And then the eleven-year-old daughter of one of the arrested comrades destroyed the child’s illusion: “Oh, he’s in the Caucasus, is he? Why does your mother pay money into the prison, then? A fine Caucasus that is!”62
But sooner or later, the wives were themselves arrested. On a single night in September 1937, all the Polish wives were taken. One that can be traced got eight years’ forced labor,63 and this seems to have been the usual sentence.
The Soviet representatives in the Comintern machinery were also destroyed, being blamed for collusion in the penetration of the enemy into the constituent Parties. The exception was Manuilsky himself, who acted as Stalin’s agent throughout. Described as a third-rate mind, he was willing to be the Comintern equivalent of a Mekhlis or a Shkiryatov and thus survived.
In his report on Comintern matters to the XVIIIth Congress, after dealing with the Polish case, he significantly added, “It was the failure of Comintern workers that they allowed themselves to be deceived … and were late in taking measures against the contamination of the Communist Parties by enemy elements.”
This referred primarily to two other members of the Central Committee of the CPSU: Pyatnitsky and Knorin. Pyatnitsky was, apart from Manuilsky, the chief Soviet operator in the Comintern. He had served on its Executive Committee since 1923, and ran the key Organization Department.64
V. G. Knorin, another Soviet representative on the Comintern Executive Committee, controlled the German and other Parties. A Latvian, he is described as an honest man, but a dogmatist.65 He seems to have been denounced for permitting nationalist deviations as early as 1936. He was arrested in June 193766 as a Gestapo agent and is said to have been tortured particularly badly.
Their subordinates fell with them, including their immediate aides, Grollman and Idelson. One of the “lists” Stalin signed for execution consisted of 300 Comintern operatives.67 Between 23 May and 1 June 1937, a wave of arrests swept the organization.68 The Head of the Foreign Communications Department, MirovAbramov, was taken with all his staff. It is said that he was accused of espionage for no fewer than fifteen countries.69 He was named as a link between Yagoda and Trotsky in the Bukharin Trial. Alikhanov, Head of the Cadre Department, was also arrested in the summer of 1937,70 as were the Heads of the Propaganda Department, the Organization Department, and the Press Section. We can trace none of them further, presumably because they were shot en masse, under the list system.
In general, a clean sweep was made of the organization, apart from such pliant figures as Kuusinen. Dimitrov alone tried to save some of the victims.
KILLERS ABROAD
It was comparatively easy to deal with the foreigners in Moscow. The operation of the Purge in foreign countries called for more secret techniques.
In December 1936, Yezhov organized in the NKVD an “Administration of Special Tasks.” Under it were the so-called mobile groups, charged with special assassinations outside Russia.71
There was one problem in particular which he faced. He could not so easily dispose of the old NKVD cadres operating abroad under the Foreign Department as he could those in the internal departments. They could refuse to come and be arrested. He coped with this by two methods. First of all, when he arrested the other heads of departments in the Lubyanka, he left Slutsky to carry on in the best of odors. The Foreign Department, it became known, was not to be submitted to the purge needed for its more corrupt confreres.
Numbers of operatives, impressed by this idea, returned to Russia, where they were mostly “transferred” and executed. The fate of some of them became known. For example, in the summer of 1937, the NKVD Resident in France, Nikolai Smirnov, was recalled to Moscow and executed. At first, Yezhov pretended that he had simply been transferred to an underground job in China. But the true story leaked out to the NKVD station in France because the wife of another officer had chanced to see the arrest of Smirnov, when she was about to call on him at the Hotel Moskva. Yezhov then put out the story that Smirnov had been a spy for France and Poland. The NKVD officers in France deduced that this was untrue from the simple fact that their cipher for communication with Moscow was not changed. If Smirnov had indeed been a French spy, it must then be assumed that he had betrayed the cipher. Similarly, the old network of informers he had built up continued to operate, contrary to the laws of espionage.72
This sort of thing encouraged defection. Yezhov therefore strengthened his appeal for loyalty by another method. The mobile groups had as one of their first priorities the making of an example of any colleague who broke with Stalin.
