AND THEN THERE WAS THE TIME she accompanied her father to the Soviet Union. This would have been in late August 1937.
Do we remember the last time Joe Patterson visited Russia, in December 1905, when it was still called Russia; when Leningrad was St. Petersburg, Czar Nicholas II’s capital; when young Patterson’s obdurate aunt Kate was the wife of U.S. ambassador Robert McCormick, still half sober and only semiloony; and when the world watched with mixed feelings as the first wave of revolution, personified by Moscow University students, took to the streets against the czar’s police? Thirty-two years later, more than middle-aged, still tall but stooped, Patterson, accompanied by his traveling partner, Alicia Patterson Brooks, was trying once again to pass through Leningrad, this time the Leningrad airport, on his way to the Soviet capital at Moscow; and trying too to keep his composure as casually truculent Soviet airport officials first detained father and daughter for no apparent reason, then unceremoniously emptied their suitcases onto the counters, literally turning them upside down, rummaging through their belongings in a supposed search for contraband. Alicia later recalled that she was more concerned for her father’s dignity than for her possessions, though in the end both emerged more or less intact, and they were allowed to make their way into the city of Leningrad and later board the sleeper train to Moscow.
Patterson and Alicia were traveling to the Soviet Union at a time when American-Russian relations, only lately emerging from a strained period of official nonexistence after President Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1932, were beginning their back-and-forth swings between friendly and frosty, between wartime partners and mistrustful allies, that eventually ended in the Cold War. Right then the Soviets seemed to have settled into what would later devolve into a familiar alternation of superficial cooperation with stony and often bewildering intransigence. For instance, two years before, with much show of reciprocal amity, the United States had finally opened an embassy in Moscow, taking over the once-palatial Spaso House, and dispatching well-regarded William C. Bullitt as ambassador. But no sooner was he installed than Bullitt had stormily requested reassignment, detailing a list of Soviet insults, some pointlessly petty, others less so, such as the Soviets’ reneging on an earlier promise not to actively support the Communist Party in the United States. Bullitt, as it happened, was an old friend of Patterson’s, a member of the same secret society at Yale, an old-style, speak-your-truth, no-nonsense businessman; Patterson had originally planned to visit Moscow while Bullitt was ambassador. But Bullitt had left, was now U.S. ambassador in Paris; and the new American Ambassador to Moscow was Joseph E. Davies, a smooth, well-meaning Chicago lawyer. Davies was the husband of the immensely rich Marjorie Merriweather Post and, more important, a Roosevelt loyalist who, unlike Bullitt, was doing his best to tell the president only what he wanted to hear about his new partners in the Soviet Union: one example was his notorious message to a complaisant Roosevelt to the effect that “Premier Stalin…in my considered opinion, is a simple, decent man who is only trying to get his house in order, despite many provocations.”
Coincidentally, during the ten days in August 1937 when Alicia and her father were in Moscow, roughly a half mile from their hotel, in the high-ceilinged, grimy Hall of Justice, the second of Stalin’s infamous “show trials” was winding down; with the pathetic parade of Stalin’s former comrades in arms, men such as Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, hollowed out by degradation and torture, forced to admit absurdities of guilt, treasonous behavior, spying for Germany. Neither Patterson nor Alicia sought admittance to the trials, though they were aware of their existence. They were also aware of the divergence of views on what was taking place between the official Soviet line, echoed by such influential voices as the New York Times’s Walter Duranty and Ambassador Davies, to the effect that the guilty verdicts and death sentences were clearly on the level, rough justice of a sort, and obviously justified, as proved by the prisoners’ admissions of espionage; and the opposing perspective, the grim truths privately provided by junior officials at the embassy, such as a young friend Alicia made at the time, the twenty-seven-year-old George F. Kennan, later architect of the State Department’s “containment policy” in the 1950s.
The Pattersons were staying at the Metropol, once a hotel in czarist days, later a Soviet office building, now more or less a hotel again. But whenever they tried to walk out the door, even to stroll around the block, there was always a so-called “guide,” sometimes two of them, in their black suits, blocking their way, telling them where they could and mostly couldn’t go. Partly to escape these clumsy minders, Patterson and Alicia would often stop in at the American Embassy, which Ambassador Davies was in the process of refurbishing with new electrical fixtures, including freezers for the chocolate ice cream his wife was partial to, and a phone system designed to be free of Soviet surveillance, which it never was. But the embassy itself was its own kind of dream zone, thanks to Ambassador Davies’s bland confidence as to Premier Stalin’s peasantlike benevolence and good intentions. After one meeting with fellow Chicagoan Davies, as Patterson told his daughter, the ambassador, speaking of Stalin, declared that he could never “distrust a fellow with such a twinkle in his eye.”
Fortunately George Kennan could get free sometimes to provide a reality check; as when one afternoon, spotting her sitting in the embassy reading room, he took her out for a drive in his car, which with embassy license plates could travel unimpeded by the Intourist “guides.” So for an hour they left the antiseptic main boulevards, traveled down side streets, some just next door to the big hotels and government buildings, where she could see the ordinary citizens of socialism’s “great experiment” in their tattered clothing, rags on their feet instead of shoes, lined up outside shops for food and clothing that all too evidently had little food or clothing within, and sometimes, as she noted, “bent over, like peasants in a field, picking through piles of garbage for a next meal.” Another unmediated glimpse of the realities of the Soviet state occurred while she and her father were actually driving in an official Intourist car to an exhibit of workers’ art. The guide appeared to make a sudden detour, though to what was obviously a predetermined destination: a small square, where on first sight could be seen a listless gathering, in fact of presentably dressed men and women, leaning against a building, holding placards at their sides. However, as soon as the Intourist car came into view, the crowd leaped into action, running into the street, yelling, chanting, brandishing their placards at the Pattersons. “These are Soviet citizens,” the guide explained, “who wish to praise the death of all the guilty traitors and enemies of the state.” Alicia remembered her father clamping his big hand on the shoulder of their secret policeman–guide, saying, “Just get us the hell out of here.”
IT’S WORTH ASKING, at least rhetorically, what Alicia took away from these two extraordinary trips, one to a Europe teetering between peace and war, the other to Stalin’s Soviet Union, with its grim stage-set version of a “workers’ paradise,” real-world big-game expeditions, one might call them, to the true dark continents of the 1930s. Not for a moment, then or later, did she ever consider herself as anything but a bystander, a tagalong, as important personages, her father among them, shook hands with Fascists and Communists, exchanged “positions” via interpreters, breathed one another’s cigarette smoke; nor did she expect, as a more-or-less young person of her time, that any of the busy, bustling men would turn to her for her opinion of larger matters, or even suppose she had one. Alicia, however, no matter how academically unschooled, was a quick study, educating herself where and how she could. In a future yet invisible, she would become a prominent liberal Democrat, an internationalist; she would strongly, and sometimes bravely, oppose the witch-hunt defamation of a generation of leftists, “pinkos,” Communist sympathizers, and so on. But at the same time, even when some of the people she most admired—as if they couldn’t help themselves—kept insisting over the years that the Soviet “experiment” was essentially benign, willfully misunderstood, and so on, she never forgot what she saw, and what she learned, on the side streets of Moscow.