The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Opposition to Stalin resurfaced at the 1934 Party Congress, though in so muted a form that it passed unnoticed by the mass of the population. In the elections to the Central Committee, Stalin polled several hundred votes fewer than Kirov, who was assassinated, probably on Stalin’s orders, at the end of the year. What increasingly obsessed Stalin, however, were less the powerless remnants of real opposition to him than the gigantic, mythical conspiracy by imperialist secret services and their Trotskyist hirelings. Though the paranoid strain in what Khrushchev later called Stalin’s “sickly suspicious” personality does much to explain his obsession with conspiracy theory, there was an impeccable Leninist logic at the heart of that obsession. Stalin claimed Lenin’s authority for his insistence that it was impossible for the imperialists not to attempt to overthrow the world’s first and only worker-peasant state:

We are living not only in a State, but in a system of States, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist States is in the long run unthinkable. But until that end comes, a series of the most terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and bourgeois States is unavoidable.

It was equally inevitable, Stalin argued, that the enemies without would conspire with traitors within. Only “blind braggarts or concealed enemies of the people,” he declared, would dispute this elementary logic.⁶ Those who disagreed thus automatically branded themselves as traitors.

Despite Stalin’s increasing obsession during the 1930s with Trotskyist conspiracy, Trotsky never really represented any credible threat to the Stalinist regime. He spent his early years in exile trying vainly to find a European base from which to organize his followers. In 1933 he left Turkey for France, then two years later moved on to Norway, but his political activity in all three countries was severely restricted by the reluctant host governments. In 1937, having finally despaired of finding a European headquarters, Trotsky left for Mexico, where he remained until his assassination three years later. The chief European organizer of the Trotskyist movement for most of the 1930s was not Trotsky himself but his elder son, Lev Sedov, who from 1933 was based in Paris. It was Sedov who, until his death in 1938, organized publication of his father’s Bulletin of the Opposition and maintained contact with Trotsky’s scattered supporters. Sedov’s entourage, like his father’s, was penetrated by the OGPU and NKVD. From 1934 onwards his closest confidant and collaborator in Paris was an NKVD agent, the Russian-born Polish Communist Mark Zborowski, known to Sedov as êtienne and successively codenamed by the Center MAKS, MAK, TULIP and KANT. Sedov trusted “Étienne” so completely that he gave him the key to his letterbox, allowed him to collect his mail and entrusted him with Trotsky’s most confidential files and archives for safekeeping.⁷

AS THE CHIEF headquarters of both the Trotskyist movement and the White Guards, Paris became for several years the main center of operations for the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks, headed by “Yasha” Serebryansky, which specialized in assassination and abduction. Serebryansky’s illegal residency in Paris had other targets, too. The most prominent was the mercurial Jacques Doriot, a rabble-rousing orator who during the early 1930s was considered a likely future contender for the leadership of the French Communist Party.⁸ In the early months of 1934, he aroused the ire of Moscow by calling on the Party to form an anti-fascist Popular Front with the socialists, still officially condemned in Moscow as “social fascists.” Doriot was summoned to Moscow to recant but refused to go. He was expelled from the Party for indiscipline in June 1934, ironically at the very moment when the Communist International, in a rapid volte-face instantly accepted by the French Communist Party, decided in favor of a Popular Front policy.