RUTHFULLY YOURS

If life was as bad as this for Russians, just think how bad it must have been for people who were trying to live like Russians, but were in fact Americans.

Not tourists, businessmen, or diplomats; no, these were just ordinary working people, who had moved to the Soviet Union. Their total number is unknown, but it must have run to several thousands, and their story – the subject of Tim Tzouliadis’s gripping and important book – has never been fully told before.

Why had they come? Some were idealistic Communists, or left-wingers whose trade-union activism had cost them their jobs in the US. But most were just looking for work, having lost their jobs in the way that millions of other Americans lost theirs, in the Great Depression. While American industry contracted, Russia had been recruiting skilled technicians, not least to run the giant car factory which was purchased – en bloc – from Henry Ford and plonked down on the banks of the Volga.

At first, life was good for most of these immigrants – better, certainly, than the life of the unemployed in the US.

They were fêted by the Russian media, and the authorities allowed major stadiums to be used for their baseball matches. The workers of the world were able to unite at last, it seemed, losing their chains but not their bats and gloves.

True, there were a few little warning signs. Many of the immigrants were relieved of their American passports on arrival, never to see them again. (Suitably doctored, some of the passports were used for sending Soviet agents to America.)

Wages which the Russian authorities had promised to deposit in US bank accounts mysteriously failed to appear there. Pressure was put on some of the Americans to take up Soviet citizenship, thereby losing the protection of international law; and some found that they had taken it up unknowingly, having been made to sign forms in Russian which they could not read.

But with the onset of the Terror, it hardly mattered what anyone had signed.

To visit the American Embassy in Moscow, in order to register US citizenship, was in many cases to write one’s own death sentence: NKVD men waited on the other side of the street, seized people as they emerged, and bundled them into vans.

Nor were the most prominent and idealistic pro-Communists immune from arrest – rather the opposite.

The Rev Julius Hecker, a Methodist from Columbia University who had published several books in the US defending Communism, was arrested, tortured and, before he was shot, made to confess that his books were just an elaborate cover for espionage.

At the heart of this book are the stories of two extraordinary young men, Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman; both were seized, tortured and sent to some of the worst Gulag camps, at which the great majority of the inmates died from starvation, disease, overwork and physical abuse.

Thanks to their physical toughness (Herman was a keen boxer who, when placed in a cell full of psychopathic Russian criminals whose task it was to kill him, pulverised two of them and was then accepted into their gang), and thanks also to some extraordinary good luck, both survived.

Decades later, both returned to America, and wrote detailed accounts of their experiences.

Sgovio’s fate was the worst: he was sent to the Kolyma death-camps of the Arctic north-east, where the temperature inside the prison barracks could sink to -40F.

Anyone who has read the classic accounts of these camps – Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, Applebaum – will know how harrowing, and compelling, descriptions of life and death there can be.

But Tzouliadis, while never abandoning his central story, has other ways of harrowing the reader. For this book is also about all the ways in which America managed to ignore, or misrepresent, what was happening to thousands of its citizens.

There is a roll-call of shame here which runs from the privileged Moscow press corps (led by the sycophantic Walter Duranty, who had published articles urging Americans to move to Russia in the first place), to visiting celebrities such as Paul Robeson (who dismissed all stories of mass-arrests as anti-Soviet propaganda), to a whole string of prominent officials in the Moscow Embassy, the State Department and the White House.

This is an extremely impressive book. Tzouliadis, a British documentary film-maker, may not be a Russian language specialist (he has commissioned researchers to do interviews and archival work in Russia), but he has done phenomenal research among English-language sources of all kinds, archival and printed.

The writing is crisp and fluent, and the ordinary lives of these Americans come vividly to life; but at the same time the larger political framework is always present, lucidly outlined.

Above all, this is a writer who, though he does not preach to the reader, clearly possesses a ‘moral compass’. Some of the American officials he describes had lost theirs altogether; and, as Tzouliadis shows, it was partly as a result of this that so many American citizens lost their lives.