The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (20 page)

Joseph Davies, meanwhile, had cabled President Roosevelt with his observation that “the confessions bore the hallmarks of credibility.” In his diplomatic report, Davies described how Stalin had uprooted “a clear conspiracy against the government.” And as if to underline his point, the ambassador bought up English translations of the trial—quickly published by TASS in Moscow—to send to his friends back home. Almost without exception, his staff in Moscow were skeptical. George Kennan wrote to the State Department that there was “in actuality . . . no real evidence—nothing, in fact, except vague and general contentions to show that these men ever constituted anything resembling an organization.”
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Shocked at the apparent naïveté of their new boss, the American diplomats met secretly in Loy Henderson’s rooms to consider a mass resignation in protest.
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Had they actually done so, perhaps subsequent events might have taken a different course, but at the critical moment the officials lost their nerve and stayed silent, reasoning that Joseph Davies would be in Moscow for only another year or possibly two, and they would wait it out. Then the steady Loy Henderson warned the younger officers that while serving under Joseph Davies, “they should not indicate by word, gesture, or even facial expression a lack of respect of him.”
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In the meantime, life was very stressful for the American diplomats, with the demands of Joseph Davies’ arrival and the stream of desperate Americans begging at the embassy for passports or harassing them on the streets for their help. At least the ban on black market currency dealings had been rescinded. Now even the lowest-ranking diplomats could buy rubles at fifty to the dollar on the black bourse in Paris, which financed a handsome lifestyle in Moscow. A group of the younger American staff officers rented a dacha in the countryside outside Moscow, staffed with Russian servants, and treated themselves to “great spoonfuls” of caviar for breakfast. There were weekend retreats of blissful calm in the midst of the Terror, in which they relaxed from the stresses of Moscow city life. In the winter of 1937, Elbridge Durbrow and Charlie Thayer brought some American records over to a public skating rink, which they managed to have played over the loudspeakers, and everyone danced along to the beat. Later they took their expensive American skis out for a run across the countryside, chased after by excited Russian children yelling, “Capitalists! Capitalists! Capitalists!”
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OBLIVIOUS TO THE mutinous intrigues of his staff, Joseph Davies cultivated the friendship of Kremlin insiders. On February 17, 1937, he entertained at lunch Boris Steiger, the Soviet diplomatic liaison officer. After a long talk over foreign affairs, Davies drew Steiger aside and asked him confidentially how he was “faring personally” in the midst of the purges. The Russian merely shrugged his shoulders and pointed with his index finger to the back of his neck. Was this witty élan or the calm resignation of someone who knew the end was nigh? The ever-charming Steiger endeavored to become a Davies family favorite, accompanying them to the royal box for the opera. After one performance, Steiger invited Davies’ daughter Ekay and her friends to dinner and dancing at the Metropol Hotel. Shortly after midnight, while seated at their table, he was tapped on the shoulder by two men in civilian dress. Steiger excused himself and left, saying he would be back shortly. He was never seen again.
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A more superstitious man might have steered well clear of the American ambassador that year. A month after Steiger’s disappearance, Davies invited a party of sixty Red Army high commanders to dinner at the American embassy, laying on the very best meal his French chefs could offer, with “all the capitalistic trimmings” and old-fashioned American cocktails that seemed to go down very well with the Soviet military elite. Marshal Tukhachevsky was placed next to Ekay Davies, who had learned some Russian while studying law at Moscow University. The Red Army marshal and the ambassador’s daughter had a long discussion about communism and women’s rights in the USSR. Toasts followed, with Ambassador Davies proposing the health of the Red Army.
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Within nine weeks of the dinner, most of Davies’ guests, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, had been shot. Their arrest, closed trial, and executions made headline news all over the world, with political repercussions in Washington, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. Naturally the ambassador’s opinion was called for, and once again Davies attempted to substantiate the charges made against his former guests: “The best judgement seems to believe that in all probability there was a definite conspiracy in the making looking to a coup d’état by the army.” One month later, Davies continued his theme in a letter to the secretary of state:
“It is scarcely credible that their brother officers . . . should have acquiesced in their execution unless they were convinced that these men had been guilty.”
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The Red Army officers who signed Tukhachevsky’s death sentence were themselves executed, one by one, over the course of the year. The rationale for their deaths was that the survivors might become resentful, a state of mind that Stalin referred to as an “unhealthy mood.” General Pavel Dybenko, one of the commanders who conscientiously signed the death warrants, was himself accused of being an American spy. Pavel Dybenko had once been described by John Reed in
Ten Days That Shook the World
as “a great bearded sailor, with the clear eyes of youth, [who] prowled restless about, absently toying with an enormous blue-steel revolver which never left his hand . . . giving rapid orders right and left.” Now the former Revolutionary hero was reduced to writing desperate pleas to Stalin from captivity: “I don’t know the American Language, Comrade Stalin. I beg you to look into it thoroughly.” His pleas fell on deaf ears, and Dybenko was shot along with the others. Nor were their families spared. Tukhachevsky’s wife and brother were executed, while his daughter and four sisters were sent to the camps.
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Barely three months after his arrival in Moscow, Joseph Davies sailed back to the United States to brief Roosevelt on the Soviet criminal procedure he had watched so carefully during the Moscow show trial. What the new ambassador never discussed, or even mentioned at the time, was the plight of the American exiles or their evident desperation to leave the USSR. This was not through ignorance, since Davies was well aware of both their existence and continued requests for help. But the ambassador and his new wife always appeared to have more pressing business to attend to.

 
 
THROUGHOUT THEIR STAY in Moscow, the American couple was consumed by an acquisitive desire for Russian art, jewelry, and pre-Revolutionary treasures on sale at the Soviet commission shops. Joseph Davies clearly understood the provenance of these items, as he revealed in a letter to his daughter Eleanor: “These resemble our antique shops and are run by the state and sell all manner of things brought in by the owners, from pictures to bedroom sets, and from jewels to china.” Even on his industrial tours of the USSR, Joseph Davies found time to buy paintings from these commission stores, closely watched over by an NKVD officer who, if an item was oversold or misrepresented, demanded a quick refund on behalf of the grateful ambassador. During the summer of 1937, Davies admitted his compulsion in another letter to his daughter Ekay:
“Marjorie was much pleased with your selections at the Commission shops. As usual, we cannot resist them and have been having somewhat of an orgy again in picking up these interesting souvenirs. I definitely made up my mind not to make any more purchases of pictures, but apparently I can withstand anything but temptation and I fell for four or five more very lovely ones.”
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Other diplomats behaved with more restraint, their consciences overcoming the bargain-hunting instinct. On one visit, Irena Wiley had encountered a distinguished-looking elderly Russian dressed in threadbare clothes. His feet were wrapped in newspaper as he offered a silver cup for sale, evidently a family heirloom. At the counter, the old man was offered such a low price that despite his evident poverty, he declined. Outside, Irena Wiley offered to buy the cup from him at a price she thought was fair, and he accepted. When she took her purchase home and polished it up, she discovered it was an eighteenth-century silver goblet with a Moscow hallmark, worth a hundred times what she had paid for it. And then she realized that every item in the Soviet commission stores was bought on the suffering inflicted upon the Russian people. The thrill of the bargain hunt was immediately replaced by guilt, and she, for one, never went back.
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But Joseph and Marjorie Davies’ desire for such treasures never wavered. Their keenest interest was usually in the possessions of the former Russian aristocracy, sold at discount by their executioners: “Marjorie dearest: Here is the letter from Paris descriptive of the Orlov Tea Service and the items which we procured, for your files . . . I have talked over with Bender all of the matters you had in mind. I think I shall send him to Leningrad personally within the next few days and he will look into the matter of the Vladimir plates, the Greuse head, the tea set, and the other items.”
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In gratitude for his ability to facilitate their acquisitions, Philip Bender soon acquired the trappings of the Davies family retinue. His fine American clothes only added to his authority.
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There were no exact figures, but it was clear that a significant portion of Marjorie Davies’ fortune was used to fund the couple’s spending spree. At the time, the German diplomat Hans von Herwarth wondered if the Americans were buying “not individual objects but whole museums,” and later he would be proved correct. In the meantime, the most immediate effect was that the American couple managed to drive up the black market ruble rate in Moscow. Too busy augmenting their collections to question their behavior, the couple kept a catalogue of their purchases that told its own story. Second on the list of Joseph Davies’ Russian icons was “an interesting example of sixteenth or seventeenth century art” taken from the Chudov Monastery during the destruction of the atheist campaign. The icon was simply titled
Descent into Hell.
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THROUGHOUT MARCH 1937, Charlie Ciliberti was approached almost every day on the street by desperate Americans either too scared or too well informed to venture into the embassy but still attempting intervention at a higher level of authority than the nay-saying officialdom of George Kennan. The chauffeur passed on the information he learned to the ambassador during their car journeys around Moscow, but it seemed that Joseph Davies was strangely unmoved by the plight of his fellow citizens, even though his public profile—and hence his ability to intervene—could scarcely have been any higher. In mid-March 1937, Joseph and Marjorie Davies were photographed holding hands and laughing for the front cover of
Time
magazine, over a quote hinting at the magnificence of their lifestyles:
“The exaggerations give both Mrs. Davies and me a big laugh!”
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At the very moment when his presence was most urgently required in Moscow, the laughing ambassador arrived back in New York City on April 6, 1937, pursued by a press forever hungry for news from the closed world of Soviet Russia. With the Terror entering its bloodiest phase, Joseph Davies briefed the American media on his recent observations:
“A wonderful and stimulating experiment is taking place in the Soviet Union. It is an enormous laboratory in which one of the greatest experiments in the realm of state administration is being accomplished. The Soviet Union is doing wonderful things. The leaders of the Government are an extremely capable, serious, hardworking and powerful group of men and women.”
His comments were widely reported in the Soviet newspapers and left even their most vigilant censors with nothing to add.
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In New York, Davies made no mention of the reports of the disappearances of Americans in Russia, or the trainloads of prisoners seen by his embassy officers pulling out of Moscow, or even the frantic telephone calls received after the callers’ friends had been arrested.
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Most tellingly, he kept absolutely silent regarding the sounds that had kept his wife awake in their bedroom in Spaso House. Only years later, after their divorce, did Marjorie Merriweather Post reveal how she had listened to the NKVD vans pulling up outside the apartment houses that surrounded the Spaso House gardens. In the middle of the night, she had lain awake listening to the screams of families and children as the victims were taken away by the secret police. It had continued night after night. Like many other historical witnesses of the Terror, Marjorie Davies was also regularly awoken by the intermittent sound of gunfire. Once, when the noise of the guns interrupted her sleep, she turned to Joseph Davies to tell him, “I know perfectly well they are executing a lot of those people.” To which the American ambassador had replied soothingly, “Oh no, I think it’s blasting in the new part of the subway.”
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None of this was mentioned at the press conference in New York. Instead, Joseph Davies traveled on to Washington, D.C., to brief the president on the show trials and his tour of the Soviet industrial showpieces. From Ambassador Davies, Roosevelt discovered that the Soviets were introducing capitalist foundations into their economy: returning to a system of personal incentives, piece rates, and new technology. At the White House, Davies also exhibited the wonderful collection of Russian art he had accumulated during his short stay in Moscow. Wheeled around the pictures hanging in the East Room, President Roosevelt remarked that he “particularly liked the vividness and beauty of the snow scenes.”
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