On Black Tuesday, 24 October 1929, the Wall Street stock market crashed. The financial crash was followed by the collapse of the US economy and the start of a ten-year period of crisis known in the US as the Great Depression. Millions of people lost everything overnight, their savings, their jobs and the roof over their heads. One by one, factories closed their doors and the queues outside people’s kitchens stretched on forever. The American economy was sick to death. For the first time in its short history, the USA had gone from being a land of immigrants to a land of emigrants. Many Americans even went to the other side of the world – to the mysterious Soviet Union – in search of a better life. The world’s first communist country was immune to the diseases of capitalism. What is more, it was experiencing high economic growth and the Soviet experiment was very attractive to many at a time when the whole developed world was struggling against recession.
Thousands of American workers, artists and peasants have traded the land of dreams and endless opportunities for a proletarian paradise. They were ordinary people, from humble families and without connections in high society. There were communists and leftists of all stripes, but the vast majority chose to go East for very different reasons. There, unlike in the USA, it was still possible to find work. Indeed, since 1930, unemployment had been officially “eradicated” in the Soviet Union.
The proverbially optimistic and eager-to-work Americans were delighted on arrival. The country seemed to be developing rapidly and there was indeed more than enough work to go around. In the 1930s, American hands also helped build Soviet communism. But the initial enthusiasm did not last long. Within a few years, one of the bloodiest periods in Russian history began – Stalin’s Great Terror. Millions of people ended up in “re-education” camps and no one knows exactly how many disappeared forever in the underground prisons of the Soviet secret services.
The Williams and Johns who worked in Russian factories, in the Azeri oil fields or in the Ukrainian collective farms suffered the same fate as their colleagues, the Volodymyr and Sergei. One by one, they began to disappear. The American state was unable or unwilling to help them. They were prisoners in Stalin’s cage. For most of them, all traces were lost. Those who miraculously survived, however, regretted for the rest of their lives that they had once set out from the land of dreams for a proletarian paradise.
Red beacon
In the early 1930s, an army of 13 million unemployed marched through American cities. One in four Americans was out of work. The crisis that gradually engulfed the whole world was at its worst right where it all began. Slums sprang up all over the country, which, in mockery of the then President Herbert Hoover, were named Hooverville. These cardboard and tin shacks were home to those who had lost everything. Capitalism had shown its ugliest face and many a newly poor person was furious at a system that could not take care of the little man. The sight of the filthy and ragged masses of paupers begging in the streets of America’s big cities made it seem that the wheel of the richest economy in the world had stopped for good. It took more than ten years to restart.
This was fertile ground for new ideas coming from the East. The exotic Soviet Union, which had succeeded in “eradicating” unemployment, unexpectedly became interesting in a country that valued individual freedom and the free market above all else. Nevertheless, it seems almost incredible that in 1931, “The Story of a Five-Year-Old”, an English translation of a simple Soviet children’s book in which the author lists the advantages of a planned economy, remained on the best-seller list in the USA for seven months. The eagerness with which Americans sought alternative solutions to the economic crisis is reflected in the fact that the same book remained at the top of the bestseller list for a decade. The Soviet Union was becoming more and more attractive to impoverished and desperate Americans.
The Kremlin also took credit for the unusual popularity of the “communist experiment” among Americans. Stalin was aware that thousands of skilled workers were unemployed in the USA, whose knowledge would have been of great use to Soviet industry. So advertisements for various jobs in the Soviet Union began to appear in American newspapers. In the first eight months of 1931, Amtorg, the Soviet commercial agency in charge of immigration, received more than 100,000 job applications.
Although the US and the Soviet Union did not formally establish diplomatic relations until two years later, some 10,000 Americans were granted Soviet entry visas that year. They included welders, plumbers, electricians and engineers from all over the US. The reasons they gave in their applications for leaving were always the same – unemployment, total disillusionment with the situation in their homeland and interest in the Soviet experiment.
“The Soviet Union will see immigration in the next few years comparable to that of the United States before World War I,” wrote Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times. Fortunately, the future Pulitzer Prize winner was honestly mistaken.
Arrival in a proletarian paradise
In 1931, hundreds of smiling Americans flocked to the Moscow train station every day. Most intended to stay until the crisis in their homeland passed, but some wanted to help the Soviet nation build communism. Those who returned home after a few years brought with them many interesting stories from an exotic land and, if they were thrifty, a hefty pile of money.
Those who, for one reason or another, stayed too long in the Soviet Union mostly met a tragic end. At that time, of course, no one could have foreseen that the second half of the 1930s would be the beginning of a period of arrests, torture and killings. Although the Soviet Union was by no means renowned for its freedom and openness, Stalin was a perfectly acceptable dictator to many in the West in the early 1930s.
Like all immigrants, Soviet Americans brought their culture with them. Although they were considered almost poor in their homeland, they attracted attention and envy in the Soviet Union for their clothes alone. In a land where everyone was equal, even the wealthiest did not have comfortable shoes or nice trousers like the Americans. These were the beginnings of the Soviet fascination with American fashion, which lasted until the country’s collapse.
Americans did not only live in the capital; many found work in other Soviet republics. Americans of Finnish origin, for example, settled in Karelia, a region along the Finnish-Soviet border. Some went to Siberia, where wages were higher than in the European part of the country. Those who wanted to study at good schools chose Leningrad or Moscow. By the early 1930s, English-language newspapers and American schools had already begun to appear in the Soviet Union, but children there were still subjected to Soviet indoctrination. They were taught the basics of Marxism-Leninism and addressed teachers as ‘comrade’.
Baseball in Gorki Park
The Americans also brought baseball, a strange game with bats and balls that fascinated the locals. It did not matter that they did not understand the rules. The sight of smiling Americans, with leather gloves, running and catching balls in Gorki Park was a feast for their eyes. The Americans set up two baseball clubs in Moscow, both with names that paid tribute to the host country – the ‘Red Stars’ and the ‘Sickles and Hammers’.
The latter was also batted for by a young man from Buffalo, Thomas Sgovio, who, together with his sister and mother, joined his father in Moscow. Sgovio Sr. was a convinced Communist and had moved to the Soviet Union in his early thirties. He worked as a welder and in his spare time lectured Soviet workers on the delusions of capitalism and the exploitation of the proletariat in the USA. His words did not fall on deaf ears, however, because when Soviet workers saw his clothes, they found it hard to believe that their brothers across the pond were worse off than they were.
Sgovio the younger, Thomas, quickly became accustomed to his new circumstances. He dreamt of one day entering the Academy of Fine Arts and becoming a famous painter. He studied Russian diligently and performed in Moscow’s halls with an American choir singing black spiritual songs. Soviet friends invited him to dances and theatre performances. In the early 1930s, it was nice to be an American in Moscow. Especially if, like Thomas Sgovio, you were a dreamy communist. Only a few years passed and Sgovio became a victim of the system he had helped to build.
The successful integration of the Americans also became a propaganda tool in the hands of the Soviet authorities. Their example was proof that communism works and that even the greatest individualists can thrive in it. Most Americans, however, cared little for communism. They were lured to the Soviet Union mainly by the promise of work which, moreover, paid much better than at home. This was especially true for skilled workers in the car industry, which was then taking its first steps in the Soviet Union.
From Jamaica to Moscow
Stalin, like Lenin before him, was a great admirer of Henry Ford, the world’s most famous capitalist. In the Kremlin, they studied with interest how he had virtually single-handedly revolutionised American industry, and asked him to help them implement his ideas in the Soviet Union. They quickly found common ground and two car factories built to Ford’s designs were built in the proletarian paradise.
Both Stalin and Ford were pleased. The former got Ford’s invaluable know-how, the latter got a fat paycheck and access to the huge Soviet market, which was still in its infancy at the time, but still. Both the Soviets and the Americans did not like to remember this unnatural alliance in later years.
One of the many Americans who helped build the Soviet car industry was Robert Robinson. Born in Jamaica, he moved to Detroit with his parents at a young age and found work as a toolmaker at Ford’s car plant. There, he was spotted by members of a Soviet delegation who had come to negotiate with Ford and offered a job in the Soviet Union. They promised him almost three times the salary, a company car, an apartment, paid holidays and even a servant. Considering that the economic crisis could have left him without a job the very next day, Robinson accepted the tempting offer with both hands. In addition, it was certainly not insignificant that Robinson was black and often faced discrimination in the USA.
When he arrived in Stalingrad to pass on his knowledge to Soviet workers at the new Ford plant, he soon became a media star. One night, on his way home from work, he was attacked by two American colleagues who had apparently not left their hatred of blacks in the US. Things might have been different back home, but there was no room for racism in the Soviet Union. Both attackers pleaded guilty and, after a short trial, were deported to the USA. Stories of racial equality in communist society filled the pages of newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. However, given that Stalin’s terror broke out in the country a few years later, it is rather ironic that racism may even have saved the lives of the attackers.
Understandably, the Soviet authorities tried to make the most of Robinson’s short-lived fame. In 1934, much to his surprise, he was elected to the Moscow Soviet. The decision was all the more bizarre because Robinson was not even a member of the Party and had never expressed any desire to be politically active. He did not refuse this offer, which was not very attractive to him. In fact, he should not have refused it, because otherwise he would have done badly.
He has become a puppet in the hands of the revolution. The Soviet authorities consistently refused his requests to leave the country. It was only in 1978 that he succeeded. In his old age, he explained that he had lived in fear all his life and that he had probably been saved by the fact that he had never accepted Soviet citizenship.
There are no untouchables
“Life has got better, comrades. Life has become more joyful,” Stalin declared in November 1935. The famous phrase of the “Father of Nations”, which sounds grotesque today, has been forever etched in Russian history. Since its creation, the Soviet Union has experienced and survived many horrors. Revolution, civil war, famine and repression had taken millions of lives, and a new and no less bloody era was at the door.
Stalin enjoyed the status of a god in the atheist Soviet Union. There was no escaping his paternal gaze – portraits of the leader of the revolution hung everywhere, and like all true dictators, Stalin was infallible and paranoid. Anyone who dared to question his infallibility ended badly. Already in 1933, some 400 000 members were expelled from the Communist Party. Stalin believed that only a “purified” Party could remain faithful to the ideals of the revolution.
In 1936, however, the word “purge” took on a completely different connotation. From then on, expulsion from the Party meant arrest, imprisonment and execution. The old Bolsheviks who had actually taken part in the October Revolution became the first victims of Stalin’s purges. In just a few years, 78% of the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party were killed. Stalin got rid of his former comrades in cold blood and replaced them with carpetbaggers and opportunists. The same fate was then suffered by the rest, the army, the intelligentsia, the kulaks, the national minorities …
Soon, the terror grew to the point where no one was safe anymore. The hunt was on for Trotskyists, agents of all kinds of foreign secret services, saboteurs, anarchists, reactionaries – anyone could become an “enemy of the nation”. It was enough to utter a word that could be interpreted as a criticism of the authorities. Even those who remained silent could become victims of repression. The madness that reigned in the Soviet Union at that time is evidenced by the execution of 35 members of the Leningrad Association of the Deaf and Dumb, who allegedly conspired in sign language against the Soviet authorities.
As is well known, walls in the Soviet Union have ears. The secret service of the NKVD, under the instructions of Stalin, exercised total control over the population. Until September 1936, it was headed by Henrik Yagoda, who was himself a victim of the purges and executed that year. He was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who was renowned for his efficiency in carrying out arrests, torture and executions. The period from 1936 to 1938, when the greatest number of people disappeared, is still known in Russia today as the “Yezhovshchina”. Like his predecessor, he ended up with a bullet in his head a few years later. In the Soviet Union, only Stalin was truly untouchable.
Fighting the Soviet windmills
The terror has also affected family relationships. Slaven became an example of a primary school child who denounced his own father for catching him reading the forbidden works of Trotsky. Parents stopped talking to their children and neighbours in the block stopped saying hello. “It was necessary to be quieter than water and lower than grass,” the poet Alexander Blok described the spirit of the times.
Fearing arrest, many people turned into leaders. Thousands of letters were sent to NKVD headquarters all over the country, in which conscious citizens reported their acquaintances, colleagues or completely random people, thinking that this would save their skin. The NKVD usually carried out the arrests at night in order to catch the “enemies of the people” unawares and to keep everything as inconspicuous as possible. In reality, everyone knew about the night visits. If rumours are to be believed, some even slept with their suitcases ready in anticipation of arrest.
The Americans have also felt the new wind blowing in their country. Their Soviet friends suddenly started avoiding them, because making friends with foreigners could have serious consequences. Anything that smacked of foreignness became dangerous. For example, Esperanto lovers and stamp collectors ended up in prison. Even listening to jazz was not recommended. Americans, who only yesterday were working for a better future for the Soviet Union, were overnight unwelcome. What is more, they became enemies of the system they themselves had helped to build.
In such an atmosphere, many decided to return home, but it was anything but easy. The Soviet authorities often confiscated the passports of American citizens on arrival in the proletarian paradise. The most ardent American Communists even threw their passports demonstratively into the Baltic Sea on arrival at the port of Leningrad. Moreover, this magic booklet was extremely valuable to the Soviet intelligence services, which were unable to forge it. The simple substitution of a picture, however, enabled Stalin to send a number of spies to the USA. Those unfortunates who were left without a passport could no longer be helped by their homeland, as the Soviet authorities considered them to be their own citizens.
Even those who had diligently guarded their passports found themselves facing an insurmountable obstacle – Soviet bureaucracy. They needed an exit visa to leave the country. Many Americans were thus stuck for years in a maze of regulations, unanswered applications and bureaucratic red tape. The Soviet authorities used every possible administrative device to keep them in the country.
What is more, their aim was to get as many of them as possible to take Soviet citizenship. In doing so, they assured that no one would take away their American citizenship. For example, they often refused to renew their residence permits, without which people risked being severely punished. Many Americans, exhausted by the endless bureaucratic battles, finally accepted Soviet citizenship and sealed their fate – they remained trapped in a country that was sinking deeper and deeper into terror.
Everyone’s turn
The NKVD soon started knocking on the doors of the Soviet Americans. One by one, they disappeared in the night. At Ford’s Nizhny Novgorod plant, where several hundred Americans were once employed, only twenty remained in 1937. Because the factory was not meeting its targets, its director, a Russian, was arrested and executed. Even those who had once sympathised with the Soviet Union learned the hard way how the Revolution had taken its children.
One of them was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the famous American communist, who was declared “the blackest of the reds” by the Times because of the colour of his skin. When he tried to leave the Soviet Union, his application for an exit visa was refused and he was arrested a few weeks later. He was denounced by a Party comrade as a “counter-revolutionary element”. He died in a Siberian gulag.
Particularly sad are the stories of parents arrested with their children. In the archives of the NKVD, historians have found a pile of documents telling how relatives were forced to testify against each other. For example, the son accused his father of being a German spy, while he himself confessed to being a Trotskyist and an enemy of the Soviet state. The confessions, which were intended to give the horrors a veneer of legality, were the result of weeks of torture. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew that the NKVD could make even stones talk. The fathers who brought their families to the proletarian paradise could not forgive themselves for their decision.
Thomas Sgovio, an unmarried painter from Buffalo, also lived in constant fear. Every day he heard stories of the disappearance of this or that acquaintance. All of them had lost their traces. The American schools in Moscow closed their doors and no one played baseball in Gorki Park anymore. His Russian friends shunned him or disappeared themselves. When his father was arrested by the NKVD in March 1938, he was left with only one option – to seek help from the American Embassy. He had visited it some time before, but had achieved nothing.
Once again, he was turned away, saying his application was still pending, and told to return in a week or two. As soon as he crossed the embassy’s threshold, he was arrested and taken to the infamous Lubyanka Square, where the prison and the NKVD headquarters were located. Thomas Sgovio was 21 years old at the time and had arrived in the Soviet Union less than three years earlier.
Although the story of the NKVD lurking behind the embassy fence to prey on poor Americans may seem unbelievable at first glance, there have been many such cases. Not so long ago, the embassy was crowded with people who realised too late that coming to the Soviet Union had been the biggest mistake of their lives. For the NKVD, the area around the embassy was therefore a rich hunting ground. At the beginning of the terror, people even resisted arrest and threatened the NKVD agents that no one could arrest US citizens. Eventually, however, they accepted that the NKVD was above the law and stopped visiting the embassy.
The eyes and ears of Roosevelt
It is also quite sad that US diplomats knew what was going on beyond the safe walls of the embassy, but did little to help their citizens. They did not respond to the pleas of frightened people begging them to help them find their missing relatives. The embassy received hundreds of letters and phone calls every day, including from across the Atlantic. The diplomats certainly could not ignore the fact that the ranks of their Soviet staff were thinning.
Anyone who lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s knew about the horrors of terror. Those Americans who were left without a passport were subjected to lengthy vetting procedures, even though it was obvious that time was running out. This was also the reason why many gave up and accepted Soviet citizenship, hoping thereby to regularise their status. The American bureaucracy at that time was no more friendly than the Soviet one.
Joseph Davies, then US ambassador in Moscow, certainly bore part of the blame for the indifferent attitude towards his fellow citizens. He arrived in the Soviet Union in 1936, just as the purges and repression were beginning in the country. He was a personal friend of Franklin Roosevelt and considered himself his “eyes and ears in Moscow”. He had no diplomatic experience and was not familiar with the Soviet Union. Perhaps that is why he respected and even admired Stalin. He did not want to resent his host, because good relations with Moscow were of the utmost importance to the White House.
His leniency towards Stalin quickly became a source of scorn among other European diplomats. For example, he often took part in the mock trials that Stalin used to convince the world that Soviet power was being undermined from within by “enemies of the nation”. These were brilliantly staged theatrical performances in which the old Bolsheviks, heads bowed, confessed their sins – some were Japanese spies, others Trotskyists, others plotting to assassinate Stalin. Twenty years have passed since the October Revolution, and in that time the Soviet secret services have perfected their torture methods.
The short-sighted US ambassador’s presence gave additional legitimacy to the rigged process. “The process worked credibly … Stalin succeeded in thwarting a blatant attempt to attack Soviet power,” he wrote in a dispatch sent to Washington. Apart from convinced communists, no one in Europe was under any illusions about the legality or credibility of such trials. Joseph Davies was unwilling or unable to see what was really going on behind the scenes of these grotesque theatricals. His chauffeur wrote in his memoirs that he was often surrounded by ragged people of all ages, begging him in American English to help them leave the country. These were trapped Americans who did not dare to visit the embassy for fear of arrest.
When Davies, and with him the NKVD agents who accompanied him every step of the way, entered a restaurant, the terrified Americans approached a black limousine and asked the driver to save them. He passed on the stories to his boss, but the ambassador was apparently oblivious to the fate of his unfortunate fellow citizens.
Born under a lucky star
While the US ambassador was fawning over Stalin, Thomas Sgovio was in prison in Lubyanka Square. From March 1938, his life was in the hands of the NKVD. The underground prisons were the entry point to the Gulag, a system of “re-education” and “labour” camps scattered throughout the Soviet Union. For many, the journey ended immediately after arrest. The life and death of an individual was decided by the so-called “Troika” – groups made up of three NKVD agents who were prosecutors and judges at the same time.
The prisoner was first read the indictment and then questioned. Those who did not confess were subjected to prolonged torture. Most people broke down and confessed to everything they were accused of. The “enemies of the nation” were most often sentenced to prison terms in the camp, and some were shot on sight.
Thomas Sgovio was lucky. He was sentenced to five years in the Gulag as a “socially dangerous element” by the country he helped build because he freely admitted to visiting the US embassy twice. The imprisonment was purely symbolic, as the NKVD knew very well that few people returned from the Gulag.
“Enemy of the State” Sgovio was on his way to Siberia shortly after his conviction. After a few days on the road, the prison at Lubyanka, where the cell walls were red with blood, seemed like a sanatorium. The train journey took over a month, and at every station the bodies of dead prisoners had to be taken out of the carriages. Ten thousand kilometres later, the convoy arrived at a transit camp near Vladivostok, at the other end of the country. There, the prisoners were put on old ships which sailed northwards. Last stop – Kolyma. Just as people all over the world think of the Holocaust when they hear the word Auschwitz, people in the countries of the former Soviet Union think of Stalin’s terror when they hear the word Kolyma.
In the very north of Russia’s Far East, where the Kolyma region is located, gold deposits were discovered as early as the beginning of the 20th century. But then Tsar Nicholas II decided that the climate was too harsh for mining. Winters last more than six months and temperatures are around 30 degrees below zero. Stalin did not worry about this, because he had thousands of ‘enemies of the people’ at his disposal who were forced to sacrifice their lives for the ideals of the revolution. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union became the second largest gold-producing country in the world, thanks to the sweat and blood of the camp inmates.
When Thomas Sgovio arrived in Colima, there were around 100,000 prisoners in several dozen camps. Some worked in the mines, others built roads and other infrastructure. The camp inmates worked up to 18 hours a day under the watchful eye of NKVD agents. If they did not meet the daily quota, they were not given food. Living conditions were so brutal that many died in the first year. Thomas Sgovio, who was brought up as an atheist and a communist, started praying in the hell of Colima.
His life was probably saved not only by God’s providence, but also by his ability as a painter. In exchange for food, he gave tattoos to fellow criminals, which have a special place in Russian prison culture and are a must-have for anyone who gives something of themselves. He made posters for the camp administration and did not mind a bit that he wrote in large letters phrases like “NKVD – the watchful eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat!”, because he got a bigger portion of bread for his services. Like most prisoners who survived the Gulag, Thomas Sgovio was above all born under a lucky star.
Semi-free
Time passed more slowly in Colima than elsewhere. Every day seemed endless. Thomas Sgovio had already served his five years, but he was still in the Gulag. His sentence had been automatically extended “indefinitely” and he was sure he would die in Colima. But in September 1946, after eight years in the Gulag, he was unexpectedly summoned to the camp administration and a piece of paper was thrust into his hands. It was a leave slip, which allowed him to leave the camp, but not the province of Kolyma. He was no longer beaten, but at the same time he was not allowed to return home. He became a semi-free man, like millions of citizens of the Soviet Union.
When he left the camp, he was 30 years old, and took a job as a cartographer on a geological expedition exploring the Russian Far East. His sister, who had found a job in the British Embassy in Moscow, and probably saved her life, was always trying to save him. She sent pleas to all sides, and her efforts were rewarded at the end of 1948 when the Soviet authorities finally allowed Thomas Sgowi to leave Kolyma. But his torment was not over.
As an ex-prisoner, he was not allowed to live in Moscow and other major cities, let alone leave the country. So he moved to Aleksandrov, a small industrial town in European Russia. After ten years of enforced absence, he found that the country had not changed much. People were still living in fear and, on top of that, the consequences of the Second World War were felt at every turn. The Soviet Union was still the biggest cage in the world, where the life of an individual was not worth much. Worst of all, Stalin was still alive.
Victory in war brought peace, but not freedom. Repression continued. The first victims were the Jews, whom Stalin blamed for their lack of patriotism. Then came the Soviet prisoners of war, who lived to see the end of the war in Germany and other European countries – 200,000 of them ended up in the gulags for “collaboration with the Nazis”. Shortly afterwards, they were joined by many former “enemies of the nation” who had already served their time. Among them was Thomas Sgovio. In 1948, he was arrested again and sent to cut firewood in Siberia, allegedly for “intending to betray his country”. In reality, his real homeland had long forgotten him.
Epilog
Thomas Sgovia’s life story is one of thousands of stories of Soviet Americans. No one knows the exact numbers, because no one cared about their fate. To the Fatherland, they were communists and speculators, to Stalin they were just insignificant figures to be sacrificed for the victory of the revolution. Thomas Sgovio met his compatriots at every step of his calvary – in the basements of the NKVD, on the train to Vladivostok, in the camps of Kolyma and in the forests of Siberia. We will never hear their stories, because they were not lucky enough to return home.
Thomas Sgovia was released from the Gulag only after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Khrushchev pardoned millions of political prisoners. It then took him another seven years to rid himself of the “enemy of the people” label and win the battle with the Soviet bureaucracy. He returned to his homeland in 1960.
