9

Forbidden Love

“You will remember the unprecedented shuttle bombing of June 21st to July 5th in which American B-17 Flying Fortresses flew from England to Russia,” wrote Howard Whitman in his opening line in an article for the New York Daily News. Whitman was referring to the Frantic II shuttle mission. To General Deane’s relief, there was no mention of the German raid on the US air bases and the damage it had done to the American Air Force and more generally to Soviet-American relations. Still, Whitman’s article, which first appeared on July 19, 1944, was soon picked up by numerous US newspapers, created a public-relations disaster of a different nature. He wrote about relations between American men and Soviet women at the Poltava-area bases—a topic previously taboo in American, to say nothing of Soviet, coverage of the shuttle-bombing operations.

Whitman was a fairly well known reporter at the time. Before starting to write for the Daily News, he had covered the world war for the London Daily Express. After the war he published a number of popular books, including Let’s Tell the Truth about Sex (1948), on the need to educate children about sexual life. Sex was also the main subject of his July 1944 Daily News article. The title left no doubt about its content: “Nude Welcome to Russia Shocks U.S. Bomber Pilots.” Other newspapers ran the article under equally provocative titles. The one chosen by the Chicago Tribune editors was “See Russia and Blush, Verdict of U.S. Flyers.” “You join the air forces and you expect to see the world, but you probably don’t expect to see it in the nude,” read the opening sentence of the piece.¹

Whitman filed his dispatch from Britain, where he interviewed American pilots who had just returned from Poltava. One of them recounted how he and his comrades had stumbled into a pond full of naked men and women taking a bath. The Soviets were not ashamed of their bodies and invited the Americans to join them in the warm water. “Finally a girl comes up to one of our fellows and motions him to take his shorts off,” one of the pilots allegedly told Whitman. “It was funny seeing her walk up like that without a thing on.” Other pilots had juicer stories to share. According to one of them, a Soviet officer approached the Americans with a question: “How many women do you want?” Whitman wrote that the officer “was prepared to provide the customary contingent of registered camp followers” and was disappointed by the pilots’ answer: “I’m afraid we don’t do things that way.” One of the pilots explained to Whitman the norms of sexual life in the Red Army. “In Russia each soldier is allowed to visit official army brothels every so often, more or less like we go to the post exchange. Russian soldiers do not pay anything if they stick to the regular ration, but if they want to make more frequent visits they have to pay a fee.”²

Whitman never named his sources, and it is not clear whether he invented parts of his story or whether the pilots had played a prank on a naïve reporter, but the article had an explosive effect at the US mission in Moscow. Everyone there, from General Deane to the lowest clerk, knew that the Red Army did not have brothels for its officers and soldiers, and the story about regular visits to brothels came straight from Wehrmacht practice. With no brothels or “registered camp followers” available, the Soviets could not have offered the Americans a “customary contingent,” although some Americans reported that in the early days at the bases Red Army officers encouraged them to dance with Soviet women.

The bathing story had some factual basis but was apparently exaggerated either by Whitman or by his informants. Franklyn Holzman, who was stationed at Myrhorod, described his bathing experience there in a letter sent home to Brooklyn on June 30, 1944: “I went swimming this afternoon. A lot of Russian fellows and girls were there. The fellows mostly went in nude. Some would hold themselves, but others made no attempt to hide.” He added: “The girls are a little more careful.” Holzman’s fellow radar operator at Myrhorod, Palmer Myhra, recalled that he and his friends watched local women coming to the river to wash their clothes and take a bath. “As we would slowly glide by we could see many of them didn’t bother with swimming suits,” wrote Myhra decades later. “Why waste cloth on a swimming suit? They probably had been bathing in the river this way for a long time.”

Myhra was not there to judge local customs. Writing that he and other Americans “wore swimming trunks or cut off old trousers,” he also remarked: “most of us farm boys remembered that wasn’t always necessary back home.” He drew no conclusions about mixed bathing, which was rooted in medieval and early modern traditions of Slavic village life and became a cliché in Western travel literature about Russia. Neither Myhra nor Holzman made any connection between nude bathing and sex. A day earlier Holzman had written to his parents, describing the town of Myrhorod: “This town is fine, although the women are a little too moral for your son.”³

Whitman’s article threatened to aggravate growing tensions in Soviet-American relations, and Deane’s subordinates in Moscow rushed to call a press conference debunking his account. The State Department in Washington issued a press release, citing American officers who had been stationed at the bases and now denied the story, stressing the “utmost hospitality and courtesy” offered to the Americans by their Soviet hosts.

Ironically, Whitman’s article appeared at a time when relations between American men and Soviet women at the Poltava-area bases actually were becoming a problem, though not of the kind imagined by Whitman or his sources. On the contrary, the Soviets were doing their best to disrupt any liaisons that the American airmen had managed to establish with Soviet women.⁴ At Poltava and other American bases, SMERSH officers alternated between the roles of chaperones and puritans, allowing local women to date American allies when this was found useful and preventing it when it was not. The Americans resented such restrictions. Conflict over dating rights became a key factor in disenchanting GIs with their Soviet allies.

On Monday, July 10, about a week before the publication of Whitman’s article, Major Albert Lepawsky, now the commandant of the Eastern Command headquarters, sat down to write a memo to Major General Walsh. As noted earlier, Lepawsky, the most senior American officer of “Russian” descent at the bases, was on the SMERSH watch list. This was in part because, as described in a Soviet counterintelligence report, he “is carefully studying our officer and civilian staff and taking an interest in those of his enlisted men who have ties of any kind with Russians.” Such ties were indeed the main theme of Lepawsky’s memo, the subject line of which read: “Reported Incidents Involving American Soldiers and Russian Personnel.”⁵

Lepawsky reported on a number of incidents that had taken place in Poltava over the previous weekend. On Friday, July 7, First Lieutenant Edward A. Coutts had been conversing with two women who were suddenly attacked by a Soviet man in civilian clothing. The attacker kicked them, shouted something in Russian, and chased them away. On the same evening, Technician 4th Class Judson J. Sorrell had a date with a local woman in the Poltava Corpus Park, the city’s main attraction and site of the recent funeral of Petr Lidov and his fellow reporters. Mindful of a briefing from his superiors, Sorrell did not dismiss the possibility that the girl he was meeting might be a Soviet spy seeking information about the Americans, but his suspicions were almost completely dispelled fifteen minutes into the date. As Sorrell, who spoke no Ukrainian or Russian, tried to communicate with the Ukrainian woman, who spoke no English, a man in Red Army uniform suddenly attacked his date. As Sorrell told Lepawsky, “after saying a few words to her, this man kicked her, thereby pushing her a distance of several feet.” After that, the attacker and the victim walked in different directions, leaving Sorrell on his own to make sense of what had happened.

The attacks continued the next day, Saturday, July 8. As Staff Sergeant T. H. Northway was speaking to his Ukrainian date in a Poltava park, a man and a woman in civilian clothing approached the couple. As Northway described what happened to Lepawsky, “The man had some heated words with … [his] friend, and then slapped her, continuing to talk to her in a scolding manner.” As in Sorrell’s case, the girl and her attackers then went off in different directions. Like Sorrell, Northway did not get into a fight: both were under instructions not to engage in conflicts with the Soviets. Also like Sorrell, he did not know what to make of the incident. His first guess was that the couple who had approached them had been the girl’s parents, and then noticed that the woman was too young to be the girl’s mother. Northway had already arranged another meeting with the girl later that day and hoped that she would explain what had actually happened, but she did not show up for the second date. Northway “does not blame her in the least,” wrote Lepawsky in his report.⁶

Lepawsky got a better understanding of what was going on after interviewing Corporal Peter Nicolaeff, a Russian-speaking native of Odesa who, like Lepawsky himself, came from a family of émigrés from the Russian Empire and was on the SMERSH espionage suspects list. Nicolaeff and Technician Sergeant Ralph Mowery met in the park with two Red Army women, one a lieutenant, the other a private. They were sitting on a bench when a woman in a Red Army lieutenant’s uniform approached them and “spoke to the girls in an insulting tone.” Then three men passed by, two of them in military uniform and one in civilian clothes, making similarly insulting remarks. The words they used were “whore” and “German whore,” but at some point “uncomplimentary” references were made with regard to the “American Allies” as well. Nicolaeff stated that one of the men involved in the incident was a member of the secret police—he was carrying a pistol and was identified as such by Nicolaeff’s date. When Nicolaeff and Mowery left the bench and walked their dates away from the trouble spot, local boys followed them, verbally assaulting the girls.⁷

Everyone Lepawsky spoke to was under the impression that the Soviets had issued a ban prohibiting local girls from dating American GIs. He received similar reports from Myrhorod, where the American commander, Major Callahan, had demanded an explanation from his Soviet counterpart. He was assured that these were isolated incidents and not sanctioned by the authorities. Lepawsky was eager to give the Soviets the benefit of the doubt and wanted to believe that the same applied to Poltava. But he also asked General Walsh to conduct a special investigation of the incidents while imposing a temporary ban on GI visits to Poltava and asking the Soviet Air Force commanders for proof that the incidents had not been coordinated. He passed on the information to his superiors, leaving them to decide those matters.⁸

The American commanders knew all along that the Soviets were opposed to personal relations between US airmen and Red Army women. On April 25, General Perminov had declared to his US counterparts: “the temper of the local population is important. The question of vodka, brothels—all these things must be liquidated. These problems must be decided soon.” In May he had complained to Colonel Kessler that unwanted advances from the Americans had so embarrassed one of the local girls working at the base camp that she stopped coming to work. Kessler found the accusations unfounded, but the American commanders did whatever was in their power to avoid upsetting their Soviet hosts. They instructed the GIs to stay away from Red Army women.

American troops arriving at the Poltava-area bases in May had already been instructed not to “expect the usual social freedom in their relations with Russian girls,” as Lepawsky noted. The Fifteenth Air Force pilots were warned before their first shuttle-bombing mission to Poltava in early June: “Russian women are quite friendly and open. Do not mistake the friendliness as an invitation to further intimacy.” The Americans were advised that Red Army women were prohibited from dating them and would be punished if caught violating that rule. Many believed that this policy was the reason for the transfer of the most attractive Soviet woman at Poltava, who held the rank of lieutenant, to the Myrhorod base. The logic behind the American indoctrination effort was that men were honor-bound to protect Soviet women in uniform by not dating them.⁹

US military commanders also wanted their men to forget the possibility of marrying a Soviet woman. In Moscow, General Deane spelled out the policy in a memorandum that he forwarded to Colonel Kessler, at the very beginning of shuttle-bombing operations in early May 1944. The memorandum read: “If a member of the Forces of the U.S. on duty in the USSR marries a citizen of the Soviet Union while in Russia, he will be immediately relieved of his assignment and be transferred to a station outside of the USSR. Experience of the State Department and the U.S. Army and Navy, while serving in the USSR, has shown that complications and differences have arisen when an American marries a Russian. To eliminate these embarrassments, marriage will be discouraged. In previous instances the American citizen has never been able to depart with his wife.”¹⁰

While recognizing as legitimate Soviet efforts to prevent airmen from dating women in uniform, the American commanders were not prepared to prohibit their subordinates from dating civilians. They considered such a policy neither fair nor enforceable. The curfew hour was 11:00 p.m., after which no American soldier was supposed be in the cities, but Soviet sentries would occasionally catch Americans staying overnight at the homes of their dates. The Americans found civilian women more attractive than those in military uniform. “The local girls … were mostly Ukrainian and had opportunities to dress up some and look more attractive,” remembered Palmer Myhra, who was stationed at Myrhorod. “Most of the girls were a little husky and strong, but not all. Most had dark hair and blondes were rather rare except those in the Army as many Russians especially from the North were blond.” Myhra did not date any Soviet women. Others did, however. In June, when American troops were moved from Pyriatyn to a camp at the airfield seven miles away, they managed to visit their girlfriends despite a temporary prohibition on visiting the city. “How this was done at a distance of 12 kilometers, without transportation being made available, is one of those secrets that only the GI in the American Army in Russia can answer,” wrote an historian of the American mission at Poltava.¹¹

At first the Soviets, who were strict about preventing contacts with women in uniform, seemed much more relaxed when it came to dates with civilians. Throughout May and June, there were almost no reports of Soviet military personnel or civilians approaching Americans and verbally or physically abusing their dates. An investigation into the matter launched by Major Lepawsky’s report and conducted by Inspector General Major Ralph P. Dunn of Eastern Command showed that such incidents increased drastically in early July: there were thirteen attempts to disrupt dates between July 3 and 14, almost all of them took place in Corpus Park in Poltava. It looked as if all and sundry took part: of the thirteen reported cases, five involved civilians, four Red Army officers, and three Red Army soldiers.

In one case, a Russian-speaking American sergeant was approached by two Red Army lieutenants while on a date with a local woman named “Viola.” “Without anything being said,” the sergeant later reported, “both lieutenants struck Viola with their clubs, one hitting her on the back of the right hand and the other hitting on the back of the left wrist.” The sergeant stepped between the attackers and his date. One lieutenant then took Viola aside and discussed something with her. The other told the sergeant that they simply wanted to protect him and other Americans from venereal disease, as many of the girls whom the Americans were dating had also dated Germans and become infected. Then a woman in civilian clothing approached the sergeant and Viola; on hearing what had happened, she made one of the lieutenants apologize. Surprising everyone, she introduced herself as a Red Army lieutenant.

Given the tensions aroused by these incidents, it was not surprising that Soviet attacks on women who dated Americans produced conflict between servicemen of the two armies. On the evening of July 14, a fight broke out between Soviet and American servicemen in Myrhorod. Two Red Army officers approached an American NCO and his girlfriend sitting on a bench in the park. One of the officers hit the girl, the American hit him back, and then one of the Soviets hit the American on the head with his pistol butt. When the American came to his senses, he found himself in a hospital. The US commanders sounded the alarm, issuing an immediate order prohibiting American personnel from leaving the bases after dark, which was significantly earlier (about 8:45 p.m. in July) than the established curfew of 11:00 p.m. The order also stated that “American troops will not be subjected to insult and injury with impunity.”¹²

On July 17, three days after the incident, Colonel Paul T. Cullen, who was commanding the bases during Kessler’s temporary absence, approached General Perminov and demanded explanations. Perminov, reported Cullen the next day, “stated officially and solemnly that neither Soviet military nor government authorities have issued any prohibition or restriction upon the association of Soviet women with US personnel.” Cullen, whose main concern, apart from the safety of his troops, was the maintenance of good working relations with the Soviets, asked the officers under his command to pass Perminov’s words on to their enlisted men. He also used the occasion to appeal to his men’s sense of loyalty to their own women back home. He asked the GIs to imagine that the situation was reversed, with Soviets stationed on US territory. In that case, suggested Cullen, “individual members of this command would be irritated and provoked that their wives and sweethearts permitted themselves to be courted by others.” Further, Cullen tried to educate his men in the basics of Soviet law, instructing subordinates that “the Soviet government does not tolerate prostitution and does everything in its power to stamp it out, usually by exile or confinement.”¹³

Colonel Cullen was right: the Soviets were out to eradicate prostitution. In the course of the 1930s they had reversed their early postrevolutionary policies, which treated prostitution as a social problem generated by capitalist society, and had begun to treat it as a crime, imprisoning prostitutes and pimps and declaring them class enemies. The official position was simple. The Soviet regime had liquidated the social condition that caused prostitution, and it had ceased to exist as a social phenomenon. Now the Soviets were eager to prevent a recurrence of prostitution with the arrival of the Americans, whose society, according to their interpretation of Marxism, was more than capable of generating it.

At first glance, the US Army was in agreement with the Soviets on the issue. In France after D-Day, the French authorities wanted to regulate the sexual activity of American soldiers by creating army brothels to remove it from public sight in streets and parks. The US Army commanders, apprehensive about a possible outburst on the part of wives and girlfriends of GIs at home, refused to comply. The Americans and the French agreed that sexual activity was essential to keep military morale high and soldiers fighting but disagreed on the role of the army in making provision for such activity. Like the Americans, the Soviets also made no such provision. They tried to control the spread of venereal disease, but otherwise their army was left to its own devices.

Of course, there was no less hunger for sex in the Red Army than in any other. As a Soviet Army veteran recalled, “death, food, and sex” were the soldiers’ most common subjects of conversation. But if there were funeral detachments to deal with the first and field kitchens to take care of the second, the third was not addressed by any service of the Red Army. Sex was not discussed in Stalinist society, which meant in wartime that the army was supposed to take care of the soldiers’ desires at the expense of the civil population. Once the Red Army crossed the Soviet border in the summer and fall of 1944, women, especially German women, were considered legitimate trophies, with Soviet commanders turning a blind eye to the sexual crimes of their subordinates or even encouraging rape, as in East Prussia.

Then there were the army’s “internal reserves,” or women who served in the army and were considered legitimate objects of sexual advances by their male counterparts. There were close to a half million such women—Air Force pilots, flak operators, machine gunners, medical doctors and nurses, telephone operators and construction workers, to name some of the most popular occupations in which the Red Army employed women during the war. No matter what position they took and what functions they performed, most Red Army officers and soldiers saw them first and foremost as sex objects. The situation of women in mixed units—and most Red Army units were—was especially difficult. Given the predominance of men in the army, there was intense competition for the affections of women, with higher-ranking commanders emerging victorious over their subordinates. In some cases, women themselves referred to their military barracks as harems.¹⁴

When it came to sexual liaisons with foreigners on their territory, however, the Soviets tried to prevent them in any way possible. In the settlements retaken from the Germans, the Soviet officials, unlike the French, never publicly humiliated women who had “collaborated horizontally” with the Germans during the occupation—since it raised the issue of political loyalty on the most intimate level, the subject seemed too potentially wounding to the pride of the regime to be addressed in public. The authorities preferred to maintain their puritan façade, refusing to recognize sexual desire as a legitimate subject of government policy in the military and civilian contexts alike.

With regard to sexual encounters between American servicemen and their Soviet dates, a policy was adopted but not publicly disclosed. SMERSH officers at the Poltava-area bases were specifically instructed to limit contacts and break those not controlled by the secret police. The rationale given to the Americans by those who attacked their dates—that they were trying to protect the Americans from venereal disease—was not credible, as some Americans noticed that Soviet men did not react when Americans dated women who “would go with anyone” but became aggressive when GIs dated attractive girls. Those Americans who could understand Russian heard attackers reproaching girls for not going out with Soviets, who apparently were not good enough for them, but dating Germans or Americans instead.

The young women who were prevented from meeting with Americans thought that there were cultural reasons behind the prohibition. One of them confided to a Russian-speaking American officer that after spending two years under German occupation, the local Ukrainian girls had seen that “the Germans were much more cultured and civilized than the Russians, and if these girls were allowed to see that the Americans were even more cultured and civilized than the Russians in their way of living, they obviously would prefer the Americans to the Russians, and the Russians would not want that to happen.”¹⁵

The American commanders believed that they could recognize a pattern. The jealousy expressed by local men toward Americans who were dating pretty girls, and attacks on women who allegedly had dated Germans, resembled behavior that American servicemen had already encountered elsewhere in Europe at the time.

Envy of Americans was part of everyday experience in Britain, the launching pad of the American-led invasion of Europe. The Americans had better uniforms, which made them all look like officers, had more money than their British counterparts and, no less important, had access to such scarce goods as American cigarettes and nylon stockings, highly valued in wartime. All that made them popular with British women—that, at least, was the opinion of British men. “They think they can buy them body and soul, if they take them into a pub and buy them a drink,” wrote one British soldier. “What chance has a poor Tommy with a couple of bob jingling in his pocket?”¹⁶

American soldiers’ success with women created even more anxiety among British soldiers stationed overseas than those at home. By the fall of 1942, the British military command in the Middle East had handled more than 200,000 divorce cases initiated in Britain by the wives of soldiers stationed in the region. Whatever the reason behind the wave of divorce, it was easy to imagine that British women were leaving their husbands to marry Americans. The “American problem” even affected the family of Winston Churchill. His daughter-in-law, Pamela Churchill, spent her nights in the company of Averell Harriman, then the administrator of the Lend-Lease program in London, while her lawful husband, Major Randolph Churchill, served in North Africa. Pamela Churchill did not marry Harriman until twenty-eight years later, but many GIs married their British girlfriends right away despite the numerous obstacles created by their commanders, who wanted their soldiers to stay single and focus on their duties.¹⁷

In July 1942 the US Army journal Yank, distributed among GIs in Britain, ran the headline: “Don’t Promise Her Anything—Marriage Outside the U.S. Is Out.” It was probably welcomed not only by British soldiers concerned about competition on the home front but by the wives and girlfriends of GIs back in the United States. Interviewed for Life magazine in September 1944, Sonya Nansen, a seventeen-year-old counter girl whose boyfriend was serving in Australia, asked the magazine reporter whether he knew anything about “two shiploads of wives of American soldiers” who had allegedly come from Australia. She was not far off the mark. Altogether about 30,000 war brides came to America from Britain, and about 70,000 from Europe as a whole.¹⁸

In France, ravaged by occupation and war, the Americans seemed even more popular with local women than they were in the United Kingdom. The language barrier was minor compared to the dire financial conditions in which many women found themselves after the Germans left the country. “In France everything was in short supply except alcoholic beverages, bread as only the French could make it, and women,” remembered one GI. The Americans wanted all three and had much to offer in return. US Army supply stores had cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, and, last but not least, soap, which could readily be exchanged for sexual favors. Prostitution, with sex exchanged for money obtained by selling American goods on the black market, flourished in French towns and cities—to the outrage of French civilians, who had seen prostitutes thriving from liaisons with the Germans a few months earlier and were now appalled to see them doing even better with the arrival of the Americans.

Even so, few French were prepared to condemn liaisons with Americans as harshly as “horizontal collaboration” with Germans. In 1945, when a writer for the Journal de la Marne compared the women walking the streets of Reims with Americans to the whores who had populated the very same streets during the German occupation, he was heavily criticized by his readers and forced to apologize. Americans were regarded as liberators, not occupiers. Yet the humiliation that came with the German occupation continued to influence public attitudes toward women who had chosen to sleep with foreigners in uniform. Once again, the reputation of the entire nation was at stake.¹⁹

Parallels with Britain and France aside, the Americans found themselves in a unique situation in the Soviet Union. What had been spontaneous manifestations of insecurity, jealousy, and national pride by citizens in Western Europe took on the characteristics of state policy in the Soviet Union, where government agencies claimed the right to monitor interaction between their citizens and foreigners. “The usual problems of social and sexual relations were given a special twist in the Russian project, largely as a result of unique Russian reactions on this subject,” wrote Albert Lepawsky later.²⁰

American airmen who dated Soviet women or were suspected of facilitating such dates found themselves under the watchful eye of SMERSH. Among the main figures on the Soviet list of espionage suspects was Albert Jaroff. The first lieutenant was under suspicion because of his position as head of the intelligence unit at Myrhorod and because of his outgoing personality, which led him to befriend Red Army personnel and locals alike. There was also the allegation that Jaroff and his Jewish family had been linked with the White movement during the Russian Revolution. Jaroff had come to the Myrhorod base in May via the Middle East route. Fluent in Russian, Jaroff was eager to establish contacts with the Soviets. He enjoyed a drink or two with Red Army officers and, by all accounts, was happy to be among people whose language and culture he shared. “I have never seen a more friendly attitude,” confided Jaroff to Raymond Davies, the Canadian reporter who had come to Poltava to report on the landing of the first Flying Fortresses on June 2.²¹

Jaroff had aroused the suspicion of the SMERSH officers early on. His openness to contacts with his Soviet counterparts was interpreted as an attempt to develop trust and potentially recruit agents; his visits to Soviet commanders in the area with offers of showing American movies were perceived as an unobtrusive way of spying on Soviet military installations. He was also suspected of eavesdropping on Red Air Force officers’ conversations. His inquiries about areas outside the Poltava-area bases seemed even more suspicious. On May 25, Jaroff told a Soviet commander visiting Myrhorod that in 1936 he had visited the Soviet Union as a tourist, with stopovers in Vladivostok, Moscow, and his native Odesa. He asked the visiting officer for assistance in locating a certain employee of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco in 1936–1937 who apparently had helped him arrange the trip. In early June in Myrhorod Jaroff asked a Soviet acquaintance, Captain Ivanov, who happened to be an undercover SMERSH officer, to check the address of a woman he had apparently met in Moscow in 1936.²²

Predictably, Jaroff did not get far with either of his requests. His inquires were viewed with suspicion as a way of acquiring information about Soviet citizens or recruiting agents. Sveshnikov and Zorin increased surveillance of Jaroff and came up with new “proof” of his espionage activities. “Surveillance of his behavior among the Americans has established that despite his insignificant service occupation and rank, the commanders of the American Air Force group reckon with him,” reported Sveshnikov and Zorin to Moscow. In their experience, only a secret-police or counterintelligence officer could be respected or even feared by his superiors. The two regarded the US Air Force from the perspective of Stalin’s police state. They had no other perspective to rely on, nor the power of imagination to suggest that things might work differently in the United States.²³

In mid-July, around the time when that Soviet lieutenant attacked an American NCO and sent him to hospital, the Soviets demanded that the US commanders recall Jaroff from the Soviet Union. His superiors in the Eighth Air Force in Britain were not happy, not being aware of the SMERSH tactics. They blamed him for the problems with the Soviets and wanted him gone. “Return this officer to the Ninth [Air Force], the Eighth does not want him,” went the cable to Myrhorod. The reason for the Soviet demand that remained unknown to the Americans was spelled out in great detail in SMERSH internal documents.

Jaroff, claimed the SMERSH officers, was trying to use the Soviet command’s prohibition on dating between Red Army women and Americans, along with the resulting dissatisfaction among the GIs, to incite conflicts between the two sides. According to the SMERSH report, during the first half of July, at the height of attacks on the American dates, Jaroff had arranged to bring sixty-five Soviet nurses from the nearby military hospital to the American camp at Myrhorod. They watched a movie with the Americans and ate and danced at their restaurant before being taken back to the hospital. SMERSH considered that a provocation, suggesting that Jaroff expected the Soviet authorities to order the Soviet nurses back to their hospital, which would provoke an outburst among the Americans. SMERSH gave itself credit for handling the provocation smoothly and allowing the evening to proceed as planned, But they wanted Jaroff out of the country.²⁴

With Jaroff out of the picture, the Myrhorod SMERSH officers turned their attention to Jaroff’s assistant in the base’s intelligence unit, Sergeant Philip Tandet. Like Jaroff, Tandet was a fluent Russian speaker and, having been born to Russian parents in the Chinese city of Harbin, was thought to have had links with the White movement. According to SMERSH reports, Tandet not only spread “fabrications to the effect that Russian girls were not allowed to meet with Americans” but also dated some of those girls himself. He was spotted on a date with Yekaterina Stankevich, an employee of Voentorg, the Red Army retail department that ran the restaurant for the Americans and sold them Soviet-made goods. The young woman, originally from Moscow, was, like her colleagues, a civilian employee in Voentorg. While military personnel were under strict orders not to date Americans, civilian employees at the bases fell into a gray area. SMERSH considered them to be under the same restrictions as the military but had trouble enforcing the prohibition.²⁵

What made the SMERSH officers especially nervous about Tandet’s liaison with Stankevich was that, according to their informers, Tandet wanted Stankevich to find a rental apartment in Myrhorod where he could live with her. He also promised to take her with him to the United States. Stankevich confided to her friends at Voentorg that she was ready to go, but only if she could take her young daughter along. The SMERSH officers demanded that Stankevich’s superiors fire her and send her back to Moscow, which was done on July 21. Before her departure, Stankevich apparently told Tandet that she had been fired for dating him and named the counterintelligence officer she believed responsible for her dismissal, Captain Ivanov.

Tandet promised to teach Ivanov a lesson. Ivanov, who knew about the threat, decided to get Tandet first. On the night of July 23 he learned that Tandet had visited another woman, named Boldyreva, who had previously shared a rented room with Stankevich. The Americans were supposed to be back in camp by 11:00 p.m., but Tandet spent the night in Boldyreva’s room. At 1:30 a.m., Ivanov showed up at Boldyreva’s building and arrested Tandet for violating the curfew. He was duly reprimanded and sentenced by his US commanders to six days of manual labor. Ivanov had a victory but wanted more. He asked the Red Army officers running Voentorg to dismiss Boldyreva. Interestingly, he received an unexpected rebuff from General Perminov himself.²⁶

What SMERSH saw as a victory was considered a complete disaster by the Soviet military commanders. The arrest of Tandet, the firing of Stankevich, and the requested dismissal of Boldyreva only worsened Soviet-American relations at the bases, already tense because of the attacks on women dating the Americans. If anything, such attacks supported the accusations made by Tandet and others that the Soviets were prohibiting their women from dating Americans and undermined the solemn statements to the contrary Perminov had made to Colonel Cullen. Moreover, the Myrhorod Voentorg was losing staff at a record rate, and if the tendency to fire female employees implicated in dating Americans continued, Perminov might soon be left without civilian help at the bases.

General Perminov complained about Ivanov’s actions to Sveshnikov, but to little avail. Sveshnikov told him that he had “directives from Moscow to break off relations between all Russians, especially girls, and the Americans.” Perminov realized that his only hope was to appeal to the higher-ups. In the growing conflict between the Air Force commander and SMERSH officers, only one authority had the power to intervene decisively—the Communist Party. On July 26, Perminov sent a report to the supreme party official in the Red Army Air Force, General Nikolai Shimanov, who was both a political appointee in the Military Council of the Red Army Air Force and head of the Aviation Department in the party’s Central Committee in Moscow. In his report to Shimanov, Perminov described the arrest of Tandet, the firing of Stankevich, the SMERSH demand to fire Boldyreva, and an earlier episode at the Myrhorod base in which a SMERSH officer had ordered two women from Voentorg to get out of a car driven by Americans.

Perminov did not dispute Moscow’s orders to Sveshnikov but questioned the way in which SMERSH implemented them and went about its work. In Perminov’s view, SMERSH tactics played into the hands of enemies—supporters of the Revolutionary-era anti-Soviet “White Guards,” as the Soviets now referred to American personnel born in Russia or elsewhere to Russian parents. The “Whites” allegedly wanted to undermine relations between the allies. “Obviously, one must know how to go about ‘breaking off’ acquaintances and not just shoot from the hip, as that affects working relations, creates new conflicts, and helps the White Guards develop their activity,” wrote Perminov. He also requested permission not to fire Boldyreva, “as no other compromising materials about her have been presented to me.” He added: “Following that line would mean dispersing all civilian women employees in the immediate future.”

In the same report he condemned even more strongly SMERSH efforts to threaten the local population into breaking off their contacts with the Americans. “I consider such a manner of solving the problem politically harmful,” argued Perminov. “If that’s the way it goes, then repressive measures will have to be taken against half the population of Poltava, Myrhorod, Pyriatyn, and surrounding villages.”²⁷

The report addressed to General Shimanov eventually ended up on the desk of SMERSH head Viktor Abakumov in Moscow, along with a memo signed by Sveshnikov, who wrote that the actions of his subordinates had caused no trouble at all: Tandet did not complain about his arrest, while Boldyreva allegedly decided on her own not to date him again. Sveshnikov was clearly on the defensive. He claimed that Perminov himself was warning civilian employees that liaisons with the Americans were prohibited. Abakumov gave his orders to subordinates orally, leaving no trace in the documents of what they actually were, but after Perminov’s intervention, attacks on women dating Americans ceased. In August, Americans were able to date their Ukrainian girlfriends and stay in Poltava-area parks during hours of darkness until the 11:00 p.m. curfew. SMERSH changed its tactics, putting more emphasis on monitoring liaisons between American men and Ukrainian women and less on brutal suppression.²⁸

The July crisis over dating endured in the memory of Americans at the Poltava air bases, changing their initially positive attitude toward the Soviets. If the Luftwaffe bombing in June had alienated the base commanders, the July events left the rank and file disaffected. August and September would add fresh concerns.