To Trinity and Beyond (Epilogue: The End of the Stick)

Eufrosinia was formally charged under Criminal Code Article 58-10, Part 2 ("libelled the life of working people in the USSR") and Article 82, Part 2 ("escaped from the place of mandatory location"). The circuit session of judicial division of Narym District Court of Novosibirsk Area sentenced her to death. She was offered to write a petition for pardon; that was another attempt to force her to plead guilty. She refused to ask for mercy. On February 24, 1943, the death sentence was commuted to 10 years in correctional labour camps (ITL) and 5 years of civil incapacity.

I thought they housed really vicious political criminals in that Inner prison... Here they are, those vicious criminals. First of all, here are three elderly women. Two of them are former nuns. One of them is imprisoned for making bed-quilts. The other - for acquiring a white goat. The third woman was a collective farmer. One rainy day she complained of schiatica and added that when her husband had been mobilised during the First War she, being a wife of a soldier had privileges, but now, when all four of her sons were at war, they forced her to work despite the illness. The next day she was arrested and for eight months they kept inquiring who had taught her to agitate against Stalin and for Nicolas II.

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

Soviet intelligence officers in the United States regularly communicated with their superiors in Moscow via telegraphic cables... the United States, with the assistance of Great Britain, began to decrypt a good number of these messages. This program led to the eventual capture of several Soviet spies within the Manhattan Project...

Although only messages up to 1945 were vulnerable to decryption, and these messages were several years old by that point, they still contained references to spies who had never been detected... From 1948 to 1951, numerous Soviet spies were uncovered and prosecuted this way, including the atomic spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Greenglass's handler Julius Rosenberg, and Rosenberg's wife Ethel.

- The Venona Intercepts,
US Department of Energy web page

"My son is also a soldier. And you have a mother too. Eat this with your mates to his health!" Anna Heintz was then arrested for insinuating that soldiers are hungry... And she is now dying.

Heintz couldn't walk but I couldn't look at her wistful eyes and make nothing of her plea. So I took her in my arms like a child and carried her from the dungeon. That became a custom, every day I carried her out and put near the wall, on the only spot where a ray of sun reached over the ten meter high brick wall of the exercise yard.

People are longing for that walk all day long. Ten minutes! One could see the sky even though we were prohibited to look up with possible penalty of deprivation of a right to walk. Look down!

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

That Hall's information, if less detailed, equaled in importance the material from Fuchs was something best understood by the agents at 7 East 67th Street and by their superiors at Moscow Center who were collating it into summary memos for Lavrenti Beria, the chilling figure who was in charge of the NKVD... Beria was as cruel and suspicious as his master, Stalin. He suspected for a long time that American intelligence might be feeding these reports to his agents in New York in order to trick the Soviet Union into wasting prodigious resources trying to build a bomb that was a fantasy... [Soviet agents in New York and Moscow] knew that if they were being hoodwinked their lives would be forfeited. Beria had said to one of his senior intelligence officers as he was being handed a report: "If this is disinformation, I'll put you in the cellar." The cellar of the Lubyanka Prison was one of the places where torture and execution took place. Ted Hall made the difference. His was the sophisticated spying of another physicist and Fuch's information checked out against his...

[Stalin] also held out to the nuclear physicists and engineers the carrot of privileged living that he accorded those who were particularly useful to him. For a nation that supposedly celebrated the equality of its citizens, Stalin's Soviet Union had always been a society with inequality. Food, medical care, apartment space, clothing, and luxuries like imported goods were apportioned according to one's rank and position in the Party and the regime. The NKVD was particularly pampered, with higher salaries, the best housing, and special shops and canteens. Now Stalin was proposing, if it succeeded, to similarly reward the nuclear weapons community. "Our state has suffered very much," he said to Kurchatov, "yet it is surely possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well, with their own dachas, so they can relax, and with their own cars." But there was peril in this promise of privileges, because the beneficent emperor who awarded them was also a hangman who rewarded failure with death. In this lay the second explanation for copying the American bomb. Kurchatov and Khariton knew that if they and their colleagues performed the task of copying well, the bomb they produced would go off. If they struck out on their own and sought a different design and it fizzled, the senior physicists and engineers involved would be shot.

- Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

... in the U.S.S.R. the principle of socialism is realized: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work..."

- Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Truth About Soviet Russia, 1942

Citizens of this country who betray their fellow-countrymen can be under none of the delusions about the benignity of Soviet power that they might have been prior to World War II. The nature of Russian terrorism is now self-evident. Idealism as a rationale dissolves . . .

I consider your crime worse than murder. Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. In committing the act of murder, the criminal kills only his victim. The immediate family is brought to grief and when justice is meted out the chapter is closed. But in your case, I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.

- Judge Irving Kaufman, Statement Upon Sentencing the Rosenbergs, 1951

But those girls, Toma and Vera? Was it a crime to leave blockaded Leningrad and, under lethal conditions, to use the lifeline across the Lake Ladoga and then fall into the Death's arms here, in prison? I couldn't see their fault at that time. It dawned on me much later how dangerous it was to listen to their stories. And to what kind of brainwash all Leningraders who were leaving the city in an organised way must have been subjected.

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

One of the most hotly debated of Einstein's political activities was his public appeal for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...

His friend and colleague, Nobel-winning chemist Harold Urey, had publicly challenged the government's case... In a letter to the New York Times on January 5, Urey, one of only five Manhattan Project scientists awarded the Medal of Merit ...charged that the couple had been convicted based "on purjured testimony" ... Within a week of Urey's letter, Einstein wrote to President Truman (with copies to the press) asking him to grant the Rosenberg's clemency.

- Fred Jerome, The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist, 2002

The Rosenbergs, sketched by Picasso

The Daily Worker, which had been silent during the trial (probably because the Party was unsure whether the defendants would confess to espionage and implicate others), waxed indignant thereafter at the prospect of martyrdom. Throughout the world the Communist and pro-Communist press orchestrated a major drive to protest the verdict as a frame-up, even though Julius and possibly Ethel were guilty as charged. "When two innocents are sentenced to death, it is the whole world's business," Jean-Paul Sartre exclaimed, defining Fascism not "by the number of its victims but by the way it kills them." The French philosopher added that the execution of the Rosenbergs was "a legal lynching that has covered a whole nation in blood." By coincidence, on the same day that the Rosenbergs defense committee was founded in France, eleven former members of the Czech Communist party were executed in Prague. Eight of those hanged were Jews, but there ended the similarities with the Rosenbergs. Since Rudolf Slansky and the others had abjectly "confessed," no judicial appeal could be presented. Since all Czech defendants were executed overnight, defense committees had no time to form anyway. Nor did mass outrage erupt in front of Soviet or Czech embassies. Pablo Picasso sketched no portraits of the victims, and Sartre was silent.

- Stephen J. Whitfield The Culture of the Cold War, Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1996

So Willy Engel, a merry German lad from the city of Saratov died. Atrophied to the limits he worked [in the workshop producing wooden toys] straining himself to exceed the quota and obtain the award food - a spoon of cabbage. Cardiac muscle... What remained of that cardiac muscle? It was clearly not enough to pump the blood. And his heart halted.

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

Beria, 20 July 1953   

Given the nature of Stalin's state, it was logical as well that he appoint Lavrenti Beria head of the committee to oversee the building of the atomic bomb. Stalin had installed Beria, a fellow Georgian whom he had spotted during a trip to the Caucasus in 1931, as head of the NKVD in 1938 when he removed and had shot its previous chief, Nikolai Yezhov, who had carried out most of the Great Purge for him... [The NKVD] also controlled one of the important economic resources of his state - the millions of prison laborers.

Hundreds of thousands of these labor camp inmates, called zeks in Russian slang, were now marshaled to create the atomic industry necessary for the bomb. ...Lev Al'tshuler, a physicist who arrived at Arzamas-16 at the end of 1946, described the sight in an interview... "The columns of prisoners passing through the settlement in the morning on their way to work and returning to the zones [prison camps] in the evening were a reality that hit you in the eyes. Lermontov's lines came to mind, about 'a land of slaves, a land of masters.'"

More, an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 were consigned to the new uranium mines opened in Soviet Central Asia... Some idea of the conditions can be obtained from those that were observed in the Soviet occupation zone in East Germany, where by 1950 the Russians had 150,000 to 200,000 conscripted German laborers toiling in newly opened uranium mines. Safety measures ...were nonexistent, there was no medical care, and the workers were housed in primitive barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by NKVD troops. In what may have been the cruelest twist of all there are no memoirs of the Soviet prison laborers whose bodies built the atomic industry, because only a few were released at the end of the penal labor terms to which they had originally been sentenced. To preserve the secrecy of the various installations of the atomic complex, once construction was completed Stalin had them shipped to the Gulags worst camps, the gold mines of Kolmya in the Far East, where they died.

- Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 2009

Lyuba is a storyteller. As soon as she says, "Ah, gals! What a dream I had!" and all stand up and surround her. It's for certain, when she begins to romance around her dream she won't let anybody grieve until the night! She also knew a great many of traditional fairy tales with old witch, dragons and hexed princesses but each time told the same tale differently. She however was the best in improvisations on any settled topic. That kind of person is just a vitamin of joy for miserable people.

- Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, 'How Much is a Person Worth?, 1964

An Englishman codenamed ERIC also provided details of atomic research in 1943, as did an American source codenamed QUANTUM, who provided secret information relating to gaseous diffusion in the summer of 1943. Who QUANTUM was or what became of him after the summer of 1943 remains a mystery.

- Espionage and the Manhattan Project,
US DoE web page

Robert Louis Benson, a senior officer in the code-breaking agency's Office of Security, noted that the Soviet spy cables decrypted in the Venona project showed more than 200 Americans had worked with Soviet intelligence during World War II. These included perhaps a dozen spies for the Soviet Union working inside the Manhattan Project and dozens more in the treasury Department, the Office of Strategic Services, and the State Department...

"Did the United States have any secrets? The answer would have to be no."

Here are three lingering questions: Who was "Fogel/Pers," and how much did he tell Moscow? ... How deeply did the KGB penetrate the Chicago operations of the Manhattan Project? ... Who were "Veksel" and "Guron," and did they ever hold a clandestine meeting in Chicago?...

- Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel
"The Youngest Spy", (Excerpt from Bombshell)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan 1998

Hall, who hated wearing hats of any kind, took special umbrage at his Army cap... For one of the few times since his bar mitzvah Hall decided to begin wearing a yarmulke, and the base legal officer decided he was within his legal rights not to wear his regulation cap. "He was the least religious Jew you can imagine, but he found a way to tweak them at every opportunity," remembered his physicist colleage Sam Cohen.

- Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel BOMBSHELL The Secret Story Of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy , 1997

Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow pressured their various American residencies to develop sources within the Manhattan Project. Many of these early attempts at recruiting spies were detected and foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Manhattan Project counterintelligence officials... The scientists in question were placed under surveillance and, when possible, drafted into the military so that they could be assigned away from sensitive subjects.

- Espionage and the Manhattan Project,
US DoE web page

Cohen remembered Hall well and described him as "the most disheveled and eccentric GI in the camp. Most of them were out of uniform and a little peculiar, but Hall stood out."

- Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 2000

Few aspects of the Manhattan Project remained secret from the Soviet Union for long... it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented...

- Espionage and the Manhattan Project,
US DoE web page

I was called up to join the Red Army, which was where the war found me... On Victory Day I was on the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, a lieutenant technician...

I returned home to Kharkov in October 1945 where I became one of the millions of Stalin's victims. My crime was meeting with other artists in Dnepropetrovsk, where I was visiting my father, and exchanging memories of what we had seen in the towns we liberated. Remnants of fascist propaganda, posters, leaflets, cartoons. One of the artists took a cigarette box and drew a caricature he had seen of Stalin with a play on the abbreviation SSSR (USSR): Skoro Smertrt' Stalinskomu Rezhimu (Sudden Death to the Stalinist Regime). An informer reported the sketch, and the whole group of us were arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. I was arrested on October 12, 1945. In January 1946 I was convicted ... I spent about eight years in Siberia (Taishetlag) and Kolyma (Svitlag). Labor camps records show that I was held in custody for seven years, ten months and eighteen days. I was freed on August 30, 1953.

In the Depths of the Kolyma Mines ... prisoners were expected to dig in the frozen ground with only pick axes and shovels. In the gold mines the work was extremely difficult, but there was still a small hope for survival. The inmates knew, however, that in the uranium mines hope was extinguished. Prolonged exposure to the mineral would eventually and inevitably kill them... There was no set system for determining which prisoners went to the uranium mines and which did not. It was simply a matter of luck.

From the very day I was released, I began to implement my plan to paint a series of pictures on the theme of the Gulag, but because this was a forbidden topic, I had to do my civic duty in secret. And so, in complete secrecy, beginning in 1953, I painted pictures about camp life that I recreated from memory. I told no one about this work--not even my wife--because this sort of activity was punishable by imprisonment or even death. I undertook the task because I was convinced that it was my duty to leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died and who should not be forgotten.

- Nikolai Getman: The Gulag Collection, jamestown.org

The FBI learned of Hall's espionage in the early 1950s. Unlike Fuchs, however, under questioning Hall refused to admit anything. The American government was unwilling to expose the VENONA secret in open court ...so the matter was quietly dropped.

- Espionage and the Manhattan Project,
US DoE web page

Soviet intelligence learned of the VENONA program in 1949 through its highly-placed British agent, Kim Philby.

- The Venona Intercepts, US DoE web page

...intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism...

- George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press (an unpublished preface to Animal Farm), 1945

The Einstein-Szilard letter appears in a panel from Adventures Inside the Atom, 1948 (US DoE web page)

In 1913, one year before the First World War, H.G. Wells wrote a book, The World Set Free. In this book he describes the discovery of artificial radioactivity and puts it in the year 1933, the very year in which it was discovered. This is followed, in the book, by the development of atomic energy for peaceful uses and atomic bombs. The world war in which the cities of many nations are destroyed by these bombs Wells puts in the year 1956...

It seems that all of these predictions - even the dates - may prove to be correct; for now it appears that 1956 is the year most likely to see the advent of atomic war...

I am certain of one thing only: Unless we find the right answers soon, war will come; and maybe in the final analysis it will come because there was too much patriotism in the United States...

- Leo Szilard, letter to the editor,
New York Times, February 1955

It took me over forty years to create this visual chronicle of the Gulag. My collection eventually grew to a total of fifty pictures, recording various aspects of camp life...

At the head of the Debin River lies the most inaccessible region of the Taiga. A punitive camp was located there for "counterrevolutionary" prisoners--those alleged to know state secrets... The bodies of two prisoners shot trying to escape were allowed to lie in the snow as a warning to the newly entering prisoners about the futility of attempting escape. The portrait of Stalin, which Getman painted while a prisoner at the camp, was there to exhort prisoners that "through honest labor lies the road to release." At camps like the Upper Debin, however, very few prisoners ever left alive.

I am sometimes asked how I felt, or rather how anyone can feel in such unimaginable circumstances as loss of freedom, arrest, interrogation, trial, prison, labor camp. The human brain possesses a unique ability to adapt, and this ability is far greater than we can imagine in ordinary life.

I did not think about death at all because I did not believe in it. I did not live in permanent fear, but with an extremely heightened sense of danger. I was always on my guard, but the main thing is that I would not have survived without the belief, the absolute conviction that good would triumph over evil. Nothing could convince me that Bolshevism -- the plague of the 20th century -- would reign unchecked in Russia...

Some may say that the Gulag is a forgotten part of history and that we do not need to be reminded. But I have witnessed monstrous crimes. It is not too late to talk about them and reveal them. It is essential to do so. Some have expressed fear on seeing some of my paintings that I might end up in Kolyma again--this time for good. But the people must be reminded, as part of their education, and as a tribute to the memory of the more than 50 million who died as a result of one of the harshest acts of political repression in the Soviet Union. My paintings may help achieve this.

- Nikolai Getman: The Gulag Collection, jamestown.org

For all I know, by the time [Animal Farm] is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.

- Orwell, The Freedom of the Press, 1945

Stalin's death changed little. Khrushchev's thaw and the denunciation of the personality cult did nothing to eliminate the system...

- Nikolai Getman: The Gulag Collection, jamestown.org

In [England] ...it is not so in the USA today - it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this...

- Orwell, The Freedom of the Press, 1945

"The world has moved on a lot since then, and certainly so have I. But in essence, from the perspective of my 71 years, I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick."

- Ted Hall, quoted in his obituary, November 1999

POSTSCRIPT:

He enlisted in the Army in 2007, to try to give his life some direction and to help to pay for college, friends said.

He was granted a security clearance and trained as an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., before being assigned to the Second Brigade 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. ...his military career was anything but stellar. He had been reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer... he wore custom dog tags that said "Humanist," and friends said he kept a toy fairy wand on his desk in Iraq...

- The New York Times describes Bradley Manning, 2010

"I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like 'Lady Gaga', erase the music then write a compressed split file," he wrote. "No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will."

"[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history," he added later.

- Bradley Manning describes himself