The tiny Romanian Party lost many of its most prominent members, including Marcel Pauker (not to be confused with the NKVD officer)fn3 and Alexandru Dobrogeanu, shot on 4 December 1937. Pauker himself is said to have been accused of collusion with Zinoviev and shot without trial.48 But in general, it was the early connection of the Romanians with Rakovsky which proved fatal. Little reference seems to have been made to this micro-purge until, at the trial in Bucharest in 1952 of the Politburo member Vasile Luca, an attack was made on “the treasonable clique of Marcel Pauker.”fn4 Bulgarian Communists were also much persecuted. Dimitrov’s fellow defendants at the Leipzig Trial, Taney and Popov, were jailed.49 Popov survived and was rehabilitated in 1955. Chervenkov, later to be the Stalinist ruler of Bulgaria, hid in Dimitrov’s flat until interceded for. There were many other victims. One Bulgarian is mentioned in a Vologda camp being thrown into a hole in the ground without food for thirteen days, and dying.50
A recent Bulgarian article tells us that “more than a thousand of the 1,200 to 1,400 Bulgarian political emigres in the U.S.S.R. found themselves in forced labor camps, and only about one hundred of them came back to Bulgaria.”51 The main leadership, such men as Islcrov, Lambrev, and Vasilev, were Nazi or Bulgarian spies. Exiles settled in the Ukraine were charged with a plot to annex that country to Bulgaria.52
And so it was with all the émigré groups. For example, Tanaka, a leader of the Japanese Communist Party, was put through the conveyor and torture and is reported liquidated.53
But the heaviest casualties fell on the Poles. The Polish Communist Party was very much a special case in its relations with Moscow. It derived in the main from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuaniafn5—admitted on a basis of autonomy, together with the Jewish Bund and the Lettish Social Democrats, into the IVth Congress of the Russian Social Democrats in 1906, when the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were still technically united. A. S. Warski and Dzerzhinsky were then elected members of the joint Central Committee as its representatives.
The Poles on the whole backed the Bolsheviks, though with reservations. Their leader Rosa Luxemburg had written privately that the Bolsheviks’ support would be valuable in spite of their “Tartar-Mongolian savagery.” Although Lenin was soon involved in organizing factions in the Polish Party, and in a series of polemics with Rosa Luxemburg and others, the quarrels were domestic in a sense which was not true of the relations with other foreign organizations. There was much coming and going between the Parties, then and later. When Poland became an independent state, Poles who had worked with the Bolsheviks and remained on Soviet soil became members of the Russian Communist Party pure and simple. We have only to think of names like Dzerzhinsky, Radek, Menzhinsky, and Unshlikht (as with the parallel Lettish cases of Eikhe, Rudzutak, and others). A Pole could be transferred between the new Communist Party of Poland and the Russian Communist Party at will. Marchlewski, named head of the Polish “Government” established behind the Red Army lines during the 1920 invasion of Poland, became, after the debacle, a Soviet diplomat. As a natural corollary, the Polish Party, insofar as its organizations within Soviet territory were concerned, was involved in the Purge in much the same way as the Soviet Party proper—Warski was, after all, practically an Old Bolshevik in almost the same sense as Rykov or Kamenev.
The Poles in Russia were to some degree comparable with the Irish in England; there were many of them, and they often played important roles in the life of the larger country. The Purge affected not only the Polish Party members, but the Polish population as a whole. The total Polish population is shown as 792,000 in the USSR census of 1926. The 1939 census (not indeed reliable) shows 626,000. Figures of their actual losses in the Purge are hard to come by. According to a Polish Communist, about 10,000 Poles from Moscow alone were shot at the time of the Bukharin Trial, with a total of 50,000 in the country as a whole.
