We visited gold mines operated by Dalstroi in the valley of the Kolyma River, where rich placer workings are strung out for miles. It was interesting to find, instead of the sin, gin, and brawling of an old-time gold rush, extensive greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons, to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins!194
I felt uncomfortable while writing down these paragraphs. Knowing what Magadan and the Kolyma gold mines were for millions of prisoners who perished, the words of the sophisticated American professor sounded blasphemous to me. I can only leave it to Lattimore’s conscience to rectify his comparison of the Dalstroi land of slavery with the “combination of Hudson’s Bay Company and TVA.”
Ivan Nikishov (1894–1958), Communist Party functionary, member of the Supreme Soviet, and candidate member of the Central Committee, was head of the Dalstroi in 1940–1946. In 1942, he married Aleksandra Gridasova, who became head of the Maglag, a complex of labor camps (including a camp for women) in Magadan and the surrounding area.195 The Nikishovs’ “extraordinary achievements” left a considerable mark in the history of the Soviet Gulag: as with Rudolf Hoess and Elsa Koch for Nazi Germany, the Nikishovs are remembered as NKVD officials with no boundaries to their cruelty.196 Vegetables were raised by slaves in permafrost soil not for themselves but only for their masters (the Nikishovs’ mansion in Magadan was surrounded by a garden), and the “first-class orchestra and a good light-opera company” consisted of slave musicians and actors, who any minute could end up in a gold, tin, or uranium mine.197 As in the Nazi camps, the “first-class orchestra” provided “high-grade entertainment” every day at 5:00 A.M. in the dark frozen tundra to gloomy columns of exhausted prisoners, surrounded by ruthless guards and barking dogs, when the prisoners were about to leave the concentration camps to work in the inhuman conditions of the Kolyma area.
As for the Nikishovs’ “trained and sensitive interest in art,” there were in fact famous imprisoned painters in this slave empire. Every government holiday, such as the May 1, November 7 (the day of the Bolshevik Revolution), and so on, they were obliged to paint copies of the official portraits of Soviet leaders. One of the copies was made by Vasilii Shukhaev, a famous painter who was arrested by the NKVD just after he had lived in Paris. Here is a typical scene:
Nikishov… a master of the region, who personally inspected the portrait [at a special exhibition in Magadan], flew into a rage: “Who did dare to show Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] with a dirty collar?!” The answer was: “This is not dirt, this is a shade. You can see that the light [on the portrait] is coming from a side.” “What shade are you talking about?” Nikishov roared. Vasilii Ivanovich [Shukhaev], who did not even know about this emotional fight, was sent from a barrack [of the concentration camp] to a kartser [a punishment building without heat and with a low food ration in the permafrost of tundra].198
One of Alexandra Nikishova’s factories of enslaved women produced embroideries. Vice President Henry Wallace admired the embroideries:
…We remember the wife of Ivan Nikishov, a plump woman of about forty, whom we first met in Magadan at an extraordinary exhibit of paintings in embroidery, copies of famous Russian landscapes. The landscapes were made by a group of local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework, an art in which Russian peasants have long excelled. As we walked along, Ivan stopped before two of the paintings I admired very much. The work was in colored threads. He took them down and handed them to me as a gift. These two wall pictures now convey to visitors at my home in Washington rich impressions of the beauty in Russia’s rural landscape.199
No wonder that the embroideries were of the highest quality: Shukhaev’s wife, who worked as a fashion designer in Paris before she was arrested, was in charge of the team of craftswomen, who were political prisoners. I wish Mr. Wallace would have seen this “group of local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework” in the barracks of Magadan labor camps and the conditions of their work. I think that if the two embroideries given to Wallace have survived, they should be displayed at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington together with the drawings of Jewish artists who worked in the ghettos and Nazi camps.
Nikishova also authorized programs of enslaved opera. Ida Varpakhovskaya, a singer at Nikishovs’ opera house who survived the imprisonment, recalled: “One day Gridasova… sent an instruction to L. V. [the enslaved director of the opera, the famous theater director Leonid Varpakhovsky], in which she ordered to include ‘the song of Doreadot’ [she meant the toreador’s aria from Charles Bizet’s Carmen] into the program of a concert.”200
I cannot believe that all the members of the American delegation were so naive that they did not notice at all what was going on around them. Besides Magadan, the delegation visited other centers of the Gulag system in the cities of Karaganda and Komsomolsk-on-Amur.201 It would have been practically impossible not to see the countless labor camps with their barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences from the plane when the delegation arrived in these cities.
Elinor Lipper, a Swiss ex-Communist and inmate of the Kolyma camp at the time of Wallace’s mission, wrote later: “Mr. Wallace went home and published his enthusiastic report on Soviet Asia. The watch towers were put up again, the prisoners sent out to work again, and in the empty shop windows there were to be seen nothing but a few dusty and mournful boxes of matches.”202
In 1945, Wallace sent articles from the Soviet press he and his staff collected during his trip to Russia to the American geneticist Leslie C. Dunn, who, together with Theodosius Dobzhansky, was preparing an English translation of Lysenko’s book Heredity and Its Variability (published in 1946).203 Dunn and Dobzhansky believed “the best way to deal with Lysenko’s influence is to make known his ideas and evidence in the form in which he himself has published them.”204 Wallace supported publishing Lysenko’s book, possibly in the hope that American geneticists would accept the new type of supposedly “progressive” Soviet genetics.205
Probably, Mr. Wallace simply did not want to confront the truth: He was a Communist sympathizer whom the FBI considered to be a Soviet spy.206 In this instance, the suspicion was based on real facts. After his governmental career (U.S. vice president, 1941–1945, and U.S. secretary of commerce, 1945–1946), Wallace campaigned in 1948 for his own third party, a pro-Soviet “Progressive Party,” with the help of American Communists and their Soviet controllers.207 The “Communist sympathizer” reputation finally cost Wallace his political career.208 Another American prisoner of Kolyma camps during the Wallace and Lattimore visit, Thomas Sgovio, added the last detail to the picture: “Before his death, Mr. Wallace admitted he had been naive and gullible. Lattimore has never admitted he was duped. I shall leave it to the American people to judge the Professor.”209
The historian and Gulag survivor Anton Anotonov-Ovseenko described Nikishov’s end.210 He died in a bath in 1956, after he wrote a detailed report to Party officials about the atrocities in the Dalstroi. Like the Nazi war criminals, he claimed that he had only followed orders:
…Yezhov and Beria demanded to fulfill the plan of gold production by any cost: “Do not be sorry for prisoners. You will receive workers always when steamers can bring them [to Kolyma]…”