Paul Goldberg - The Yid

The place was a construction camp, where workers — mostly displaced peasants and unskilled laborers — had to survive Siberian winters in canvas tents. Workers’ barracks went up; they were filled beyond capacity.

Though some visitors described Gary as the gates of hell, by comparison with Magnitogorsk, it was a garden spot.

The latter metropolis was a forest of half-completed smokestacks tied together with a tangle of pipes and railroad tracks. American earth-digging machines sat abandoned to rust in the open pits where they became incapacitated. In the residential areas, you could see the beginning of incongruously wide boulevards that became rivers of mud in the spring. There were also people’s palaces, with massive columns that grotesquely mimicked Russia’s imperial past. All of it was unfinished, probably impossible to complete, yet amid the chaos of construction, completed smokestacks were starting to spew out clouds of dark smoke, melting ore, making steel.

Workers’ barracks, tent cities, and the zones of prison camps were woven into this mad landscape.

German architects were brought in to make an attempt at urban planning. The Germans wanted to separate residential zones from industrial, creating a kind of balance between work and life. Alas, this vision was just that — a hallucination. Construction of industrial and residential zones was well under way before planning began.

Large numbers of skilled foreign workers were brought in to exercise some control over the situation, and Lewis, an expert welder, was among them.

Dark skin was a rarity in the Soviet Union’s workers’ barracks. There were two Negroes in Magnitogorsk in January 1932. By February, their ranks declined by fifty percent when the African welder, who spoke French and mostly kept to himself, slipped off a scaffold and fell forty-five meters, landing on a pile of steel bars.

This left only Friederich Robertovich Lewis.

Born to descendants of freed slaves, named after Frederick Douglass, and raised in Memphis, Omaha, Chicago, and Cleveland, Lewis was what used to be known as “an enlightened worker,” an autodidact drawn to revolutionary ideologies. He worked as a porter, then a waiter, and ultimately apprenticed as a welder at McKee, a company whose projects included building blast furnaces in the USSR.

One could say that Lewis’s disgust with Jim Crow’s America drove him to a new life in Joe Stalin’s Russia. That would be a bit simplistic, but mostly true. In the late twenties, Lewis tried to join a Chicago cell of the Communist Party, hoping to be sent to the land of victorious revolution, where the color of a man’s skin had been negated. But the wheels of Party machinery turned slowly, and in the spring of 1931 he asked the capitalists at McKee to send him to Magnitogorsk.

On entry to Russia, his name became Friederich — Germanized, presumably, in honor of Engels. The clerk who issued Lewis’s visa knew nothing of Douglass. A Russian-style patronymic Robertovich, son of Robert, was inserted into his name in accordance with rules and traditions.

In his search for a race-free society, Lewis found himself in a place where he felt like a revolutionary from the planet Mars. There was racism in Stalin’s Russia, too, a naïve kind of racism. While a foreman at McKee wouldn’t hesitate to call him a nigger, a drunk on a Moscow streetcar could innocently refer to him as a primate. Along the same lines, his appearance was known to move street urchins to jump like baboons and shout good-naturedly about “djazz.”

* * *

On a particularly cold February morning in Magnitogorsk, Lewis climbed to the top of a scaffold only to be summoned to the office of the kombinat construction director. It was unclear why the matter was so important that even the American engineer Charles Bunyan descended from Olympus, but there he was, in the meeting room, kindly offering his services as a translator.

Bunyan was one of humanity’s secret heroes.

Short, bearded, bespectacled, he was as old as Lewis, yet had the gravitas of a European professor. Armed with a cold Lutheran stare (he was presumed to have been at some point a Lutheran), conspicuously grammatical Russian, and considerable ingenuity, he fought off the ideological hacks and ignorant central planners, preventing complete bungling of the project.

Lewis regarded Marxism as a powerful tool for generating mathematical insights into history and all aspects of the world around him. It was the fundamental science, the science of science. During his enlightened worker, pre-Communist phase, he became attuned to what he called “paternalism” among white comrades. His analysis of the phenomenon yielded the following insight: Paternalism = Racism Repressed. Lewis trusted his ability to see through a man, to gauge his innermost feelings about race. Turned on Bunyan, Lewis’s finely calibrated gauge registered the most extraordinary reading he had ever observed: zero. No paternalism. No racism. A perfect zilch.

The difference in their social status notwithstanding, the welder and the construction director met often and spoke openly, without fear.

“You’ve made the right choice to come here,” Bunyan once observed over dinner in his bungalow. “This is the ultimate land of opportunity. Extraordinary wealth is perpetually up for grabs. Billions of dollars in gold, soon to be dwarfed by immense wealth of oil, coal, ore, steel. All of it changed hands in 1917, and it may again.”

“I didn’t come here for wealth,” said Lewis.

In those days, he still found it difficult to accept the idea that a white man of Bunyan’s stature would find him a worthy interlocutor.

“Nor I,” said Bunyan. “I came here to help them make something of it. To give them focus.”

“You seem to be succeeding,” said Lewis. “The blast furnaces are going up.”

“By hook or crook. Do you know what makes this country run?” This was, of course, a rhetorical question. Bunyan leaned back in his chair to offer the answer: “The mandates.”

A mandate was no more than a piece of paper: a letter, preferably handwritten, from a high-level bureaucrat, stating that the bearer should be given whatever it was he seeks. Some used the mandates for their personal benefit. Others, like Bunyan, to break through bureaucratic logjams.

At that time, Bunyan operated with a supply of mandates from Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the people’s commissar of heavy industry.

“These are simple pieces of paper, not always on letterhead, not always stamped,” Bunyan continued. “Just imagine having a mandate from Stalin himself. There would be no stamp, no letterhead, no date of expiration. Who’d ever dare to check whether it’s real? And how would you check?”

“I wouldn’t want to be caught with one of those,” said Lewis.

“Neither would I.”

Bunyan’s ability to procure freight trains, copper wire, pipe, lumber, and welding torches was legendary in Magnitogorsk. Indeed, were it not for Bunyan, the construction of the kombinat would have turned into an exercise in marching in place, and without Magnitogorsk, Russia would have had less pig iron, less steel — and fewer tanks, planes, and Katyushas — when it needed them.

Were it not for Charles Bunyan, the war could have been lost.

* * *

As he had come down from the scaffold, Lewis showed up wearing a singed sheepskin coat, an ushanka with ear flaps down, and black valenki , felt boots that had all the traction of bedroom slippers and left his ankles wobbling. Large gloves protruded from his pocket.

“This is our brigadier of welders, Comrade Friederich Lewis,” Bunyan said, introducing him to a diminutive, middle-aged, paleskinned man and a young woman.

Lewis had never heard Bunyan call him comrade before. After all, neither of them was Soviet or, technically, a Communist. Bunyan worked for McKee and drew a hard currency paycheck. Lewis had overstayed his McKee assignment, and though he was being paid in rubles, he was still an American.