Jack Littlepage
 |
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| Jack Littlepage | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Ivan Eduardovich |
| Occupation | Mining engineer |
| Known for | Employment in the USSR; recipient of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour |
Jack Littlepage was an American mining engineer. He was long employed in the USSR, and was Deputy Commissar of the USSR's Gold Trust in the 1930s. He is one of the recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.[1]
[edit] Biography
Having successfully completed his assignment to return the Caucasian oil fields to production after the Russian Civil War, Alexander Serebrovsky was charged by Joseph Stalin to reform the Soviet gold industry. Serebrovsky immediately travelled to Alaska posing as a simple "Professor of Mines"; his plan was to duplicate American mining techniques in the USSR. At one of the first mines he visited, Serebrovsky met Jack Littlepage, who was a successful mining engineer.[1]
Littlepage flatly turned down Serebrovsky's offer of work in the USSR stating that he "did not like Bolsheviks" as they "seem to have the habit of shooting people, especially engineers." However Serebrovsky persevered and persuaded Littlepage to emigrate to the USSR with his family.[1]
Littlepage arrived on 1 May 1928 with his wife and two young daughters. In a Soviet propaganda leaflet, Littlepage was said to have been "drawn to the Soviet Union by the grand scale of our construction work, the ideas of great Stalin, the chance to unfold his talents freely." The financial incentive was left unstated, but the leaflet, penned by Serebrovsky, soundly reflected at least the non-pecuniary elements by which Littlepage was motivated. Littlepage soon learned Russian, was re-named Ivan Eduardovich and with unflagging drive "set about verifying calculations, designs, estimates, plans of work."[1]
In the following six years, the USSR's gold production outstripped the United States' and was poised to exceed the British Empire's. Unlike many US citizens who emigrated to the USSR at the time, Littlepage was not forced to take up Soviet citizenship nor did the Soviet regime confiscate his US passport as it did in the case of many such emigrees.[2] However he was required to ignore the use of slave labour in the Soviet gold mines. In the midst of the Soviet repressions, Littlepage carried on his work as Deputy Commissar, advising Serebrovsky on the deployment of Alaskan-style prospecting parties in the virgin Soviet gold]] fields.[1]
Despite his skepticism about the regime before he emigrated, Littlepage claimed to believe that the "wreckers" and "saboteurs" condemned at the Soviet show trials were the cause of the poor industrial performance of the USSR.[1]
Littlepage's success earned him the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and a Soviet-built Ford Model A the latter being regarded as one of the most precious gifts of the time in the USSR. Littlepage was to return to the US several times to recruit more engineers into the Soviet gold]] mine industry: at the time of the Great Depression there was never a shortage of willing candidates. Many of the thousands of US workers who emigrated to the USSR at the time in search of work subsequently became victims of the Terror.[1]
Serebrovsky was eventually "unmasked", according to Stalin's own report, as a "vicious enemy of the people" who had delivered no less than 50m gold bars to Leon Trotsky. Dubbed the "Soviet Rockefeller" for his work on the Caucasian oil fields, Serebrovsky was executed and Littlepage was tainted by his connection at Serebrovsky; Littlepage found himself starved of work. Petrified Russian employees refused to come anywhere near him, a friend of an executed "enemy of the people" and a foreigner at a time when foreigners were deeply distrusted by the paranoia which dominated Soviet policy.[3]
Remarkably, Littlepage was one of the few immigrants from the US allowed to leave the USSR during the Terror: those who remained captive were killed or persecuted. Littlepage left the USSR shortly after an interview at the US embassy in Moscow on 22 September 1937 in which he asserted his opinion that Soviet industry Commissar Georgy Pyatakov had organized "wrecking" in various gold mines.[3]
In a series of articles for The Saturday Evening Post Littlepage described a continuing "Far Eastern gold rush" and the "intrepid men and women" prospecting the wastes of Eastern Siberia. Even when responding to questions from the US War Department, Littlepage did not mention the legions of slaves deployed to extract the gold in lethal conditions in the frozen wastlands of the Gulag in north Eastern Siberia.[3]
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken, Penguin, New York, 2008, pp 164-166
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken, Penguin, New York, 2008, pp 164-166, and see Alexander Dolgun, Thomas Sgovio and Victor Herman
- ^ a b c Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken, Penguin, New York, 2008, pp 169-171
