Stalin's Secret Police Executed Many Americans -- Hundreds May Have Been Killed, Jailed For Connections To The U.S.

MOSCOW - Alexander Gelver was afraid. People around him were getting arrested. He wanted to get out of the country, to go home to America, so he went to the U.S. Embassy for help.

But outside the gates, he was stopped - by the secret police.

Was it true, his interrogator demanded, that Gelver thought life was better in the United States than the Soviet Union? Had he said as much to his fellow workers at a local factory?

All true, said Gelver, who had come to Russia years earlier with his parents. An open-and-shut case of espionage, the secret police declared. And then he disappeared. His fate remained unknown for 60 years.

Gelver was just one of hundreds of American leftists who had moved here in the 1920s and 1930s to help Josef Stalin build the new worker's paradise, and who then vanished, one by one, from the face of the earth.

Their friends and relatives have grown old without ever knowing, for certain, what happened to them.

But now, the answer is emerging, documented in moldy secret police files obtained by Associated Press, revealed in recent interviews with people who survived the Stalinist purges, told in old U.S. State Department documents, some declassified at the AP's request.

On New Year's Day 1938, his file shows, Alexander Gelver, 24, of Oshkosh, Wis., was executed. His last moments were not documented; the favored method was a single shot to the back of the head with a small-caliber pistol.

There is reason to believe that hundreds of Americans met a similar fate. The files of 15 missing Americans whose disappearances were investigated in detail show that two died in Soviet labor camps and eight others were executed. The other five spent years in Soviet prisons.

They were artists, factory workers, teachers and engineers. They were arrested after engaging in such subversive activities as wearing American clothes, asking the U.S. Embassy for help or talking about life back home. U.S. Embassy officials in Moscow chronicled the terror in a series of internal memos but were ambivalent about helping, in part because American fears of communism already were in full bloom.

Declassified State Department records show that some Americans who came to the embassy for help were turned away because they lacked an up-to-date photo or didn't have the few dollars in American currency required to renew their passports. Some of them were then arrested by secret police agents lurking outside the embassy gates.

In recent years, there have been scattered reports of Americans executed during the Stalinist purges; but until now, details have been few and the role of the American embassy has remained unknown.

Sergei Zhuravlev, a historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says other governments, including Germany and Austria, long ago formally investigated the fates of countrymen who disappeared in the purges, which also killed several million Soviet citizens. The United States has made no effort to find its victims of the Stalin era.

One victim, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, was well-known in America. He founded the American Communist Party's black affiliate, the American Negro Labor Congress.

The Soviet government invited him to Moscow in the 1920s to work in the upper reaches of the party's international arm, the Comintern. For nine years, he worked in Moscow, but he disappeared in 1937 after trying to get permission to return to the United States.

His file, found by the AP in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakstan, shows he was accused of making anti-Soviet statements and exiled to the city of Semipalatinsk, in distant Soviet Central Asia. A few months later, he was arrested again and sentenced to hard labor.

Whiteman died in a labor camp at 1 a.m. on Jan. 13, 1939, according to his file. He was 44.

The rest of the victims were a varied lot. Some were American-born. Others were Russian-born naturalized Americans who went back to the Soviet Union and took their American-born children with them. Some were members of the Communist Party; most were not.

Some were deported by the United States because of their subversive politics, but many went willingly. As America sank into the Great Depression, they interpreted the bank failures and bread lines as the death throes of capitalism. The Soviet Union, they believed, was the future.

The USSR recruited them by the hundreds as advisers to fledgling Russian industries, often paying their passage. But before long, Stalin's paranoia about anything foreign overcame his need for expertise.

Arthur Talent was only 7 years old when he was brought to Moscow from Boston by his mother, but he had already developed a taste for American music. At age 20 or so, he somehow became acquainted with the wife of Paul Robeson, an American famous for his singing voice and left-wing politics. When the Robesons came to Moscow for a performance, she brought the young man a new suit of American clothes.

On Jan. 28, 1938, secret police files show, agents searched Talent's apartment and seized the clothes, which they insisted were payment for his spying.

The first 11 pages of his interrogation transcript show him denying the accusation. At the end of page 11, the transcript says: "the interrogation has been interrupted."

When the interrogation resumed, Talent was told: "You are arrested and accused of espionage activities in the USSR in favor of one foreign state. Do you plead guilty?"

His response: "Yes! I plead guilty of being involved in espionage activities for Latvia. After a 38-day denial I decided to tell the inquest the truth."

A crumpled slip of paper, inserted near the end of the file, says Talent was shot June 7, 1938. He was 21 years old.

Death was not always so swift. Thomas Sgovio, one of a handful of Americans known to have survived the notorious prison camps in the Russian Far East, was a witness. He told his story in a recent interview.

Sgovio was 19 when he came to Moscow with his father, who the U.S. deported as a communist agitator in 1935. The Soviet government was delighted to have them. By day, they lectured Russian workers on the horrors of the American Depression. By night, Sgovio danced in the hotels with Lucy Flaxman, a young American who had been brought to Moscow by her parents.

But within two years, foreigners began to disappear. Among them was Sgovio's father.

Thomas Sgovio made several trips to the U.S. Embassy to ask for help in returning to America. Each time, he was told his case was being considered. On March 21, 1938, he asked again and was told to come back after lunch. Sgovio walked outside and was seized by three secret police agents. Soon, he was in a freight car with twelve other Americans, heading for a prison labor camp. After a year of work in the arctic mines, 10 of them were dead.

Sgovio's father, Joseph, spent 11 years in labor camps. His health broken, he died shortly after his release in 1948. Thomas Sgovio was freed after 16 years in the camps. He managed to return to America in 1960 when U.S.-Soviet relations warmed briefly.

He died in Arizona this summer, at age 81. But before his death, he examined his 91-page secret police file, sent to him by the AP.

The first thing Sgovio wanted to know was what had happened to his girlfriend, Lucy. On page 80, he found out. She had been an informer for the secret police, regularly reporting on him and other Americans.

"Thomas slanderously swore that Soviet power wasn't based on the love of the people, but on terror instilled by fear of being arrested," she had said in one of her reports.

"She was not a very courageous person," Sgovio said sadly. "It was a frightening time for everyone."

Internal State Department memos show that the U.S. embassy in Moscow watched the arrests and sent reports to Washington.

George Kennan - later architect of the U.S. policy of "containment of Soviet communism, but then a Moscow embassy official - declined to be interviewed for this story, but answered some questions in writing. Asked about the arrests, Kennan, now 93, offered a legalistic reply:

"I can recall no instance in which any of them who, being there for open and legitimate purposes and with a proper Soviet visa on their American passports, was arrested, confined for any length of time, or executed by Soviet authorities."

However, in 1931, a few years before the U.S. established its embassy in Moscow, Kennan compiled a confidential list of 85 "individuals residing in Soviet Russia, reputed to be American citizens but communist sympathizers."

A note at the top of the list warns that some "might no longer be entitled to protection without the special approval of the Department."

Kennan did not reply to questions about the memo.