Dr. Vadim J. Birstein

In late May 1944, a group of four American officials headed by US Vice President Henry A. Wallace visited the Soviet Far East on the way to China. The group included John N. Hazard, an expert on Soviet law who was deputy director of the Soviet branch of the Lend-Lease Administration, John Carter Vincent, Counselor to the American Embassy in Chongqing and Owen Lattimore, a well-known China specialist and Mongolian-speaker from the Office of War Information.

The purpose of the mission, initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was to visit the Soviet Union’s Far East and Central Asia as goodwill envoys and then to continue to China for a meeting with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The book that Wallace wrote about the trip, Soviet Asian Mission, published in 1946, triggered a storm of criticism, especially when it became clear he had apparently been completely duped by the Soviets. Both Wallace and Lattimore considered the NKVD organization, Dalstroi (an acronym of a Russian phrase meaning ”Far North Construction Trust”), “a combination TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] and Hudson’s Bay Company.”

Their attitude became especially embarrassing six years later after the memoirs of Swiss citizen Elinor Lipper, a former Kolyma prisoner, which described Wallace’s visit to Magadan from the point of view of a labor camp inmate, were published in English. Since then, numerous additional Gulag survivor memoirs describing the event have appeared, which make Wallace and Lattimore’s enthusiastic descriptions of Dalstroi even harder to understand.

Click here to read the full article, which was published as part of the "e-Dossier" series of the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars