Moscow, 1937
Page 57
That meant that ‘outside my work I could not have any social life at all. I never give a vecher at all, nor do I ever go to any vecher’ [an evening social gathering].27 Willi Bredel likewise complained that he had to keep on writing and earn money in order to pay for the hotel room he shared with three others.28
In this way life became narrowed down to a few key points. In addition, there were the clubs where literary evenings and talks were given, criticism and self-criticism were practised, and political information and education were on offer. Examples were the Club for the Association of Foreign Workers (ulitsa 25 Oktiabria, now Nikol'skaia ulitsa), the House of the Austrian Schutzbund (Vorotnikovskii pereulok 7/9), the Culture Clubs of the Lithuanians, Poles and Spaniards, and the evenings in the House of Writers or the House of Scientists. The focal points of meetings and exchanges included the secretariats, editorial offices and general offices, where editors, writers and translators all came together. The highly developed publishing and propaganda activities of the Comintern and its ‘front organizations’ led to a veritable Gutenberg galaxy of prominent publications: Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung (Tretiakovskii proezd 19/1), Inprekorr, Internationale Literatur (ulitsa 25 Oktiabria 10/12), Journal de Moscou, Kommunistische Internationale, Das Wort, Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, Verlagsgenossenschaft ausländischer Arbeiter and last, but by no means least, the editorial offices of the Comintern’s broadcasting station. Since there were a large number of intellectuals, scientists and artists among the refugees, important Moscow institutes functioned as bases for the exiles: the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, the capital’s numerous universities and, lastly, the schools concerned with fostering internationalism, such as the International Lenin School, with its high-quality and elitist language school.
This enforced proximity in a cramped space without the luxury of gated communities promoted certain forms of behaviour and created a climate of its own. The great world of the Comintern, where global issues and questions were negotiated and resolved, was reduced to a tiny space. A world full of the bustle of emissaries, agents and propagandists had now shrunk to the four walls of overcrowded communal apartments. People who had not known one another before were forced into acquaintance. People whose paths had crossed previously now found themselves meeting up again and, under the pressured conditions which encouraged self-analysis and the examination of one’s own conscience, all too readily poured out their whole lives to each other. An entire epoch of war and revolution, underground fighting and defeat was reviewed once again – in the stuffy atmosphere of crowded hotel rooms, boarding houses and communal apartments. ‘Doesn’t everyone know someone or other here?’ asked Emma Dornberger during one of the self-criticism sessions that went on deep into the night.29 Indeed, people’s lives were now so reduced and circumscribed, the world outside had become so incomprehensible, inaccessible and alien, the walls of fear and despair had become so huge, and Comintern Moscow with all its ramifications had become so confusing that people no longer knew whether it was a safe haven or a prison from which there was no escape. Despite their good intentions politically, its inhabitants found their surroundings taxing, since they had proved more backward and recalcitrant than those to which they were accustomed. Their ignorance of the language tended to isolate them.30 Living together in cramped spaces and extreme poverty called for people who barely knew each other to stick together, but it also abandoned them to the dictatorship of an intimacy that allowed of no privacy. People learned about private matters of which they should rather have remained in ignorance, both foibles and idiosyncrasies. There would be bouts of drinking and people would even come to blows.31 They were compelled to remain in one another’s company and were more or less prevented from having a look at the country they were living in. Everything took place in a space where there was simply no privacy at all. Everyone knew everything. For example, Gustav von Wangenheim, as he openly confesses in his self-criticism, had a detailed knowledge of the sex life of someone in his circle:
We all knew that Rauschenbach was a homosexual or a man of a homoerotic type. He was an extremely manly man, a muscular figure, a fantastically hard man who, as was common knowledge among the entire Kolonne Links, was passionately in love with this Bruno. He was completely besotted with him, but because we all knew this we kept a close watch on him. They were never alone together throughout the entire tour; they never slept alone once this homoerotic relationship had become known. I have looked into this and had lots of conversations about it with the members of the Kolonne itself, but nothing ever became public. I must add that, if you knew the Kolonne Links comrades of old, you will be aware that their way of life was such that nothing could remain a secret. There could be no love affairs in the troupe without its becoming known to the whole troupe. And, even today, I am still quite convinced that this boy, who has refused to become involved and who declares that he never knew that the other man was homosexual, only found out about it the day he found himself being blackmailed. This Rauschenbach was being pursued by a blackmailer. No one had told me about it, and I only found out afterwards. In the old days, as director, I never took any notice of conversations of this kind; nor did I pay attention to kitchen gossip. It was beneath my dignity. But not today.32
On the one hand, the distance between people disappeared; on the other, the pressure of immediate social control increased. Nothing remained hidden. Who had slept with whom, who was living with whom, who had adopted a particular posture in the factional struggles in the Neukölln branch of the Party a decade earlier, or who had used what tricks to make an illegal frontier crossing. These were details and personal information of no importance in ordinary life but might be lethal in a climate of universal denunciation. The microcosm of the Comintern society thrown back on itself simply seethed with gossip, tittle-tattle and rumours, and everything together created an atmosphere of distrust, suspicion and fear. Georg Lukács coined the term ‘émigré psychosis’ to describe it.
This émigré life contains many illnesses within our organization. We have failed to draw the right conclusions from the fact of our emigration. We are fully aware of what Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote about their emigration and how they fought this émigré psychosis. We have failed to offer similar resistance. What is the central issue of this illness? It consists in the fact that the émigré does not have a direct relationship to the living mass movements of the proletariat, that émigrés are not sufficiently involved in Russian life; there is an absence of close contact.33
He was well aware that such contact was not easily established. That made the contrast between this oppressive background and the luminous places of happiness which also existed – the summerhouse, the dacha, and sometimes too the children’s summer camp or the sanatorium in the Crimea – all the more striking. The Comintern had summerhouses of its own where its officials but also its guests could remain incognito.
Building No. 1, the International Liaison Office (OMS), was situated close to the village of Sukovo. It was a country house where confidential couriers belonging to the organization could be housed and where meetings were held. The building was also used for holidays for members of the ECCI. The latter also spent their summer leave there. Moreover, the estate was used to supply the ECCI canteen with fresh fruit and vegetables.34
Sukovo was also home to a colony of German political émigrés, a place where prominent officials lived with their families. Dimitrov was able to inspect the Molotov dacha in Meshcherino.35 Ruth von Mayenburg, who lived in the Lux, later described Serebrianyi Bor on the Moskva, her refuge outside the city:
At that time the Comintern’s closed dacha grounds lay in Serebrianyi Bor, which means Silver Woods. The place lies to the west of Moscow in a large bend of the Moskva with its many tributaries, so that there were plenty of bathing opportunities. That was where the famous nudist beach beloved of the Germans was to be found. In 1934 I was forced for the first time in my life to strip off completely bec
ause Béla Kun was not ashamed to put his huge naked belly on display, and the wife of Fritz Heckert, the German representative of the Party, performed dances of the veils with pendulous breasts to the delight of the entire nudist colony.36
Dachas appear in the memoirs of all the survivors as places of happiness. One instance is to be found in the memoirs of Marcus Wolf, the son of Friedrich Wolf, the prominent writer.
Peredelkino! This little picturesque suburb of Moscow, just an hour by rail from the Kiev Station, had been chosen by the writers to establish a settlement. With the growing success of his plays, our father had enough money and also the opportunity to lease a plot of land and build on it. The land was covered with birch trees and had a view out onto an open field and a stream that wound its way down to the village pond and to a hill with a little cemetery and the old Orthodox Church … At the time Peredelkino seemed idyllic to us, despite everything else that was going on.37
The inhabitants of this Noah’s Ark had learned a lot in their efforts to find their feet in this foreign country, but their minds were simply unable to come to terms with the fact that everything they might once have been proud of could now be interpreted as crimes for which they were to be held responsible.38 But this was exactly what came to pass. Their whole past, their involvement with the great wide world of the International, was now treated as a crime. Even worse, they were now doomed by their foreignness, the mere fact that they were foreign. This was understood clearly by ordinary people with ordinary common sense, as we can see from a letter written to Dimitrov on 10 May 1938 by a M. Simenova:
I am a Stakhanovite, and sympathize with the Party… . a week ago, my son came from school and said that all the boys are preparing a pogrom and will beat up all the other nations, the Poles, Latvians, Germans, because all their parents are spies. When I tried to find out who said this, one of the boys said that one boy’s brother was a Komsomol member and worked in the NKVD, and he added that soon all the foreign spies who lived in Moscow would be put on trial, and their families [in the apartments] and children at school would be beaten up as Yids were under the tsar. I went to the school to see the director, but he says that it is all the parents’ fault and that he could not track down every rumour. Today again I saw a group of women at our factory discussing the sign ‘Kill the Latvians, the Poles’ [that appeared] on the wall in the morning. It is a bad situation. I also wrote to com. Stalin, and other women suggested informing you too because one can hear this kind of talk every day. Even the Party members are all scared, but still there is talk in private about whether the children and women are guilty, [and] that they would be beaten up and thrown out of their apartments.39
The comrades who had converged on Moscow from all over the world had now become foreigners, alien bodies, enemy foreigners and spies.
Vulnerability: world communism as world conspiracy
The transformation of refugees into ‘enemy foreigners’ was not peculiar to the Russians. The same phenomenon was widespread in the First World War in all the warring nations; it would reappear in the Second World War. Japanese nationals and US citizens of Japanese origin were interned in the United States, anti-fascist refugees from Germany and Austria were to be found in the internment camps in France and Britain. No doubt, the xenophobia and spy mania concealed a fear of a new war.40 Hardly any group could be more easily exploited to help to incite war panic than the members of the parties of the Communist International, who could now be redefined as spies and agents. As early as September 1935, Yezhov had identified the political immigrants as the ideal agents of foreign powers:
Foreign intelligence officers, saboteurs, knew that there was no better cover for their espionage and subversive operations than a party card, and they relied on that fact. For this reason, it was necessary to hide behind a party card at whatever cost. And they utilized every means of deception in order to obtain a party card for a spy or a saboteur. We can assert firmly that Poles, Finns, Czechs, and Germans have been openly gambling on this.41
Everything that once distinguished communists now redounded to their disadvantage with fatal effects. Insignificant details suddenly assumed decisive importance: who said what to whom in a Paris café, who had criticized whom in a meeting of the Party cell, who had lent whom a book – the chain of suspect actions was endless. What formerly had been thought of as an unconventional, independent lifestyle, as breaking taboos, was now judged ‘characteristic of people who have gone downhill’, a Bohemian way of life. All the qualities that had once made people respect them now rendered them suspect. Their chief defect, however, lay in their nationality, the fact that they came from countries where fascism and National Socialism had triumphed and which were now preparing to unleash a war on the Soviet Union. If a communist had escaped from a fascist gaol, this was no longer viewed as a courageous act worthy of respect but a reason to suspect that the fascist police simply staged the escape in order to give credibility to an agent. A person who had made an illegal frontier crossing at a risk to his life was not someone who had outwitted the enemy but someone who had been smuggled over by him. Hardly any of the refugees had papers that were in order; many had managed to escape only with the aid of forged passports. These were now used as proof that they were class enemies in disguise. Almost all refugees had had complicated, even convoluted lives. They had been active in the factional struggles of the period, they had taken part in the polemics of the day; disputes about the correct line to take had always been seen as an integral part of life. They had now landed in a country where disagreements and divergent opinions had long since been suppressed and an independent opinion was treated as opposition or even a criminal offence. They had passed their lives in the midst of contradictions and resistance; now they were supposed to fit in without any ifs and buts. There was, in short, a clash of two political cultures, two worlds, a clash that was seen as an assault. A carefree approach to things, talking without paying heed to who was listening, leaving documents lying around – all that was a sign of ‘bourgeois liberalism’, a ‘lack of vigilance’, a crime. ‘Thanks to this idiotic disease, carelessness, spies were able to put down roots in our organization.’42 Many of them had not just one name but several, not just one personal identity but several Party identities. Seen from the vantage point of the NKVD, they were an inexhaustible reservoir of ‘double-dealers’ who could not be trusted an inch. As Comintern people they were at home all over the world, had connections everywhere, and were therefore ideal candidates for a network of international plots and conspiracies! They frequently came from communist parties that had been infiltrated by the security services of their home states. There was plenty of evidence to support that idea. As professional illegals, they knew all about smuggling messages and working undercover. As civil war specialists, they knew how to get hold of weapons and how militant and military actions should be organized. They were the ideal assassins, a category of persons which, to the mind of the NKVD, were needed in such large numbers. As persecuted victims and asylum seekers, they were unable to return to their native country; as the stateless persons of global war, they had no mother country and no natural territory of their own; they were completely disarmed and defenceless. They spoke a foreign, incomprehensible language and for that reason alone were suspect. If they spoke two languages or more they were doubly dangerous. As exiles, they were at home in two cultures, perhaps also in a double culture, and that meant ‘double-dealing’, double loyalty or, in other words, unreliability. It was not difficult to get the better of them, for they were defenceless and at loggerheads among themselves. They were utterly isolated in a world alien to them. And, since they fought desperately for their own survival, they did things that no one else does in normal circumstances and that everyone does when it is a matter of saving one’s own skin: they denounced others, and the others denounced yet others, and thus produced that spectre of global conspiracy of which Stalin and Yezhov were in such urgent need if they were to weld the entire country together by in
stilling universal fear. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 it was claimed that ‘a spectre is haunting Europe’. In 1937 communism really had become a spectre. In such mausoleums as the Hotel Lux it had become a shadow of its former self. By the time the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, it was long since done for.
Lists, dossiers and card indexes
There is hardly any sector of our construction industry where the enemy has not found ways to entrench himself and to attempt to undermine the fortress of our proletarian dictatorship from the outside. We are the organization that, more than any other, stands at the junction with the capitalist world. To our shame, we have to admit that our vigilance proved to be at a lower level than in the other organizations of the VKP(B). We see a picture of profound penetration by the enemy into the most important parts of our organization. The most affected are two such important sectors as communications and personnel… . Look what happened. The most important sector – communications – turned out to be in the enemy’s hands. The other most important department – personnel – had been in the hands of the enemy for a number of years.43
And again:
The whole leadership of the Personnel Department was in the enemy’s hands. The problem of the selection of workers for the Personnel Department was not approached in a satisfactory way. There was constant staff turnover; during the past three years, forty-five people passed through the Personnel Department… . There is a certain sense of confusion among the workers of the organization. This is absolutely inadmissible because panic will only favour the enemy. In order to unite ourselves in a Bolshevik way, it is essential to lead the whole organization on to the broad Bolshevik road.44