In 1930, GPU agents in Paris kidnapped General Kutepov, the president of ROVS. Thirty-five years later, Krasnaya zvezda (Red star) published an article praising S. V. Puzitsky, a "pupil of Dzerzhinsky's," for his brilliant leadership of the "operation to arrest Kutepov."115 In 1937, Kutepov's successor, General Miller, was likewise kidnapped in Paris. It then became evident that an assistant to Kutepov and Miller, a much-heralded White general named Skoblin, was an NKVD agent. Skoblin managed to escape from France, but his wife, a famous singer of Russian folk songs, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, was arrested and ended her days in a French prison. Much later, it became known that she too had worked for the "organs." A Moscow theatrical figure recalled in his memoirs that in the mid-1920s, through her booking agent, Plevitskaya had asked for permission to come to Russia, but Dzerzhinsky would not grant such permission; he wanted his agent to stay at her post. "Dzerzhinsky knew something her manager didn't know," writes the memoirist.116 Plevitskaya continued to pierce the hearts of emigr6s with her plaintive songs: "Ah, Mother Russia, you are covered deep in snow...."
The "meat grinder" of the late 1930s forced the emigr6s to define their attitude toward the homeland. This period saw a deepening rift between those for whom the question of Russia was seen from a moral angle and those who looked at it from a purely political viewpoint. Georgy Fedotov wrote,
We will never forgive the Bolshevik regime for the profound and terrible way in which it has deformed the soul of the people. This loss of moral sense stems not so much from the materialist and atheist propaganda and the destruction of the family as from the universal necessity to lie and betray, from the penetration of the political police into people's most private affairs. You have to lie to live, betray for a piece of bread.117
Among politically minded emig^s there were a few small groups, mostly right-wing, who regarded the Stalinist terror as positive, since it rid the country of many Communists and Jews. The "returners," on the other hand, saw Soviet successes as proof of a renaissance of Russia and the terror as necessary to counteract the enemy. The Union for Repatriation (Soyuz Vozvrashcheniya), which functioned in Paris under the tutelage of the Soviet embassy, attracted many young emigr6s.
After 1929—1930 the iron curtain hid the Soviet Union completely from the eyes of young emig^s. Trips abroad by Soviet citizens (and thus the chance for emig^s to meet them) virtually came to an end. The Soviet press stopped mentioning emigr6 writers and literature altogether. Only after Stalin's death, for example, would people in the Soviet Union hear of a world famous Russian emigr6 writer, Vladimir Nabokov. The young emigr6s who came to the Union for Repatriation wanting to go back to their roots, of which they knew so little, were told they had to earn the right to repatriation. Some were asked to fight in Spain, others to perform missions of a different kind. Sergei Efron, husband of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, sent one of his acquaintances to Spain, "to Comrade Orlov," who was the chief NKVD operative there.118
In 1937, Ignace Reiss, a man highly placed in the Soviet intelligence network, broke with Stalin and called for a "return to Lenin." Paris received orders to eliminate the traitor. Sergei Efron and several other aspiring "returners" were given the assignment. Reiss's bullet-riddled corpse was found near Lausanne, and Efron returned to Russia, where prison and death awaited him. 119
In 1938—1939 the emigres made their choice between Hitler and Stalin. Most chose Stalin because Hitler seemed worse and Stalin embodied Russia. Some who chose Hitler, however, discovered after the war how similar the two totalitarian systems were and unhesitatingly passed from the Nazi camp to the Communist fatherland. Some went to Moscow, where they were greeted warmly. Konstantin Rodzaevsky, head of the Russian Fascist party, who turned himself in to the Soviet authorities in Harbin in 1945, repented in a letter to Stalin filled with boundless ingenuousness:
The erroneous principle of the liberation of the motherland from Jewish communism at all costs was the source of my fatal error and of the wrong general line of the Russian Fascist party during the Soviet-German war. ... I issued a call for an "unknown leader," appealing to the strong elements in the USSR to save millions of Russian lives by selecting a Commander X, an unknown leader capable of overturning the Jewish government and creating a new Russia. I failed to see that, by the will of fate, of his own genius, and of millions of toilers, Comrade J. V. Stalin, the leader of the peoples, had become this unknown leader.120
Historians have not finished trying to decipher by whose "will" Stalin became the "leader of the peoples." But they all agree that by the end of the 1930s socialism had been built in the Soviet Union.
In February 1938 the third and last major show trial took place in Moscow, bringing to an end the Ezhovshchina and the building of socialism. This was the most notorious of the three trials, with Bukharin, "the favorite of the whole party," the last of Lenin's comrades-in-arms, on the stand, along with Yagoda, Stalin's loyal hatchetman, who knew too many secrets. Then socialism began to flower. In September 1938 the new epoch was blessed with the publication of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course, more commonly referred to simply as the Short Course. With this publication the totalitarian state received its bible.
Thus was achieved a society in which the individual depended entirely on the state. The state gave him his daily bread, both material and spiritual, and he better not ask for any other. With the appearance and sanctification of the Short Course, the only permissible version of history, memory was taken away. History became an essential tool in the process of dehuman- ization.
In December 1938, Beria replaced Ezhov as commissar of internal affairs, a signal that the latest application of the shock treatment was nearly over. A "liberal" would replace the blood-stained executioner, and life would become peaceful. Meanwhile, the country was heading full steam ahead toward war.
CHAPTER
-7
ON THE BRINK,
1939-1941
READY TO REPEL THE FOE?
According to the 1939 census, the population of the Soviet Union, as of January 17, was 170.6 million (on a territory of 21.7 million square kilometers). Two-thirds of the population, or 114.5 million (67.1 percent), lived in the countryside, and only one-third, or 56.1 million (32.9 percent), lived in the cities. An estimated 8 million Soviet citizens, or 9 percent of the total adult population, were in concentration camps.1
The Soviet Union is a land of great riches, with vast mineral reserves, including oil, coal, and precious metals. Numerous rivers and seas provide an important energy source. The diversity of climate, soil type, and terrain provides remarkable possibilities for grain production, livestock raising, fruit and vegetable growing, fishing, and forestry. These natural resources would have sufficed to meet the needs of many generations, had they been utilized in a rational way.