11. The American Dream

On 15 February 1947, the Soviet Politburo approved a law “On the Prohibition of Marriage between Citizens of the USSR and Foreigners.” Those found in violation of the new law were to be charged with anti-Soviet agitation and prosecuted according to article 58 of the Soviet penal code.

The Iron Curtain was coming down between the Soviet Union and the outside world, breaking links established during the war and preventing the establishment of new ones. The state was laying exclusive claim to the loyalty of Soviet men and, more particularly, women, but the justification offered for the adoption of the law was as benign and humanitarian as it could possibly be. “Our women who have married foreigners and found themselves abroad in unaccustomed conditions feel bad and are subject to discrimination,” read the text of the law adopted by the Supreme Soviet in March 1947.¹

It has been argued that the reasons for the introduction of the new law included the dire demographic situation in the So­viet Union, which had lost tens of millions of its citizens in the war. Scholars also point to the regime’s apparent desire to avoid recognition of dual citizenship and thus conflicting loyalties in families created during the war by Soviet citizens on German- occupied territories or in Germany itself, as well as to prevent the formation of such families in Eastern Europe, where there was now a significant Soviet military contingent. Finally, the Soviet law was adopted in the context of World War II laws and reg­ulations prohibiting relationships between German soldiers and East European slave laborers and between American soldiers and German and Austrian women.²

In this essay, I consider the Soviet prohibition on marriag­es with foreigners in the context of growing Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and its former World War II allies, Americans in particular.

I discuss the story of the three airbases in my book Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front (2019), where I document Soviet efforts to break up relationships between American airmen and Soviet women. In this essay, I continue that story into the early Cold War era. The research presented in my book leaves little doubt that the Soviet practice of disrupting relations and pro­hibiting marriages between American and Soviet citizens, driven by ideological zeal, xenophobic distrust of the West, and cul­tural inferiority, began while the USSR and the United States were still allies. The story told in this essay, that of the Ukrainian woman Zinaida Tkachenko and the American airman John Ba­zan, demonstrates in great detail the extent to which the Soviet government and its secret police were prepared to go in order to deny Soviet citizens not only the right but also the opportunity to marry Americans. Although there were no basic changes of policy in that regard between 1944 and 1947, the Soviet attitude toward marriages with foreigners hardened significantly with the start of the Cold War.³

The love story of the thirty-three-year-old American airplane mechanic John J. Bazan and the twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian woman Zinaida Tkachenko began on a summer day in Poltava in 1944.

Zinaida Tkachenko had been born there in 1921 to the family of a blue-collar worker. Before the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941, she managed to complete seven classes of secondary education, get married, and give birth to a baby girl named Liud- myla. She was twenty-three years old when the first Americans showed up in her native city. She soon met John. Born in New York City, John Bazan belonged to a family that counted seven sons and one daughter. Before the war the entire family lived at 867 Van Nest Avenue in the East Bronx. John was the oldest child, born on 4 February 1911. He joined the US Army on 17 April 1942. Army records identified him at the time as a single white male with no dependents. He had completed two years of high school, and his civilian occupation was listed as “technician.”John was of medium height, 68 inches tall, and weighed 147 pounds.

A photo ofJohn Bazan in military uniform that he gave Zin­aida showed a man with an open face and a pleasant, somewhat shy smile. The chevrons on his left shoulder indicated that he held the rank of sergeant. Zinaida also kept another photo of John, pictured in warm winter clothing next to the American barracks at Poltava. Unlike many Ukrainian women who dated Americans, she did not conceal her relations with John from her friends or neighbors. They later recalled that he spoke fluent Rus­sian. His family records indicate that Ukrainian was his mother tongue—the 1940 US Census gave Austria as the birthplace of John’s mother, Catherine, who probably came from either Galicia or Bukovyna, two Ukrainian-speaking regions that belonged to Austria-Hungary before 1918. The two lovebirds could obviously communicate on a variety of topics, and their relations soon devel­oped into something more than a chance sexual encounter. John often showed up at her house on the outskirts of Poltava with parcels of food and gifts. Zinaida spoke of John as her husband.⁴

Oddly, Sergeant Bazan’s liaison with Zinaida Tkachenko at­tracted no attention from SMERSH officers in 1944-45.

But the MGB officers were spurred into action in the spring of 1948, when John Bazan petitioned the American embassy in Moscow for an entry visa to the United States for his fianc6e, Zinaida Tkachenko. He gave his old Bronx address. The MGB bosses in Kyiv wrote to their Zhovkva underlings, giving them three days to put together a plan to investigate Tkachenko. By the end of March 1948 they had established her address in Zhovk- va and were reading her correspondence. In June they recruited a friend of Tkachenko’s with whom she had come to Zhovkva in April 1947 and could report the first results of their work.⁶

Tkachenko had allegedly moved because she did not have a permanent job in Poltava and, to make ends meet, had had to sell all the dresses she got from Bazan. While in Zhovkva, she continued to correspond with Bazan and kept receiving parcels from him. She also tried to get an exit visa to the United States, but her correspondence with John came to an end in February 1948.

When an MGB informer ran into Tkachenko in mid-June 1947, Zinaida informed her that she had married. Her husband, a Red Army soldier who also came from Poltava, had been dis­missed from the service earlier that year. “When I asked her how John was,” reported the agent, “Zina cursed, saying that there was no point in thinking of what could never be and that John had not written her for five months.” According to the MGB report, Zinaida still held an “anti-Soviet and pro-American attitude” but “had become convinced that it was impossible to obtain an exit visa to America.” In July, the Kyiv MGB sent their Lviv subor­dinates a copy of a letter to Tkachenko from the US embassy in Moscow. Two months later Tkachenko and her new husband suddenly left Zhovkva without informing anyone of their desti­nation or new address.⁷

The MGB officers believed that Tkachenko had never given up hope of emigrating to the United States. She tried to vis­it Kaliningrad, the former Konigsberg in East Prussia, by then under Soviet control, apparently in the hope of escaping to the West on a Soviet ship. She also expressed a desire to move to Sakhalin Island in the Far East, which had been divided between the Soviet Union and Japan before the war. None of those plans materialized, and by 1951 Tkachenko was back in Poltava, working as a seamstress at the local garment factory. It seemed that she had come full circle and that her saga was finally over. But the period of tranquility did not last very long.⁸

The Poltava MGB was actually waiting for Tkachenko. They were particularly interested in her visit to the American embassy in September 1946, which she had confided to a girlfriend who turned out to be a MGB informer.

The details of the visit sounded like an episode from a spy novel and must have quickened the pulse of the MGB agents.

The Kyiv MGB offered its subordinates in Poltava one of its own agents to help crack the case. The agent’s code name was “Karenina,” as in Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel. She was in­troduced to Tkachenko as another unfortunate woman trying to get an exit visa to the United States to join her loved one. Karenina’s main task was to find out what had happened to Tka­chenko when she visited the embassy. What made the episode particularly suspicious in the eyes of the Kyiv and Poltava officers was that the MGB could not confirm through its informers in the embassy—Soviet citizens employed by the Americans—that Tkachenko had been there at all, as her name was absent from the register of visitors. Karenina, star agent that she was, succeeded where others had failed and provided an important new piece of information. After meeting with Tkachenko in June 1951, Kare­nina delivered the name of the US official who had interviewed Tkachenko—Roger Taylor. The MGB soon confirmed that there was indeed such a consular official at the embassy, but it was anyone’s guess whether he had recruited Tkachenko to work for US intelligence.¹⁰

What concerned the MGB officers was Tkachenko’s ability to establish contacts with Red Army officers. Their reports charac­terized her as a cunning individual who was good at establishing relations, especially with men. In the postwar Soviet Union, where so many men had died in the war, it was no easy task for women of Tkachenko’s background to marry, but she seemed to have no problem in arranging her personal affairs. She had clearly capti­vated John Bazan, who was still trying to get her into the United States three years after their parting at Poltava. She got married within weeks after the correspondence with Bazan ended, and her plans to move to East Prussia in the hope of escaping from the USSR via the Baltic Sea were also associated with a man serving there in the Soviet Army. The fact that she eventually returned to Poltava made her an eligible bride to scores of Soviet military pilots posted at the bases previously used by the Americans.

The MGB had to do something to crack the Tkachenko case and establish whether she was spying for the Americans. They eventually decided to turn Tkachenko’s alleged knack for establishing relations with Soviet military men against her and introduce her to “Romeo,” an agent of military counterintelligence posing as an army officer. His code name was “Nikolaev.” They designed a complex scheme whereby Nikolaev and Tkachenko would meet at the Poltava theater frequented by the Americans during their stay in the area. An MGB informer code-named “Rozova,” who was closest to Tkachenko, would invite her to a performance, using two of four tickets purchased by the MGB. Rozova would explain that the tickets had been bought by her husband, but they had quarreled, so she was now happy to invite Tkachenko to come along.

Nikolaev, for his part, was to pretend that he had an extra tick­et for a friend who had failed to show up. With one seat empty and another occupied by the MGB informer Rozova, Nikolaev would be free to exercise his talents as “Romeo” and establish contact with Tkachenko. He was supposed to invite the two ladies to a cafe after the performance and then “develop” his contact with Tkachenko. Nikolaev read his instructions on the day of the planned operation, 4 October 1952, and signed below the line that said: “Read, absorbed, and accepted for implementation.” But the plan fell apart when Rozova told her handlers that she was busy that evening and refused to go to the theater. Then Nikolaev took a vacation. Eventually the operation had to be postponed until December 1952. With the “Romeo” scenario delayed, the MGB decided to bring back agent Karenina in order to find out as soon as possible whether Tkachenko was a spy. If not, they needed to recruit her as an agent for themselves.¹¹

The Poltava MGB had high hopes of recruiting Tkachenko to help with the MGB's most important assignment of the early Cold War—uncovering an alleged Jewish plot against the Soviet regime. The anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR had picked up with the worsening of Soviet-American relations and the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948. From then on, Soviet Jews would be suspected of concealing their true loyalty to the new Jewish homeland and its American allies. The campaign against “cosmopolitans,” a euphemism for Soviet Jewry, reached its height in 1952, with scores of luminaries of the Soviet medical profession, most of them Jewish, arrested on charges of poisoning or con­spiring to poison the leaders of the Soviet government, including Stalin himself. Anything smacking of a Jewish conspiracy, espe­cially ties between Jews in the USSR and their counterparts in the West, particularly the United States, became the subject of the MGB's close attention and an absolute priority when it came to the allocation of time and resources.¹²

To the MGB officers in Poltava, who were eager to respond to signals from Moscow, it seemed that the Tkachenko case could be adapted to fit the regime’s new priority. The Poltava MGB learned that while visiting Moscow to petition for an exit visa from the USSR, Zinaida Tkachenko had made the acquaintance of a Jewish woman, Rakhil Borisovna Kapova-Kagan. The MGB’s interest in Kapova-Kagan was much deeper than in Tkachenko. Her husband had been arrested by the secret police back in 1931 and accused of dealing in foreign currency. He managed to leave the USSR for the United States in 1933 and, as the relevant MGB document expressed it, “betrayed the motherland” by refusing to return. Ever since then he had been in correspondence with his wife, and she had kept trying to get an exit visa to join him in the United States.¹³

The MGB had information about Kapova-Kagan visiting the American embassy back in 1935 and meeting informally around the same time in a coffee shop with an American citizen sus­pected of spying on the USSR. MGB officers in Moscow were now concerned about Kapova-Kagan’s current activities, and their Poltava underlings looked for ways to help answer that question and advance their careers. The plan was to recruit Tkachenko as an agent to spy on Kapova-Kagan. But what if Tkachenko herself were an agent spying for the United States? The whole thing could then backfire, ending the careers of the Poltava MGB officers. Time was of the essence, and they finally decided to risk inviting Tkachenko for questioning about her visit to the Amer­ican embassy in September 1946. Depending on the results of the interrogation and her willingness to cooperate, they would decide whether or not to recruit her.

The head of the Poltava MGB approved a detailed plan of recruitment. Lieutenant Panfilov was ordered to summon Tka­chenko to the registration department of the local police, alleged­ly to discuss her emigration to the United States. He would then drive her to MGB headquarters in Poltava for interrogation and

possible recruitment. Thie meeting was scheduled for 10:00 a. m. Since interrogation and recruitment might take up much of the day, and Tkachenko’s long absence from home could alarm her relatives, it was proposed to send her two invitations, one for 10:00 a.m. and the other for 4:00 p.m., the second invitation allegedly to discuss the alimony case involving her daughter and her former husband. Panfilov would have the whole day at his disposal to complete the job.

Panfilov planned to start with questions about Tkachenko’s contacts with the Americans and her ties with John Bazan. If she denied such ties, he would confront her with a photograph showing her together with Bazan. He would then discuss her visit to the US embassy in 1946. Panfilov had at his disposal the testimony of D. K. Gershanovich, a former Soviet employee of the US embassy, who had been arrested and sentenced on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation and betrayal of the moth­erland. Under interrogation, Gershanovich had testified that she remembered a girl from Poltava visiting the embassy in 1946. The problem was that she did not remember the girl’s name and could not recognize Tkachenko from a photo provided by the MGB. But that was where Panfilov’s interrogation skills would come into play. The recruitment plan was finalized by the end of February 1953 and approved for action on 3 March. But the next few days brought confusion into the ranks of the MGB.¹⁴

On 4 March, the day after the approval of the recruitment plan, Soviet newspapers carried disturbing news: Stalin was se­riously ill. He died on 5 March, having been in a semi-conscious state since ³ March. Lavrentii Beriia, the Soviet security tsar, now emerged as a leading figure and put the brakes on Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. On 10 March, the day after Stalin’s fu­neral, Beriia invited Viacheslav Molotov to his office. Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had been incarcerated since December 1948: she was arrested a month after befriending the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Golda Meir. Molotov was in for a surprise. There in Beriia's office was his wife, released from the Gulag and free to go home. Times were changing.¹⁵

It is hard to tell what went wrong with the Poltava MGB plan to recruit Tkachenko. Whether changes at the top of the Soviet pyramid influenced the outcome or she was approached and refused to cooperate with the MGB, they never recruited her as an agent. Thiey also did not believe that she was working for the United States. But the MGB had no doubt that she harbored anti-Soviet views inspired by the authorities’ refusal to grant her an exit visa and exacerbated by the difficult financial situation in which she found herself afterwards. They did not expect to change her views but wanted her to abandon her plans to leave the Soviet Union. In July, they asked their bosses to send agent Karenina back to Poltava, as she had previously managed to elic­it from Tkachenko the name of Roger Taylor, the US embassy official whom she had met in Moscow in September 1946. Now Karenina’s task was “to convince Tkachenko of the futility of her efforts to leave for the USA.”¹⁶

The task was carried out successfully, and in September 1954 the MGB, now called the KGB, archived its file on Tkachenko. Agent Rozova assured her handlers that Tkachenko had “com­pletely renounced plans to leave for America.” Rozova provided two additional pieces of information that supported her judgment and may have been partially responsible for Tkachenko’s change of heart. Zinaida had found her first husband, whom she expected to support their daughter. She had also married again and had a child with her new husband.¹⁷

Zinaida Tkachenko’s American dream was over. By the time the KGB archived her file, the 1947 law prohibiting Soviet citizens to marry foreign nationals had been annulled. That was done in November 1953, soon after Stalin’s death. On paper, marriage to a foreigner ceased to be a crime, but that did not change the So­viet policy of preventing not only marriage but any unsupervised contact between Soviet citizens and foreigners. The authorities still insisted on deciding whom their citizens had the right to love. We do not know what happened to Zinaida Tkachenko after 1954. John Bazan continued to live in the Bronx until his death at the age of seventy in December 1981, with the Cold War still far from over.¹⁸