Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [265]
I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.
The Major looked at Sorokin, and then again turned to me.
“And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know that you are a Jew?”
“If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Ach, you yid mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped hard for breath and fell.
“What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?”
As a result of this interrogation, Klein was first sentenced to death. He was then reprieved—and given a twenty-year katorga. 81
“There were all kinds of people in the camps, especially after the war,” wrote Hava Volovich later. “But we were all tormented just the same: the good, the bad, the guilty, and the innocent.” 82
If, during the war years, millions of foreigners entered the Gulag against their will, at least one foreigner arrived voluntarily. The war may have provoked new paroxysms of anti-foreigner paranoia among the Soviet leadership; but it was also thanks to the war that a senior American politician visited the Gulag, for the first and only time. Henry Wallace, Vice President of the United States, made a trip to Kolyma in May 1944—and never even knew that he was visiting a prison.
Wallace’s visit took place at the height of Soviet-American wartime friendship, the warmest moment of the alliance, when the American press was wont to describe Stalin as “Uncle Joe.” Perhaps for that reason, Wallace was inclined to look kindly upon the Soviet Union even before he arrived. In Kolyma, he saw all of his prejudices confirmed. As soon as he arrived, he saw the many parallels between Russia and the United States: both were great “new” countries, carrying none of the aristocratic baggage of the European past. He believed, as he told his hosts, that “Soviet Asia” was in fact the “Wild West of Russia.” He thought that there were “no other two countries more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States”: “The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate—from tropical to polar—her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my homeland.” 83
If the landscape pleased him, so too did what he took to be the nation’s industrial strength. Nikishov, the notoriously corrupt, high-living Dalstroi boss, escorted Wallace around Magadan, the main city of Kolyma. Wallace, in turn, imagined Nikishov, a senior NKVD officer, to be the rough equivalent of an American capitalist: “He runs everything around here. With Dalstroi’s resources at his command, he’s a millionaire.” Wallace enjoyed the company of his new friend “Ivan,” and watched as he “gamboled about” in the taiga, “enjoying the wonderful air immensely.” He also listened closely to “Ivan’s” account of Dalstroi’s origins: “We had to dig hard to get this place going. Twelve years ago the first settlers arrived and put up eight pre-fabricated houses. Today Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and all are well-housed.”
Nikishov failed to mention, of course, that the “first settlers” were prisoners, and that most of the 40,000 inhabitants were exiles, forbidden to leave. Wallace was equally ignorant of the status of the contemporary workers—nearly all prisoners—and went on to write approvingly of the Kolyma gold miners. They were, he recalled, “big, husky young men,” free workers who were far harder-working than the political prisoners whom he supposed had inhabited the far north in Czarist times: “The people of Siberia are a hardy, vigorous race, but not because they are whipped into submission.”84
This, of course, is precisely what the Dalstroi bosses wanted Wallace to think. According to the report which Nikishov himself later wrote for Beria, Wallace did ask to see a prison camp, but was kept away. Nikishov also assured his bosses that the only workers Wallace encountered were free workers