Ignace Reiss, an NKVD Resident in Switzerland, broke with the regime in July 1937. His body, riddled with bullets, was found on a road near Lausanne. The Swiss police also found in the abandoned baggage of the friend of Reiss’s who had betrayed him a box of poisoned chocolates, apparently intended for his children.73
Agabekov, former OGPU Resident in Turkey, had broken with the regime as early as 1929. He was murdered in Belgium in 1938.74 Walter Krivitsky, whose book is a useful source for this period, had been NKVD Resident in Holland. On 10 February 1941 he was found shot in a hotel room in Washington.
When the situation among the spies abroad had been largely cleared up, it became possible finally to dispense with Slutsky. But in order to avoid troubling the agents still in the field, this was done tactfully. His death on 17 February 1938 was announced in a short friendly obituary the next day.
In fact, he appears to have been poisoned by Frinovsky, by then Deputy Head of the NKVD, in his office (though a recent Soviet account makes it suicide). Slutsky’s deputy, Shpiegelglas, was suddenly called in and told that Slutsky had had a heart attack. Slutsky lay in state in the main hall of the NKVD club, with a guard of honor. But many NKVD officers had some smattering of forensic medicine and at once noticed on his cheeks the spots indicating cyanide poisoning.75
IN SPAIN
Slutsky had recently given important service in Spain, which by now had become a major theater of operation for the Purge—not only at the level of Yezhov’s mobile groups, which roamed the country arresting and killing deviationists on the international scale, like Camillo Bernini. For there were also larger political issues: the supression of Spanish “Trotskyism” and the gaining of effective control of the Spanish Government.
As early as December 1936, the Soviet press was speaking of the necessity for the elimination of POUM, the heretical Marxist Party of Catalonia,76 equivalent of the British ILP—that is to say, revolutionary Socialists opposed to Communist methods. It was not in any real sense “Trotskyite” (and the few genuine Spanish Trotskyites did not belong to it). While its Twenty-ninth Division (in which George Orwell served) was fighting against Franco on the Aragon front, the Russians were able to secure its suppression.
Jesds Hernéndez, one of the two Communists in the Spanish Republican Government, tells us how he was summoned by the Soviet Ambassador, Rosenberg, and introduced to Slutsky, then going under the pseudonym Marcos. Slutsky said that the suppression of POUM was an urgent matter. Not only was it openly criticizing the Soviet Union, and in particular the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials, but it was attempting to bring Trotsky to Spain.
(There seems to be nothing in this latter allegation, but if the Russians believed it, Stalin might well have had qualms. In a civil war or revolution, it could have been argued, Trotsky’s name was “worth 40,000 bayonets.” In fact, such an idea was chimerical, and even to Spaniards not basically hostile to Trotsky the disadvantages of his presence must have outweighed the advantages.)
Rosenberg remarked that he had often told Spanish Prime Minister Largo Caballero that the liquidation of POUM interested Stalin personally, but that Largo Caballero would not listen to this. Slutsky made it clear that an alternative method was to be found—a provocation mounted by the NKVD which would allow the seizure of power in Barcelona by the Communists, and give them the excuse to get rid of Largo Caballero if he attempted to undo the
The operation was prepared by Antonov-Ovseenko, then Soviet Consul General in Barcelona, and Ernő Gerő, later to be overthrown in the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party by the revolution of 1956, and at that time senior Comintern operative in Spain.
On 3 May 1937, the subservient Spanish Communist whom they had intruded into the leadership of the Catalan police, Rodríguez Sala, seized the Barcelona telephone exchange from the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade unionists who had controlled it since the beginning of the war. The left-wing organizations, including POUM, resisted, and after four days of fighting, which is said to have caused about 1,000 deaths, they were put down by specially prepared police troops brought in from Valencia and elsewhere. On 15 May, the Communist Ministers in the Spanish Cabinet asked for the formal suppression of POUM. But even so, Largo Caballero again refused.
Stalin’s orders to get rid of Largo Caballero and to put in Dr. Negrin as Premier were now transmitted to the Spanish Politburo at a meeting with the Comintern representatives, including Togliatti and Gerő.77
