The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (52 page)

At first the MVD’s response was cautious. But by early August 1953, the deputy minister of the interior, Ivan Maslennikov, was sent to end negotiations and reassert control by the traditional methods. The striking prisoners who refused to return to work were fired on with automatic weapons. In one volley more than one hundred prisoners were killed and five hundred badly wounded. In the week after the general return to work at Vorkuta, three hundred of the strike’s leaders were executed.
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Working as an orderly in the camp hospital of Dzhezkazgan, in Central Asia, the former American embassy clerk Alexander Dolgun gave comfort to the prisoners who were dying. In Dzhezkazgan, Dolgun heard of the uprising at the Kengir camp, just twenty-seven kilometers away.
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On May 16, 1954, eight thousand male and female prisoners had taken over the camp. Alexander Solzhenitsyn chronicled the uprising in
The Gulag Archipelago,
describing scenes of Ukrainian girls meeting their husbands, whom they had secretly married with the blessing of imprisoned priests. Services for all religions were conducted in the mess hall according to a fixed timetable. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were free to observe their own rules and, refusing to stand guard, volunteered to wash dishes instead. For forty days, the prisoners of Kengir were free once more, albeit barricaded within the camp. From the point of view of the authorities, their existence was now a threat to the state.

At first the Soviet police units punched holes in the camp walls, thinking that all but the ringleaders would flee. When this ploy failed, in the early dawn of June 25, 1954, parachute flares lit up the sky and cannon fire was heard overhead as tanks rolled into the Kengir camp. The assault was filmed by the cameras of the secret police: ranks of Ukrainian women dressed in embroidered dresses, which at home they wore to church, linked arms and, holding their heads up, marched forward, believing they might stop the assault. But the tanks only accelerated, driving over their bodies. Then the MVD troops started shooting in a massacre which began at three o’clock in the morning and continued for the next five hours. When the fighting was over, a secret police officer who had been seen shooting more than two dozen prisoners with his revolver placed knives in the hands of the dead, ready for a photographer to record the pictures of these “gangsters.”
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In 1953 and 1954, similar events were recorded across the Gulag Archipelago, proof that the pitiless functionality of the Soviet state had continued after Stalin’s death. In Kolyma, an underground opposition group had been formed, calling itself “the Democratic Party of Russia.” Little is known of the Russians who led the uprisings here—the documentary evidence of their existence is limited and there appear to have been few survivors.
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But although their collective rebellions were all crushed, the political message was not lost on Stalin’s successors. It was evident that ever-increasing levels of violence would be required to keep the Gulag legions in timid acquiescence. Over the next two years, between 1954 and 1956, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the release of millions of prisoners from the camps. And among the millions freed from their sentences were two surviving members of the ill-fated American baseball teams of the 1930s: Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman.

 
 
THEIR LIVES WERE saved in different ways. Thomas Sgovio survived thanks, in part, to the gift of his artistic talent, and Victor Herman through his ability to fight. Born within months of each other, they were both young men when first arrested, and they were both relatively short, wiry, and extremely tough. Such physiological characteristics were important factors in their survival. But the most essential quality of all was luck. Their stories were extraordinary because the camps of Kolyma and Burelopom were not places from which prisoners normally returned. The Gulag itself was a system where men died, and that these two Americans survived should not deflect us from this essential truth. Both Thomas and Victor escaped death on several occasions and only by the narrowest of margins, and each believed himself to have lived a charmed existence. Most importantly, we know of their existence only
because
they survived. There were many others just like them, the overwhelming majority in fact, of whom we know almost nothing at all—save for a passing reference in a chauffeur’s memoir, a reporter’s fleeting encounter in a subway shelter, or a forgotten face smiling in a baseball team photograph.

In his analysis of the Holocaust, Bruno Bettelheim wrote that concentrating on the few who survived must not draw our “attention from the millions who were murdered.” The same lesson is surely true for the victims of Stalinism, the other great tragedy of the twentieth century.
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There was, however, a sense in which survival had an abiding moral quality, even when the life saved was simply one’s own. Survival was also an act of resistance, hope, and triumph, inasmuch as it allowed an individual to bear witness on behalf of those who had lost their lives.
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Both Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman would fulfill this duty for the remainder of their lives. Eighteen years after they were first sentenced, each received an amnesty from the Soviet authorities for their respective “crimes.” From his exile in the remote wilderness, Victor Herman returned with his family to the city of Krasnoyarsk to resume his career as a boxing coach.
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Thomas Sgovio took the train, for a second time, back to his mother and sister in Moscow.

On March 24, 1954, Thomas’ sister, Grace, had written her latest appeal to the Soviet president, Malenkov, requesting Thomas’ release: “Please remember that of the nineteen years my brother has lived in the Soviet Union, sixteen of them have been in prison.”
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In the backlash against the old regime, after his return to Moscow Thomas discovered that Lucy Flaxman had been arrested as a “spy” and sentenced to a twenty-five-year jail term.
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The MVD had come for her on March 5, 1953, the day of Stalin’s death. Her son Evgeny remembered clearly how the police had arrived at six o’clock in the morning. Suddenly the lights were switched on and a voice told him, “Don’t get up.” Then the uniformed men ordered his mother to “get dressed.” Lucy Flaxman had looked back at them in surprise and incomprehension: “In front of you?”

After they took her away, the search of her apartment continued until four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the Chekists had told Evgeny: “You are going to write a letter? Well don’t address it to Beria.” And for years afterward Lucy Flaxman’s son would wonder how this man knew that Beria would soon be arrested. All his mother’s possessions were confiscated, including her clothes and the family’s precious television set. Evgeny was expelled from university the next day and drafted into the army. After his mother’s sentencing, he was allowed to visit her before her birthday on September 25, 1953. At the Moscow prison they were separated by two sets of bars and a guard. In six months, Lucy Flaxman had lost some weight but according to her son, “she did not look awful.” She told him that since the “Leader of Nations” had died, she hoped she would be freed soon: “I have signed everything they gave me,” she said. “I can’t bear it when they beat me.”
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Lucy Flaxman’s fate was like that of so many women, both those who had been coerced into working for the regime and those who had refused. Later Boris Pasternak remembered their lives in the fate of “Lara,” the beloved heroine of
Doctor Zhivago.
Pasternak’s novel was banned in the USSR, since the author was savagely critical of the Soviet regime. But ordinary Russians paid vast sums of rubles for the samizdat version on the black market. And in its pages they read a description of what had happened to their missing loved ones: “One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”
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Thomas Sgovio never saw Lucy Flaxman again. Instead, in Moscow, he came across other Americans, far guiltier than Lucy, who had survived. These were men such as Bernie Cooper, Eddie Ruderman, and Joe Adamov, whom he remembered as “the Hatchet Man of the American community.” Seeing Thomas approach, they crossed the street to avoid him.
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25

Freedom and Deceit

Varlam Shalamov,
Graphite
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In Moscow, Thomas Sgovio realized that everyone seemed to know something about Kolyma. The name had become a household word signifying the very worst of the camps. From the mid-1950s, the millions who returned brought back explicit accounts of suffering that, until then, had been concealed from the Soviet public. The survivors reappeared with little else besides their lost years, their lives, and a continuing trauma. “All I have left is the bones in my body and the skin stretched over them” was one description, repeated in endless variations by those who attempted to adjust to life outside “the zone.”
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Some managed to create new lives and remarried. Others refused to have children, citing the simple reason “I don’t want to be the father of slaves.”
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Their return was often the point at which the prisoners realized it had not been enough to survive. Their essential task was yet harder: to survive and keep one’s soul intact. There were men and women who walked around the streets of Moscow “with horrifyingly empty eyes.”
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It was an easy condition to recognize, even after the weight had returned and the rags were replaced by clean clothes. They walked and yet they hesitated, unsure of what to do without instruction. For many who had spent long years confined within the regimen of prison cells and concentration camps, the idea of even limited freedom was terrifying. Crossing the street seemed a feat of extraordinary magnitude.
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Even their journeys
away
from the camps had been difficult to bear. The prisoners returned to “Soviet civilization” in passenger trains whose mirrored bathrooms were often the cause of distress. One female prisoner described washing her face and catching sight of a haggard old woman staring back at her. Frightened, she ran into the corridor and returned with a guard. Of course, there was no one there.
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As a survivor, the former law student Varlam Shalamov described the process by which human emotions returned to a prisoner saved from the prospect of imminent death. Out of nothingness, first a degree of indifference was felt, then fear, then envy. Love resurfaced last, if at all.
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As the literary chronicler of Kolyma, Shalamov would die tragically. Forty-five years after his first arrest, he was confined in a Soviet psychiatric institution for his final incarceration. Only his prose remained to lend meaning to his suffering, and provide a degree of understanding to his future readers: a testimony to the events that had taken place in that far northeastern corner of Russia.
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Like Shalamov, many survivors who witnessed the execution of their fellow prisoners attempted to document their stories, anxious lest they themselves died and, according to Ivan Okunev, “they won’t know where those who were killed were buried.” Okunev was a survivor sent to Kolyma as a twenty-year-old in the terrible year of 1938:

 
Although they reawakened the events which they had endured, such memoirs were also a form of catharsis, an unburdening that provided a degree of comfort to the survivor. In any case, it was impossible for the human mind to remain unscathed. Those who had denied themselves all feeling in order to survive discovered themselves to be something less than human when they left “the zone.” At night the survivors lay sleepless, wide-eyed with fear lest they be arrested and sent back “there.” Some were quite literally unable to close their eyes as a result of this all-consuming anxiety. The Greeks had invented a term for this condition of extreme shock,
lagophthalmia,
fusing together the words for
hare
and
eye,
since the hare was believed never to close its eyes. The survivors wondered when the knock on the door in the night might come—and in the morning they attempted to live.

Such were the consequences of severe trauma. There were those who remembered too much and went mad under the strain. Others recalled too little and became amnesiacs trying to piece together their fragmented minds. For many, their condition within the camps had been so unbearable, so traumatizing, that they lost all knowledge of both their families and themselves. One scientist named Nikolai Timofeev recalled,
“I remembered only that the name of my wife was Lyol’ka, but I forgot her full name. I forgot the names of my sons. I forgot everything. I forgot my last name. I remembered only that Nikolai was my first name.” The same amnesiac response to severe trauma was recorded among the survivors of the Holocaust.
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