Before his arrest, Walecki provided an example of the way old revolutionaries had become humiliated and degraded. Walecki, who had always given friendly greetings to Neumann’s wife, met her in the Lux soon after Neumann’s arrest. “I smiled and nodded,” she remembers, “but he looked away deliberately and there was an embarrassed, rather guilty expression on his face.”57 Walecki was to confess that he was a spy.58 By 11 September 1937, the whole Polish Politburo had been arrested. Stalin signed a proposal on “cleaning up” the Polish Party on 28 November 1937.59
Usually Stalin, after purging a Party, could make use of the struggles over power and policy invariably prevalent to select a new leadership. But in this case, “both factions” in the Polish Communist Party in 1937 were accused of “following the instructions of the Polish counter-revolutionary intelligence.”60 It seems to have issued its last official statement on 8 June 1938 and to have been finally dissolved by a vote of the Presidium of the ECCI on 16 August 1938. “Agents of Polish fascism” had “managed to gain positions of leadership” in it, according to the report of the Comintern delegate to the Soviet XVIIIth Party Congress, Manuilsky. (Manuilsky, making this report, referred also to police agents in the Hungarian and Yugoslav Parties.) When the accusations were announced to the Polish members of the International Brigade in Spain, they were received with silence and tears.61
The final batch of leaders, like Kostrzewa, were shot in 1939, when accounts were being settled with the whole Comintern apparatus. The left-wing poets Stande and Wandurski and other literary men perished; the most important was Bruno Jasienski, of whom we have written in Chapter 10.
The total dissolution of the Polish Communist Party was an extraordinary measure. It reflected simply the physical destruction of its cadres. It probably suffered little more than the Ukrainian Party. But Stalin could not, of course, simply dissolve the Ukrainian Party, since he needed someone to rule in Kiev. He did not, at the moment, have any immediate need of a group for ruling Poland and doubtless reflected that—as it turned out in practice—he could scrape one up from somewhere when and if required. The Polish Party, moreover, was one in which hostility to the forthcoming Nazi-Soviet Pact, with its partition of Poland, was likely to be strong.
The wives of the arrested foreigners suffered like those of the Russian victims. But they had no relations to turn to. They remained entirely at the mercy of official caprice. First, they were involved in a continual struggle with the manager of the Lux, who soon contrived to transfer them from their rooms to a separate, older building on the other side of the courtyard, crowded in with other wives. From here, too, they were eventually evicted.
Their papers were not in order, and they had to queue up regularly every five days to renew them. It was impossible to get jobs. They could live only by selling their possessions and books.
It was common to try to keep the children from knowing what had happened to their fathers. Margarete Neumann quotes a conversation:
“Is your daddy arrested too?”
“No, my daddy’s on holiday in the Caucasus.”
And then the eleven-year-old daughter of one of the arrested comrades destroyed the child’s illusion: “Oh, he’s in the Caucasus, is he? Why does your mother pay money into the prison, then? A fine Caucasus that is!”62
But sooner or later, the wives were themselves arrested. On a single night in September 1937, all the Polish wives were taken. One that can be traced got eight years’ forced labor,63 and this seems to have been the usual sentence.
The Soviet representatives in the Comintern machinery were also destroyed, being blamed for collusion in the penetration of the enemy into the constituent Parties. The exception was Manuilsky himself, who acted as Stalin’s agent throughout. Described as a third-rate mind, he was willing to be the Comintern equivalent of a Mekhlis or a Shkiryatov and thus survived.
In his report on Comintern matters to the XVIIIth Congress, after dealing with the Polish case, he significantly added, “It was the failure of Comintern workers that they allowed themselves to be deceived … and were late in taking measures against the contamination of the Communist Parties by enemy elements.”
This referred primarily to two other members of the Central Committee of the CPSU: Pyatnitsky and Knorin. Pyatnitsky was, apart from Manuilsky, the chief Soviet operator in the Comintern. He had served on its Executive Committee since 1923, and ran the key Organization Department.64
V. G. Knorin, another Soviet representative on the Comintern Executive Committee, controlled the German and other Parties. A Latvian, he is described as an honest man, but a dogmatist.65 He seems to have been denounced for permitting nationalist deviations as early as 1936. He was arrested in June 193766 as a Gestapo agent and is said to have been tortured particularly badly.
Their subordinates fell with them, including their immediate aides, Grollman and Idelson. One of the “lists” Stalin signed for execution consisted of 300 Comintern operatives.67 Between 23 May and 1 June 1937, a wave of arrests swept the organization.68 The Head of the Foreign Communications Department, MirovAbramov, was taken with all his staff. It is said that he was accused of espionage for no fewer than fifteen countries.69 He was named as a link between Yagoda and Trotsky in the Bukharin Trial. Alikhanov, Head of the Cadre Department, was also arrested in the summer of 1937,70 as were the Heads of the Propaganda Department, the Organization Department, and the Press Section. We can trace none of them further, presumably because they were shot en masse, under the list system.
In general, a clean sweep was made of the organization, apart from such pliant figures as Kuusinen. Dimitrov alone tried to save some of the victims.
KILLERS ABROAD
It was comparatively easy to deal with the foreigners in Moscow. The operation of the Purge in foreign countries called for more secret techniques.
In December 1936, Yezhov organized in the NKVD an “Administration of Special Tasks.” Under it were the so-called mobile groups, charged with special assassinations outside Russia.71
There was one problem in particular which he faced. He could not so easily dispose of the old NKVD cadres operating abroad under the Foreign Department as he could those in the internal departments. They could refuse to come and be arrested. He coped with this by two methods. First of all, when he arrested the other heads of departments in the Lubyanka, he left Slutsky to carry on in the best of odors. The Foreign Department, it became known, was not to be submitted to the purge needed for its more corrupt confreres.
Numbers of operatives, impressed by this idea, returned to Russia, where they were mostly “transferred” and executed. The fate of some of them became known. For example, in the summer of 1937, the NKVD Resident in France, Nikolai Smirnov, was recalled to Moscow and executed. At first, Yezhov pretended that he had simply been transferred to an underground job in China. But the true story leaked out to the NKVD station in France because the wife of another officer had chanced to see the arrest of Smirnov, when she was about to call on him at the Hotel Moskva. Yezhov then put out the story that Smirnov had been a spy for France and Poland. The NKVD officers in France deduced that this was untrue from the simple fact that their cipher for communication with Moscow was not changed. If Smirnov had indeed been a French spy, it must then be assumed that he had betrayed the cipher. Similarly, the old network of informers he had built up continued to operate, contrary to the laws of espionage.72