This chapter from Vadim Rogovin's work “Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR” details how Stalin’s Great Terror extended beyond Soviet citizens to systematically persecute, imprison, and execute foreign communists and Comintern cadres internationally. We are publishing this as a supplementary text to the lecture given by Katja Rippert to the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2025 Summer School and encourage our readers to purchase the full volume by Rogovin, as well as his other works on the Left Opposition, through Mehring Books.
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Until now we have been dealing with mass repression against Soviet citizens. With no less fury, however, the purge was directed against revolutionary emigrants, members of the international communist movement.
In the mid-1930s, several tens of thousands of foreign communists were living in the Soviet Union. Some of them worked in the Comintern, the Profintern, the Communist Youth International, and other international organizations. Others worked in Soviet enterprises and establishments. Significant, too, was the number of non-party emigrants who had used the right of asylum; according to the Constitution of the USSR, this right was extended to “foreign citizens persecuted for defending the interests of workers, or for their scientific activity, or for participating in national-liberation struggles.” As the famous Soviet intelligence officer L. Trepper believed, 80 percent of these people were repressed during the years of the Great Purge.
Among the first to be arrested in the USSR were the founders of foreign communist parties, participants in the first congresses of the Comintern, and past members of the left wing of the Second International. There is a famous photograph of the Presidium of the First Congress of the Comintern where, next to Lenin sit the foreign delegates Klinger, Eberlein, and Platten. They all perished in Stalin’s prisons and camps.
One of the oldest revolutionary-internationalists was Edmondo Peluso, who, during various years of his life, was a member of the social-democratic and communist parties of France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Italy. While being investigated, Peluso was accused of having ties with Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, and others. To this he replied that he might just as well be accused of having ties with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. As he wrote in a complaint sent to the prosecutor, “four men, armed with various instruments, beat me for 40 minutes after hanging me upside down.” In 1940, Peluso was sentenced by a Special Board to five years in exile, and, in 1942, he was shot on charges of belonging to a “counter-revolutionary insurgent organization.”
As I. Reiss would recount, at the beginning of 1937 the NKVD prepared a memorandum which stated that all prisoners of war remaining in Russia after the Brest Treaty had actually stayed in order to engage in espionage. This memorandum, wrote Reiss, “evidently was supposed to give grounds for persecuting foreign communist-emigrants who now are being slaughtered to a man in the USSR.” Reiss stressed that “the situation is especially desperate for those whose homelands are ruled by fascism: Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and others. No one was going to defend them, and therefore they were dealt with unceremoniously. As a rule, they were all charged with espionage. Very soon arrests began of Russians married to foreign women, i.e., to ‘spies.’”
The repressions fell with particular cruelty on the apparatus of the Comintern. In 1937–1938, a Comintern trial was prepared in Moscow. Malenkov and Poskrebyshev came several times to the prison where Comintern officials were held in order to find out how the “Comintern case” was proceeding. On the sixth day after his arrest, Jan Anvelt died during interrogation; he had been the executive secretary of the International Control Commission of the Comintern, and chairman of the Estonian Workers Commune in 1918–1919. After being sentenced to death, Melnikov, the director of the communications between the Comintern and its foreign centers, continued to run the foreign network for eight more months from his cell in the internal prison of the NKVD, after which he was shot.
Georgii Damianov, the head of the cadre department of the Comintern, who worked under the pseudonym of Belov, took an active part in reprisals against the revolutionary emigrants. Before Damianov was appointed to this post, he had been ferocious in Spain as the inspector of the International Brigades. Without the sanction of Manuilsky and “Belov,” the NKVD did not have the right to arrest foreign communists. Damianov prepared hundreds of reports and recommendations for the NKVD with comments like the following: “He does not enjoy our political trust,” “dubious from the standpoint of his acquaintances,” and so forth. From 1946, Damianov was at the post of Minister of Defense, and, after Dimitrov’s death, became Chairman of the Presidium of the People’s Council of Bulgaria.
Given the mass persecution of Comintern cadres, the majority of high-ranking leaders, however, survived—members of the Presidium and secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Comintern [ECCI]. These people loyally recommended themselves as the obedient executors of Stalin’s will, as participants in the struggle against all oppositions and “deviations” in the international communist movement. Supported for many years by Moscow and enjoying privileges on a par with the highest Soviet bureaucrats, these people step by step lost the qualities of a communist. Having in mind this “leading core,” Trotsky wrote in 1937:
“The apparatus of the Comintern consists of people who are diametrically opposed to the revolutionary type. A genuine revolutionary has his own opinion which he has established, and in whose name he is prepared to make sacrifices, up to sacrificing his life. A revolutionary prepares the future and therefore in the present reconciles himself easily to any difficulties, deprivations, and persecution. In contrast to this, the bureaucrats of the Comintern are complete careerists. They have no opinions and subordinate themselves to the order of the bosses who pay them. Since they are agents of the all-powerful Kremlin, each one of them feels like a small ‘superman.’ They can do anything. They easily denigrate the honor of others since they have no honor of their own. This completely degenerated and thoroughly demoralized organization maintains itself in radical public opinion, including in the minds of the workers, as the ‘builder’ of socialist society only through the authority of the Kremlin.”
Of course, these words of Trotsky’s should not be taken as absolute. Many leaders of the Comintern had a significant revolutionary past and subjectively were devoted to the cause of communism. In a number of cases they tried to oppose the terror which was descending on their parties and the communist movement as a whole, although the majority limited themselves to appeals to Stalin and his assistants. On 28 March 1938, E. Varga wrote to Stalin:
“As a result of the mass arrests, the cadres who are at liberty in the Soviet Union are profoundly demoralized and dismayed. This demoralization seizes the majority of Comintern officials and is spreading even to individual members of the secretariat of the ECCI. The main reason for this demoralization is the feeling of complete impotence in matters concerning the arrests of political emigrants… Many foreigners gather their things every evening in expectation of a possible arrest. Because of the constant fear, many have become half-mad and are incapable of work.”
In a number of cases, G. Dimitrov, who was sent investigatory material concerning foreign communists, provided the secretaries of the CC VKP(b), the leaders of the NKVD, and the procuracy with positive characterizations of those arrested, which sometimes aided in their release. However his influence was not very great. L. Trepper tells of a meeting between Dimitrov and Bulgarian communists, who said to him:
“If you don’t do everything necessary to stop the repressions, then we will kill Yezhov, this counter-revolutionary.”
Dimitrov left them no illusions:
“I have no chance of doing anything; all this remains exclusively in the hands of the NKVD.”
In telling this story, Trepper added that
“the Bulgarians did not manage to remove Yezhov. He shot them all like rabbits. Yugoslavs, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs—all disappeared. In 1937, besides Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht, not a single one of the main leaders of the Communist Party of Germany remained. The repressive madness knew no limits.”
Stalin put constant pressure on the leaders of the Comintern, trying to draw them further into the execution and ideological justification of the political terror. On 11 February 1937, he received Dimitrov for a discussion of the draft of a decree by the ECCI with regard to the Radek-Piatakov trial. As can be seen from Dimitrov’s notes, Stalin declared to him:
“The European workers think that this is all because of the falling-out between myself and Trotsky, because of Stalin’s poor character.”
In order to repudiate such opinions, Stalin demanded that the decree state that Trotsky and his supporters
“fought against Lenin and against the party even during Lenin’s lifetime.”
At the close of the discussion, Stalin uttered the ominous phrase:
“All of you there, in the Comintern, are working to the advantage of the enemy.”
In November 1937, when he had become familiar with the official draft of the ECCI’s decree on the struggle against Trotskyism, Stalin gave Dimitrov an even more fanatical directive:
“Trotskyists must be driven out, shot, and destroyed. They are world-wide provocateurs, and the most vicious agents of fascism.”
Foreign communists presented a particular threat to Stalin because, while they traveled in their countries, they had access to Trotskyist sources. Their familiarity with “Trotskyist literature” often served as the basis for the arrest of political emigrants. In this regard, the fate of D. Gachev is noteworthy. He was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1921 to 1926 and a member of the VKP(b) from 1926 to 1938 (frequently, after arriving in the USSR, revolutionary emigrants changed membership in their native parties into membership in the VKP(b)). In a statement to the general prosecutor of the USSR, Gachev, who was sentenced to eight years in the camps for “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity,” wrote that the sole “crime” imputed to him was reading, in 1934, an article by Trotsky which he had discovered accidentally in a French newspaper used to wrap some produce belonging to his comrade who had arrived from Bulgaria. In a private conversation, he had referred to this article as “a new example of the degeneration of Trotskyism into the most undisguised fascism.” Despite these words, the investigators described this conversation as evidence that Gachev, “while subjectively not a Trotskyist, objectively propagated counter-revolutionary Trotskyist ideas.”
In many instances the very fact that a foreign communist had been arrested was seen as evidence that he was a spy or a Trotskyist. On 31 August 1937, Belevsky, the chairman of the Communist Party of Poland in the ECCI, wrote to Moskvin (pseudonym of the former Chekist Trilisser), the secretary of the ECCI:
“The fact that the NKVD organs have arrested a number of members of the CPP, and members of the Central Committee of the CPP in particular, points to the existence in the ranks of the CPP and its CC of agents belonging to the class enemy, namely, supporters of Pilsudski and Trotsky.
In such an atmosphere, to use the words of the German emigrant and poet Johannes Becher, what inevitably arises is:
“a jungle atmosphere, where no one believes anyone else, where hunter becomes prey and prey becomes hunter, and all political activity is reduced to ‘giving away’ one’s closest associates.”
In describing the contradictory feelings which gripped him and other foreign communists, Becher recalled:
“To the degree that I respected and loved Stalin, I was shaken by several things which were happening in the Soviet Union... My very being was shattered... ‘People don’t talk about that’—this unwritten, general rule was simply a sign of our general hypocrisy.”
The ferocity of the persecution of the foreign communists was explained to a significant degree by Stalin’s fear that socialist revolutions in other lands might arise outside his control. As a result, the center of the revolutionary movement might shift from Moscow, and the movement itself might end up under the leadership of the Fourth International. In order to maintain his unlimited control over the communist movement, Stalin ruthlessly annihilated foreign communists, with the exception of those who showed their personal devotion and “reliability” through joint participation in his criminal actions.
In talking about the annihilation of the internationalists, Trotsky recalled that the murder of Jean Jaurès had been committed by an ignorant, petty-bourgeois chauvinist, and the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by counter-revolutionary officers. Now, however, “imperialism need no longer rely on ‘good fortune’: in Stalin’s mafia it had a ready international group of agents for the systematic extermination of revolutionaries.”
Communists from countries with fascist or semi-fascist regimes, where communist parties worked in the underground (in the 1930s, dictatorial, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes existed in more than half the nations of Europe), turned out to be in the most difficult straits. If they were living in the USSR, members of the communist parties of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Finland were subjected to particularly cruel annihilation.
In July 1937, Milan Gorkic, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was summoned to Moscow. After a few months, officials of the political secretariat of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), located in Paris, were told that Gorkic had been arrested as “an English spy,” the remaining leadership of the CPY was being disbanded, and the party’s monetary assistance from the Comintern was being halted until the “Comintern decides otherwise.”
After Gorkic’s arrest, Tito was ordered to fulfill the duties of senior secretary of the Central Committee of the CPY. In March 1938, he arrived in Yugoslavia from Paris in order to form a provisional leadership of the CPY, which would have to fulfill the role of the Central Committee until the resolution of the “question of the CPY” by the leadership of the Comintern. In May, Tito created such a provisional leadership, which included A. Rankovic, M. Djilas, and I. L. Ribar.
While he was still in Paris, Tito published three articles expressing enthusiasm for the “merciless purges” in the USSR. In the article “Trotskyism and Its Accomplices” he revealed an understanding of the Stalinist interpretation of “Trotskyism” when he declared:
“From hidden Trotskyists you often hear: ‘I am not a Trotskyist, but neither am I a Stalinist.’ Whoever speaks this way is surely a Trotskyist.”
In August 1938, Tito came to Moscow, where by this time 800 Yugoslav communists had already been arrested. Here, before anything else, he had to write an extensive explanation in connection with the arrest of his wife, the German communist L. Bauer. In it Tito said that he had asked his wife “not to have any ties with emigrants from Germany, since he feared that someone would use her for hostile goals in relation to the USSR.” Nevertheless he confessed that “he had been insufficiently vigilant,” and declared that his ties with Bauer were “a great stain” on his party life.
Afterwards, Tito called his trip to Moscow the most difficult period in his life. He said that at that time
“almost every Yugoslav was suspected of Trotskyism. In such an atmosphere, one after another the Yugoslav communists disappeared, people who had left their homeland because of police terror, … volunteers who had returned from Spain, who had survived in battles for the republic, as well as those who remained in Soviet Russia after the world war in order to build the first socialist state in the world.”
During his stay in Moscow, Tito was accused of allowing “Trotskyist distortions” in his translation into Serbo-Croatian of the fourth chapter of The Short Course of the History of the VKP(b). This charge was removed only after his personal case had been reviewed by the Comintern’s Control Commission.
As archival documents show, in Moscow Tito participated as much as he could in the persecution of his party comrades. Thus, he wrote a 50-page memorandum regarding the activity of the former secretary of the Serbian territory committee of the CPY, P. Miletić, in which he called the latter “an inveterate factionalist.” In the fall of 1939, Miletić, who had finished many years of a prison sentence in Yugoslavia, arrived in Moscow, whereupon he was arrested.
At a session of the secretariat of the ECCI which reviewed the “question of the CPY,” Tito gave a report which said:
“The new leadership stands before the task of purging the party of various factionalists and Trotskyist elements, both abroad and in our nation… Our party… will gladly accept any decision which the Comintern makes.”
However, the leaders of the Comintern considered such a declaration insufficient for them to completely pass the leadership of the Yugoslavian Communist Party into Tito’s hands. On 30 December, Dimitrov declared that Tito did not deserve “the complete trust of the ECCI” and that to win such trust he must “show in deed that he is carrying out the directives of the ECCI in good conscience.” In response, Tito assured Dimitrov that he would see to it that the CPY wiped “the mud from its name before the Comintern.”
After this, the secretariat of the ECCI gave Tito full powers to form a new Central Committee. Before leaving Moscow, Tito told Dimitrov that he thought the leadership of the CPY should be located in Yugoslavia. “What leadership?” Dimitrov asked in surprise. “You are the only one left, Walter [Tito’s party name–V. R.]. It’s a good thing that at least you are left, otherwise we would have to disband the CPY.”
In March 1939, Tito returned to Yugoslavia, where he held a session of the “provisional leadership,” at which the decision was made to expel from the party the communists arrested in Moscow, as well as several members of the CPY living in Yugoslavia and France—on charges of Trotskyism. He entrusted the investigation of the “actions of Trotskyists” to Djilas and Kardel.
Persecution of the Yugoslav “Trotskyists” continued also during the war. One of its victims became Gorkic’s closest comrade, Zh. Pavlovic, who had been expelled in 1937 from the CPY. In 1940 he published the book The Balance of the Soviet Thermidor, in which he describes the repressions against Yugoslav Trotskyists and “Gorkichists.” This book, which was banned by the authorities of royal Yugoslavia, could see the light only at the end of the 1980s. In 1941, Pavlovic surfaced in the territory of the partisan “Uzhitskaia Republic,” where he was arrested. Djilas recalled that Tito told him: Pavlovic is a police informer. “He categorically denied this even though they beat him horribly.” Not long before the fall of the “partisan republic,” Pavlovic was shot.
Thus, the sole ruling communist party which cast off the yoke of Stalinist hegemonism in the 1940s was headed by people who had tainted themselves with active participation in a whole series of ruthless purges. Even though, after Tito’s break with Stalin, the Soviet press called the Yugoslav leaders Trotskyists, they had not the slightest relationship to Trotskyism. In the past they had been, on the contrary, inveterate Stalinists who had exterminated Trotskyists.
Total repression reached the Communist Party of Poland, for whom Stalin had nursed a special distrust since 1923–1924, when its leadership spoke in support of the Left Opposition in the RKP(b). The repressions against the Polish communists started at the end of the 1920s, when the party split into a “right” and “left” faction. As noted in the Bulletin of the Opposition, even in 1929 “the Comintern with the aid of the GPU ‘arbitrated’ the debate between the right group of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party (Warski, Kostrzewa, and others) and the left (the Lenski group), by sending into exile the majority of the rights.” At the end of the 1920s the repressions began against the activists in the communist parties of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, which then were part of Poland. In 1933, the “rights” were arrested and declared agents of the Polish dictator Pilsudski. In 1933–1934, several members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland (CPP) and communist delegates to the Polish Sejm were shot, as well as the poet Wandurski, who headed the Polish theater in Kiev.
After these repressions, the Lenski group declared the “destruction of provocateurs” and the “cleansing of the atmosphere” in the CPP. On Stalin’s orders, the Central Committee of the CPP conducted an ultra-left, adventuristic policy, and then just as submissively shifted to the diametrically opposed policy of the “popular front.” In 1937, it became this group’s turn. Almost all the Polish communists who were located in the USSR were arrested. The leaders of the CPP, including its general secretary, Lenski, and the 70-year-old Warski—one of the founders of the social-democratic and communist parties of Poland—were shot.
This campaign was completed with the ECCI’s decree disbanding the Polish Communist Party. After reading the draft of the decree, Stalin told Dimitrov:
“You were late in disbanding them by two years. They must be disbanded, but in my opinion it is not necessary to make an announcement in the press.”
In the “Appeal of Polish Bolshevik-Leninists regarding the Disbanding of the Polish Communist Party,” it states:
“The destruction of the CPP is the last link in the chain of Stalinist crimes: it is the furthest step in the victorious movement of the Thermidorian counter-revolution which is annihilating the old revolutionary generation—and not only the Russian—with fire and sword.”
The arrests and executions of the German emigrants in the USSR started in 1934. During the years of the Great Purge the following people were arrested: member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany (CPG) Remmele; Thälmann’s former secretary, Hirsch; one of the leaders of the Red Front, Kupferstein; the writers Otwald and Günther; as well as leading journalists of the German communist press.
In January 1937, Krinitsky, the first secretary of the Saratov area committee of the VKP(b), told Stalin that in the republic of Germans of the Povolzh’e, “a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization had been uncovered, the leading core of which were former members of the Communist Party of Germany.” The head of this organization was declared to be W. Leow-Hofmann, the former leader of the Union of Red Front Fighters—the militarized organization of the CPG, created in 1925 to defend workers meetings and demonstrations.
One of the victimized leaders of the CPG was Heinz Neumann, who in 1936 had been assigned the translation of the transcript of the first Moscow trial. As his wife, M. Buber-Neumann, later recalled, after completing this work he said:
“I assure you that if they put me on public trial, then I will find the strength to shout: ‘Down with Stalin!’ No one will prevent me then.”
“After a long silence he added: ‘Only what can these dogs do to people!?... After this night-time confession he began to talk for the first time about suicide.”
At the beginning of 1937, the Neumanns received from their friend in Spain a letter which at first seemed strange. It contained the text of a song which supposedly all Europe was singing at that time. In the text there was a nonsensical proposal: “Therefore take a hot iron and put it to the paper.” Realizing what was going on, Neumann “developed” the secret text and read:
“Maybe you will lose everything, but you must try to leave the Soviet Union before it is too late. But never, under any circumstances, should you come to Spain, for there also the NKVD is in a frenzy.”
Two months after receiving this letter, Neumann was arrested.
The fate of another prominent member of the CPG, Willi Münzenberg, unfolded in a different way. He had become famous throughout the world after he had organized a counter-trial in Paris and London with regard to the burning of the Reichstag. In October 1936, Münzenberg arrived in Moscow on a summons from the leadership of the Comintern. Recounting her Moscow meetings with him, Buber-Neumann wrote: “The trial against Zinoviev raised doubts in Münzenberg’s mind, at the same time as the beginning of the civil war in Spain became a source of hope for him.” Soon after he arrived, Münzenberg was called to the ECCI for interrogations. “After the first interrogations Münzenberg was seized with a feeling that he had already fallen into the hands of the NKVD. It was enough to spend only a few days in Moscow for Münzenberg and Babette (Buber-Neumann’s sister and Münzenberg’s closest collaborator–V. R.) to feel the same panic-stricken fear which held in its talons many thousands of people in this land… Immediately a vacuum formed around him. People avoided him like a leper. His small number of friends slipped into his hotel only under the cover of darkness.”
Münzenberg was saved only by the fact that Stalin had issued a secret directive to send Soviet arms and specialists to Spain. Togliatti declared that Münzenberg was indispensable for carrying out such an assignment, since he had more of the necessary contacts in Europe than any other communist functionary. After returning to Paris, Münzenberg broke with the Comintern and published a series of anti-Stalinist articles.
The scale of the repressions against the German political emigrants can be seen by the memorandum from the head of the service for counting, registering, and verifying the cadres of the representatives from the CPG to the ECCI, Isaak Dietrich. He reported to the leadership of the delegation that on 28 April 1938, the representative body had registered 842 arrested Germans.
“In actual fact the number of arrested is of course higher… In the provinces—for instance, in Engels—not a single German (emigrant) remained at liberty. In Leningrad, at the beginning of 1937, the group of German communists stood at 103, and in February 1938, of these only 12 comrades remained… One could say that more than 70 percent of the members of the CPG have been arrested. If the arrests continue at the same rate as in March 1938, then in three months not a single German member of the party will remain.”
In describing the atmosphere which reigned among the German emigrants, Dietrich noted: “The mood of a certain portion of the comrades is exceedingly agitated. They are shaken and depressed by the many arrests. If they meet one another, then they ask: ‘Are you still alive?’”
“Several wives of those arrested have committed suicide,” reported Dietrich. “Some of the wives and children of those arrested are starving in the literal sense of the word… After some of the comrades had been sent on assignment to Spain, several of their wives came and said that they had been visited by agents of the NKVD who had come to arrest their husbands.”
The Ninth Congress of the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the governing party of the German Democratic Republic] (January 1989) reported that at least 242 prominent members of the German Communist Party had perished in the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of 1937, the majority of Austrian Schutzbundists had already been arrested. They were members of the socialist military organization “Schutzbund” who, after the defeat of the anti-fascist uprising in 1934, had emigrated to the USSR and had been received there as heroes.
Out of more than 3,000 Bulgarian emigrants, one third were persecuted. Six hundred Bulgarian communists, comprising the most active cadres of the Bulgarian Communist Party, perished in Stalinist prisons and camps.
After the wave of repressions had subsided, G. Dimitrov and V. Kolarov, the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party, made considerable effort to help out their party comrades. In February 1941, Dimitrov sent Andreev, the secretary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), a list of 132 arrested Bulgarian emigrants whose cases, in his opinion, should be reviewed, insofar as,
“according to the information we have about these people, it would simply be impossible to consider them capable of committing anti-Soviet and anti-party acts.” Dimitrov mentioned also that many cases, which the Prosecutor’s office had long ago unequivocally established to be groundless, remained on the books, and the people sentenced according to them continued to be held in the camps. He asked Andreev to facilitate “the closing of at least those cases concerning political emigrants which, according to officials from the prosecutor’s office, were clearly ‘frame-ups.’” According to Dimitrov, the cases of many Germans, Austrians, and others under arrest were also frame-ups. “The question arises,” he stressed in his letter, “not only about the rehabilitation and salvation of innocent people who are suffering, but of the return to useful work and to militant activity against our class enemies in the capitalist countries by loyal cadres belonging to our fraternal communist parties.”
After the war, Dimitrov turned to Stalin with a request to free 29 Bulgarian communists “for extremely necessary work in the interests of the party.” The given question was handed over for review to the Minister of State Security, Abakumov, who said in a memorandum sent to the Council of Ministers of the USSR: “In connection with the methods of physical coercion used during investigation against the majority of those arrested, it would be inexpedient to release them abroad at the present time.”
Meanwhile Dimitrov and Kolarov did nothing to save Bulgarian oppositionists (the Iskrov group) who had criticized the policies of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
In 1937, Popov and Tanev, Dimitrov’s co-defendants in the Leipzig frame-up trial, were arrested. Between them, only Tanev was released, on Dimitrov’s request. In a memo about Popov, Dimitrov wrote that “in 1927, after expressing solidarity with the famous Trotskyist Iskrov, Popov insisted on a broad and prolonged discussion, and did not agree with the methods of fighting against the Trotskyists.” Popov was sent to a prison camp, from which he was sent into exile after the war. He was released only in 1953.
At the beginning of the 1920s and 1930s, about 25,000 to 30,000 Hungarians were living in the Soviet Union, the largest portion of whom were political emigrants. The majority of them became victims of persecution. Ten of 16 members of the first Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party were killed, as well as 11 out of 29 people’s commissars of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
From the beginning of 1937, the threat of arrest hung over the head of Béla Kun, the former chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in Hungary. As his wife later recalled, for several months before his arrest, Kun would return from work, “talk with nobody, and moreover, wouldn’t even read anything… He would sit, staring at one spot. When people spoke to him, he wouldn’t answer.” At times Kun tried to shrug off the idea of his inevitable arrest. A few days before his arrest he said to his relatives: “Just think what people are saying. I met Enö Varga on the street and asked him: ‘How are things?’ ‘I’m still free,’ he answered. Even such an intelligent person as Varga, and he is talking nonsense.”
In June 1937, Stalin phoned Kun and merrily said: “Foreign newspapers write that you have been arrested in Moscow. Please, talk to a French journalist, let him be persuaded that the opposite is true.” After this meeting, the French newspapers published refutations of the news about Kun’s arrest. But a few days later, Kun was arrested. In 1938 they arrested his wife, Irina, and his brother-in-law, the famous Hungarian writer Antal Gidazs. Then in 1941, they took his daughter, Agnessa.
In the arrests of the Hungarian and other political emigrants, an active role belonged to the future Prime Minister of Hungary, Imre Nagy. Although documents of his activity as an agent were hidden in the inner recesses of the NKVD, rumors about him as a provocateur circulated even in the 1940s. In his memoirs, Khrushchev mentions that, although Rákosi accused Nagy of a “right deviation” after the war, “Stalin did not arrest Nagy. People said that it was because in the USSR Nagy had helped him decimate the Comintern cadres.”
Only at the end of the 1980s were documents found showing that Nagy, who emigrated in 1929 to the USSR, had been a secret informer for the NKVD since 1933. His denunciations led to the arrest of dozens of Hungarian, German, and Polish communists. Even in 1941, as it states in an NKVD report sent to Malenkov, Nagy “dug up a group of anti-Soviet Hungarian political emigrants.”
Communists from the Baltic countries who were living in the USSR were subjected to total persecution. The scale of the devastation caused in these parties by Stalinist repression can be seen from Dimitrov’s letter to Andreev on 3 January 1939:
“After the arrest of the former leaders of the communist parties of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in Moscow as enemies of the people, the honest communists in these countries remained disoriented and without ties to the Comintern. We do not have now in Moscow a single comrade from these parties whom we can fully rely on, for establishing ties or eventually to be sent into that country.”
At the June Plenum of the Central Committee of 1957, Snechkus, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania, announced that the most active part of the Lithuanian communists, who were living in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, had perished. The only ones to survive had been engaged in underground work or had been in Lithuanian prisons. One of the leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Aleksa-Agnaretis, was shot in 1940, literally three weeks before Lithuania was liberated. Snechkus reported that, after the death in 1935 of one of the oldest Lithuanian communists, Mitskiavichus-Kapsukas, a commission was formed to study his archives.
“Several months ago we received from the Central Committee of the CPSU the archival materials of this commission. How shocked I was when I saw that of this commission, I alone remained alive! And I remained alive because I had been carrying out underground work in fascist Lithuania.”
Altogether, more communists from Eastern European countries were killed in the Soviet Union than died at home in their own countries during Hitler’s occupation.
Many foreign communists who were not touched by the Stalinist repressions were forced to reconcile themselves to the persecution of members of their families, without even daring to ask about the fate of the latter. Paolo Robotti—the son-in-law of Togliatti—was arrested in 1938 and tortured in prison. Kuusinen’s wife spent 17 years in exile in Siberia, and his son was arrested.
In 1936, Kalnberzin, one of the leaders of the Latvian Communist Party, was sent from Moscow to Latvia in order to direct the party underground. In 1939, he was seized by the Latvian police and given a death sentence, which was then commuted to many years in prison. During his absence from the Soviet Union, his wife was arrested and their three children were sent to orphanages. After the Sovietization of Latvia in 1940, Kalnberzin was elected the first secretary of the Communist Party of Latvia. The only thing that he managed to do with regard to his family was to get his children out of an orphanage. Several years later, Kalnberzin told his daughter: “I asked nothing about your mother. It would have been senseless. Nor did they ever tell me anything.”
In Mongolia, which was a satellite of the USSR in the 1930s, mass repressions touched every tenth inhabitant of the republic. The persecution was directed by Marshal Choibalsan; Frinovsky, the deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, had been sent to instruct him. Out of 11 members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, 10 were killed—all except Choibalsan.
The purge encompassed all the Communist Parties, including those with small memberships, which were deprived of the most experienced and educated people, capable in the future of heading mass revolutionary movements in their lands. The section of Korean communists which was located in the USSR was completely liquidated. The leaders of the Communist Party of Iran, Sultan-Zade, and of Mexico, Gomez, were shot. Among the victimized Indian communists was Professor Mukardji, a member of the Indian Revolutionary Party since 1905, a historian with a European education and the author of many books. So, too, was Chattopadiaia, about whom in 1920 an English intelligence agent wrote to his superiors: “Chatto hopes to make all Indians Bolsheviks and hopes to get started with this together with Rabindranath Tagore,… whose latest statements reinforce Chatto’s hopes.”
During the years of the Great Purge, the leaders of the Communist Parties who survived were primarily those who took a hand in destroying their party comrades. Among these is, for instance, Nosaka, who for many years headed the Japanese Communist Party. In 1992 a group of experts of the CPJ was sent to Moscow, where it discovered letters from Nosaka to Dimitrov which served as the grounds for arresting and shooting many Japanese communists. Only after this discovery was the 100-year-old Nosaka stripped of his post as honorary chairman of the Communist Party of Japan.
In the torture chambers of the NKVD, incriminating testimony was coerced from those under arrest against almost all the leaders of the Comintern and “fraternal parties.” The archives have disclosed such testimony against Togliatti, Pollitt, Duclos, Mao Tse-Tung, Zhu De, Pieck, Ulbricht, Gottwald, Šmeral, and Zapotocki. Some of them avoided persecution because they were outside the jurisdiction of the NKVD (for instance, the Chinese leaders), others, because Stalin personally favored them. And those who displayed special zeal in destroying revolutionaries in Spain also survived and retained their posts. This includes W. Ulbricht, who directed the persecution of German, Swiss, and Austrian Trotskyists, and A. Marty, who received the nickname of “the executioner of Albacete” (the Spanish town where the headquarters of the emissaries from the Comintern was located).
The leaders of the Communist Parties of bourgeois-democratic lands, who did not have to participate in persecuting the members of their own parties (the latter were protected from repression by public opinion in their countries), fulfilled the shameful mission of justifying the Great Purge. L. Trepper tells about a mass meeting in Paris where Marcel Cachin and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who had attended the first Moscow trial, spoke of Stalin’s far-sightedness “in exposing and disarming the terrorist group.”
“We heard with our own ears how Zinoviev and Kamenev confessed to committing the most heinous crimes,” exclaimed Vaillant-Couturier. “What do you think, would these people have begun to confess if they were innocent?”
Trepper reasonably notes that, even if the leaders of foreign Communist Parties sincerely believed in the justice of the trials of the Soviet communists, they could not help but understand the falseness of the charges made against Comintern members with whom they had worked hand in hand for many years.
“After the Twentieth Congress they pretended to be completely bewildered. To hear them, it turned out that Khrushchev’s report was a revelation for them. But in reality they were knowing participants in the liquidation of true communists, even when this involved their own party comrades.”
In 1961, the leaders of the “fraternal communist parties,” who for long years had tried to persuade their parties of the authenticity of the Moscow Trials, intervened in the internal affairs of the CPSU when they convinced Khrushchev not to release material about these trials at the Twenty-Second Congress. Unnerved by the consequences which the exposure of the judicial frame-ups might bring to their authority in their own parties, they tried in every way to prevent the exposure of Stalin’s crimes.
Only a few foreign communists decided in 1937–1938 to break with the Comintern and join the Fourth International. This included, for instance, a group of Palestinian Communist Party members, who sent a letter in November 1938 to the editors of the Bulletin of the Opposition, stating: “We are not writers, nor the usual journalists, but simple workers, armed, thanks to relatively many years of political activity, with certain experience and having used years of prison and unemployment for the most through study of Marxism we could manage.” The Bulletin of the Opposition published a declaration from this group, which stressed:
“Can anyone imagine a thinking person who believes in the power and significance of socialism, and who is capable at the same time of believing in this entire exhibition… of fantastic, insane treachery which Stalin’s Moscow trials are offering us? Can it really be that in the land of the greatest revolution the moral power of fascism is so great, and the influence of socialism is so insignificant, that all the acknowledged leaders and genuine revolutionaries, and along with them the broad masses, hundreds of thousands of communists, have turned out to be traitors to communism and are selling themselves to fascism?… If all this were true, if people believed in this—then socialism would be disgraced for all time, and it would be dealt a mortal blow as an idea and a movement.”
The authors of the letter declared:
“In our best, politically conscious years, we followed Stalin. Not because we actually considered him our ‘father.’ In our self-deception we believed that devotion to Stalin was the same as devotion to the cause of the Soviet Union and the world revolution. We hoped that these (Stalinist) methods were accidental and transitory. But Stalin exploited our devotion in order to continue his dark deeds without end or limit… The relentless war which Stalin has been waging against party, economic, and military cadres, is liquidating the gains of the revolution and is destroying the foundations of the Soviet state… If bourgeois reaction had managed to place a provocateur at the head of the workers movement and socialist construction, it could not have caused more harm than Stalin with his evil deeds.”
The annihilation of thousands of foreign communists, as well as the political and moral degeneration of many of those who remained at liberty, was one of the main reasons that, in the majority of countries which became “socialist” after the Second World War, no forces emerged which were capable of resisting the installation of regimes patterned after the regime which existed in the USSR. At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, many of the former leaders of the Comintern (Gottwald, Rakosi, and others) instigated in their own countries purges and trials like those which had occurred earlier in the Soviet Union. Even those political figures in the “countries of people’s democracy” who dared to oppose Soviet hegemonism were deeply infected by the virus of Stalinism and were tainted by active participation in the purges of the 1930s.
It is characteristic that in the majority of Eastern European countries, the rehabilitation of the victims of political repression proceeded in a more half-hearted and inconsistent manner than even in the USSR. Only at the very end of their reign did the leaders of the communist parties of these nations decide to provide statistics about how many of the members of their parties were persecuted in the Soviet Union.