The Great Terror

13

THE FOREIGN ELEMENT

The N.K.V.D. organs … could extend the category of “enemy of the people” to everyone who dared to utter a word of criticism.

Wladislaw Gomulka

IN THE COMINTERN

The Purge also operated abroad and against foreigners in the USSR. The most obviously purgeable of the latter were the foreign Communists in the apparatus of the Comintern. It was more particularly the Communist Parties which were illegal in their own countries that bore the brunt. First of all, their leaderships were mainly ready to hand in Moscow. Then again, there was no democratic opinion back in Germany or Yugoslavia or Italy which could raise objections. There were almost no victims, even in Moscow, among British or American Communists, who were thus not called upon to run the risks, either at home or in Russia, which the rest of the Comintern Parties had to face. Their protection derived from the nature of the regimes they were working to overthrow.

Lenin, in creating the Comintern, skimmed off a lively section of the European revolutionary Left, which might have otherwise fertilized a broad and unified movement and barred the way to Fascism. It became instead a set of parties founded strictly on the Bolshevik model, and constitutionally subordinated to the Comintern—which always remained under effective Soviet control. After a while, these parties’ leaderships were selected and their tactics dictated by Moscow—almost invariably with disastrous results.

The last flicker of independence in the Comintern took place in May 1927. In the presence of Stalin, Rykov, Bukharin, and Manuilsky, the Executive Committee of the Comintern was asked by Thalmann to condemn a document of Trotsky’s on the Chinese question. All present were prepared to do so, when the Italian delegates—Togliatti and Silone—said that they had not seen the document. It turned out that no one else had either. The Italians objected that though Trotsky was doubtless wrong, they could hardly be expected to subscribe to a formal condemnation of something they had not seen. It was explained to them that the Soviet Politburo thought it inexpedient to circulate it. The session was adjourned so that the old Bulgarian Communist Kolarov could go over the question with the recalcitrant Italians in private. He told them quite frankly that it was not a question of getting at the truth, but of the struggle for power. The Comintern must go along with the Soviet Politburo majority, and that was all there was to it. The Italians still persisted in their attitude, and Stalin typically withdrew the motion.¹ This appeal to independent judgment was, however, the last.

Silone left the Party. Togliatti must have decided that his choice was of submitting to Stalin and hoping to exert some influence, or going under; he chose the former course, and persisted in it, as an accomplice in many a far grosser breach of confidence, in later years.

Henceforward, the Comintern—after the removal, at that time peaceable, of various supporters of Trotsky and Bukharin—became merely another element in Stalin’s political machine. As early as 1930, a member of the Yugoslav Politburo observed that apart from men of “limited intelligence” like Pyatnitsky and Remmele, the Comintern leaders appeared to him to be “men at one time remarkable, but now demoralized or exhausted.”²

The Comintern and its organs were by the nature of their work particularly liable to the charge of contact with foreign countries. The Communist Party of the Western Ukraine, which had been kept organizationally separate from the Communist Party of Poland, was already being purged as a nest of spies in the late 1920s.³ In 1936, a purge took place in the Communist Party of Latvia in which numbers of the Party’s leadership then in Moscow were repressed “for treachery and treason.” This amounted to “in effect the dissolution” of the Party.⁴ The Latvian Party had been little more than a branch of the Soviet Party—in earlier times, even officially so—though many Latvians, like Rudzutak, were prominent in Russia, and their origin was used against them. The Estonian Communist Party, too, was denounced as “compromised.” So few Estonian Communists survived that on the Soviet annexation of their country in 1940, one of the highest posts went to a man of Estonian origin who had hitherto been an assistant station master in the North Caucasus.⁵ The entire Lithuanian Central Committee was also arrested, and charged with working for the Lithuanian government.⁶ In any case, all this was a mere preliminary. In 1937, the storm broke over the main body of foreign Communists.

In the dingy corridors of the Hotel Lux, the Comintern officials led a rather bohemian existence. Full of foreigners with nowhere else to go, the hotel became something like a frontier village raided nightly by bandits. Occasionally there was trouble. One Polish Communist shot down several NKVD men before he was overcome.⁷

On 28 April 1937 Heinz Neumann, former member of the German CP’s Politburo, was arrested. After being one of the leading foreigners in the Canton Commune, with his friend Lominadze, he had been removed from the leadership of the German Communist Party early in the 1930s, but had been working for the Party in Moscow since 1935.

Neumann’s “dark, petite, vivacious and gay”⁸ wife describes his arrest. At one o’clock in the morning, three uniformed police officials and the manager of the Lux, Gurevich—himself certainly an agent—came in and roused Neumann. Forbidding the couple to speak in German, they made a long search, lasting until dawn, of his documents, taking a trunkful and sixty books of allegedly oppositionist content. When Neumann was finally taken out, he said to his wife, “Don’t cry.

‘That’s enough. Get a move on, now,’ ordered the leader. At the door, Heinz turned and strode back, took me in his arms again and kissed me. ‘Cry then,’ he said. ‘there’s enough to cry about.’⁹

In December 1937, Neumann was removed from the Lubyanka, and he was evidently sentenced about then, since the order confiscating his goods was handed to his wife in January 1938.¹⁰ He seems to have been transferred to the Butyrka in the summer of 1938 and still not to have signed any confession.¹¹ His wife had by then been sentenced to five years as a socially dangerous element.

Three other members of the German Politburo disappeared at about the same time: Hermann Remmele, Fritz Schulte, and Hermann Schubert—the last arrested in July.¹² Schubert was denounced by an Austrian woman Communist for having mentioned Lenin’s 1917 deal with the Germans in connection with Trotsky’s alleged relations with the Nazis. Togliatti then managed the attack on him.¹³ Other prominent German victims included Hans Kippenberger, head of the Party’s military apparatus; Leo Flieg, the organizational secretary of its Central Committee; and Heinrich Susskind and Werner Hirsch, editors-in-chief of Rote Fahne, together with four of their assistant editors. (Hirsch seems to have been saved from a Nazi prison and allowed to go to the USSR by the intervention of Goering’s wife, who knew his family.)¹⁴ Remmele is reported as going mad in camp, and always coming to blows with both guards and fellow prisoners.¹⁵

The veteran Hugo Eberlein had been the only genuine delegate at the conference at which the Comintern was founded. The “delegates” allegedly representing foreign countries were mostly just foreigners in the Soviet service; for example, Unshlikht represented Poland. Eberlein had instructions from Rosa Luxemburg to oppose the formation of the new International and did so firmly (though abstaining in the final vote).

His arrest was now reported in a Swiss paper, and he gave a press conference denying it, only to be arrested the next day. He is reported as being brutally interrogated while he was suffering from asthmatic attacks in the Lefortovo prison, and to have been sentenced to twenty-five years.¹⁶ When with a group of prisoners being moved from Kotlas to Archangel, he was too ill to travel and was shot.¹⁷

For lesser figures any excuse served, as with Soviet citizens. One German Communist was arrested for saying that the only Nazi with principles was Goebbels. This was construed as “counter-revolutionary agitation.”¹⁸ Another was accused of “counter-revolutionary agitation against the Soviet State” on the grounds (in any case false) of having belonged to the opposition within the German Communist Party from 1931 to 1932.¹⁹ A Soviet writer reports a German Communist in the Butyrka in 1937 with body scars from the Gestapo and crushed fingernails from the NKVD.²⁰

Several of the arrested were Jews. This did not save them from charges of fascist espionage, any more than it had Yakir. An interrogator is quoted as saying, “The Jewish refugees are Hitler’s agents abroad.”²¹ The German occupation of Czechoslovakia resulted in Czechs, too, being regarded as German agents. One Czech is reported as having had to confess that he became a German agent early in the First World War, at a time when neither Czechoslovakia nor the Soviet Union existed.²²

Willi Miinzenberg, the German Communist Party’s propaganda genius, was summoned to Moscow to share the fate of Flieg, who had been arrested as he stepped off the train on arrival from Paris (as is also reported of Eberlein; one or the other was evidently the leading German Communist who was brought in, in precisely these circumstances, to Ivanov-Razumnik’s cell in the Butyrka, in his neat Western suit—horrified to learn from those present that he was, of course, a Nazi spy)²³ Miinzenberg refused to go and was expelled from the Party in 1938. He was in France and was interned at the outbreak of war in the following year. When the refugee camps were opened by the French in view of the Nazi advance in 1940, Miinzenberg struck for the Swiss border with another inmate. A few days later, his body was found in a forest near Grenoble, hanging from a tree. His face was battered, and reports make it clear that suicide is unlikely.²⁴

After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1939, about 570 German Communists were assembled in the Moscow prisons.²⁵ A number of them were sentenced by the Russians, but the majority were told that they had been judged by a Special Commission of the NKVD and expelled as undesirable aliens. These German Communists, who included Jews and men especially wanted by the Nazis for armed resistance to them during the street fights of the early 1930s, were hustled over the bridge to German-occupied Poland at Brest-Litovsk, while NKVD men checked the lists with Gestapo men. They included the widow of Erik Miihsam, the poet, and the composer Hans David, a Jew eventually gassed by the Gestapo in the Maidanek concentration camp.fn1 The actress Carola Neher, who was originally on the list, disappeared in Russia instead.²⁶ She was sentenced to ten years but is believed, according to a recent Soviet article, to have been shot in Orel in 1941. Her son had been taken from her, and only found out his parents’ names in the late 1960s.²⁷

The son of Ernst Torgler, the main German defendant at the Leipzig Trial, who had been Communist leader in the Reichstag, was then about thirteen. He appeared at protest meetings in the West and eventually went to Russia. There he got a long sentence as a German spy. He was reported at a camp in the Komi area in the far north, where he had the job of disposing of bodies. He had by this time become completely assimilated into the young criminal element. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he too was handed over to the Gestapo with the other German Communists²⁸

The Hungarian losses were also heavy. They included Béla Kun, leader of the 1919 Communist Revolution in Hungary, himself. His conduct of the Terror in Budapest preceded even worse actions when, on fleeing to Moscow, he was put in charge of the newly conquered Crimea, and was censured and withdrawn by Lenin for his excessive cruelties. He then operated in the Comintern, and had been partly responsible for the Communist fiasco in Germany in 1921. He has been described as “the incarnation of intellectual inadequacy, uncertainty of will, and authoritarian corruption.”²⁹

A meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in May 1937 saw his fall. Manuilsky made a speech violently denouncing him for insulting behavior to Stalin and contacts with Romanian Secret Police since 1919. The other members of the ECCI looked on in silence.fn2 Kun, who was quite unprepared for the attack, went white. He “roared like a mortally wounded lion: ‘this is a terrible provocation, a conspiracy to get me murdered. But I swear that I have not wanted to insult Comrade Stalin. I want to explain everything to Comrade Stalin himself.’ “But everything had been set up in advance. As Kun, pale and shocked, left the room in a dead silence, two NKVD men escorted him out.³⁰ But he was not arrested immediately. A few days later, Stalin telephoned and “gaily asked Kun to receive a French reporter and refute a rumour of Kun’s arrest.” This he did; the denial was published; and he was arrested soon afterwards.³¹ He had had several members of his own Politburo arrested earlier.³²

Bela Kun was taken to the Lefortovo, where he was tortured. He is reported as having been kept standing on one foot for periods of from ten to twenty hours. When he returned to his cell after interrogation, his legs were swollen and his face was so black as to be unrecognizable.³³ He was in the same cell as Muklevich.³⁴ He was then held in the Butyrka until his execution for espionage—as an agent of Germany since 1916, and of Britain since 1926.³⁵ This took place on 29 August 1938.³⁶ It seems clear that the formalities were complied with, for he is described as having been “sentenced on the basis of a faked indictment.”³⁷ Kun’s frail wife, IrMa, was arrested on 23 February 1938,³⁸ and got eight years, going first to Kolyma,³⁹ but survived and was eventually released. His son-in-law, the Hungarian poet Hidas, was also sent to a labor camp.⁴⁰

Of the other leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, twelve more People’s Commissars of the then Communist Government in Budapest were arrested. These included the Grand Old Man of Hungarian Communism, Dezso Bokanyi, and Jozsef Pogany, known under the name of John Pepper as the Comintern’s representative to the American Communist Party. Of the twelve, two survived imprisonment. Theorists like Lajos Magyar also perished.

Many Italian Communists died—such as Edmondo Peluso, who had been with Neumann in the Canton Commune. He got a letter out of prison begging friends for help and saying that his strength was failing through torture, but that they should believe his innocence. Because this was suspected to be a police trap, there was no response. The few who were later released found that their stories of prison were not believed. Togliatti’s brother-in-law Paoli Robotti was arrested in 1937. The torturers broke his teeth and incurably injured his spine,⁴¹ but he was eventually released and was later, in 1961, to say that he had kept silent about all this because.⁴² it was not the business of Italian, but of Soviet, Communists to speak.’

Few had Robotti’s luck. Most of the actual leadership was protected by Togliatti’s docility in the face of Stalin’s line. But about 200 Italian Communists perished. Eugenia Ginzburg mentions an Italian woman Communist screaming in the punishment cells of Yaroslavl on being beaten and hosed down with icy water.⁴³

Gorkić, the General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 1937. His Polish wife had already been seized as a British agent. Almost the whole of the Yugoslav Central Committee followed him, together with a large number of the remaining Yugoslav Communists; of these, more than 100 “found their death in Stalin’s prisons and camps.”⁴⁴ They included such men as Vlada Copi6, the Party’s Organizational Secretary, newly back from command in the International Brigade in Spain. Tito came to Moscow at this time and lived on the fourth floor of the Lux. He later said that he never knew whether he would get out alive or awake in the night “to hear the fatal knocking at my door.⁴⁵ He noticed that there was a tendency in the Comintern to dissolve the entire Yugoslav Party—as was being done with the Polish and Korean Parties. Finally, he was allowed to form a new Central Committee. As soon as he could, he transferred it to Yugoslavia and Western Europe, where it had some chance of survival.

The then First Secretary of the Finnish Communist Party, Arvo Tuominen, gives a long list of Finnish leaders shot, and says that “nearly all Finns then living in the Soviet Union were labelled ‘enemies of the people.’” These Finnish Communists were involved through a confession obtained from Otto Vilen, “gained by Stalinist beating methods.”⁴⁶ They were spies in the service of France, Germany, Norway, and so on. Of those not shot but sent to camp, most died, though one woman member of the Finnish Politburo drowned herself in a stream in the Solovki prison area.⁴⁷

The tiny Romanian Party lost many of its most prominent members, including Marcel Pauker (not to be confused with the NKVD officer)fn3 and Alexandru Dobrogeanu, shot on 4 December 1937. Pauker himself is said to have been accused of collusion with Zinoviev and shot without trial.⁴⁸ But in general, it was the early connection of the Romanians with Rakovsky which proved fatal. Little reference seems to have been made to this micro-purge until, at the trial in Bucharest in 1952 of the Politburo member Vasile Luca, an attack was made on “the treasonable clique of Marcel Pauker.”fn4 Bulgarian Communists were also much persecuted. Dimitrov’s fellow defendants at the Leipzig Trial, Taney and Popov, were jailed.⁴⁹ Popov survived and was rehabilitated in 1955. Chervenkov, later to be the Stalinist ruler of Bulgaria, hid in Dimitrov’s flat until interceded for. There were many other victims. One Bulgarian is mentioned in a Vologda camp being thrown into a hole in the ground without food for thirteen days, and dying.⁵⁰

A recent Bulgarian article tells us that “more than a thousand of the 1,200 to 1,400 Bulgarian political emigres in the U.S.S.R. found themselves in forced labor camps, and only about one hundred of them came back to Bulgaria.”⁵¹ The main leadership, such men as Islcrov, Lambrev, and Vasilev, were Nazi or Bulgarian spies. Exiles settled in the Ukraine were charged with a plot to annex that country to Bulgaria.⁵²

And so it was with all the émigré groups. For example, Tanaka, a leader of the Japanese Communist Party, was put through the conveyor and torture and is reported liquidated.⁵³

But the heaviest casualties fell on the Poles. The Polish Communist Party was very much a special case in its relations with Moscow. It derived in the main from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuaniafn5—admitted on a basis of autonomy, together with the Jewish Bund and the Lettish Social Democrats, into the IVth Congress of the Russian Social Democrats in 1906, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were still technically united. A. S. Warski and Dzerzhinsky were then elected members of the joint Central Committee as its representatives.

The Poles on the whole backed the Bolsheviks, though with reservations. Their leader Rosa Luxemburg had written privately that the Bolsheviks’ support would be valuable in spite of their “Tartar-Mongolian savagery.” Although Lenin was soon involved in organizing factions in the Polish Party, and in a series of polemics with Rosa Luxemburg and others, the quarrels were domestic in a sense which was not true of the relations with other foreign organizations. There was much coming and going between the Parties, then and later. When Poland became an independent state, Poles who had worked with the Bolsheviks and remained on Soviet soil became members of the Russian Communist Party pure and simple. We have only to think of names like Dzerzhinsky, Radek, Menzhinsky, and Unshlikht (as with the parallel Lettish cases of Eikhe, Rudzutak, and others). A Pole could be transferred between the new Communist Party of Poland and the Russian Communist Party at will. Marchlewski, named head of the Polish “Government” established behind the Red Army lines during the 1920 invasion of Poland, became, after the debacle, a Soviet diplomat. As a natural corollary, the Polish Party, insofar as its organizations within Soviet territory were concerned, was involved in the Purge in much the same way as the Soviet Party proper—Warski was, after all, practically an Old Bolshevik in almost the same sense as Rykov or Kamenev.

The Poles in Russia were to some degree comparable with the Irish in England; there were many of them, and they often played important roles in the life of the larger country. The Purge affected not only the Polish Party members, but the Polish population as a whole. The total Polish population is shown as 792,000 in the USSR census of 1926. The 1939 census (not indeed reliable) shows 626,000. Figures of their actual losses in the Purge are hard to come by. According to a Polish Communist, about 10,000 Poles from Moscow alone were shot at the time of the Bukharin Trial, with a total of 50,000 in the country as a whole.

Arrests of Polish Communists had taken place sporadically all through the 1930s. Now the Party as a whole was caught up in an unprecedented campaign of almost literal annihilation, both organizationally and physically. The survivors in the whole of the Polish Communist movement and its following are said to have been about seventy or eighty in number. A Polish leader remarks, “Almost all the leaders and active members of the K.P.P. then in the Soviet Union were arrested and sent to camps.”⁵⁴ It is certainly true that when a Polish Communist Government had to be formed in 1944, the leaders were scraped up from all over the place. The few who had the luck to remain in Polish jails, like Gomulka, had superimposed on them men like President Bierut, formerly (under the name Rutkowski) an NKVD interrogator, and as economic chief, Minc, who had been a lecturer in an institute in Central Asia.

On 20 and 21 August 1937 Warski, Budzynski, and others were shot.⁵⁵ War-ski is said to have gone mad under interrogation and to have imagined that he was in the hands of the Gestapo. A number of Polish Communist leaders then in Poland were invited to Moscow for “consultation.” They included Ring and Henrykowski, both members of the Polish Politburo. The latter saw what was going on, and for weeks never ventured out of his room at the Lux except on nocturnal shopping for supplies. All eventually disappeared.⁵⁶ From 1937 to 1939, all twelve members of the Central Committee present in Russia, and several hundred others, were executed. Among those who perished were all the Party’s representatives on the Executive Committee and the Control Commission of the Comintern, including the veteran Walecki.

Before his arrest, Walecki provided an example of the way old revolutionaries had become humiliated and degraded. Walecki, who had always given friendly greetings to Neumann’s wife, met her in the Lux soon after Neumann’s arrest. “I smiled and nodded,” she remembers, “but he looked away deliberately and there was an embarrassed, rather guilty expression on his face.”⁵⁷ Walecki was to confess that he was a spy.⁵⁸ By 11 September 1937, the whole Polish Politburo had been arrested. Stalin signed a proposal on “cleaning up” the Polish Party on 28 November 1937.⁵⁹

Usually Stalin, after purging a Party, could make use of the struggles over power and policy invariably prevalent to select a new leadership. But in this case, “both factions” in the Polish Communist Party in 1937 were accused of “following the instructions of the Polish counter-revolutionary intelligence.”⁶⁰ It seems to have issued its last official statement on 8 June 1938 and to have been finally dissolved by a vote of the Presidium of the ECCI on 16 August 1938. “Agents of Polish fascism” had “managed to gain positions of leadership” in it, according to the report of the Comintern delegate to the Soviet XVIIIth Party Congress, Manuilsky. (Manuilsky, making this report, referred also to police agents in the Hungarian and Yugoslav Parties.) When the accusations were announced to the Polish members of the International Brigade in Spain, they were received with silence and tears.⁶¹

The final batch of leaders, like Kostrzewa, were shot in 1939, when accounts were being settled with the whole Comintern apparatus. The left-wing poets Stande and Wandurski and other literary men perished; the most important was Bruno Jasienski, of whom we have written in Chapter 10.

The total dissolution of the Polish Communist Party was an extraordinary measure. It reflected simply the physical destruction of its cadres. It probably suffered little more than the Ukrainian Party. But Stalin could not, of course, simply dissolve the Ukrainian Party, since he needed someone to rule in Kiev. He did not, at the moment, have any immediate need of a group for ruling Poland and doubtless reflected that—as it turned out in practice—he could scrape one up from somewhere when and if required. The Polish Party, moreover, was one in which hostility to the forthcoming Nazi-Soviet Pact, with its partition of Poland, was likely to be strong.

The wives of the arrested foreigners suffered like those of the Russian victims. But they had no relations to turn to. They remained entirely at the mercy of official caprice. First, they were involved in a continual struggle with the manager of the Lux, who soon contrived to transfer them from their rooms to a separate, older building on the other side of the courtyard, crowded in with other wives. From here, too, they were eventually evicted.

Their papers were not in order, and they had to queue up regularly every five days to renew them. It was impossible to get jobs. They could live only by selling their possessions and books.

It was common to try to keep the children from knowing what had happened to their fathers. Margarete Neumann quotes a conversation:

“Is your daddy arrested too?”

“No, my daddy’s on holiday in the Caucasus.”

And then the eleven-year-old daughter of one of the arrested comrades destroyed the child’s illusion: “Oh, he’s in the Caucasus, is he? Why does your mother pay money into the prison, then? A fine Caucasus that is!”⁶²

But sooner or later, the wives were themselves arrested. On a single night in September 1937, all the Polish wives were taken. One that can be traced got eight years’ forced labor,⁶³ and this seems to have been the usual sentence.

The Soviet representatives in the Comintern machinery were also destroyed, being blamed for collusion in the penetration of the enemy into the constituent Parties. The exception was Manuilsky himself, who acted as Stalin’s agent throughout. Described as a third-rate mind, he was willing to be the Comintern equivalent of a Mekhlis or a Shkiryatov and thus survived.

In his report on Comintern matters to the XVIIIth Congress, after dealing with the Polish case, he significantly added, “It was the failure of Comintern workers that they allowed themselves to be deceived … and were late in taking measures against the contamination of the Communist Parties by enemy elements.”

This referred primarily to two other members of the Central Committee of the CPSU: Pyatnitsky and Knorin. Pyatnitsky was, apart from Manuilsky, the chief Soviet operator in the Comintern. He had served on its Executive Committee since 1923, and ran the key Organization Department.⁶⁴

V. G. Knorin, another Soviet representative on the Comintern Executive Committee, controlled the German and other Parties. A Latvian, he is described as an honest man, but a dogmatist.⁶⁵ He seems to have been denounced for permitting nationalist deviations as early as 1936. He was arrested in June 1937⁶⁶ as a Gestapo agent and is said to have been tortured particularly badly.

Their subordinates fell with them, including their immediate aides, Grollman and Idelson. One of the “lists” Stalin signed for execution consisted of 300 Comintern operatives.⁶⁷ Between 23 May and 1 June 1937, a wave of arrests swept the organization.⁶⁸ The Head of the Foreign Communications Department, MirovAbramov, was taken with all his staff. It is said that he was accused of espionage for no fewer than fifteen countries.⁶⁹ He was named as a link between Yagoda and Trotsky in the Bukharin Trial. Alikhanov, Head of the Cadre Department, was also arrested in the summer of 1937,⁷⁰ as were the Heads of the Propaganda Department, the Organization Department, and the Press Section. We can trace none of them further, presumably because they were shot en masse, under the list system.

In general, a clean sweep was made of the organization, apart from such pliant figures as Kuusinen. Dimitrov alone tried to save some of the victims.

KILLERS ABROAD

It was comparatively easy to deal with the foreigners in Moscow. The operation of the Purge in foreign countries called for more secret techniques.

In December 1936, Yezhov organized in the NKVD an “Administration of Special Tasks.” Under it were the so-called mobile groups, charged with special assassinations outside Russia.⁷¹

There was one problem in particular which he faced. He could not so easily dispose of the old NKVD cadres operating abroad under the Foreign Department as he could those in the internal departments. They could refuse to come and be arrested. He coped with this by two methods. First of all, when he arrested the other heads of departments in the Lubyanka, he left Slutsky to carry on in the best of odors. The Foreign Department, it became known, was not to be submitted to the purge needed for its more corrupt confreres.

Numbers of operatives, impressed by this idea, returned to Russia, where they were mostly “transferred” and executed. The fate of some of them became known. For example, in the summer of 1937, the NKVD Resident in France, Nikolai Smirnov, was recalled to Moscow and executed. At first, Yezhov pretended that he had simply been transferred to an underground job in China. But the true story leaked out to the NKVD station in France because the wife of another officer had chanced to see the arrest of Smirnov, when she was about to call on him at the Hotel Moskva. Yezhov then put out the story that Smirnov had been a spy for France and Poland. The NKVD officers in France deduced that this was untrue from the simple fact that their cipher for communication with Moscow was not changed. If Smirnov had indeed been a French spy, it must then be assumed that he had betrayed the cipher. Similarly, the old network of informers he had built up continued to operate, contrary to the laws of espionage.⁷²

This sort of thing encouraged defection. Yezhov therefore strengthened his appeal for loyalty by another method. The mobile groups had as one of their first priorities the making of an example of any colleague who broke with Stalin.

Ignace Reiss, an NKVD Resident in Switzerland, broke with the regime in July 1937. His body, riddled with bullets, was found on a road near Lausanne. The Swiss police also found in the abandoned baggage of the friend of Reiss’s who had betrayed him a box of poisoned chocolates, apparently intended for his children.⁷³

Agabekov, former OGPU Resident in Turkey, had broken with the regime as early as 1929. He was murdered in Belgium in 1938.⁷⁴ Walter Krivitsky, whose book is a useful source for this period, had been NKVD Resident in Holland. On 10 February 1941 he was found shot in a hotel room in Washington.

When the situation among the spies abroad had been largely cleared up, it became possible finally to dispense with Slutsky. But in order to avoid troubling the agents still in the field, this was done tactfully. His death on 17 February 1938 was announced in a short friendly obituary the next day.

In fact, he appears to have been poisoned by Frinovsky, by then Deputy Head of the NKVD, in his office (though a recent Soviet account makes it suicide). Slutsky’s deputy, Shpiegelglas, was suddenly called in and told that Slutsky had had a heart attack. Slutsky lay in state in the main hall of the NKVD club, with a guard of honor. But many NKVD officers had some smattering of forensic medicine and at once noticed on his cheeks the spots indicating cyanide poisoning.⁷⁵

IN SPAIN

Slutsky had recently given important service in Spain, which by now had become a major theater of operation for the Purge—not only at the level of Yezhov’s mobile groups, which roamed the country arresting and killing deviationists on the international scale, like Camillo Bernini. For there were also larger political issues: the supression of Spanish “Trotskyism” and the gaining of effective control of the Spanish Government.

As early as December 1936, the Soviet press was speaking of the necessity for the elimination of POUM, the heretical Marxist Party of Catalonia,⁷⁶ equivalent of the British ILP—that is to say, revolutionary Socialists opposed to Communist methods. It was not in any real sense “Trotskyite” (and the few genuine Spanish Trotskyites did not belong to it). While its Twenty-ninth Division (in which George Orwell served) was fighting against Franco on the Aragon front, the Russians were able to secure its suppression.

Jesds Hernéndez, one of the two Communists in the Spanish Republican Government, tells us how he was summoned by the Soviet Ambassador, Rosenberg, and introduced to Slutsky, then going under the pseudonym Marcos. Slutsky said that the suppression of POUM was an urgent matter. Not only was it openly criticizing the Soviet Union, and in particular the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials, but it was attempting to bring Trotsky to Spain.

(There seems to be nothing in this latter allegation, but if the Russians believed it, Stalin might well have had qualms. In a civil war or revolution, it could have been argued, Trotsky’s name was “worth 40,000 bayonets.” In fact, such an idea was chimerical, and even to Spaniards not basically hostile to Trotsky the disadvantages of his presence must have outweighed the advantages.)

Rosenberg remarked that he had often told Spanish Prime Minister Largo Caballero that the liquidation of POUM interested Stalin personally, but that Largo Caballero would not listen to this. Slutsky made it clear that an alternative method was to be found—a provocation mounted by the NKVD which would allow the seizure of power in Barcelona by the Communists, and give them the excuse to get rid of Largo Caballero if he attempted to undo the fait accompli.

The operation was prepared by Antonov-Ovseenko, then Soviet Consul General in Barcelona, and Ernő Gerő, later to be overthrown in the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party by the revolution of 1956, and at that time senior Comintern operative in Spain.

On 3 May 1937, the subservient Spanish Communist whom they had intruded into the leadership of the Catalan police, Rodríguez Sala, seized the Barcelona telephone exchange from the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade unionists who had controlled it since the beginning of the war. The left-wing organizations, including POUM, resisted, and after four days of fighting, which is said to have caused about 1,000 deaths, they were put down by specially prepared police troops brought in from Valencia and elsewhere. On 15 May, the Communist Ministers in the Spanish Cabinet asked for the formal suppression of POUM. But even so, Largo Caballero again refused.

Stalin’s orders to get rid of Largo Caballero and to put in Dr. Negrin as Premier were now transmitted to the Spanish Politburo at a meeting with the Comintern representatives, including Togliatti and Gerő.⁷⁷

Immediately after the formation of the Negrin Government, the new Director-General of Security, the Communist Colonel Ortega, told Hernández that Orlov, the NKVD chief for Spain, had had him sign a number of warrants for the arrest of POUM leaders, without his superior, the Minister of the Interior, being informed. Orlov himself told Hernéndez that the leaders of POUM would be “exposed” as being in collusion with a group of Franco spies already under arrest.

Hernéndez recounts that the majority of the Spanish Communist leadership, though acting loyally in accordance with the Comintern directives, was disgusted with the whole affair. The Secretary-General, José Díaz (who was later to jump or be pushed from his window in Tbilisi), spoke of “this spiritual death” which had come over him. Togliatti and Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”—a Communist who was never to be afflicted with qualms of conscience) had sent the Assault Guards’ Commander in Catalonia an order to arrest the POUM leadership.

On 16 June, Andrés Nin, Political Secretary of POUM and former Secretary of the Red Trade Union International in Moscow, who had held the portfolio of Justice in the Catalan autonomous Government, was arrested. He was taken to Alcala, to a prison in Communist hands. There he was seized by a group of men, including Orlov and Vittorio Vidali (an old Comintern agent later to be involved in the murder of Trotsky, and after the war to lead the anti-Titoite Communists in Trieste). He was removed to El Pardo and there submitted to a Soviet-style investigation. First he was interrogated for thirty hours in relays, without success, and then tortured. “At the end of a few days, his face was no more than a formless mass.”⁷⁸ However, no confession could be obtained from him, and he seems either to have been killed or to have died under interrogation. El Campesino was told that he was buried on the spot.⁷⁹

The formation in France of the Committee for the Defense of POUM and, even more, a strong but simple letter demanding merely a fair deal and treatment of the POUM accused, signed by Gide, Mauriac, Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard, and others, seems to have had an effect in Spain and even on Negr1n. In the case of the senior POUM leaders still surviving, the Government was able to insist on no further “disappearances,” though the rank and file were shot freely. Julian Gorkin, representative of POUM on the Central Committee of the People’s Militia, was one of those who survived.

Hernéndez takes the view that an important motive of Stalin’s was to show that not only in Russia, but also in a “democratic” country governed by the Popular Front, Trotskyites had been proved traitors. Thus it was a question not simply of pursuing the feud and destroying all Trotskyite bases, but also of obtaining an ostensible non-Soviet confirmation of the existence of Trotskyite plots.

Meanwhile, the vulnerable units of the International Brigade were being combed for Trotskyites. For example, Walter Ulbricht was conducting among the German Brigaders the Spanish end of the purge which was sweeping the German Communists in Moscow. (The seconded Red Army commander “Kleber,” commanding the International Brigade, was removed in February 1937 and soon afterward arrested.) The Soviet soldiers in Spain, who must have resented the NKVD actions, were often shot on return, as we have seen.

Ironically, as Stalin carried out his will as regards purges and control over the political machinery in Spain, he lost interest in the outcome of the actual war. Ehrenburg tells us that though the Soviet authorities expressed great indignation at Fascist and Nazi intervention in Spain, as soon as it became evident that the Republicans were fighting a losing battle, this interest became a mere formality. Ehrenburg’s own dispatches, sometimes sent with considerable risk, were cut, altered, or simply thrown into the wastepaper basket.⁸⁰

Many Spaniards who managed to escape the final debacle made their way to Moscow-150 in a single boat.⁸¹ About 6,000, including 2,000 children, is the figure given.⁸² They found themselves facing a different danger.

This wave of political refugees of the Left had been preceded by others. After the defeat of the Socialist rising in Vienna in 1934, several hundred members of the Socialist defense organization Schutzbund took refuge in Russia. They were welcomed as heroes, and marched past in a body in the Red Square to applause and congratulations. By mid-1937, they had been arrested and sent to camps “almost without exception.”⁸³ Some of their dependents, with children to feed and no source of income (having been fired from their jobs), went in 1938 to the German Embassy, now controlled by the Nazis, in an attempt to get back to their homes. The Nazis put them up in the Embassy building and escorted them to the Soviet Registration Office for Foreigners to get permission to go back. Apparently, some succeeded.

The Austrians were, in the main, non-Communists. While, like them, the Spanish Republican rank and file was gradually deported to Central Asia and elsewhere, the leadership of the Spanish Communist Party became involved in the more political Purge that had long been sweeping the Comintern apparatus and the foreign Parties based in Moscow. Soon General González (El Campesino), after a long wrangle with a Comintern commission, was digging in the Moscow Metro, preparatory to being sent to a northern labor camp; and the General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, Diaz, had died in dubious circumstances. They were known casualties. In all, by 1948, only 1,500 of the 6,000 are reported to have survived.⁸⁴

THE TROTSKY MURDER

Abroad, one major piece of unfinished business remained. Rakovsky had remarked in his last plea that “even beyond the Mexican meridian Trotsky will not escape that complete, final, shameful ignominy which we all are undergoing here.” But this prediction had not yet been fulfilled in a literal sense.

Since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky—from Turkey, Norway, and finally Mexico—had loomed hugely in the Stalinist mythology as a diabolical figure, sunk in the morass of Nazi intelligence and finally responsible for the whole vast plot whose subordinate branches were continually being uprooted in Russia by a vigilant NKVD. In reality, he was trying to organize a political movement on a world scale. Odd sects of the Communist movement joined his Fourth International. But in the USSR itself, his influence was practically nil. He was a figure offstage in all the events we have recounted. His main participation in Soviet affairs was simply as a commentator and analyst from outside. In his Bulletin of the Opposition, he presented his ideas of the current situation in the country, and made recommendations for correct action by anti-Stalinist Communists.

For all his vigor and polemical skill, his ideas are notable mainly for two things. First, a total lack of solicitude for the non-Communist victims of the regime: no sympathy whatever was expended, for example, on the dead of the collectivization famine. Second, an unbelievable ineptitude in political judgment. It is natural that there should hang about Trotsky the glamor of a lost cause. This is a normal historical sentimentalism, reminding one of Scottish feelings about Bonnie Prince Charlie, entertained by many who would admit when it came to it that there is a vast difference between their hero fleeing persecuted through the Western Isles and the certainly unpleasant results of an actual Jacobite restoration.

To attribute too much political virtue, or political intelligence, to Trotsky, as Malcolm Muggeridge has done, on account of his “vivacious pen” or even of the combination of “an independent mind … courage, high spirits and unshakeable resolution,” seems a similarly romantic view.⁸⁵ Muggeridge gives the impression of a “rebel” against all tyranny. But this needs to be very severely qualified. During the period when Trotsky held power, he was, whatever his personal magnetism, a ruthless imposer of the Party’s will who firmly crushed the democratic opposition within the Party and fully supported the rules which in 1921 gave the ruling group total authority. And the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion was as much his personal battle honor as the seizure of power had been. He was the leading figure among the doctrinaire Leftist Bolsheviks who were finding it hard to stomach Lenin’s concessions to the peasantry, and preferred a far more rigorous regime, even before Stalin came round to the same view. Trotsky might have carried out such policies less crudely than Stalin. But he would have used, as ever, as much violence as he thought necessary—and that would not have been a small amount.

But more destructive still to the image of the “good old rebel” was his attitude to the Stalin regime. Even when in exile during the 1930s, Trotsky was not by any means a forthright revolutionary out to destroy a tyranny. His attitude was rather that of a “loyal opposition.” In 1931, he published his key manifesto, “The Problems of the Development of the U.S.S.R.” This accepted the main lines of Stalin’s program, defined Stalinist Russia as “a proletarian State,” and simply quarrelled with Stalin about which “phase” of evolution toward Socialism had been attained. Trotsky stood, in fact, not for the destruction of the Stalinist system but for its takeover and patching up by an alternative group of leaders.

In the autumn of 1932, Trotsky wrote in a letter to his son:

At present Miliukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts—will willingly echo the cry “Remove Stalin.” Yet, it may still happen within a few months that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pressure, and that we may have temporarily to support him…. This being so, the slogan “Down with Stalin” is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.⁸⁶

In his Bulletin, Trotsky wrote, “If the bureaucratic equilibrium in the U.S.S.R. were to be upset at present, this would almost certainly benefit the forces of counterrevolution.”⁸⁷

Trotsky was always arguing that a “Thermidor” was being prepared, with the support of “petit-bourgeois elements.” Obsessed with comparisons with the French Revolution, he continually spoke of Thermidor and Brumaire. The parallels between Stalin and either the Directory or Napoleon are interesting, but the differences are so great that for purposes of practical politics they are not worth taking into account. Stalin’s regime—indeed, Lenin’s regime—had its own laws of development and potentialities. And when Stalin established his autocracy, it was comparable with other despotisms of the past, but hardly with those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Trotsky was attentive to the lessons of history, but they were not the lessons of Russian history. If instead of worrying about Barras and Bonaparte he had given some thought to Ivan the Terrible, it might have been more to the point.

Trotsky had objected to Lenin’s machine right up to 1917, but having then accepted it, had never again denounced it in principle or seen that Stalinism, or something like it, was its natural product. The furthest he went was to say that it was “rather tempting” to suggest that the Stalin system was “already rooted in Bolshevik centralism, or, more sweepingly, in the underground hierarchy of professional revolutionaries.”⁸⁸

Since Stalinist historiography is so extravagantly unreliable, there has been a tendency for historians to accept Trotsky’s account of certain events. In the intrigues following Lenin’s death, he was by no means straightforward, but at once “devious and faint-hearted,” and his own account is “pathetic in its half-truths and attempts to gloss over the facts.”⁸⁹ This is natural enough, and the only problem is why Trotsky’s virtually unsupported word should have been so widely accepted. Partly, no doubt, because his books, written under the comparatively critical eye of the West, were not so wildly and unashamedly falsified as their Stalinist competitors; partly because the Trotskyite tradition has trickled here and there into the mainstream of independent historical writing. But Trotsky had never failed in his duty to suppress or misrepresent facts in the interests of politics. And his general reliability on the period in question could have been considered in the light of his accusation that Stalin poisoned Lenin. There is no evidence whatever that this is true, and Trotsky himself only brought it up many years later—in 1939. The only serious point in favor of it is not evidential at all, but simply a consideration of cui bono insofar as Lenin’s death saved Stalin from the loss of his main positions of power. But it is more reasonable to see in Trotsky’s accusation a lesser, mirror image of Stalin’s own habit of mind in making wild accusations of treachery against political opponents.

When people say that Trotsky had an attractive personality, they are speaking mainly of his public persona, his appearance before great meetings, his writings, his dignity. But even so, he repelled many who felt him to be full of vanity, on the one hand, and irresponsible, on the other, in the sense that he tended to make a bright or “brilliant” formulation and press it to the end regardless of danger.

Stalin’s colorless, short-view remarks carried more conviction. Their very drabness gave them a realism. In a period of comparatively down-to-earth problems, the great revolutionary (like the great “theoretician” Bukharin) did not feel at home. Whatever his aberrations, Trotsky had a good deal in him of the European Marxist tradition. As Russia lapsed into isolation, the Asian element he had before the Revolution denounced in the Bolsheviks came to the fore. A Soviet diplomat told Ciliga that the country was, after all, Asiatic: “The way of Gengis Khan and Stalin suits it better than the European civilization of Lev Davidovich.⁹⁰

Trotsky’s vanity, unlike Stalin’s, was, practically speaking, frivolous. There was something more histrionic about it. He had shown himself no less ruthless than Stalin. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, he had ordered executions on a greater scale than Stalin or anyone else. Even in this, he showed some of the attributes of a poseur—the Great Revolutionary dramatically and inexorably carrying out the cruel will of history. If Trotsky had come to power, this concern for his image would no doubt have made him rule in a less ruthless, or, rather, a less crudely ruthless, fashion than Stalin. The Soviet peoples would perhaps have been able to say

… What his hard heart denies,

His charitable vanity supplies.

Stalin’s pragmatic approach gave the impression of a sounder man, and in a sense this was a true impression. He was always capable of retreat—from the calling off of the disastrous collectivization wave in March 1930 to the ending of the Berlin Blockade in 1949. Stalin’s skills in Soviet political methods make Trotsky look superficial, and the conclusion seems inevitable that he had far more to him than his rival. A mind may be intelligent, abilities may be brilliant; yet there are other qualities less apparent to the observer, without which such gifts have a certain slightness to them. Trotsky was a polished zircon; Stalin was a rough diamond.

Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov had been deprived of Soviet citizenship on 20 February 1932. They had not, as is sometimes said, been condemned to death by the courts, at least not openly. It had been announced as part of the verdicts in the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Cases that they would be liable to immediate arrest and trial “in the event of their being discovered on the territory of the U.S.S.R.”

Trotsky boldly challenged the Soviet Government to seek his extradition from Norway, which would have meant the examination of his evidence in the Norwegian courts. Instead, it put pressure on the Norwegian Government to expel Trotsky. Through the painter Diego Rivera, he obtained asylum from President Cardenas of Mexico, and on 9 January 1937 reached that country in a Norwegian tanker.

Like Lenin, who welcomed and protected Malinovsky and other Tsarist spies within the Bolshevik Party, even when they came under suspicion from the rest of his entourage, Trotsky proved gullible about his contacts. Lenin’s defense had been the rather inadequate one that even while Malinovsky was betraying Bolsheviks, he was also having to work hard and well to make new ones. Trotsky took the view that if he refused to meet any but his oldest and closest disciples, he would lose important opportunities to preach his doctrines and gain new followers.

The plot against Trotsky was tied in with the murky world of Soviet espionage in the United States, and some of it was only unraveled after the arrest of Jack Soble in 1957.

Soble had spied on Trotsky as early as 1931 and 1932, with useful results. The next NKVD agent to penetrate Trotsky’s political family was the extraordinary Mark Zborowski, of whom it has been said that he everywhere “left behind a trail of duplicity and blood worthy of a Shakespearean villain,” and who, after establishing himself in the United States as a respectable anthropologist at Columbia and Harvard, was finally exposed and convicted on charges of perjury in December 1958, getting a five- to seven-year term.⁹¹

Zborowski had managed to become Sedov’s right-hand man, and had access to all the secrets of the Trotskyites. He was responsible for the robbery of the Trotsky archives in Paris in November 1936. Although he never committed any murders himself, remaining a finger man, he seems to have played some role in the killing of Ignace Reiss.⁹² He also nearly procured the death of Walter Krivitsky in 1937, and did succeed in having Trotsky’s secretary, Erwin Wolf, murdered in Spain. The young German Rudolf Clement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, seems also to have been conveyed into his murderer’s hand by Zborowski, in 1938. A headless body found floating in the Seine in Paris was tentatively identified as Clement’s; in any case, he has not been seen since. On 14 February 1938 Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov died in suspicious circumstances in a Paris hospita1.⁹³ Since Zborowski was the man who rushed him there, there is a very strong presumption that he informed the NKVD killer organization of the opportunity which now presented itself.

That Trotsky himself survived as late as 1940 is probably due to the breakdown of the NKVD Foreign Department as a result of Yezhov’s and then Beria’s purge of it and the difficulties produced by the defection of high officers like Lyushkov and Orlov.

Moreover, after some sort of attempt on Trotsky’s life which seems to have been made in January 1938, very strict security measures were taken at the villa where he now settled at Coyoacán, outside Mexico City. Apart from Trotsky’s own guards, considerable police protection was provided.

The planning of the attempts on Trotsky was now entrusted to a large staff, who made minute preparations. The Trotsky dossier in the NKVD registry at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street occupied three floors.⁹⁴

We can certainly deduce a main motive of Stalin’s as the simple physical destruction of all alternative leaderships. No further blackening of Trotsky’s character was necessary or possible. In every sense except that of killing his great enemy, Stalin could only expect a political debit from the operation. It was the same concern as was to be shown in the execution of long lists of military and other men already serving in camps, at precisely the two defensive crises of the Second World War.

The organization of Trotsky’s murder was assigned to Leonid Eitingon, a high NKVD officer, who was given virtually unlimited funds for the purpose. Eitingon had been sent to Spain to work under Orlov, taking the pseudonym Kotov, in 1936. He had already had considerable experience of terrorist activity abroad. He continued with this career for many years. The agent Nikolai Khokhloy, sent to Germany to assassinate anti-Soviet émigré leaders, who defected to the West in April 1954, had worked under him. (Eitingon seems to have been sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment after the fall of Beria in 1953, but to have been released in the late 1960s, getting a job in publishing.)

Eitingon set off for Mexico, taking with him Vittorio Codovilla (a founder of the Argentine Communist Party and a trusted Stalinist, who had been involved in the murder of Andres Nin) and Vittorio Vidali, another of the most formidable of the killers from Spain.

The Mexican Communist Party, under its leader Herman Laborde, had been a genuine political trend, and was lukewarm about such action against Trotsky. As part of the move against Trotsky, Laborde and his followers were purged and an intransigent group, including the painter Siqueiros, placed at the head of the Party.

Taking the name of Leonov, Eitingon organized his first attempt on Trotsky on a lavish scale. The central figure was Siqueiros.

On 23 May 1940 Siqueiros and two accomplices collected a number of submachine guns, police and Army uniforms, and some ladders and incendiary bombs, together with a rotary power saw. He dressed himself as a major in the Mexican Army and put on a disguise. At about 2:00 A.M., he assembled the twenty men he had chosen, and they drove in four cars to Trotsky’s fortified villa. Some of the police had already been lured away; the others were trussed up at gunpoint. The telephone lines were cut, and the sentry on duty, an American called Harte, was rushed and overwhelmed. The force broke into the patio and swept the bedrooms with tommy guns for several minutes. They then pulled out, leaving several incendiaries and a large dynamite bomb. The latter failed to explode. Trotsky was slightly wounded in the right leg; his ten-year-old grandson was also hit. His wife received some burns from the incendiaries. Otherwise, the attack was a failure.

The body of Harte was found, shot, buried in the grounds of a villa rented by Siqueiros.

The Mexican Communist Party disowned the attack and dissociated itself from Siqueiros and Vidali. By 17 June, the identity of the attackers had been established by the Mexican police.

Siqueiros was arrested in a hideout in the provinces in September 1940, but although the facts were established, great political pressures were now brought to bear. At the same time, “intellectuals and artists” urged the President to take into account the fact that “artists and men of science are considered as the bulwark of culture and progress.”⁹⁵

As a result, the court accepted Siqueiros’s plea that the firing of 300 bullets into the bedrooms had been for “psychological purposes only,” without any intention of killing or hurting anyone. Evidence that when Siqueiros heard of Trotsky’s survival he had exclaimed, “All that work in vain!” was disregarded. The facts about Harte’s death were found not to constitute a prima facie case of murder. The judge claimed that the accused did not form a “criminal conspiracy,” since a conspiracy could not be made for a single temporary job but must have “stability and permanence.” They were even acquitted of impersonating police officers, on the grounds that though they had dressed up in uniforms, they had not actually attempted to usurp any police functions.

While Siqueiros was still out on bail, a convenient invitation to paint some murals in Chile, at the instance of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, led to his decamping thither. So even the light sentence he might have got for the crime still attributed to him—stealing the two automobiles outside the Trotsky house—was avoided.

On the failure of Siqueiros, Eitingon had put his second plan into operation. Four days after the first attempt, Ramon Mercader was introduced to Trotsky for the first time.

Mercader’s mother, Caridad, a Spanish Communist, seems to have become sexually entangled with Eitingon during the Civil War in Spain, when she had worked in the liquidation squads. The NKVD made a practice of securing the passports of members of the International Brigade who had been killed. Mercader was given one which had originally belonged to a Yugoslav-Canadian volunteer killed in action early in the war. It had been reforged under the name of “Jacson’—a curious example of the absurd slips which crop up in these otherwise highly skilled operations, though in fact this attracted no attention.

The plot now reached into the world of outwardly respectable New York Leftism, which at the time was seething with intra-Communist intrigue, and provided a ready recruiting ground for Yezhov’s men. In fact, general supervision of the murder seems to have come under the purview of the permanent Resident of the NKVD, the Soviet Consul-General in New York, Gaik Ovakimian, who was later exposed, in May 1941, and expelled from the country.

The details—some of which are even now a little obscure—do not concern us here. But it is at least interesting to note—in this, as in the great espionage cases of the 1940s and 1950s—how many people, of whom their non-Party acquaintances would have certainly denied any possibility of their joining in such activity, were, from factiousness, revolutionary romanticism, and even idealism, to become willing or half-willing accomplices in a vulgar murder.

These put Mercader in touch with Sylvia Ageloff, an American Trotskyite who was a social worker. He seduced her and entered into a relationship with her which passed for marriage. She was entirely innocent of the planned crime. Through her, he was admitted to the Trotsky household.

Over the next few months, Mercader made five or six visits and, as Sylvia Ageloff’s husband, became reasonably established. On 20 August, he arrived at Trotsky’s villa, ostensibly to have an article he had written criticized. He wore a raincoat. A long dagger was sewn into the lining. A revolver was in his pocket. But his actual weapon, a cut-down ice axe, was in his raincoat pocket. (An NKVD murder—of a Soviet Ambassador—by a strong assassin using an iron bar is reported by the Petrovs.) Mercader was an experienced mountain climber, and his choice of the ice axe as an assassination weapon was based on considerable experience of its use and power. Outside, his car was parked facing the right way for a quick move, and around the corner another car with his mother and an agent was waiting. Eitingon, in yet a third car, was a block or so away.

Trotsky had two revolvers on his desk, and the switch to an alarm system within reach. But as soon as he started to read Mercader’s article, the assassin took out his ice axe and struck him a “tremendous blow” on the head.

Mercader had planned to leave quickly. But the blow was not immediately lethal. Trotsky screamed for “very long, infinitely long,” as Mercader himself put it, “a cry prolonged and agonized, half-scream, half sob,” according to one of the guards—who now rushed in and seized the assassin.

Trotsky was operated on, and survived for more than a day after that, dying on 21 August 1940. He was nearly sixty-two.

Mercader, coming to trial after Siqueiros, seems to have hoped that he, too, might get a light sentence. Perhaps the judge would hold that he had been teaching Trotsky how to climb the Alps. But he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, which he served. Even after his identity had been established by fingerprints, he refused to admit who he was or why he had committed the murder. The official Stalinist version was that he was a disgruntled Trotskyite, and that the NKVD had nothing to do with it.

Mercader’s imprisonment was passed under conditions superior to those prevailing in Soviet prisons and camps. The Mexican Revolution had effected genuine reform. A visitor notes, “His cell, spacious and sunny … with a little open-air patio in front, contained a neat bed and a table loaded with books and magazines.” He was also, under Mexican law, allowed women in his cell. (On his release, he went to Czechoslovakia, moving from that country, when it became too liberal, to Moscow in 1968, though he is later reported in Havana.)

Eitingon and Seilora Mercader left by the prepared escape route. She was received in Moscow by Beria, presented to Stalin, and decorated, for her son and herself.⁹⁶

And, indeed, the destruction of Stalin’s last great opponent must have caused great satisfaction in the Kremlin. For once, it might have been noted, a prediction of Trotsky’s had been literally fulfilled. He had written of Stalin, in 1936: “He seeks to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.”