A little item buried in the columns of the Kurier Codzienny [Daily Express] reported the dissolution of the Polish Communist Party. We were stunned. At first, we thought this report was a base provocation on the part of the secret police … But the next days’ papers had more detailed reports and however much we tried to suppress our anxiety, they continued to reveal the sorry truth. Finally, someone who had just been arrested brought official confirmation. An oppressive silence fell over the prison … How could anyone believe such terrible accusations? How could we reconcile the monstrous crimes imputed to these people with the splendid image that we had formed of them?
Naszkowski lists the names of the comrades who had been arrested and attempts to provide an explanation:
People tried to figure out the causes by digging up the old history of factional struggle between the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’ … But none of the pieces fitted, the whole thing seemed highly implausible. After all, the ‘liquidated agents’, as the Comintern report called them, included people from the ‘majority’ as well as the ‘minority’.
However, even if in the final analysis we accepted the news that the entire leadership of our Party was consumed by provocation, then we had to face the most important question: What would happen now to the movement? Who were we now? Could it be that our glorious militant Party, in which we took such pride, which had raised us, for which each of us would give his life, could it be an agency of the Pilsudskyites?
And we all answered, No, a thousand times no. A Party that had done so much to awaken the revolutionary spirit of the masses, a Party that had led mighty working-class brigades to war with capitalism, with fascism, could not be a fraud … Shaken to the depths of our souls, accepting with pain, with bitterness, the ‘truth’ about our leaders’ treachery, not for a moment did we doubt our idea or the rightness of our movement, our Party. That gave thousands of Communists the strength to live through the difficult times that had arrived. That was the basis for the resurrection of the Party later on.6
And yet, such a news item would prove to be far from the last one to stun and demoralize the parties. Further shocks would shatter their moral fibre – the treaty of non-aggression and friendship between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 was still to come.
Within the Comintern organization, only a few isolated voices spoke up. One such was Jenö Vargas, the economist and crisis analyst, one of the many Hungarians who had been living in Moscow for a decade or more. He wrote a letter to Stalin, Yezhov and Dimitrov in which he said that ‘foreigners are indiscriminately viewed as spies; foreign children in schools are cursed as fascists.’ This no doubt flowed from the belief that ‘it was better to arrest two innocent people than not to arrest one spy!’ The result of the mass arrests was the ‘demoralization of the cadres of the Communist Parties of fascist countries … This demoralization grips the majority of Comintern workers and extends right up to specific members of the ECCI Secretariat … The main reason for this demoralization is the feeling of complete helplessness in the matter concerning the arrests of political émigrés.’ The NKVD hadn’t got a clue, he maintained, about the history of the foreign communist parties. ‘Every evening many foreigners packed up their belongings in the expectation that they might be arrested.’ And what should they say to people at home? ‘That the Hungarian proletarian revolution [of 1919] was undertaken by enemies of the working class?’ Vargas pointed out that ‘each arrested Hungarian had friends and relatives in Hungary who knew of the arrests, so the Hungarian Party found its work increasingly difficult.’7
Dimitrov’s diary: a record of self-destruction
Everything done to the comrades who had been arrested was done in the name of the cause they had believed they were fighting for. And it was done by people to whom they had never displayed the slightest degree of disloyalty and whom they had never resisted. That was their greatest weakness. While they were driven to despair or even to the verge of insanity by arrests that had come like a bolt from the blue, and by fantastic accusations for which they could find no explanation, there was nothing tentative or haphazard about the actions taken by Stalin and Yezhov. Speaking to Georgii Dimitrov, the general secretary of the Comintern, the ‘Lion of Leipzig’, who had openly challenged the Hitler regime in the trial following the Reichstag fire, Stalin remarked in a conversation following a Pushkin evening at the Bolshoi Theatre: ‘All of you in the Comintern are just playing into the hands of the enemy.’8 And Yezhov, whom Dimitrov had visited on 26 May 1937 at 1 a.m., had said to him, ‘The greatest spies are working in the CI.’9 Thus, while one group of people remained frozen in disorientation and terror, the other coolly dealt out their lethal blows. By the end of the wave of repression the world communism movement was weakened to the point where Georgi Dimitrov was compelled to assume all the roles made vacant by the arrest of other leading members and was reduced as a result to asking the Soviet Communist Party for help in running the organization. The national communist parties, for their part, were so weakened that they ended up unable to provide the necessary number of ‘agents’. In the case of many countries – the Baltic nations in particular – ‘there was not a single reliable comrade from these parties here in Moscow on whom we could count to establish connections with or eventually send to those countries.’10
The destruction of the Communist International, together with his own active complicity in this, is in effect scrupulously minuted in the diary of its general secretary, Georgi Dimitrov – a diary which switches between three languages. His diary – which the publishers call his ‘work journal’ – punctiliously records the disappearance of his own closest associates. He records all those unmasked, arrested and executed as enemies. He notes down whom he has summoned to Moscow only to see them promptly arrested by the NKVD and charged. The ‘Lion of Leipzig’ composes commentaries on the progress of the show trials as an aid to orchestrating the propaganda of the parties in the different countries. He was evidently not always able to keep this up, since time and again there are longer or shorter gaps – from 7 July to 21 October 1937, from 21 October to 7 November 1937, and also between 12 December 1937 and 17 February 1938 and between 17 March 1938 and 16 August 1938.There are also a number of missing pages – for example, on 18 August 1936, at the beginning of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev.11 The diary is thus a precise mirror of his role as actor, medium and victim of repression.
Vanishing point Moscow: biotope
In the martyrology of the communists and anti-fascists, all countries are represented, for communism was a worldwide movement. It embraced not simply the immediate members but also the many thousands who had gone to the Soviet Union out of tacit sympathy or with a feeling of great hope, or even in the expectation of a better life – people from all walks of life and of all ages, artists as well as ordinary working men, but doubtless also some adventurers. The number of those who had flocked to the Soviet Union full of enthusiasm at the end of the 1920s to help in the process of industrialization now dwindled, but at the same time the numbers of political refugees and émigrés grew. Every defeat of the left in whatever country, every newly established right-wing dictatorship somewhere in the world, triggered an influx of people seeking asylum and refuge in Moscow. International circles in Moscow were fed by participants in the failed communist attempts at coups d’état and revolution, and by the persecuted victims of the new authoritarian regimes. They poured over the frontier in waves: as early as 1919 they came from the collapse of the Soviet republic in Hungary, and after 1922, when Italy succumbed to Mussolini’s fascism, Moscow became a haven for the ‘criminals’ sought by the police in the authoritarian regimes of Central and Southern Europe. They came from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, from Romania and Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece, and from the liberation struggles in the colonies. The largest waves of refugees reached Moscow in 1933, with the victory of the National Socialists in Germany, in 1934, with the suppression of the republican Schutzbund in Vienna, and in
the wake of the Spanish Civil War. As the world centre of communism, the capital of the USSR became the refuge of a defeated world movement. If Berlin had once been envisaged as the capital of a victorious world movement, then Moscow in the 1930s became the locus of its retreat and the site of its downfall. For thousands of people the escape to Moscow was an escape into death.12
All roads led to the three-storey neoclassical building on the corner of Mokhovaia and Vozdvizhenka in the centre of Moscow. From the headquarters of the ECCI, all the important institutions were more or less within sight: the Kremlin and Red Square lay opposite, the Lenin Library had just been completed, the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute was just ‘around the corner’, and the accommodation for the staff of the organization was also centrally located. The major hotels where prominent foreigners stayed – the National, the Metropol, the Grand Hotel – and the hostels for their personnel, chiefly in the Hotel Lux, were close by. The House of the Unions, where the most important events affecting the capital, including the show trials, took place, was just out of sight. Not without a certain pride could Dimitrov point to this cosmopolitan and international centre at the heart of Moscow, noting that more than half of the Party organization of the Comintern consisted of foreigners (260 out of 468) and that ‘thousands of ties, thousands of roads lead from Mokhovaia to all the countries of the world – to China, to Germany, to Spain and to the Balkans’.13 The roads led not just to Mokhovaia, but directly to Dimitrov himself, as we see from the entries in his diary. Page after page is filled with phrases such as ‘Arrived …’, ‘Received …’, ‘Left …’, ‘Met on his way through’. It is a meeting point of the entire world communist movement.
There are no precise figures about the size of the political emigration. When the personnel section of the ECCI tried early in 1936 to establish an overview and some measure of control over the immigrants living in Moscow, it was able to obtain data from only a portion of the member parties. How many were there? At the start of 1936 the ECCI estimated that between 35,000 and 37,000 political émigrés had settled in the Soviet Union. Around 20,000 of these came from states bordering the USSR – Poland, the Baltic nations and, above all, Germany. Roughly one-quarter – around 10,000 – joined the Soviet Party. The majority of the immigrants who joined the Soviet Party were from Germany (2,600), Poland (2,000) and America (2,000–3,000).14 Since the personnel section only recorded actual Party members, we can assume that the number of foreigners living in the USSR and especially in Moscow was significantly larger.15 But there was great uncertainty on this point, and everything possible was done to control the entry and residence of foreigners. These controls were tightened as far as the inspection of Party documents was concerned and in connection with the first show trial, in which political émigrés – members of the German Communist Party who had fled from Nazi Germany – played a major role influencing its entire conduct. The entry applications that went to MOPR (International Red Aid) were passed on to the NKVD for consideration.16 Among those on the list was Valentin Olberg, who was among the accused in the first show trial. He had entered the USSR illegally in 1935 and had obtained a post in an education institute. A review of the Polish émigrés, for example, revealed that over one-fifth of those inspected were suspect and should be further scrutinized by the NKVD; 140 Poles were to be sent back.17 The involvement of political emigrants with obscure origins and a suspect political past in the first show trial – including Konon Berman Yurin, Valentin Olberg, Fritz David and Natan Lurie – was of crucial importance in constructing a link between the internal and external enemies.
Foreign comrades
The Moscow Directory of 1936 and the Tourist Guide for 1937 tell us little about the international make-up of the population in the capital. But this is compensated for in the memoirs, the diaries and, above all, the court records and the records of interrogations – as in the cases of Carola Neher, Krasnoprudnaia ulitsa 36, Apartment 17, and Gustav von Wangenheim, Kuznetskii most 22/2.18 As the world capital of communism, Moscow was the headquarters of dozens of organizations, societies and institutions, all with the appropriate offices, staff and associated sympathizers. The microcosm of the Comintern and its milieu, which was far more than an organization, amounted to a specific lifeworld of its own. It was the Comintern as biotope.
Figure 26.2 The Government House was built between 1928 and 1931 to a design by Boris Iofan. Iurii Trifonov’s ‘House on the Moskva’ was not only the most modern ‘gated community’ of the elite of both the state and the Party of the USSR, but also the man trap in which hundreds of people were arrested in the period 1937–8. Georgii Dimitrov was among the residents.
‘Meetings were part of the daily round; they sometimes decided the difference between life and death.’
Topographically, its centre lay in the building in Mokhovaia, at the corner of Vozdvizhenka, where the ECCI had its official headquarters. But other international organizations were also located there: the Young Communist International, the Red Peasant International, International Red Aid, which was an indispensable organization for inducting people into the new living conditions, and Workers International Relief, all with the relevant head offices and national secretariats. No doubt, organizational life did not take place merely or even primarily in the offices of these organizations but in rather more informal settings – in other words, the important conversations took place after receptions and parties, in the invitations to Dimitrov’s private apartment in Government House, and again and again in the dachas in the Moscow suburbs.19 A life conducted in meetings, the forming of personal relationships as mediated by political activities, was the ‘social locus’ at the time, and this emerges time and again from the reminiscences of those involved. Meetings were part of the daily round; they sometimes decided the difference between life and death. This ‘life in meetings’ has been depicted by the German émigré poet Erich Weinert, whose constant complaint was that you could never get any work done or that, if you did, you would lose all contact with the world around you.
There are the countless meetings we have or have had. We held innumerable meetings from January until May [1936], so that we spent more time in these rooms than at our desks – commission meetings, Party cells, political circles, working groups, the editorial board meetings of International Literature. That’s a whole lot of things. Anyone can figure out how many meetings there were in a month. What is more, many of these meetings went on far too long …
since every comrade had to have his say, even if he was just repeating what had already been said.20 There are similar complaints in the memoirs of the Austrian communist Ernst Fischer:
We drove or walked to the Comintern every day, read reports, wrote reports, articles and brochures, took part in meetings, and discussed the problems of international politics, while all the time our thoughts were in Austria, Germany, France or Spain, and we knew almost nothing about Moscow. I lived among foreigners, worked among foreigners or among Russians who had dealings only with foreigners, and it was not easy to come into contact with actual Russians. The few Russians I knew were unprejudiced Jews. Only now, looking back on it, do I realize how isolated I was.21
Another base – or, better, focal point – of the Moscow émigrés was one’s own apartment. Given the extreme shortage of housing in Moscow, and since most of the immigrants were accustomed to Central European living conditions, most of them found their accommodation a disaster. Only a few privileged people had places to live on a par with the residents of Government House or the sanatorium in Barvikha,22 and a candid comment could result in an arrest – a fate that befell Zenzi Mühsam, a woman who was not afraid to air her views even in Moscow.23 The majority squatted in cramped quarters, and many tried to escape and find a place in a hotel, even if only provisionally, although this was extremely difficult and expensive. In the upshot the names of certain hostels and hotels keep cropping up as centres of émigré life, among them the famous and privileged Lux, Dom Vostoka, and the hotels Novaia-Mo
skovskaia, Savoy, Oktyabr' and Soiuznaia.24 The topography of this ‘cosmopolitan Moscow’ also included certain hostels – for example, the hostel for skilled German workers in Matrosskaiatishina 1625 and the hostel of the International Red Aid at 4 Ogarev Street, where Zenzi Mühsam lived for a time.26 To have found a place to stay was an essential prerequisite for survival, and losing your lodging was the equivalent of banishment. Battles were fought to secure some living space, bitter rivalries were unleashed, and hatred and envy frequently came uncontrollably to the surface. As Erich Weinert explained at the writers’ self-criticism tribunal:
For example, there is the housing question. It can turn into a disaster. For the majority of comrades it is quite impossible to do work in accordance with particular political aims because the fact is that their work has to be done to earn money. The rents are so high that you need to earn large amounts of money just to pay the rent. For example, quite a few of our comrades, like Becher, Gabor and Halpern, have nowhere to live at all. By chance I was given an apartment in the Savoy.
Moscow, 1937 Page 56