Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Planning for the abduction of Sedov was at an advanced stage by the time Miller disappeared. A fishing boat had been hired at Boulogne to take him on the first stage of his journey to the Soviet Union. 40The operation, however, was aborted—possibly as a result of the furor aroused in France by the NKVD’s suspected involvement in Miller’s abduction. A few months later Sedov met a different end. On February 8, 1938 he entered hospital with acute appendicitis. “Étienne” Zborowski helped to persuade him that, to avoid NKVD surveillance, he must have his appendix removed not at a French hospital but at a small private clinic run by Russian émigrés, which was in reality an easier target for Soviet penetration. No sooner had Zborowski ordered the ambulance than, as he later admitted, he alerted the NKVD. But, for alleged security reasons, he refused to reveal the address of the clinic to French Trotskyists. Sedov’s operation was successful and for a few days he seemed to be making a normal recovery. Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled his doctors. Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on February 16 at the age of only thirty-two. The contemporary files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for his death. 41It had, however, a sophisticated medical section, the Kamera, which experimented with lethal drugs and was capable of poisoning Sedov. It is certain that the NKVD intended to assassinate Sedov, just as it planned to kill Trotsky and his other leading lieutenants. 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. 42

Sedov’s death enabled the NKVD to take a leading role in the Trotskyist organization. Zborowski became both publisher of the Bulletin of the Opposition and Trotsky’s most important contact with his European supporters. While unobtrusively encouraging internecine warfare between the rival Trotskyist tendencies, Zborowski impeccably maintained his own cover. On one occasion he wrote to tell Trotsky that the Bulletin was about to publish an article entitled “Trotsky’s Life in Danger,” which would expose the activities of NKVD agents in Mexico. In the summer of 1938 the defector Aleksandr Orlov, then living in the United States, sent Trotsky an anonymous letter warning him that his life was in danger from an NKVD agent in Paris. Orlov did not know the agent’s surname but said that his first name was Mark (the real first name of “Étienne” Zborowski), and gave a detailed description of his appearance and background. Trotsky suspected that this letter and others like it were the work of NKVD agents provocateurs. Zborowski agreed. When told about one of the accusations against him, he is reported as having given “a hearty laugh.” 43

Following the death of Sedov, the NKVD’s next major Trotskyist target in Europe was the German Rudolf Klement, secretary of Trotsky’s Fourth International, whose founding conference was due to be held later in the year. 44On July 13, 1938 the NKVD abducted Klement from his Paris home. A few weeks later his headless corpse was washed ashore on the banks of the Seine. The founding conference of the Fourth International in September was a tragicomic event, attended by only twenty-one delegates claiming to represent mostly minuscule Trotskyist groups in eleven countries. The Russian section, whose authentic members had probably been entirely exterminated, was represented by Zborowski. The American Trotskyist Sylvia Angeloff, one of the conference translators, was accompanied by her Spanish lover, Ramón Mercader, an NKVD illegal posing as a Belgian journalist who was later to achieve fame as Trotsky’s assassin in Mexico City. 45

BY 1938 SEREBRYANSKY’S Administration for Special Tasks was the largest section of Soviet foreign intelligence, claiming to have 212 illegal officers operating in sixteen countries: the USA, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and China. After Trotskyists, the largest number of “enemies of the people” pursued abroad by the NKVD during the Great Terror came from the ranks of its own foreign intelligence service. 46When receiving reports from Moscow of show trials and the unmasking of their colleagues as agents of imperialist powers, intelligence officers stationed abroad had to pay careful attention not merely to what they said but also to their facial expressions and body language. Those who failed to respond with sufficiently visible or heartfelt outrage to the non-existent conspiracies being unveiled in Moscow were likely to have adverse reports sent to the Centre—frequently with fatal consequences.

After the trial of Lenin’s former lieutenants Zinovyev, Kamenev and other “degenerates” in August 1936, the Centre received an outraged communication from the Paris legal residency regarding the unsatisfactory level of indignation displayed by the military intelligence officer Abram Mironovich Albam (codenamed BELOV):

BELOV does not appear to feel a deep hatred or a sharply critical attitude towards these political bandits. During discussions of the trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovyevite bandits, he retreats into silence. BELOV was hoping that the sixteen convicted men would be shown mercy, and, when he read about their execution in the newspaper today, he actually sighed. 47

Albam’s subversive sigh helped to convict not merely himself but also a number of his colleagues of imaginary crimes. His file lists thirteen of his acquaintances who were subsequently arrested; at least some, probably most, were shot. Albam’s wife, Frida Lvovna, tried to save herself by disowning her arrested husband. “The most horrible realization for an honest Party member,” she wrote indignantly to the NKVD, “is the fact that he was an enemy of the people surrounded by other enemies of the people.” 48

Both at home and abroad the Great Terror favored the survival of the most morally unfit. Those who were quickest to denounce their colleagues for imaginary crimes stood the greatest chance of being among the minority of survivors. The fact that Yakov Surits, ambassador in Berlin at the beginning of the Great Terror, was one of the few senior diplomats to survive may well have owed something to his expertise in denunciation. Surits sought to head off denunciation by the head of the legal residency in his embassy, B. M. Gordon, by denouncing Gordon first. At the outset of the Terror, Surits drew to the attention of the Centre that a Soviet diplomat with whom Gordon was on friendly terms was a former Socialist Revolutionary who frequently visited relatives in Prague “where other SR émigrés reside.” 49After the show trial of the “Trotskyite-Zinovyevite Terrorist Center” in January 1937, Surits reported disturbing evidence of Gordon’s Trotskyite sympathies:

On February 2 a Party meeting was held in the Berlin embassy. Gordon, B. M., the resident and Communist Party organizer, delivered a report on the trial of the Trotskyite Center.

Gordon did not say a word about the fact that his rabble of bandits had a specific program of action; he did not say why this scum hid its program from the working class and from all working people; why it led a double life; why it went deeply underground.

He did not dwell on the reasons why after all the enemies managed to cause damage for so many years.

He did not deal with the question why, despite wrecking, sabotage, terrorism and espionage, our industry and transport constantly made progress and continue to make progress.

He did not touch on the international significance of the trial. 50

Surits, however, was unaware that he was himself being simultaneously denounced for similar failings by one of his secretaries, who wrote virtuously to the Centre: