The Great Terror

13 The Foreign Element

fn1

There were cases, the other way round, of people who had been in Nazi camps and went to Russia on release. A woman who had done three years in a Nazi concentration camp got eight years as a Trotskyite on arrival in Russia owing to her acquaintance with a German Communist who had fallen under suspicion. Her husband had “repudiated” her, but still contrived to send her occasional parcels (Eleanor Lipper,

Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps

[London, 1951], p. 7). Another case is quoted of a Viennese Jew who had withstood nearly a year in Dachau, but committed suicide in a Soviet camp (D.

J

. Dallin and B. I. Nicolaevsky,

Forced Labour in the Soviet Union

[London, 1948], p. 38).

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Among them were Wilhelm Pieck (later to precede Ulbricht in the leadership of East Ger-many), Kuusinen, Togliatti, Gottwald, and Wang Ming.

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Pauker

is said to have been denounced by his wife, Anna Pauker (D. J. Dallin,

Soviet Espionage

[New Haven, Conn., 1956], p. 100).

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The Luca Trial gives a curious example of nature imitating art—in this case, the career of Snowball in

Animal Farm

. Luca, who had hitherto featured as having played a heroic role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, was now exposed as having actually commanded a machine-gun unit on the other side.

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This is not the place to go into the complex origins of Polish Communism, in the two factions of the old Polish Social Democratic Party and the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party.