Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

As for the Nikishovs’ “trained and sensitive interest in art,” there were in fact famous imprisoned painters in this slave empire. Every government holiday, such as the May 1, November 7 (the day of the Bolshevik Revolution), and so on, they were obliged to paint copies of the official portraits of Soviet leaders. One of the copies was made by Vasilii Shukhaev, a famous painter who was arrested by the NKVD just after he had lived in Paris. Here is a typical scene:

Nikishov… a master of the region, who personally inspected the portrait [at a special exhibition in Magadan], flew into a rage: “Who did dare to show Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] with a dirty collar?!” The answer was: “This is not dirt, this is a shade. You can see that the light [on the portrait] is coming from a side.” “What shade are you talking about?” Nikishov roared. Vasilii Ivanovich [Shukhaev], who did not even know about this emotional fight, was sent from a barrack [of the concentration camp] to a kartser [a punishment building without heat and with a low food ration in the permafrost of tundra]. 198

One of Alexandra Nikishova’s factories of enslaved women produced embroideries. Vice President Henry Wallace admired the embroideries:

…We remember the wife of Ivan Nikishov, a plump woman of about forty, whom we first met in Magadan at an extraordinary exhibit of paintings in embroidery, copies of famous Russian landscapes. The landscapes were made by a group of local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework, an art in which Russian peasants have long excelled. As we walked along, Ivan stopped before two of the paintings I admired very much. The work was in colored threads. He took them down and handed them to me as a gift. These two wall pictures now convey to visitors at my home in Washington rich impressions of the beauty in Russia’s rural landscape. 199

No wonder that the embroideries were of the highest quality: Shukhaev’s wife, who worked as a fashion designer in Paris before she was arrested, was in charge of the team of craftswomen, who were political prisoners. I wish Mr. Wallace would have seen this “group of local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework” in the barracks of Magadan labor camps and the conditions of their work. I think that if the two embroideries given to Wallace have survived, they should be displayed at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington together with the drawings of Jewish artists who worked in the ghettos and Nazi camps.

Nikishova also authorized programs of enslaved opera. Ida Varpakhovskaya, a singer at Nikishovs’ opera house who survived the imprisonment, recalled: “One day Gridasova… sent an instruction to L. V. [the enslaved director of the opera, the famous theater director Leonid Varpakhovsky], in which she ordered to include ‘the song of Doreadot’ [she meant the toreador’s aria from Charles Bizet’s Carmen ] into the program of a concert.” 200

I cannot believe that all the members of the American delegation were so naive that they did not notice at all what was going on around them. Besides Magadan, the delegation visited other centers of the Gulag system in the cities of Karaganda and Komsomolsk-on-Amur. 201It would have been practically impossible not to see the countless labor camps with their barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences from the plane when the delegation arrived in these cities.

Elinor Lipper, a Swiss ex-Communist and inmate of the Kolyma camp at the time of Wallace’s mission, wrote later: “Mr. Wallace went home and published his enthusiastic report on Soviet Asia. The watch towers were put up again, the prisoners sent out to work again, and in the empty shop windows there were to be seen nothing but a few dusty and mournful boxes of matches.” 202

In 1945, Wallace sent articles from the Soviet press he and his staff collected during his trip to Russia to the American geneticist Leslie C. Dunn, who, together with Theodosius Dobzhansky, was preparing an English translation of Lysenko’s book Heredity and Its Variability (published in 1946). 203Dunn and Dobzhansky believed “the best way to deal with Lysenko’s influence is to make known his ideas and evidence in the form in which he himself has published them.” 204Wallace supported publishing Lysenko’s book, possibly in the hope that American geneticists would accept the new type of supposedly “progressive” Soviet genetics. 205

Probably, Mr. Wallace simply did not want to confront the truth: He was a Communist sympathizer whom the FBI considered to be a Soviet spy. 206In this instance, the suspicion was based on real facts. After his governmental career (U.S. vice president, 1941–1945, and U.S. secretary of commerce, 1945–1946), Wallace campaigned in 1948 for his own third party, a pro-Soviet “Progressive Party,” with the help of American Communists and their Soviet controllers. 207The “Communist sympathizer” reputation finally cost Wallace his political career. 208Another American prisoner of Kolyma camps during the Wallace and Lattimore visit, Thomas Sgovio, added the last detail to the picture: “Before his death, Mr. Wallace admitted he had been naive and gullible. Lattimore has never admitted he was duped. I shall leave it to the American people to judge the Professor.” 209

The historian and Gulag survivor Anton Anotonov-Ovseenko described Nikishov’s end. 210He died in a bath in 1956, after he wrote a detailed report to Party officials about the atrocities in the Dalstroi. Like the Nazi war criminals, he claimed that he had only followed orders:

…Yezhov and Beria demanded to fulfill the plan of gold production by any cost: “Do not be sorry for prisoners. You will receive workers always when steamers can bring them [to Kolyma]…”

I do not feel guilty… I was only an executor. Here are copies of Yezhov’s and Beria’s orders. I kept them because I knew that I might be asked… 211

In contemporary Russia, the connection between the academy and the former KGB structures remains tight. Academician Yevgenii Primakov, formerly director of the Institute for Oriental Studies (IVAN) and the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), in 1991 headed the KGB First Main Directorate and then, in 1991–1996, the Foreign Intelligence Service (the SVR, a new agency that was previously the KGB First Main Directorate). 212Primakov’s close contact with the KGB started in the late 1950s, when he served as a Middle East correspondent for Pravda . As he told the investigative journalist Yevgeniya Albats privately, “no one who wanted to work abroad got away without some contact with the organs.” 213His KGB code name at that time was “Maxim,” and he was sent frequently on intelligence missions to the Middle East and the United States. 214According to Primakov himself, these missions were ordered by the Central Committee. 215During his years as a Pravda correspondent, Primakov published a series of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda brochures: Who Is Behind Israel? (1959), The USSR Is a True Friend of Arab Nations (1969), and The Middle East Crisis Is a Threat to the World Peace (1969). 216

In 1970, Primakov was appointed vice director of IMEMO. 217This institute was created in 1956. Anushavan Arzumyan, son-in-law of the Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, was its first director. He died in 1966 and Academy Corresponding Member Nikolai Inozemtsev (elected in 1964), vice chief editor of Pravda , was appointed IMEMO director. In 1968, he became an academician. Inozemtsev’s main duty was to write speeches for General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Having known Primakov through the work in Pravda, Inozemtsev invited him to IMEMO. Inozemtsev and Primakov changed the work of the institute from academically oriented research to the analysis of current political international events. IMEMO prepared secret reviews of the events to inform the Central Committee and Politburo. With the support of Inozemtsev, in 1974 Primakov was elected corresponding member of the Academy. 218