Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

The movie was so favorable for the Soviet Union and its leaders that in 1947 it was cited by the House Un-American Activities Committee. 78Davies stubbornly defended it. Finally, Koch was labeled a “Communist” and blacklisted by the committee for a decade. 79

In 2001, Mission to Moscow was shown on the American Movie Classics TV channel as part of a Curtiz retrospective. I was stunned by Davies’s and Koch’s presentation of the victims of the Bukharin trial as conscious “enemies of the Soviet people” and of Prosecutor Vyshinsky, Stalin, and Molotov as real fighters against these traitors. The movie went far beyond Davies’s book. Definitely, the two Americans had been completely fooled by the carefully staged performance in Moscow. The producer of the movie, Robert Buckner, later said: “It is now common historical knowledge, of course, that Stalin brainwashed him [Davies] completely.” 80Koch, who died in February 2001, was confident even in the 1990s that he had been right. In an interview with Griffin Fariello, he said: “It’s the thing I value the most in my life—that I was able to stand for something that needed to be said.” 81

In 1937–1938, after the fall of Yagoda, a period of purges of Politburo members and of the old guard NKVD began under the guidance of the new NKVD commissar, Nikolai Yezhov. Apparently, the methods of “Yasha’s Group” were in use even at Lubyanka headquarters and the Kremlin. On February 17, 1938, the chief of the NKVD Foreign Department, Abram Slutsky, was found “slumped awkwardly across an armchair with an empty tea glass at his side [at the office of Yezhov’s deputy, Mikhail Frinovsky]. Frinovsky confidentially announced that a doctor had already ascertained that Slutsky had died of a heart attack. Several NKVD officers who knew from experience the symptoms of cyanide poisoning observed the telltale blue spots on the face of their late Foreign Department chief.” 82

Later, on February 3, 1940, during his own trial, Yezhov testified: “As far as Slutsky is concerned, I had instructions from the directing organs [i.e., the Politburo]—don’t arrest Slutsky, get rid of him some other way… Otherwise our own agents abroad would have run for safety. So Slutsky was poisoned.” 83Recently, the Russian historians Nikita Petrov and Konstantin Skorkin were able to identify Slutsky’s assassins. Slutsky was poisoned by the deputy head of the GUGB Twelfth Department, Mikhail Alekhin, and Deputy Commissar Leonid Zakovsky. The GUGB Twelfth Department was established within the NKVD on August 7, 1937, and for a short time, until January 17, 1938, was headed by Semen Zhukovsky. This is the first precise information about the poisons laboratory within the secret service.

Apparently, Alekhin was a specialist in poisons and poisoning (he had some professional education and attended the Military Academy for three years), and Zakovsky supervised the operation. Since Frinovsky was not surprised by Slutsky’s sudden death in his office, it seems he was also involved in the plot. After Slutsky’s death, his deputy, Sergei Shpigelglass, took over the NKVD Foreign Department as acting head.

Slutsky’s fate was not unique in 1938–1939. As already described, in late 1938, Pavel Alliluev also died of “a heart attack” in the Kremlin Hospital. However, his postmortem report said: “When he was admitted [to the Clinic], he was unconscious, cyanotic, and apparently dying.” 84

Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was practically cut off from political life in the 1930s. But apparently she was still a potential threat to Stalin’s power: She might say something against Stalin at the Eighteenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, scheduled for March 1939. She conveniently died on February 27, 1939, just before the Congress. The symptoms were the same as Pavel Alliluev’s. Her death certificate issued at the Kremlin Hospital pronounced: “The illness began with severe pains throughout the abdomen, accompanied by repeated vomiting, a very fast pulse, and cyanosis of the nose and the extremities… Cardiac arrest set in and Comrade Krupskaya died.” 85Cyanide had become fashionable.

Yezhov’s terror was unleashed not only within the country but also abroad. Poisons were widely used by special “mobile groups” in different European countries and the United States that traced and liquidated NKVD agents who refused to follow orders to return to Moscow (which usually meant a death sentence) or those who tried to defect to the West. 86In summer 1937, Shpigelglass personally headed a “mobile group” in Paris determined to kill a defector, a former Soviet agent named Ignace Poretsky (alias “Reiss”). 87At first the plan was to poison him with chocolates laced with strychnine. But finally he was shot. Although the killers escaped, the Swiss police, which investigated the case, found a suitcase left by one of the assassins with a detailed plan of the Mexican home of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s most hated enemy.

The strange death of Lev Sedov, the son of Leon Trotsky, in Paris on February 16, 1938, was probably caused by poisoning with an unknown drug. The official historians of the current Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claim that there are no documents in the NKVD/KGB/SVR files supporting this possibility. Nonetheless, they found Yakov Serebryansky’s report, dated 1937, which says that Serebryansky and his group received an order from Moscow to kidnap Sedov and bring him to Moscow. 88In the middle of 1937, everything was ready to move Sedov out of France secretly by a boat or a private plane (Serebryansky’s terrorist group bought both), but according to this official SVR version, Sedov’s sudden death after a surgical operation put an end to the plan.

Vasilii Mitrokhin, a long-term worker at the KGB archives who defected to England in 1992, agrees that the contemporary SVR files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for Sedov’s death. However, he concludes: “What remains in doubt is whether Sedov was murdered by the NKVD in February 1938 or whether he died of natural causes before he could be assassinated.” 89Sedov had never realized that his most trusted friend and colleague in Paris, whom he knew as “Étienne” Zborowski (his real name was Mark Zborowski; alias “Maks,” “Mak,” “Tulip,” and “Kant”) was, in fact, an NKVD agent who was in contact with Serebryansky’s group. 90The fact that Zborowski persuaded Sedov to go not to a French hospital but to a Russian private clinic and refused to reveal its address to Sedov’s French colleagues still makes Sedov’s death suspicious.

The rise of the new commissar, Lavrentii Beria, began before Yezhov’s end. On August 22, 1938, first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Beria was appointed first deputy NKVD commissar. 91Two weeks later, on September 8, Yezhov’s first deputy, Frinovsky, was dismissed, then arrested and shot. On September 29, 1938, Beria was appointed head of the GUGB, and his former colleague from the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party Vsevolod Merkulov became Beria’s deputy. The same day, yet a new structure of the NKVD was announced and a reorganization started.

Yezhov’s short but bloodthirsty reign (in 1937, 936,750 Soviet citizens were arrested for committing “counterrevolutionary crimes” and 353,074 were shot; in 1938, 638,509 were arrested for political crimes and 328,618 were shot) 92ended on November 24, 1938, when Stalin signed a Politburo resolution dismissing him. On November 25, Beria was appointed commissar, and Merkulov, the first deputy commissar and head of the GUGB. Yezhov was accused of “political unreliability” and arrested on April 10, 1939. On February 4, 1940, after a one-day trial, Yezhov was condemned to death for “treason against the Motherland, wrecking, spying, preparation of terrorist acts, and organization of assassinations of persons he did not like.” Nothing was said, of course, about the fact that the terrorist acts and assassinations had been ordered by the Politburo and Stalin. Yezhov was shot in the basement of the Military Tribunal building on Nikol’sky Street in front of the Kremlin. 93In June 1998, the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court refused to rehabilitate Yezhov. 94