Gulag

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 rather than prisoners. Many of them may have even been members of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth league, who had been handed miners’ clothing and rubber boots only minutes before Wallace’s arrival, and would know what to say if asked questions. “I spoke with some of them,” Wallace noted later. “They were keen on winning the war.”⁸⁵

Later, Wallace did encounter real prisoners, although he did not know it: these were the singers and musicians, many of them arrested opera performers from Moscow and Leningrad, who performed for him in the Magadan theater. Told they were members of a “nonprofessional Red Army choir” stationed in the city, he marveled that amateurs could achieve such artistic heights. In fact, each one had been warned that “one word or sign that we were prisoners would be considered an act of treason.”⁸⁶

Wallace also saw some prisoner handiwork, although again he did not know that either. Nikishov took him to an exhibition of embroidery, and told him the works on display had been made by a group of “local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework.” Prisoners, of course, had done the work, in preparation for Wallace’s visit. When Wallace stopped before one of the works, in clear admiration, Nikishov took it off the wall and handed it to him. Much to his (pleasurable) surprise, Nikishov’s wife, the much-feared Gridasova, modestly let it be known that she herself was the artist. Later, a prisoner, Vera Ustieva, learned that her picture was one of two which had been given to the Vice President as a memento of his trip. “Our boss received a letter from the wife of the Vice President, thanking her for the present and saying that the pictures hung in her hall,” she wrote later.⁸⁷ In his memoirs Wallace also described the gifts: “These two wall paintings now convey to my visitors at my home in Washington rich impressions of the beauty of Russia’s rural landscape.”⁸⁸