VP Henry Wallace's Handwritten Notes During his '44 Trip to Soviet Slave Camps

“Stalin has made gold mining a preferred war industry and has frozen the men in it.”

Henry Wallace (1888-1965) is the most liberal Vice President in American history.

So he gets a lot of protection and coverage from the hard-left academic left.

The academic left well understands that their writings and work are meant to have a political dividend, a byproduct paid over time by writing lies, and suppressing truths.

Wallace was surrounded by Communists.

Wallace, while Vice President from 1941-1945, visited Asia in 1944. As part of that visit, he brought along three advisors: John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore, John Hazard. Lattimore and Vincent were accused later of being active Communist agents.

Yesterday I sent out my several thousand word screed about Owen Lattimore. There’s more of course to the story, but time is finite and I’m a barely competent writer in need of an editor.

Wallace’s papers are primarily held at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

In the collection are his handwritten notes from his 1944 Asia trip. Wallace had a habit of collecting his notes written over other printed writings. He wrote on whatever was available. As well, many of his observations are rather banal.

I ran across a program from the early 60s where he was attending a Truman function, and he made conspicuous notes of all the food, what was served and how it tasted. It is hard to fathom how in the world that information would ever be relevant later.

But the handwritten notes from this trip are more profound and of greater consequence.

A sitting Vice President during a global war was visiting slave labor camps in the Arctic Circle. If we want to be charitable, we can assume he didn’t know better and was just being duped on a massive scale.

If we don’t want to be charitable, we need to seriously reconsider and reexamine a great deal of modern American political history.

The official party line from the mainstream academics on this topic is that Wallace and his party had no idea of what was really going on, that they were completely duped, and had absolutely no idea of what was going on at places like Kolyma.

He knew.

The handwritten notes capture nearly a month of travel, so I am only excerpting pieces from the Soviet/Russian parts of the trip.

Here’s Wallace’s picture of one of the slave mines.

Here’s Wallace recording what he was being told by the Soviets about why there were so many miners willing to dig for gold in the Arctic: “workers mostly come from old Russia on a 3 yr. contract. Wages 2000 rubles a month, compared with 800 rubles in old Russia.”

This next excerpt is poignant because permafrost meant that many slaves that were worked to death weren’t able to be buried. Many were supposedly stuffed into old mines. Dormant mines filled with the preserved bodies of the men who extracted gold to fund Stalinism.

“Stalin has made gold mining a preferred war industry and has frozen the men in it.”

“NAME says the whole idea of developing the M[agadan] area was Stalin’s.”

“The [Dalstroi] trust has 100 mines coal, lead, gold in which work 300,000 people over a wide area extending more than 800km. from Magadan. M[agadan] has a beautiful harbor. It receives goods to transmit to interior but the goods produced in the mines goes out by the rivers.” - the current claim is that there were 85,000 inmate slaves as of 1944. So perhaps they were talking about the wider network of workers used by Dalstroi, or perhaps this information is at odds with the current narrative. Frankly I’m not sure which is the answer.

It’s difficult to know the truth of anything using Soviet documents because the Communists were clever enough to sow constant disinformation throughout their archives, to create a kind of gnostic game of piecing together the truth decades later. They ensured that their crimes would be hidden behind disinformation even from lowly archivists and historians.

“In the winter the men dig up huge piles of gold bearing rock. They do not work outside when the weather is more than 40 degrees below zero.” This was not true.

“On the plane I talked to NAME about the fundamental differences between Trotskyites and Stalinites. He said Trotsky wanted to make peace with Kyraks (possibly Kulaks?). That he felt world revolution was vital. Stalin believed Russia must discipline herself and that agricultural and industrial production must be increased and that it was not necessary to have world revolution.”

On the left is the head of the Dalstroi organization, Ivan Nikishov, the one running slave labor GULAG camps mining for gold in the Magadan region. On the right is his guest while touring Magadan, the headquarters for Dalstroi, the US Vice President, Henry Wallace

Here is the link to the file of Henry Wallace’s 1944 handwritten notes during his Soviet Asia trip. These notes are currently held in the Wallace Archives at the University of Iowa. I made this PDF this past summer and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

The document is 237 pages long. The “Kolyma” section starts on page 40.