Benson, Raymond Ellis
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RAYMOND ELLIS BENSON Interviewed by: Robert V. Daniels Initial interview date: April 27, 2000 Copyright 2015 ADST POSTS Background: Moscow 1930 Return to USA -1932 Wisconsin – 1938; New Jersey Join USIA as Foreign Service- 1957 Zagreb 1959-1960 Branch Public Affairs Officer Belgrade 1961-1964 Press Officer Information Officer Armed Forces Staff College 1965 Hamburg 1965-1968 Branch Public Affairs Officer USIA Washington 1968-1970 Assistant Director, Research analysis Office of Policy Research Russian Language Institute Garmisch 1970 Turkey 1971-1975 Counselor for Public Affairs Moscow 1975 Belgrade 1979-1982 Atlantic Institute 1982-1983 1 Moscow 1983-1987 INTERVIEW [Note: this interview was not edited by Mr. Benson.] Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History Program interview with Raymond E. Benson. Today is April 27, 2000, and we are in Burlington, Vermont, the home of the University of Vermont. This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I’m Robert V. Daniels. Ray, let’s start with your date and place of birth. BENSON: I was born in New York City, on November 2nd, 1924; born in the Bronx though we lived in Manhattan at the time. Q: Can you say something about your father and mother? BENSON: Well, that’s a long story. Both my father, Michael Benson, and my mother, Vera Benson, were born in Russia. Of course, their names were different at that time. They came to the United States before the First World War, my father, I guess, on the very eve of it in 1914. They got their higher education here in the United States, and they met here and were married here. Q: What was the name in Russian? BENSON: My mother’s maiden name was Peskin, P E S K I N. My father’s last name when he came to the United States was Benjaminovich, Benjamin with an O V I C H at the end of it. Of course they both had patronymics in the Russian style. He changed his name in the United States. Q: Benson is more or less a translation? BENSON: Well, it’s very apt and clever of you. He was going to night school at Cooper Union and working during the day, getting a degree in engineering, and one day went up to his professor, who was an immigrant himself, a Swede, and said that he had been preparing his lessons, if you will, he thought very well, but “You never call on me,” said my father to this professor, whereupon the professor said, “I’m so glad you bring this up, because I was embarrassed to bring it up. I just cannot, I don’t think, pronounce your name. What does all this mean in Russian?” My father said it means ‘new Benjamin’. “Perfect,” said the Swedish professor. “We have a name for you in Sweden. It’s Benson. You will be true to your ancestors, and I will be able to call on you.” And so the name was changed, quite legally, I might say. 2 Q: Now, your father had some unusual political involvements? BENSON: You put it very delicately. My father, from the time he was a teenager, was a member of the Social Democratic Party in Russia. He had, while he was at gymnasium, the counterpart of our high school, in the city of Uralsk just above Astrakhan, he had fallen out with his father, who was a very orthodox Jew and very severe and a disciplinarian, I am led to believe. In any event, my father left home. How he managed it I do not know, but he continued at the gymnasium and declared himself a Social Democrat, an atheist, very much against his father’s principles, and he became-- obviously I don’t know any details--the chief, I suppose you would call it, of a secret cell or group within the gymnasium of young men and women who were dedicated to the principles of social democracy. Q: Can you tell me when that would have been? What year was your father born? BENSON: He was born in 1892. This would have been a little bit after, I believe--I think I can be more precise next time we meet, to have some papers--a little bit after the 1905 revolution. Q: Oh, it would have to be, because he would have gone into gymnasium at around age 15, and that would put that about 1907 to 1910. BENSON: Yes, that fits with other data about what happened to him, because, you see, as a Social Democrat, you very well know, Bill, the Social Democratic in the Russian context at the time is the precursor of the Communist Party. Q: Well, the Bolshevik faction. Did you know anything whether he was inclined to the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks within the Social Democratic Party? This was, of course, the time when they were nominally factions of the same party but they were growingly at odds with each other. BENSON: He was very much inclined to the Bolsheviks. He either was immediately, that is the ground rules of the cell that I refer to, or he later became involved with the Bund, the B U N D, which was the Jewish national arm or group within the Social Democrats. This group was more inclined toward the Menshevik faction. This contretemps or paradox or confrontation he carried with him into New York. We can come to that a little later, but in any case, there he was, back to your first question, in Uralsk at the gymnasium, not living at home, at total odds with his father, who was a devout Jew, very orthodox and observant and a very important businessman. On the other hand, here was my father running the cell. He had a klichka, he had a nom de guerre which was Mikhai, deriving from Michael, and he was caught. The Czar’s police--if you want to put it that way, and I guess it was--caught him. What had happened is that one of the graduates at the gymnasium, a member of the cell, had moved to Moscow, where he continued his political activity, and he was caught. During interrogation he revealed what was going on back home in Uralsk, and that broke the cell, meaning the police gathered them all in, and my father went to prison there in Uralsk. 3 Q: At about the age of 20? BENSON: I think he was probably.... I’ll do a little bit of research, Bill, because I have some papers. I did not do my homework, but the question leads me to fill that in. I will if I can from the papers I have, and I can tell you what these papers are. But he went to prison. I have a picture of him snapped in the courtyard of the prison, which, when you think of the conditions under which political prisoners in Communist Russia were imprisoned, is almost either laughable or really a profound commentary. He’s sitting on a chair facing another fellow sitting in a chair. They’re both dressed in suits. They have high, white collars in the old-fashioned style with neckties. In his handwriting on the back of the picture, it says “Laudi y ya,” “Laudin and I.” While he was in prison, his father was shot and killed. When he came out, he found that his mother, a widow, had moved to Warsaw, part of the Russian Empire at the time, to be with her sister, and he went off to visit her. From there he went to the United States. Under what circumstances were my grandfather killed? There were not too many Jewish people living in Uralsk. It was outside the pale of settlement. Well, it meant that you had to be invited to take up residence there and were registered as one who had the legal authority to live there. My grandfather was a kupietz peiruvagilda, in other words a merchant of the first guild. I presume this meant that he had to take certain exams and probably had studied accounting, whatever one did in the early 20th century to qualify. He was invited to come to Uralsk and manage the outlet of an Astrakhan brewery and Vichy water plant, and there were several bars in Uralsk which served the beer of this Astrakhan plant, and I guess the citizens of Uralsk would pick up their Vichy water. You know, they’d be in these big glass bottles with a siphon at the top. In any case, there was a protection racket run, in fact, by golly, by the chief of police, which he directed against the Jewish merchants. One day my grandfather sent a letter to a newspaper and said, “We don’t think we ought to be treated this way. We have been invited to be here, and we shouldn’t have to put with this,” and he mentioned the man who was the chief of police, a minor member of the local nobility. It’s very hard to explain. Q: Well, isn’t it because any official of certain status automatically got a corresponding noble rank? BENSON: For his lifetime. Q: Like Lenin’s father. BENSON: Like Lenin’s father. That’s an odd comparison, but perfectly apt. In any case, the chief of police brooded about this awhile, and one day, very liquored up, he sallied forth from his house with his revolver all loaded and he sought out the two men who were involved, in other words my grandfather and another person, and killed them, killed my grandfather in front of one of his breweries--not breweries, his beer shtuba, his bar, 4 where he had stopped, I gather, on his way home to have a brew with the boys.