John Dickinson "Jack" Littlepage (September 14, 1894 - July 8, 1948) was an American mining engineer. He was born in Gresham, Oregon on September 14, 1894.[2][3] Littlepage was employed in the USSR from 1928 to 1937,[4] becoming Deputy Commissar of the USSR's Gold Trust in the 1930s. He is one of the foreign recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.[5]
Alexander Serebrovsky (1884-1938),[6] "one of the mainstays of the [Soviet] regime",[7] was charged by Joseph Stalin with reforming the Soviet gold industry. Stalin had read several books about the 1849 California Gold Rush, including works by Bret Harte and Blaise Cendrars' book Sutter's Gold, later turned into an American film.[8] In 1927, the 45-year-old Serebrovsky travelled to Alaska posing as a simple "Professor of Mines" (he was in fact a professor at the Moscow Mining Institute as well as a key functionary of the regime); his plan was to duplicate American mining techniques in the USSR.
At one of the first mines he visited, Serebrovsky met Jack Littlepage, then age 33,[9] who was a successful mining engineer.[5] Littlepage initially dismissed Serebrovsky's offer of work in the USSR stating that he "did not like Bolsheviks" as they "seem to have the habit of shooting people, especially engineers."[10] However Serebrovsky persevered and persuaded Littlepage to emigrate to the USSR with his family.[5]
Littlepage arrived on 1 May 1928 with his wife and two young daughters. In a Soviet propaganda leaflet, Littlepage was said to have been "drawn to the Soviet Union by the grand scale of our construction work, the ideas of great Stalin, the chance to unfold his talents freely.", with the financial incentive left unstated. Littlepage soon learned Russian, was renamed Ivan Eduardovich and with unflagging drive "set about verifying calculations, designs, estimates, plans of work."[5]
Sabotage was something strange to my experience before I went to Russia... However, I hadn't worked many weeks in Russia before I encountered unquestionable instances of deliberate and malicious wrecking... we removed from the oil reservoir [of a large Diesel engine] about a quart of quartz sand... such petty industrial sabotage was, and still is, so common in all branches of Soviet industry... that the police have had to create a whole army of professional and amateur spies to cut the amount down...[11] [because] the authorities in Russia have been fighting a whole series of open or disguised civil wars.[12] [bolding added]
In the following six years, the USSR's gold production outstripped the United States' and was poised to exceed the British Empire's. Unlike many US citizens who emigrated to the USSR at the time, Littlepage was not forced to take up Soviet citizenship nor did the Soviet regime confiscate his US passport as it did in the case of many such emigres.[13] However he was required to ignore the use of slave labour in the Soviet gold mines. In the midst of the Soviet repressions, Littlepage carried on his work as Deputy Commissar, advising Serebrovsky on the deployment of Alaskan-style prospecting parties in the virgin Soviet gold fields.[5]
The December 1934 assassination of Stalin's right-hand man Sergei Kirov served as one of the triggers for the Great Purge of the Soviet Communist Party. Littlepage noted that the assassination when occurred "the country had just begun to settle down to a fairly comfortable routine after the painful years which followed the Second Communist Revolution."[14] Just a few months prior "in the summer of 1934, the Government had announced... that the federal police... would no longer have the power of arrest people.... for five years without open trial. Now the Government announced the old powers were restored to the police, and the latter began to exercise them with the greatest vigor."[15]
The authorities use forced labor consisting not only of small farmers, but of every other group [deemed] socially undesirable [for examples] former priests and Mohammedan holy men... The recent purges, which have affected hundreds of thousands of persons, have no doubt added to the labor army. Ordinary criminals, such as murderers and thieves are mixed up indiscriminately... with members of various disfavored groups such as the kulaks, nomads, ex-priests, and the like. In fact, the authorities... treat a brutal murderer, as a rule, with more consideration than a small farmer who didn't want to turn his domestic animals and house and garden into a common pool with his neighbors to make a collective farm.[16] [bolding added]
Littlepage's success earned him the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and a Soviet-built Ford Model A the latter being regarded as one of the most precious gifts of the time in the USSR. Littlepage was to return to the US several times to recruit more engineers into the Soviet gold mine industry: at the time of the Great Depression there was never a shortage of willing candidates. Many of the thousands of US workers who emigrated to the USSR at the time in search of work subsequently became victims of the Terror.[5]
In 1936, Serebrovsky's Russian-language book On the Gold Front was published; however his book was "withdrawn from circulation very shortly after it appeared because some of the men mentioned in it were later discovered to be conspirators."[17] Serebrovsky was eventually "unmasked", according to Stalin's own report, as a "vicious enemy of the people" who had delivered no less than 50m gold bars to Leon Trotsky. Dubbed the "Soviet Rockefeller" for his work on the Caucasian oil fields, Serebrovsky was executed and Littlepage was tainted by his connection to Serebrovsky; Littlepage found himself starved of work. Petrified Russian employees refused to come anywhere near him, a friend of an executed "enemy of the people" and a foreigner at a time when foreigners were deeply distrusted by the paranoia which dominated Soviet policy.[18]
[As] an American, I am not compelled or expected to do many of the things which Soviet engineers have to do, and which cut down their efficiency to a fraction.[19][20] [Engineers] must take an active part in the country's political life [spending] hours every day on matters which have nothing to do with production... In addition to this, Soviet engineers are subjected to several times more paperwork than western industrial countries.[21] [bolding added]
Remarkably, Littlepage was one of the few immigrants from the US allowed to leave the USSR during the Terror: those who remained captive were killed or persecuted. Littlepage left the USSR shortly after an interview at the US embassy in Moscow on 22 September 1937 in which he asserted his opinion that Soviet industry Commissar Georgy Pyatakov had organized "wrecking" in various gold mines.[18]
In a series of articles for The Saturday Evening Post Littlepage described a continuing "Far Eastern gold rush" and the "intrepid men and women" prospecting the wastes of Eastern Siberia. Even when responding to questions from the US War Department, Littlepage did not mention the legions of slaves deployed to extract the gold in lethal conditions in the frozen wastelands of the Gulag in north-eastern Siberia.[18] Littlepage authored a book on his experience: "In Search of Soviet Gold" jointly with foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and The Christian Science Monitor Demaree Bess[22][23][24] (Jan 1, 1938), ISBN0405030444.
The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The full official name of the agency changed several times.
The Great Purge or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.
Kolyma or Kolyma Krai is a region in the Russian Far East. It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. The region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain system, parts of which were not accurately mapped by Russian surveyors until 1926. It consists roughly of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast.
NKVD Order No. 00447 of July 30, 1937 was signed by Nikolai Yezhov and approved by the Politburo during the Great Purge.
John Scott (1912–1976) was an American writer. He spent about a decade in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1941. His best-known book, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, is a memoir of that experience. The bulk of his career was as a journalist, book author, and editor with Time Life.
Alexander Michael Dolgun was an American survivor of the Soviet Gulag who wrote about his experiences in 1975 after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
The Shakhty Trial was the first important Soviet show trial since the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of conspiring to sabotage the Soviet economy with the former owners of the coal mines. The trial was conducted on May 18, 1928 in House of Trade Unions, Moscow.
Dalstroy, also known as Far North Construction Trust, was an organization set up in 1931 in order to manage road construction and the mining of gold in the Russian Far East, including the Magadan Region, Chukotka, parts of Yakutia and parts of present-day Kamchatka Krai.
John H. Noble was an American survivor of the Soviet Gulag system, who wrote two books which described his experiences in it after he was permitted to leave the Soviet Union and return to the United States.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union is a documentary book written by Loren Graham, an MIT professor specializing in the history of modern Russian science that criticizes the direction of Soviet industrialization. Published by the Harvard University Press in 1993, it describes the life of Peter Palchinsky, in whom it personifies the struggles and misfortunes of Soviet industrialization.
Thomas Sgovio was an American artist, ex-Communist, and former inmate of a Soviet Union GULAG camp in Kolyma. His father was an Italian American communist, deported by the US authorities to the USSR because of his political activities.
Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov was a Soviet NKVD Lieutenant General and director of Dalstroy.
Robert Nathaniel Robinson was a Jamaican-born toolmaker who worked in the auto industry in the United States. At the age of 23, he was recruited to work in the Soviet Union. Shortly after his arrival in Stalingrad, Robinson was racially assaulted by two white American workers, both of whom were subsequently arrested, tried and expelled from the Soviet Union with great publicity.
Alexei Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician and statesman, most prominent as premier of Russia and the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1929 and 1924 to 1930 respectively. He was one of the accused in Joseph Stalin's show trials during the Great Purge.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Victor Herman was a Jewish-American who spent 18 years as a Soviet prisoner in the Gulags of Siberia. At 16 years of age, his family went to work in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s but who met tragic fates during the Stalin purges. He briefly held the world record in 1934 for the highest parachute jump and became known as the 'Lindbergh of Russia'.
Alexander Pavlovich Serebrovsky was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet petroleum and mining engineer nicknamed the "Soviet Rockefeller".
Robert Indrikovich Eikhe was a Latvian Bolshevik and Soviet politician who was the provincial head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Siberia during the collectivization of agriculture, until his arrest during the Great Purge.
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a 2008 book published by Penguin Books. It tells the story of thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Sergei Vitalevich Mrachkovsky was a Russian revolutionary, Red Army commander, and supporter of Leon Trotsky, who was executed at the start of the Great Purge.
Alexander Dolgun (1926-1986) survivor of the Soviet Gulag who returned to his native United States.
John H. Noble (1923–2007) American survivor of the Gulags
Robert Robinson (engineer) (1907-1994) Jamaican-born toolmaker who initially worked in the US auto industry in the United States but spent 44 years in the Soviet Union.
Thomas Sgovio (1916-1997) American artist, and former inmate of a Soviet GULAG camp in Kolyma
Victor Herman (1915-1985) Jewish-American initially known as the 'Lindbergh of Russia', who then spent 18 years in the Gulags of Siberia.
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