MY PARENTS WERE HARDLY the only Americans to be stranded in Moscow after 1936. Hundreds like them were cut adrift in the Soviet Union, comprehending too late that they’d fallen from the grace of the American government. The U.S. Embassy seems to have found every excuse to deny or delay reissuing these citizens their American passports—passports they had lost through no fault other than their na?veté. The schemes that the Soviet government employed to strip American expats of citizenship were numerous. Those living outside of Moscow were required to send in their passports for renewal by post, only to be informed that their documents were “lost in the mail”—bundled and repurposed, no doubt, by spies. Muscovites like my mother were required to submit theirs to work-or housing-permit boards. This was how Mama lost hers, though in her whitewashed account the bureaucratic sleight of hand was—her words—an unexpected convenience, as she was planning to apply for Soviet citizenship in any case.
I have since read about those who attempted to seek recourse in the protective fortress of that embassy. If they managed to enter, they were informed by embassy workers that the processing fees for their new passports were to be paid in dollars—currency that was illegal to possess. Other applicants were merely instructed to return again, and again, and again, so that their cases could be “fully investigated”—even as the consular staff that gave these instructions could observe from their office windows that the plaza below was patrolled on all corners by the Soviet secret police, who showed up each morning like fishermen to cast their nets into this reliable pool.
I had always assumed that our embassy’s malicious indifference to these castaways must have been a symptom of the anti-Red prejudice that was permeating America at this time and would overtake it completely after the Second World War. Who were these defectors but malcontents and radicals that had turned their backs on their country—on Democracy and Capitalism? They’d made their pink bed, now let them lie in it.
That, at least, was the only explanation that made sense to me. I might have continued to believe it had I not, some years into my new American life, been given the gift of a VHS tape of “a classic American film” bequeathed to my wife and me by one of our patrons at Temple Beth Emet—a friendly, burly psychologist by the name of Harold Greene, who’d taken a special interest in my family’s story because he saw in us some sort of missing link to the world of his recent ancestors. With unaccountable pride, Harold once informed me that he came from a long line of socialists, “on both sides,” and spoke excitedly of the rally his father and grandfather had attended for Trotsky in the Bronx a thousand years ago. The gift of this VHS tape was only one of Harold’s many acts of generosity. (His first present to me and Lucya was a saggy queen-sized spring mattress, which, in bestowing it upon our impoverished household, Harold advertised as “a good Jewish mattress—two terrific Jewish children have been conceived on this mattress!”) The video he gave us was called Mission to Moscow. Its case still bore the proprietary stamp of the “Library of NYU” and must have found its way to Harold as one more piece of apocrypha from that Red decade for which he nursed such nostalgia. My guess, though, is that he never actually watched it to the end. Had he done so, I suspect that even he, an uncritical sentimentalist, would have recognized it for the watery load of propagandistic Hollywood excrement that it was.
The film was based closely on the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, and produced by Warner Bros. Studios at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. After the war—this I learned from Harold—it became the first of the big studio films to be burned on the stake of McCarthy’s “un-American” campaign. For good reason, I should say. The list of endless elisions that make up this lying travesty of a movie includes Davies declaring that the confessions made during Moscow’s show trials appeared to him “authentic and uncoerced.” The film also includes Davies rationalizing Stalin’s unprovoked attack on Finland and his pact with the Nazis, and generally whitewashes one of history’s bloodiest dictators as some kind of bumbling uncle moving his nation clumsily toward American-style democracy. For me, the height of the film’s delusion comes in a scene in which the ambassador gently scolds his staff for being outraged that their embassy is bugged. But how will the Soviets ever know we mean them no harm, he lectures his subordinates, if they can’t listen to our private conversations? At this I wanted to wipe my eyes. Surely, the movie was meant as pure lampoonery, I thought. How could any diplomat be at once so dangerously submissive and so flawlessly arrogant? My disbelief made me curious to learn more about the man under whose aegis my parents had been barred from the one sanctuary that might have given them protection when their lives were so obviously in peril.
Joseph Davies, I would learn, was a liberal Washington lawyer and friend of Roosevelt who had the great ingenuity to marry, at the height of the Depression, the richest woman in America. Marjorie Merriweather Post had inherited the Post Foods empire from her father and expanded it with the help of her second husband. She presided over a kingdom of cereals, cake mixes, coffees, chocolate syrups, cooking powders, and frozen vegetables like a Catherine the Great. Every time an American housewife tore open a box of Grape-Nuts, or brewed a pot of Maxwell House, or chilled a bowl of Jell-O for her children, her domestic gesture contributed another tiny spike to Marjorie Post’s prodigious portfolio.
In 1935, Post’s divorce of her financier husband and her marriage to Joseph Davies was, along with the trial of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapper, fruitful fodder for the tabloids. Columnists wondered what a woman as regally striking and obscenely rich as Marjorie could find appealing in an antitrust attorney who resembled a cartoon mouse in a bowler hat. Obviously, they underrated the allure of politics for a woman who had everything. Marjorie Post Davies’s wedding present to her third husband was a titanic check made out for the reelection campaign of his buddy Franklin D. Roosevelt, a contribution that naturally left a debt to be repaid once the president entered his second term. No doubt Mrs. Davies hoped that her six-figure gift would guarantee her husband an ambassador’s post in London or Paris. Instead, the couple got Moscow. And, more relevant to my parents’ story, Moscow got them.