles with the authorities. The Mexican government, long proud of the country’s muralists, commissioned him to do four big paintings for the Interior Ministry headquarters, which were unveiled with great public fanfare in 1994. Several months later, they disappeared. Officials had judged one of them to be too sympathetic to the Zapatista peasant rebels in the state of Chiapas.

  Vlady remembers well his childhood years in the 1920s and early ’30s, as darkness closed over Russia. Two rooms in that Leningrad communal apartment where he grew up were occupied by families of policemen (one possibly including the woman I met), and “each time Serge went to the telephone, someone opened a door” to listen. Serge told his young son Russian fairy tales at night and took him skiing on the snow-covered ice of the Neva River. But a normal childhood became difficult as arrests mounted and newspapers filled with articles demanding death for traitors. The translation work on which Victor Serge depended for his income dried up. Vlady was twelve when his father was arrested for the second time.

  He telephoned me, from his prosecutor’s office. He told me that I was now the man of the house, that I had to take care of my mother, to study, to brush my teeth, to speak French, to draw.

  Things were very tense at home. I went out one evening, and I passed the building of the GPU [the secret police]. I ran in the door. There were two soldiers with bayonets, and a red carpet on a big staircase.

  “Stop!”

  There was a door, and a man there, in uniform, who asked, “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve arrested my father!”

  I remember he had a corner office. He picked up the telephone, talked, and then said, “Your father is in Moscow.”

  “It’s not true!”

  He telephoned Moscow, and then said, “He’s in the Lubyanka [national secret police headquarters].”

  At home, Vlady’s maternal grandparents were aghast that he had entered the secret police building. Ten months later the family finally received permission to join Serge in exile in Orenburg. Vlady and his mother sold their books and furniture and left for the Urals. “We had a particularly hard time with hunger there. People were dropping like flies.” But Orenburg was where, with strong encouragement from his father, Vlady really discovered himself as an artist.

  When Vlady speaks of Victor Serge as a human being, what he remembers most warmly is his father’s calm, optimism, and equanimity. “He never swore—even though he had been long in prison, with some terrible people.” And, wherever they were—at home, in exile, on shipboard—whether there was hope of publication or not, Serge wrote. He and Vlady were stuck in an internment camp for some weeks in Martinique in 1941, trying to get to their promised haven in Mexico. Even in the camp, Serge kept writing, prose and poems—Vlady makes the motion of a writer’s hand holding a pen and crossing a page—“he worked just as if he were at home.”

  Have his father’s beliefs influenced Vlady’s art? One answer lies in the giant canvas on the end wall of his studio, which he has been painting and repainting for many years, interrupted by a public viewing at an exhibition. The painting shows the Persian emperor Xerxes, who invaded Greece in 480 BCE. When a storm destroyed the pontoon bridges he had built to cross the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between Asia and Europe, the enraged Xerxes ordered his soldiers to whip the sea in punishment. Xerxes is a cyclops in Vlady’s painting, mounted on a dragon the color of fire; the soldiers whipping the stormy, deep green sea are tiny figures, in keeping with the hopelessness of their task. More than half a century after Victor Serge’s death, his artist son has gone back two and a half millennia to find an image for the lesson that Serge’s own life taught them both, about the arrogance of an autocrat’s grasping for absolute power.

  1979, 2012

  SIXTEEN

  Shortstops in Siberia

  THE MOUNTAINOUS REGION OF KOLYMA, some five hundred miles west of the Bering Strait, is the coldest inhabited area on earth. During Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship, so
me two million prisoners were sent to mine the rich deposits of gold beneath its rocky, frozen soil. In 1991, researching a book on how Russians were looking back at Stalin’s rule, I traveled there to see some of the old prison camps, legendary as the most deadly part of the Soviet Gulag. I had interviewed survivors from them. In a country beset by shortages of building materials, all the hundreds of former Gulag camps that anyone could drive a truck to had long since been stripped bare. The only ones still standing were those reached by roads that had washed away or reverted to wilderness, and to get to them you had to rent a helicopter. Amazingly, since the slowly collapsing Soviet Union had not yet let the ruble float against the dollar, you could do this for the equivalent of about $30 an hour, less than a taxi would cost in New York.

  I spent a full day flying across desolate Kolyma, its gravelly mountainsides streaked with snow even in June (see the photograph on p. 243). We descended into three of the old camps, finding rickety wooden guard towers, high perimeter fences of rusted barbed wire, and, in one camp, an internal prison of punishment cells. Its wooden roof was rotted away, but thick stone walls still stood; within them were small windows crossed both vertically and horizontally by heavy bars, the intersections further cinched with thick iron bands. A photograph of the view through one of these cell windows is this book’s cover. At the end of the day, as we flew back to the town where I was staying I sat in the helicopter cockpit between the pilot and co-pilot. Beyond every jagged ridge, it seemed, in every hollow or valley, were the ruins of yet another camp, the crumbling wood blackened by decades of exposure.

  No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens perished outside of war during the quarter-century that Stalin wielded absolute power, but like the similar horror show unfolding in German-occupied Europe in the same period, the Soviet story was one of death on an almost unimaginable scale. But in its first two decades, the Soviet Union was idolized by millions of people the world over, who fervently saw it as the just society of their dreams. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a poignant reminder of this. For he looks at this period through an unusual prism: the experience of Americans who emigrated to the USSR in the 1930s and who, like so many of the Soviet subjects they lived among, fell victim. Bits and pieces of this story have been told before, mainly in the memoirs of a few survivors. But his is a more comprehensive history, and a fascinating and tragic one it is.

  Like the tens of thousands of western Europeans who arrived in the same period, these immigrants were driven by the Great Depression at home and the hope for a better, fairer way of life in the Soviet Union. A quarter of the U.S. labor force was out of work, another quarter underemployed, and millions of Americans were standing in line at soup kitchens or living in “Hooverville” shantytowns after losing their homes, farms, or jobs. Was it not possible to build a better world than this? Of course it was—and in Russia, apparently, they were doing it. Factories were hiring from abroad—particularly skilled workers and engineers, who were being offered lucrative contracts. And these factories were said to have nursery schools, clinics, libraries. Although many of the American immigrants to Russia had been socialists or communists in the United States, you didn’t have to be one to believe that somewhere on Earth people had been able to build a more sensible economy than the Depression-ridden one of the Western world. An English translation of something originally written for Soviet schoolchildren, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, spent seven months on the U.S. bestseller list in 1931.

  When the Soviet foreign trade agency advertised jobs for skilled workers in Russia that year, a hundred thousand Americans applied. Ten thousand were hired; untold thousands more headed for the country on tourist visas, hoping to find work when they got there. By early 1932, the New York Times was reporting that up to a thousand new American immigrants were arriving in Moscow each week—and that the number was increasing. This may have been an exaggeration; nonetheless, that year the total climbed so high that the English-language weekly Moscow News turned daily. The American immigrants brought their children, and soon there were English-medium schools in at least five Soviet cities. For $40 million, Stalin bought 75,000 Model A sedans from Henry Ford, plus an entire Ford factory—which required expert technicians to run it, and so more Americans came.

  With them, the eager newcomers brought baseball. The Forsaken includes a group photograph of smiling young American players at Gorky Park in the summer of 1934, with the initials on their jerseys identifying the teams: the Moscow Foreign Workers’ Club and the Gorky Auto Workers’ Club. One of the teams named Paul Robeson, who had been a star college athlete before becoming a communist and famous singer, honorary catcher. Other American baseball teams sprang up everywhere from Kharkov in the Ukraine to Yerevan, Armenia. The motif of baseball threads through the book, and some of its pages trace what happened to the men who played that day in Gorky Park.

  Baseball caught on with Russians, and they began joining the American teams or starting their own, although they considered the practice of stealing bases somewhat capitalistic. Then suddenly it was 1936, and the Great Purge had begun. Having already shot, jailed, or exiled all his real political opponents, a paranoid Stalin now went after imaginary ones, in the process tapping a deep vein of Russian xenophobia. Waves of mass arrests swept across the country. Millions were seized in the space of a few years. At the show trials of high Communist Party officials, the charge was usually espionage for a foreign power. Kept awake for days at a time and brutally interrogated, one person after another was made to confess to having been a spy or saboteur for Britain, Germany, the United States. And so foreigners, or anyone connected with foreigners, were suspect. No more Russians joined the American baseball games. Very soon, there was no more baseball.

  From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the forced confessions, the trains hauling boxcars packed with emaciated prisoners to labor camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the Gulag, they survived their imprisonment, Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. My own guess would be that the total of American deaths might approach a thousand; if we add victims among other Westerners living in USSR at the time, their ranks increased by refugees from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the total would be far higher.

  The testimony of Herman and Sgovio has found its way into some books about the Gulag, including my own, for which I was able to interview Sgovio. But Tzouliadis’s most unexpected contribution is the sorry tale of how desperate pleas for help from captive Americans, some smuggled out of prison, some made by family members still at liberty who risked their lives by walking into the closely watched U.S. embassy, were ignored by diplomats in Moscow and officials back in Washington. Old State Department correspondence files reveal this evidence, which includes even a wooden tag smuggled out of a camp with the words, in English, “Save me please and all the others.” Even though the conservative ambassador of tiny Austria was able to protect more than twenty Austrian left-wingers by sheltering them in his basement, the U.S. embassy staff, contemptuous of the Americans who had come to Russia out of naïve idealism, did virtually nothing. Yet they could have saved many lives if they had tried, for Stalin was shrewd enough to want to please a valued foreign trading partner. Again and again, the diplomats turned aside those begging for help, generally with the excuse that there was no proof that the prisoner involved was a U.S. citizen. This was often
literally true, for when Americans arrived to work in the Soviet Union, the Russians usually confiscated their passports—the better to exert control and also to acquire a stash of passports they could later doctor and use to send Soviet spies abroad.

  Why were the officials so callous? For one thing, making too much noise might get you expelled from what was, for a rising young Foreign Service officer, a plum post. Beyond that, diplomats temperamentally are seldom troublemakers; the exceptions, like Raoul Wallenberg, are rare. And finally, behind those who played it safe at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s was another factor: their boss.

  In the American practice of handing out ambassadorships to presidential chums and campaign contributors, never was there a more ill-fated choice than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s selection, in 1936, of Joseph E. Davies as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Davies knew nothing about Russia; he had made a small fortune as a lawyer, defending corporations against tax collectors during the boom times of the 1920s. He had then married the owner of a much larger fortune, the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, known for her array of extravagant homes, one of which was the world’s largest private yacht, the three-masted Sea Cloud, with a crew of sixty-two.

  Davies “loved bigness,” Justice Louis Brandeis once said, criticizing him for his failures when serving on a government commission that was supposed to curb monopolies. In Stalin’s Russia, Davies found plenty of highly satisfying bigness. To the horror of other envoys, he attended several of the Purge show trials and told the State Department that justice had been done. It did not seem to bother him when Russian acquaintances vanished. One Soviet diplomat had taken Davies’s daughter and some friends out for dinner and dancing when two men came to their table and tapped him on the shoulder. “He was never seen again,” Tzouliadis writes. Nor was Mrs. Davies much disturbed by any of this, even though, she said years later, from their bedroom at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in central Moscow she could sometimes hear women and children screaming in nearby apartment buildings as men were arrested in the middle of the night. Her main interest was in collecting art, jewelry, and china that had belonged to the prerevolutionary Russian aristocracy, something she was able to do on a lavish scale as the government sold off confiscated collections.