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

On February 2 a Party meeting was held in the Berlin embassy. Gordon, B. M., the resident and Communist Party organizer, delivered a report on the trial of the Trotskyite Center.

Gordon did not say a word about the fact that his rabble of bandits had a specific program of action; he did not say why this scum hid its program from the working class and from all working people; why it led a double life; why it went deeply underground.

He did not dwell on the reasons why after all the enemies managed to cause damage for so many years.

He did not deal with the question why, despite wrecking, sabotage, terrorism and espionage, our industry and transport constantly made progress and continue to make progress.

He did not touch on the international significance of the trial.⁵⁰

Surits, however, was unaware that he was himself being simultaneously denounced for similar failings by one of his secretaries, who wrote virtuously to the Centre:

To this day the office of Comrade Surits is adorned with a portrait of Bukharin with the following inscription: “To my dear Surits, my old friend and comrade, with love—N. Bukharin.” I deliberately do not take it down, not because I greatly enjoy looking at it, but because I want to avoid the cross looks which Comrade Surits gave me when I removed the portrait of Yenukidze.

I am waiting for him to remove it himself, since if Bukharin was indeed once his close friend, he must now be his enemy, as he has become the enemy of our Party and of the whole working class. The portrait should immediately have been thrown into the fire.

That, really, is all that I considered it my Party duty to report to you. After the adoption of the Stalin Constitution [of 1936] which has granted us great rights and put us under great obligations, calling us to exercise discipline, honest work and vigilance, I could not remain silent about these facts.⁵¹

In 1937-8, following the recall and liquidation of all or most of their officers, many NKVD residencies ceased to function. Though the residencies in London, Berlin, Vienna and Tokyo did not close, they were reduced to one or, at the most, two officers each.⁵² Most of the Great Illegals were purged with the rest. Among the first to fall under suspicion was the London head of probably the NKVD’s most successful illegal residency, Teodor Maly, whose religious background and revulsion at the use of terror made him an obvious suspect. He accepted the order to return to Moscow in June 1937 with an idealistic fatalism. “I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance,” he told Aleksandr Orlov. “But I have decided to go there so that nobody can say: ‘That priest might have been a real spy after all.’”⁵³ Once in Moscow he was denounced as a German spy, interrogated and shot a few months later. Moisei Akselrod, head of the illegal residency in Italy and controller of DUNCAN, the most productive source of intelligence on Britain during the previous decade, was also recalled to Moscow. After a brief period in limbo, he too was executed as an enemy of the people.⁵⁴