Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Despite the numerous other duties of Serebryansky’s Paris residency, its main task remained the surveillance and destabilization of French Trotskyists. Until 1937 Lev Sedov, thanks to his misplaced but total confidence in “Étienne” Zborowski, was such an indispensable source on the POLECATS (as the Trotskyists were codenamed by the Centre) that he was not marked down as a target for liquidation. 12In the autumn of 1936 Zborowski warned the Centre that, because of his financial problems, Trotsky was selling part of his archive (formerly among the papers entrusted by Sedov to Zborowski for safekeeping) to the Paris branch of the International Institute of Social History based in Amsterdam. Serebryansky was ordered to set up a task force to recover it, codenamed the HENRY group. He began by renting the flat immediately above the institute in the rue Michelet in order to keep it under surveillance. On Serebryansky’s instructions, Zborowski, then working as a service engineer at a Paris telephone exchange, was ordered to cause a fault on the Institute’s telephone line in order to give him a chance to reconnoitre the exact location of the Trotsky papers and examine the locks. When the Institute reported the fault on its line, however, one of Zborowski’s colleagues was sent to mend the fault instead. Zborowski promptly put the Institute’s phone out of action once again and on this occasion was called to make the repair himself. As he left the Institute, having mended the fault and closely inspected the locks to the front and back doors, he was given a five franc tip by the director, Boris Nikolayevsky, a prominent Menshevik émigré classed by the NKVD as an “enemy of the people.” 13

Serebryansky fixed the time for the burglary at two o’clock on the morning of November 7, 1936, and ordered it to be completed by 5 a.m. at the latest. Since his agents were unable to find keys to fit the Institute locks, he decided to cut them out with a drill powered by an electric transformer concealed in a box filled with sawdust and cotton wool to deaden the sound. 14The burglars broke in unobserved and left with Trotsky’s papers. Both Sedov and the Paris police immediately suspected the NKVD because of both the professionalism of the burglary and the fact that money and valuables in the Institute had been left untouched. Sedov assured the police that his assistant “Étienne” Zborowski was completely above suspicion, and in any case kept the main archive, which had not been stolen, at his home address. Ironically, Sedov suggested that the NKVD might have learned of the transfer of a part of the archive as the result of an indiscretion by the Institute director, Nikolayevsky. 15

The extraordinary importance attached by the Centre to the theft of the papers was demonstrated by the award of the Order of the Red Banner to the HENRY group. 16The operation, however, was as pointless as it was professional. The papers stolen from the Institute (many of them press cuttings) were of no operational significance whatever and of far less historical importance than the Trotsky archive which remained in Zborowski’s hands and later ended up at Harvard University. 17But by the mid-1930s Stalin had lost all sense of proportion in his pursuit of Trotskyism in all its forms, both real and imaginary. Trotsky had become an obsession who dominated many of Stalin’s waking hours and probably interfered with his sleep at night. As Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, concludes:

The frenzy with which [Stalin] pursued the feud, making it the paramount preoccupation of international communism as well as of the Soviet Union and subordinating to it all political, tactical, intellectual and other interests, beggars description; there is in the whole of history hardly another case in which such immense resources of power and propaganda were employed against a single individual. 18

The British diplomat R. A. Sykes later wisely described Stalin’s world view as “a curious mixture of shrewdness and nonsense.” 19Stalin’s shrewdness was apparent in the way that he outmaneuvered his rivals after the death of Lenin, gradually acquired absolute power as General Secretary, and later out-negotiated Churchill and Roosevelt during their wartime conferences. Historians have found it difficult to accept that so shrewd a man also believed in so much nonsense. But it is no more possible to understand Stalin without acknowledging his addiction to conspiracy theories about Trotsky (and others) than it is to comprehend Hitler without grasping the passion with which he pursued his even more terrible and absurd conspiracy theories about the Jews.

GENRIKH GRIGORYEVICH YAGODA, head of the NKVD from 1934 to 1936, was far less obsessed by Trotsky than Stalin was. Stalin’s chief grudge against him was probably a growing conviction that he had been deliberately negligent in his hunt for Trotskyist traitors. 20His nemesis arrived in September 1936 in the form of a telegram from Stalin and his protégé, Andrei Zhdanov, to the Central Committee declaring that Yagoda had “definitely proved himself incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- Zinovyevite bloc” and demanding his replacement by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.

As head of the NKVD for the next two years, Yezhov carried through the largest scale peacetime political persecution and blood-letting in European history, known to posterity as the Great Terror. 21One NKVD document from the Yezhov era, which doubtless reflected—and probably slavishly imitated—Stalin’s own view, asserted that “the scoundrel Yagoda” had deliberately concentrated the attack on the “lower ranks” of “the right-wing Trotskyite underground” in order to divert attention from its true leaders: Zinovyev, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Kamenev and Smirnov. Yagoda, it was claimed, had either sacked or sidelined NKVD staff who had tried to indict these former heroes of the Leninist era for their imaginary crimes. 22All save Tomsky, who committed suicide, were given starring roles in the show trials of 1936 to 1938, gruesome morality plays which proclaimed a grotesque conspiracy theory uniting all opposition at home and abroad by the use of elegantly absurd formulae such as: “Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovyevism is a variety of Trotskyism.” In the last of the great show trials Yagoda, despite a plea for mercy written “on bended knees,” was himself unmasked as a leading Trotskyist conspirator. The chief author of the gigantic conspiracy theory, which became undisputed orthodoxy within the NKVD and provided the ideological underpinning of the Great Terror, was Stalin himself. 23Stalin personally proofread the transcripts of the show trials before their publication, amending the defendants’ speeches to ensure that they did not deviate from their well-rehearsed confessions to imaginary conspiracies. 24NKVD records of the period proclaim with characteristic obsequiousness that, “The practical organization of the work exposing the right-wing Trotskyite underground was supervised personally by Comrade Stalin, and in 1936-8 crippling blows were delivered to the rabble.” 25

“Crippling blows” against both real and imaginary Trotskyist “rabble” were struck outside as well as inside the Soviet Union. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 opened up a major new field of operations for Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks and for INO as a whole. The struggle of the Spanish republican government to defend itself against the nationalist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco fired the imagination of the whole of the European left as a crusade against international fascism: 35,000 foreign volunteers, most of them Communist, set out for Spain to join the International Brigades in defense of the republic. In October 1936 Stalin declared in an open letter to Spanish Communists: “Liberation of Spain from the yoke of the Spanish reactionaries is not the private concern of Spaniards alone, but the common cause of all progressive humanity.” From the outset, however, the NKVD was engaged in Spain in a war on two fronts: against Trotskyists within the republicans and the International Brigades, as well as against Franco and the nationalist forces. The former illegal resident in London, Aleksandr Orlov, sent to Spain as legal resident after the outbreak of the Civil War, confidently assured the Centre in October, “The Trotskyist organization POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista] can be easily liquidated.” 26