Читать книгу In Stalin's Secret Service - W/ G. Krivitsky - Страница 7

THE Communist International was born in Moscow on March 2nd, 1919. It received its death blow in Moscow on August 23, 1939, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact by Premier Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. But its decay was apparent in many things that happened years before.

On a May morning in 1934, I was with Volynski, the chief of the counter-espionage section of the Ogpu, in his office on the tenth floor of the Lubianka building in Moscow. Suddenly, from the street below, we heard the sound of music and of singing men. Looking down we saw a parade going by. The marchers were three hundred members of the Austrian Socialist Army, the Schutzbünd, who had fought heroically on the barricades in Vienna against the Fascist Heimwehr. Soviet Russia had given refuge to this small battalion of Socialist fighters.

I shall always remember that May morning: the happy faces of the Schutzbündler as they marched, singing their revolutionary song, Brueder Zur Sonne, Zur Freiheit, the spontaneous fellowship of the Russian crowds as they joined the march. For a moment I forgot where I was, but Volynski brought me down to earth.

“How many spies do you suppose there are among them, Krivitsky?” he asked in the most natural tone of voice.

“Not one,” I replied angrily.

“You’re making a big mistake,” he said. “In six or seven months seventy per cent of them will be sitting in the Lubianka prison.”

Volynski was a good judge of the way the Stalin machine functioned. Of those three hundred Austrians not a single one remains today on Soviet territory. Many of them were arrested soon after their arrival. Others, although they knew what awaited them at home, came flocking to the Austrian embassy for their passports and returned home to serve long prison sentences.

“Better behind bars in Austria,” they said, “than at liberty in the Soviet Union.”

The last of these refugees were shipped by the Soviet government to the International Brigade in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was moving swiftly on the road to totalitarian despotism, and the Comintern had long since outworn its original purpose.

The Communist International was founded by the Russian Bolshevik Party* twenty years ago in the belief that Europe was on the eve of world revolution. Lenin, its moving spirit, was convinced that the Socialist and labor parties of Western Europe by supporting the “imperialist war” waged by their governments from 1914 to 1918, had forfeited the support of the working masses. He believed that the traditional labor parties and Trade Union Federations of Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States with their faith in representative government and peaceful evolution to a more equitable social order, were completely outmoded; that it was the task of the victorious Russian Bolsheviks to provide revolutionary leadership to the workers of all nations. The vision which guided Lenin was a Communist United States of Europe and ultimately a world Communist order.

Lenin was certain that the Bolsheviks, despite their enthusiasm in the first flush of victory, could not build a Communist society in Russia unless the working classes of advanced countries came to their aid. He saw his bold experiment doomed to failure unless backward agricultural Russia was joined by at least one of the great industrial states. He put his biggest hopes in a speedy revolution in Germany.

The last twenty years indicate that Lenin underestimated the significance of existing labor organizations, trade-union as well as political, and over-estimated the adaptability to Western Europe of Russian Bolshevism, with its battle cry of the immediate overthrow of all governments, democratic as well as autocratic, and the establishment of an International Communist Dictatorship.

For two decades the Communist International—the Comintern—founded, inspired and directed by the Russian Bolsheviks, sought to implant their methods and their program beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. It established its Communist parties everywhere, patterned them closely after the highly centralized and disciplined Bolshevik model and made them responsible and obedient to the general staff in Moscow.

It sent its agents to every corner of the earth. It planned mass insurrections and military uprisings in Europe, in the Far East, and in the Western Hemisphere. And finally, when all these efforts failed, it embarked in 1935, upon its last course of political action, the Popular Front. In this final period, with the new weapons of camouflage and compromise, it made its greatest drive, penetrating into the organs of public opinion and even the governmental institutions of the leading democratic nations.

I was in a position from the very beginning until 1937 to observe closely the workings of the Comintern. I took a direct political and military part in its revolutionary actions abroad for eighteen years. I was one of the executive arms of Stalin’s intervention in Spain, during which the Comintern sent its forces into battle for the last time.

My work with the Comintern began in 1920 during the Russo-Polish war. I was then attached to the Soviet Military Intelligence for the Western Front which had its headquarters in Smolensk. As the Red Armies of Tukhachevsky moved toward Warsaw it was the function of our department to operate secretly behind the Polish lines, to create diversions, to sabotage the shipment of munitions, to shatter the morale of the Polish army by propaganda, and to furnish the general staff of the Red Army with military and political information.

As there was no clear line separating our work from that of the Comintern agents in Poland, we cooperated in every possible way with the recently formed Polish Communist Party, and we published a revolutionary newspaper Svit (Dawn) which we distributed among the soldiers of the Polish army.

On the day that Tukhachevsky stood before the gates of Warsaw, Dombal, a peasant deputy, declared in the Polish parliament: “I do not see in the Red Army an enemy. On the contrary, I greet the Red Army as the friend of the Polish people.”

To us this was an event of great importance. We printed Dombal’s speech in Svit, and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies throughout Poland, especially among the Polish soldiers.

Dombal was immediately arrested and confined in the Warsaw Citadel, the dreaded Polish political prison. After three years the Soviet government finally obtained his release by exchanging him for a number of Polish aristocrats and priests held as hostages. He then came to Moscow where he was acclaimed as one of the heroes of the Comintern. Lavish honors were heaped upon him and he was raised to a high position. For more than a decade, Dombal was one of the most important non-Russian officials of the Communist International.

In 1936 he was arrested on a charge of having been a Polish spy for seventeen years—ever since his speech in the Polish parliament. The Ogpu decided that Dombal’s greeting to the Red Army, as well as his three-year prison term, had been part of a prearranged plot of the Polish Military Intelligence. Dombal was executed.

During the Russo-Polish war the Polish Communist Party worked hand in hand with our department, and we prepared that party for action in cooperation with the Red Army. The Polish Communist Party obeyed all the commands of the advancing army of Tukhachevsky.

Members of the Polish Communist Party aided us in organizing sabotage, in creating diversions, and in impeding the arrival of munitions from France. We organized a strike in Danzig to prevent the landing of French munitions for the Polish army. I traveled to Warsaw, Cracow, Lemberg, German and Czech Silesia and to Vienna, organizing strikes to stop arms shipments. I organized a successful railroad strike in the Czech railroad junction of Oderberg, persuading the Czech trainmen to walk out, rather than handle Skoda munitions for the Poland of Pilsudski.

“Railroad workers!” I wrote in a leaflet. “You are transporting on your line guns to slaughter your Russian working-class brothers.”

At the same time, a Polish Soviet government, organized in anticipation of the capture of Warsaw, was moving with Tukhachevsky’s staff toward the Polish capital. Felix Djershinski, veteran Polish revolutionist and head of the Russian Cheka (the earlier name for the Ogpu) had been appointed by Moscow to head this government.

The Russo-Polish war was the one serious attempt made by Moscow to carry Bolshevism into Western Europe on the points of bayonets. It failed, despite all our efforts, military and political, despite the victories of the Red Army, and although we had a Polish section of the Comintern working with our political agitators and intelligence men behind the Polish front. In the end the exhausted Red Army was forced to fall back. Pilsudski remained master of Poland. Lenin’s hope of joining hands through Poland, with the revolutionary workers of Germany and helping them extend the revolution to the Rhine was lost.

The idea of hastening Bolshevist Revolution through military invasion had been entertained earlier, in 1919, during the existence of the short-lived Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet republics. Detachments of Red Guards were then only about a hundred miles from Hungarian territory. But the Bolsheviks were then too weak, and were moreover fighting against the Whites for their very existence.

By the beginning of 1921, when the treaty of Riga was signed between Russia and Poland, the Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin himself, realized that to bring successful revolutions to Western Europe was a serious and long-time task. There was no such hope of quick triumph on an international scale as had existed at the first and second Congresses of the Comintern when Zinoviev, its President, proclaimed that within one year all Europe would be Communist. Even after 1921, however, and as late as 1927, Moscow launched a series of revolutionary adventures and putsches.

In this series of irresponsible attempts, thousands of workers in Germany, in the Baltic and Balkan countries, and in China, were needlessly sacrificed. They were sent to slaughter by the Comintern on a gamble, with cooked-up schemes of military coups d’état, general strikes and rebellions none of which had any substantial chance of success.

Early in 1921 the situation in Russia was particularly threatening to the Soviet regime. Hunger, peasant uprisings, the revolt of the sailors in Kronstadt, and a general strike of the Petrograd workers, brought the government to the brink of disaster. All the victories of the Civil War seemed to have been in vain, as the Bolsheviks groped blindly in the face of opposition from those workers, peasants and sailors who had been their chief support. The Comintern, caught in this desperate situation, decided that the only way of saving Bolshevism was through a revolution in Germany. Zinoviev sent his trusted lieutenant Bela Kun, former head of the Hungarian Soviet republic, to Berlin.

Bela Kun appears in Berlin in March, 1921, with an order to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party from Zinoviev and the executive committee of the Comintern: There is a revolutionary situation in Germany. The Communist Party must seize power. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party is incredulous. The members can scarcely believe their ears. They know that they cannot hope to overthrow the Berlin government. But Bela Kun’s orders are clear: an immediate uprising, the abolition of the Weimar republic, and the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in Germany. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party obeys the instructions from Moscow. As a loyal subordinate of the Executive Committee of the Communist International headed by Zinoviev and directed by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek and Stalin, the German Communist Party it can not disobey.

On March twenty-second, a general strike was declared in the industrial districts of Mansfeld and Merseburg, central Germany. On March twenty-fourth, the Communists seized the city administration buildings at Hamburg. In Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, and other cities of central Germany the Communists directed their attack upon court houses, city halls, public banks and police headquarters. The official German Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, openly called for a revolution.

In the Mansfeld copper mining district, Max Hoelz, the Communist Robin Hood who had a year before single-handedly waged guerrilla warfare against the Berlin government throughout the Vogtland area of Saxony, arrived to announce that he was in charge of operations. About the same time a series of bombing outrages took place throughout Germany, including attempts to blow up public buildings and monuments in Berlin. In this the government recognized Hoelz’s expert hand.

On March twenty-fourth, the Communist workers in the huge nitrogen plant at Leuna, armed with rifles and hand grenades, barricaded themselves within the factory.

But the Communist effort to co-ordinate these localized actions broke down completely. Their loyal, trained party regulars responded to the call, and were sent to their death by the party, battalion after battalion, more ruthlessly than Ludendorff had sent his troops into battle. The great mass of workers neither responded to the call for a general strike, nor joined in the scattered outbreaks. By early April, the uprising had been put down everywhere.

The leader of the German Communist Party, Dr. Paul Levi, who had opposed the adventure as madness from the very start was expelled from the party for putting the blame in no uncertain language where it belonged.

He informed Moscow that it understood nothing of the conditions in Western Europe, that it had sacrificed the lives of thousands of workers upon an insane gamble. He referred to the Bolshevik leaders, and the emissaries of the Comintern as “scoundrels” and “cheap politicians.”

Within a short time after this March uprising, the Communist Party of Germany had lost half of its members. As for Max Hoelz, the Communist firebrand who expected to seize power by dynamite, he was tried on charges of “murder, arson, highway-robbery and fifty other counts” and sentenced to life imprisonment.

I was interested in Hoelz’s fate, because for all his wild notions, he was undoubtedly an honest and bold revolutionist. To the workers of his native Vogtland he has become a legendary figure. When I was stationed several years later in Breslau, where Hoelz was imprisoned, I established contact with one of his jailers who had become deeply attached to him. Through him I sent Hoelz books, chocolates and food. Together we plotted to liberate Hoelz. But it was necessary for me to obtain assistance as well as authorization from the Communist Party. I communicated with Hamann, the leader of the party in Breslau, and he promised to have several reliable men for me. I then went to Berlin and conferred with the Central Committee of the party. They debated the issue. Some wanted Hoelz released through a legal maneuver, such as electing him to the Reichstag. Others believed that his escape would be the very thing to galvanize the masses, who were then very apathetic to the Communist Party. I was granted permission to attempt the jail delivery. Upon my return to Breslau, however, the first thing Hoelz’s jailor told me was: “We have been ordered to chain up his door.”

The authorities had learned of our plot, through none other than Hamann himself, the leader of the Breslau Communists, member of the Reichstag—and police stool pigeon.

Hoelz was later released by legal means. Although I had been working to effect his escape and was in constant communication with him while in Breslau, I met him for the first time in Moscow in 1932, at the apartment of Kisch, the German Communist writer. When he learned who I was, he laughed:

“Oh, you are the rich American uncle who sent me good books and food.”

In Moscow Hoelz was a hero for a time. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a factory in Leningrad was named after him, and he was furnished with a good apartment at the Hotel Metropole. But when the Communists capitulated to Hitler in 1933 without firing a shot, and it became clear that this was the official policy of Stalin and the Comintern, Hoelz asked for his passport. He was put off day after day, and spies were set on his trail. He became furious. He demanded immediate permission to leave. His friends in Moscow now avoided him. The Ogpu refused to return his passport. A little later an insignificant notice appeared in the Pravda announcing that Hoelz had been found drowned in a stream outside Moscow. In the Ogpu I was told that after the rise of Hitler, Hoelz had been seen coming out of the German Embassy in Moscow. The fact is that Hoelz was killed by the Ogpu because his glorious revolutionary past made him a potential leader of the revolutionary opposition to the Comintern.

The defeat of the March uprising in Germany sobered Moscow considerably. Even Zinoviev toned down his proclamations and manifestoes. Europe was quite evidently not done with capitalism. Nor was Russia itself—for after the suppression of the peasant rebellions and the Kronstadt revolt, Lenin made important economic concessions to peasants and business men. Russia settled down to a period of internal reconstruction, and the world revolution went decidedly into the background. The Comintern was busy finding scapegoats for its defeats, cleaning out Communist Central Committees in various countries and appointing new leaders in their places. Factional fights in the Communist Parties abroad kept the machinery of the Comintern busy drawing up resolutions, counter-resolutions and expulsion orders.

In January, 1923 I was working in Moscow in the third section of the Intelligence Department of the Red Army. Word reached us that the French were about to occupy the Ruhr in order to collect reparations. I was living at this time in the Hotel Lux, which was also the chief residence of the officials of the Comintern and of visiting foreign Communists. . . .

I want to explain that the Hotel Lux was, and still is in fact, the headquarters of Western Europe in Moscow. Through its lobbies pass Communist leaders from every country, as well as trade union delegates, and individual workers who have in some fashion earned a trip to the proletarian Mecca.

Consequently, it is important for the Soviet government to keep a close watch upon the Hotel Lux, in order to discover exactly what the comrades in every country are saying and doing, to know their attitude toward the Soviet government and toward the warring factions within the Bolshevik Party. For this purpose the Hotel Lux is honeycombed with Ogpu agents registered as guests and residents. Among the agents who lived at the Hotel Lux and kept the Ogpu informed about the doings of foreign Communists and workers, was Constantine Oumansky, at present Soviet ambassador to the United States.

I met Oumansky in 1922 for the first time. Oumansky, born in Bessarabia, had lived in Rumania and Austria until 1922 when he came to Moscow. Because of his knowledge of foreign languages, he received a position with Tass, the official Soviet News Agency. His wife was a typist in the Comintern office.

When Oumansky’s turn came to serve in the Red Army he told me that he did not wish to “waste” two years in common army barracks. Soviet life then had not assumed the caste character it now bears, and his remark shocked me. Most Communists still look upon service in the Red Army as a privilege. Not so Oumansky. He presented himself at the offices of the Intelligence Department with a recommendation from Foreign Commissar Chicherin and from Doletsky, Chief of the Tass, requesting that he be permitted to “serve” his two years in the Army as a translator for the Fourth Department.

That very evening while I was in the company of Firin, at that time assistant to General Berzin, Chief of the Military Intelligence Department, I saw Oumansky in a Moscow restaurant. I went over to his table and asked him why he was dropping his job with Tass. He replied that he was going to kill two birds with one stone—keep his Tass job, and serve his military term in the Fourth Department offices.

When I told this to Firin, he replied angrily:

“You may rest assured that he will not work in the Fourth Department.”

In those years soft berths were not easily arranged, and Oumansky did not get the translator’s job with the Red Army. But he succeeded in staying out of those uncomfortable barracks by serving as a diplomatic courier of the foreign office. This was considered a substitute for military service, because all diplomatic couriers are on the staff of the Ogpu. Without giving up his Tass job, Oumansky traveled to Paris, Rome, Vienna, Tokyo and Shanghai.

Oumansky served the Ogpu in the Tass News Agency too, for here were Soviet journalists and correspondents having a dangerously close contact with the outside world. Oumansky was able to spy upon Tass reporters from every vantage point, from the Moscow office and from abroad. And at the Hotel Lux he kept his ear tuned sharply to bits of stray conversation exchanged by foreign Communists. All of Oumansky’s superiors, in every department in which he has worked, have either been removed and broken or fallen before the bullets of the purge. These include his former chief in the Tass, Doletsky, as well as nearly all his colleagues there; his former chief in the foreign office, Maxim Litvinov; Alexander Troyanovsky, first Soviet ambassador to the United States, and Vladimir Romm, Tass correspondent in Washington, his personal friend. Troyanovsky and Romm were recalled to Moscow from Washington while Oumansky was working side by side with them in the United States.

Oumansky is one of the few Communists who succeeded in crossing the barbed-wire frontier that separates the old Bolshevik Party from the new. During the purge there was only one passport across this frontier. You had to present Stalin and his Ogpu with the required quota of victims. Constantine Oumansky made good. . . .

When news reached our department of the French occupation of the Ruhr, a group of five or six officers, including myself, were ordered to leave at once for Germany. Within twenty-four hours all arrangements were made. Moscow hoped that the repercussions of the French occupation would open the way for a renewed Comintern drive in Germany.

Within a week I was in Berlin. My first impression was that Germany stood on the eve of cataclysmic events. Inflation had carried the reichsmark to astronomical heights; unemployment was wide-spread; there were daily street fights between workers and police, as well as between workers and nationalist fighting brigades. The French occupation added fuel to the flames. For a moment it even looked as if exhausted and impoverished Germany might take up arms in a suicidal war against France.

The Comintern leaders followed German events cautiously. They had come off badly in 1921, and they wanted to be certain that no blow was struck until internal chaos was complete. Our Intelligence Department, however, had given us very definite instructions. We were sent to Germany to reconnoiter, to mobilize elements of unrest in the Ruhr area, and to forge the weapons for an uprising when the proper moment arrived.

We at once created three types of organizations in the German Communist Party; the Party Intelligence Service working under the guidance of the Fourth Department of the Red Army; military formations as the nucleus of the future German Red Army, and Zersetzungsdienst, small units of men whose function was to shatter the morale of the Reichswehr and the police.

At the head of the Party Intelligence Service we named Hans Kiepenberger, the son of a Hamburg publisher. He worked tirelessly, weaving an elaborate spy net in the ranks of the army and police, the governmental apparatus, and every political party and hostile fighting organization. His agents penetrated the monarchist Stahlhelm, the Wehrwolf and the Nazi units. Working hand in hand with the Zersetzungsdienst, they secretly sounded out certain officers of the Reichswehr concerning the stand they would take in the event of a Communist uprising.

Kiepenberger served the Comintern with great loyalty and courage. During the events of 1923, his life was in danger every day. In the end he suffered the fate that befell all loyal Communists. Elected to the Reichstag in 1927, he became a member of the Committee on Military Affairs. Regarding himself as the Comintern’s representative on that body, he supplied the Soviet Military Intelligence with valuable information for many years. He remained in Germany for some months after Hitler came to power, continuing to do dangerous underground work for the Communist Party. In the fall of 1933 he fled to Russia. In 1936 he was arrested as a Nazi spy.

The Ogpu examiner pressed him for an admission that he was in the service of the German Intelligence. Kiepenberger refused to “confess.” “Ask Krivitsky whether I could become a Nazi agent,” he pleaded. “He knows what I did in Germany.”

“Didn’t you know General Bredow, head of the Reichswehr Military Intelligence?” asked the Ogpu examiner.

“Of course I knew him,” replied Kiepenberger, “I was a member of the Communist fraction of the Reichstag and on the Military Affairs Committee.” (General Bredow had frequently appeared before the Reichstag Committee.)

The Ogpu had no further “incriminating” evidence against Kiepenberger. Nevertheless, after six months of “questioning” the dauntless fighter “confessed” that he was in the service of the German Military Intelligence. “There is a nail in my head,” he kept repeating. “Give me something that will put me to sleep.”

We Soviet officers organized German Communist Military formations, the foundation of the German Red Army that was never to be, in a very systematic fashion, dividing them into units of one hundred men, Hundertschaft. We prepared lists of Communists who had served in the war, cataloging them according to their military rank. Out of this list we expected to create the officers corps of the German Red Army. We also organized a technical staff of experienced specialists: machine-gunners, artillery officers, the nucleus of an aviation corps, and a liaison personnel chosen from trained wireless and telephone operators. We set up an organization of women and trained them for hospital duty.

In the Ruhr, however, as a result of the French occupation, we were faced with an entirely different problem. The Ruhr was the scene of one of the strangest spectacles in history. Unable to oppose French arms by force, the Germans were waging a war of passive resistance. Mines and factories shut down, leaving only skeleton staffs at their places to prevent the mines from flooding and to keep factory equipment in working order. Railroads were almost at a standstill. Unemployment was universal. The Berlin government, already faced with a fantastic inflation, supported virtually the entire population of the Ruhr.

Meanwhile the French began to encourage the Separatist movement which aimed to detach the entire Rhineland from German and form an independent state. Casual observers thought that the Separatist movement was nothing but French propaganda. In fact, however, it was native and very serious, and if the British had not opposed it, the Rhineland would have severed itself from Germany in 1923. In many Rhenish homes I saw busts of Napoleon, the creator of the Confederation of the Rhine. Often enough I heard the inhabitants complain that their rich country was exploited by Prussia.

The Communist Party opposed the Separatist movement by every means at its disposal. The slogan of the Comintern was “War Against Stresemann and Poincaré!” The slogan of the Nazis and their nationalist allies was: “War Against Poincaré and Stresemann!” It was during these days that Schlageter, a Nazi terrorist, was executed by the French military authorities. Schlageter’s death would have passed unnoticed outside the narrow circle of his comrades had not Karl Radek, the Comintern’s cleverest propagandist, brought it home to the German people. “Join the Communists,” cried Radek, “and you will liberate the Fatherland nationally and socially!”

For a time negotiations went on between Radek and a number of Nazi and Nationalist leaders, notably Count Reventlow. The basis for collaboration was that German nationalism’s sole chance of success was in joining hands with Bolshevik Russia against imperialist France and Great Britain. But this union was not consummated. It was not until 1939 that it finally took place under conditions vastly different from those contemplated by Moscow when Germany was the underdog.

Meanwhile everything was prepared for a Separatist coup d’état. The leaders of the Separatist Party—Mathes, Dorten, Smith—marshaled their forces. A great demonstration in Dusseldorf late in September was to be the signal for the proclamation of the Rhenish republic.

The Nationalists were combatting the Separatists by individual acts of terror. The Communist Party called a counter-demonstration “against the Separatist traitors.” When the two conflicting forces met at a cross section in the city, I saw, for the first time in my life, Communists fighting side by side with Nationalist terrorists and the German police. The Separatists were defeated, mainly because of the interference of the pro-German British cabinet.

Even while we were supporting German Nationalists against the French in the Rhineland and the Ruhr with every weapon at our disposal, we decided that in the event of a Communist uprising in Germany, we would not allow ourselves to be drawn into conflict with French military forces. Our plan of strategy, as formulated by our staff officers in the Rhineland, called for the withdrawal of our party military formations into central Germany, into Saxony, and Thuringia, where the Communists were particularly strong at that time. We trained our units with that in mind.

In preparing for the Communist revolution, the German Communists created small terrorist groups, so-called “T” units, to demoralize the Reichswehr and the police by assassinations. The “T” units were composed of fiercely courageous zealots.

I recall a meeting of one of these groups on a September evening in the city of Essen, shortly before the Communist uprising. I recall how they came together, quietly, almost solemnly, to receive their orders. Their commander announced tersely:

“Tonight we act.”

Calmly they took out their revolvers, checked them for the last time, and filed out one by one. The very next day the Essen press reported the discovery of the body of a murdered police officer, assassin unknown. For weeks these groups struck swiftly and effectively in various parts of Germany, picking off police officers and other enemies of the Communist cause.

When peace came these fanatics could find no place in the orderly life of the country. Many of them took part in armed holdups for revolutionary purposes at first, and then simply in acts of brigandage. The few who found their way to Russia usually wound up in Siberia in exile.

In the meantime the German Communist Party was awaiting instructions from the Comintern which seemed incredibly slow in coming. In September Brandler, the leader of the party, and several of his colleagues were summoned to Moscow for instructions. Interminable discussions took place in the Political Bureau, the supreme body of the Russian Communist Party, where the Bolshevik leaders were debating the proper hour to launch a German revolution. For many anxious hours the leaders of the German Communist Party cooled their heels in Moscow while the Bolshevik brain trust was formulating its final plan of action.

Moscow decided to do the thing thoroughly this time. It secretly dispatched its best people into Germany: Bukharin; Max Levine, who had been one of the leaders of the four weeks’ Bavarian Soviet dictatorship; Piatakov, Hungarian and Bulgarian Comintern agents, and Karl Radek himself. We Red Army men in Germany continued training our military forces. We held secret night maneuvers in the woods near Solingen in the Rhineland in which several thousand workers would take part.

At last the word went around: “Zinoviev has set the date for the uprising.”

Communist Party units throughout Germany awaited their final instructions. A telegram arrived from Zinoviev to the German Central Committee fixing the exact hour. Comintern couriers hastened to the various party centers with the command from Moscow. Guns were removed from their hiding places. With mounting tension we awaited the zero hour. And then. . . .

“A new telegram from ‘Grisha,’ ” said the Communist leaders. “The insurrection is postponed!”

Again the Comintern couriers sped through Germany with new orders and a new date for the revolution. This state of alarm continued for several weeks. Almost every day a new telegram would arrive from ‘Grisha’ (Zinoviev)—new orders, new plans, new agents from Moscow with new instructions and new revolutionary blueprints. At the beginning of October, orders came through for the Communists to join the governments of Saxony and Thuringia in coalition with the Left Socialists. Moscow thought that these governments would become effective rallying centers for the Communists, and that the police could be disarmed in advance of the uprising.

At last the stage was set. A categorical telegram came through from Zinoviev. Again the couriers of the Comintern sped to every party district in Germany passing along the word. Again the Communist battalions mobilized for the attack. The hour drew near. There could be no turning back now, we thought, and awaited with relief the end of those nerve-wracking weeks of delay. At the last moment the Central Committee of the German Party was again hurriedly convened.

“A new telegram from ‘Grisha’! The insurrection is postponed again!”

Again messengers were dispatched with urgent last minute cancellation orders to the party centers. But the courier to Hamburg arrived too late. The Hamburg Communists, with true German discipline, went into battle at the appointed hour. Hundreds of workers armed with rifles attacked the police station. Others occupied strategic points in the city.

Communist workers in other parts of Germany were thrown into a state of panic.

“Why are we doing nothing while the workers of Hamburg are fighting?” they asked the district leaders of their party. “Why don’t we come to their aid?”

The party lieutenants had no answer to give them. Only those on top knew that the workers of Hamburg were perishing because of ‘Grisha’s’ latest telegram. The Hamburg Communists held out for about three days. The great working-class masses of the city remained indifferent, and Saxony and Thuringia did not come to the aid of the Communists. The Reichswehr under General Von Seckt entered Dresden and threw the Communist-Left Socialist cabinet of Saxony out of office. The Thuringia cabinet suffered the same fate. The Communist revolution had fizzled out.

Those of us in Germany all knew that headquarters in Moscow were responsible for the fiasco. The entire strategy of the proposed revolution had been worked out by the Bolshevik leaders of the Comintern. This made it necessary to find a scapegoat. The factional rivals of Brandler in the German Party were familiar with the Comintern technique of covering up the mistakes of the high command, and they at once swung into action.

“Brandler and the Central Committee are responsible for our failure to capture power,” shouted the new “opposition” headed by Ruth Fischer, Thaelmann and Maslow.

“Entirely correct,” echoed Moscow. “Brandler is an opportunist, a social democrat. He must go! All hail to the new revolutionary leadership of Ruth Fischer, Thaelmann and Maslow!”

At the next World Congress of the Comintern this was all dressed up in ritualistic resolutions and decrees, and with Moscow’s blessings the German Communist Party was turned over to its new general staff.

Brandler received an order to come to Moscow, where he was deprived of his German passport and given a Soviet office job. German matters, he was informed by Zinoviev, were no longer to concern him. All of his efforts to return to Germany were unsuccessful until his friends threatened to create an international scandal by bringing the matter to the attention of the Berlin government. Only then was he released from Soviet Russia and expelled from the Communist Party.

Souvarine, the eminent French writer and author of the most comprehensive biography of Stalin, had the same experience. Ousted in 1924 from the leadership of the French Communist Party by order of the Comintern, he was detained by the Soviet government until his friends in Paris threatened to appeal to the French authorities.

Upon one branch of the Soviet government the costly experiment of 1923 was not entirely wasted. That was the Military Intelligence Service. When we saw the collapse of the Comintern’s efforts, we said: “Let’s save what we can of the German revolution.” We took the best men developed by our Party Intelligence and the Zersetzungsdienst, and incorporated them into the Soviet Military Intelligence. Out of the ruins of the Communist revolution we built in Germany for Soviet Russia a brilliant intelligence service, the envy of every other nation.

Shaken by the defeat in Germany, Moscow began looking for other fields of conquest. By the late fall of 1924, Germany had become stabilized. The Communist International after nearly six years had not a single victory with which to justify its enormous squandering of money and lives. Thousands of Comintern parasites were on the Soviet payrolls. Zinoviev’s position within the Bolshevik Party was beginning to wobble. A victory, somehow, somewhere, was necessary at any cost.

On Soviet Russia’s western border was Estonia, a tiny nation, then apparently in the throes of a crisis. Zinoviev and the executive committee of the Comintern decided to throw all Marxian theory to the wind. Summoning the chief of the Intelligence Department of the Red Army, General Berzin, Zinoviev spoke to him along these lines: Estonia is in a revolutionary crisis. We will not act there as we did in Germany. We will use new methods—no strikes, no agitation. All we need is a few courageous groups under the command of a handful of Red Army officers, and in two or three days we will be masters of Estonia.

General Berzin was a man who obeyed orders. In a few days a group of about sixty reliable Red Army officers, mainly Baltic Russians, was organized under Zhibur, one of the heroes of the civil war. They were directed to enter Estonia through different routes, some through Finland and Latvia, others by slipping across the Soviet border. Awaiting them in Estonia were scattered special Communist units totaling about two hundred men. By late November all preparations were ready.

On the morning of December 1, 1924, a “revolution” struck at specified focal points in Reval, the capital. The country remained completely calm. The workers proceeded to their factories as usual. Business moved at a normal pace, and in about four hours the “revolution” was completely crushed. About one hundred and fifty Communists were shot on the spot. Hundreds of others not connected with the affair in any way, were jailed. The Red Army officers returned quickly to Russia along pre-arranged routes. Zhibur reappeared at his desk in the offices of the General Staff, and the Estonian “revolution” was hushed up as quickly as possible.

In Bulgaria, the Comintern enjoyed a period of prosperity while Stambouliski, the leader of the Peasant Party, was in power. Stambouliski was friendly to Moscow. The remnants of General Wrangel’s White Army, which the Bolsheviks had driven out of the Crimea, were on Bulgarian territory, and the Soviet government was anxious to break up this force. With Stambouliski’s consent Russia sent a group of secret agents into Bulgaria for this purpose. These agents used every method of propaganda, including the publication of a newspaper, and every means of terror, including assassination. To a considerable extent they were successful in demoralizing this potential anti-Soviet army.

Despite these friendly relations between Stambouliski and Moscow, when in 1923 Tsankoff executed a military revolt against Stambouliski’s government Moscow directed the Bulgarian Communist Party to remain neutral. The Communist leaders hoped that as a result of the death struggle between the army reactionaries and Stambouliski, they would gain full power for themselves.

Stambouliski was overthrown and slain. Tsankoff established a military dictatorship. Thousands of innocent people went to the gallows, and the Communist Party was driven underground.

Two years passed and the Comintern decided that the time had come for a Communist putsch against the Tsankoff government. A conspiracy was organized in Moscow by the leaders of the Bulgarian Communist Party with the assistance of Red Army officers. One of these Bulgarian leaders was George Dimitrov. The Communists learned that on April 16, 1925, all the ranking members of the Bulgarian government would attend services in the Sveti Cathedral in Sofia. They decided to use the occasion for their uprising. By order of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Party, a bomb was exploded in the cathedral during the religious services. About one hundred and fifty persons were killed. But Premier Tsankoff and the important members of his government survived. All the direct participants in the bombing were executed.

Dimitrov himself continued to work for the Comintern in Moscow. He became its representative in Germany. Late in 1932 he was ordered back to Moscow, and people on the inside said that his career was at an end. Before he could obey the order he was arrested in connection with the historic Reichstag fire. His bold and clever behavior before the Nazi court, where he succeeded in fixing the guilt on the Nazis themselves, made him the Communist hero of the day.

It is one of the inimitable ironies of Comintern history that Dimitrov, one of those responsible for the Sofia bombing, later became, as president of the Comintern, the official spokesman of “democracy,” “peace,” and the popular front.

Moscow had elaborate theoretical explanations for its failures in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Estonia and Bulgaria. These filled volumes of theses, resolutions and reports. In no case, however, was it suggested that Bolshevism and its Russian leaders were responsible. The myth of the infallibility of the Comintern leaderhip was preserved with ecclesiastical stubbornness. The clearer became the fact of failure, the more grandiose became the plans for the future, and the more complicated the international structure of the Comintern.

Although the Communist International never accomplished its primary aim, the establishment of a Communist dictatorship, in a single country, it became—especially after it turned to the stratagem of the popular front—one of the most important political agencies in the world.

The general framework of the Comintern is no secret. It is widely known that there are Communist Parties, legal or illegal, in every country of the world. The world knows that the headquarters are in Moscow. But it knows almost nothing of the real apparatus, and its intimate connection with the Ogpu and Soviet Military Intelligence.

The general staff of the Comintern is located in a building facing the Kremlin and heavily guarded by Ogpu agents in civilian attire. It is no spot for curious Muscovites to congregate. Persons who have business within the building, whatever their rank, are subjected to the very closest scrutiny from the moment they enter until they depart. To the left of the main entrance is the office of the commandant, staffed by Ogpu agents.

If Earl Browder, general secretary of the American Communist Party, desires an audience with Dimitrov, he must obtain a pass in the commandant’s office, where his papers will be thoroughly examined. Before he is permitted to leave the Comintern building his pass will again be examined. It must bear, in Dimitrov’s hand, the exact moment when their interview ended. If any time has elapsed since the end of the interview, an investigation is conducted on the spot. Every minute spent in the Comintern building must be accounted for and recorded. Informal chats in the corridors are severely discouraged and it is not unusual for an Ogpu agent to reprimand a ranking official of the Comintern for violation of these rules. This system provides the Ogpu with a comprehensive file regarding the associations of Russian and foreign Communists, which can be put to use at the proper time.

The heart of the Comintern is the little known and never publicized International Liaison Section, known by its Russian initials as the O.M.S.* Until the purge got under way, the O.M.S. was headed by Piatnitsky, a veteran Bolshevik, trained during the Czarist regime in the practical business of distributing illegal revolutionary propaganda. Piatnitsky had been in charge of the transport of Lenin’s paper, Iskra, from Switzerland to Russia in the early part of the century. When the Communist International was organized Lenin’s choice for head of the all-important Foreign Liaison Section naturally fell upon Piatnitsky. As the chief of the O.M.S. he became, in effect, the Finance Minister and Director of Personnel of the Comintern.

He created a world-wide network of permanently stationed agents responsible to him, to act as the liaison officers between Moscow and the nominally autonomous Communist Parties of Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States. As resident agents of the Comintern, these O.M.S. representatives hold the whip over the leaders of the Communist Party in the country in which they are stationed. Neither the rank and file, nor even the majority of the leaders of the Communist Parties, know the identity of the O.M.S. representative, who is responsible to Moscow, and who does not participate directly in party discussions.

In recent years the Ogpu has gradually taken over many of the O.M.S. functions, especially the hunting down and reporting to Moscow of cases of heresy against Stalin. However, in the immensely complicated work of subsidizing and co-ordinating the activities of the Communist Parties, the O.M.S. is still the chief instrument.

The most delicate job entrusted to the O.M.S. resident agents is the distribution of money to finance the Communist Parties, their expensive propaganda and their false fronts—such, for instance, as the League for Peace and Democracy, the International Labor Defense, the International Workers’ Aid, the Friends of the Soviet Union, and a host of ostensibly non-partisan organizations, which became especially important cogs when Moscow embarked upon the popular front.

For many years, while revolutionary prospects there seemed promising, the Comintern poured the greater part of its money into Germany and Central Europe. But when it became more decisively an appendage of the Soviet government, and revolutionary objectives were sidetracked in favor of Stalinizing public opinion and capturing key positions in the democratic governments, Moscow’s budgets for France, Great Britain and the United States were enormously increased.

At no time has any single Communist Party in the world managed to cover more than a very small percentage of its expenses. Moscow’s own estimate is that it must bear on an average from ninety to ninety-five per cent of the expenditures of foreign Communist Parties. This money is paid from the Soviet treasury through the O.M.S. in sums decided upon by Stalin’s Political Bureau.

The O.M.S. resident agent is the judge, in the first instance, of the wisdom of any new expenditure which a Communist Party wishes to make. In the United States, for example, if the Political Bureau of the American Communist Party contemplates the publication of a new newspaper, the O.M.S. agent is consulted. He considers the suggestion, and if it merits attention he communicates with the O.M.S. headquarters in Moscow. From there, in important cases, it is referred to the Political Bureau of the Russian Bolshevik Party for decision. In minor matters, of course, the O.M.S. representative has wide discretion.

One of the favorite methods of transmitting money and instructions from Moscow to a foreign country for the use of the local Communist Party is through the diplomatic pouches, which are immune from search. For this reason the O.M.S. representative is usually employed in a nominal capacity in the Soviet Embassy. From Moscow he receives, in packages bearing the seal of the Soviet government, rolls of bank notes together with sealed instructions for their distribution. He personally delivers the roll of bills to the Communist leader, with whom he maintains direct contact. Through carelessness, American, British and French bank notes have several times been sent abroad for Comintern use bearing the telltale stamp of the Soviet State Bank.

In the first years of the Comintern the financing was done even more crudely. I recall a time when the procedure was for the Political Bureau to order the Cheka (Ogpu) to deliver sacks of confiscated diamonds and gold to the Comintern for shipment abroad. Still other methods have since been developed. Convenient blinds are the Soviet Trading Corporations, such as the Arcos in London and the Amtorg in the United States, and connected private business firms. The constant displacement of leaders in the foreign Communist Parties presents its own special problem to the O.M.S. in its monetary operations. When Moscow supplanted the leadership of the German Communist Party, after the failure of the 1923 uprising, Mirov-Abramov, the O.M.S. agent in Germany, as well as Piatnitsky in Moscow, spent many anxious hours wondering whom they could now trust with Comintern money. It was a relief to them when Wilhelm Pieck was retained in the new Central Committee, for both Piatnitsky and Mirov-Abramov trusted this veteran labor leader.

Mirov-Abramov, whom I knew for many years, was the O.M.S. representative in Germany from 1921 to 1930. Officially he worked in the press department of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. Actually he directed the distribution of money and the transmission of Comintern instructions throughout Germany and the greater part of Central Europe. At the height of the Comintern’s German drive, Mirov-Abramov employed a staff of more than twenty-five assistants and couriers. Later he was recalled to Moscow to work as Piatnitsky’s assistant. When the old Bolshevik general staff of the Comintern was liquidated by Stalin, Mirov-Abramov together with Piatnitsky were removed. Because of his exceptional underground contacts in Germany, Mirov-Abramov was then transferred to the Soviet Military Intelligence where he served until 1937, when he was shot in the great purge. Absurdly enough, when Yagoda, the fallen chief of the Ogpu, was tried the following year, he declared on the witness stand that he had sent large sums of money through Mirov-Abramov to Trotsky.

Managing the finances of the Comintern and its foreign section is only a small part of the tasks of the O.M.S. It functions also as the nervous system of the Comintern. Envoys dispatched by Moscow as political commissars to the Communist Parties of foreign countries establish all their contacts through the O.M.S., which furnishes them with passports, directs them to “reliable” addresses, and generally acts as the permanent liaison staff between the home offices in Moscow and these political agents abroad.

A notable Comintern Commissar for the United States some years ago was the Hungarian Communist, Pogany, known in this country as John Pepper. His primary mission here was to remove Lovestone and Gitlow, the leaders of the American Communist Party, after they had won a vote of confidence from the vast majority of the party members. Pogany-Pepper carried out his orders, and installed a new high command for the American Communist Party. Pepper himself was arrested in Moscow in 1936 and shot.

The passport division of the O.M.S., unlike the Ogpu and Military Intelligence, does not actually manufacture passports. It gets genuine documents whenever possible and doctors them according to requirements. In obtaining passports it draws upon the fanatical zeal of Communist members and sympathizers. If the O.M.S. representative in the United States requires two American passports for Comintern agents in China, he communicates with his man in the American Communist Party. This latter obtains genuine United States passports from party members or sympathizers. The O.M.S. staff then removes the photographs, substitutes others and skillfully makes the other necessary changes.

Moscow has always been fond of American passports. In another connection I have described the part they played in the Spanish Civil War. It is not unusual for the O.M.S. representative or Ogpu agents to send batches of American passports to Moscow, where the central O.M.S. office has a staff of about ten people engaged in fixing such documents according to the Comintern’s needs.

In 1924 the Berlin police raided the O.M.S. headquarters there, and seized a batch of German passports, together with files listing the names of their original owners, the true names of the Comintern agents then using them, and the fictitious names with which they were traveling. For such reasons of course a genuine passport is much preferred.

In 1927 the Comintern and the Ogpu sent Earl Browder to China. I do not know why Browder was chosen for the mission, but I believe the main reason was his American passport. I am reminded in this connection of a conversation I had with Piatnitsky. He had a man working for him named Lobonovsky, whose incompetence was always the subject of anecdotes in our circle. I would often run into Lobonovsky in one of the capitals of Europe as he scurried about on seemingly important missions. Later I had occasion to discuss him with Piatnitsky.

“Tell me frankly, Comrade Piatnitsky,” I said, “why do you keep that idiot on your staff?”

The veteran Bolshevik leader smiled tolerantly and replied:

“My dear young Walter, the question here is not Lobonovsky’s capability. What is important is that he has a Canadian passport and I need a Canadian for the missions on which I send him. No one else will do.”

“Canadian!” I exclaimed. “Lobonovsky isn’t a Canadian. He’s a Ukranian born in Shepetovka.”

Piatnitsky bellowed.

“What do you mean, a Ukranian born in Shepetovka! He has a Canadian passport. That’s good enough for me. Do you think it’s so easy to find a real Canadian? We’ve got to make the best of a Canadian born in Shepetovka!”