A meeting of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in May 1937 saw his fall. Manuilsky made a speech violently denouncing him for insulting behavior to Stalin and contacts with Romanian Secret Police since 1919. The other members of the ECCI looked on in silence.fn2 Kun, who was quite unprepared for the attack, went white. He “roared like a mortally wounded lion: ‘this is a terrible provocation, a conspiracy to get me murdered. But I swear that I have not wanted to insult Comrade Stalin. I want to explain everything to Comrade Stalin himself.’ “But everything had been set up in advance. As Kun, pale and shocked, left the room in a dead silence, two NKVD men escorted him out.30 But he was not arrested immediately. A few days later, Stalin telephoned and “gaily asked Kun to receive a French reporter and refute a rumour of Kun’s arrest.” This he did; the denial was published; and he was arrested soon afterwards.31 He had had several members of his own Politburo arrested earlier.32
Bela Kun was taken to the Lefortovo, where he was tortured. He is reported as having been kept standing on one foot for periods of from ten to twenty hours. When he returned to his cell after interrogation, his legs were swollen and his face was so black as to be unrecognizable.33 He was in the same cell as Muklevich.34 He was then held in the Butyrka until his execution for espionage—as an agent of Germany since 1916, and of Britain since 1926.35 This took place on 29 August 1938.36 It seems clear that the formalities were complied with, for he is described as having been “sentenced on the basis of a faked indictment.”37 Kun’s frail wife, IrMa, was arrested on 23 February 1938,38 and got eight years, going first to Kolyma,39 but survived and was eventually released. His son-in-law, the Hungarian poet Hidas, was also sent to a labor camp.40
Of the other leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, twelve more People’s Commissars of the then Communist Government in Budapest were arrested. These included the Grand Old Man of Hungarian Communism, Dezso Bokanyi, and Jozsef Pogany, known under the name of John Pepper as the Comintern’s representative to the American Communist Party. Of the twelve, two survived imprisonment. Theorists like Lajos Magyar also perished.
Many Italian Communists died—such as Edmondo Peluso, who had been with Neumann in the Canton Commune. He got a letter out of prison begging friends for help and saying that his strength was failing through torture, but that they should believe his innocence. Because this was suspected to be a police trap, there was no response. The few who were later released found that their stories of prison were not believed. Togliatti’s brother-in-law Paoli Robotti was arrested in 1937. The torturers broke his teeth and incurably injured his spine,41 but he was eventually released and was later, in 1961, to say that he had kept silent about all this because.42 it was not the business of Italian, but of Soviet, Communists to speak.’
Few had Robotti’s luck. Most of the actual leadership was protected by Togliatti’s docility in the face of Stalin’s line. But about 200 Italian Communists perished. Eugenia Ginzburg mentions an Italian woman Communist screaming in the punishment cells of Yaroslavl on being beaten and hosed down with icy water.43
Gorkić, the General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, was arrested in Moscow in the summer of 1937. His Polish wife had already been seized as a British agent. Almost the whole of the Yugoslav Central Committee followed him, together with a large number of the remaining Yugoslav Communists; of these, more than 100 “found their death in Stalin’s prisons and camps.”44 They included such men as Vlada Copi6, the Party’s Organizational Secretary, newly back from command in the International Brigade in Spain. Tito came to Moscow at this time and lived on the fourth floor of the Lux. He later said that he never knew whether he would get out alive or awake in the night “to hear the fatal knocking at my door.45 He noticed that there was a tendency in the Comintern to dissolve the entire Yugoslav Party—as was being done with the Polish and Korean Parties. Finally, he was allowed to form a new Central Committee. As soon as he could, he transferred it to Yugoslavia and Western Europe, where it had some chance of survival.
The then First Secretary of the Finnish Communist Party, Arvo Tuominen, gives a long list of Finnish leaders shot, and says that “nearly all Finns then living in the Soviet Union were labelled ‘enemies of the people.’” These Finnish Communists were involved through a confession obtained from Otto Vilen, “gained by Stalinist beating methods.”46 They were spies in the service of France, Germany, Norway, and so on. Of those not shot but sent to camp, most died, though one woman member of the Finnish Politburo drowned herself in a stream in the Solovki prison area.47
