11

THE THEATER OF DIPLOMACY

“Did you murder someone that your fingers are dipped in blood?” a pedestrian asked Irene Wiley, the newlywed wife of the counselor at the American embassy.¹ It was April 1934 in Moscow. Irene went home and cleaned the red polish from her nails—a Russian-speaking cosmopolitan artist of Polish-Jewish origin who, as the wife of the second in command at the American embassy, became its first lady. Soviet officials called her “pilsudchitsa,” a class enemy and follower of Polish president Joseph Piłsudski.

Greeting the Wileys, who came straight from their wedding in France, Bullitt filled their sitting room with white chrysanthemums. The only flowers he could get in the city, they created a “funeral parlor atmosphere,” Irene later wrote. The Wileys got an apartment in the National, a luxurious but dilapidated hotel next to the Kremlin. The food in the hotel was “very appetizing but highly lethal,” and Irene learned to cook in the bedroom. She found out, however, that even if consumed the same day it was butchered, “the underfed Soviet cow” was inedible. Desperate, she bought crawfish and left them to soak in the bathtub until dinner, but they were so lovely that she decided to release them into the Moscow River. Even this was difficult in Moscow: the police immediately approached her, suspecting foul play. It became her responsibility to instruct the embassy’s waiters, whom she found entirely untrained. She spent hours teaching them which glasses were for the wine and which for the water, and heard one of them telling another, “Madam Wiley must be very superstitious, she wants us to do everything the same way all the time.” She had to endure long Russian dinners, from ten o’clock in the evening to two in the morning, and usually found herself “between the Japanese ambassador, who spoke only Japanese, and the British Ambassador, who refused to speak at all.” Sometimes, the Soviet leaders were more entertaining. Kalinin once asked her over champagne in the Kremlin: “You are an artist, why aren’t you a Bolshevik?”²

Concerned about the psychological state of Bullitt’s embassy, Roosevelt acknowledged that Soviet agents continually and illegally monitored the American diplomats. Proposing new security measures, the president asked Bullitt not to recruit anyone who was not born in America and to encourage members of the staff to study Russian language. He also instructed Bullitt to prohibit “spying of any kind” by everyone employed by the embassy, including military experts, even though they would be “spied upon constantly.” To keep the diplomats entertained during their difficult mission, Roosevelt sent Moscow the latest movie projector that was able to show sound films—a “talking picture machine,” as he called it.³

Unexpectedly, the embassy began to run out of money. The official ruble exchange rate was vastly different from its real value, the fact that every foreigner in Moscow knew well. Most foreigners exchanged their dollars or francs on the black market, which secured them a good life for little money. But foreign embassies could not use the black market for official dealings with the Soviets such as paying for construction projects and other expenditures. For their everyday necessities such as food and drinks, the Americans in Moscow could only go to stores that accepted rubles. At the start Bullitt forbade his associates from using the black market. However, the official rate made living prohibitively expensive. Bullitt told Litvinov that a bouquet of flowers in Moscow would cost him 130 dollars, and a piece of chocolate would cost 13 dollars. He also complained that it cost twenty times more to send a telegram from Moscow to Washington than from Washington to Moscow. The seductive availability of the black market surfaced even in Bullitt’s correspondence with Roosevelt. The British consul in Leningrad, Reader Bullard, followed the situation with pleasure; he had relied on the black market for years, and now he saw that his American peers tried to survive without it. As he expected, Bullitt soon gave up: “As for the Ambassador, the friend of the Soviet Union, the more rubles he can buy illegally, the better pleased he is.”⁴

The embassy wanted the Soviet government to respect intellectual property. Specifically, Bullitt asked the Soviet publishing houses to pay royalties to the American writers who had been translated in the previous years. The Commissariat for Foreign Affairs prepared a list of these American writers, most of them left-wing novelists, and estimated the overall debt to be about 20,000 convertible rubles. It was a relatively big sum; in 1933, the USSR paid 4,500 convertible rubles to translated authors in all foreign countries combined.⁵ After making this calculation, the officials at the commissariat realized that they had forgotten about the Russian translation of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which sold 733,000 copies. The royalties for Reed’s book would have come out to 175,000 convertible rubles alone. Moreover, the Soviets would have to pay this money to John Reed’s widow, Louise Bryant, who had recently divorced the American ambassador, and they expected that this money would be another area of conflict with Bullitt. Passing Bullitt’s concerns to Stalin, Litvinov proposed a financial scheme that would help the American embassy without compromising general principles. According to a memo from Litvinov, Bullitt proposed to use Reed’s royalties to pay the ruble expenditures of his embassy. As an alternative, Commissar of Finance Grigory Grinko generously offered to disburse one million nonconvertible rubles to the American embassy for its expenditures in Moscow, and to end the debate. The issue went to the Politburo, which did not support either of these proposals. Bullitt then suggested that Russia buy American films in dollars, import them, sell them in rubles, and transfer the surplus to the embassy. Soiuzkino, the Soviet Film Agency, approved this plan, and Litvinov asked Stalin to support it. Again, Stalin refused to strike a special deal with the ambitious American.⁶

Following Russian tradition, the embassy rented a log cabin in the country—a dacha—for officials to spend weekends there. It had been previously rented by the Lithuanian embassy and had a tennis court and rose bushes. Bullitt added a stable and three decent horses and named the roses after American presidents. “There was always something very comforting about driving through those big wooden gates after a long hard day trying to understand the Russians.”⁷ It was a hard task indeed. After talking to American diplomats in Moscow about their construction projects, the British consul in Leningrad wrote in his diary that they “were railing against the Russians they have to work with. The real start of the work . . . has not been made—after four months.”⁸ When the building for the embassy on Mokhovaia Street in central Moscow was just about finished, Litvinov realized that it neighbored the anatomic theater of Moscow State University, which was also “a workshop for manufacturing human skeletons, and in the summer this workshop poisons the air for the whole block.” Litvinov was sincerely concerned: “Having had several unresolved arguments with Bullitt, I find it extremely desirable to avoid new reasons for conflict”—this time, about the smell of dead human bodies.⁹

Entertaining Semyon Budyonny, another veteran of the Russo-Japanese War who had made his way into the leadership of the Red Army, Bullitt brought up polo. The Soviet cavalryman did not know about the game, but Bullitt and Thayer told Budyonny that polo was a key element of training the American cavalry. In no time Bullitt and Thayer found themselves teaching polo to the Red cavalry on a field outside Moscow; they were surprised by the excellent quality of the horses that Budyonny had gathered from all over Russia, even from Siberia. Throughout the summer Thayer coached two teams of Soviet cavalrymen, and Bullitt judged the matches while riding his chestnut stallion. But then, the horsemen were called up for maneuvers and their horses were exchanged for tanks.

Watching Hollywood movies and drinking French champagne, the American bachelors dived into the Soviet life with its skeleton workshops and peaceful dachas, cavalrymen and ballerinas, gossip and arrests. Agents of the secret police accompanied the Americans everywhere—on the streets of Moscow, in the fields around the dacha, and even on their hunting trips. Working in shifts, the agents were always the same, and the diplomats learned their names, features, and habits. Some agents seemed happy to accompany Thayer while he was hunting; others were afraid of the gunfire. The Commissariat for Foreign Affairs commissioned George Andreychin to coordinate Bullitt’s mission’s relationship with the Soviet authorities; he was also supposed to inform on Bullitt and his colleagues. But this Balkan Communist had a reason to be loyal to the American ambassador and not to his Soviet employers: he had spent his youth in America and he wanted to return there. In April 1934 Bullitt asked Roosevelt to help Andreychin, who had long ago violated bail in Chicago: “He saves our tempers and almost our lives two or three times a day. He is one of the loveliest human beings I have ever known—a sort of Jack Reed in Macedonian terms. Some day he should be the Soviet Ambassador in Washington.” Indeed, Andreychin was in danger: “Trotsky was his intimate friend.” Andreychin had already served years in Siberian camps, and there was little doubt that he would be arrested again. Bullitt asked Roosevelt to pardon him: “I can think of no other act which would cost us so little and win so much good will here for you and me.”¹⁰ But Roosevelt did not help Andreychin.

Bullitt had particular respect for writers and poets. In Moscow he befriended Jurgis Baltrusaitis, a Symbolist poet who wrote in Russian and Lithuanian and who served as the Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow (1922–1939). Baltrusaitis knew everything and everyone in Moscow, Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt; he was a great source for understanding both the Moscow cultural elite and the NKVD. Reporting to Roosevelt about journalist Roy Howard’s visit to Moscow, Bullitt explained: “This is the first time within my knowledge that any prominent American has talked like an American to the Bolsheviks. The usual run of businessmen who come here think that they will get somewhere by licking the Bolshevik boots.” But Howard’s speech “was so perfect,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt with his usual flattery, “that it might have been made by yourself.”¹¹

Despite some initial successes, Russia betrayed Bullitt, and he complained: “Moscow has turned out to be just as disagreeable as I anticipated.” Writing to the president, Bullitt expressed his desire to go back to Washington: “I am a bit homesick. It is a new sensation for me, and it arises from a very happy thing. . . . In this past year you and Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss LeHand have made me feel that I was a member of the family, and the thing I miss so much is the afternoons and evenings with you in the White House.”¹²

Margaret LeHand was Roosevelt’s personal secretary for more than two decades—from 1920 when they were both young and vigorous until 1941 when he was half-paralyzed and she had suffered a stroke. She took part in Roosevelt’s five election campaigns—once for governor, once for vice president, three times for president. Her duties were endless; having started working as Roosevelt’s secretary, later her role more closely resembled that of his chief of staff, with whom he discussed appointments, political tactics, and gossip.¹³ LeHand emanated energy, running up staircases instead of using elevators, and performed somersaults at the parties. Living in the White House, she accompanied Roosevelt on his travels, including sailing on the military vessels that he was particularly fond of. Seven years younger than Bullitt and sixteen years younger than Roosevelt, she bound them together.

Bullitt’s and LeHand’s affair began just before his appointment as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Roosevelt knew about it, and the State Department was informed as well. After Bullitt’s departure, the affair continued from a distance. Bullitt used to call her from Moscow; when he came to Washington, he took her out.¹⁴ From time to time, Roosevelt, Bullitt, and LeHand dined together, and these dinners continued even after their relationship became strained. During one such dinner at the White House in February 1940, Roosevelt fainted suddenly. He had had a mild heart attack, which was kept a secret from the public.¹⁵

Although Bullitt purged his archive before leaving it to the Sterling Library at Yale, his transatlantic correspondence with LeHand preserved some intimate details of their relationship. On September 21, 1933, Bullitt returned LeHand her pearl earrings, “which turned up on the floor of the car” after a ride in the country; he returned these earrings with an official letter signed by “Special Assistant to the Secretary of State.”¹⁶ Before his departure to Moscow, they spent a happy week together. She sent candid letters to Moscow on official White House letterhead. “You really are an angel and I miss you so much” (January 14, 1934). “Silly, isn’t it, to mind being without you for a few days when there have been so many, but I do mind” (December 30, 1934). “My love to you—much more of it than I like to confess” (January 17, 1934). “I hope Moscow is three feet deep in snow and that you are virtually (not virtuously) frozen!” (March 12, 1934). Bullitt had left Washington without saying goodbye to her. “I really am furious. Will you please use my other silly, stupid letter to light your cigarette” (Bullitt complied with the request, that letter vanished). “I hate Russia. I hate the Mr. Stalins of this world, and—and I did like you so much,” she wrote (March 12, 1934). While Bullitt was in Moscow, Russia was on LeHand’s mind. When the conservatives in Congress and the Supreme Court blocked a package of labor reforms, she wrote to Bullitt, “strikes are threatening everywhere and the government powerless to help. Should we send for Stalin!???”¹⁷ In another letter she asked how his Russian lessons were going and said that she had bought a Russian dictionary for herself, although she probably did not use it. She was jealous and aware of gossip: “at the Ritz at lunchtime three ladies at the table back of me were discussing a certain ambassador very loosely to my perfect fury. . . . I suspect the ladies will descend upon Moscow this summer, and I hope you will be in Hawaii or some place.”¹⁸

In July 1934 Roosevelt planned a visit to Hawaii; it was the first presidential visit to the archipelago. Bullitt wanted to join him and prepared to take the Trans-Siberian Railway, which he had long wanted to do. Sailing from Vladivostok to Hawaii on an American vessel would send a strong message to Japan; a meeting on Hawaii between the American president and his ambassador to the Soviet Union would be a symbolic gesture that Bullitt believed could bring peace to the Far East. But Roosevelt did not approve of Bullitt’s visit to Hawaii. As he explained to Bullitt, he was “ganged” by the officials of the State Department who convinced him that if he invited his ambassador to Russia he would also have to invite his envoys to Japan and China, and such a conference would create “a stir . . . at a time when they want to avoid just that.” Bullitt was “really terribly sorry” that this trip was off; “I had counted on it absolutely,” he wrote to LeHand.¹⁹ This was the first sign that his friendship with the president was cooling down; it was also an indication that Roosevelt did not support, or maybe did not understand, his game with the Soviets and the Japanese. Cancelling Bullitt’s trip, Roosevelt sounded apologetic: he believed that they “could have had our little party in Hawaii without bringing on a World War,” and he yielded “with much reluctance,” he wrote. LeHand, as always, went to Hawaii with Roosevelt. About Bullitt’s cancelled trip, she wrote on May 18: “I am terribly sorry, and wish there were something I could do.”²⁰

There is little doubt that LeHand helped Bullitt get precious information from the top levels of the administration, and he probably tried to use her to influence Roosevelt. But the president was also a master of such games. Bullitt and LeHand did not try to hide their relationship, and Roosevelt’s entourage believed they were engaged and would soon be married. Even the Soviet guests of the White House knew about LeHand’s connection to Bullitt. In May 1934 Evgenii Rubinin, an official from the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, visited Washington; introduced to LeHand, he soon heard that she had intimate relations with Bullitt and that their wedding was planned for the summer, and he passed this gossip on to Litvinov.²¹ The president viewed the relationship with respect: LeHand had devoted many decades of her life to him and had the right to have her own family. Some memoirists, however, say that the president was jealous and this was a reason for his cooling toward Bullitt.²² In any case, the wedding did not take place, although the friendship between Bill and Margaret lasted for years. There was a rumor that she had come to Moscow and found out that Bullitt had been having too much fun with Russian ballerinas. In fact, although LeHand did plan a trip, she did not go to Moscow. But it was indeed a ballerina that made LeHand cancel her trip.

The Bolshoi Theater dancers frequented the American embassy in Moscow. The diplomats knew, of course, that the ballerinas had special motives for their visits; but the temptation to host them was strong. With his love of the navy, Roosevelt advised Bullitt to run the embassy like a ship: “you will be . . . cut off from civilization and I think you should organize your expedition as if you were setting out on a ship which was to touch no port for a year.”²³ Among other things, this meant that there should be no women at the embassy. Generally, the diplomatic service was organized very differently from the military: the ambassadors and their staff lived in their missions with their wives. However, the twice-divorced Bullitt tried to keep the embassy all male. Bullitt wrote, “There is absolutely nothing for a woman to do here . . . there is an intense intellectual ferment here . . . but ordinary social life does not exist.” Therefore, he argued, American women would be unhappy in Moscow unless they were of “an exceptional, intellectual type.”²⁴ Despite his initial intention to recruit only the bachelors, some members of Bullitt’s staff were married, and some had local wives or permanent girlfriends. One evening in 1934, Bullitt looked around the dinner table and noticed that every single wife was foreign born.²⁵ The next morning he telegraphed the State Department and insisted that diplomats with foreign wives not be hired in the future; he also tried to force the wives out of Moscow. This policy caused new tensions. Married to a Norwegian who mostly stayed with her parents while he was in Moscow, Kennan felt lonely. He complained in his diary: “The struggle of the spring has taken the heart of me. To be a diplomat is bitter enough, to be a married one is still bitterer.”²⁶ Agreeing that it was a security risk, Roosevelt instructed Bullitt to monitor the behavior of those women who had already been in the embassy. With time, this policy was softened; Wiley stayed in the mission with his Polish wife.

When two junior secretaries at the embassy married Russian women, it was interpreted as a security risk, and the diplomats were transferred to other countries. Their wives, however, were not allowed to leave the USSR. The husbands wrote desperate letters to the State Department and even to Eleanor Roosevelt. Another employee, Elbridge Durbrou, lived with his Russian girlfriend, Vera, for four years. Then, in 1937, Vera suddenly disappeared; everyone in the embassy knew that she had been arrested. Durbrou had to be transferred to another embassy, but he returned in 1945 and found out that Vera had spent three years in the camps. Later Durbrou wrote, perhaps unfairly, that in comparison with Stalin, Hitler looked like a “little kindergarten kid.”²⁷ In 1940 the former cypher clerk at the American embassy in Moscow, Tyler Kent, was arrested as a spy in the American embassy in London. When the FBI investigators asked Bullitt about Kent’s work in Moscow, he said that he suspected Kent of spying after working with him for three months; Bullitt did not denounce him then but transferred him to another mission. It turned out that Kent’s Moscow lover, the English-speaking Tatiana, had recruited him to spy for the Soviets; still, after multiple investigations, the FBI could not decide whether Kent was a Nazi or a Communist sympathizer. In his memoirs, Charles Thayer wrote that “the romantic attachments and resulting complications of the bachelors soon outmatched any indiscretion that wives might have committed.” Writing in 1959, Thayer noted that the policy of recruiting personnel to the American embassy in Moscow was later revised with the opposite principle in mind: “preferably no bachelors.”²⁸

The ambassador loved unusual entertainment. In the 1920s, according to Vice President Henry Wallace, Bullitt threw stunning parties in Paris, at which butlers served guests in the nude; Bullitt probably spread this gossip himself.²⁹ His patron in the State Department, Walton Moore, saw the ambassador slightly differently: “Your preference is for conversation with men who are thinking about world affairs. You prefer what my colored cook calls ‘snag’ parties. Is this a correct diagnosis?” he wrote to Bullitt.³⁰ Despite the security concerns and the presence of the ambassador’s daughter, “snag parties” continued at the embassy. John Wiley joked that NEP (the abbreviation for the Bolsheviks’ relatively liberal “New Economic Policy” of the mid-1920s) actually stood for “New Erotic Policy.” American diplomats’ relationships with their Russian girlfriends were unambiguous, and conversations at the embassy were similarly frank. The State Department complained to Ambassador Bullitt that, according to confidential information, his employees drank too much and were “pawing women”; Bullitt’s superiors were also unhappy that the ambassador had ignored Madame Litvinov while turning over his wine cellar to the Bolshoi’s dancers.³¹ Charles Bohlen, who had a reputation of a playboy even before his arrival in Moscow, wrote that “there were usually two or three ballerinas running around the embassy.” They came over for lunch or dinner and then stayed until dawn, talking and drinking. Then a bachelor, Bohlen wrote, “I have never had more fun or interest in my whole life. . . . This embassy . . . is like no other embassy in the world.”³² Ballerinas from the Bolshoi seemed to have a special right to have relations with members of the diplomatic corps, Bohlen wrote in his memoirs. Further, he said that one of Andreychin’s main functions was supplying the girls to eminent foreign guests.³³ Following in Bullitt’s footsteps, Bohlen would become the US ambassador to the Soviet Union (1953–1957) and then France (1962–1968)—one of the “boys” whom Bullitt launched to the top just as he did it for the Stalin ballerinas.

For a while, the ambassador chose Irina Charnotskaya as his favorite ballerina. Having danced at the Bolshoi since 1927, she was at the peak of her career when he knew her. According to Bohlen, Charnotskaya truly believed in the Communist doctrine and spent many hours convincing her American friends of the glory of the Soviet Union.³⁴ Thayer wrote in his diary that Charnotskaya took “a trio consisting of B[ullitt], B[ohlen] and myself by storm. . . . We simply cannot keep our hands off her. She has become an acquisition of the embassy.” She slept in a vacant room, which the three “carefully lock[ed]” and then fought “violently” for the key. Historian Frank Costigliola, who first published this evidence from Thayer’s papers, noted not only a heterosexual attraction of the three diplomats toward an exotic woman but also a homoerotic fascination within the “trio.”³⁵ Bullitt wrote later, “Aside from ballet girls, and a few other NKVD agents, who are ordered to establish contacts with the diplomatic corps, all Russians know that it is not healthy to speak too often to foreigners, and, if they do, they disappear. The NKVD has succeeded in making fear the dominant emotion in Russian life.”³⁶ In 1940 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt that American diplomats’ relationships with Russian girls resulted in “amazing” leaks. According to Hoover, the women used a simple technique: they pretended that they did not speak English and let the diplomats indulge in political debates in their presence. Hoover went further in his suspicions; he wrote that some male employees engaged “in sexual perversion in the Code Room of the Embassy.”³⁷ Whether or not these stories were true, they combined erotic fantasies with Orientalist ideas about Russia as a space of risky pleasures. Soviet agents continuously played on these treacherous rumors, and Bullitt and his friends were all too happy to rely on the agents’ help.

With time Bullitt developed a more serious relationship with Olga Lepeshinskaya, who was little more than eighteen years old and had just begun to perform at the Bolshoi. Much younger than Charnotskaya, Liolia (as she was called both in the theater and at the embassy) quickly achieved tremendous success: she won a number of state prizes and became known as “Stalin’s favorite ballerina.” Later, she was thrice married, to a film director and two generals. One of those generals, a high-level officer in the NKVD, was imprisoned in 1951 but soon released; there were rumors that Lepeshinskaya paid a visit to Lavrentiy Beria to get her husband out of jail.

Charnotskaya and Lepeshinskaya had much in common. Both became stars in a profession in which success depends as much on talent as on discipline and training. As prima ballerinas of the Bolshoi, they walked a thin line between art and prostitution. Later, during the war, they both performed near the front lines to provide entertainment for Soviet soldiers. After the war, both held high administrative positions in the world of Soviet theater, which could be earned only through high-level contacts. Their early dealings with Bullitt and other American diplomats, which were supervised by the Soviet authorities, also contributed to their success.

In August 1934 Bullitt vacationed in Odessa and had “a bully time.” He wrote to George Andreychin that he liked everything there; he called the hotel “one of the pleasantest hostelries that I know in the world.” Andreychin helped him organize his trip, and Bullitt was grateful. It is obvious from their letters that they were very close; Bullitt called Andreychin “my boy.” Andreychin wrote to Bullitt, “your letter made me very happy: first, because it tells me that you are enjoying yourself, and second, that you have not forgotten me. I am missing you terribly. Especially now, when Liolia [Lepeshinskaya] is back here and wants to know a million intimate things of which I am ignorant.” Then, Andreychin’s letter sounds alarming: “A young woman arrived few days ago from America. She knows Marguerite LeHand (she showed me her letters and telegrams). Miss LeHand had been planning to come to Moscow and the damned New Yorker spoilt it all.”³⁸ From this letter we understand what happened in the summer of 1934 between the ambassador and the president’s personal secretary: gossip about Bullitt’s dalliances with ballerinas led LeHand to cancel her visit to Moscow and cancelled their wedding.

Writing about the “damned New Yorker,” Andreychin was referring to Grace Davidson, a journalist who wished to write a book about Bolshevik Moscow. It was not her first visit to Moscow; she had an ongoing affair with Boris Steiger, a socialite and secret agent who was well known among the foreigners in Moscow. LeHand wrote Bullitt on June 4, 1934: “Miss Grace Davidson of the Boston Post, who writes particularly well, will get to Moscow about August 30th. She is, I think, quite devoted to Mr. Steiger, who means nothing to me. She is almost indecently fond of me, and has asked me to give her a letter to the Ambassador. . . . She knows most of the officials, I think.”³⁹ Upon her arrival Bullitt met Davidson for a luncheon, and he wrote about their meeting to LeHand. He knew that she learned too much from Steiger, but he could not neutralize the gossip. After talking to his secretary Roosevelt wrote Bullitt an ironic letter dated June 3, 1935: “I have been much interested in hearing from Missy [LeHand] the story of Grace Davidson. You must be glad to have her on her way back to America.”⁴⁰ Bullitt thus learned that the gossip about him had reached the president. From his correspondence with LeHand, we can garner that Bullitt apologized, complained about his health, and even went to Vienna to see a doctor.

Bullitt’s subordinates in the embassy remembered Grace Davidson well. Charles Thayer described her as someone who had come to Russia “for emancipation after reading the books about free love in Russia.”⁴¹ Her lover, Boris Steiger, was an interpreter and an expert in fine arts, though everyone in the embassy knew he was, as Irene Wiley put it, “the GPU agent whose job was to watch the Diplomatic Corpse.”⁴² Davidson also knew it, and LeHand learned it as well. While Davidson was in Moscow, her father died, and she had to go back to the United States. LeHand commented: “That is an amazing story about Grace. . . . I feel awfully sorry for her because she certainly loved him [Steiger] deeply. She undoubtedly assumed too much. However, he should have sent a few less cables urging her to return.”⁴³ After meeting Davidson again in Washington, LeHand sent Bullitt a letter that was as warm as always, though this time with a twinge of bitter irony: “I had a whale of a session with your girlfriend Grace Davidson. How shocked you must have been when she told you Steiger’s real job! . . . She is writing a book and wrote a long letter to the Soviet embassy here in Washington. . . . What a humiliating experience the whole affair must have been. . . . I think at the moment G[race] D[avidson] is a little unbalanced—her whole story was bitter.”⁴⁴ The letter ends with assurances of love and hope that they will meet again soon; LeHand was able to put on a good face even in difficult times, a skill learned during her many years with Roosevelt.

The atmosphere in Moscow and the entire Soviet Union changed on December 1, 1934, when the leader of the Leningrad Communists, Sergei Kirov, was murdered in his office, allegedly by a jealous husband. Bullitt was away, and John and Irene Wiley were hosting a reception that night in Spaso House. She was talking to Radek, when a man entered the ballroom and whispered something to him; Radek’s face turned white, as if he were about to faint, and he left the party. Within fifteen minutes, all the Russian guests had left. The hosts did not know the reason until one of the guests, the ubiquitous Boris Stieger, came back and told them that Kirov had been murdered, and that there would be consequences. Irene Wiley noted one of these consequences: before that night, she and her husband saw Russians constantly and freely; after it, their meetings were “rigidly controlled and restricted.”⁴⁵

Referring to the swift and surprisingly complete version of the events that he received from the Lithuanian ambassador, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Bullitt wrote that the assassination of Stalin’s possible successor, Kirov, would intensify the state terror: “The arrest and exiling of innocent human beings in all quarters of the Soviet Union continues apace.” His closest friends in Moscow, including Andreychin, now were in jail and probably being tortured. “I can, of course, do nothing to save anyone,” Bullitt wrote. “It is extraordinarily difficult to preserve a sweet and loving exterior under the circumstances.”⁴⁶

Still, preserving such an exterior was his duty as a diplomat. Pushing back against the terror that had shrouded the country, the ambassador decided to organize a large reception to celebrate the coming of spring in 1935. From Washington he sent a telegram to Irene Wiley, the first lady of the embassy, asking her to arrange a party and telling her, “the sky is the limit.” A creative artist stuck in the midst of terror, Irene was thrilled. “I have always wanted to design and stage a ballet, but this was far more exciting.”⁴⁷ Her partner in this venture was Charles Thayer, whom Bullitt asked to create a party “that would compete with anything Moscow had yet experienced, before or after the Revolution.” Wiley decided that the Spring Festival would be arranged in white, green, and gold, and that it would feature a small collective farm in the corner. The flowers were not a problem this time—white tulips were delivered from Finland. But they could not find green trees in Moscow; Irene found firs and pines “too sad and wintry.” They uprooted a dozen birch trees, put them into Bullitt’s bathtub, which was illuminated by his sun lamp, and the buds opened on the day of the party. Serious preparations went into building a collective farm in the American embassy. Wiley and Thayer wanted to have some white sheep present, but the stink was overwhelming, so they went to the Moscow Zoo and discovered that mountain goats smelled better; a half dozen of them were put on a platform at the head of the buffet table. Following the advice of Alexander Tairov, the famous theater director, they found big fishing nets, soaked them in gold powder and glue, and stretched them along the marble walls of the huge ballroom. They filled the nets with hundreds of zebra flinches, which fluttered and sang merrily behind the gold mesh. The ambassador covered all of the expenses personally. The embassy had been already known in the Moscow diplomatic corps as “Bill Bullitt’s circus.” This time, it lived up to its name.

In February 1935 the embassy officially revealed that Bullitt was sick with “streptococcal angina” and was being treated in Vienna. But he was, in fact, in good shape; visiting Berlin, he fascinated the American ambassador in Germany, William Dodd: “Bullitt still impressed me as quite proud of himself, and rather more boyish than one could expect for a man of his years.”⁴⁸ He arrived in Moscow on April 13, 1935, and let everyone know he was sick; he complained about his health even to Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs Krestinsky.⁴⁹ However, the Spring Festival took place as scheduled, on April 23, 1935.

The guests arrived at midnight. Ambassador Bullitt and Councilor Wiley, wearing white ties, tails, and gloves, awaited the guests under the chandelier in the huge hall; a finch flew around them. Commissar Litvinov and his English wife, Ivy, were among the first guests to arrive; she immediately took one of the “collective farm” baby goats, holding it in her arms throughout the evening. At the start of the ball, five hundred guests watched in awe as projected images surrounded them. Flowers appeared on the walls, a constellation of stars complete with a bright moon turned up on the high-domed ceiling, and multicolored spotlights shone down on the guests from the balcony. Alexander Tairov, a brilliant theater director with a Cubist bent, had designed the show. The guests danced among the columns where the son of the lord of the mansion had killed his father seventeen years before. In the dining room there were pens with baby goats, sheep, and bear cubs. Cages with roosters hung on the walls; they were supposed to crow at three in the morning. The ball was “Russian style,” playwright Mikhail Bulgakov’s wife remarked in her diary with irony.⁵⁰ The male guests’ costumes attracted her attention most of all. All the diplomats, except the military attachés, wore tailcoats. The leading Bolsheviks looked different from the foreign diplomats: Bukharin was dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat, Radek wore a hiking outfit, and Bubnov was in a khaki suit. A socialite and mole, baron Steiger was dressed, of course, in a tailcoat. Bulgakov did not have a tailcoat, so he came in a black suit; his wife, Elena, was in a black ball gown with pale pink flowers.

Thrilled by the success of his party, the ambassador reported to the president: “It was an astonishingly successful party, thoroughly dignified yet gay. Everyone happy and no one drunk. In fact . . . it was the best party in Moscow since the revolution. We got a thousand tulips from Helsingfors and forced a lot of birch trees into premature leafage and arranged one end of the dining room as a collective farm with peasant accordion players, dancers, and all sorts of baby things, such as birds, goats, and a couple of infant bears about the size of cats. We also had pleasant lighting effects done by the best theater here and a bit of cabaret.”⁵¹ Although he suffered from the “internal streptococci” and told everyone he went to bed about 7.30 every night, the Spring Ball was an exception. The “Turkish ambassador and about twenty others remained until breakfast at eight,” and as Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt, “I survived the night with the assistance of a few doses of strychnine.”⁵²

Despite the purges and terror, there was everyone at this American ball who was anyone in Moscow, except Stalin.⁵³ The future victims drank, danced, and flirted together with their executioners, many of whom would later also perish. The intellectual Bolsheviks (Bukharin, Bubnov, and Radek were among the guests) would lose their power and lives in a few months. The high-ranking military commanders (Tukhachevsky, Egorov, Budyonny) had already become pawns in the game between the Soviet and German intelligence services; most of them would be executed over the next few years. Litvinov’s whole team was also there; he would survive the purges, but his Commissariat for Foreign Affairs would be purged in 1939. Andreychin was not around; he had already been arrested. The towering figures of the Soviet theater—Meyerhold, Tairov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Bulgakov—were at the Spring Festival; they all expected to be arrested and tortured at any moment. For some, the wait would be short; for others, painfully long. The Americans wanted to have some honest fun; it was a smart gesture to emulate a collective farm, the core symbol of the Soviet disaster, in the main hall of the Spaso House. As if they had a foresight, the finches escaped from the nets and flew around the embassy in a “terrifying panic.”

Even Roosevelt and LeHand heard about the success of this party. “We have had lots of excitement over your Ball,” LeHand wrote to Bullitt.⁵⁴ This ball is a focal point of Thayer’s and Wiley’s memoirs of Moscow, and from them we know many interesting details. Thayer had already had a painful experience organizing American parties in Moscow. The previous reception had featured an animal trainer with seals from the circus; they juggled obediently until the trainer got drunk, at which point the seals went for a dip in the salad bowl. The animals for this ball were rented from the Moscow Zoo, and they behaved themselves, with some exceptions. The roosters underperformed, as if on a real collective farm. On Thayer’s command, the cages were uncovered, but only one rooster out of twelve began to crow, albeit loudly. Another rooster escaped and landed in a dish of duck-liver pate that had been delivered from Strasbourg.⁵⁵ However, it was the bears that most entertained the guests; they did not need a trainer to give a memorable show. Wiley remembers only one baby bear: “To achieve a real effect of spring, I thought we should have at least one wild newborn animal. The director of the Moscow Zoo produced the most charming baby bear,” and he ran around the room while the guests fed him milk from a baby bottle. At some point in the night, Radek, who was known for his sharp wit, transferred the nipple from the bear’s bottle to a bottle of champagne. The cub took several swallows of Cordon Rouge before he noticed he’d been fooled. Meanwhile, the devious Radek disappeared, and General Egorov, the head of the Red Army’s General Staff who was supposed to lead his men to victory over Japan, picked up the crying bear to console him. As the general rocked the bear, it vomited profusely on his medaled uniform. Thayer soon appeared at the scene of the crime. Half a dozen poorly trained waiters were fussing with Egorov, as he bellowed: “Tell your ambassador that Soviet generals are not accustomed to being treated like clowns!” The general left the embassy “cursing and shouting, ‘This is the last time I will ever walk through this door’”; Wiley felt better when the general returned an hour later, “gay as a lark, in a new uniform.” A veteran of the First World War, Egorov received the highest Soviet military rank of a marshal; then he was arrested and executed for espionage in 1939.

Throughout the night, the commander of the Red Cavalry, Semyon Budyonny, danced the Cossack trepak, “with his center of gravity almost touching the floor, his arms folded on his chest, and his legs working like locomotive pistons.”⁵⁶ Exotically mustached, Budyonny also became a marshal (there were only five marshals in the entire Red Army in 1935) and would survive the purges. A Czech jazz band, which was performing at the time in Moscow, was hired along with gypsy dancers to entertain the guests. A Georgian restaurant served food on the second floor, with shashlyk (kebabs) cooked on an open fire and ethnic music playing in the background. The event ended at ten in the morning with a wild Caucasian dance, the lezginka, which General Mikhail Tukhachevsky performed with Liolia Lepeshinskaya.⁵⁷ Madame Litvinov watched the sun rise with a baby goat in her arms. Another Moscow beauty, Elena Bulgakova, had already left by then; as she wrote down next morning, “we wanted to leave at three but the Americans did not allow us to. . . . At about six we got into their embassy Cadillac and drove home. I brought home a huge bouquet of tulips from Bohlen.”⁵⁸

Bullitt’s stay in Moscow and his friendship with Bulgakov were coterminous with Bulgakov’s work on the third, pivotal draft of The Master and Margarita, his magisterial novel. His wife’s diary makes it clear that Bulgakov based his Satan Ball, a central chapter in the novel, on the Spring Festival at the US embassy. According to this diary, Bulgakov drafted the scene of the Satan Ball after he and his wife came home from the Spring Festival at Spaso. The action he depicted was charged with a decidedly non-Soviet eroticism; situated halfway between The Great Gatsby and much later fantasies such as Eyes Wide Shut, the scene is explicitly American: “Margarita screamed and shut her eyes for several seconds. The ball burst upon her in an explosion of light, sound and smell. . . . Scarlet-breasted parrots. . . . Some naked Negroes. . . . A low wall of white tulips. . . . Champaign bubbled in three ornamental basins. . . . The naked woman mounting the staircase between the tail-coated and white-tied men . . . a spectrum of colored bodies that ranged from white through olive, copper and coffee to quite black.”⁵⁹

In this novel, Woland is a foreign “consultant” who visits the corrupt, frightened Moscow of the mid-1930s. Mighty, mischievous, and able to perform magic, Woland is a modern devil. Several assistants accompany him; helping with miracles, they entertain Woland and explore Russia. Although their mission is not entirely clear, one of their purposes is to observe “Muscovites en masse” and to evaluate the psychological change in the populace. “The Muscovites have changed considerably—outwardly, I mean, as too has the city itself. . . . But naturally I am . . . interested in the much more important question: have the Muscovites changed inwardly?” Woland asks his entourage. “A vital question, indeed, sir,” they confirm with one voice. “I’m not really a magician at all,” Woland says in an attempt to clarify his objectives and methods: “I simply wanted to see some Muscovites en masse and the easiest way to do so was in a theater.” He chooses a Moscow theater named in an American way, “Variety,” and stages experiments that combine his magical powers with scholarly logic. Like a psychologist, he stages uncertainty, nudity, and violence, and he comments on their dramatic results. The Muscovites’ responses were adequate, perhaps universal, Woland concludes. “They’re people like any others. . . . They’re over-fond of money, but then they always were. . . . They’re thoughtless . . . but they sometimes feel compassion too.” Woland continues, “They’re ordinary people, in fact, they remind me very much of their predecessors, except that the housing shortage has soured them.”⁶⁰

These were the central issues of the time, and they variously engaged Freud and Trotsky, Bullitt and Bulgakov. To what extent can the power of the state transform men, women, and their relations? Did Bolshevism change human nature, and what remained unaltered? At Bullitt’s dinners in Moscow, the Americans and their Russian friends and girlfriends had much to say about these questions. Bulgakov also took part in these debates; conservative in his customs, ironic in his writings and no Soviet sympathizer, he was probably closer to Bullitt than many others. They had many other topics to discuss as well. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov depicts a Russian author who is trying to rewrite the narrative of the Gospel. Insane for all practical purposes, he revises the stories of Christ, Judah, and Pontius Pilate. His approach to canonical issues is clearly subversive though subtly Soviet. The Master and his manuscript would both have perished if Woland had not invited his girlfriend, Margarita, to preside over the Satan Ball as its chief witch. Naked and exhausted, Margarita greets the myriads of guests, who are mostly ghosts coming from distant times and lands. She watches the miraculous transformation of a random Moscow apartment into a palace of luxury and vice. In his gratitude, Woland takes the Master and Margarita to his land, though it is unclear whether that is heaven, hell, or some place on earth.

One guest, however, came to this fictional ball from the historical Moscow. Baron Maigel, whom Woland convicts and shoots at the end of his ball in The Master and Margarita, is a satirical portrait of Baron Boris Steiger. “With a welcoming smile to his guest,” Woland introduces Maigel as “a guide to the sites of the capital for foreign visitors.” Woland declares that Maigel with his “unquenchable curiosity” and “conversational gifts” will meet an “unhappy end” in real life. To save Maigel “from the agonized suspense of waiting,” Woland shoots him, and with this act of ritual sacrifice ends his ball.⁶¹

In real life, Steiger would fall victim to the purges a little later. He was arrested on April 17, 1937, in a Moscow restaurant, during dinner with the new American ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies. The child of Baltic barons, Steiger was an official employee of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and a secret agent of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Everyone in Moscow high society knew about his role as an informant. Thayer spoke of him as “a cultured man with an excellent sense of humor and a fund of stories,” which he loved to tell in flawless French. He had obvious connections in the Kremlin but spent “most of his time” in the foreign embassies in Moscow; Irene Wiley wrote that he “had become a great friend of ours.”⁶² Steiger did considerable damage to Bullitt: he told his occasional lover, Grace Davidson, about Bullitt’s relationship with Moscow ballerinas, and Davidson passed along this information to LeHand and Roosevelt. A few years later, in a letter to Roosevelt from Paris, Bullitt vengefully spoke of them both—Davidson was back in the United States, and Steiger was imprisoned in Liubianka, the notorious NKVD prison in Moscow. “If you do not know what the Liubianka is, ask your friend Grace Davidson. Her love, Steiger, is now interred there. You will certainly remember the gentleman she adored so because he used to knock her on the floor and jump on her stomach. For a New England girl, that was exciting.”⁶³

At the time of the Spring Festival, Bullitt and Bulgakov were good friends. Earlier, in December 1933, Elena Bulgakova noted in her diary that the American ambassador had arrived in Moscow. Reading about this event in a Soviet newspaper, she was probably concerned about the American royalties for Bulgakov’s play, The Days of the Turbins (1926), which had been produced at Yale (the premier was in March 1934). The translator of this play, Eugene Lyons, was their friend in Moscow; he could tell the Bulgakovs that Ambassador Bullitt loved theater, was a graduate of Yale, and could help them receive their royalties. Indeed, Bullitt attended a performance of The Days of the Turbins at the Moscow Art Theater soon after his arrival. The play, which was forbidden in 1929, was unbanned in 1932, allegedly after Stalin personally intervened. Through Intourist, the Soviet state travel agency, Bullitt requested a manuscript of the play, which he kept in his desk. Thayer recalled that his first encounter with Bullitt after his arrival was connected to The Turbins. Thayer, who had just started to learn Russian, was unemployed and wanted a job in the American embassy. The ambassador was then living in the Metropole Hotel, and Thayer managed to push his way past the doorman and introduced himself. Bullitt asked him to read a page from the manuscript on his desk. It was The Days of the Turbins.⁶⁴ Thayer could not yet read Russian, but he knew the play and paraphrased the plot. His cheating did not escape the ambassador, but Bullitt appreciated the skills of the young man who eventually became his interpreter and a career diplomat.

Bulgakov and Bullitt met on September 6, 1934, at a performance of The Turbins. Bullitt told the playwright that “he had seen the play four times, and he went out of his way to praise it.” Bullitt could sympathize with the Turbins, who witnessed the way that the First World War and then the Russian Revolution destroyed the aristocratic order of which they were a part. Realistic, reasonably critical, and conservative in comparison to some other experiments in Soviet theater, the play was closer to It’s Not Done than to The Great Gatsby or The Master and Margarita. With pride, Elena Bulgakova wrote down that Bullitt knew the play very well: “He followed along with an English translation of the script. He said the first few times he had to glance down at the text fairly often, but now he rarely had to.”⁶⁵ Bulgakova’s diary documents many occasions on which she and her husband attended receptions at the embassy, and the American diplomats paid visits to their small apartment in central Moscow. At first, this acquaintance seemed unusual to the Bulgakovs’ friends: “The curiosity was killing them—friendship with Americans!” On April 11, 1935, the Bulgakovs received the Americans in their apartment, where “caviar, salmon, homemade pate, radishes, fresh cucumbers, fried mushrooms, vodka, and white wine” were served. On April 19, they had lunch with the embassy’s secretary, Charles Bohlen. On April 23 the Spring Festival was held at the embassy; though hundreds of dignitaries attended, the Bulgakovs were treated as if they were a royal couple: “Bohlen and Faymonville went down to help us in the lobby. Bullitt instructed Mrs. Wiley to entertain us,” and Mrs. Wiley was the first lady of the embassy.

On April 29 the Bulgakovs hosted Bohlen, Thayer, Irene Wiley, and several other Americans. “Mrs. Wylie invited us to go to Turkey with her,” Bulgakova wrote in her diary. The next day, the Bulgakovs were at the embassy again. “Bullitt brought many people over to meet us, including the French ambassador and his wife and the Turkish ambassador, a very fat and jolly fellow.” The Bulgakovs spent the next evening, the third in a row, with the US diplomats. “Wiley had about thirty guests. . . . All our friends were there, Bullitt’s secretaries”; the indispensable Steiger was also there. The Bulgakovs gossiped with Thayer, the secretary of the embassy, and Faymonville, the military attaché, about the private life of their colleague, Bohlen. Bohlen courteously flirted with Elena Bulgakova, sending her flowers and enjoying spending time with her. In his memoirs Bohlen wrote about Bulgakov in detail. The diplomat knew about Bulgakov’s play The Fatal Eggs, which was forbidden by Soviet censors, about Stalin’s telephone call to Bulgakov, and finally, about Bulgakov’s struggle to obtain an exit visa.⁶⁶

Bulgakov and Bullitt—one a doctor who became a writer, the other a writer who became an ambassador—had much to talk about. They shared interests in Istanbul and Paris, literature and politics, the universal nature of man and the limits of his transformation by the state. One was more successful in literature, the other in politics, but both were elegant, ambitious, and aristocratic. Both were born in 1891.⁶⁷ Bulgakov, known for inventing funny and strange names for his fictional stories, probably noticed the similarity of their names (one of Bulgakov’s pseudonyms was M. Bull); as Freud and Bullitt wrote, similar names cause “unconscious identification.” Both men were proud of their ability to understand the present and predict the future.

At times, Bulgakov and Bullitt saw each other almost every day; when Bullitt was away, Bulgakov and his wife socialized with his assistants, particularly Bohlen and Kennan. They conversed in French, and if there was any difficulty communicating they could rely on Bullitt’s interpreters. With time, Elena’s entries about these contacts became more reserved, even monotonous. On February 16, 1936, she penned, “Bullitt was very courteous, as always”; on February 18, “The Americans are very nice”; and on March 28, “we were at Bullitt’s. All the Americans, including him, were even sweeter than usual.” Two weeks later she wrote: “As always, Americans are extremely nice to us. Bullitt begged us to stay longer.”⁶⁸ The ambassador, himself a novelist and playwright, introduced Bulgakov to European ambassadors and lauded his work. Cultural connections were a part of his duties. He could also help Bulgakov by demonstrating this writer’s international prestige to the Soviet authorities. However, Bulgakov needed more immediate help.

While Bulgakov was writing about the Master who was writing about Christ, he was so sick that he was afraid of leaving home; doctors saw his ailment as a neurosis and treated it with massages and hypnosis.⁶⁹ He was in the middle of a long, painful conflict with the censors and cultural authorities. All this time, the Bulgakovs were trying to leave the USSR on medical grounds. They discussed their emigration plans with American diplomats, and probably with their European colleagues as well. On April 11, 1935, when the Bulgakovs hosted Bohlen and Thayer, Elena wrote down: Mikhail “said that we applied for passports for foreign travel. . . . The Americans responded positively and said it was time to go.⁷⁰ The Bulgakovs submitted their application for emigration papers in June 1935. In August, they were denied an exit visa and were left in despair. The word “refusnik” was coined much later, but it was a refusnik who wrote The Master and Margarita.

On October 16, 1935, the Bulgakovs traveled to the countryside with Thayer. Two days later, they dined with the ambassador: “Bullitt came, and we talked for a long time about the Turbins, which he loved.” Bullitt then asked Bulgakov about his most recent play, which had been censored. The play, entitled The Life of Monsieur de Moliere, tells the story of a humiliated but brilliant playwright who finds himself in mortal combat with a supreme power. After much trouble, Moliere was shown in Moscow four months later, and Thayer and his colleagues attended the dress rehearsal. On February 16, 1936, the Bulgakovs attended a reception at Spaso House to greet Bullitt who had just returned from America: there was the diplomatic corps and a few Russians, among them Budyonny. Three days later, Bulgakov again visited Bullitt, who showed the guests a film about an English person who “stayed in America because he was fascinated with the Americans and their way of life.” On February 21, Bullitt came to see Moliere and, according to Elena, “during the tea break . . . Bullitt spoke unusually highly of the play and of Mikhail in general, referring to him as a master.” Shortly thereafter, Moliere was banned from the stage. On March 14, the ambassador once again invited the Bulgakovs to dine with him. “We decided not to go, as we did not want to hear all his questions and expressions of sympathy.” Two weeks later, however, the Bulgakovs visited Bullitt again. “The Americans, including the ambassador, . . . were even nicer than ever.” On April 12, they attended Sergei Prokofiev’s concert in the embassy. “As always, the Americans are surprisingly nice to us. Bullitt urged us to stay longer, to listen more to Prokofiev, but we left about 3am by the car of the Embassy that Kennan offered us.”⁷¹ Kennan visited them for a dinner later the same week. On October 7, Kennan “wanted to pick us up by car about 11pm. I did not go,” wrote Elena. However, Mikhail did go to the embassy. In November, Bulgakov went at least two more times to the receptions at the embassy.

The demonic protagonist of Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is a bald foreigner with philosophical interests, magic skills, and rheumatic pains. A witness of Christ’s passions, Kant’s interlocutor, and now a foreign consultant to the Soviet authorities and explorer of the internal change among the Muscovites, Woland has the human features of Bullitt. Woland’s face was “tilted to the right side, with the right-hand corner of the mouth pulled downward; the skin darkened by the timeless sunshine.” The figure is complex and tragic, but also ironic. “Deep furrows marked his forehead parallel to his eyebrows,” and Woland’s eyes reflected his self-contradictory nature: “In the depths of the right eye was a golden spark that could pierce any soul to its core; the left eye was as empty and black . . . as the mouth of a bottomless well.”⁷² And even Woland’s entourage, which accompanies their demonic boss in all his mystical adventures, resembles the staff of the American embassy: for example, the tall, ironic, and clumsy Kennan is depicted as Koroviev. Although the Bulgakovs socialized with the ambassador’s entire retinue, their relationship with Bullitt was particularly close. After Bullitt’s departure, Bulgakov never returned to the embassy. In April 1937, he was invited to a costume ball, this time organized by the daughter of the new ambassador, Joe Davies. Bulgakov did not go, saying that he did not have a proper costume.

Moscow changed Bullitt, and he eagerly demonstrated this transformation to his subordinates in Moscow and to his superiors in Washington. In July 1935 he gave a speech in Virginia. Comparing Bolshevik Russia with Nazi Germany, Bullitt’s undiplomatic rhetoric was at least a decade ahead of Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. “The noblest words that can issue from the mouth of man have been prostituted and the noblest sentiments of the heart of man have been played upon by propaganda to conceal the simple truth: that those dictatorships are tyrannies imposing their dogmas on an enslaved people,” said Bullitt.⁷³ His disenchantment with Stalinism became a mass phenomenon about fifteen years later, as documented in The God that Failed (1949), a collective repentance of Western fellow travelers of Soviet communism who had observed it from a safe distance. What was different with Bullitt, Kennan, and a few other Americans in Moscow was the tragic ability to see both the facts and the people on the ground.