FIVE
TERROR
Though “special tasks” only began to dominate NKVD foreign operations in 1937, the problem of “enemies of the people” abroad had loomed steadily larger in Stalin’s mind since the early 1930s as he became increasingly obsessed with the opposition to him inside the Soviet Union. The most daring denunciation of the growing brutality of Stalin’s Russia was a letter of protest sent to the Central Committee in the autumn of 1932 by a former Party secretary in Moscow, Mikhail Ryutin, and a small band of supporters. The “Ryutin platform,” whose text was made public only in 1989, contained such an uncompromising attack on Stalin and the horrors which had accompanied collectivization and the First Five Year Plan over the previous few years that some Trotskyists who saw the document believed it was an OGPU provocation.1 It denounced Stalin as “the evil genius of the Russian Revolution, motivated by vindictiveness and lust for power, who has brought the Revolution to the edge of the abyss,” and demanded his removal from power: “It is shameful for proletarian revolutionaries to tolerate any longer Stalin’s yoke, his arbitrariness, his scorn for the Party and the laboring masses.”2
At a meeting of the Politburo Stalin called for Ryutin’s execution. Only Sergei Mironovich Kirov dared to contradict him. “We mustn’t do that!” he insisted. “Ryutin is not a hopeless case, he’s merely gone astray.” For the time being Stalin backed down and Ryutin was sentenced to ten years in jail.3 Five years later, during the Great Terror, when Stalin had gained the virtually unchallenged power of life and death over Soviet citizens, Ryutin was shot.
During the early 1930s Stalin lost whatever capacity he had once possessed to distinguish personal opponents from “enemies of the people.” By far the most dangerous of these enemies, he believed, were the exiled Leon Trotsky (codenamed STARIK, “Old Man,” by the Centre)4 and his followers. “No normal ‘constitutional’ paths for the removal of the governing [Stalinist] clique now remain,” wrote Trotsky in 1933. “The only way to compel the bureaucracy to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard is by force.” Henceforth Stalin used that assertion to argue that the Soviet state was faced with a threat of forcible overthrow, which must itself be forcibly prevented.5
Opposition to Stalin resurfaced at the 1934 Party Congress, though in so muted a form that it passed unnoticed by the mass of the population. In the elections to the Central Committee, Stalin polled several hundred votes fewer than Kirov, who was assassinated, probably on Stalin’s orders, at the end of the year. What increasingly obsessed Stalin, however, were less the powerless remnants of real opposition to him than the gigantic, mythical conspiracy by imperialist secret services and their Trotskyist hirelings. Though the paranoid strain in what Khrushchev later called Stalin’s “sickly suspicious” personality does much to explain his obsession with conspiracy theory, there was an impeccable Leninist logic at the heart of that obsession. Stalin claimed Lenin’s authority for his insistence that it was impossible for the imperialists not to attempt to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state:
We are living not only in a State, but in a system of States, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist States is in the long run unthinkable. But until that end comes, a series of the most terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and bourgeois States is unavoidable.
It was equally inevitable, Stalin argued, that the enemies without would conspire with traitors within. Only “blind braggarts or concealed enemies of the people,” he declared, would dispute this elementary logic.6 Those who disagreed thus automatically branded themselves as traitors.
Despite Stalin’s increasing obsession during the 1930s with Trotskyist conspiracy, Trotsky never really represented any credible threat to the Stalinist regime. He spent his early years in exile trying vainly to find a European base from which to organize his followers. In 1933 he left Turkey for France, then two years later moved on to Norway, but his political activity in all three countries was severely restricted by the reluctant host governments. In 1937, having finally despaired of finding a European headquarters, Trotsky left for Mexico, where he remained until his assassination three years later. The chief European organizer of the Trotskyist movement for most of the 1930s was not Trotsky himself but his elder son, Lev Sedov, who from 1933 was based in Paris. It was Sedov who, until his death in 1938, organized publication of his father’s Bulletin of the Opposition and maintained contact with Trotsky’s scattered supporters. Sedov’s entourage, like his father’s, was penetrated by the OGPU and NKVD. From 1934 onwards his closest confidant and collaborator in Paris was an NKVD agent, the Russian-born Polish Communist Mark Zborowski, known to Sedov as êtienne and successively codenamed by the Center MAKS, MAK, TULIP and KANT. Sedov trusted “Étienne” so completely that he gave him the key to his letterbox, allowed him to collect his mail and entrusted him with Trotsky’s most confidential files and archives for safekeeping.7
AS THE CHIEF headquarters of both the Trotskyist movement and the White Guards, Paris became for several years the main center of operations for the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks, headed by “Yasha” Serebryansky, which specialized in assassination and abduction. Serebryansky’s illegal residency in Paris had other targets, too. The most prominent was the mercurial Jacques Doriot, a rabble-rousing orator who during the early 1930s was considered a likely future contender for the leadership of the French Communist Party.8 In the early months of 1934, he aroused the ire of Moscow by calling on the Party to form an anti-fascist Popular Front with the socialists, still officially condemned in Moscow as “social fascists.” Doriot was summoned to Moscow to recant but refused to go. He was expelled from the Party for indiscipline in June 1934, ironically at the very moment when the Communist International, in a rapid volte-face instantly accepted by the French Communist Party, decided in favor of a Popular Front policy.
Doriot responded with a series of increasingly bitter attacks on both Stalin’s “oriental” despotism and the French Communist leadership, whom he derided as “Stalin’s slaves.” The Centre, fearing the effect of Doriot’s impassioned and now subversive oratory on the French left, ordered Serebryansky to keep him under continuous surveillance. In 1935, after almost the whole non-Communist press had publicized Doriot’s revelation that the French Communist Party received secret instructions and funds from Moscow, the Centre instructed Serebryansky to draw up plans for his liquidation.9 The order to go ahead with the assassination seems never to have been given, perhaps because of the triumph of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections and Doriot’s foundation soon afterwards of the neofascist Parti Populaire Français. Doriot’s public vindication of the Communist charge that he was a fascist collaborator provided the Centre with a propaganda victory which his assassination would have spoiled rather than enhanced.10
Among other assassinations which Serebryansky was ordered to organize was that of the leading Nazi Hermann Goering, who was reported to be planning a visit to Paris. The Administration for Special Tasks ordered its Paris residency to recruit a sniper and find a way of infiltrating him into the airport, probably Le Bourget, at which Goering was expected to land.11 Goering, however, failed to visit France and the sniper was stood down. The files seen by Mitrokhin give no indication of the Centre’s motive in ordering an assassination which was undoubtedly authorized by Stalin himself. The probability is, however, that the main objective was to damage relations between France and Germany rather than to strike a blow against Nazism. The assassination on French soil in 1934 of the President of the Republic and the King of Yugoslavia by a non-Communist assassin doubtless encouraged the Centre to believe that it could avoid responsibility for the killing of Goering if an opportunity arose.
Despite the numerous other duties of Serebryansky’s Paris residency, its main task remained the surveillance and destabilization of French Trotskyists. Until 1937 Lev Sedov, thanks to his misplaced but total confidence in “Étienne” Zborowski, was such an indispensable source on th
e POLECATS (as the Trotskyists were codenamed by the Centre) that he was not marked down as a target for liquidation.12 In the autumn of 1936 Zborowski warned the Centre that, because of his financial problems, Trotsky was selling part of his archive (formerly among the papers entrusted by Sedov to Zborowski for safekeeping) to the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History based in Amsterdam. Serebryansky was ordered to set up a task force to recover it, codenamed the HENRY group. He began by renting the flat immediately above the institute in the rue Michelet in order to keep it under surveillance. On Serebryansky’s instructions, Zborowski, then working as a service engineer at a Paris telephone exchange, was ordered to cause a fault on the Institute’s telephone line in order to give him a chance to reconnoitre the exact location of the Trotsky papers and examine the locks. When the Institute reported the fault on its line, however, one of Zborowski’s colleagues was sent to mend the fault instead. Zborowski promptly put the Institute’s phone out of action once again and on this occasion was called to make the repair himself. As he left the Institute, having mended the fault and closely inspected the locks to the front and back doors, he was given a five franc tip by the director, Boris Nikolayevsky, a prominent Menshevik émigré classed by the NKVD as an “enemy of the people.”13
Serebryansky fixed the time for the burglary at two o’clock on the morning of November 7, 1936, and ordered it to be completed by 5 a.m. at the latest. Since his agents were unable to find keys to fit the Institute locks, he decided to cut them out with a drill powered by an electric transformer concealed in a box filled with sawdust and cotton wool to deaden the sound.14 The burglars broke in unobserved and left with Trotsky’s papers. Both Sedov and the Paris police immediately suspected the NKVD because of both the professionalism of the burglary and the fact that money and valuables in the Institute had been left untouched. Sedov assured the police that his assistant “Étienne” Zborowski was completely above suspicion, and in any case kept the main archive, which had not been stolen, at his home address. Ironically, Sedov suggested that the NKVD might have learned of the transfer of a part of the archive as the result of an indiscretion by the Institute director, Nikolayevsky.15
The extraordinary importance attached by the Centre to the theft of the papers was demonstrated by the award of the Order of the Red Banner to the HENRY group.16 The operation, however, was as pointless as it was professional. The papers stolen from the Institute (many of them press cuttings) were of no operational significance whatever and of far less historical importance than the Trotsky archive which remained in Zborowski’s hands and later ended up at Harvard University.17 But by the mid-1930s Stalin had lost all sense of proportion in his pursuit of Trotskyism in all its forms, both real and imaginary. Trotsky had become an obsession who dominated many of Stalin’s waking hours and probably interfered with his sleep at night. As Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, concludes:
The frenzy with which [Stalin] pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international communism as well as of the Soviet Union and subordinating to it all political, tactical, intellectual and other interests, beggars description; there is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense resources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual.18
The British diplomat R. A. Sykes later wisely described Stalin’s world view as “a curious mixture of shrewdness and nonsense.”19 Stalin’s shrewdness was apparent in the way that he outmaneuvered his rivals after the death of Lenin, gradually acquired absolute power as General Secretary, and later out-negotiated Churchill and Roosevelt during their wartime conferences. Historians have found it difficult to accept that so shrewd a man also believed in so much nonsense. But it is no more possible to understand Stalin without acknowledging his addiction to conspiracy theories about Trotsky (and others) than it is to comprehend Hitler without grasping the passion with which he pursued his even more terrible and absurd conspiracy theories about the Jews.
GENRIKH GRIGORYEVICH YAGODA, head of the NKVD from 1934 to 1936, was far less obsessed by Trotsky than Stalin was. Stalin’s chief grudge against him was probably a growing conviction that he had been deliberately negligent in his hunt for Trotskyist traitors.20 His nemesis arrived in September 1936 in the form of a telegram from Stalin and his protégé, Andrei Zhdanov, to the Central Committee declaring that Yagoda had “definitely proved himself incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- Zinovyevite bloc” and demanding his replacement by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.
As head of the NKVD for the next two years, Yezhov carried through the largest scale peacetime political persecution and blood-letting in European history, known to posterity as the Great Terror.21 One NKVD document from the Yezhov era, which doubtless reflected—and probably slavishly imitated—Stalin’s own view, asserted that “the scoundrel Yagoda” had deliberately concentrated the attack on the “lower ranks” of “the right-wing Trotskyite underground” in order to divert attention from its true leaders: Zinovyev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Kamenev and Smirnov. Yagoda, it was claimed, had either sacked or sidelined NKVD staff who had tried to indict these former heroes of the Leninist era for their imaginary crimes.22 All save Tomsky, who committed suicide, were given starring roles in the show trials of 1936 to 1938, gruesome morality plays which proclaimed a grotesque conspiracy theory uniting all opposition at home and abroad by the use of elegantly absurd formulae such as: “Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovyevism is a variety of Trotskyism.” In the last of the great show trials Yagoda, despite a plea for mercy written “on bended knees,” was himself unmasked as a leading Trotskyist conspirator. The chief author of the gigantic conspiracy theory, which became undisputed orthodoxy within the NKVD and provided the ideological underpinning of the Great Terror, was Stalin himself.23 Stalin personally proofread the transcripts of the show trials before their publication, amending the defendants’ speeches to ensure that they did not deviate from their well-rehearsed confessions to imaginary conspiracies.24 NKVD records of the period proclaim with characteristic obsequiousness that, “The practical organization of the work exposing the right-wing Trotskyite underground was supervised personally by Comrade Stalin, and in 1936-8 crippling blows were delivered to the rabble.”25
“Crippling blows” against both real and imaginary Trotskyist “rabble” were struck outside as well as inside the Soviet Union. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 opened up a major new field of operations for Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks and for INO as a whole. The struggle of the Spanish republican government to defend itself against the nationalist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco fired the imagination of the whole of the European left as a crusade against international fascism: 35,000 foreign volunteers, most of them Communist, set out for Spain to join the International Brigades in defense of the republic. In October 1936 Stalin declared in an open letter to Spanish Communists: “Liberation of Spain from the yoke of the Spanish reactionaries is not the private concern of Spaniards alone, but the common cause of all progressive humanity.” From the outset, however, the NKVD was engaged in Spain in a war on two fronts: against Trotskyists within the republicans and the International Brigades, as well as against Franco and the nationalist forces. The former illegal resident in London, Aleksandr Orlov, sent to Spain as legal resident after the outbreak of the Civil War, confidently assured the Centre in October, “The Trotskyist organization POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista] can be easily liquidated.”26
WHILE ORLOV COORDINATED the NKVD’s secret two-front war within Spain, Serebryansky conducted operations from abroad. Serebryansky organized training courses in Paris for saboteurs from the International Brigades, run by GIGI, a French Communist mechanic who usually worked without pay, FRANYA, a female Polish student paid 1,500 francs a month, and LEGRAND, on whom no further details are available. The greatest sabotage success reported by Serebryansky was the claim by the ERNST TOLSTY group of illegals, based in the Baltic
and Scandinavia, to have sunk seventeen ships carrying arms to Franco.27 One of the leading saboteurs was a young German Communist, Ernst Wollweber, who twenty years later was to become head of the Stasi in East Germany.28 An NKVD inquiry after the Civil War concluded, however, that some of the reports of sinkings were fabrications.29
The main NKVD training grounds for guerrillas and saboteurs were within Spain itself at training camps supervised by Orlov at Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao and Argen. Orlov later boasted of how his guerrilla platoons succeeded in blowing up power lines and bridges and in attacking enemy convoys far behind the nationalist lines. As an SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov acknowledges, his larger purpose was “to build up a secret police force under NKVD control to effect a Stalinization of Spain.” The chief Soviet military adviser in republican Spain, General Jan Berzin, formerly head of Red Army intelligence, complained that Orlov and the NKVD were treating republican Spain as a colony rather than an ally.30
In the spring of 1937 Orlov and Serebryansky were ordered to move from the surveillance and destabilization of Trotskyist groups to the liquidation of their leaders. While Serebryansky began preparing the abduction of Sedov,31 Orlov supplied the republican government with forged documents designed to discredit POUM as “a German-Francoist spy organization.” On June 16 the head of POUM, Andreu Nin, and forty leading members were arrested, its headquarters closed and its militia battalions disbanded. Less than a week later Nin disappeared from prison. An official investigation announced that he had escaped. In reality, he was abducted and murdered by a “mobile squad” of NKVD assassins, supervised by Orlov. Nin was one of many Trotskyists in Spain, both real and imagined, who met such fates. Until Orlov defected to the United States in 1938, fearing that he too had been placed on an NKVD death list, he lived in some luxury while organizing the liquidation of enemies of the people. A young volunteer in the International Brigades summoned to his presence was struck by how strongly he reeked of eau de cologne, and watched enviously as he consumed a large cooked breakfast wheeled in on a trolley by a whitecoated servant. Orlov offered none of it to the famished volunteer, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours.32
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