NIGHT MADNESS
We know of cases in which an enemy hand has skillfully introduced into an ordinary photograph pictures of enemies of the people which are clearly visible if you examine the newspaper or photograph from all angles.
—Bolshevik magazine, August 1937
Party secretaries in every oblast armed themselves with magnifying glasses, and many successes were reported. The secretary of the Party committee at the Ivanovo Textile Combine, for instance, took out of production a material it had been making for many years because “with the aid of a magnifying glass he detected a swastika and a Japanese helmet in the design,” repeated Komsomolskaya Pravda in January 1938.
Wherever he looked, laudable zeal was all that the Boss could see.
EXPORTING TERROR
Stalin was simultaneously cleaning up abroad. The biggest wasp’s nest was outside the USSR. At one time he had sent oppositionists abroad, to disqualify them from the political contest; now he wanted them back.
He was compelled, of course, to dismantle the intelligence service, which had such close ties with all those diplomats and Comintern officials. The service had been set up when Zinoviev and Bukharin lorded it over the Comintern, and Yagoda ran the NKVD. Its members must surely fear that their fate would be the same. How could he possibly rely on them? How could he trust them? They must all disappear. He treated them all alike. Summoned to Moscow for promotion, they were suspicious—but they hoped—and went.
Antonov-Ovseenko was recalled from Spain to be appointed People’s Commissar of Justice—and was duly appointed, to reassure his colleagues abroad. Lev Karakhan was recalled from Turkey, with an offer of the embassy in Washington. Both were arrested and shot in Moscow. One of Antonov’s cellmates remembered that he knew just what was happening when they came to take him for execution: “He said goodbye to us all, took off his jacket and shoes, gave them to us, and went out to be shot half-undressed.” Twenty-one years earlier in the Winter Palace—hair down to his shoulders, artist’s hat at a rakish angle—he had announced the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Now he was led barefoot to the execution cell.
Karakhan, a former ambassador and Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was shot in distinguished company, that of Avel Enukidze, former Secretary of the Supreme Central Executive Committee. These two aging Adonises were very fond of the ballet, or, rather, of young ballerinas. Their names were often mentioned together in tales of the court theater’s love life. Stalin’s arrangement for them to be shot together shows kind Joseph in a playful mood. They were executed on the eve of the Boss’s birthday, which had so often been an enjoyable occasion for his friend Enukidze.
The extermination of diplomats and intelligence agents continued throughout 1937. The head of the Soviet intelligence service, Slutsky, was poisoned and given a lavish funeral, so as not to alarm agents in the field. When an agent came home he would be appointed to a different country and would tell colleagues abroad about it. Before taking up his new post he would be sent to some luxurious sanatorium for a well-earned holiday. On his return he would pick up the necessary papers for his new clandestine work, and friends would come to see him off. There would be kisses and farewells. Then, at the very first station into his compartment came visitors.…
Rumors of this mass destruction reached agents abroad. They nonetheless went meekly home. Only a handful refused to return. In 1937 two Soviet intelligence officers, Reiss and Krivitsky, defected. Another agent, General Alexander Orlov, shortly followed. His real name was Lev Feldbin. In the second half of the twenties he was a “resident” (spy) in Paris, and in 1933–1935 he operated in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1936, while the show trials were in progress, Orlov was sent to Spain, where General Franco was fighting, with Hitler’s support, against the left-wing Republican government, which was aided by Stalin.
Stalin exploited the Spanish Civil War to the full. Besides supplying Soviet arms to the Republicans, he flooded their army with Soviet “military advisers,” genuine or spurious, but in reality mostly NKVD agents. From Spain, Stalin’s spies infiltrated other European countries, while in Spain itself they recruited additional agents from among the antifascists. Stalin made Orlov deputy chief military adviser to the Republican army. His official assignment was to organize intelligence and counterintelligence activities and guerrilla warfare behind Franco’s lines.
He had a further, unofficial task. Stalin had a secret and extremely important aim in Spain: to eliminate the supporters of Trotsky who had gathered from all over the world to fight for the Spanish revolution. NKVD men, and Comintern agents loyal to Stalin, accused the Trotskyists of espionage and ruthlessly executed them. As the Stalinist spy Sudoplatov said in his memoirs: “When the Spanish Civil War ended there was no room left in the world for Trotsky.”
But Orlov’s main service was the top-secret assignment which he subsequently described in his book. When General Franco’s forces were approaching Madrid, Orlov received an encoded telegram from a certain “Ivan Vasilievich.” (Stalin sometimes signed secret telegrams with the Christian name and patronymic of his greatest hero, Ivan the Terrible.) The telegram ordered Orlov to persuade the government of the Spanish Republic to transfer the country’s gold reserves to the USSR. His efforts were successful. The gold had been stored in a cave at Cartagena. To the end of his days, Orlov remembered entering the cave and suddenly seeing a mountainous pile of boxes containing six hundred tons of gold. The Boss had insisted in his telegram that there should be no trace of Russian involvement in the export of the gold, and Orlov realized that he had no intention of returning it. Ever thrifty, the Boss obviously regarded the gold as a form of payment by the Republicans for his help in the war. Orlov supervised the export of the gold as “Mr. Blakeston, representative of the National Bank of America.”
While all this was happening Orlov carefully read the reports of the Moscow trials in Pravda. He realized that they spelled the complete destruction of the old Party. It was not difficult for him, as an old Party member and a GPU officer since 1924, to foresee what his own end might be. So when, in 1938, he was told to return quickly on a Soviet motor vessel, allegedly for secret consultations, he did not hesitate. His hour had come, and, like Reiss and Krivitsky before him, he chose to remain in the West. Knowing how ruthlessly the Boss punished defectors, Orlov wrote to him proposing a deal: if the Boss spared him and his family he undertook to keep secret all that he knew. The Boss did not reply, but acted accordingly, and Orlov survived. He did not publish his book about the secrets of the NKVD, from which I have so frequently quoted, until after Stalin’s death.
The Soviet ambassador to Bulgaria, Fyodor Raskolnikov, also refused to return. He later described how, in 1936, he was struck by the extraordinary silence in the Kremlin dining hall: the highly placed functionaries using it were literally afraid to open their mouths, afraid of each other, paralyzed with fear.
Raskolnikov himself, however, also kept very quiet in those days. His wife, M. Kanivez, described in her memoirs how she often woke up in the middle of the night and found her husband sitting hunched over a radio listening to the reports of the trials. He knew very well that the proceedings were a grotesque lie from beginning to end. He knew, for instance, that Pyatakov, who confessed to meeting Trotsky in Norway, had been in Germany at the time in question; Raskolnikov and Pyatakov had, in fact, as Kanivez tells us, been members of the same dinner party. But Raskolnikov said nothing. And suffered torments. Until, in 1937, he found his own Kronstadt and St. Petersburg in 1917 on the list of forbidden books. Only then did he speak out, in an open letter to Stalin: “Over the main door of the cathedral of Notre Dame there is a statue of St. Denis meekly carrying his own severed head.” Refusing to follow St. Denis’s example he remained in the West. “You,” he wrote, “cultivate power without honesty, and socialism without love for mankind.… On various sordid and fraudulent pretenses you have staged trials on charges far more nonsensical than anything in the medieval witch trials o
f which you know from your seminary textbooks.” The Boss must have smiled when he read this letter. Where had “love for mankind” been when sailors, led by the young midshipman Raskolnikov, were killing their officers at Kronstadt? And Stalin’s trials were reminiscent not only of “medieval witch trials.” There was also, for instance, the trial of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922, conducted by Raskolnikov’s good friend Public Prosecutor Krylenko, at which, on Lenin’s insistence, eleven innocent people were sentenced to death.
Like other defectors Raskolnikov was declared an “outlaw.” The Boss set up “mobile groups” within the NKVD to carry out sentences on these people. As early as September 1937 Reiss was brutally murdered in Switzerland. Raskolnikov died in Nice in 1939. Officially, the cause of death was pneumonia complicated by meningitis. But it was immediately rumored that he had been poisoned. The Boss could not, after all, leave his insolent letter unanswered.
In February 1941 another defector, Krivitsky, was found in a pool of blood in a Washington hotel room, with a gun beside him. The police announced that he had committed suicide. But Ralph Waldman, Krivitsky’s (and also Trotsky’s) lawyer, remained convinced that it was murder.
In 1989, working on this book, I kept trying to find one of the former “residents.” The Boss seemed to have made a clean sweep. Time went by, and I had found nobody. Then, suddenly, a miracle.
AN AMERICAN MILLIONAIRE IN A COMMUNAL APARTMENT
One day in 1989 I was being interviewed for a radio program. The conversation got around to Armand Hammer, and I said: “How extraordinary that this American millionaire is the only person mentioned in Lenin’s works who is still alive.” “You are wrong,” the interviewer replied, “there is one other, also, incidentally, a famous old man and also an American millionaire—in the distant past, it’s true. I am speaking of Theremin.” “Theremin still alive? Impossible! How old can he be?” I remember half-rising from my chair in my excitement. I had already learned a great deal about Theremin.
Soon afterward, I found myself sitting in a Soviet communal apartment on the Lenin Prospect in a room cobwebbed with electrical wiring. Facing me sat a man of ninety-three, perhaps the last of the great men of the twenties still living. In Western encyclopedias the date of his birth is given as 1896, and he is mistakenly said to have died in 1936. That, in fact, was simply the date of his arrest, after which he managed to live on for more than half a century. His ancestors were Huguenots who had fled from France after St. Bartholomew’s Day. In the thirties this Russian Frenchman had owned a six-story house in New York—he still remembered the address.
Theremin was just an ordinary genius who had graduated from the Petersburg Conservatoire, from the Military Engineering School, and from the Electro-Technical School. In 1917 he had sided with the Bolsheviks.
As a Bolshevik engineer, Theremin bombarded Lenin with ideas. In the collected works of Lenin there is a letter to Trotsky dated April 4, 1922: “Discuss the possibility of reducing guard duties of Kremlin Kadets by introducing electric signal system. An engineer called Theremin showed us his experiments in the Kremlin.” Theremin had invented his electrical “Radio Sentry.” It was immediately put on the secret list and installed in the State Bank.
In the twenties he invented the famous “Theremin,” an electric musical instrument which sounded like a violin. He exhibited his device at the All-Russia Electrical Congress in 1921 and Lenin once played a tune on it. After a concert attended by Lenin, Theremin’s “electromusic” began a triumphant progress round the country. The Theremin was regarded as the instrument of the future. He supplemented the sound with colored lights and a mechanism for reproducing odors. The aged Glazunov and the young Shostakovich both attended his concerts. He went abroad and made successful appearances at the New York Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall. He performed with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, played duets with Albert Einstein—Theremin on his instrument, Einstein on his famous violin. The Theremin was mass-produced by the thousands, and its inventor became a millionaire.
Only Yagoda knew for whom this strange genius was really working, and why he had gone to America. The GPU had been keeping a watchful eye on him for some time. Yagoda had sent him first, with his Theremin, to an international exhibition in Frankfurt. He was an enormous success. People called him a “second Trotsky” because he threatened to carry out a “world revolution in music” with his instrument. Next, Yagoda dispatched him in the full blaze of his glory to America, where he was to cooperate with the GPU, and regularly pass on interesting information to the embassy. His acquaintances included a number of Jewish physicists, whom he was supposed to sound out as possible collaborators. He got married, and bought a six-story house on 54th Street in New York City. But then he was recalled to Moscow. It was near the end of 1938; not one of his former NKVD acquaintances was still around. Like other “residents” he was accused of being a double agent. But whereas his colleagues had all been shot, he was given what was by the standards of the time a generous sentence—eight years’ imprisonment. This was not just a matter of luck. There was no such thing in those days. No, the genius Theremin and his work had remained in the Boss’s excellent memory, and he was quickly transferred from a normal prison camp to a sharashka. This was one of the Boss’s most impressive inventions: a closed research institute in which imprisoned scientists could continue their work. Theremin helped the great Korolev and the famous Tupolev, both prisoners, to develop a radio-controlled, pilotless plane. Then he was taken to another sharashka, where he developed a unique system of remote eavesdropping. This system was called the “Snowstorm,” and it earned its incarcerated inventor a Stalin Prize.
Life was like that in Stalin’s time: from high honor to prison, from prison to high honor again, back to freedom and daylight. In 1947, thanks to the Boss’s clemency, Lev Theremin, Stalin Prize winner, reappeared in Moscow.
As I was leaving his apartment, he said: “I am young. The secret of Dr. Faustus is simple: old age hides when you are working.” And he promised to live at least to a hundred.
I did not see him again, but I heard recently that he did not keep his promise. His granddaughter Maria told me about his mysterious end. As his hundredth birthday drew near, perestroika made it possible for him to travel abroad. His triumphal progress took him to Sweden, Holland, and of course France. He visited America. All this time he continued working on new inventions. When he returned in 1993 from one of his excursions, his laboratory had been wrecked, and the archive which he valued more than his life had vanished. The police were powerless. Someone was evidently very interested in the ideas of this strange twentieth-century Dr. Faustus. This was too much for Theremin, and he died, aged ninety-seven, before the year was out.
PURGE OF THE TOWER OF BABEL
In 1937 the Boss felt obliged to destroy Comintern. It was inseparably tied to people whom he had shot as enemies. And here he was playing one of his long chess games. He was contemplating an abrupt change of foreign policy. He had calculated long ago that he needed to ally himself with Hitler. How could he be sure that Comintern, which had fought fascism tooth and nail, would tamely accept an about-face? As he began his bloody purge of Comintern he was already planning to establish an international body in which the very thought of questioning his decisions would seem sacrilegious. Only with a Communist International of that kind would he ever realize his secret objective—the Great Dream. The secret Comintern files give us a glimpse of what happened.
He began the extermination of Comintern at a signal from the head of Comintern itself. In 1937, Dimitrov wrote (or rather found that he had written) a letter to the Central Committee: “The Comintern leadership has screened the whole staff and 100 people altogether have been dismissed as politically insufficiently reliable.… Several sections of the Comintern were found to be in the hands of the enemy.” The fight against “the enemy” began at once. Comintern became an arena for NKVD operations. An endless series of arrests followed in the first hal
f of 1937—members of the German, Spanish, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Polish, Austrian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and other Communist Parties. Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and a close associate of Zinoviev and Trotsky, was summoned to a meeting of the Comintern’s Executive Committee in the spring of 1937. Across the table sat leading Western Communists: Pieck, Togliatti, and representatives of the French Party. The Soviet representative, Manuilsky, stated that according to information supplied by the NKVD, Bela Kun had been recruited by the Romanian intelligence service in 1923. And not one of those present, most of whom had known Kun for years, said that this was insane; not one of them protested or demanded proof. They had passed their exam; they’d won the right to go on living, and to work in the new-style Comintern.
An NKVD car was waiting at the door for Kun. Twelve former commissars of the Hungarian Soviet Republic followed their leader. The Communist Parties of Mexico, Turkey, and Iran also lost their general secretaries without a murmur.
G. Dimitrov now had to prove, from day to day, his own right to live. He served diligently, and succeeded. He authorized the arrest of his own comrades-in-arms in the Bulgarian Communist Party. When some of the Bulgarian leaders protested, his only answer was a helpless gesture and “It’s not in my power. It’s all in the hands of the NKVD.” Yezhov, in his own words, “liquidated Bulgarians like rabbits.”
The old Comintern had to vanish completely. Fritz Platten, founder of the Swiss Communist Party, who had organized the return of Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, and the others to Russia in 1917, was shot. Of the eleven leaders of the Mongolian party only Choibolsan survived. The leaders of the Indian and Korean parties were destroyed. Of the German Communist leadership only Pieck and Ulbricht went unscathed. Yezhov commented in a memorandum that “it would be no exaggeration to say that every German citizen living abroad is a Gestapo agent.” A large group of German Communists was handed over to Hitler. Ironically, many of them survived Hitler’s camps, while those imprisoned in the land of socialism all perished. Many Italian Communists disappeared into the night. Togliatti’s son-in-law was arrested, to keep the Italian leader on his toes. It did.
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