Stalin had once again won the battle of wits. For he understood, as the intellectual Bukharin did not, that political effects did not depend on simple logic, just as, in the 1920s, his opponents had “won” the arguments at Congresses in the debating-point sense, without affecting his practical victory.
All the accused except Yagoda were rehabilitated in 1988.
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