Witness

by Ruth Gruber

  Yakutsk was old and new. Like every Siberian town I had visited along the Trans-Siberian railroad, it was a city of wood. Modern prefab wooden houses often stood beside native yurts made of birch bark and reindeer hide. One or two of the wooden houses caught fire nearly every day from the candles and kerosene lamps that lit their rooms. To be sure, there was electricity, but it lit the homes of the leaders; my bedroom was brightly lit with a lamp on my table where I typed my notes.

  The population comprised a mixture of native peoples and political prisoners, who were allowed to bring their wives and children while they served out their prison terms. No one could escape. Yakutsk was surrounded on all sides by dense forests. The only way out was by airplane or ship, and no prisoner had access to either. Maxim Gorky, the Soviet novelist, had dubbed Yakutia “the Land of Death and Chains.”

  Soon after my arrival, I set up an interview with André Petrovich Carosin, the head of the NKVD, Russia's secret police. His head was shaved smooth as a bowling ball. He wore the khaki uniform of the secret police, with a burgundy red collar and a gold stripe and star on his arm.

  “Everybody knows you have political prisoners in Yakutsk,” I said, confronting him. “I've promised the Herald Tribune a story on them. But when I ask people where the Trotskyites are, they pretend they've never heard the word.”

  “Of course we have Trotskyites here,” he said. “One of them runs the book-shop. We even have criminals and thieves. We rehabilitate them with work. Work, work, work. We don't have prisons here like they do in capitalist countries. We don't have guards or jailers, the way they did under the czars. We give our exiles freedom.”

  Freedom! A strange word in the gulag.

  After I left his office, I went to the bookshop, where the man in charge stood motionless watching me leaf through books. After about half an hour, I saw him look around, making sure no one else was in the shop.

  He then approached me. “I heard through the underground who you are. I must speak to you. My name is Medved. You are a journalist. I will tell you things the whole world must know. Can you come tonight?”

  “I will come.”

  “Wait until it is dark on the streets. Then come to the bookstore. Make sure nobody follows you. I will take you upstairs, where I live with my wife and child.”

  That night, as soon as Tonya, my ubiquitous guard, left the house to visit her friends, I slipped out. Knowing that I might be followed and that a camera might tip off a spy, I left mine in my bedroom. But I hid a small notebook in my bra.

  In the darkened bookstore, Medved led me up a ladder to a loft lit by a candle in a green bottle. I could make out his wife and his baby sitting against the far wall.

  “I am a historian of India,” Medved said. “If they let me do my own work, I'd be in a library doing research. Instead, all day I work in the store. I can only do my research at night, with no electricity. So I do nothing.”

  I decided to check up on Carosin's statements. “I was told by one of the political leaders here that political prisoners are not put into prison, that they're sent into exile as soon as they're sentenced.”

  “A lie,” he said. “Political prisoners are put into prison and then exiled. I've been in different prisons almost every year since 1927. I was in prison for eight years. My wife and I, we've been here for over a year already.”

  “How many exiled prisoners would you say are now in Yakutsk?”

  “They won't tell you the truth. There are at least 350 in this godforsaken city, but thousands, some of us think tens of thousands, are prisoners all over the Yakutia Republic.”

  “Why were you exiled here?”

  “I was a soldier in the Great War. And I was in the Bolshevik party. In 1927, Stalin and Trotsky split. The way Stalin began to run the country was inhuman. It was murder. I decided to join the opposition. I took a job as an ordinary laborer in a factory, so that I could do underground work against Stalin, that murderer. I had a mimeograph machine in Leningrad.”

  “Tool of the revolution,” I murmured.

  “Correct. I printed leaflets telling the workers in the factory the truth. I worked up a real proletarian base. I committed sabotage.”

  “What kind of sabotage?”

  “We entered factories and wrecked machines. We caused a death or two by doing it. It was the only way we could let the workers know that the opposition to Stalin was powerful.”

  He paused, waiting for me to jot his words in my notebook. “My wife,” he said, “she was so afraid that the police would find all my books that she burned every one of them.”

  His wife began weeping. “I had to do it. They pulled up the floorboards when they came to our house looking for your books and your papers.”

  He went over to comfort her. “Milenka maya [my darling], I know you had to do it.”

  I left them, telling him as he led me down the ladder, “I promise you, one day I will tell your story.”

  My days were crowded with interviewing and photographing life in Yakutsk. In a small neighboring village, a 104-year-old Yakut woman, Marfa Mikhailovna, showed me a cradle in which she had rocked each one of her twenty children. It was an ingenious cradle made of birch bark, carved to fit a baby's body. Under the baby's bottom was a smooth trench of birch bark with a hole at the end. It emptied into a birch-bark potty.

  “It has its own irrigation system,” I laughed, thinking Yakut babies never needed diapers.

  “You like it?” Marfa asked.

  “It's a great piece of engineering.”

  “It's yours,” she said. I would have liked to decline it, but I knew that in Yakut culture, if you rejected a present, you insulted the giver.

  I carried Marfa's cradle back to New York and, fifteen years later, rocked my own children in it.

  My book I Went to the Soviet Arctic was published by Simon & Schuster on September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler sent his tanks and troops in a Blitzkrieg into Poland. It was the start of World War II. All my relatives in Poland were murdered.

  In America, our young people were inspired to go west and to live a life of adventure. When the Soviet Arctic was opened up, young people were urged to go north. Many came to Igarka, the boomtown north of the Arctic Circle, where I photographed them as they worked. I was especially excited to see young women in jobs long considered for men only.

  Evenings Igarkans spent in the clubhouse, with giant posters of Stalin's face staring down at them. They sang, danced, drank, and listened to lectures from political leaders who congratulated them on building this new town and told them how proud Stalin was of them.

  Igarka was a lumber town with workers in the mills, others hauling lumber and still others hoisting lumber on ships bound for Europe. The town was built of wood, which meant at least one wooden house burned each day.

  I was in Igarka for about a month and tried to send my articles by short wave radio to the Moscow office of the New York Herald Tribune. They would send them to Paris to appear in the Paris Herald Tribune. Paris would then send them to New York for the New York Herald Tribune.

  Ice floes in the Soviet Arctic became safe landing fields for polar seaplanes. I took this picture from the open-cockpit plane in which I flew around the Arctic in 1935 and 1936.

  In Moscow, fellow reporters wanted to show me how excited they were that I had received this plum assignment. They brought presents, only a few of which I could really take. The most useful one was a hot-water bottle. The reporters tried to figure out how I got the assignment. Some decided it was good timing.

  It was so cold flying in an open-cockpit plane that even before we took off people began bundling me in scarves and warm leather coats. The Russians were determined that the first amerikanskaya jurnalistka that they had ever seen in the Arctic had to be properly fortified against the cold.

  Igarka's agronomists and visiting officials, 1935.

  There were always rallies in Igarka to encourage the workers and to tell them they were meeting their quotas. These “
Stakhanovites” were pioneers, who were rewarded with a few extra rubles.

  Adeckhand on the SS Russianoff, a Soviet ship that sailed across the Arctic Ocean carrying Siberian lumber from Igarka's mills to ports in Scandinavia, 1935. Siberian lumber was considered top quality. These workers carefully guarded their words when they talked with me. They wanted me to believe they were living in paradise. As the only foreign correspondent in Iganka, I was given free rein to photograph anything that interested me. But I suspected that if there were any prisons, military bases, or airports, they were hidden or disguised.

  In 1936, I flew to Yakutsk in Northeastern Siberia, the largest town in the Yakutia Republic. I packed a duffel bag with copies of the Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, thinking: wouldn't it be fun to give these copies to the native people? The Yakuts were learning to read and write in their own language.

  A public health nurse taught the Yakuts modern methods of sanitation. “Wash your hands, wash your bodies, and change your underwear once a month.”

  I lived in a modern house that had no bathroom. Like everyone else, I went to a bathhouse, where I was given a massage and where my back was beaten with leaves. There were special women's days, and I was happy to use every one of them. Sitting naked in a steam room, I soon became friends with many of the women.

  Tuberculosis was a dread disease in 1936. An entire building in Yakutsk was turned into a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. To find a sanitarium in Siberia took me back home to Brooklyn. One of my older brothers, Harry, was a TB specialist at Kings County Hospital. His work alerted me to the havoc this disease caused families around the world. He became so involved with his patients that he turned the attic above our Brooklyn garage into a TB laboratory. He built his own pneumothorax machines, which were used to collapse the patients' lungs while they healed.

  The children in this picture all had TB. The doctors and nurses I met told me how desperately they were trying to conquer this disease. I wondered, if I were to come back in a year or two, how many of their young patients would be alive.

  The pasture lands of the Arctic tundra, 1936.

  The pilot of this open-cockpit seaplane was Victor Galishev, one of the best pilots in the region. Standing beside him is Tonya Kliukvina, my interpreter and unwelcome guide, from whom I was forever seeking to escape; I was becoming more and more certain that her job was to report my activities to the secret police.

  A Yakut woman milks her reindeer, 1936. Reindeer were an important part of Siberian life, providing leather, horns, skin, and milk for the native people.

  Tixie Bay was a polar radio station on the rim of the Arctic Ocean, that guided planes and ships over the top of the world. The sun was shining brightly as I stood with one of the scientists. The rivers of Yakutia were like arteries pumping life into the station. Oceangoing ships brought goods from Europe and the Orient, and riverboats and barges ferried the goods up the Lena River to Yakutsk.

  I think the fact that I was knowledgeable intrigued the scientists. I had worked for the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, so I knew some of the Arctic problems and some of their solutions. Stefansson did a report for the War Department on the whole world's Arctic, and I had translated some German documents for the project.

  Ayurt, made of wood and mud, was used largely as a winter house by the native people. It could have been a model for Bucky Fuller's geodesic dome.

  Inside was a room with no furniture. The people slept on the floor in layers of clothing that kept them warm.

  Some Yakut families lived in yurts, while others lived in tents made of reindeer hide. A Yakut family brought all their children out of their tent for me to photograph. Besides admiring their beautiful faces, I found their birch-bark cradles intriguing.

  On their days off, many Yakuts dressed in Western holiday clothes and visited the Park of Culture and Rest. Inside were booths that sold food, newspapers, and magazines. Here, in faraway Yakutsk, some of the people told me they felt connected to the rest of the world.

  Hunters prepared furs to be sent to the international fur market in Leningrad.

  Alaska

  1941–1943

  We'd like you to go to Alaska,” Joe Barnes, foreign editor at the New York Herald Tribune, telephoned me in the spring of 1941. “We'd like you to do a series of articles on how we're preparing for war up there. Alaska's going to become very important once we enter.”

  Barnes suggested I take a train down to Washington to interview Harold L. Ickes, the secretary of the Interior. Alaska, not yet a state, was in Ickes's grab-bag department, together with Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

  Ickes's office was a study in blue—a thick blue carpet and heavy blue drapes framed the long windows, with Ickes sitting hunched over his desk in a blue suit. By a lucky coincidence, I was wearing a blue suit with a blue hat and high-heeled blue shoes that I hoped would make me look taller than my five feet two inches.

  “Sit down,” Ickes said, pointing to a chair at the right side of his desk. Having read a good deal about him before coming to Washington, I expected to find a New Deal Democrat, a crusty curmudgeon, pugnacious and fiercely honest, who had cleaned up both the Teapot Dome oil scandal in the Interior Department and the corruption under President Warren G. Harding. Instead, I found a warm, approachable man who looked like the editor of a country newspaper, his eyes glinting behind gold-rimmed glasses.

  After half an hour in his office discussing how important Alaska would become as soon as we entered the war, I observed, “The shortest route between America and Europe is across the top of the globe.”

  Ickes nodded. Suddenly, looking straight at me, he said, “Don't go to Alaska for the Herald Tribune. Go for me. I read your book about the Soviet Arctic. I want you to do something similar. Make a social and economic study on how we can open Alaska to homesteaders, and at the same time save its environment. I want you to be my eyes and ears, and to send me constant reports. Travel wherever you want up there. Stay about a year. I suggest you take a couple of cameras and even a movie camera.”

  “Mr. Secretary, if you give me a camel and two strong men to carry all that equipment, I'll be happy to do it.”

  He laughed. “Carry as much as you can.”

  I had come for an interview as a freelance writer for the Herald Tribune and left with a full-time job as Ickes's field representative in Alaska. I was now a member of the Roosevelt administration.

  For my reports to Ickes, I used a Leica for color photos, a Rolleicord for black-and-whites, and an 8-mm movie camera. The cameras were to play an important role in validating the reports and recommendations I sent to Ickes.

  Alaska was an empty country. Though it was huge, a fifth the size of the United States, it had only 30,000 native people—Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts— and 30,000 settlers.

  In my notebook, I summed up my first few months in Alaska: “I went everywhere that first summer—everywhere. I wanted to see it all, live it, breathe it, experience it, swallow it, know it as I had known the Soviet Arctic.” I recorded what I was seeing in countless notebooks and with three cameras.

  I became enchanted with the Eskimos. I loved their way of life, their serenity, their acceptance of the climate, and especially the care they gave their children. An Eskimo mother was almost never without her child, either on her back or in her belly.

  On November 4, 1941, sitting in my office in the penthouse of the Federal Building in Anchorage (it was the third floor), I sent Ickes a long report summing up the first six months of my study. I had already filled up forty-five notebooks, taken scores of pictures, and shot reels of film.

  “All along the way,” I wrote to him, “sailing down the Yukon, living among the Eskimos on the islands of the Bering Sea, photographing the government reindeer herd at Kotzebue, I've tried to get at the Truth of Alaska.”

  Truth had always been at the core of my writing. In the Soviet Arctic and now in Alaska, truth became the core of my pictures. To be sure, there
are people who argue that photographs can distort the truth just as much as words can. But unmanipulated pictures do not deceive.

  I discovered there was a mystique about the camera.

  Photographs, just like articles and books, can help change the world. They can reveal the soul, the essence of people who are good and the essence of people who are evil. My goal was to capture the beauty of mothers and children and to bring to life workers, fishermen, pioneers, and so-called common people— though they were not common. They were, by and large, people who create and build, but do not destroy.

  I did not want to romanticize Alaska, though I think the beauty of the country seen through the lens of my camera might have justified it. Nor did I want to trash it as did some of the soldiers. Many were teenagers who had never been told what their mission would be once we entered the war. They were homesick and confused. “Why were we sent up here?” they would ask me.

  One morning, a teenage soldier from a farm in the Midwest knocked on my door. “Excuse me for bothering you. I'm so lonely. I only want to hear you laugh.”

  Often in Anchorage, I arranged to meet the soldiers in the Army clubhouse they had helped build. I encouraged them to show me snapshots and tell me stories of their mothers, their wives, or their girlfriends. Each day more and more soldiers came, pulled up chairs, sat in a circle around me, and shared their feelings about Alaska.

  Army officers, seeing the soldiers absorbed, began asking me to give daily lectures in the clubhouse, illustrated with my photographs. I accepted, in the hope that, through these talks, I might help them understand Alaska's importance.