The Great Terror

There were cases, the other way round, of people who had been in Nazi camps and went to Russia on release. A woman who had done three years in a Nazi concentration camp got eight years as a Trotskyite on arrival in Russia owing to her acquaintance with a German Communist who had fallen under suspicion. Her husband had “repudiated” her, but still contrived to send her occasional parcels (Eleanor Lipper,

Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps

[London, 1951], p. 7). Another case is quoted of a Viennese Jew who had withstood nearly a year in Dachau, but committed suicide in a Soviet camp (D.

J

. Dallin and B. I. Nicolaevsky,

Forced Labour in the Soviet Union

[London, 1948], p. 38).

fn2

Among them were Wilhelm Pieck (later to precede Ulbricht in the leadership of East Ger-many), Kuusinen, Togliatti, Gottwald, and Wang Ming.

fn3

Pauker

is said to have been denounced by his wife, Anna Pauker (D. J. Dallin,

Soviet Espionage

[New Haven, Conn., 1956], p. 100).

fn4

The Luca Trial gives a curious example of nature imitating art—in this case, the career of Snowball in

Animal Farm

. Luca, who had hitherto featured as having played a heroic role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, was now exposed as having actually commanded a machine-gun unit on the other side.

fn5

This is not the place to go into the complex origins of Polish Communism, in the two factions of the old Polish Social Democratic Party and the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party.

14 Climax

fn1

This date for Bubnov has been given officially for the past quarter of a century; however, a very recent Soviet listing has him shot on 1 August 1938, with the others (

lzvestiya TsK KPPS

, no. 12 [1878]).

15 Heritage of Terror

fn1

Father of the Army Commander of that name.

fn2

The only member to withdraw his evidence was the Bulgarian Dr. Markov, who did so after some months in prison when arrested by the Russians on their entry into his country.

fn3

The last show “trial” of the Stalin period, that of Slansky and others in Prague in November 1952, was announced as public. But this time, no Westerners were admitted. (The Slansky Trial was conducted under Soviet supervision. At the political level, Mikoyan was sent by Stalin in November 1951 to arrange for the next batch of arrests. At the Secret Police level, the scenario was supervised by M. T. Likhachev, Deputy Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases—himself to be shot with Abakumov in 1954—and other MGB officials.) (

Nova mysl

, no. 7 [10 July 19681)

fn4

Hicks later made the

amende honorable

.

fn5

The obituary of Victor Kravchenko in

The Times

of 26 January 1966 was an extraordinary example of the carrying forward of sentiments common in the 1940s. Ignoring the question of the truth of his book (long since established) and the falsehood of the libels against him (established even at the time by the court), it represented it all as a reprehensible “Cold War” action.

fn6

As Arthur Koestler points out, Professor Joliot-Curie intervened in the case of certain physicists imprisoned in the Soviet Union, implying realization that charges were not always sound (

The God That Failed

, ed. Richard H. Crossman [London, 1950], p. 79).

fn7

For example, Yuri German, /

Am Responsible

and

The New Year’s Eve Party;

Kozhevnikov,

The Shield and the Sword;

Bylinov,

The Streets of Wrath;

and Zalynsky’s play

Pebbles in the Hand

.