Beginning in January this year, I asked our NKVD men many times to give my division, even if only temporarily, an experienced instructor who could organize the special apparatus and get its work going. But because of the acute shortage of people, even among our comrades, I was unable to obtain any practical help. My attempt at improvisation produced some results, but these were very far from what might have been achieved if, instead of a crude, primitive special department, we had had at our disposal an apparatus headed and directed by experienced specialists.32
The practices already tried and tested in the Soviet Union included compiling lists of the entire supreme command of the Republican army and the volunteers of the International Brigades, detailing their origins, their political opinions and their attitudes towards the Soviet Union.33 The Russian term ‘Cheka’ was introduced into Spain. Julián Gorkin, one of the leaders of the POUM, describes the uninhibited actions of the security services: ‘They arrested everyone according to their own whims or some policy of NKVD reprisals. Suspects were thrown into prison, and charges were drawn up … The SIM kept files for months and months, on the pretext that it always needed more information.’34 And after the suppression of the revolt in Barcelona early in 1937, the whole of Spain came to acquire a strange topography of terror. Its notable features included the Hotel Falcon, the former headquarters of the POUM now transformed into a prison; the Calle Corsiga, where suspects were photographed and their fingerprints taken;35 and prisons in the Horta district of Barcelona and in Castellón de la Plana, at 24 Avenida Puerto del Angel, with other branches in the Hotel Colón in the Plaça de Catalunya, the former Atocha Convent in Madrid, Santa Ursula in Valencia and Alcalá de Henares. Several private houses were also requisitioned and served as centres for detention, interrogation and execution.36 It comes as no surprise to learn that the Spanish Communist Party in Barcelona also called for a show trial against the Trotskyists. It posed as the executor of popular anger: ‘The masses are demanding merciless and energetic repression. That is what is demanded by the masses of people of all of Spain, Catalonia and Barcelona. They demand complete disarmament, arrest of the leaders, and the creation of a special military tribunal for the Trotskyists! That is what the masses demand.’37
This show trial in fact took place, tolerated by a Republican government facing its own demise and under constant harassment by the communists.
From 11 to the 22 October 1938, members of the P.O.U.M. Executive Committee – Gorkin, Andrade, Pascal Gironella, José Rovira, Arquer, Bonet, Jean Reboul and José Escuder – were brought before a special court highly reminiscent of the Moscow show-trials … André Gide, Georges Duhamel, Roger Martin de Gard, François Mauriac, and Paul Rivet sent telegrams to Juan Negri demanding that the accused be given a fair trial …[Even though] the Communist press vigorously demanded death sentences, none was handed down. Even so the P.O.U.M. militants were … sentenced to fifteen years in prison … Luckily, all the members of the P.O.U.M. Executive Committee managed to escape …38
… before the security services in Catalonia could hand them over to the Francoist forces that were already at the gates. Nor did the state security forces (SIM) call a halt at the volunteers of the International Brigades, who were depicted in a dossier as potential recruits to the fascist secret services:
If the former internationalist volunteers are left without the necessary political care and material support, many soldiers who fought for the revolution yesterday may in the coming class battles be found on the other side of the barricades or be recruited for dirty and base espionage-sabotage work against the USSR. This cannot be permitted.39
Many members of the International Brigades, people who had made the struggle for ‘the freedom of Spain’ the very centre of their lives, realized only much later that their greatest defeat had been inflicted by the enemy behind their backs – and some never realized this at all.
Barcelona transfer: Moscow experiences
Between 1936 and 1939 Spain was the prelude to the Second World War and the point of contact for all the forces involved in that great struggle. Left to its fate by the Western democracies, it was a unique meeting point, where a nation’s and an entire generation’s love of liberty collided with cynical power plays, where self-sacrifice and horrifying atrocities went hand in hand, where the fascination exerted by the aeroplane and the terrors of the first modern war in the air were juxtaposed. It was a place of disillusionment and moral disintegration, a laboratory for novel military, political and police techniques. It was in this way that the Spanish battlefield became the space in which the transfer of experiences could take place, including experiences of the Moscow of 1937.
The hunt for Trotsky entered a new phase in a Spain in which Andrés Nin, the leader of the Spanish Trotskyists, was murdered on the orders of Aleksandr Orlov.
I had no idea then what the future held for Mercader, that he would become Trotsky’s assassin and that I would direct the operation … We sent our young inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors. Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations … The Spanish Republicans lost, but Stalin’s men and women won. When the Spanish Civil War ended, there was no room in the world left for Trotsky.40
From Spain, paths led not just to Mexico, where Trotsky was murdered two years later – on 21 August 1940 – but also back to Moscow. Many members of the first generation of actors – political, military and secret police – were now dead. None of them, however, had fallen in battle; they had died in the cellars of the NKVD. They disappeared in a process parallel to the Moscow show trials. Among them was Marcel Rosenberg, the USSR envoy to Spain. He was recalled in 1937 and died in 1939. Then there was Ian Berzin, the head of Red Army intelligence; he was arrested by the NKVD on 27 November 1937.41 Grigorii Stern (i.e. Manfred Stern) likewise vanished in the purges, as did Artur Stashevskii, the economic attaché in Spain, who disappeared in 1937.42 Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, an Old Bolshevik and one of the leaders of the assault on the Winter Palace and now a USSR representative in Spain, was arrested by the NKVD on 12 October 1937 and sentenced to death on 8 February 1938.43 Vladimir Gorev, a military attaché in Spain, was arrested on 25 February 1938 and sentenced to death on 20 June 1938.44 Mikhail Kol'tsov, the best-known and most capable of the journalists covering the theatre of war in Spain, the author of The Spanish Diary, was sentenced to death on 12 December 1938.45
A third path takes us from Spain to places where the victims of one dictator meet up with those of others and attempt to find words for what they have experienced. Arthur Koestler, who had succeeded in escaping from a Spanish gaol, met up in Paris with Eva Weissberg, who had previously been an inmate of the Lubianka, but who had miraculously managed to escape from the USSR.
I had known Eva since I was five. We had been to the same kindergarten, and had in later years remained close friends in Paris, Berlin, and Kharkov. Now she had been rescued from a Communist, I from a Fascist prison. We had been pacing up and down our respective cells in Moscow and Seville at the same time, and at the same rate of four miles an hour. So we could exchange some modern traveller’s tales.46
The harvest of these experiences is not confined to a profusion of Spanish diaries; it amounts to a literature that formulates and thus preserves the accounts of people caught between opposing fronts. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon – which he began in 1938 and completed in April 1940 – is just as much a part of this as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.
7
Blindness and Terror: The Suppressed Census of 1937
In January 1937, a nationwide census was held, the results of which were not made public until half a century later.1 They were revealed to the world when the archives were opened following the collapse of the Soviet Union. V. Tsaplin, the director of the Central Archive of the Economy, provided access to the materials preserved in the archives in the early 1990s.2 The Soviet leadership had previously explained the failure to publish th
e results of the census by referring to deficiencies in its methods and implementation. Those responsible for carrying it out were persecuted; many of them lost their lives as a result. The history of this census, however, is more than the story of a terrorist regime’s bid to assert its control over the population. Since the census was the most ambitious, most complex and expensive attempt to draw up a balance sheet of society and to conduct a process of self-diagnosis twenty years after the Revolution – ‘The census was a pioneering enterprise intended to provide the fullest possible picture of Soviet life’3 – the suppression of its findings and the murder of those who organized it was nothing less than the obliteration of the capacity for social self-analysis. An authoritarian society, however, that is unable to form an idea of itself, whatever social engineering its leadership may have in mind, is doomed to the blind exercise of state violence. Blindness resulting from the destruction of a society’s knowledge of itself inevitably turns into blind terror.
A journey into the interior of society
S. Kovrigin, one of the enumerators responsible for the conduct of the census in the Pervomaiskii district of Moscow, gave an account of his experience of the preparations for the census on 5 January 1937 – i.e. the day before it was due to be carried out. He had earlier taken part in the census of 1926, in the village where he lived at the time. ‘Ten years lay between the two censuses. The All-Union census of 1937 will show, and already shows, the tremendous changes that have taken place in the country and its people.’ He himself had become a student of the Moscow Bauman Institute of Engineering and now, shortly before his final engineering exam, was in charge of two apartment blocks on the Dangauerovka Estate in Moscow.
One of them was inhabited by workers from the compressor factory, the other by construction workers. The work was hard. Most of the workers had only recently arrived in Moscow and belonged to various nationalities. I was given a friendly and cheerful welcome in every home. Almost everyone responded readily and at length to the questions on the census form, often in greater detail than was wanted, especially when it was a matter of explaining when and where they had studied, why they had changed their job and when they had married. Occasionally, my colleagues and I found ourselves in a disagreeable situation. In many apartments, people had gathered together on 1 and 2 January in order to celebrate the New Year. The hospitable hosts invited us to join them and were angry when we declined their invitation. While doing the rounds, I was depressed by the discovery that ignorance about the census was widespread. The managers of the apartment blocks had omitted to inform people about the importance of the census and to explain how they should go about answering the questions. As a result there were all sorts of provocative rumours flying about. An old woman asked whether it was true that the authorities were planning to expel religious people from Moscow. This meant that I had to act the part of a propagandist. To my surprise no particular difficulties arose in putting the questions to the non-Russian workers. They were aware that they could choose their own nationality freely. There was a very illuminating dialogue in one particular apartment. I questioned a young worker who was a Mordvin by nationality. He had lived among Russians for a long time, had attended a Russian school and spoke, read and wrote excellent Russian.
‘Your nationality’, I asked.
‘Russian’, he replied without hesitation.
‘What do you mean, Russian’, his companion asked. ‘You are a Mordvin.’
‘I was born a Mordvin’, the other replied. ‘But now I have more in common with the Russians than with Mordvins. Can you put me down as a Russian?’ he asked me. ‘Of course’, I said.
In another apartment there was an equally interesting encounter. This was with a Chinese married to a Russian woman. They had a child of eleven.
‘How will you decide on the nationality of your child?’ I asked.
The parents gave each other a look. Then they stepped aside and conferred at length. Finally, the father came up to me and told me the result of their consultation. Even if the child looks Chinese, it was born in the USSR, lives among Russians, goes to a Russian school, knows no Chinese and speaks only Russian. The parents registered him as Russian.
Problems of class ascription arose when the father was a salaried employee and the mother a manual worker. They then divided the children up among themselves. Some of the people I questioned were religious. They discussed this openly, though they also wanted to know why such questions were being put. The majority of those I questioned could read and write, apart from a few older people who were newcomers to Moscow. One older woman declared that she used to be religious but had now abandoned her belief in God. Some of the people I questioned had higher education. The workers mainly had vocational training. Looking around the apartments gives you a good idea of how people live. There was a Christmas tree in almost every apartment. Many workers have shelves with books and musical instruments – violins, guitars and accordions. Almost all the families have children who constantly interrupted.4
This is just one of the many reports of the process of taking the census. Readers of Pravda could look into apartments, hostels and train compartments with the eyes of the enumerators. Reports flowed in from the different districts of the capital, from the capitals of the republics, from Kiev, from Ashgabat, from the Taiga and the Pacific ports, from the newly built suburbs. We are given interviews with workers, especially ‘educated workers’ with bookshelves and a rug on the walls. We are able to enter the newly completed Hotel Moskva, this ‘city within a city’ inhabited by the ‘transitory residents of the city’. Engineers from Kazakhstan, sailors from Kronstadt, managers from the Donbass – we join a rail journey on the Trans-Siberian Express or enter a maternity unit in one of the new towns in the Urals. The armada of enumerators – around a million in all, 18,000 in Moscow alone5 – not only penetrated the furthest corners of the Soviet Union; it systematically explored the social landscape and immersed itself in the milieu of factory workers and specialists, and came across the members of a vast spectrum of religious faiths. On the Trans-Siberian Express – in the trains alone some 320,000 to 350,000 passengers were included in the census6 – the enumerators discovered a Soviet Union in miniature, where the people’s comings and goings, their professions and education, threw light on social and geographical mobility. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the census activists. The enumerators were millions of pairs of trained eyes who were supposed to acquire as complete and accurate a picture of the entire population as possible. Every apartment block that was included in the census was a microcosm of the Soviet world. The mixed society of the first two Five-Year Plans was refracted in the specific organic composition of every residential block. These plans give us an insight into a society in flux, into identities in transition, and into the construction of new life plans and identity plans – all of this by the hundred thousand, by the million, and in a form designed from the outset to be evaluated systematically. The enumerator on the move was not only an inspector, he was also a ‘friend and helper’ who was supposed to assist the people he was questioning in defining their social, ethnic and cultural position in society as accurately as possible. On the other hand, there is no trace in the newspaper reports of the statistics that had been collected from the NKVD, the camp administrations or the Red Army.
6 January 1937: snapshot of an empire
Today our country is conducting a universal census. Since the crack of dawn a million-strong army of enumerators has been at work. They are to be found everywhere where there are people, and they enter into their lists all the inhabitants of the USSR, however great or small. No one must be overlooked, regardless of where he lives, whether he lives in the savage taiga, is a road sweeper or is a passenger on the Trans-Siberian Express – the enumerator must find everyone, talk to everyone and obtain accurate responses from everyone. That is the nature of the complexity and the responsibility of the task we face. Only if we carry out this task to the letter will we be able to discov
er precisely the total number of people in the multinational society of our great fatherland. Both the Party and the government attach the very greatest significance to this census. The forms were already filled in between 1 and 5 January; the population had already been familiarizing itself with the questions, which had been previously displayed on posters; people are prepared and are able to answer the questions. The questions are welcomed everywhere like long-awaited guests. How different this census was from the census taken under the tsars in 1897, when the population responded in a hostile or apathetic manner! At that time, no information was available; there were even public disturbances, with members of religious sects setting themselves on fire rather than respond to the questions.7
People’s particulars were taken wherever they happened to be at the time. Before the set date, people were registered between 1 and 5 January 1937, and the lists were then checked between 7 and 11 January by local teams of inspectors.8 The actual counting process was restricted to the twenty-four hours from midnight of 6 January to the following midnight, so as to ensure that the margin of error was as small as possible and to keep double-counting to the absolute minimum. Between 8 a.m. and 12 o’clock midnight citizens were supposed to be prepared to answer the questions put to them by the enumerators. The life of the entire nation was to be put on hold for the critical period. The winter had been chosen as a time of reduced mobility, but also the authorities had failed to notice that the day chosen coincided with the eve of the Orthodox Christmas, which was celebrated as always by millions of people and was of course associated with journeys, family visits, etc. Moreover, that particular day was also the day on which the collective farms settled up their annual accounts.9
Moscow, 1937 Page 17
