Stalin полностью

The regime held a closed trial of the Leningrad NKVD on January 23, 1935. Borisov’s death was ruled an accident, and four operatives were released. Twelve others were convicted, including Medved and Zaporozhets (three years each), as well as Gubin and Fomin (two years). Almost all ended up serving their time as commandants at the Dalstroi gold camps in the far northeast.¹⁸⁸ Three days later, 663 former Zinovievites in Leningrad were exiled to Siberia, and 325 others transferred to jobs in other regions. In the meantime, on January 25, Valerian Kuibyshev died of heart failure, at age forty-six. The autopsy would find arteriosclerosis and blood clots. His heavy drinking had resulted in unpredictable work absences, a constant refrain in Stalin’s correspondence.¹⁸⁹ He was cremated, and the urn with his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall, adjacent to Kirov’s.¹⁹⁰

NAZISM’S WINDFALL

Soviet military intelligence, for all its blowups and failures, amassed a breathtaking network in Warsaw—thanks to Hitler. Rudolf Herrnstadt, born in the Silesian town of Gleiwitz (1903), a correspondent for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt and a Jew, had joined the German Communist party as Rudolf Arbin, began working for Soviet intelligence around 1931, and fled the Nazis to Warsaw in 1933 with his lover, also a Soviet agent. He maintained journalist cover and recruited Gerhard Kegel (“X”), a junior banker and journalist (b. 1907) also from Upper Silesia, who had joined the German Socialist Party and then the Communists and now worked in the trade department of Germany’s embassy in Warsaw. Herrnstadt’s lover, the angular-faced Ilse Stöbe (b. 1911), code-named “Alta,” the daughter of working-class parents in Berlin, had worked for the same newspaper as Herrnstadt. She had been directed to join the Nazi party and, in mid-1934, was named a cultural attaché of the Nazi party’s foreign office in Poland. Stöbe would recruit the Silesia-born (1897) Rudolf von Scheliha (“Aryan”), the son of a Prussian squire, who joined the Nazi party at the suggestion of Soviet intelligence and in late 1934 had gotten himself named as the top aide in Warsaw to German ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke. Other recruits included the radioman Kurt Schulze (“Berg,” b. 1894), Kurt Welkisch (“ABC,” b. 1910), a German journalist and diplomat, and his wife, Margarita Welkisch (“LCL,” b. 1913).¹⁹¹ They were linked in their anti-Nazism.

Inside Nazi Germany, Wilhelm “Willy” Lehmann (b. 1884), code-named “Breitenbach,” a long-serving Berlin policeman, had been secretly recruited even before the Nazis came to power, then moved into the Gestapo, where he was assigned to nothing less than counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. (He had been tasked with summary executions during the Night of the Long Knives, which helped solidify his bona fides.) Lehmann passed to Moscow details of German intelligence’s organizational structure and forthcoming operations and, in 1935, of early German rocket tests. That same year, Harro Schulze-Boysen (b. 1909), a Prussian aristocrat officer at Göring’s Luftwaffe, contacted the Soviet embassy offering his services; he was given the code name “Elder.” Not long thereafter, Arvid Harnack (b. 1901), a senior official in the Nazi economics ministry and onetime leftist youth organizer, also made contact with the Soviet embassy; he was advised to join the Nazi party and given the code name “Corsican.” No other country would field such an undercover network in the halls of the Third Reich.

Another remarkable anti-Nazi Soviet spy was in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, the offspring of a Russian mother and a German father, who, in preparation for assignment to Japan, had traveled to Germany and happened to meet the publisher of the Journal of Geopolitics, a zealous Nazi who gave him a contract as a stringer and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo. Sorge, code-named “Ramsay,” joined the Nazi party, took with him a radio operator, and charmed the ambassador in Japan, Herbert von Dirksen. Other contacts gave Sorge entrée to Colonel Eugen Ott, who became the German military attaché (and would one day replace Dirksen). Sorge also had spectacular success penetrating Japanese officialdom, partly thanks to the esteem in which the Germans held him. German diplomats discovered that the journalist stringer Sorge had better information about Japan than they did, and they let him help compile embassy reports to Berlin, copies of which surreptitiously went to Moscow.¹⁹²