12

DISENCHANTMENT

Once, the staff of the embassy found a microphone in Bullitt’s office at Spaso House, but it was not wired to anything. Thayer, Kennan, and Durbrow spent nights in the attic of the ambassador’s office, in shifts, a revolver in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Nobody appeared; those who installed the microphone knew about the ambush. The diplomats built a trap in the corridor that led to Bullitt’s office: hitting the cable, the agent would trigger an electric alarm. In response, all the electricity in the embassy was cut. After some insistence and laboring, the electric supply resumed, but Thayer found out that his trap had vanished along with the microphone. Later on, fighting wiretaps became a routine in the embassy. The Soviet secret service continued bugging the embassy even after Joe Davies, a much friendlier ambassador, replaced Bullitt. During his tenure, a microphone was found in his bedroom just between his and his wife’s pillows.¹ This was all new for the Americans; before Bullitt’s mission to Moscow, the US embassies around the world did not have to contend with wiretaps and other security threats that have since become commonplace.

Thayer always carried a revolver in his pocket. He learned Russian and interpreted for Bullitt, willingly traveling across the Soviet Union. He preferred Tbilisi to Moscow, but he loved the whole empire. Thayer noted the surprising coexistence of xenophobia and hospitality among Muscovites. “Russian hospitality is a curious thing. Perhaps because for so long there has been little stability in their political and economic lives, with the police, Czarist and Bolshevik, confiscating and arresting at pleasure, they’ve come to look on possessions as rather transitory things, and when they have a bit of good luck they try to share it as quickly as possible with their friends. . . . What is more, they expect any temporarily affluent friend to do exactly the same thing with them.”² This was, in fact, what the Soviet government expected from its new friends at Spaso House.

The Soviet government needed road-building equipment, trucks, rails, locomotives, weapons, and much more. In an effort to pay for this massive import, the government sold gold to Germany, timber to Sweden, and furs and collectible art to the United States. Litvinov played on the rivalry between France and Germany, trying to obtain credit from both countries. Hoping to get state-backed loans, the Soviet Union refused to purchase American goods and products for cash. However, no American loans or credits could be given to a country that did not pay its war debts, which Russia had not done. Involved in the grand geopolitics and petty accounting debates, Bullitt thought that Litvinov was obstructing his access to Stalin, and he tried to circumvent the commissar. Stalin thought that Bullitt was standing between him and Roosevelt, making it difficult to get loans and credits.

From Moscow, the Comintern funded the Communist Party of the USA, which engaged in propaganda and espionage campaigns. From the start of diplomatic relations, the Roosevelt administration viewed Soviet propaganda in America as an unacceptable interference in internal affairs. In July 1935 Bullitt warned the State Department about the forthcoming Third Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. Led by Bullitt’s frequent guest, Karl Radek, the Comintern was determined to expand its activities in America. The State Department decided to limit its response, sending a note of protest. For its part Moscow accused Bullitt of provoking a diplomatic crisis. Walter Duranty, the Moscow reporter for the New York Times, brought to the embassy the rumor that Bullitt was interested in this crisis because it would have given him an opportunity to return to Washington and get a position in the administration. Informing the State Department about this allegation, Bullitt added that Duranty’s articles were so completely pro-Soviet he suspected Duranty was on the Bolshevik payroll.³ Featuring many American guests, the Third Congress of the Comintern called for revolution in the United States and elsewhere in the world. When Bullitt protested, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs explained that the Comintern was a nongovernmental organization: it just invited American trade unions to collaborate with the Soviet Union. Bullitt was determined to convince the State Department that this interference in American affairs grossly violated the agreements on the basis of which the United States had established diplomatic relations with the Soviets.

Growing tensions in Europe were proving Bullitt’s old prophecies true. In April 1935 he wrote to the State Department that he had been convinced since the Treaty of Versailles that the resurgence of a nationalist movement in Germany was inevitable and that a revisionist Germany would absorb Austria. “The statesmen and diplomatists in Europe are in such a neurotic state of mind that everything is possible,” he wrote to Roosevelt.⁴ In June the president sent him to Warsaw to attend the funeral of Polish leader Joseph Piłsudski. There, Bullitt, at his own initiative, spoke with Hermann Goering. “When he was 250 pounds lighter he must have been a blond beauty of the most unpleasant sort. He is really the most unpleasant representative of the nation that I have ever laid eyes on. . . . He made me feel that the Germans will achieve nothing but a series of national disasters until they cease to take the Nibelungenlied seriously,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt. The president responded ironically: “What a grand picture that is of that Goering person! If you get a figure like his I will order a special uniform for you and send you to all official funerals.”⁵ Interestingly, in Bullitt’s reports about German leaders he used a kind of homophobic vocabulary that he never used in his reports about the Soviet leaders. When the Nazis named their military academy after the recently murdered Ernst Roehm, Bullitt reported, “In view of the revelations about Roehm, the English equivalent would be the renaming of Sandhurst ‘Oscar Wilde Institute.’”⁶

The letters that Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt fill dozens of boxes in his archive at Yale. He wrote them from many different places—Moscow, Washington, Paris, and the capitals of the Near East. In the spirit of dispatches that the aristocratic ambassadors of the eighteenth century wrote to their monarchs, Bullitt both informed the sovereign and entertained him. These letters offered gossip about high society, psychological observations, and allegations about the intimate lives of spoiled Europeans, including the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. They also demonstrated the uniqueness of Bullitt’s sources of information, the breadth of his connections, and the depth of his intuition. He had a close, almost familial relationship with the president, and in their correspondence Roosevelt often addressed him “Bill Buddha.” In public service, promotion depends on personal relations more than in many other domains. An experienced master of these relations, Bullitt fell into a trap: the more he demonstrated his competence and manipulative skills, the more fear and resistance he aroused in his superiors, particularly in Roosevelt. Trying to make up for the wasted decades of his career, he could not afford to relax and swim with the current, which is the secret of many successful officials in any country.

Bullitt’s restlessness was motivated not only by careerism but also by the forthcoming tragedy that he saw more clearly than many others did. He had resigned from the diplomatic service at the end of the First World War and returned to it when the danger of a new, even bigger war was already in the air. Nevertheless, he never stopped playing his practical jokes. On March 4, 1936, the State Department received an unusual report from Moscow, arguably the strangest dispatch its official mailbox has ever seen: “I believe that what follows is an accurate picture of life in Russia in 1936, but a regard for truth compels me to admit that the remainder of this dispatch was written not by myself but another American envoy.” Citing the Honorable Neil S. Brown of Tennessee, the American ambassador to Russia from 1850 to 1853, Bullitt informed the authorities about the current situation. “This is a hard climate, and an American finds many things to try his patience, and but few that are capable of winning his affections,” wrote Brown. “One of the most disagreeable features that he has to encounter is the secrecy with which everything is done. He can rarely obtain accurate information. . . . His own movements are closely observed by eyes that he never sees. . . . Everything is surrounded with ceremony, and nothing is attainable but after the most provoking delays.” Speaking about the reign of Nicholas I, the ambassador wrote about harsh police tactics, censorship, and spies. “No nation has more need for foreigners, and none is so jealous of them.” Bullitt was astonished to find these feelings, which were so close to his own, articulated in a dispatch written by a distant predecessor. “This is the best school in which to Americanize our countryman,” Brown wrote about the Russia of 1850.⁷

Watching the waves of terror rolling through Moscow, Bullitt was horrified by the senseless acts of mass violence. Thayer wrote that by 1937, “every two or three days we read in the papers the name of some acquaintance who had been convicted of espionage or had confessed to sabotage or had been denounced as a traitor.”⁸ From prison Andreychin managed to pass along a message to Bullitt, asking his old friend “for God’s sake to do nothing trying to save him,” otherwise he, Andreychin, “would certainly be shot.”⁹ Bullitt relayed the message to Roosevelt.

Andreychin managed to serve out his term—ten years for espionage and Trotskyism—in the northern camps of Ukhta and Vorkuta. In January 1938 he was brought to Moscow and spent two more years in prison there. With the outbreak of war, Andreychin, who held Soviet, American, and Bulgarian citizenships, was released. He was able to find employment in the Soviet Information Bureau in Kuibyshev, where many Soviet offices and foreign embassies had been relocated. There, Andreychin again met the staff of the American embassy. On December 28, 1941, Edward Page, the second secretary of the embassy who had worked with Bullitt in Moscow years before, talked to Andreychin and wrote a detailed memorandum about their conversation. He sent a copy of this “top secret” memo to Bullitt. This paper was never published, and I will present it here almost completely.

Page reported that Andreychin had just arrived in Kuibyshev after serving a six-year term in a northern camp. With irony, he noted that Andreychin was “completely rehabilitated (whatever that may mean).” He received American support, including the five hundred dollars that Charlie Chaplin sent him through Bullitt, and he was grateful. This money, Page explained, would see Andreychin and his family through the winter. Page was more excited when Andreychin shared with him “some exceedingly interesting explanations with regard to the mysteries of the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1939.” According to Page, the former Soviet ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, who was then also in Kuibyshev, told Andreychin this:

Back in 1934 the Soviet government had been needlessly difficult with Bullitt, but various factors had been responsible. First, Stalin had let Litvinoff down on his commitments to Roosevelt. Second, Bullitt as a result thereof had himself been hard-boiled personally with Litvinoff. Third, they suspected Bullitt of trying to bring them to blows with the Japs for which they knew they were not prepared.

They, therefore, decided to get rid of Bullitt, apparently with the idea of making him the scapegoat for the bad turn in Soviet-American relations. They believed him to be a politician who was attempting to use his successes in Soviet-American relations to obtain the Presidency or at least the post of Secretary of State. They also believed they could discredit him in the eyes of the president simply by sabotaging his mission and spared no efforts in order to bring about this result.

Troyanovsky also told Andreychin that he had taken part in these efforts. He went on to say that Bullitt had “proselytes” whom he had “hypnotized” into sharing his anti-Soviet views (he mentioned Henderson, Kennan, and Thayer). However, Troyanovsky was impressed by Bullitt’s appointment to the Near East—a mission he considered to be “much more important than it appeared.” Releasing Andreychin from his northern imprisonment, Troyanovsky obviously wanted to reestablish contact with Bullitt: “the mistake made by the Soviet Government in underestimating and antagonizing Bullitt must now be redeemed at any cost. . . . Soviet-American relations are all-important to Russia and every means must be used to improve them,” Troyanovsky said. Sending Andreychin to the American embassy, he also suggested that he write a letter to Bullitt, renew their friendship, and “use his influence to soften Bullitt’s feelings toward the Soviet Union.” At the end of this conversation, Troyanovsky told Andreychin, “I have ways and means of knowing all that they do” at the American embassy.¹⁰

While Bullitt was accusing Litvinov of interfering with his cordial relations with Stalin, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs waged a campaign of personal revenge. Troyanovsky and Litvinov did ultimately best Bullitt in Moscow. Roosevelt came to believe that Bullitt was responsible for the deterioration of American-Soviet relations, and this was one of the reasons that he replaced Bullitt with his political opposite, Joseph Davies. But in 1941, with the war going badly for the Soviets and Moscow desperately in need of American aid, Troyanovsky and his colleagues decided to try something new. In the hopes of getting in touch with Bullitt, who had been appointed the president’s special representative in the Middle East, they orchestrated Andreychin’s visit to the American embassy.

Troyanovsky worked for the new and powerful Soviet Information Bureau, which ran domestic and international propaganda. Its chief, Solomon Lozovsky, was deputy commissar for foreign affairs responsible for the Far East, which meant mostly Japan. Lozovsky was an experienced, and unusually entrepreneurial, Soviet official. In Kuibyshev in 1942, he created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which raised huge sums of money for the Soviet military effort in the United States and Europe (as the secretary of this committee, he was arrested and executed in 1952). Having saved Andreychin from the Gulag in 1941, the Soviet Information Bureau hired him to do for them in Kuibyshev what he had done earlier in Moscow, that is, maintain contacts with the foreign diplomats and lobby for Soviet interests. Troyanovsky not only asked Andreychin to tell Page that Soviet-American relations were more important than ever; he hinted that “every means must be made to improve them.” More specifically, Troyanovksy said that the Soviet government had been mistaken in “underestimating and antagonizing Bullitt,” and that he sought to remedy this mistake at any cost. He and other Soviet officials still believed that Bullitt was headed to the top of the American government. Seeking contacts with the Roosevelt administration and the American public that would go beyond the official channels, Troyanovsky and Lozovsky counted on Bullitt. Possibly, Lozovsky was already thinking about his Jewish Anti-Fascist initiative and wanted Bullitt’s help with it. Grasping the situation, Page forwarded a copy of his classified memo to Bullitt.

However, the experienced Andreychin did not want to help the regime, which had brought him many years of senseless suffering. His letters to Bullitt were full of complaints about his loneliness in Russia, yearnings for American friends, and hopes that America would win the war with Japan. Passing his letters to Bullitt through American diplomats, Andreychin could be sincere. He was “happy as a lark” to receive a message from Bullitt; this message inspired him to create “hopes and plans” that were all about America. These handwritten letters from the broken man whom Bullitt used to call “my boy” were touching; but Bullitt still could do nothing to help him. “Twenty years spent in Russia have taught me that friendship, love and all human relations in general need certain conditions sine qua non for thriving,” Andreychin wrote. His only friends were Americans, with an exception of one man who remained in the Gulag. “I still live on the interest of the spiritual values which I accumulated in my years in America.” In Russia, he felt “not only a very lonely man but an outsider, a person to be shunned.” However, his friendship with Bullitt put him in a much more favorable situation than millions of his Soviet peers who died or suffered in the camps. He lived in Kuibyshev with his wife and daughters. He had a job, and the American embassy helped him. Still, he was in despair: “I shall never feel safe as long as I remain here,” he wrote.¹¹

In spite of the war between Japan and the United States and the coalition between Stalin and Roosevelt, diplomatic relations between the USSR and Japan remained intact until the very end of the war. Deflecting the Japanese threat that Stalin had long feared was a strategic victory for Soviet diplomacy in the Far East. First led by Maxim Litvinov and later by Solomon Lozovsky, the Soviet diplomats outmaneuvered their American counterparts, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, at tremendous cost to the United States. Stalin was neither grateful nor consistent: Lozovsky was executed during the last wave of terror but Litvinov survived all these waves. Working with Lozovsky in the Soviet Information Bureau, Andreychin also survived the war, though not for very long. In 1946 he was sent to his native country, Bulgaria, to run the chancellery of its pro-Soviet government. In 1949 he was arrested again—this time under suspicion of being a British and American spy. He was brought back to the Soviet Union and shot. In 1989 Andreychin was again rehabilitated, “whatever that may mean,” as Page would say.

Bullitt’s final message from Moscow was an unusually harsh, unrestrained letter to the secretary of state, which he sent on April 20, 1936. He had already received an appointment to Paris and was able to speak frankly. Summing up years of conversations with Kennan and other Russian experts, the letter contained the basic elements of the American politics of the future Cold War. The Soviet Union, wrote Bullitt, was “unique among the great powers. It is not only a state but also the headquarters of an international faith.” To understand the Soviet Union, it is necessary to understand its geographical position, vast resources, and “racial composition.” But what was “the most vital,” he wrote, was to understand the substance of the “Communist faith,” because it defined both the “peculiar internal institutions” of the USSR and its “extraordinary attitude” toward other states. The mystical content of this religion, explained Bullitt, was the belief that once communism was established everywhere on earth, vices such as greed or cruelty would be eradicated. But while the Communist paradise was being built, the state could and should lie, hate, and confiscate. Then, with the fulfillment of communism, the state would withdraw; evil, poverty, and war no longer exist, and a millennial grace would reign on earth. This is how Bullitt retold “the gospels according to Marx, Lenin and Stalin.”¹²

The Soviet political system was a “godless theocracy,” Bullitt reported to Hull. He saw it as a faith that ran counter to the Greek and Roman traditions and to the teachings of the Christian Church. “Moreover, they run counter to all that anthropologists and psychologists have been able to learn about the nature of man.” Even though he knew that many were disenchanted and even more were oppressed or murdered, Bullitt did not deny that millions of Soviet citizens—including their dictator and his loyal associates—did believe in the Communist religion. Bullitt emphasized the sincerity of this faith: many Bolsheviks were willing to sacrifice not only others but also themselves.

By the mid-1930s the idea that communism or Marxism was a new type of world religion had already been explored. In Russia and later in France, exiled philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev had been advocating this idea for decades. Waldemar Gurian, a Jew from St. Petersburg who converted to Catholicism and worked in Germany, turned this idea into the main thesis of his political philosophy, which he articulated in writings published in the early 1930s. Bullitt did not know this literature. Based in his experience with the Soviet Union, he improvised a theory that gained prominence much later, during the Cold War. Developing his argument about communism as a world religion, Bullitt compared it to Islam. Both religions, he thought, contained many absurd regulations, but these absurdities only made them stronger. Thanks to this strength, the Muslims, wrote Bullitt, were once at the walls of Vienna. Like Islam, communism also promised universal salvation by the sword. In the 1930s, “the communist Caliph” was Stalin, Bullitt wrote to Hull in the same report: “he is the embodiment of the holy spirit of communism.”

Like the Muslims at the gates of Vienna, as Bullitt imagined them, the Communists were ready to forgive any sin—deception, robbery, even mass murder—if it was committed in the name of their faith. Like Islam, militant communism was an international affair; the aims of the Communist International were exploitation, deception, and violence for the sake of its God, Bullitt wrote. The Soviet Union threatened not only American freedoms; it also threatened American lives. Bullitt stated, “There is no doubt whatsoever that all orthodox communist parties in all countries, including the United States, believe in mass murder.” Their threat was real because the Soviet Union was a country endowed with vast territory and huge natural resources—more self-sufficient, Bullitt wrote, than any other nation. Although the “chief weakness of the Soviet State today is, indeed, the inefficiency of its bureaucracy,” the country had the capacity for tremendous economic growth. However, according to Bullitt, the standard of living in the Soviet Union was still very low—lower than anywhere else in Europe, including the Balkans. Preserving its monopoly on foreign trade, the Soviet Union was not interested in developing the international economy. On the contrary, Stalin’s regime would prefer to sow chaos in capitalist countries in hopes that a world revolution would be born.

In this report Bullitt laid the discursive foundations of what would become the American political logic of the Cold War period, which became mainstream only twenty years later. “Russia has always been a police state. It is a police state today.” Order throughout the Soviet Union was maintained by the secret police, which eliminated anyone who complained. In the nineteenth century there was a saying, “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar”; now it was right to say, “Scratch a communist and you will find a Russian.” That is why our reports, he added, resemble the reports of Honorable Neil Brown, written in the 1850s; moreover, they look like reports written by British ambassadors to Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. “To speak of the Russians as ‘Asiatics’ is unfair to ‘Asiatics’”: Japan and China created great civilizations, Bullitt wrote, but Russia had never ceased to be barbaric, and Stalin was following in the footsteps of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. However, Bullitt acknowledged the strength of the Soviet army, which in his opinion had nothing to fear but the Japanese. Nazi Germany “for many years” would not be ready to attack Poland and the Soviet Union, wrote the American ambassador in 1936; but this time, his prediction was clearly wrong.

Still, the Soviet Union had great potential, he observed: “the territory which the Communists hold today is a base uniquely adapted to their needs.” The Soviet bureaucracy, he believed, had to be afraid only of itself. “The single real fear of the Communists is that their bureaucratic machine might break down under the strain of war. [The] dread of the Kremlin is so great that all Russian officials, except the highest, hesitate or refuse to make decisions. . . . The communist form of State requires a bureaucracy of exceptional ability.” But the Russians, Bullitt wrote, “have always been and are bad bureaucrats.”

From this observation Bullitt drew further findings that even many decades later sound shocking. His findings related to “the racial composition” of the Soviet bureaucracy. Since the Russians remained poor bureaucrats and the socialist state required an efficient bureaucracy, the country was actually run by the Jews. “Extraordinary numbers of the Jews are employed in all the Commissariats.” Bullitt provided the statistics: in the USSR, according to his calculations, there were sixty-one commissars and their deputies, and twenty of them were Jewish; yet there was only about one Jewish person for every sixty Soviet citizens of other ethnic backgrounds. “The upper bureaucracy in nearly all commissariats is Jewish.” Bullitt named the leaders with whom he was dealing, and many of those were Jews: the People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs, Foreign Trade, Transportation. Only “the army was relatively free of Jews, but there are many in the Ordnance Department.”

It was 1936. The Nazis were triumphing in Germany, Europe was pursuing a policy of appeasement, and terror reigned in the USSR. In Germany the Nazis had already banned Jews from many professions, including public service and medicine. Bullitt addressed the potential for a rise of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: “This astonishing number of Jews in the better paid positions [in the Soviet bureaucracy] has not yet produced overt anti-Semitism, but there are many bitter comments on the fact that about 80% of those who can arrange to pass their vacation at Sochi, the expensive and fashionable summer resort on the Black Sea, are Jews.” Again discussing the future, Bullitt gave a valid prognosis this time: “The strain of a long war, therefore, might produce a wave of violent anti-Semitism, and increase the already notable inefficiency of the Commissariats.”¹³ This was exactly what happened in the Soviet Union about a decade later, when a public campaign of anti-Semitism was unleashed in Moscow and, until Stalin’s death, many expected that mass pogroms would be carried out.¹⁴

Bullitt would continue to develop his geopolitical vision in Paris and Washington, but it really matured in Moscow. “We should use our influence quietly to oppose war in the Far East . . . because if there is a war, someone may win it.” Any result of the war—either Communist China or the China dominated by Japan—was against American interests, he wrote. At the moment, the Communists did not expect a major revolution in Europe, but they hoped, he said, that a great war there would lead to a new chain of revolutions. By fomenting war in Spain, they expected revolution would spread to France or even Poland and Romania. They needed a European war, and they played on tensions between France and Germany as much as they could. Bullitt argued that American diplomats should do everything possible to preserve the balance of power in the Far East and delay a Franco-German war; that the Soviet Union should be treated not only as a trading partner but also as a dangerous rival; and that the American and European Communist Parties should be confronted as agents of the USSR. The main thing that the federal government had to take care of, he wrote, was to increase the purchasing power of ordinary Americans, so that the Communist religion would remain alien to them.¹⁵

Roosevelt listened to Bullitt, but he did not follow his advice. Despite Bullitt’s insistence that someone from the “Russian experts” of the State Department should succeed him, the man Roosevelt sent to Moscow was Joseph Davies, who had made a substantial contribution to Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. Like Bullitt, Davies took part in the Paris Peace Conference but later lived in Washington, where he played golf with Roosevelt. In Moscow, he showed extraordinary naiveté, ignored the “Russian experts” at the embassy, and demonstrated full confidence in the local authorities. Kennan said that Davies made such an impression on the embassy staff (which had been hired and trained by Bullitt) that they considered resigning collectively. But common sense prevailed, and Kennan, Bohlen, and others left Moscow one by one. Davies shaped Roosevelt’s notion that the Soviet Union, like America, was building a modern and, in its own way, democratic society, and that Stalin, like Roosevelt, supported progressive policies. According to this theory, modernity, progress, and democracy operated differently in the Soviet Union than they did in America or Europe, and they had to be adjusted to operate in accord with the peculiarities of the Soviet people. Just as the New Deal would emulate elements of the Soviet economy such as state planning, the Soviet Union would import the necessary mechanisms for entrepreneurship and competitiveness from America.

At the invitation of the Kremlin, Davies observed the Moscow show trials of 1937 and saw how the tortured Bolshevik leaders confessed their incredible sins. Terrified, indignant, and fearing that his ulcer was about to burst, Kennan translated these confessions to Davies. During the breaks the ambassador gave interviews, explaining how fair and well-organized the court process was. At the trial Davies ate sandwiches that were delivered to the courtroom straight from the embassy freezer (he ate nothing else). Davies’s wife, one of the richest women in America, built a large collection of icons, paintings, and jewelry while she was in Russia. These objects, which Boris Steiger helped her collect, came from the estates that had fallen victim to the revolution. The authorities let the Davieses take their collection back to America, and it is currently on display at a private museum in Washington, DC. We know some details about this business from Irene Wiley. Buying antiques for rubles made them extremely cheap, but Irene realized that every antique had been confiscated or stolen; “it represents sorrow and suffering, every such object tells a story of want and pain.” After this insight, Irene saw every antique shop in Moscow as a graveyard, and she stopped collecting.¹⁶

Because of either greed or stupidity, Ambassador Davies strongly supported the Soviet government. He reassured Roosevelt and the world that the Soviet word was as good as the Bible’s. Under his guidance the embassy produced a film, “Mission to Moscow,” which praised the Soviets and Stalin. Davies served as ambassador until June 1938, when Stalin was preparing to enter into a dangerous alliance with Hitler. It was Bullitt from Paris—and not Davies from Moscow—who warned Washington about the preparations for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Again, Roosevelt was not terribly interested in Bullitt’s analysis. In a conversation with one of his top officials, Harold Ickes, in March 1937, Roosevelt complained that week after week, Bill Bullitt and other experts were sending him conflicting messages. Distrustful of these dispatches, Roosevelt remarked that “when the international experts felt sure that war was coming, he was easy in his mind, but that when they all saw nothing but peace, then he began to worry.”¹⁷

For Roosevelt, Davies’s endorsement of the Soviet Union was more effective than Bullitt’s condemnation. During the war, the president needed to sell an alliance with the Soviet Union to the American people: a military coalition with the Soviets would be more palatable if he could convince his people that Stalin was not a medieval tyrant but a creator of an alternative modernity. Admiring Stalin, Walter Duranty justified Soviet excesses with references to Dostoevsky: the New York Times correspondent also believed that the Russians loved to suffer and this perverted desire could, according to Duranty, explain collectivization. During the war, Bullitt wrote later, Soviet fellow travelers worked in the State Department, the Treasury, and even the Department of Defense.¹⁸ Conversely, the few experts on Soviet affairs that existed in the United States—most of them former employees of Bullitt—lost their jobs in Washington precisely because they spoke and wrote the truth about the Soviet Union.