Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Save for a few hunting trips, Trotsky spent most of his time in Alma-Ata at his desk. Between April and October 1928 he sent his supporters about 550 telegrams and 800 “political letters,” some of them lengthy polemical tracts. During the same period he received 700 telegrams and 1,000 letters from various parts of the Soviet Union, but believed that at least as many more had been confiscated en route . 78Every item in Trotsky’s intercepted correspondence was carefully noted by the OGPU, and monthly digests of them were sent both to Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (Dzerzhinsky’s successor) and to Stalin. 79Stalin, who never failed to overreact to opposition, cannot but have been unfavorably impressed by letters which regularly described him and his supporters as “degenerates.”

OGPU reports on Trotsky and his followers were written in a tone of selfrighteous outrage. No counter-revolutionary group since the October Revolution, it declared, had dared to behave “as insolently, boldly and defiantly” as the Trotskyists. Even when brought in for interrogation, Trotsky’s supporters refused to be intimidated by their interrogators. Most declined to reply to questions. Instead they submitted impudent written protests, such as: “I consider the struggle I am engaged in to be a Party matter. I shall explain myself to the Central Control Commission, not to the OGPU.” Early in 1928 the OGPU carried out its first mass arrests of Trotskyists, incarcerating several hundred of them in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. The Butyrka, however, had not yet descended into the brutal squalor for which it became infamous during the Great Terror a decade later, nor had the spirit of Trotsky’s followers been broken. On their first night in prison the Trotskyists staged a riot, kicking down doors, breaking windows and chanting politically incorrect slogans. “Such,” reported the OGPU indignantly, “was the behavior of the embittered enemies of the Party and Soviet power.” 80

The liquidation of the Trotskyist heresy and the maintenance of ideological orthodoxy within the Communist one-party state required, in Stalin’s view, Trotsky’s removal from the Soviet Union. In February 1929 the great heretic was deported to Turkey and given 1,500 dollars by an OGPU escort to enable him to “settle abroad.” 81With Trotsky out of the country, the tone of OGPU reports on the destabilization and liquidation of his rapidly dwindling band of increasingly demoralized followers became more confident. According to one report, “a massive retreat from Trotskyism began in the second half of 1929.” Some of those who recanted were turned into OGPU agents to inform on their friends.The same report boasts of the subtlety of the methods used to undermine the credibility of the “counter-revolutionary” hard core. Individual Trotskyists were summoned to OGPU offices from their workplaces, left standing around in the corridors for several hours, then released without explanation. On returning to work they could give no credible account of what had happened. When the process was repeated their workmates became increasingly suspicious and tended to believe rumors planted by the OGPU that they were employed by them as informers. Once the “counter-revolutionaries” were discredited, they were then arrested for their political crimes. 82

Stalin, however, was far from reassured. He increasingly regretted the decision to send Trotsky abroad rather than keep him in the Soviet Union, where he could have been put under constant surveillance. One episode only six months after Trotsky was sent into exile seems to have made a particular impression on Stalin. In the summer of 1929 Trotsky received a secret visit from a sympathizer within the OGPU, Yakov Blyumkin. As a young and impetuous Socialist Revolutionary in the Cheka in 1918, Blyumkin had assassinated the German ambassador in defiance of orders from Dzerzhinsky. With Trotsky’s help, however, he had been rehabilitated and had risen to become chief illegal resident in the Middle East. Blyumkin agreed to transmit a message from Trotsky to Karl Radek, one of his most important former supporters, and to try to set up lines of communication with what Trotsky termed his “cothinkers” in the Soviet Union. 83Trilisser, the head of foreign intelligence, was probably alerted to Blyumkin’s visit by an OGPU agent in Trotsky’s entourage. He did not, however, order Blyumkin’s immediate arrest. Instead he arranged an early version of what later became known as a “honey trap.” Trilisser instructed an attractive OGPU agent, Yelizaveta Yulyevna Gorskaya (better known as “Lisa,” or “Vixen”), 84to “abandon bourgeois prejudices,” seduce Blyumkin, discover the full extent of his collaboration with Trotsky, and ensure his return to the Soviet Union. Once lured back to Moscow, Blyumkin was interrogated, tried in secret and shot. According to the later OGPU defector Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov, Blyumkin’s last words before his execution were, “Long live Trotsky!” Soon afterwards “Lisa” Gorskaya married the OGPU resident in Berlin (and later in New York), Vasili Mikhailovich Zarubin. 85

As Stalin became increasingly preoccupied during the early 1930s with the opposition to him within the Communist Party, he began to fear that there were other, undiscovered Blyumkins within INO. But Trotsky himself had not yet been targeted for assassination. The main “enemies of the people” outside the Soviet Union were still considered to be the White Guards. General Kutepov, the head of the ROVS in Paris, was brave, upright, teetotal, politically naive and an easy target for the OGPU. His entourage was skillfully penetrated by Soviet agents, and agents provocateurs brought him optimistic news of a nonexistent anti-Bolshevik underground. “Great movements are spreading across Russia!” Kutepov declared in November 1929. “Never have so many people come from ‘over there’ to see me and ask me to collaborate with their clandestine organizations.” Unlike Savinkov and Reilly, however, Kutepov resisted attempts to lure him back to Russia for meetings with the bogus anti-Communist conspirators. With Stalin’s approval, the OGPU thus decided to kidnap him instead and bring him back for interrogation and execution in Moscow. 86

Overall planning of the Kutepov operation was given to Yakov Isaakovich (“Yasha”) Serebryansky, head of the euphemistically titled “Administration for Special Tasks.” 87Before the Second World War, the administration functioned as a parallel foreign intelligence service, reporting directly to the Centre with special responsibility for sabotage, abduction and assassination operations on foreign soil. 88Serebryansky later became a severe embarrassment to official historians anxious to distance Soviet foreign intelligence from the blood-letting of the late 1930s and portray it as a victim rather than a perpetrator of the Great Terror. An SVR-sponsored history published in 1993 claimed that Serebryansky was “not a regular member of State Security,” but “only brought in for special jobs.” 89KGB files show that, on the contrary, he was a senior OGPU officer whose Administration for Special Tasks grew into an élite service, more than 200-strong, dedicated to hunting down “enemies of the people” on both sides of the Atlantic. 90

Detailed preparations for the kidnaping of Kutepov were entrusted by Serebryansky to his illegal Paris resident, V. I. Speransky, who had taken part in the deception of Savinkov six years earlier. 91On the morning of Sunday, January 26, 1930 Kutepov was bundled into a taxi in the middle of a street in Paris’s fashionable seventh arrondissement. Standing nearby was a Communist Paris policeman who had been asked to assist by Speransky so that any bystander who saw the kidnaping (one did) would mistake it for a police arrest. Though the Centre commended the kidnaping as “a brilliant operation,” the chloroform used to overpower Kutepov proved too much for the general’s weak heart. He died aboard a Soviet steamer while being taken back to Russia. 92