RUTHFULLY YOURS

As one tyranny replaced another, Natalie Makarova was allowed to work with the immigration authorities processing refugees. She may have hoped to make some contact there or gather information that might help the family to get out of the country. Even the faintest possibility had to be followed through.

The following are two extracts from Escape from the Sun: Surviving the Tyrannies of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin by Eugene Schlusser, published last May by Australian Scholarly, $39.95. Each extract is briefly introduced by Eugene Schlusser.

I believe my father Paul learned of his sister-in-law Zinaida’s arrest in Berlin in October 1947. She was accused of spying for the CIA. As my mother Natalie later described it, he then became almost “schizophrenic” with fear.

Paul, now close to desperation, made a drastic and in many ways an inexplicable decision. He resigned from Schanzenbach & Co to take work with the US Occupation Forces. Did he hope that this could give him contacts to help with an escape from Europe? Family lore, often repeated, was that he had been dismissed because he was a foreigner. This was a fabrication, designed to dis-inform every­one as Paul tried to hide his increasingly desperate state. The strain was telling on his health. His blood pressure was high and he seemed to be tired all the time. As medication was not available, he tried water and steam baths to assist with his breathing, cleanse the skin and above all reduce his blood pressure. He improvised a sauna in our living room and tried to replicate the Russian banya. After a period in the sauna he would lie exhausted on the living room sofa trying to get his strength back with an afternoon sleep. We would be sternly instructed to remain quiet, speak in whispers and above all not slam any doors.

It is unclear what information father kept from mother, but she also felt the increasing stress. We all felt it. Loud voices of frustration came from the kitchen more frequently. Their tone of voice revealed their state of mind.

I imagine that when the disputes were not about finances, they were disagreements about Paul’s reasoning, and his plans to get the family out of Europe. Naturally, Natalie worried about his health and the many things he was involved in: his job, his family, the Russian Welfare Society. He had also recently undertaken to help build an Orthodox church in Frankfurt. All this took time, in addition to the long irregular hours he worked. His income had dropped considerably, as his teaching earned him much less than his salary as an engineer. He still had money deposited at Schroders in London but he could not access it.

‘Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” It is difficult to think of any words delivered at any university commencement that had more historical weight than those spoken in the final minutes of George C. Marshall’s speech at Harvard on June 5, 1947.

The venue was carefully chosen as a dignified but noncontroversial place. The speaker was one of the greatest secretaries of state this country ever produced. The words had been crafted and recrafted by some of the most brilliant minds at the State Department and on its Policy Planning Staff. But while key sentences took the high moral ground, there was an urgent political purpose to this declaration by Marshall. He addressed the pressing issue of how to prevent European nations from collapsing into economic ruin and despair, and in some cases suffering a Communist takeover.

Marshall’s speech announced a great act of American statecraft, and marked a significant step away from the prewar, Rooseveltian era of noncommitment in European matters. In this dramatic move, the Truman administration—glumly recognizing it was the only Western country with any money after World War II, shocked by the reports of near-starvation across Europe and desperate to shore up friendly governments—stepped up to the plate.

With an equally frightened American Congress behind it, the government offered huge sums of money to any democratic country in Europe able to come up with a plausible recovery scheme. These countries—and this was a deliberate gesture—could be on either side of the zonal division of Europe established at Yalta; all that was needed was a willingness to produce a rebuilding plan and join in the common effort. America’s aid package was unprecedented in size, threatened no one and therefore ought to have been opposed by no one. Who on earth would want to stop this act of extraordinary generosity? Who could be against the Marshall Plan?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question, because one person would definitely want to stop the scheme: the powerful and increasingly paranoid Joseph Stalin. He feared America’s economic power, was scared stiff of Germans (still) and any future unified Germany, and in fact by this time saw demons everywhere. As Benn Steil details in his brilliant book “The Marshall Plan,” the Soviets had shown ever-greater intransigence throughout 1946 and 1947 in regard to all proposals for the economic rebuilding of Europe and the political reconstitution of the defeated Germany. The exceptions, to be sure, were schemes of theirs that calculated to have all Germany fall into the Eastern orbit. CONTINUE AT SITE