I understand that Comrade H. has been living for approximately three years together with his wife, Comrade H., in Moscow. He met her before this, but three years ago is when they entered into wedlock. Did Comrade H. question other comrades with regard to his wife’s earlier life, or was she his only source of information?
My wife, Comrade H., as many of you know, has been a member of the Communist Party of Austria since 1920.
Immediately before her departure to Moscow, she had contact in Prague with the Trotskyite A.
I can’t respond to that, I was still in Berlin at the time.
We have not only the right but also the duty to speak about everything we know.
Only in his later work did A. develop Trotskyist tendencies. I can assure you that Comrade H. did not identify with him and, above all, where his assessment of the Soviet Union was concerned, she vehemently disagreed.
It seems to me her relationship with A. went beyond mere friendship. In any case, the two of them embraced when they parted on the evening in question, according to the report of Comrade Sch.
I can’t respond to that.
Answer this question: Could Trotskyite, semi-Trotskyite, or oppositional leanings be observed in her?
No, not at that time.
What does “not at that time” mean? I have to say I don’t have the impression that this testimony is completely truthful. What’s hiding behind it? Why does Comrade H. not speak freely about the case of his wife Comrade H. in this context? Why does he have to be prompted by additional questions to speak of it?
There was no question of any opposition on her part in the sense in which we use this term in the Party.
I hope that it is clear to all our comrades how crucial it is for us to spare no effort in critical situations. These criminals who have been torturing our comrades in Germany and sending us their spies must be met with wave after wave of destruction. What if scoundrels or counterrevolutionaries like A. had managed to point a gun at Comrade Stalin? Comrades, we are faced with the question: peace or war?
Would her motherly friend O. — with whom they shared a dacha summer after summer, often staying on into September — conceal or admit under interrogation that they had all expressed doubts regarding the guilt of the young poet D. after his arrest? Might the wife of the author V. (V. had been recently condemned on charges of engaging in Trotskyist activities and shot), who was now supporting herself as a seamstress and had come to her room for a fitting, really have dug around in her papers when she stepped out to the toilet? Why had R., with whom she and her husband had enjoyed so many excellent conversations about literature early in their Moscow days, been sent off to an outpost in the German Volga Republic exactly one week before her husband’s arrest? Who was responsible for cutting the final sentence of the review she had written in July for the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung so that her critique of the book by mustached K. was transformed into its opposite? And was that good or bad fortune? She’s long since stopped getting together with the friends she used to play cards with sometimes in those first years after they arrived, and the literary working groups were dissolved two years ago. Even the assemblies of German Party members have been discontinued. Her friend C., who used to cry her eyes out in front of her all the time over her inability to have children, recently refused to so much as nod in greeting when she walked past Café Krasni Mak and saw her — the wife of H., who has been arrested — sitting at the window.
And she herself?
During the rehearsals for the last play her husband wrote before his arrest, five of the eight actors were arrested over a period of several days, after which rehearsals were canceled until further notice. Comrade Fr., the wife of one of these actors, came up to her yesterday at the café, holding the hand of Sasha, her nine-year-old son, and entreated her to take the two of them in for at least a night. I can’t, she responded. Without another word, the woman turned and went out again, holding her child by the hand. I can’t. Only a few weeks before, her husband had been folding paper airplanes for Sasha during breaks in rehearsal. It seems to her unimaginably long ago now that she learned from the poet Mayakovski: It is not enough to be eighteen years old.
In their fight against the Fascists’ despotism and contempt for human dignity, they had all risked their lives, wrestling with the death that is fascism, and many of them fell victim to it. But if the young, beautiful Soviet Union was, by contrast, Life itself (as she believes even now), then death could no longer serve as a currency here. This fmeant that if even only a single person who fought against despotism lost his life to despotism here, then his death was in vain — deeply, profoundly, in vain — and nothing that remained here deserved the name Life, even if, seen from the outside, it resembled life.
But if in the land of the future, death were still the currency with which you paid a debt you didn’t know you had — in other words if it hadn’t been possible even here to abolish the rift between human beings that goes by the names trade, commerce, and deception, if even here there were still the same accursed two sides to humanity, unbridgeable, just as in any transaction in the old world, that would mean the sale had already gone through, and all her comrades — including her and her husband — were long since betrayed and sold and now served only to bring the seller a good price: one consisting of themselves, paid not just once or twice or even three times, but ten, a hundred, perhaps even a thousand times over.
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So have things really come so far now that all she can do is hope that the members of the secret police who seized her husband and took him away in the name of political vigilance are merely traitors, enemies of the people, that they are Hitler’s people — possibly even high-ranking ones? Not only her husband but in fact every last one of the comrades whose arrests she’s been hearing about is someone she’s known well for years. She’s now almost certain: if Hitler himself proves to be her adversary even here in the capital of the Soviet Union, only then can the antifascists’ hope for a better world possibly survive their torture and death. Or is it perhaps that Stalin himself — disguised as Hitler, who in turn is disguised as Stalin, doubly masked, doubly veiled, and thus genuinely duplicitous — that Stalin himself is acting as his own agent and, out of fear that in a good world the hope for a better one might be lost forever, out of fear of stagnation, is now trying to murder the Communist movement back into hopefulness? Or perhaps that all of them together are dreaming a nightmare from which there will never be an awakening, and in this nightmare Stalin, the good father, creeps into the rooms where his children are sleeping with a knife in his hands.
Land of ours that blooms and blossoms,
Listen, darling, listen,
Was given to us for time eternal.
Hear me, darling, listen.
Child, thy land is guarded well,
Sleep, my angel, slumber.
Red Army men watch over you.
Sleep, my darling, slumber.