“Whatever I had to do to save myself, or you.”
She couldn’t bear the look on his face. It was one of bottomless devotion, more frightening to her than all of his rage.
There were other reasons—besides my friend Yasha’s hints about Mama’s unsavory entanglements with the secret police—why I was eager to return to the archives on Neglinnaya Street. For years, another question has riddled me. How was it that my mother survived the twin horrors of prison and the camps, whereas my father, an altogether more charming and resourceful person, perished? If he had succeeded in withstanding the treadmill of interrogation and torture, and the cattle car to Siberia, I am certain Mama and I would have been informed of it. All we were ever told during those freezing, senseless excursions to the Lubyanka Prison at five in the morning was that my father had been given “ten years of corrective labor without the right of correspondence,” which everyone, even then, knew was a euphemism for a bullet in the back of the neck. (Only Florence remained unnervingly optimistic about the possible definitions of Papa’s penal sentence.) How did someone who willingly imbibed such self-deceptions withstand the brutal realities of the Gulag? In circumstances identical to my father’s, how did she manage to get her own crime reduced from treason to a minimal sentence of “agitation”?
Now that I was seeking answers, I could admit to being in the grip of a still more puzzling conundrum, about which I’d never managed to extract a satisfying answer from my mother. It concerned her aborted attempt to escape the Soviet Union. During my college years at the progressive height of Khrushchev’s thaw, Florence let slip that she and Papa had tried, quite intrepidly, to leave Russia before it had become “too late.” When I later brought it up, she retracted. Heaven knows, Florence had a gift for backpedaling on all manner of revelations, but this one I could not let rest, in light of her nerve-grating refusal to discuss, in 1978, the subject of our family’s emigration. If it were true—if she herself had tried to escape—why not admit it now that we could all leave the country together? And why, after pounding (however briefly) on a locked door, did she decline even to consider stepping across a suddenly open threshold with her own family? Didn’t she want to pick up the keys to her cage? What had happened between 1937 and 1978 that made her constitutionally incapable of even discussing it?
I wondered if maybe, very simply, she had finally given up on America the same way America so pitilessly had given up on her.
—
MY PARENTS WERE HARDLY the only Americans to be stranded in Moscow after 1936. Hundreds like them were cut adrift in the Soviet Union, comprehending too late that they’d fallen from the grace of the American government. The U.S. Embassy seems to have found every excuse to deny or delay reissuing these citizens their American passports—passports they had lost through no fault other than their naïveté. The schemes that the Soviet government employed to strip American expats of citizenship were numerous. Those living outside of Moscow were required to send in their passports for renewal by post, only to be informed that their documents were “lost in the mail”—bundled and repurposed, no doubt, by spies. Muscovites like my mother were required to submit theirs to work- or housing-permit boards. This was how Mama lost hers, though in her whitewashed account the bureaucratic sleight of hand was—her words—an unexpected convenience, as she was planning to apply for Soviet citizenship in any case.
I have since read about those who attempted to seek recourse in the protective fortress of that embassy. If they managed to enter, they were informed by embassy workers that the processing fees for their new passports were to be paid in dollars—currency that was illegal to possess. Other applicants were merely instructed to return again, and again, and again, so that their cases could be “fully investigated”—even as the consular staff that gave these instructions could observe from their office windows that the plaza below was patrolled on all corners by the Soviet secret police, who showed up each morning like fishermen to cast their nets into this reliable pool.
I had always assumed that our embassy’s malicious indifference to these castaways must have been a symptom of the anti-Red prejudice that was permeating America at this time and would overtake it completely after the Second World War. Who were these defectors but malcontents and radicals that had turned their backs on their country—on Democracy and Capitalism? They’d made their pink bed, now let them lie in it.
That, at least, was the only explanation that made sense to me. I might have continued to believe it had I not, some years into my new American life, been given the gift of a VHS tape of “a classic American film” bequeathed to my wife and me by one of our patrons at Temple Beth Emet—a friendly, burly psychologist by the name of Harold Greene, who’d taken a special interest in my family’s story because he saw in us some sort of missing link to the world of his recent ancestors. With unaccountable pride, Harold once informed me that he came from a long line of socialists, “on both sides,” and spoke excitedly of the rally his father and grandfather had attended for Trotsky in the Bronx a thousand years ago. The gift of this VHS tape was only one of Harold’s many acts of generosity. (His first present to me and Lucya was a saggy queen-sized spring mattress, which, in bestowing it upon our impoverished household, Harold advertised as “a good Jewish mattress—two terrific Jewish children have been conceived on this mattress!”) The video he gave us was called Mission to Moscow. Its case still bore the proprietary stamp of the “Library of NYU” and must have found its way to Harold as one more piece of apocrypha from that Red decade for which he nursed such nostalgia. My guess, though, is that he never actually watched it to the end. Had he done so, I suspect that even he, an uncritical sentimentalist, would have recognized it for the watery load of propagandistic Hollywood excrement that it was.
The film was based closely on the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, and produced by Warner Bros. Studios at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. After the war—this I learned from Harold—it became the first of the big studio films to be burned on the stake of McCarthy’s “un-American” campaign. For good reason, I should say. The list of endless elisions that make up this lying travesty of a movie includes Davies declaring that the confessions made during Moscow’s show trials appeared to him “authentic and uncoerced.” The film also includes Davies rationalizing Stalin’s unprovoked attack on Finland and his pact with the Nazis, and generally whitewashes one of history’s bloodiest dictators as some kind of bumbling uncle moving his nation clumsily toward American-style democracy. For me, the height of the film’s delusion comes in a scene in which the ambassador gently scolds his staff for being outraged that their embassy is bugged. But how will the Soviets ever know we mean them no harm, he lectures his subordinates, if they can’t listen to our private conversations? At this I wanted to wipe my eyes. Surely, the movie was meant as pure lampoonery, I thought. How could any diplomat be at once so dangerously submissive and so flawlessly arrogant? My disbelief made me curious to learn more about the man under whose aegis my parents had been barred from the one sanctuary that might have given them protection when their lives were so obviously in peril.
Joseph Davies, I would learn, was a liberal Washington lawyer and friend of Roosevelt who had the great ingenuity to marry, at the height of the Depression, the richest woman in America. Marjorie Merriweather Post had inherited the Post Foods empire from her father and expanded it with the help of her second husband. She presided over a kingdom of cereals, cake mixes, coffees, chocolate syrups, cooking powders, and frozen vegetables like a Catherine the Great. Every time an American housewife tore open a box of Grape-Nuts, or brewed a pot of Maxwell House, or chilled a bowl of Jell-O for her children, her domestic gesture contributed another tiny spike to Marjorie Post’s prodigious portfolio.
In 1935, Post’s divorce of her financier husband and her marriage to Joseph Davies was, along with the trial of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapper, fruitful fodder for the tabloids. Col
umnists wondered what a woman as regally striking and obscenely rich as Marjorie could find appealing in an antitrust attorney who resembled a cartoon mouse in a bowler hat. Obviously, they underrated the allure of politics for a woman who had everything. Marjorie Post Davies’s wedding present to her third husband was a titanic check made out for the reelection campaign of his buddy Franklin D. Roosevelt, a contribution that naturally left a debt to be repaid once the president entered his second term. No doubt Mrs. Davies hoped that her six-figure gift would guarantee her husband an ambassador’s post in London or Paris. Instead, the couple got Moscow. And, more relevant to my parents’ story, Moscow got them.
The Davieses arrived in Russia unblemished by any knowledge of its language or history. It seemed that Marjorie was worried they might starve there, and so brought with her several boxcars of Post foods, inexhaustible filets and fowls, and four hundred quarts of frozen cream in a dozen freezers, which immediately blew out Spaso House’s primitive electrical system, and promptly melted. Needless to say, Moscow failed to offer Marjorie Post Davies much in the way of her preferred entertainment: shopping. And there are only so many evenings a person can go out to the theater and the ballet. Of course, there were other forms of theater to attend, if one counts Stalin’s show trials, which Joseph Davies seems to have sat through with the same illiterate appreciation he brought to bear on the operas he watched from his royal box at the Bolshoi.
Ten weeks into their stay the couple was already bored. They sailed their yacht back to America for an extended vacation. At home Davies gave the president and media his diplomatic report: The forced confessions, according to his lifelong experience as a trial lawyer, were “legally credible.” The executions of Bolsheviks? “Uprooted conspiracies.” Forced collectivization? “A wonderful and stimulating experiment.” Stalin? “A fine, upstanding fellow.” Nothing was mentioned about the harassments and intimidations suffered by Davies’s own diplomatic staff at the hands of the NKVD, and certainly nothing about the hundreds of Americans who were disappearing without a trace. Not long into his tenure, Davies’s entire staff threatened to resign in protest of his abysmal stupidity, but lost nerve at the last minute. Afraid of falling on the wrong side of the Russian secret police, they stalled on granting passports to the American nationals whom the Soviets had started claiming as their own.
Was Davies really deaf to all the American citizens banging fruitlessly on his embassy’s doors? I refuse to believe that. So—would it have been so hard to intervene on behalf of these marooned souls? The problem was that intervening would have required Davies to perform some actual diplomacy. But how hard could that have been? America still exerted no small degree of leverage over the Soviets at this time: Russia still owed the United States hundreds of millions of dollars for all that industrial machinery it had been buying for years on credit. However, Joseph Davies had not been appointed for his moral courage. That mistake Roosevelt had made once already. The former ambassador, William Bullitt, had been replaced as soon as he stopped affirming the president’s own convictions about the benevolence of their Soviet friends. No, the fault was not Davies’s ignorance, or his cowardice. He had, after all, been sent to Russia to make nice at the cost of everything else. And he carried out his function marvelously. During the 190 days a year they actually spent inside of Russia, the ambassador and his wife were busy throwing costume parties (“Come as your Secret Desire”) with gowns and props loaned by the Bolshoi Museum, hosting private screenings of American films for the same NKVD thugs who were bullying his staff, and sailing their four-hundred-foot yacht, Sea Cloud, around the Black Sea. Most notably, they spent their free time cruising the Soviet commission stores for prerevolutionary antiques being sold off by a starving populace at bargain-basement prices. Mr. and Mrs. Davies might not have cared to know much about the Soviet Union, but they did make an exhaustive study of Russia’s imperial era. By the end of their tenure, they had carted off the biggest collection of paintings, tapestries, Fabergé eggs, silver tea services, religious icons, enameled boxes, royal jewels, porcelain, and liturgical objects ever to be amassed outside of Russia. All of these expropriated treasures are now sheltered in exquisitely lighted display cases inside Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate in Washington, D.C., not far from my office. I once paid a visit there and discovered that, along with a marvelous painting of Catherine the Great, there hangs on one of the walls a portrait of the middle-aged Marjorie Post Davies herself, costumed as Marie Antoinette.
It would be too convenient to conclude that Joseph Davies and his wife were merely two more dupes of Stalin’s regime. That would be giving them too little credit. In my experience, those who amass great wealth or power, however fatuous or dim-witted they might appear to the public, possess some mysterious instinct with regard to where their bread is buttered. Joseph Davies, for all his simplemindedness, had a genius for keeping powerful people happy: he pampered his wife, fawned on FDR, and as for Stalin and Litvinov, it seems he adopted the lawyer’s posture that they were his clients! Entitled to the best defense that money could buy, regardless of what crimes they had committed.
In turn, it would be giving Roosevelt too little credit to imagine that he chose Ambassador Davies simply on the basis of nepotism and reciprocity. Davies possessed one virtue that every other Russia expert in Washington at the time lacked: he was ready to affirm Roosevelt’s own political faith that the Soviet Union shared with the United States a fundamental aim to improve, if by its own peculiar methods, the lot of Everyman. At a time when Europe was drifting toward war, there was a great deal of expediency in this alliance with Russia. But my reading of history suggests that even with America’s closest allies there has never been a more uncritical friendship than the one that existed between Roosevelt and Stalin in those years. So let me put forward a different proposition, a heresy for all the FDR idolators who are ready to paint our thirty-second president into The Last Supper: somewhere in his heart Roosevelt admired that lupine monster! Admired the iron will, the unapologetic social engineering, the politico-economic experiments that were such a potent model for his own expansion of government from a small racket to a big one. Admired, most of all, the conviction that the evolution of great nations was irreversible. Just as the United States was moving from unfettered capitalism to big-government socialism, so, too, Roosevelt might have thought, the U.S.S.R. would evolve from totalitarianism to social democracy. On what basis would he have believed this? On the basis of the same hallucinatory utopism that was so catching in those days among intellectuals. Was FDR a closet communist? Heavens, no. The dispenser of government millions to the biggest corporations in the country was nothing of the sort. He was just a run-of-the-mill utopist. Scratch a utopist and you find a Machiavellian—one who, to achieve his shining vision, must inevitably subscribe to the principle that the ends justify the means.
In short, the trapped Americans, my parents included, were not abandoned. They were not even forgotten. They were sacrificed on the common altar of two superpowers.
My only consolation is that history has not been kind to Joseph Davies. He will be remembered as the craven and obsequious ignoramus he was. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, that old patrician, will retreat exonerated into the pantheon of great leaders whose myths only swell with time. For this act of misdirection even I must admit some reluctant admiration. One has to appreciate FDR’s deftness in allowing his accommodating old friend Davies to take the fall for his unholy alliances—an act of political cunning in every way worthy of The Prince.
Florence survived the year 1937 working as a janitress at the V____ Theater on Arbat Street, a job she obtained through the theater connections of the wife of her former boss, Timofeyev. It would be his final favor to his American ingénue, not counting the favor she still did not recognize as one, which was to cut off all contact.
And so, in January, while the Party’s inner chambers were swept of Stalin’s former comrades, Florence pushed a broom down the dusty labyrinth of
actors’ dressing rooms. In March, when Stalin launched his campaign to rub out deviationist intellectuals like the writers Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam, Florence struggled to eradicate muddy boot-prints from the crimson carpets in the old theater lobby. In May, when the Great Leader commenced his purge of the Red Army, liquidating thirty-five thousand officers in a span of eighteen months, she expunged grime from the fibers of velvet cushions. The cleanings would go far into 1938, when the “Father of the Peoples” would order masses of Poles, Koreans, Greeks, and Finns to be rounded up and dumped in Siberia, all while Florence disposed of bucketfuls of cigarette ash and soiled newspaper into rubbish bins along Arbat’s crooked alleys. And while Yezhov, the new head of the NKVD, was “cleansing the organs” by executing thousands of his predecessor’s agents, thereby setting himself up to be flushed out along with them, Florence chafed her knees scrubbing the porcelain bowls of public toilets.
And yet it would not have been fair to say that she hated the work. Just as a hospital orderly may come to like the smell of chloroform, Florence grew to enjoy the scent of makeup that clung to the carpet runners and drapes after performances. She found herself reawakened to a kind of lonely childhood magic in the company of the empty costumes and abandoned props, the dingy soaring ceiling, the voluptuous curtains that were of a piece with the tattered magnificence of old theaters everywhere. She attended the dress rehearsal of every new production, leaning on her broom like Cinderella in the dark rear corners of the auditorium. She understood perfectly well that she’d been given this job on the tacit condition that she keep herself tishe vody, nizhe travy, quieter than water and lower than grass. Watching other dramas unfold onstage, Florence took care not to be noticed, struggling to take comfort in her anonymity.
At night, she came to life in recounting the plays to Leon, scene by scene. She let him knead her tired feet with the heel of his hand while she shut her eyes in raconteurial pleasure at the tales of the characters’ tantrums and love affairs, their thwarted aspirations and bitter disappointments—so much easier to speak about than her own. She did not miss a play that season: Arbuzov, Gorky, Chekhov. Sometimes her eyes drifted from the performers to the audience. They too seemed to her like actors, if only because she felt equally apart from them. She interacted with no one unless the cloakroom attendant, Agnessa Artemovna, was ill and Florence sat in her place, stacking moist coats and hats, or wadding scarves into sleeves. Then, after the show, Florence would watch the crowds muscling back toward her in their sharp-elbowed footrace to the cloakroom and would feel, like one of Chekhov’s consumptives, shocked at their energy for life. It was the agreeable company of Agnessa Artemovna—a decade and a half older than Florence, but mistakable for Florence’s mother if one were to judge from her swollen legs and knuckles—that made Florence’s demotion more tolerable. The janitor’s closet just off the public cloakroom was Agnessa’s private realm, and she tended its clutter of busted chairs, cracked broom handles, scraps of carpet, and chipped pans as neatly as a city sparrow tends her nest of sidewalk trash. After the first act of a play, Agnessa would lock up the cloakroom and invite Florence for a glass of black tea that she brewed with an ancient, calcium-scarred teakettle.
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