to the regimented stiffness of the first -and second-class decks. America’s relaxed social attitudes suited the students. The Soviet government insisted on premium-class tickets as such passengers were treated differently by customs and immigration. Experience had shown that first-and second-class ticket holders would escape hours of questioning on arrival, or worse, internment at Ellis Island.
The party had arrived in the belly of the great capitalist beast. They had been taught that their class enemy, the American elite, feared the inevitable triumph of Communism and was scheming to destroy the Soviet Union, but that ordinary exploited American workers were their brothers, although politically asleep, bought off by consumerist dreams and neglectful of their political destiny. Lacking such a purpose, they were told, American life was empty or shallow. In a future Communist society, each member would contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
The students were instructed to describe the Soviet grand project as work in progress, with many problems, challenges and difficult choices. To succeed in their goal entailed making enormous sacrifices for the certainty of a better tomorrow. Having such beliefs separated the Soviets from most Americans, whose lives and aspirations they found materialistic and selfish. It is notable that none of the students decided to defect after their taste of America. Despite Russia’s many privations, Soviet society was on the road to an improvement in living standards for the masses over the squalor and hopelessness of Tsarist autocracy. The students knew that there was still a long way to go, but significantly they had fought hard to come a fair distance already. All of them had benefited from the educational opportunities offered them. Denied formal education under Tsarism, under Communism they were now on their way to study at the most elite universities in the world. Their education would be used not to obtain for themselves a bigger salary but for the greater good of all. Despite the current conditions, the ration cards, public canteens and cramped accommodation, their system was moving forward, offering a brighter future, while capitalism was in retreat and could not even provide jobs for a high proportion of its population. They also expected to meet the cowboys and gangsters they had seen in the movies.
At their first hotel, the Soviets found evidence of the very class oppression they had been warned to avoid. To real Communists, tipping porters for carrying their bags or paying for a shoe shine were open symbols of class exploitation. Communists could never adjust to paying others to perform simple everyday tasks that they were accustomed to do themselves. They would carry their own bags. They had already seen the evidence on the city streets, and would later read in newspapers lurid accounts of the awful privations of the Great Depression that affected the many, while themselves tasting the surreal world of luxury liners and hotels enjoyed by the few.
New York was in crisis. There was unprecedented mass unemployment. A plethora of apple sellers could be found on each city street, the unemployed struggling to earn money in order simply to eat. Others wandered the sidewalks wearing placards advertising their skills. All Soviet visitors at the time were consistently surprised at the diversity of immigrants that made up the population, remarking on the large number of countries represented. At this time, close to 7 million lived in the city, with a population density of over 23,000 people per square mile. Moscow was growing fast but still only had a population of 2.8 million.
Even in the midst of depression, however, New York was the definitive twentieth-century city; its wide streets and boulevards made a deep impression on foreign visitors, not least via the symbol of the modern age, the car and heavy traffic. The New York skyline had only recently taken on its impressive modern form, dominated by the three tallest buildings in the world. The arriving Russians were awed by the three buildings, visible from anywhere in Manhattan.
The Empire State Building at 102 storeys had won the friendly competition with the builders of 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building to be the world’s tallest. Construction had begun on 17 March 1930, and the skyscraper was officially opened a few months before the students arrived, on 1 May 1931. The total cost of the building, including the land, was $40,948,900. An MIT alumnus, Pierre S. du Pont, had partly financed the project. Construction required the use of up to 3,400 workers working 7 million working hours over a period of just one year and forty-five days including Sundays and holidays, a feat worthy of a Soviet Five-Year Plan. The art deco building, wrapped in Indiana limestone and granite, aluminium and chrome nickel steel, was the wonder of the modern age – even if in 1931 it was virtually empty, the victim of an unfashionable location and the Depression. The three skyscrapers had been built in a race to the sky as symbols of America’s business confidence that was now shattered.
• • •
On the face of it, the students’ host, AMTORG, was a legitimate trading company with a valuable monopoly on Soviet trade with the United States. American conservatives suspected AMTORG was the hub of major Soviet espionage activities designed to undermine the government of the United States; in fact it was neither capable nor sufficiently resourced to be anything of the sort. Soviet intelligence in the US at the time of Shumovsky’s arrival was in its infancy, small in scale and disorganised. Only in 1933, with the establishment of official diplomatic relations, would the Soviet Consulate take over the leadership role in intelligence from AMTORG and build up resources. The AMTORG office was not the centre of a grand conspiracy to topple capitalism. Soviet espionage sought to strengthen the position of the USSR not to destroy the US system of government. Marxists believed that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable. In 1925 Stalin had adopted a policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’, abandoning the cause of world revolution, and would finally close down Comintern (The Communist International) in 1943.
Until Shumovsky’s mission, spy work had consisted almost exclusively of the gathering and collation of what would be described today as open-source information, supplemented by an occasional one-off operation. Open-source intelligence is information in the public domain in a particular country that has a value for a foreign power. Intelligence is further subdivided between political and science and technology; activity in the latter field was performed by a small team of technicians at AMTORG who would comb through newspapers and periodicals, mainly technical and scientific journals, for information that might be of use to the industrialising Soviet Union. As the technological gap between the countries was so wide, there was a vast amount of useful information available in US publications.
Valuable intelligence was often received on an unsolicited basis.US firms would sometimes include commercially sensitive information in the marketing material they sent to AMTORG, which would forward anything useful on to Moscow; some of it would end up on Stalin’s desk. One explosives manufacturer, the Trojan Powder Company of Allentown, Pennsylvania, disclosed the chemical formulae for its solid explosives hoping for a lucrative deal. Stalin personally annotated the document.9 The company even offered to provide the Soviet Union with an unlimited quantity of poison gas munitions. Soviet experts were unimpressed with the Trojan Company’s proposal.
Accurate political intelligence proved harder to acquire than S&T. Without reliable sources, information was either biased or in some cases downright false. An early large-scale NKVD operation in the 1930s, based in New York and Washington, turned out after many years and a detailed investigation to have relied on a completely fake source. An enterprising New York Post journalist, Ludwig Lore, had created a family industry producing political information for the NKVD and employing his son and wife in the enterprise. The NKVD were entirely taken in.
Lore claimed that his intelligence reports came directly from a network of well-placed agents in the State Department in Washington, even insisting that the State Department’s Head of Research, David A. Salmon, was his principal agent. In reality, none of Lore’s agents existed. He had plucked names from the internal phone directory of the State Department. Lore was nevertheless able to charge the NKVD exorbitantly for several years for the information he provided, which consisted either of old news stories reheated or pure invention.10 Without checking, the NKVD had already put some of the fake material on Stalin’s desk, describing it as ‘must read’.11 Stalin believed
