Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 23

Table of Contents

The lusty water-front districts of Antwerp had, in my absence, undergone a thorough cleansing under the influence of an aggressive Catholic campaign. Policing had become much stricter. No longer did nude harlots lean out of the windows facing the Cathedral to yell their enticements at passing sailors. The public mass brothels had disappeared. The hordes of beach-combers and outcasts from all the coasts of the world were no longer permitted to camp on the promenades along the river. The hundreds of male and female innkeepers, stretching from the Rhine Quay to Siberia Dock, were less bland and more grouchy since Antwerp was on the way to surrender its reputation as the wildest and most vicious port in the world to Hamburg, Shanghai, and Alexandria.

And Bandura was no longer in Antwerp. I was somehow disappointed to hear that the old warrior had been induced to kowtow to Communist Party discipline. After repeated arrests and deportations to Holland and France, and persistent returns to Antwerp, he had been maneuvered into moving to the Hamburg water-front where a tighter supervision of his doings by the Party was possible. The Antwerp harbor “activist” brigades had fallen wholly under communist control, exercised by Ilja Weiss, the Hungarian, with the assistance of a Chinese student from Berlin and a horse-faced militant, “Red” McGrath, a native of New Zealand. Fortified with a monthly subsidy from the treasury of Albert Walter, they swamped an average of eight hundred ships a month with propaganda.

A letter from Albert Walter suddenly ordered me to leave Antwerp. It appeared that I had been selected for a term of special training at the Communist University in Leningrad. My instructions were to get my sailing papers from Comrade Anton, at an address in Merxem, a suburb of Antwerp. I found myself in a well-appointed drygoods store, in the back of which was an elegantly furnished office completely equipped. A demure woman led me into this inner office, where Comrade Anton received me. He was a stern-faced six-footer, of polished manner, resembling a churchman far more than an agent of the G.P.U. Yet he was in charge, as I discovered later, of all the G.P.U. operations in Flanders. He had an Apparat of his own, which functioned independently and the existence of which was unknown even to Ilja Weiss and the local Party leaders.

Comrade Anton spoke faultless German, English, French, and Flemish—his mother language. He received me in a business-like fashion. He knew in advance of my coming, and prepared for me a document typed in Russian and bearing two huge blue Soviet seals. He gave me the sum of twenty Dutch guilders, detailed instructions as to how I was to get to Russia, and told me to report to Comrade Ryatt, 15 Prospekt Ogorodnikova, in Leningrad.

My ship was the Russ, a German vessel chartered by the Soviets and manned by a crew approved by Albert Walter’s office. She was due to sail from Rotterdam with a cargo of iron for Leningrad. I went to Holland via the “underground” route. At every important frontier-crossing, the Comintern had established a courier station charged with conducting illegally traveling communists across the borders. I went to the Belgian frontier town of Esschen by train. A well-dressed young man awaited me at the station. He had two bicycles, one for himself, and one for me. We waited until it was dark. At a leisurely pace he led me over a labyrinth of obscure country-paths toward the north. No border patrol stopped us. Two hours later we arrived at the Dutch frontier town of Rozendaal. My guide saw me aboard a train to Rotterdam; he himself returned to his relay station on the Belgian side.

Although I did not pay for my passage, I did not have to hide except during our traverse of the Kiel Canal where German officials checked the steamer through the largest canal locks in the world. Most students for the Comintern schools travel in this manner, which enables them to slip in and out of Russia without the knowledge of foreign port or border authorities.

I despair at describing my emotions when the first dim landmarks of the Soviet Union rose out of the mist,—Kronstadt, the outlying islands, and then the workaday contours of Leninport. No devout worshiper could have entered a holy shrine with greater reverence than I entered Russia’s westernmost metropolis.

I walked through the dreary streets of Leningrad, and my steps were light and firm. Of the many strange towns I had entered in the course of my long vagabondage, Leningrad was the least strange of all. I was like a ragged wanderer coming home at last to see if things are as they should be. Gone was all the unrest, gone the accursed lust for action at any price. I was no longer a chunk of mutinous scum in enemy country. I was content to hold my head high and let my eyes drink in the expressions in the faces of simple men and women who had their place at the helm of the first Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

No one came to tell me: “Turn! Flee, you innocent, you ridiculously happy fool! Flee before it is too late!” Had someone said it, I should have struck him down.

Throngs were on the streets. The men and women I saw were better clothed and looked better fed than I. Many faces were serious, almost sad, but many were also strong with mute determination. And smiles and laughter were common among those who sauntered in groups between drab rows of houses aching for paint. I was hungry, and dog-tired from hours of walking. My shoes were worn out. The overcoat I wore was torn. I kept on asking for the way, until at last an open-faced boy understood what I wanted. He was a student of chemistry, and a Komsomol. We walked side by side and talked.

“They should have sent somebody down to meet you at the ship,” the student said. And after a while, when he learned that I had been in America:

“Is it true that workers in America have automobiles?”

“Yes, a good many of them.”

“They say a worker in America is as good as dead at forty,” the student said, adding pensively, “We, too, shall have automobiles.”

We swung into the Prospekt Ogorodnikova, and entered a massive building flanked by gardens. The thickly carpeted vestibule was dominated by a bronze bust of Lenin. There was an array of palms almost touching the lofty ceiling. Large mirrors reflected the brilliant light. Heavy leather arm-chairs were arranged along the walls. Wide doors painted ivory and gold led off in all directions. Signs at the doors bore the words “French Section,” “Anglo-American Section,” “Colonial Section,” and others. I was in the International Club of Leningrad.

“Formerly it was the private palace of a big ship-owner,” the student explained. “You should have been here a few days ago for the October celebration. The Internationale was sung in seventeen languages at the same time.”

Ryatt, the Lettish Bolshevik to whom I was to report, was not in the Club. He had gone to Moscow for a couple of days. A gloomy German functionary took care of my needs. He led me to a rambling basement restaurant which resembled a modernized medieval wine cellar. Half of the fifty large round tables were occupied. Many languages could be heard. I ate a hearty, well-cooked meal, and my beer glass was filled and refilled without my asking. From the restaurant I was led to a barber shop, and from there into a steam-chamber and bathroom where I lingered all of an hour. After the bath, a husky, taciturn woman put me to bed on a ponderous leather couch in one of the upper rooms of the Club.

“Schlaf,” she said curtly. “Now you must sleep.”

I closed my eyes and slept long, until late the next morning.

“Vstavayte! Get up!” a harsh voice said.

Above me towered a hard-faced man in white. At his side hovered a pleasant young woman. The man reminded me of the gunner of the whaler Hawk; the woman resembled in stature and expression the girls I had seen working as stevedores in the harbors of Finland.

“I’m the doctor,” the man said. “I must examine you.”

I looked for my clothes. They had disappeared. The contents of my pockets lay neatly on a table.

The woman laughed. She said something in Russian.

“She says your rags are in the furnace,” the doctor translated. “She burned them.”

“But what am I to put on?”

“Never mind. You’ll get others.”

She went away to get clothes. The doctor examined me. He could find nothing wrong. The garments which the woman brought me were not new, but they were strongly made, and they were warm. A faint smell of disinfectant clung to them.

“We take care of our boys,” the doctor said. “You may go down for breakfast.”

In the restaurant the sad-looking German was waiting for me. “Eat quick, it’s late,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To the G.P.U.”

“The G.P.U?”

“Yes, naturally.”

I thought I should be questioned. I had been warned that the secret services of capitalist countries were eager to send their spies into the Comintern schools.

On foot and in battered, overcrowded street cars we traveled into a district of palaces which had once belonged to men who were now dead and gone, or in exile. We passed the hulking Admiralty and entered one of the thoroughfares which radiate from that point. We approached the silent, thick-walled building on Majorov Prospekt.

All manner of people cluttered the grimy hallways. After a period of waiting, I was conducted to a spacious office the only decorations of which were a portrait of Lenin and another of Felix Dzerjinsky, the creator of the Tcheka. Two men in uniform sat at a table. One was short and fat. The other seemed hardly more than a pair of piercing eyes in a landscape of prominent bones.

I was not questioned. They were well informed about my past. All they wanted was to verify my identity and obtain a photograph for my communist student’s pass card. I was instructed to use the name of Adolf Heller during my stay in the Soviet Union. All students used assumed names to safe-guard them against informers of foreign police departments. Anonymity was essential for the work we were expected to do. I was warned to be wary about communications with strangers. I was also requested not to send letters by mail to friends or relatives abroad. All letters with foreign destination were to be turned over to the secretary of the International Club. They would be brought to Berlin by the weekly courier, and posted there so as not to show their Soviet origin. The real reason for this was a strict censorship of outgoing communications by the G.P.U. Then I was photographed.

Before I left, the cadaverous-looking official made a short speech. Except for his accentuation of each sentence with a jerk of his corpse-like head, he might have been talking to himself. No doubt, he had made the same speech a thousand times or more. “Maintain unshakable proletarian discipline,” he concluded. “You are a guest of the Soviet Union. You shall become its son. Prove yourself worthy of our common historical task. Be worthy of the great tradition of the Soviet Revolution.”

The morning after Ryatt’s return from Moscow, I attended my first lecture in the International Division of the Communist University. The central building of this academy of Bolshevist theory and practice was the former palace of the Duma, now the Uritzky Palace, facing one of the largest garden-squares in the world. The lofty windows, the columns and marble stairways, the paneled wall and enormous candelabras, the whole massive splendor of a vanished regime, brought home to the newcomer a realization of the completeness of the Bolshevist triumph. From the secret schooling circles in the Czarist prisons and underground hovels to this magnificent Palace! The somber portraits of the giants of the Revolution were everywhere. Emblazoned in stone were the words, Workers of the World, Unite!

Over six thousand students attended the Communist University in the winter of 1925-’26. The large majority were Russians, who were trained for political and administrative work in the Party machine, the economic councils, in the trade unions and co-operatives, in the Red Army, the Red Navy and the G.P.U., and for functions in the great number of communist auxiliary organizations.

The foreign students were incorporated in the International Division which occupied twenty-odd rooms on the second floor of an adjoining building which once housed the Leningrad garrison. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Malays had their own “University of the Peoples of the East” in Moscow, and a smaller one, the Pan-Pacific University, in Vladivostok. American communists had their special department in the “University of the Peoples of the West,” also in Moscow. Each of the foreign groups of the Communist University also included a number of Russian communists who were being prepared for revolutionary service outside the Soviet frontiers. They were a picked lot, young and alert, and all of them were fluent in at least one language besides their native Russian.

The courses of the International Division dealt almost exclusively with aspects of class war and the struggle for communism. They did not aim at educating academic scholars. Revolutionary theories were never treated apart from actual class war experiences. The battles of the past and present—armed risings, strikes, civil wars—were analyzed and dissected, the mistakes of strategy and methods were pointed out, and lessons were drawn to guide the student in the actions of the future. All courses led up and culminated in the Leninist conception of the most important step on the road to a classless society—the seizure of power through revolution, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of the Communist Party. Every thought, every campaign, every action whatsoever had value only if it constituted a forward step to the seizure of power. Every omission, every scruple and laxity that could tend to retard the advance was an unpardonable crime. Revolution was not one way out—it was the only way out.

There was a special Military Department where Red Army officers lectured on the strategy of street fighting and the science of civil war. There was a special section for the study of African problems and languages, and another one—reserved for a strictly segregated and tight-lipped élite—where G.P.U. officers were the instructors. Photography, finger-printing and police work were taught here. And known to all were the classes in which large numbers of Russian girls worked tirelessly to acquire fluency in the languages of the West. These girls were political workers. They were the “Aktivistki”—a title of which they were very proud.

The international universities of the Comintern are in reality schools established and maintained by the Russian Communist Party which is identical with the Soviet government. The Comintern being in effect no more than the foreign division of the Russian Party, we students often jokingly referred to the Comintern as the Moskauer Fremdenlegion—Moscow’s Foreign Legion. Yet very few of our instructors were Russian. The majority of the members of our faculty were Germans, Letts, Poles, Finns and Hungarians. Most prominent among them was Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen, a leader of the Finnish Soviet revolution of 1918, one of the founders of the Comintern, who had been a trusted collaborator of Lenin. Today Kuusinen still remains a loyal servant of the Kremlin, and recently figured in the world news as the head of the Finnish puppet government set up by Stalin during the Russian invasion of Finland.

Of my other instructors, the two Hungarians, the sedate and scholarly Pap and the good-natured though volcanic Goegoes, came to grief some years later in Budapest, where they had been sent to stage a communist coup. Both were betrayed to the authorities by their own Party chief, Rakoshi. Driven to insanity by the police, Pap hanged himself in the prison of Zegedin in 1930. Goegoes died in the grip of his torturers. Another lecturer, the talented German, Arthur Ewert, who was popular because of his robust warmth and rollicking humor, rots to this day in a Brazilian prison. Most horrible was the end of Rosa Speculant, a puritanical Jewess, who lectured on propaganda. She was subsequently sent by the Comintern to Poland, and was seized there by the political police. Nothing was heard of her until an escaped fellow-prisoner arrived in Berlin with this report:

“Police Inspector Tkaczuk came to Luck prison to question Comrade Speculant. To make her confess, he had the soles of her feet beaten with canes. Water, petroleum and urine were poured into her nostrils. Because she still refused to confess, she was raped by prison guards. They transferred her to the venereal ward of the prison hospital.”

Since then a children’s home on the Black Sea near Novorossisk had been named after Rosa Speculant.

High functionaries of the Comintern occasionally lectured at the University. These lectures were gala events. They had the character of Bolshevik mass meetings, and were held in the venerable main hall where formerly the ill-fated Duma convened. Outstanding among our guest lecturers was Ossip Piatnitzky, the hard-boiled chief of the organization department—the Orgbureau—of the Comintern. Piatnitzky was the man feared most by sluggish Party bureaucrats the world over. He was the man who paid or stopped, decreased or increased the subsidies of the Comintern for Parties abroad. He was the man who swung the lash of open criticism without fear or favor; where he saw a festering wound—he jabbed his fingers into it with gusto. The short, stubby, graying, blunt-faced and keen-eyed Piatnitzky waved applause aside as a waste of time. He was immensely popular among the students. Among the experts of conspirative organization he was the undisputed master. His voice rang hard, and it had a humorous tinge. He ended a three-hour speech on the “organization of victory” with the cry: “Our revolutionary fatherland, the Soviet Union, is at war with the whole of the capitalist world. Only the triumph of the world revolution can end this war.”

The foreign students lived in segregated quarters, grouped according to their nationalities. Aside from official fraternity nights, close private relationships between students of different nationalities were not encouraged, because of fear that spies might have wormed their way into the student corps. I lived with a group of German and German-speaking comrades from the Baltic countries in an old tenement house in the Viborg district. On one side was the Nevka, the northern arm of the Neva estuary; on the other a vast lunatic asylum, one section of which was run by the G.P.U. We rose at half past six, awakened by a swarthy house superintendent’s helper, a Georgian, who ran from room to room, shouting hoarsely, “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation. . . .” After a breakfast of bread and tea, we were on our way. A street car bore us south across the Neva at a snail’s pace, stopping at every block while hordes of passengers piled in and out. In high spirits, we often indulged in coarse flirtations in the darkness and the slashing cold of a Leningrad winter morning.

The first lecture started at nine. The subjects ranged from Marx’s “theory of surplus value” to the “application of Clausewitz’ Rules of Warfare in the conduct of strikes,” from “revolutionary defeatism and the transformation of an imperialist war into a civil war” to “mass psychology and propaganda.” Then followed an hour of discussion. Every problem from war to marriage was analyzed from a strict class viewpoint. Another lecture followed, and another hour of discussion. By that time it was one o’clock.

The hour from one to two was devoted to gymnastics, target practice with small-caliber revolvers and rifles, and other forms of physical exercise. The instructors were officers’ apprentices of the Red Army, and superb examples of physical perfection they were! Individual athletic stunts were taboo. If anyone possessed exceptional prowess, he was not permitted to boast about it as young people like to do. Everything was done collectively, and the pace of motion was that of the slowest. At times three Komsomols supplied a musical rhythm with trumpets. One of the exercises consisted of doing gymnastics while standing under icy showers, a test of self-control in which the girls invariably outdid the hardiest of the male students. Severnoye Siyanye—“aurora borealis”—this torture was called.

In the afternoons, we usually wrote essays or leaflets on subjects assigned by our instructors. The students had a choice between two themes, such as “Why do the Communist Parties fight the Versailles Treaty?” or “What must be the policy of the Communist Parties in the event of war between Germany and France?” I recall an assignment on the question, “Is America an imperialist state?” It followed our study of Scott Nearing’s book, The American Empire, given us in mimeographed copies translated in various languages.

Each minute of our time was supervised by a Comintern control bureau of which Kuusinen was the invisible, and the German communists Kuehne and Schneller, the visible heads. Schneller had been a world war officer in the German army. Kuehne was a combination of a fox and a scientist, and later became the secretary of the communist bloc in the German Reichstag. At times Heinz Neumann, whose regular abode was in the Comintern building in Moscow, took a hand in the planning of our time down to the smallest detail. Many of us developed a secret animosity for this scion of a Berlin grain millionaire because of his brusque, dictatorial manner, and because of the undisguised cynicism with which he summoned likable girl students to his hotel. It was known that he had a beautiful young girl from the Caucasus region as his mistress in Moscow. Nevertheless, each time he was in Leningrad some Scandinavian or German girl was invited to gratify Heinz Neumann’s appetite. The girls went to him willingly. Neumann had the reputation of being one of the few foreign communists who belonged to the inner circle around Stalin, whose name already then spelled magic to us. But the whole foreign division of the Communist University chuckled when Heinz Neumann was set upon and beaten by unnamed men in the shadow of Peter the Great’s monument on Dekabrist Square. As usual, Neumann was in the company of a young woman, and both were tipsy with vodka. The following day,—the Lenin-Liebknecht-Luxemburg memorial day,—Neumann nursed his bruises in solitude. But the next morning he appeared in the control bureau to issue orders to student delegates about a fraternity evening with Putilov workers in the Palace of Labor. This cold-blooded libertine was an efficient Party worker.

Official supervision did not stop with the detailed disposition of our time. All our reading, our conversations, our personal associations were supervised by undercover agents of the G.P.U., which also had an informer assigned to every group of students. Only communist newspapers—a huge selection of them—were allowed to be in our hands. We were not permitted to have books other than those issued by the libraries of the University and the International Club. We were carefully steered away from all private contacts with Russian workers and students. At regular intervals, all rooms in the students’ homes showed traces of a thorough search, conducted while their occupants were in school or on an excursion. G.P.U. men listened in on all group conversations. We were sincere revolutionists, and regarded the G.P.U. as our protectors. We were devoted to the Soviet Union. We had nothing to hide. We were far too busy from morning till night to stray off the ironbound communist path. Nothing ever came to my attention in all those months to indicate that a foreign communist student had gotten himself into difficulties with the G.P.U.

The student group to which I belonged counted fifty-three members, sometimes more, sometimes a few less. We lived well. We received our meals free of charge; we were given clothing when we needed and applied for it; entertainment and excursions did not cost us one kopeck. The fifty rubles each of us received fortnightly from the Kassa of the control bureau we could spend as we liked on drinks, cigarettes and other incidentals. But fifty-three of us were assigned to sleep in eight small rooms, the three largest of which provided quarters and sleeping space for the fifteen girls in our group. The boys were crammed, seven and eight strong, into each of the remaining chambers. We slept on collapsible army cots. When all the cots were mounted, the rooms were filled with sleeping gear from wall to wall. Usually the lights were kept burning all night, for there was always one who thought it more important to do required reading than to snatch a full measure of sleep. Iron stoves glowed red, but there were not enough to go around. Small oil lamps, battered percolators, samovars and even candles were used to battle the grim cold of winter. There were broken window-panes patched up with paper or pieces of old cloth. Yet, all the discomfort and lack of privacy never led to quarrels or peevishness among us. We took pride in showing that no hardship could daunt us.

We despised the bourgeois ideals of a settled existence, of marriage and love, of ownership and law and order. None of us looked forward to having children or a garden or only a roomful of furniture and books of his own. We thought we knew what awaited us in the years to come. We were the youth of international conspiracy. The capitalists and their hireling governments would fight us tooth and claw because they knew that our triumph would spell their death. We expected no quarter and we intended to give none. Our job was destruction—utter, uncompromising destruction—of capitalist society and the capitalist state, an uprooting and overturning of all standards and values grown out of the basic conceptions of my land, my house, my country, my wife, my factory or ship or mine or railroad!

Marriage among the young professionals of world revolution was discouraged. Men with families and women with children were too likely to become lovers of peace. In the always stormy and frequently short career of the professional communist normal marriage relations were blasted in the bud. In the face of the tremendous revolutionary goal set before us, cultivation of a permanent emotional alliance between one man and one woman seemed trivial and futile. But we were no celibates. We were healthy young animals as capable of erotic passion, of falling in love, and of yearning for the caresses of a beloved as any virile youths and life-hungry girls.

Debates on the merits and demerits of “free love” we left to the intellectuals of an already rotting liberalism. We were too direct in our mutual relationships to fall victim to the customs of courtship and flirtations prevalent on “the other side.” Outlawed were sultry whisperings and lascivious insinuations. Outlawed was erotic jealousy. Outlawed was the pursuit and the pestering of girls who were in no mood to respond. Outlawed were false shame and morbid curiosity. It was a rule that the student who felt himself drawn to a certain girl would tell her frankly: “I desire you. Be my companion as long as the Party permits us to be together.” When the feeling was reciprocal, the girl would smile and nod, and the matter was settled. And so it was also the other way around. Often two or more young men sometimes shared the intimate friendship of one girl. No secret was made of such an agreement. The recreation rooms on the ground floor of our house, where we danced and drank vodka and played chess in the evenings, became toward midnight the inalienable reservation of the lovers. The Russian Komsomol girls haunted the international students’ homes in flocks, surrounding as they did the young revolutionists from foreign lands with an aura of romantic heroism. But the hordes of luckless prostitutes who shivered in the squares and doorways never entered our life. Cases of venereal disease among the students were extremely rare.

The master craftsmen in the Kremlin could not have wished for better tools. We were the unflinching prisoners of a grandiose make-believe, we who looked upon ourselves as hard-headed materialists. We dismissed the distress of today, the human wreckage littered all about us, the terror and the militarism prevailing in the country, with the stereotyped belief that we were marching forward with giant strides: “The power is ours—and the future, too!”

Of the six comrades who were my room-mates during that Leningrad winter, two are dead, one is in prison. I lost all trace of the others.

In prison is Hans Sorgers. He was a cheerful, tenacious youth who danced the Schuhplattler at the International Club and liked to sing Bavarian mountaineer songs. He became an editor for the German Party press, stuck to his post after the Reichstag went up in flames, until an infatuation with a young Jewish girl brought him into the toils of the Gestapo. They questioned the girl after a routine roundup. Half-crazy with fear, she betrayed her lover. Fifteen years of solitary confinement in Ploetzensee prison near Berlin are his lot.

Another, Nicola Koffardschieff, a bold and earnest Bulgarian, with a head like carved oak, was an excellent chess player. He was the only one in our group who never put his arm around a girl. But he liked children. He gave them bon-bons and told them stories. That was his relaxation—that, and a liter of vodka once a month. When Nicola was drunk, he became gloomy and went out to walk in the streets all night. He was a hard worker whom only children could make smile. In September, 1931, Georgi Dimitrov sent Nicola to Bulgaria on a Comintern mission. On October 30, risking his own life to liberate an arrested comrade, he was shot to death by police agents in the streets of Sofia.

And there was Kazys Kentautas, the Lithuanian, whom I will never forget. He was the best student in our group, the son of a blacksmith in Memel. He read Hegel and Feuerbach in the original, and surreptitiously he read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Kazys was no fighter, but he was one of those who would walk naked into a fire to prove to himself that mind could sometimes triumph over matter. One evening in the Leningrad Palace of Labor he saw me dancing with Kristinaite, a fiery-eyed slip of a girl, who studied economics and conspiratorial organization at the Foreign Division. He fell in love with her at once. He could work himself into a state of near-intoxication simply by staring at Kristinaite’s hair, which was a smooth glistening black. From that day on, he showed less interest in school, but somehow he was too shy to speak to her. I told Kristinaite about Kazys. He was training himself for work in Fascist countries—the most dangerous of all activities. Kristinaite gave me a flashing laugh and went to Kazys Kentautas. After that they were together almost every night. He was courageous enough to marry her. Kristinaite used to say, “After the revolution we shall have babies.” Shortly afterwards, he was sent to work underground in Finland, she to Roumania or Greece. Later they worked together in Latvia, and in 1930 Kristinaite had a baby which she kept in a children’s home in Ostrov, just across the border.

I heard nothing more from them until the end of 1933. In the Comintern service we hardly ever wrote each other private letters. One was not supposed to know where the other was, unless both had the same assignment. But in October, 1933, I discovered their names in the files of the western Secretariat of the Comintern in Copenhagen. From Latvia both had been sent to reorganize the Party in Lithuania. They were captured and thrown into the dungeons of Kovne. Kazys Kentautas was condemned to death for high treason. Kristinaite refused to make a confession. Inhuman jailers tortured her with heavy prison keys. Kristinaite went mad. To hide the consequences of their brutality the jailers murdered her a night later.

I often think of Kristinaite’s flashing laugher. Had I told Kazys, when he declared his love for her: “Go away, Comrade Kentautas, she is not for you, you cannot even dance,” Kristinaite might have lived a little longer.