Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 3, p. 90.

8. k-4,198,206. Doriot’s emotionally charged oratory caused him to perspire so profusely that after every major speech he was forced to change not merely his shirt but his suit as well. Brunet, Jacques Doriot, pp. 208-9.

9. k-4,198,206. A recent biography of Eugen Fried, the secret Comintern representative in the leadership of the French Communist Party, reveals that Comintern instructions were that the campaign against Doriot should go through three phases: “maneuverer, isoler, liquider.” Without access to KGB files, the authors assume—reasonably but wrongly—that only “political,” rather than “physical,” assassination was intended. Kriegel and Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 228.

10. On Doriot’s break with the Communist Party and move to fascism, see Brunet, Jacques Doriot, chs. 9-12; Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste, chs. 5, 9.

11. k-4,198,206.

12. There are a number of examples in the VENONA decrypts of the use of the KHORKI (“Polecat”) codename for the Trotskyists.

13. k-4,206. The codename of the task force appears in vol. 7, app. 3, n. 15.

14. k-4,206.

15. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 348-9.

16. vol. 7, appendix 3, n. 15.

17. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, p. 349.

18. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 125-6.

19. Minute by R. A. Sykes, October 23, 1952, PRO FO 371/100826 NS 1023/29/G.

20. vol. 6, ch. 12.

21. Among the growing number of studies of the Terror, the classic account remains that by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment. There is, however, vigorous controversy over the numbers of the Terror’s victims. In 1995 Colonel Grashoven, head of the Russian security ministry rehabilitation team, estimated that in the period 1935-45 18 million were arrested and 7 million shot. Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of Khrushchev’s rehabilitation commission, gave the figure of those “repressed” (imprisoned or shot) from 1935 to 1941 as 19.8 million (a statistic also found in the papers of Anastas Mikoyan). Dmitri Volkogonov arrived at a total of 21.5 million (of whom a third were shot) for the period 1929-53. Conquest’s own revised estimates are of a similar order of magnitude (Conquest, “Playing Down the Gulag,” p. 8). Recent studies based on incomplete official records suggest considerably lower, but still large figures. Stephen Wheatcroft, one of the leading analysts of the official figures, believes it “unlikely that there were more than a million executions between 1921 and 1953. The labor camps and colonies never accounted for more than 2.5 million prisoners.” What is striking even in the official records is the enormous rise in executions during the Great Terror: 353,074 in 1937 and 328,618 in 1938, as compared with a total of under 10,000 for the five year period 1932-6 (Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-45”). Controversy over the level of incompleteness in the official records (which do not, of course, include deaths in the camps or the millions who died from famine) will doubtless continue.

22. vol. 6, ch. 12.

23. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 149-61.

24. Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 371.

25. vol. 6, ch. 12.

26. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 281.

27. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 1, n. 1; vol. 7, app. 3, n. 15.

28. On Wollweber, see Flocken and Scholz, Ernst Wollweber.

29. k-4,206.

30. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 267.

31. See below, chapter 5.

32. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, chs. 10, 11.

33. vol. 5, ch. 7. All these episodes are conspicuous by their absence from the official SVR hagiography: Samolis (ed.), Veterany Vneshnei Razvedki Rossii, pp. 21-4.

34. Castelo’s personal file, archive no. 68312, registration no. 66160, once in the files of the FCD Fifteenth Department of the First Chief Directorate was transferred to the Eighth Department of FCD Directorate S. vol. 5, ch. 7.

35. After the defection of Orlov in July 1938, Eitingon succeeded him as resident.

36. vol. 5, ch. 7.

37. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

38. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 177-8.

39. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

40. k-4,198.

41. There is, however, one later reference to him being “killed”; vol. 6, ch. 12.

42. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 179-80. Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 359-60. Costello and Tsarev, Dangerous Illusions, pp. 282-4.

43. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 405-10. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, pp. 319-21.

44. vol. 6, ch. 12.

45. Deutscher, Trotsky, vol. 3, pp. 407-8, 419-20. Sylvia Ageloff later described how, at an apparently “accidental meeting,” the “handsome and dashing” Mercader, posing as a Belgian journalist, had “swept her off her feet with his charm, gallantry and generosity.” Hook, Out of Step, p. 242.

46. k-4,198,206.

47. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2, n. 4.

48. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2, n. 4. Albam’s file does not record his wife’s arrest, so her denunciation of him may have saved her. Acquaintance with Albam was also among the evidence which led to the arrest of the military intelligence officers who had recruited him some years earlier: S. P. Uritsky and Aleksandr Karin. At the time of their arrest in 1937 they were, respectively, head and assistant head of military intelligence. Both were shot.

49. k-9,75.

50. k-9,76.

51. k-9,83. Bukharin was tried and sentenced to death in the last of the great show trials in February 1938.

52. vol. 6, ch. 8, part 1.

53. Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crime, pp. 235-7. Though he had only deacon’s orders when he gave up the monastic life, Maly was regarded within the NKVD as a former priest.

54. vol. 7, ch. 14, item 1. Cf. Primakov et al., Ocherki Istorii Rossiyskoi Vneshnei Razvedki, vol. 3, p. 166.

55. Information from the son of the late Oscar Deutsch, David Deutsch, who recalls meeting Arnold Deutsch at sabbath dinners in Birmingham.

56. vol. 6, ch. 5, part 2.

57. The two most detailed accounts of the assassination of Poretsky, which disagree on some points of detail, are: Poretsky, Our Own People, pp. 1-3, chs. 9, 10; Krivitsky, I was Stalin’s Agent, ch. 8.

58. vol. 7, ch. 9.

59. vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 22.

60. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 233.

61. Rees, A Chapter of Accidents, pp. 110-11.

62. Rees, Looking for Mr. Nobody, pp. 87-90.

63. vol. 7, ch. 10, app., item 7.

64. Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, p. 245. Blunt had left Cambridge for the Warburg Institute in London, but returned for meetings of the Apostles and other occasions.

65. The files noted by Mitrokhin suggest that the intelligence supplied by Rees was of slender importance—items such as information on the correspondence of the Czech newspaper editor Hubert Ripka (later a member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London) and the unsurprising news that the former British secret agent Sir Paul Dukes was still in touch with SIS. vol. 7, ch. 10, app., item 7.

66. Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crime, pp. 237-8. An alternative version has it that Slutsky was smothered in his office; vol. 7, ch. 9, para. 37. The pretense was maintained that he had died from natural causes in order not to alarm other enemies of the people being recalled from foreign postings to retribution in Moscow.

67. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 156.