Few had Robotti’s luck. Most of the actual leadership was protected by Togliatti’s docility in the face of Stalin’s line. But about 200 Italian Communists perished. Eugenia Ginzburg mentions an Italian woman Communist screaming in the punishment cells of Yaroslavl on being beaten and hosed down with icy water.43
Gorkić, the General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 1937. His Polish wife had already been seized as a British agent. Almost the whole of the Yugoslav Central Committee followed him, together with a large number of the remaining Yugoslav Communists; of these, more than 100 “found their death in Stalin’s prisons and camps.”44 They included such men as Vlada Copi6, the Party’s Organizational Secretary, newly back from command in the International Brigade in Spain. Tito came to Moscow at this time and lived on the fourth floor of the Lux. He later said that he never knew whether he would get out alive or awake in the night “to hear the fatal knocking at my door.45 He noticed that there was a tendency in the Comintern to dissolve the entire Yugoslav Party—as was being done with the Polish and Korean Parties. Finally, he was allowed to form a new Central Committee. As soon as he could, he transferred it to Yugoslavia and Western Europe, where it had some chance of survival.
The then First Secretary of the Finnish Communist Party, Arvo Tuominen, gives a long list of Finnish leaders shot, and says that “nearly all Finns then living in the Soviet Union were labelled ‘enemies of the people.’” These Finnish Communists were involved through a confession obtained from Otto Vilen, “gained by Stalinist beating methods.”46 They were spies in the service of France, Germany, Norway, and so on. Of those not shot but sent to camp, most died, though one woman member of the Finnish Politburo drowned herself in a stream in the Solovki prison area.47
The tiny Romanian Party lost many of its most prominent members, including Marcel Pauker (not to be confused with the NKVD officer)fn3 and Alexandru Dobrogeanu, shot on 4 December 1937. Pauker himself is said to have been accused of collusion with Zinoviev and shot without trial.48 But in general, it was the early connection of the Romanians with Rakovsky which proved fatal. Little reference seems to have been made to this micro-purge until, at the trial in Bucharest in 1952 of the Politburo member Vasile Luca, an attack was made on “the treasonable clique of Marcel Pauker.”fn4 Bulgarian Communists were also much persecuted. Dimitrov’s fellow defendants at the Leipzig Trial, Taney and Popov, were jailed.49 Popov survived and was rehabilitated in 1955. Chervenkov, later to be the Stalinist ruler of Bulgaria, hid in Dimitrov’s flat until interceded for. There were many other victims. One Bulgarian is mentioned in a Vologda camp being thrown into a hole in the ground without food for thirteen days, and dying.50
A recent Bulgarian article tells us that “more than a thousand of the 1,200 to 1,400 Bulgarian political emigres in the U.S.S.R. found themselves in forced labor camps, and only about one hundred of them came back to Bulgaria.”51 The main leadership, such men as Islcrov, Lambrev, and Vasilev, were Nazi or Bulgarian spies. Exiles settled in the Ukraine were charged with a plot to annex that country to Bulgaria.52
And so it was with all the émigré groups. For example, Tanaka, a leader of the Japanese Communist Party, was put through the conveyor and torture and is reported liquidated.53
But the heaviest casualties fell on the Poles. The Polish Communist Party was very much a special case in its relations with Moscow. It derived in the main from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuaniafn5—admitted on a basis of autonomy, together with the Jewish Bund and the Lettish Social Democrats, into the IVth Congress of the Russian Social Democrats in 1906, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were still technically united. A. S. Warski and Dzerzhinsky were then elected members of the joint Central Committee as its representatives.
The Poles on the whole backed the Bolsheviks, though with reservations. Their leader Rosa Luxemburg had written privately that the Bolsheviks’ support would be valuable in spite of their “Tartar-Mongolian savagery.” Although Lenin was soon involved in organizing factions in the Polish Party, and in a series of polemics with Rosa Luxemburg and others, the quarrels were domestic in a sense which was not true of the relations with other foreign organizations. There was much coming and going between the Parties, then and later. When Poland became an independent state, Poles who had worked with the Bolsheviks and remained on Soviet soil became members of the Russian Communist Party pure and simple. We have only to think of names like Dzerzhinsky, Radek, Menzhinsky, and Unshlikht (as with the parallel Lettish cases of Eikhe, Rudzutak, and others). A Pole could be transferred between the new Communist Party of Poland and the Russian Communist Party at will. Marchlewski, named head of the Polish “Government” established behind the Red Army lines during the 1920 invasion of Poland, became, after the debacle, a Soviet diplomat. As a natural corollary, the Polish Party, insofar as its organizations within Soviet territory were concerned, was involved in the Purge in much the same way as the Soviet Party proper—Warski was, after all, practically an Old Bolshevik in almost the same sense as Rykov or Kamenev.
The Poles in Russia were to some degree comparable with the Irish in England; there were many of them, and they often played important roles in the life of the larger country. The Purge affected not only the Polish Party members, but the Polish population as a whole. The total Polish population is shown as 792,000 in the USSR census of 1926. The 1939 census (not indeed reliable) shows 626,000. Figures of their actual losses in the Purge are hard to come by. According to a Polish Communist, about 10,000 Poles from Moscow alone were shot at the time of the Bukharin Trial, with a total of 50,000 in the country as a whole.
Arrests of Polish Communists had taken place sporadically all through the 1930s. Now the Party as a whole was caught up in an unprecedented campaign of almost literal annihilation, both organizationally and physically. The survivors in the whole of the Polish Communist movement and its following are said to have been about seventy or eighty in number. A Polish leader remarks, “Almost all the leaders and active members of the K.P.P. then in the Soviet Union were arrested and sent to camps.”54 It is certainly true that when a Polish Communist Government had to be formed in 1944, the leaders were scraped up from all over the place. The few who had the luck to remain in Polish jails, like Gomulka, had superimposed on them men like President Bierut, formerly (under the name Rutkowski) an NKVD interrogator, and as economic chief, Minc, who had been a lecturer in an institute in Central Asia.
On 20 and 21 August 1937 Warski, Budzynski, and others were shot.55 War-ski is said to have gone mad under interrogation and to have imagined that he was in the hands of the Gestapo. A number of Polish Communist leaders then in Poland were invited to Moscow for “consultation.” They included Ring and Henrykowski, both members of the Polish Politburo. The latter saw what was going on, and for weeks never ventured out of his room at the Lux except on nocturnal shopping for supplies. All eventually disappeared.56 From 1937 to 1939, all twelve members of the Central Committee present in Russia, and several hundred others, were executed. Among those who perished were all the Party’s representatives on the Executive Committee and the Control Commission of the Comintern, including the veteran Walecki.