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

Following the death of Sedov, the NKVD’s next major Trotskyist target in Europe was the German Rudolf Klement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, whose founding conference was due to be held later in the year.⁴⁴ On July 13, 1938 the NKVD abducted Klement from his Paris home. A few weeks later his headless corpse was washed ashore on the banks of the Seine. The founding conference of the Fourth International in September was a tragicomic event, attended by only twenty-one delegates claiming to represent mostly minuscule Trotskyist groups in eleven countries. The Russian section, whose authentic members had probably been entirely exterminated, was represented by Zborowski. The American Trotskyist Sylvia Angeloff, one of the conference translators, was accompanied by her Spanish lover, Ramón Mercader, an NKVD illegal posing as a Belgian journalist who was later to achieve fame as Trotsky’s assassin in Mexico City.⁴⁵

BY 1938 SEREBRYANSKY’S Administration for Special Tasks was the largest section of Soviet foreign intelligence, claiming to have 212 illegal officers operating in sixteen countries: the USA, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and China. After Trotskyists, the largest number of “enemies of the people” pursued abroad by the NKVD during the Great Terror came from the ranks of its own foreign intelligence service.⁴⁶ When receiving reports from Moscow of show trials and the unmasking of their colleagues as agents of imperialist powers, intelligence officers stationed abroad had to pay careful attention not merely to what they said but also to their facial expressions and body language. Those who failed to respond with sufficiently visible or heartfelt outrage to the non-existent conspiracies being unveiled in Moscow were likely to have adverse reports sent to the Centre—frequently with fatal consequences.

After the trial of Lenin’s former lieutenants Zinovyev, Kamenev and other “degenerates” in August 1936, the Centre received an outraged communication from the Paris legal residency regarding the unsatisfactory level of indignation displayed by the military intelligence officer Abram Mironovich Albam (codenamed BELOV):

BELOV does not appear to feel a deep hatred or a sharply critical attitude towards these political bandits. During discussions of the trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovyevite bandits, he retreats into silence. BELOV was hoping that the sixteen convicted men would be shown mercy, and, when he read about their execution in the newspaper today, he actually sighed.⁴⁷

Albam’s subversive sigh helped to convict not merely himself but also a number of his colleagues of imaginary crimes. His file lists thirteen of his acquaintances who were subsequently arrested; at least some, probably most, were shot. Albam’s wife, Frida Lvovna, tried to save herself by disowning her arrested husband. “The most horrible realization for an honest Party member,” she wrote indignantly to the NKVD, “is the fact that he was an enemy of the people surrounded by other enemies of the people.”⁴⁸

Both at home and abroad the Great Terror favored the survival of the most morally unfit. Those who were quickest to denounce their colleagues for imaginary crimes stood the greatest chance of being among the minority of survivors. The fact that Yakov Surits, ambassador in Berlin at the beginning of the Great Terror, was one of the few senior diplomats to survive may well have owed something to his expertise in denunciation. Surits sought to head off denunciation by the head of the legal residency in his embassy, B. M. Gordon, by denouncing Gordon first. At the outset of the Terror, Surits drew to the attention of the Centre that a Soviet diplomat with whom Gordon was on friendly terms was a former Socialist Revolutionary who frequently visited relatives in Prague “where other SR émigrés reside.”⁴⁹ After the show trial of the “Trotskyite-Zinovyevite Terrorist Center” in January 1937, Surits reported disturbing evidence of Gordon’s Trotskyite sympathies: