There were some 10,000 foreign Communists in residence in the Soviet Union.75 They and their counterparts abroad were feared the world over as subversives of bourgeois order, but in Stalin’s mind they were a mortal danger to the Soviet Union. Back during the centennial celebration of Pushkin’s death at the Bolshoi, he had blurted out to Dimitrov, “All of you there in the Comintern are playing into the enemy’s hands.” He called the Comintern a “nest of spies.”76 Foreign Communists talked. They could not fail to observe the abject subordination of all Communist parties to Moscow, the embourgeoisement of Soviet upper echelons, the opacity of decision making, the lack of commitment to world revolution (as opposed to Soviet state interests). But the overwhelming majority of foreign Communists had little to nothing of value to divulge to foreign governments. Formal structure in the Comintern had been abandoned: it was just the Little Corner, and just when Stalin got around to summoning or corresponding with Dimitrov. Dimitrov, who had stood up to Göring and Goebbels in a Leipzig courtroom, received foreign Communists’ interrogation protocols containing ever new names and had to issue telegrams summoning some of these people from abroad to Moscow, where, he knew, they would be executed.77
The 400 rooms of the isolating Comintern residence, the perversely named Hotel Lux, were cleared out multiple times during the terror. None of it appears to have been policy driven. Pyatnitsky, Lozovsky, Knorin, and Kun had all supported the “social fascism” thesis close to Stalin’s heart and they all perished; Dimitrov, Manuilsky, and Kuusinen had supported the broad leftist front, and they survived.
British, American, French, and Czechoslovak Communists largely escaped death or the Gulag; they belonged to legal parties and did not require refuge in the Soviet Union. Chinese Communists, in the deep interior of their country, also mostly escaped Stalin’s cellars. But of the sixty-eight German Communists who managed to obtain refuge in the USSR after Hitler had come to power, Stalin had forty-one put to death. More members of the pre-1933 German Communist politburo were killed in the Stalinist terror (seven) than under Hitler (five).78 Polish Communists in Soviet exile suffered the worst: an estimated 5,000 arrests just in spring–summer 1937. Stalin had the Polish Communist party formally dissolved, “owing to its saturation with spies and provocateurs.” He wrote across Dimitrov’s draft resolution, “The dissolution is about two years late.”79 (Many Polish Communists would hear of the dissolution of their party by Moscow while wallowing in prisons in Poland.)80 To be sure, Stalin was hardly alone in his suspicion of political émigrés: verification campaigns directed at foreigners living in the Soviet Union were long-standing and accepted as necessary, given the tense international situation and the shadowy nature of politics under Communism.81 But the verifications did not establish facts. They began with presumed guilt and snowballed via all manner of slander and innuendo.
Planning went forward for a public trial of “Trotskyite-fascists” in the Comintern, and the tentative list of “Trotskyites” seems to have included Mao.82 The trial never materialized. It was supposed to center on Pyatnitsky, an original member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1898) who had never joined any opposition but was expelled from the Central Committee and placed “under investigation” during the June 1937 plenum. Despite being beaten to a pulp over the course of a full year, Pyatnitsky refused to slander himself.83