fn3
Levin
: … Gorky loved fire, flames, and we made use of this. A bonfire would be lit up for him. Just when Gorky would feel the fatigue after his work all the chopped branches were gathered together, and a flame kindled. Gorky would stand near this bonfire, it was hot there, and all this had a harmful effect on his health (
Bukharin Trial
, p. 537).
fn4
Professors Shereshevsky and (V. N.) Vinogradov were to survive Levin by many years. In 1952–1953, they themselves were to go through the same process. Vinogradov, who was seventy on 3 November 1952, was arrested a few days later, and proved to have been “an old agent of British Intelligence.” He had, it was announced on 13 January 1953, been one of the murderers of Zhdanov (whose death certificate on 31 August 1948 he had signed). On Stalin’s personal order, he was put in chains. Shereshevsky’s name was not announced as one of those arrested, but in the larger list of those released when the Doctor’s Plot was repudiated by Beria on 4 April 1953, it turned out that he, too, had been implicated and arrested. This later batch of doctor-poisoners, who survived by the happy chance of Stalin dying in the meanwhile, had been treated with particular brutality. It was to them that Stalin’s order “Beat, beat and beat again” was applied by ‘3eneral of State Security M. D. Ryumin, Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases and Assistant Minister of State Security (himself shot in July 1954) (Khrushchev, Secret Speech).
fn5
It is a curious fact that Stalin was later (in his Report to the 1939 XVIIIth Congress) twice to name Rosengolts first among the 1938 conspirators—once in a general list of spies and so on, running “Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengolts, Bukharin,” and then on the 1938 Trial alone, “Rosengolts, Rykov, Bukharin and others.” This seems to reflect some special animus on the part of the dictator, and fits in with the special jab at Rosengolts on the “talisman,” doubtless ordered from above.
fn6
Other members of the Central Committee implicated include Vareikis, Lyubimov, Lobov, Su¬limov, Kabakov, Razumov, Rumyantsev, and Komarov.
13 The Foreign Element
fn1
There were cases, the other way round, of people who had been in Nazi camps and went to Russia on release. A woman who had done three years in a Nazi concentration camp got eight years as a Trotskyite on arrival in Russia owing to her acquaintance with a German Communist who had fallen under suspicion. Her husband had “repudiated” her, but still contrived to send her occasional parcels (Eleanor Lipper,
Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps
[London, 1951], p. 7). Another case is quoted of a Viennese Jew who had withstood nearly a year in Dachau, but committed suicide in a Soviet camp (D.
J
. Dallin and B. I. Nicolaevsky,
Forced Labour in the Soviet Union
[London, 1948], p. 38).
fn2
Among them were Wilhelm Pieck (later to precede Ulbricht in the leadership of East Ger-many), Kuusinen, Togliatti, Gottwald, and Wang Ming.
fn3
Pauker
is said to have been denounced by his wife, Anna Pauker (D. J. Dallin,
Soviet Espionage
[New Haven, Conn., 1956], p. 100).
fn4
The Luca Trial gives a curious example of nature imitating art—in this case, the career of Snowball in
Animal Farm
. Luca, who had hitherto featured as having played a heroic role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, was now exposed as having actually commanded a machine-gun unit on the other side.
fn5
This is not the place to go into the complex origins of Polish Communism, in the two factions of the old Polish Social Democratic Party and the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party.
14 Climax
fn1
This date for Bubnov has been given officially for the past quarter of a century; however, a very recent Soviet listing has him shot on 1 August 1938, with the others (
lzvestiya TsK KPPS
, no. 12 [1878]).
15 Heritage of Terror
fn1
Father of the Army Commander of that name.
fn2
The only member to withdraw his evidence was the Bulgarian Dr. Markov, who did so after some months in prison when arrested by the Russians on their entry into his country.
fn3
The last show “trial” of the Stalin period, that of Slansky and others in Prague in November 1952, was announced as public. But this time, no Westerners were admitted. (The Slansky Trial was conducted under Soviet supervision. At the political level, Mikoyan was sent by Stalin in November 1951 to arrange for the next batch of arrests. At the Secret Police level, the scenario was supervised by M. T. Likhachev, Deputy Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases—himself to be shot with Abakumov in 1954—and other MGB officials.) (
Nova mysl
, no. 7 [10 July 19681)
fn4
Hicks later made the
amende honorable
.
fn5
The obituary of Victor Kravchenko in
The Times
of 26 January 1966 was an extraordinary example of the carrying forward of sentiments common in the 1940s. Ignoring the question of the truth of his book (long since established) and the falsehood of the libels against him (established even at the time by the court), it represented it all as a reprehensible “Cold War” action.
fn6
As Arthur Koestler points out, Professor Joliot-Curie intervened in the case of certain physicists imprisoned in the Soviet Union, implying realization that charges were not always sound (
The God That Failed
, ed. Richard H. Crossman [London, 1950], p. 79).
fn7
For example, Yuri German, /
Am Responsible
and
The New Year’s Eve Party;
Kozhevnikov,
The Shield and the Sword;
Bylinov,
The Streets of Wrath;
and Zalynsky’s play
Pebbles in the Hand
.