Owen Lattimore's Glowing Write-Up of the Soviet Union in December 1944
Spoiler alert: They were actually death camps masquerading as a worker's paradise!
Owen Lattimore was described by Senator Joe McCarthy as “the most dangerous man in America.”
Modern historians write him off as an academic victim of the supposed red scare of the 1950’s. To the extent that he’s remembered at all, he’s kind of vaguely remembered as a nothing-but-kindly academic who was just trying to do research and was hounded by a red-baiting Senator and who was ultimately exonerated and innocent of whatever it was that he was being accused of doing.
I’m confident that Tailgunner Joe was right about Lattimore, and I’ve been working for a few years to try and prove it.
This isn’t necessarily about that, at least directly.
But I have come to realize that long-term investigations and archival work lends itself to a certain neurosis. You save all the gems for a later publication and forget to share those things with friends. Little snips of information float around in your head like ghosts waiting to haunt your free time.
When I was in college, I spent most of my time as a history major going through U.S. Diplomatic History from 1945-1975. It’s still a fascinating time to investigate, but I eventually realized that you can’t separate that diplomatic history from domestic political history.
And when you peer into the period starting slightly earlier, 1935-1975 in American political history, there are so many rich, untold, or poorly told, tales.
One that I ran across and it just stuck with me, was that FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace visited a Soviet death camp during the second World War. The Soviets dressed things up very nicely to be a ‘Potemkin Village’ for their guests, but it was hard to misunderstand why people were digging for gold year-round in the Arctic Circle.
U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace took an extended tour of Asia, including the Soviet Union and China, visiting primarily the Nationalists in China who were fighting both the Japanese and the Communists led by Mao. By far Wallace’s most infamous stop was the Kolyma region, where Soviet political prisoners were sent to dig for gold until they died.
Kolyma was the most feared of the GULAG camps, the human labor department that used millions of slaves to enrich the floundering Soviet economy.
The Kolyma camps get little mainstream mention outside of people seeking it out. They don’t show up in American culture. They get zero amplification from the cultural industrial complex.
But the few anecdotes we do have, are quite vivid.
In his 1980 novel “Kolyma Tales”, Varlam Shalamov had many semi-fictional stories to tell about his 14 years in Stalin’s death camps:
Shalamov’s stories are broken into small little vignettes, little tastes of what it was like to mine for Stalin’s gold.
I can’t resist but to share at least one poignant one, called “On Lend Lease” - it’s long and visceral, but worth it because it’s hard for us to conceive of what life was like under that regime.
So if you’re reading this, you might not be shocked to learn that the Soviet death camps were a very unpleasant place to find yourself. They were littered across the country until Stalin’s death/murder in 1953.
But the idea that, amidst this hellish inhumanity, the U.S. Vice President paid a social call and toured the facility, is a new level of depravity. Just in case you think this is a conspiracy theory: there is zero historical doubt that Wallace visited the camps while in operation. Wallace himself later admitted it.
No doubt it served to remind the prisoners that there was no hope, no chance of reprieve. Whatever they may have thought about the United States, they knew in that moment that they were just as corrupt and as compromised as their own officials.
American Kolyma survivor Thomas Sgovio said as much when he later said that there were rumors among Dalstroi slaves that “Americans visited Dalstroi to see for themselves how Lend-Lease products and supplies were being administered.”
Wallace visited the slave labor camps and was given a grand tour, as part of a larger grand tour of Asia including both the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and China.
Wallace even wrote a book about his trip after his return, “Soviet Asia Mission”
Supposedly, while visiting the Soviet slave labor camps, a slave being worked to death, an older woman, allegedly threw herself at the feet of Vice President Wallace and pled for help, aid, and relief from the horrors she and her inmates were facing in her native Russian tongue. This inmate believed in the mercy and generosity of the United States and her people. The Soviet authorities said she was crazy and took her off. Wallace, unable to translate with only a rough understanding of the complicated Russian language, supposedly thought little of it.
Here’s Wallace aping being a miner while in Siberia visiting Soviet death camps:
Anyhow it’s a powerful anecdote, a slave throwing herself at the feet of the U.S. Vice President asking for help and mercy, and being shoo-ed away.
But it’s hard to prove.
I do know that Wallace’s opinion about his trip changed years later when courageous Elinor Lipper published a book in 1950, ‘Eleven Years in Soviet Slave Camps.’ Lipper had been an inmate in the region and was present for Wallace’s trip. Lipper’s book, published originally in Germany, details the absurdity of the Wallace visit six years prior and describes the efforts to which the Soviets went to deceive Wallace.
Wallace then, to his credit, changed his mind about the Soviet Union. In 1952, in a public article, “Where I Was Wrong” in LOOK Magazine.
But the Lipper anecdote about the woman who threw herself at Wallace’s feet is not in her book. That’s the challenge. Supposedly, later in life, she told it to Marvin Liebman. Liebman put it in his book, “Coming out Conservative”, and his papers are held at the New York Public Library.
Here is what’s reported on the moment:
Suddenly, a woman ran from the ranks and threw herself at Wallace’s feet. She screamed in Russian how the prisoners were being treated, how they were dying, how they were innocent, as innocent as the snow at his feet. ‘Please,’ she sobbed, ‘please help us.’
She was taken away, of course, while Wallace’s translator told him that she was mentally ill and he could not understand what she was saying… I subsequently discovered that Wallace’s translator that day had been Owen Lattimore...
I don’t know if this is true, it’s double hearsay. But I am tracking it down. It certainly fits within what I have already found out about Lattimore, Wallace, and friends. The only incongruence is that Wallace spoke a little Russian at the time, and I’m not clear on Lattimore’s level of Russian proficiency. There’s more to research here before this is a definitive anecdote indicting Lattimore and Wallace.
Nevertheless Wallace still has his avid left-wing fans.
An undergrad history professor of mine, Peter Kuznick, has made a personal mission to rehabilitate Henry Wallace. Or at least the Henry Wallace of 1944, on the theory that Wallace would have steered America into Communism and also prevented the Cold War and atomic bombings of Japan if it weren’t for the conservative faction denying him the microphone at the Democrat political convention in the summer of 1944.
Kuznick is a left-wing hack who made an interesting comment once during a presentation at the American University, when he said that he was less concerned about his role as an accurate historian as he was concerned about his role as provoking activism as a historian. You could see the other historians tense up at the admission, because he was saying politics was more important than the truth. He would rather mythmake in lieu of having to admit inconvenient facts.
Kuznick taught a class called “Oliver Stone’s America” which was a history class, that I happened to be in during the fall of 2001, during 9/11. We had a class the day after, on 9/12. Oliver Stone himself was a featured speaker not long after 9/11, and Stone made some very politically incorrect remarks at the time, which Kuznick was trying hard to silence on the spot.
I was my typical asshole self, and trying hard to get Stone to expiate further on the topic, which I found quite interesting.
Specifically, Stone said that many were cowards who lacked the courage to enlist and fight for their country and that America needed to liquidate the Taliban and invade Afghanistan. Of course this wasn’t a controversial position at all at the time, but it was certainly not in vogue among the left-wing mindset that Kuznick represents. Stone said that many times in history required people to stand up and hit back. This was before Afghanistan and Iraq.
I suspect Stone has since changed his opinion to conform a little better to the party line, but he was generally right on September 12th, 2001. Countries often need people of courage to set things right.
But Wallace is in vogue because he was surrounded by Communists. He was either a crypto Communist or at least a fellow traveller. Wallace’s current usefulness is positing that hard-left leadership was possible if it weren’t for the ‘conservatives’ who pushed Truman, which ought to be a laughable historical position but fairly represents academic thought on the question.
Some, such as Conrad Black, allege that Wallace was reporting back to Soviet high command in 1945-1946. Wallace was certainly surrounded by Communists. Lattimore was in interesting company, to say the least.
When in 1944 Wallace was standing among political prisoners being worked to death, he was reliant on his local expert, his native expert. Vice President Wallace brought along a small team of men to help him see the truth, to properly translate and understand what they were seeing, to help him analyze and assess those things. It’s normal for any major politician to have a staff, to have senior advisors.
On that trip to Stalin’s death camp, Vice President’s advisor was Owen Lattimore.
I am having a hard time confirming whether or not Lattimore spoke fluent Russian. He certainly had a rudimentary understanding of the language and was a bit of a polyglot. Some unofficial sites say he was fluent in Russian, others conspicuously leave Russian off the list of his known languages. His father David was a language instructor, Owen considered himself a linguist, as even the mainstream sources admit. Lattimore, despite having no collegiate qualifications, was considered an expert on Asia, China, and Russia. Lattimore had spent a great deal of time in Asia.
In case you were wondering if Lattimore’s FBI file would offer any answers, you clearly haven’t perused enough governmental documents yet. A b(7)D redaction is to preserve law enforcement’s sources and information.
Lattimore ran the Institute of Pacific Relations from roughly 1934-1941, which was absolutely infested with Communists and was considered by the government to be a Communist front group to develop pro-Soviet Asian policy. The IPR was also involved in the Amerasia spy case, which has largely been forgotten now but was a strong precursor both to the Hiss trial and to many other revelations of massive Soviet espionage.
Soviet spy handler Elizabeth Bentley turned and testified against her former comrades and alleged Lattimore and the IPR were Communist fronts. Bentley, as well, has largely been forgotten though every major detail of her testimony that I’ve looked into has been corroborated by later discoveries and disclosures.
It’s hard to get a good estimate on how many people died in the Kolyma camps, which were a subset of the overall GULAG system. The surviving inmates have a perspective that millions were there and a million or so died. Shamalov estimates three million died, as did historian Robert Conquest originally though he later thought that number was too high. Some like author Martin Bollinger have examined shipping data and estimate lower, pushing the numbers debate down to 50,000 or so dead at Kolyma. Separately, the entirely disreputable and dishonest Anne Applebaum has worked to suppress the death count and push the fatalities down at Soviet camps.
The GULAG or Dalstroi system was notorious not just for working people to death, but also in wisely releasing a small number of survivors so that the political terror could spread nationwide in order to consolidate political control. Nothing clarifies what’s at stake as having your decade-arrested-ago uncle you thought was dead reappearing as a skeleton talking about cannibalism to clarify what was at stake for offending the Soviet authorities. Many prisoners were condemned without the ‘right of correspondence’ meaning that relatives had no idea if they were alive or dead for the entire time of their tenure in Communism’s camps.
These are snapshots of what these camps were about.
Owen Lattimore had the information he needed to warn America about what they were really facing. Lattimore could have highlighted the rampant human rights abuses, the crushing workloads, the persecution.
Of the three Wallace aides on the trip, Lattimore, Hazard, and Vincent, it was well-known what was going on. Hazard later told Lattimore he knew that these were concentration camps.
According to Robert Newman, the author of the book Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China, in 1982 Lattimore told him that Hazard knew about the camps: “During the McCarthy years Lattimore asked Hazard if there had been any prison stockades visible near Magadan. Hazard replied: ‘Oh, yes, there were plenty of those, and when I asked the Russians what they were, they replied perfectly frankly that they were the stockades of prison camps.’”
They all knew. There is no way this was a secret from these experts on Asia.
But when Lattimore had the chance to tell America later, instead of doing so in National Geographic later that year, he highlighted the region in a much different way.
Here is a link to the full article, “New Road to Asia” by Owen Lattimore in National Geographic, December 1944 issue.