THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

THE KREMLIN
AND THE PEOPLE

Walter Durantf

THE

KREMLIN

AND THE

PEOPLE

Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc. New York

COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY WALTER DURANTY

All rights reserved, including the right to

reproduce this book, or portions

thereof, in any -form

Second Printing

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE CORNWALL PRESS, CORNWALL, N. Y.

To my friend, John Cooper Wiley, the "ablest of

the younger American diplomats/ who has served

in the U.S.S.R. and knows Europe better than I

do, but seldom agrees with me about either.

>O,r

CONTENTS

I. The Whys and Wherefores of the

U.S.S.R i

II. Kirof s Murder 21

III. The Kamenef-Zinovief Trial ... 38

IV. The Execution of the "Generals". . 54
V. The Bukharin-Yagoda Trial ... 70

VI. The Great Purge 116

VII. The U.S.S.R. and Munich .... 136

VIII. The Hearts of the Russian People . 155

IX. The Period of "Neutrality" . ... 166

X. The U.S.S.R. at War 190

Index 217

THE KREMLIN
AND THE PEOPLE

I. THE WHYS AND WHEREFORES
OF THE U.S.S.R.

I AM SUPPOSED to know about Russia, because
I ve been there twenty years and speak the
language fluently and have interviewed Stalin
twice, and ought to know about Russia. Well, I
don t know all. The Russians have a saying,
"What man in his little head can compass mighty
Russia?" I fear that saying is true. I know enough
o the U.S.S.R. to know how little I know, and I
can t explain "What" or "How." If you want that,
you must read Russian books, like one called
Red Planes Fly East, by Piotr Pavlenko, which has
been translated and published in New York. Or
Cement and Quiet Flows the Don, which have
also been translated; or Tolstoy s War and Peace,

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

about Napoleon, which is truer today, far truer,
than when it was written, in 1864, and gives
you a vision seen and depicted by an artist of
something which happened a hundred and thirty
years ago and is being repeated, miraculously.
The essential question is "Why," and few books
certainly no short books can pretend to ex
pound the "What." That of course is best done by
fiction. I say Chekov and Dostoyevsky will teach
you more about Russia than twenty long-winded
books. Because people, you know, don t change,
at least they do not change quickly, their nature
does not change. The Russians are always Rus
sians, and the wonderful thing about them is that
they are so Russian, so alike in character, although
there are seventy-nine different major languages
in the U.S.S.R., and hundreds of minor dialects.
They act alike and think alike, and this goes for
the Tsarist emigres as it goes for the Bolsheviks at
home. I say Russians are always Russians, and
every Russian is the same Russian, kind, cruel,
hospitable, envious, suspicious, affectionate, gen
erous, will shoot you as soon as look, and if he hap
pens to miss might kiss you the next minute on
both cheeks.

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

The new Russians hate to be told this. They
think they have changed their spots, or cast their
swart Ethiop skin. But they haven t. They cannot
escape what life made them, the way they were
molded by life, for centuries, as we all are
molded by years. The basic fact about Russians
is that they re a childish people, a young people,
full of strength, and of the heat and nonsense of
childhood. They ve not yet had time to grow up,
because for hundreds of years they accepted more
or less willingly the life and condition of slaves.
There was no Magna Charta in Russia, no process
of habeas corpus, no freedom of press or speech.
Do you realize that in 1914 the will of the Tsar
was law for the highest and the lowest, and no one
could gainsay it? That the whole vast country was
run for the benefit of about 5 per cent of its
population, who got the plums and the gravy,
while the rest of them did the work? That only
one out of five could read or write, that the top-
dogs lived in luxury and splendor to make even
Hollywood blink, and the others lived like pigs,
in filth and disease and hunger?

How can I picture all that, or the changes that
I have seen? The Russian himself has not changed,

3

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

but the process of change is working. It will take
considerable time. Lenin said, "Give me three
generations/ but he added something else: "Give
me five years talk to the children, and my clock
shall not be set back/ He meant literally what
he said, as the Freudians say and the Jesuits, that
the early years are the formative years, that what
you learn first lies deepest, and the short phrase,
"Teach the children/ is the meaning of statecraft
always. Lenin doubtless used the word "children"
literally, as I have said, with no reference to the
childishness of his people, their swift jumps from
hot to cold, from friendliness to killing, from de
spair to the heights of joy. Lenin would have
resented my remarks, because Lenin was not child
ish, although he was wholly Russian, a truly typi
cal Russian, with just a touch of the Tartar. He
was born on the outer edge of what is now the
Tartar Republic, at Simbirsk called Ulianovsk to
day, after him, because his real name was Ulianof,
not Lenin.

In one of the great moments of my life, on the
day after Lenin died, I heard his widow tell why
her husband became a Bolshevik. He had, it seems,
a brother, older than he, whom he loved. This

4

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

brother was educated in St. Petersburg, and main
tained, as any boy would he was only twenty-one
friendship and correspondence with some of his
classmates there. He wrote a letter to one of them,
just the usual sort of letter, about "how are things
with you, and I m doing this and that, and let me
hear from you soon, and what are your plans/
and so on an ordinary letter. But it seems that
the boy who received it was closely involved in the
assassination of the Tsar, which happened about
that time. So the Tsarist police hanged him, and
for good measure hanged Lenin s brother as well,
because he had written that letter.

Lenin s widow told this story in a matter-of-fact
way, with accents of utmost truth. She said, "My
husband loved his brother. He admired and loved
him dearly. He was only eighteen when it hap
pened, but old enough to think. He thought he
would tear them down, the Tsars from their
golden thrones, because this thing was wrong, it
could not and must not exist. No power should
have the right to take a boy from his home and
hang him like a dog because he had written a
letter." She said, "My husband saw that, and
thought what he ought to do. He thought for a

5

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

long time before he made up his mind. And finally
he thought that the source of it all was money, or
rather love of money, and money s power. He
thought that was wicked and bad, the limitless
power of money. He had read the book of Karl
Marx [which I personally think is a long dull
book, and tediously written everything Marx had
to say in that long dull book was better and far
more succinctly said in a pamphlet called The
Communist Manifesto which he wrote jointly
with Friedrich Engels] called Das Kapital, and
decided for himself, this youngster of eighteen,
that here was the key of the problem. And so,
his widow told us, "Vladimir Ilyich Ulianof be
came a Marxist," and everyone knows that he has
set the Marxist stamp on one-sixth of the world s
land surface, which may grow bigger tomorrow, if
Stalin has something to say.

I wrote the "What" about Lenin, not the
"Why" nor the "How" but the "What," the
"What" of his funeral in Moscow when 750,000
people stood in the snow for an average of five
hours in a temperature thirty below zero Fahren
heit, to have the honor and privilege of walking
through the room where his body lay in state, to
6

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

say farewell to their leader. That story wrote it
self, I saw what I saw and wrote it regardless of
length, ten thousand words a day> and Mr. Sedg-
wick, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whom
I did not know, sent me a message out of a clear
sky saying, "Your Lenin story was grand/ That s
the kind of thing that makes a reporter feel good.
It doesn t happen often, but when it does you feel
good.

If you catch the implication of this not-so-
modest passage, it is that I can write "What/* But
I won t do it in this book. The thing that matters
is "Why," and the only way to know "Why" is go
back to what went before, to seek and find the
cause, in order to know the effect. Let me show
you at once and simply the book I am trying to
write. It s this, that starting from Kirof s murder
in 1934, I saw the gradual development of Nazi
action against the U.S.S.R., which culminated in
war on June 22, 1941. Do not think that the
"Trials" and the "Purge" are dead bones, with
out flesh or substance. The men whose last words
I relate are dead . . . that I know . . . and
dust; but the reasons behind their crimes, or
follies, or misdemeanors, is the answer to Russia

7

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

today, the reason why Russia has fought bravely.

At this point I take time out for some personal
explanation. I am, you see, a reporter, and I care
for "none of these things," as they said of the
Roman Gallic in the long-past days of St. Paul.
I don t care for their "isms" and "ologies," I want
only to find the truth and write it as best I can.

I thought, if you want to know, that the Bolshe
viks were disgusting: I was in Latvia in late 1919
and early 1920 with the army that fought the
Reds. And beat them, the only time they were
beaten, did the Lettish Army, which re-took its
province of Lettgalen, and drove the Reds out of
this Lettish province. I met scores of men and
women who had suffered hell and worse from the
Bolshevik Revolution. I thought the Bolsheviks
were terrible. What s more, I had been at French
Headquarters in the last year of the war, and there
it was an article of faith that the Bolsheviks nearly
killed us, that their Peace of Brest-Litovsk had be
trayed the Allied cause and released a million Ger
mans to shatter the Allied line. They did shatter
it, in March, 1918, when they knocked to pieces
a British army, and it seemed to us who knew
that the road to Paris was open, with all which
8

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

that implied. From March until July, the Ger
mans looked like winning, because of that Bolshe
vik Peace, and didn t I know it and know! The
day of their final offensive, July 15 it was, the
French Headquarters told me: "Write your story
down, make it pessimistic. We are not really
afraid, because the Americans are coming at the
rate of half a million a month, but make it pessi
mistic, because we may lose Paris, or have Paris
under the gun, and that is a kettle of fish. Write
your story dark and down, so the folks at home
will know how strong the Germans still are, and
how much we need their help."

As it happened, that drive was checked. The
Fourth Army under Gouraud held the Germans
where they hit, and in the center of his line were
Americans helping him hold. Four days later, on
the nineteenth, Foch counter-attacked near Sois-
sons, but even then Headquarters was doubtful, at
the beginning. They said: "Don t call it a counter-
offensive. You can say that our troops have at
tacked, but don t call it a counter-offensive/ This
is the truth that I am telling you, and it is inter
esting. They said that at 9 A.M., but at noon they
said: "Now you can write that the Allied forces,

9

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

French, British and American troops, have at
tacked the enemy on an eighty-mile front facing
Soissons and driven him back at all points. For the
first time this year the Allies have the initiative."
So they did, and never lost it, and the war was
won in three months.

Anyway, when I went to Moscow in August,
1921, with the Hoover Relief people, carrying
relief for that ghastly famine which menaced
thirty million lives and at the peak feeding eleven
million men, women, and children, and saving
their lives when I went to Moscow, then I
thought the Bolsheviks were dreadful. I thought
they were murderous apes and enemies of God
and man. I thought that, but the strangest thing
is that when you are helping people and even in
my way I was helping, by writing stories about
what the A.R.A. (American Relief Association)
was doing for the Russians I say when you are
helping people you somehow begin to like them.
All the A.R.A. folks felt like that; they didn t like
the Bolsheviks, but they were helping them, or
anyway helping the Russians, in an hour of the
blackest need. They d have died like flies without
us, they were dying as it was, and we helped them
10

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

and had to like them: it s a psychological truth.
So I said to myself, "O well ... I rather do like
the Russians. They may be as bad as I thought,
but I rather do like the Russians. And anyway,
why should I care? ... it wasn t my people they
killed." That was, i you ll allow me, the first
stage in my education.

The next one came later when I picked Stalin
out of six possible successors to Lenin. It was
some time in 1923 when I knew that Death s hand
was on Lenin s shoulder. I knew that he was
doomed, and looked at the men around him, to
see who might carry his torch. The one that I
picked was Stalin, for reasons too long to tell here,
and I picked him and backed him throughout,
the way that you back a horse. He said to me once
himself, "You bet on the right horse." Ostensibly,
he was talking about Russia, but he knew and I
knew that he really meant he was talking about
himself, that I had picked him first and bet on
him throughout. Against Trotsky, or Tukhachev-
sky, or Yagoda, or Bukharin, or any of them.

I backed Stalin the way you back a horse, until
you think of it as "your" horse: though it may be
long to Whitney or Widener or someone, you

11

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

think of it as your horse because you always backed
it. That s how I felt about Russia, that s how I
feel about Stalin. I don t care a whoop for social
ism, or totalitarianism, or any of their "isms." Oh,
perhaps, some day in the future, but hardly today,
and certainly not for us. Maybe the Russians can
make good with State capitalism, which isn t
quite socialism, and surely isn t communism, but
why should we follow their line? I think that our
trend is clear, toward State-controlled capitalism,
but socialism as I have seen it in the U.S.S.R.
does not work so well thus far.

Now let me tell you my story, which is inter
esting, as you will find. It does dig up dead bones,
and tells about men who lost and perished and
might be forgotten, unless I dug them up, but it
also tells the "Why" of today, why the Germans
are fighting Russia, and why Russia is holding
the Germans.

I think, however, that now at the outset I should
say something about the men who are running the
U.S.S.R. Stalin, of course, is the center, a shortish
thickset Georgian in his early sixties, whose bushy
hair and mustache are turning gray; strong of
body, well-educated in a religious seminary, from
12

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

which he was expelled for "seditious tendencies/
I asked him once why he used the name Stalin
his real name is Josef Vissarionovich DjugashvillL
I d thought that he probably had been doing un
derground work in the old days in some steel plant
and took the name Stalin from that. As Lenin
chose his name because he was fired with anger by
a massacre of workers in a goldfield strike on the
Lena River, so thenceforth he signed himself
Lenin, for remembrance. Stalin shrugged his
shoulders and smiled he has an attractive smile,
but his eyes can be cold as steel, as I know because
the first time I talked with him he got angry at
something I said and it made me feel uneasy the
way he looked at meand said, "No, it wasn t like
that, the name just seemed to happen, my friends
seemed to think it suited me/ His health is good,
but he is said to have a dilated heart, not mortal
nor even dangerous, but precluding hard physical
exertion.

A story was told about that, some years ago in
Vienna, before the Nazis moved in, that one of
the notable heart specialists in that city of great
physicians flew suddenly east on a plane. And
arrived next day in Moscow, at the Kremlin.

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

He d been asked, for a very large fee, to report on
Stalin s health. He examined the Red leader thor
oughly, then was directed to another room where
they told him to write his report. He did so and
thought it was finished, but it wasn t. They sum
moned him back again to examine another Stalin,
and another and another, five in all, and each time
to write a report. To him they all looked the same,
or nearly so, but his diagnoses were different. One
man could not live three months; another was also
doomed; one had a dilated heart, but with care
might live twenty years. One had nothing wrong
whatever, and one a slight cardiac murmur. The
professor wrote the reports, and flew back to his
native Vienna; but he did not know and could not
tell the world which Stalin was sick or well. I think
that s a charming story, but I fear that it is not
true. The physician in question did fly east sud
denly, canceling all his engagements, but only to
Bucharest, for Queen Marie of Rumania.

Stalin is the ruler of the U,S.S,R.; he has
greater power over more people than any man
ever before him, save the peerless Alexander, King
of Macedon, and Lord of the then known world.
Stalin is modest and talks low, with few gestures.

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

In public speeches he uses notes for data material
only. He is not an exciting speaker, but makes
each word count. I once wrote a piece for the New
York Times Magazine Section based on Hakluyt s
account of the visit of Queen Elizabeth s envoy,
Sir Richard Chancellor, to) the court of Ivan the
Terrible. I implied, pretty clearly, the parallel be
tween Ivan and Stalin, and a Communist sheet in
New York screamed its head off and said I de
served to be shot, for lese-majeste or something.
But Karl Radek, who then was still friends with
Stalin, told me later that Stalin had read my piece
and thought it rather good. His greatest qualities
are perseverance and cool judgment of men and
things. He is a Georgian, as you know, a "hot"
race, like the Irish, but he has learned to control
his hotness and master it and keep cool, like the
late Charles Murphy of Tammany Hall, New
York, whom I think Stalin resembles.

The next man is Zdanof, heavy, in his early
forties, who they say is Stalin s successor, now po
litical boss of Leningrad. The best mind in the
Kremlin group, Marxian theorist but clear, de
voted to Stalin, as indeed are all the others. Stalin
picked out the men he had worked with in the old

15

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

days. Each one of them, Molotof, Voroshilof, Ka-
ganovich, Mikoyan and the rest, had worked with
him in the old days under great pressure, and they
trust him and he trusts them. But amongst them
there are two young ones, too young to have
worked in the old days, this Zdanof, and Beria,
Commissar of the Interior, or "NKVD" as they
call it, alternatively known as the OGPU. I think
he comes third on my list. Beria is a Georgian, tall,
handsome, rather studious-looking, with pince-
nez, educated, also in his early forties. He ended
the Purge, that s enough, and perhaps saved the
whole regime.

Molotof, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, is a
sturdy, solid fellow, who never was a genius,
but can always be relied on. When Stalin asked
Lenin to admit Molotof to the Central Committee
of the Party, Lenin said, "Why that one? ... A
good, dull, plodding creature, and if you want
him, why not? . . . But I don t quite understand
... If you want my opinion, the best filing-clerk
in Moscow."

For once Lenin was not right. I mean, Molotof
may be a plodder, and is surely a dull speaker, but
he gets there just the same. He s a man who has
16

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

grown with his job, not brilliant but ever so
sound, the sort of man every State ship needs as
ballast, a man upon whom an administration can
depend,

Kaganovich, the only Jewish member of the
Politburo, is tall and brilliant and rather gay.
Some foreign observers think his star is under a
cloud, but I rate him high in the list. I met him
once at a lunch for some subway engineers. You Ve
heard of the Moscow subway, how they built it
with drive and sweat, and made it a peasant s
dream, of colors and shining marble, to up-catch
and pass America they ve done it with their sub
way, and the peasants come and wonder. To be
frank, it makes the New York subway look like a
dirty nickel, and it works, not quite so well per
haps as the New York subway, but it works, and
it looks like Solomon in all his glory. The most
amazing subway, which Kaganovich built. He s
the Kremlin s best pinch-hitter, Commissar of
Heavy Industry, which was in a mess and he
pulled it out, and nowadays Commissar of Oil,
which is the blood of a country in modern war.

Voroshilof, Commissar of Defense, has Molo-
tof s solidness plus. Popular with the Army and

17

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

the country, he once made an inspection trip to
Siberia that led me to compare his speeches with
the Letters of St. Paul. High praise but not unde
served. Voroshilof is nearly sixty, but is still one
of the best pistol shots in the Red Army. Of the
soldiers, I d say the best is Shaposhnikof, Chief of
Staff, an older man who graduated with high hon
ors from the Tsarist Staff College and was, I be
lieve, a colonel, or anyway a ranking officer, in the
Tsarist Army during the last war. Timoshenko
is another good one, cautious and a thinker. I
couldn t understand when I read the first German
communiques after they struck at Russia, when
they said that they d captured thousands of tanks
and airplanes and troops and Lord knows what
else, in the outer skirmish zones, the territory
which the U.S.S.R. had "recuperated" in Poland
and Bessarabia and the Baltic and South Finland,
to serve it as skirmish zones, to delay and harass
the Panzers. I did not understand how Marshal
Timoshenko, the Soviet Generalissimo, a heavy-
built, stubborn Ukrainian, could possibly have
risked his main force and equipment in these out
lying areas. The answer was that he didn t. He
held to his plan of battle, and met the Germans
18

WHYS AND WHEREFORES

head-on, in his "battle zone" at Smolensk, and all
along the old frontier from Odessa to Leningrad.
In the Lower Ukraine they broke through, be
cause the ground there is flat, unwooded and good
for tanks.

Marshal Budenny is the most colorful of the
Soviet soldiers, a ten-strike typical Cossack, tough
as death and hard as a flint. With a sweeping Cos
sack mustache, and a marvelous Cossack "pa
nache," hard drinker, hard swearer, hard rider, a
soldier like Stewart or Murat. Short, stocky, strong
as an oak, a fighting man amongst men. There are
stories about Budenny, but I haven t time to tell
them, a great guerilla fighter, but not, I think, a
strategist. His Chief of Staff has the brains, but
Budenny has what Russia needs in this stark and
bitter winter: the courage of a man who will never
admit that he s licked.

The next one is Mikoyan, a sharp, black-eyed
Armenian of about fifty, and brighter than any
button. He is Commissar of Trade and exceed
ingly close to Stalin,

Andreyef is a man of importance in the Krem
lin hierarchy. He stands for the Party conscience,
he s head of the Control Commission, which

19

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

thinks how the Party should think. And Kalinin,
the old peasant President, who thinks how the
peasants think.

There you have the men who run Russia, and
if I were placing bets, I d put them in this order:
Stalin first; then Zdanof and Beria, almost tied for
second. Then Mikoyan and Kaganovich, again
tying for third.

II. KIROF S MURDER

THE MURDER OF Kirof at Leningrad in Decem
ber, 1934, was a turning point in Soviet his
tory, if not in the history of Europe and the
world. Perhaps it was even the first shot fired in
the Russo-German conflict which did not burst
into open flame until June, 1941.

By a sinister coincidence, that same autumn
had witnessed another political assassination the
murder of Alexander of Serbia and the French-
man, Barthou, at Marseilles which was also a di
rect signpost along the road of things to come.
Had Barthou lived, he who died stupidly by the
error of some excited fool who put a tourniquet

21

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

in the wrong place on his arm, the Franco-British
policy toward the Soviet Union might have been
saved from such hands as those of Chamberlain-
Wilson and Laval-Bonnet. The rape of Czecho
slovakia might have been avoided and even
Hitler s whole progress from Vienna to Prague.

I rate the murder of Kirof as a no less momen
tous event because it marked the end of a period
of internal conciliation in the U.S.S.R. and drove
the Kremlin to the fantastic "Treason Trials" and
the "Purge/ which undermined Soviet prestige
abroad and thus aided the machinations of Hitler
and his friends in London, Paris, and elsewhere.

Stalin was sitting with Kaganovich and Voroshi-
lof in the latter s study in the Kremlin when the
news of Kirof s murder came to Moscow. The
three men were close friends, but it is typical of
the "ivory tower" in which dictators must live
that it was to Kaganovich, then head of the Mos
cow Company Secretariat and, as such, political
boss of Moscow, that the messenger addressed him
self.

"Can you come with me, Comrade Kaganovich?
There is someone who wants to speak to you."
22

KIROF S MURDER

They had been talking about Russia s role in
the League of Nations, which the U.S.S.R. had
joined not long before. Voroshilof had been skep
tical from the outset, but Stalin thought that the
League with all its imperfections might neverthe
less prove an obstacle to war. He said, "Our pro
gram, you know, requires peace. You must know
that this country needs peace.. We ve had enough
trouble to put the collective farms across, and how
dearly it has cost us. Remember what Lenin said
about the need for a breathing-space. No less we
need peace for industry to set it working efficiently.
Then, too, there s our internal problem, the for
mer Opposition, which was envenomed by the
struggle with the Kulak opponents of the collec
tive farm system."

"That s all over," said Voroshilof. "The Op
position is finished all save Trotsky, and we ve
thrown him out into Turkey to howl like a wolf
in the steppe. The rest of them all caved in, and
said they d behave well in future. But about this
League of Nations, I m not sure . . ."

Kaganovich interrupted. "At least, it s the best
we can do and . . ."

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
At that point the messenger came in, and Ka-
ganovich went out with him.

The man led him quickly to an anteroom where
an OGPU officer in uniform was standing amongst
a group of white-faced secretaries. He looked at
Kaganovich and said, "We have just received this
telegram from Leningrad."

The message was laconic:

KIROF SHOT DEAD IN HIS OFFICE TODAY BY
NICOLEYEF WHO WOUNDED HIMSELF UNFA-
TALLY IN SUICIDE ATTEMPT STOP AWAIT IN
STRUCTIONS.

Kaganovich read the telegram without any
change of expression. For a year or more he d been
imitating Stalin s impassivity and had even dressed
his hair and mustache to make him look more
like his leader. "All right/ he said. "You wait
here," and hurried back to tell Stalin,

Within an hour, Stalin and Voroshilof were
rushing off to Leningrad on a special train. They
talked all through the night in fury and perplex
ity. More perhaps than Voroshilof and Kagano
vich, Sergey Kirof was close to Stalin, although a

KIROF S MURDER

junior in years. One of the toughest of the younger
Bolsheviks, he d been Stalin s man from the start,
and Stalin had made him Party chief in Leningrad
to counteract and destroy the influence of the Op
position leaders, Zinovief, Yevdokimof, and Ba-
kayef.

After the Opposition was broken, Kirof showed
an unexpected vein of generosity. All through the
year 1934, he had argued for mildness and con
ciliation towards the repentant Oppositionists
and, for that matter, to the anti-collectivist peas
ants, who had been exiled in tens or hundreds or
thousands in the fight to socialize agriculture.
Despite their difference in age, or perhaps because
of it, Stalin, the hard man of steel, had a warm
affection for Kirof and was said to have chosen
him as his eventual successor.

Stalin was sore at heart and spoke savagely
about the "dogs who let Kirof die/ But some
doubts were mixed with his anger, because hasty
telephone talks to Leningrad had informed him
that Kirof s murder might be nothing more than a
crime passionel The story, you see, was this. Ser
gey Kirof, a young, full-blooded man, had a hand
some secretary, whose name, I believe, was Katya,

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

and she had a worthless husband, whose name was
Nicoleyef. He d been at one time a member of the
Communist Youth Organization and perhaps still
was a member, although his standing was low.
He d gotten in trouble in Archangel, or some
where up north, about some accounts or some
thing, and had nearly been expelled from the
Party. But his wife was Kirof s secretary and Kirof
was said to like her. At any rate, there was little
doubt that Kirof had protected this young man
from the consequences of his misdemeanors and
perhaps or so it was whispered had promised
him advancement. Such things have occurred in
other lands since the days of David and Bathsheba,
when, if you remember, that lady s husband was
given a front line command by order of King
David. Nicoleyef was more flattered than dis
tressed by Kirof s penchant for Katya, but the
thing that annoyed him was that he didn t get the
advancement. So, one day at the end of October,
he ran out and caught hold of Kirof as the latter
was getting into his automobile and began to
plead his case about the job he d been promised.
Kirof said, "Oh, never mind that now. I haven t
26

KIROF S MURDER

time for that now. Come and see me tomorrow or
some time."

It seems that Nicoleyef looked ugly, because one
of the guards caught hold of him and pinned his
arms and said, "Hey, you, get back there! Can t
you see the boss is busy? Now, shut up and get
back as I tell you, or else . . ."

Subsequent inquiry laid an ominous construc
tion upon this incident, and that unhappy guard
was shot one fine morning because he had not ap
prehended Nicoleyef and taken him to the guard
house and searched him to see if he carried a gun.
But what is a soldier to do when he knows, as this
one knew, that Nicoleyef was the husband of
Kirof s favorite secretary?

At this point, there comes into play a strange
and dangerous factor. It has long been an axiom
of history that the slayers of great men, the polit
ical assassins, have mostly been fanciful creatures
with slight or imagined wrongs, upon whom a
more baleful mind has worked subtly to urge
them forward.

In the case of Kirof there are ample grounds for
supposing that such an incitement existed. He
was, we must remember, the advocate of concilia-

27

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

tion inside Russia, of giving the former Opposi
tionists a chance, and of letting the Kulaks come
home. He stood for more than that: he had per
suaded Stalin to allow the intellectuals and the
doubters and the "camp-followers/ in fact, every
one who was not an orthodox Party member, to
co-operate in the second Five Year Plan, which
had been launched just about that time with a
mighty flourish of trumpets. Kirof represented an
era of amity and internal peace which was doubt
less to Russia s interest but was far from welcome
to the OGPU, whose activities and power had
been vastly extended during the fight with the
Opposition and the Kulaks in the past five years.
It may well be possible, and indeed was later
almost proved, that Yagoda, the OGPU chief,
looked askance at the peaceful prospect before
him and saw that as far as he and his men were
concerned "Othello s occupation was gone/ that
the numbers and prestige of the OGPU must in
evitably dwindle, as the need for their services
diminished. Perhaps then Yagoda, through his
subordinates, used Nicoleyef as a tool. He did not
dare overtly to plan, or even countenance, Kirof s
murder, but he or one of his Chekists may have
28

KIROF S MURDER

thought it a good idea to let Nicoleyef make a
flamboyant attempt on Kirof s life and thus im
press upon Kirof and Stalin above him the per
manent necessity for a large and powerful OGPU
to protect them.

This theory may seem far-fetched to the average
American reader, but it was a classic form of prov
ocation used by the Tsarist police and has not
always been neglected by the police of other coun
tries. Be that as it may, Nicoleyef once more ap
proached Kirof in Kirof s office, or rather just as
Kirof was leaving his office. Nicoleyef hid behind
the door and as Kirof came out, he shot him in
the back of the neck and then turned the pistol
upon himself and shot himself through the breast
without any fatal effect. His motives, I think, were
mixed. I think that he felt aggrieved that Kirof
had promised him something and failed to deliver
the goods, but I think that also, behind his feel
ing of grievance, there had been the whetstone of
some other more crafty mind to sharpen that
grievance to action.

Stalin and Voroshilof knew this story and it
worried them. Even then, they may have guessed
there was something more behind it, but of that

29

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

they could not be certain. And were not certain
for at least two years. What Stalin did was imme
diately to order the arrest of the Leningrad head
of the OGPU and his two principal subordinates
on grounds of culpable negligence. In due course
of time they were shot. It is probable, although of
this I have no sure knowledge, that Stalin himself
talked with Nicoleyef, who at that time main
tained obstinate silence. Later, after he was con
fronted with some of his former intimates and
with his own diary which was found in a friend s
room, and after the OGPU had worked on him for
a month or so, he made one of the strange Russian
confessions which so surprised the world at the
big public Treason Trials in subsequent years. I
shall refer to this topic later.

Nicoleyef s trial was not public, and the news
papers only carried a brief item that he and some
accomplices had been sentenced to death and shot.
Despite what followed, I do not think that the
Kremlin by which I mean Stalin and his nearest
associates in the Politburo was at first aware of
the possible implications and ramifications of the
Kirof assassination. I think that they were by no
30

KIROF S MURDER

means sure at the time that the crime passionel
motive was not, after all, the chief one.

There is also reason for doubt concerning
Yagoda s attitude. He was a murky spider, that
one, spinning mysterious webs, Lord of the High
Justice and the Low, like Yezhof after him, to Rus
sia s bane. At his own trial some three years later
Yagoda assented to the prosecutor s statement that
he, Yagoda, had connived at or even fomented
Kirof s murder. Perhaps he may have done so, al
though I doubt it, because the Leningrad OGPU
chief was one of the few people for whom Yagoda
a more cold-hearted scoundrel than anyone now
alive except Himmler had any feeling of friend
ship. He must have known that his friend would
be the first to suffer, as he did suffer, for Kirof s
death. So I am inclined to suppose that his "con
nivance" was initially limited to the idea of allow
ing an attempted assassination, when the OGPU
would nip in at the last minute and save the hero
from death. But the effect would have been pro
duced and the Kremlin would have realized the
necessity of maintaining the OGPU in all its pow
ers and numbers to shield the State and its leader
from hidden foes.

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

There was, at the time, no suggestion that a
foreign enemy s finger had been dipped in the
Kirof death-pie, but, as earnest of what was to
come, Zinovief, former political boss of Lenin
grad, whom Kirof had succeeded, and Kamenef,
also an ex-member of Lenin s Politburo, and
Bakayef, another prominent figure in Zinovief s
Leningrad Secretariat, were put on trial, held se
cretly in 1935, on a ra ther vague charge of com
plicity in Kirof s murder. And acquitted. All
three had been in opposition to Stalin in the
years 1924 to 1929, during which that shrewd and
tenacious statesman played both ends against the
middle and each end against the other in a way
that has never been equaled except by the late
Charles Murphy of Tammany after Richard
Croker s retirement. Stalin used Kamenef and
Zinovief to hamstring Trotsky, his principal op
ponent, then took Rykof and Bukharin to crush
Kamenef and Zinovief. After that, he dealt quite
easily with Bukharin and Rykof. All the while he
was building his own power you might almost
call it a party within the Party from the men he
had known and trusted in the years when Tsarist
reaction was triumphant, between 1906 and 1916.
3*

KIROF S MURDER

This may sound like old wives tales and ram-
blings of the past but it is really important in its
bearing on past and present. Because there arose
a feeling among the Bolsheviks between the West
ern exiles, those who had fled in pre-revolutionary
days to Europe, and the others who stayed in
Russia. The " Westerners" were Trotsky and Ka-
menef and Zinovief and Radek and Rykof and
others who got away and sat talking revolution in
little cafes in Paris and Berne and London and
where you please. Among them, but how far above
them, was also Lenin himself. Meanwhile, Stalin
stayed in Russia and Voroshilof was there, and
Molotof and Mikoyan and many more now dead;
devoted men, tried in the fire of Tsarist persecu
tion and police provocation and treachery all
around them. They lived "underground," as they
called it, with different names and faked papers
and phony addresses. They were constantly being
arrested and tortured and imprisoned and some of
them fainted and died and others fell by the way
side, but the best ones held on and took it, like
Bunyan s Mr. Standfast. Of them the leader was
Stalin, and in leading he learned to know them, to
know the men he could trust and almost uncon-

33

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

sciously to despise the Western exiles who sat
abroad in their squalid cafs and talked about
what they would do. But always Lenin was differ
ent, they all knew he was utterly different.

The first time I interviewed Stalin, in the fall
of 1929, I wrote in my report that he was the "in
heritor of Lenin s mantle/ When that evening I
showed him my story, as had been arranged be
forehand, he scratched this phrase out and wrote
instead, "Lenin s most faithful disciple and the
prolonger of his work." I know and this isn t
guesswork or historical reconstruction I know
that Stalin s mainspring was and is devotion to
Lenin. He thought, and doubtless correctly, that
Lenin was one of the Great Ones, the inspired
teachers of humanity like Confucius, Buddha, and
Mohammed, who come once in a thousand years-
Stalin sneered at the Western exiles, damned them
as loafers and apes while he and his friends were
being sweated in Tsarist prisons or frozen in Arc
tic wastes. But he never thought that of Lenin.
He knew deep down in his heart that Lenin was
always Lenin and what Lenin did was right. I
don t care what Trotsky has said or Trotsky s
friends, like Max Eastman and meaner folk who

34

KIROF S MURDER

don t write so well as Max Eastman and haven t
half his brains. I say that Stalin today, and always
since Lenin died, has never made a decision nor
even approached a decision without first asking
himself, "What would Lenin have done in this
case?" And thinking what Lenin would do and
how he would do it and why.

Stalin is not an arrogant man, although he is
master and lord of a large and populous country.
In meetings of the Politburo, he never says as
Lenin used to say, "Here is the way things are and
here is what we must do. If any of you have better
ideas and can prove to me they are better, go
ahead." Stalin doesn t act like that. He says, "Here
is the problem, and perhaps one of us" say, Voro-
shilof, if it s a military matter, or Mikoyan if it s
commerce, or Kaganovich for industry "will tell
us what he thinks." After that, there is general dis
cussion while Stalin sits and listens. He may lead
the conversation as a lawyer can "lead" a witness,
but when the decision is reached it is, or appears
to be, a joint not a single decision. Yet Stalin has
greater power and wields it with greater severity-
than Lenin ever did.

In the years after Lenin s death, Stalin shattered

35

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

his enemies piecemeal and then, which may seem
surprising but really was consummate skill, he got
them all into a bloc how distrustful and mutually
suspicious a bloc can only be understood by peo
ple who know politicians, not only Russian poli
ticians, but any politicians- and washed them all
off the map. One, Trotsky, he exiled abroad, and
afterwards regretted it. The others were sent far
away to think what they should have done and
wonder why they hadn t. He let them trickle back.
They said they d be good as gold, they said they d
been foolish and bad. They said they were very
sorry and wouldn t Stalin forgive them? and
allow them perhaps to receive some minor but use
ful positions in the Union of Socialist Soviet Re
publics, which they, while Lenin was living, had
done so much to create.

Pravda and Izvestia, the chief organs of Soviet
official opinion, shrieked loudly that Kirof s assassi
nation had sent a shudder of horror through the
length and breadth of the U.S.S.R., that in every
peasant cottage and every city tenement the blood
of the workers and peasants was boiling with indig
nation and eagerness to demand a full investiga
tion and the most condign of penalties. I think

36

KIROF S MURDER

that was somewhat exaggerated. In fact, I believe
that the inner doubts, which again I say at that
time afflicted the Bolshevik leaders about the true
facts and motives of the murder, had seeped down
through the Communist Party to the mass of the
people and made them uncertain too. They knew,
of course, that no prominent Bolshevik had been
murdered, for political or other reasons, since
Uritsky in 1918, he who was also boss of Lenin
grad, or Petrograd as they called it at that time,
and therefore that Kirof s murder was a direful
thing and a portent. But they got no clear direc
tives; there came no clear directives from the
Kremlin down to the people.

III. THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

DESPITE THE ACQUITTAL of the ZinOVief-
Kamenef group in the middle of 1935,
they were all retained in custody and sub
jected to further examination by the OGPU. This
looks like a further proof of the Kremlin s initial
uncertainty about the Kirof murder and its grow
ing conviction that the crime was political rather
than personal. Trotsky and his supporters abroad
have frequently claimed that all the Trials were
faked in order to rid Stalin, the "tyrant," of the
Bolshevik Old Guard. They add that the process
of false evidence, pressure, and trickery gradually
acquired momentum until it developed into the

38

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

monstrous horror of the "Purge" in 1937-38. The
Stalinists on the other hand declare that new facts
and data were gradually discovered and disclosed
to establish the existence of a gigantic conspiracy,
or rather series of conspiracies, whose threads ex
tended beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R. and
were connected with anti-Soviet organizations in
Germany and elsewhere. Future historians will
probably accept the Stalinist version, but it has
two elements of weakness, first that the Purge did
later become a sort of universal madness, and
second that all OGPU proceedings during this
period were open to suspicion through the char
acter of its then chief, Yagoda, who himself was
afterwards shot as a traitor.

Be that as it may, Kamenef, Zinovief, and four
teen other members of the so-called "Trotskyite
terrorist center" were brought to public trial in
Moscow in August, 1936, before the Supreme
Military Tribunal presided over by Ulrich. They
all were found guilty and shot, and the verdict
stated expressly that they had planned the murder
of Kirof and were planning the murder of Stalin
and other Soviet leaders with the assistance, not
only of Trotsky and other anti-Stalin Commu-

39

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

nists, but of the German Gestapo. To this the
accused confessed, although little documentary
evidence was produced in court. Indeed, the ac
cused wept and wailed and beat their breasts and
snarled at themselves and each other in mutual ac
cusation. The Trial shocked the world and gave
most foreign observers an ugly impression that the
prisoners must have been "worked on" to make
them behave like that. I was not present myself,
but that is what my colleagues felt, and that was
the way they wrote it. Later Trials, which I did at
tend, were handled differently, but the Kamenef-
Zinovief case set the tone, so to speak, and created
a most damaging effect abroad.

There are three points about the Soviet Trials
which must not be overlooked. First, they were
cases of high treason tried by court-martial, whose
procedure in all countries is greatly different
from that of civilian courts. Second, it appears
to be the Russian principle, at least in the case of
crimes against the State, to treat a man as guilty
until he can prove himself innocent, on the theory
that better nine innocent men should suffer than
one guilty man escape. Third, a rule or practice
that persons accused o high treason in the
40

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

U.S.S.R. are not brought to trial until they have
confessed. This is an old ecclesiastical doctrine
which may arise from a failure to distinguish be
tween sin and crime. It was current in Europe dur
ing the dark period of the Middle Ages, when the
clear and masterly justice of Roman Law had been
forgotten.

What strikes me, however, as the gravest flaw in
the Soviet system is the "confusion," or duplica
tion, of the arresting authority, the examining au
thority, and the judging authority. People were
arrested and held in prison by the OGPU without
right of appeal to lawyers or habeas corpus, or any
sort of publicity. They were examined by officials
of the OGPU and brought to confession. Finally,
they were tried by a tribunal in which judge and
prosecutor were so close to the OGPU as to be
scarcely distinguishable from it. And then, if con
demned, they were executed by the OGPU. The
trial itself, therefore, was no more than a "demon
stration process," as the Russians called it, for the
benefit of the public, and a method to determine
the respective degrees of guilt of the accused, and
to pronounce their sentence. Zinovief, Kamenef,
and the others were dead men, and all of them

4 1

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

knew it before their "Trial" began. I received an
illustration of the difference between American
and Soviet thought in this matter, at the opening
of one of the Trials, in the shape of a cable from
my managing editor. It ran:

DON T LIKE YOUR TENDENCY ASSUME GUILT
OF ACCUSED BEFORE TRIAL EVEN BEGUN.

No reproof could be juster or more natural
from the American standpoint. Nevertheless, I
had written my dispatch from the official Act of
Indictment, according to which the accused had
confessed and admitted their guilt, and conse
quently the chief purpose of the Trial was, as I
have said before, to decide the degree of guilt and
punish it.

On the other hand, there seems to be little
doubt that the accused in these Trials were guilty
of treason according to Article 58 of the Soviet
Penal Code. This is the kind of law which West
ern legal codes abhor, because it contains a num
ber of "blanket" clauses by which almost anything
can be construed as treasonable conduct and pun
ishable therefore by death. For instance, subver
sive talk and subversive plans. Personally I must
42

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

doubt whether more than a few of the accused, or
of the "Generals" or other civilians who perished
later, were guilty of acts of treason, as we consider
treason. But they did discuss and consider plans to
overthrow Stalin. Stalin then was, and is today,
the core of the Russian State, so that opposition
to him was treason, whether in word or deed. Inci
dentally, the Russians have never gone so far as to
make "dangerous thoughts" the crime which today
fills Japanese prisons. Do you see what I m trying
to say, that the accused knew thoroughly that
Stalin, like Lenin before him, represented the
"Party Line/ the central authority of Bolshevism?
They knew that, but they rebelled against him
personally, because they did not like him. I do not
think that they were tortured into confessions or
subjected to physical pressure, but they were
brought to realize that their opposition to Stalin
was opposition to the Party Line, and that their
conduct was thus something worse than a crime-
it became a cardinal sin.

I shall speak later of the theatrical nature of the
Trials. But there was another factor worth men
tioning now, namely a strange sense of unreality
from time to time. In trying to explain the picture

43

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

to readers in America, I referred more than once
to Dostoyevsky, one of whose books, The Pos
sessed, does, I think give an insight into the Rus
sian character. It is the story of a young man who,
mainly for his own entertainment, invented a fan
tastic story of plot and conspiracy in a small pro
vincial Russian town. Lives were actually lost, and
houses burned, in consequence. But the point of
the story was that, despite this and the punish
ments which followed, the whole thing was largely
a product of the Russian imagination, which is so
vivid and dynamic that its dreams can become
reality.

I have sometimes suspected, and perhaps still
slightly suspect, that this kind of imagination was
at work in the Soviet Trials, I may add that my
allusions to Dostoyevsky found little favor in Mos
cow. Bukharin himself, in his death speech, re
marked pointedly that any such theory was silly
and old-fashioned, as Dostoyevsky and other
former intellectuals" no longer meant anything
in the U.S.S.R. What is more, the censors got mad
and cut my copy and said that I didn t know what
I was talking about, and that to hint at the pos
sibility of there being something imaginative,
44

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

much less fictitious, in these Trials, was a naughty
trick on my part and discourteous in a guest of the
Soviet Union.

There is nothing more infuriating to a foreign
correspondent than to be told that he is the
"guest" of a country where he works and must
therefore pull his punches. American newspaper
men don t think in those terms and don t like it.
We are sent on our jobs as reporters to find and
relate the facts as best we can. Of course we all
make mistakes ... I myself was lamentably
wrong about the extent and gravity of the "man-
made famine" in Russia during the fight to col
lectivize the farms, in 1930-33. But every reporter
who is worth his salt tries always to tell the truth,
and none of the good ones I ve known could be
swayed by threats or money, or cajolery and
tricks, and when people talk to us about polite
ness and being guests, it makes us angry and sick*
I ve been wanting to say this for a long time, not
only about the Russians, but about the British
and French and Japanese and Argentineans and
Greeks, and everywhere that American reporters
have to work. Now I ve said it and feel better.

I don t suppose that the Kremlin was satisfied

45

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

with the Kamenef-Zinovief Trial. The Kremlin
had perhaps been a little nervous about Zinovief,
who might have proved a redoubtable opponent
and therefore desirable to liquidate/ but it (the
Kremlin, meaning Stalin) still could scarcely be
lieve that Kamenef and Zinovief, who had been
friends and comrades of Lenin, were actually-
whatever they admitted engaged in conspiracy to
murder Kirof, and Stalin himself, and the others.
Stalin could not easily credit it, because the Bol
sheviks, with all their hardness of realism, have
never played murder as politics. They never liked
and did not use political assassination. They
weren t chary of human lives, but political assassi
nation was a method Lenin condemned. He
admitted, or condoned, the value of "terror kill
ing," if absolutely necessary, but he always wrote
and said that assassinations as approved and prac
ticed by the Social Revolutionaries didn t lead
anywhere, except perhaps to the scaffold.

If you have followed me thus far, I hope that
you ll now understand how tangled the whole
thing was, how confused and Dostoyevskyean. But
that was the way it happened, and Yagoda, per
haps, was the villain of Dostoyevsky s Possessed,
46

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

the spider who spun his webs and caught men for
fun, and his profit. Yagoda was caught himself,
and that I saw and will tell, but there came after
him another, named Yezhof, a bloodthirsty fanatic
who slew by thousands where Yagoda had slain his
dozens.

The people of the U.S.S.R., whose opinion is
not to be neglected, and is not neglected, by the
Kremlin, were distressed by the Trial of Kamenef,
Zinovief, and company. They had no newspapers
in which to express their opinion, or may not have
dared to express it. But they thought that it some
how smelt queer. They could not say what they
thought because "Freedom of Speech," as we
know it, is not one of Russia s Freedoms; but they
said it among themselves, in private and under
their breath. They couldn t believe either that
such formerly great Bolsheviks as Zinovief and
Kamenef, whom Lenin had used and liked al
though he sometimes reproved them the people
of Russia could not believe that men like these
were involved in the murder of Kirof. Unfortu
nately, they did not yet know, and the Kremlin
did not know, the murk of Yagoda s mind, nor
Yezhof s sadistic fervor.

47

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

The following Trial, however, that of Radek,
Piatakof, Muralof, and fourteen others, in Janu
ary, 1937, went further and established, according
to the verdict of the Court, that the accused had
organized a conspiracy "with the object of expedit
ing an armed attack on the Soviet Union and
assisting foreign aggressors to seize the territory of
the Soviet Union." This is an interesting and im
portant statement, because henceforth it may be
said that the Supreme Military Tribunal assumed
as a matter of course the connection between Op
position conspirators on Soviet soil and Nazi Ger
many, which more and more clearly loomed forth
as the implacable foe and ultimate assailant of the
U.S.S.R.

By a speech of singular dexterity, which few of
us foreigners who heard it fully understood,
Radek talked himself out of death, with Sokol-
nikof, former Commissar of Finance, and two
other minor accused. But the statements of Pia-
takof and Muralof (both shot like the rest of the
culprits) were straightforward, clear, and unmis
takable, and I think that few of those who heard
them, whether Russians or strangers, could doubt
that their words were true. A lot of ink has been
48

MAIN

TRiAL

spilled about political trials in the U.S.S.R., and
the silliest assertions have been made. Hypnosis,
hashish, torture those are simple allegations, but
some ingenious scribes let their imaginations fly
still higher to the mountains of Tibet, that land
o mystery and distance. In Tibet, they claimed,
there was a drug unknown to Western science
whose properties are such that those who have
consumed it become as clay in the potter s hands,
to be shaped as the potter pleases.

What preposterous nonsense! No one who
heard Piatakof or Muralof could doubt for a mo
ment that what they said was true, and that they
were saying it from no outer drag of force. I don t
speak of Kamenef or Zinovief, because their Trial
I did not see, but Piatakof and Muralof I heard
and believed. Remember, please, that these were
no mediocre citizens of the Soviet Union. Piatakof
had a first-class mind and was a first-class execu
tive; Muralof won Moscow for the Revolution in
the hour of crisis, and had proved himself a
doughty warrior for the Soviet cause. Their words
rang true, and it is absurd to suggest or imagine
that men like this could yield to any influence,
against their own strong hearts. Why, then, it may

49

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

be asked, did they confess so freely if, as I say, they
were impervious to pressure?

The answer to that must be found in the differ
ence between Russians and Western races. Haupt-
mann, the German, went mute to death, biting
back confession of undoubted guilt behind
clenched teeth. Americans and Englishmen have
lost lives for proven crime without a word let past
their lips. But Russians are different. When con
fronted with damning facts which they can t deny
they seem to find a last satisfaction in "spilling the
beans," a final move towards atonement, a feeling
that somehow they can square themselves, not per
haps with their judges, but with their own con
sciences, by telling all the truth. Why this is so I
don t attempt to explain, but that it is so I am
convinced.

This being the case, I have to ask myself why
these men preferred such frank confession to the
tight-lipped denials of a Hauptmann. And I revert
to the suggestion that it was due to something in
the Russian make-up. Trotsky, in a statement pub
lished in the New York Times of February 10,
*937> onc e poured ridicule on me as a "hypocriti
cal psychologist of the Russian soul," or words to
50

THE KAMENEF-Z1NOVIEF TRIAL

that effect, and added, with more emphasis than
politeness, "You lie about the Russian soul, you
lie about the human soul in general." He did not,
however, challenge my assertion that Piatakof s
testimony, delivered with the gravity, coolness, and
precision of a professor addressing his class, had
made an almost irresistible impression of sincerity.

In Moscow after the Trial I was told that Ord-
jonikidze, the late Commissar of Heavy Industry,
one of Stalin s oldest and nearest friends, went to
Stalin to beg Piatakof s life. "I need him," he said,
"the country needs him. I know that he is guilty
of treason, but nevertheless he s the brains in our
heavy industry. Surely, what he has done for us
can be balanced with what he has done against
us."

"No," said Stalin.

"But I need him," Ordjonikidze insisted, "and
what s more, I will answer for him personally."

"No," said Stalin. "He must die."

I can t vouch for this story, although I am in
clined to believe it. Anyway, if it is not factually
true, it corresponds to the facts, because Piatakof
was the brains of heavy industry, and a steel blade
of executive ability in Ordjonikidze s hands. That

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Stalin should refuse him pardon is to me the most
vital factor in the whole affair. Stalin knew all the
undercurrents of this Trial, and if he decided that
Piatakof must die you cannot doubt that no ex
tenuating circumstances could balance Piatakof s
crime. Piatakof s execution and the execution of
Muralof are to me the strongest proofs that they
were guilty. Because I know something of what
Bolsheviks mean by "comradeship/ and how close
are the ties that bind old revolutionaries together.
Especially a man like Muralof, who had worked
"underground" in Russia with Stalin as one of the
earliest laborers in the vineyard."

There is no denying that many of the ablest and
best-informed foreigners in Moscow were highly
skeptical about the Kremlin s claim that a wide
spread murder and treason plot existed, with rami
fications abroad involving the Nazi Gestapo, and
to a lesser degree the Secret Services of Britain and
Japan. They were no less skeptical, however, three
years later about the Kremlin s other claim, that
the occupations of East Poland, the Baltic States,
Bessarabia, and Southern Finland, were in reality
measures of precaution against a danger which did
in fact materialize, the danger of Nazi invasion.

5*

THE KAMENEF-ZINOVIEF TRIAL

This point has a vital bearing on the case I shall
now discuss, the execution of Marshal Tukhachev-
sky and seven other high-ranking officers of the
Red Army in June, 1937.

53

IV. THE EXECUTION OF
THE "GENERALS"

THE SHOOTING OF Tukhachevsky and his fel
low-generals in June, 1937, did more to mis
lead the world about the U.S.S.R. in gen
eral and about the Red Army in particular than
any of the public civilian Trials. I suppose, in
a way, that we reporters were to blame for not
making the story clearer. But limitations of cen
sorship and time and space newspaper space, I
mean make life hard for the foreign correspond
ent, and in this case the official information was
most scanty. I think, however, that some of the
diplomatic corps and military attaches, who had
time to compose and ponder and were able to send
54

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS 7

their reports in sealed diplomatic pouches, might
have guessed nearer the truth. Let s leave that
and come to the facts.

There are three points in the "Generals" story
of which the first is almost unknown, the second
misunderstood, and the third unduly exploited.
As follows:

i. Most of the conflict between the Kremlin
and the "Generals," which led to their
execution, had nothing to do with con
spiracy or Trotsky or the Gestapo.

Si. The "Generals" did dicker with the Ger
mans.

3. The "Generals" probably discussed, pos
sibly planned, but certainly did not at
tempt, a military coup d etat.

i. The "Generals" and the Kremlin.

Every revolutionary regime, from Cromwell
and the French to the Bolsheviks, is bound to
think quick and hard about how to handle the
Army. Cromwell of course was lucky, because,
like Washington, he commanded the Army him
self, and the Army had faith in him, and despite

55

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

civilian opposition he knew that the Army was
there and his to use when he chose. The French
Revolution got dreadfully tangled in trying to
handle its Army, until Napoleon came and ended
the Revolution, but he was a soldier too. Now
Lenin was not a soldier; a small, professorial man
of singular brain and heart, but nevertheless not
a soldier. Long before he took power in Russia he
had studied most carefully the English, French,
and American Revolutions and the careers of
Cromwell, Napoleon, and Washington.

Accordingly, he devised a scheme for civilian-
Kremlin-Communist Party-control of the Red
Army. It consisted in what he called the Political
Department of the Army. The Political Depart
ment was a combination of M.I. (Military Intel
ligence), as the British name it, or G% and
Deuxime Bureau, as it is known to the Ameri
cans and the French a combination of that with
chaplains and Y.M.C.A. and mental and physical
training. Lenin s Political Department of the
Army was planned to work through and by a body
of men called Commissars, who with their subor
dinates should really be, as Lenin intended, the
means of his civil control over the Army and mili-
56

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

tary leaders. The Commissars and their subordi
nates were incorporated in the Army, but were
appointed direct from the Kremlin and drawn
from civilian Communists of politically proven
worth. The scheme, like some other Russian
schemes, was just a trifle Utopian did you know
that the word Utopia means Nowhere? and, for
that matter, when it was re-introduced in the Fin
nish war, it didn t work any too well. But that I
shall come to later, and why it was re-re-intro
duced in the greater struggle with Germany.

The scheme worked fairly well in the Russian
Civil War. It wasn t so good or so bad, but it did
keep the Kremlin s control and had the practical
value of checking some "doubtful" officers who
weren t always wholly sure if they fought for the
Reds or Whites. But after the Civil War and after
the war with Poland, there came a long term of
peace, and little by little, as the Russians say, the
Political Department of the Red Army became
part of the General Staff, instead of the Kremlin s
instrument. It was the inevitable attraction of
armies which all soldiers know, although few of
them fully understand it; and so as the years went
by, the Political Department grew aloof from the

57

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Kremlin and civil control, and was just like G%
in this country, a branch of the Army itself.

Here, I think, Yagoda saw an opportunity to
further his own ends, and perhaps even to render
service to the Kremlin s enemies abroad, with
whom he later admitted he was then in treacher
ous contact. There was a certain degree of rivalry
between the OGPU and the Army for pride of
place as the Kremlin s buckler and sword, and it
seems more than probable that in the winter of
1936-37 Yagoda adroitly brought the Kremlin to
perceive that it had little control over the Red
Army, because the Political Department had be
come more military than civil. The Kremlin was
"conditioned" to mistrust of all and sundry. Stalin
and his associates who remained in Russia after
the abortive Revolution of 1905-06 had been sub
ject to police provocation and every form of mal
ice. They had learned to trust no one, not even
their best friends or closest relatives. They were
fertile soil for suspicion, which Yagoda knew how
to sow. Later I shall tell how Yagoda confessed to
spraying poison upon the carpet of his own office,
which he was about to relinquish to Yezhof, named
chief of the OGPU in his stead. I think he sprayed

58

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

poison before in the Kremlin s mind about the
danger of leaving the Army free from direct
civilian control.

The Army leaders were taken aback. Like all
soldiers in every period and country, they resented
curtailment of their own prerogatives, and had a
true military dislike for civilian interference.
Tukhachevsky, after all, ranked by this time as
one of the leading European strategists. His books
had been widely translated and studied by every
General Staff. He could not fail to foresee the dis
advantages of a divided authority in wartime, if
the Political Department were put back into civil
ian hands, with its powers stemming straight from
the Kremlin instead of the High Command. In
deed, there is little doubt that part of the Red
Army s failure in Finland was due to this very
cause.

One can easily imagine the discussion which
arose and grew ever more bitter between the
Kremlin and the Staff. At first long Staff reports
exposing the unwisdom, from a military stand
point, of the proposed reform. A firm reply from
the Kremlin insisting upon its standpoint, then
another Staff report, and this time a more curt re-

59

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

ply. Can you guess what a chance for Yagoda to
add fuel to either fire? I see the "Generals," whose
loyalty had never been doubted, growing week by
week more bewildered, stubborn, and angry. And
Stalin more peremptory, more willing to listen to
the suggestion that the resistance of the General
Staff had secret unworthy motives.

We must understand his position; he had been
startled and horrified by Kirof s murder, and in
the two and a half years which followed had be
come convinced that there existed a conspiracy, at
home and abroad, against himself and the Soviet
regime. As discussion waxed into conflict, the
Kremlin pressure increased, and the "Generals* "
temper hardened, until one fine day in the spring
when amongst them was voiced the fatal doubt
whether Stalin and Stalin s program were not a
positive menace to the defense which the Red
Army was feverishly preparing against Germany
or Japan or both. That doubt distilled the potion
from which their deaths were brewed.

60

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

2. The Generals 3 and the Germans,, and 3. The
"Generals" and their plans.

The "Generals" quickly saw, or knew already,
that the rank and file of the Army would not sup
port them in any move against the Kremlin. Ac
cordingly, they began to dicker with outsiders for
foreign aid. It is no secret that in the period of
Russo-German friendship which followed the
Treaty of Rapallo from 1922 until the advent of
Hitlerrelations between the Russian and Ger
man Armies were close and cordial. German offi
cers of all branches had served as instructors to
the Red Army, and it is even said that on one
occasion the German General von Hammerstein
personally conducted Red Army maneuvers in
the Ukraine. What could be more natural, once
the "Generals" reached their decision, than to
appeal to their German colleagues?

This task fell to Marshal Gamarnik, chief of
the Political Department and Vice-Commissar of
War, who from the outset had stood with the Gen
eral Staff against the Kremlin and the OGPU.
Gamarnik therefore made overtures to the Nazis
to balk Stalin, as the German General von

61

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Schleicher had earlier made overtures to the
French to balk Hitlerand met Schleicher s fate.
It was said afterwards that Gamarnik, acting with
and for Tukhachevsky and the General Staff, had
offered the Ukraine to the Nazis in return for
their support in a coup d etat against Stalin. The
story went in Moscow that the Czechs or perhaps
the French got wind of this offered bargain and
informed the OGPU.

About that I have no sure knowledge; but
Gamarnik committed suicide on May 30, and
almost immediately afterwards Marshal Tukha
chevsky and seven other ranking officers were ar
rested and summarily shot. The participation of
Gamarnik seems to prove beyond doubt that the
Political Department had indeed become part of
the Staff, more loyal to the Army than to the
Kremlin. His suicide further proves that he had
been engaged in some deal with the Germans, and
had learned that his game was known to the Krem
lin, and therefore committed suicide in order to
avoid the more shameful trial and execution
which awaited Tukhachevsky and the rest.

I am sure that this must be the answer, because
I cannot conceive anything less grave than a com-
62

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

pact with foreign enemies that would have caused
the summary execution of such men as Tukha-
chevsky, Yakir, Uborovich, Eideman, and Putna,
who had all been as brave and competent warriors
of the Soviet cause as Ney, Murat, and Lannes had
been in the cause of France. Remember, too, that
the Bolshevik "Generals" were condemned by a
court of their peers. The Supreme Military Tri
bunal presided over by Ulrich with two assistant
judges was reinforced on this occasion by eight
other high officers, including Marshal Budenny.
The trial was held in camera., and was tragically
short. The accused admitted their guilt and were
shot at dawn the next day.

I was in Washington when it happened, and
the Soviet Ambassador, Troyanovsky, was the first
to tell me the news. He said he could scarcely be
lieve that these men, of whom many had been his
warm friends in the Civil War, were guilty of such
treason, but he added that those who tried them
and found them guilty of treason were also their
friends and comrades, and that therefore he had
no doubts in accepting the verdict of guilt. Per
haps more than any Soviet Ambassador in the
brief history of the U.S.S.R., Troyanovsky en-

63

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

joyed the esteem of the country to which he was
accredited. I think that I am not wrong in saying
that Washington liked and respected him. I know
that I did myself, and would take his word as a
bond. So it all must build up to the fact that, Ya-
goda or no Yagoda, mistrust or no mistrust, there
was indeed a conspiracy against the Kremlin and
its leader. Without, maybe, treacherous action,
but not without treacherous connections and
treacherous plans.

The shocking thing, however, was that the trial
of the "Generals" really marked the beginning of
the "Purge/ which I shall describe in a later chap
ter. To give a small foretaste of what that Purge
was to mean, I may say that six of the eight high
officers who condemned the "Generals" to death
themselves disappeared from the scene within two
and a half years. One Gorbachef, died a natural
death; two, Ulrich and Budenny, survive. The
remaining five were "liquidated." The Spaniards,
who are a cruel people, have a proverb that "Dead
men cannot bite"; and, Heaven knows, I wit
nessed enough quick killing in Spain to slow and
chill my heart-beats. But never such mass hysteria
64

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

or frenzy of destruction as Russia showed to the
world in the awful days of the Purge.

I cannot dare to portray the scenes in the Krem
lin at the time of the "Generals " trial and exe
cution. We know that Stalin and Voroshilof had
played a big personal part in the Russian Civil
War, the former as a most active member of the
High Military Council, and the latter as an out
standing partisan leader. They had fought side by
side with the "Generals" and had counted them
good men and true. Moreover, these were no polit
ical "Western exiles/ talkers in European cafes,
but men who had stayed and worked, like Stalin
and his associates, in the dark days of Tsarist re
pression from 1906-14, and had fought for the
Revolution on many a bitter field. Whatever
doubts there may be about the guilt of other ac
cused in other Trials, it is unthinkable that Stalin
and Voroshilof and Budenny and the Court-Mar-
tial could have sentenced their friends to death
unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.
Then, too, there are other points, as follows:

(a) The suicide of Gamarnik.

(b) The accused all confessed guilt, although

65

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

their Trial was held so soon after their
arrest that they could not have been sub
jected to the long, gruelling process of
imprisonment and examination which
later was said to have extracted confes
sions from civilian prisoners.
(c) The Trial was attended by a hundred or
more representative officers of the Red
Army summoned from all over the coun
try. For them, too, the accused had been
trusted colleagues or leaders. They all
accepted the verdict without question.

I was not in Moscow at the time of the "Gen
erals " execution, but I am told that it struck the
whole Soviet nation like a thunderbolt. The Red
Army was held in the highest esteem, and the
news that its topmost leaders had been convicted
of treason was horrifying to all. People stood, I
am told, in little groups, talking in hushed voices,
or staring blankly at the newspapers as if they
couldn t believe their eyes. But it is significant
that after the first shock had passed there was no
where any marked tendency to doubt or discredit
the sentence. The same applies to the Army itself,
66

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS"

and the reason in both cases was the same, that the
officers who attended the Trial as spectators, and
the civilians present, picked men like the officers,
were able to impart their certainty of the guilt of
the accused to their subordinates and friends.

This perhaps is the answer to the question that
has been raised abroad, why, if the "Generals"
were guilty beyond cavil, did the Kremlin not
make public the full story? I think, however, that
there is another answer, that some of the facts
must have been grave enough and far-reaching
enough to involve not merely a "Palace Revolu
tion" or coup d etat, but the safety of the State
itself. At that time, one remembers, the Spanish
Civil War was raging hotly, and the Kremlin was
aware that the Nazi-Fascist nations were using
Spain as a guinea-pig to test and determine meth
ods which later became the "blitzkrieg," The
Franco-British governments had already displayed
the lethargy, indifference, or worse, which later
culminated in the great betrayal of Munich. The
Kremlin must have reckoned Spain a prelude and
foretaste of things to come. The Russians in Ma
drid had learned, perhaps even invented, a phrase
the whole world would learn later, the phrase

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

"Fifth Column/ the sinister pro-Nazi activity of
traitors in the camps of Hitler s intended victims.
,To such culprits the Kremlin knew that no mercy
could be granted.

The killing of the "Generals" had a deplorable
effect upon opinion abroad, especially military
opinion. This effect was no doubt enhanced and
confirmed later by the Purge, which took a much
higher toll of lives from the higher ranks of the
Soviet combatant forces. But soldiers abroad were
shocked by the sudden ruthlessness of the "Gen
erals" affair, which undoubtedly created the be
lief in their minds that the loyalty and the
discipline of the Red Army must have been
gravely impaired. The initial failures of the Red
Army during the Finnish war were considered in
foreign military circles to be further proof of de
moralization. This is important, because it may be
taken for granted that one of the reasons if not
the chief reasonwhy Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R.
in June, 1941, was his conviction that the Red
Army was a "pushover," or anyway quite inca
pable of prolonged resistance.

There remains the final point were the "Gen
erals" guilty in deed? I suppose the answer is nega-
68

THE EXECUTION OF THE "GENERALS 7

tive, because there was no German invasion o the
Ukraine, nor any overt act of Nazi hostility. There
was no coup d etat, or attempted coup d etat, in
Moscow or any other Soviet city. Nevertheless,
throughout history the preparation of conspirative
action against the State, especially if made in col
lusion with hostile or potentially hostile foreign
ers, has always been considered little less serious
than the action itself, and in extreme cases deserv
ing of capital punishment. The Soviet Code, of
course, leaves no doubts upon the subject, and it
was by the Soviet Code that the "Generals/* and
civil offenders as well, were judged, condemned,
and executed.

Now this may seem like dead bones, because I
wasn t in Moscow when the "Generals" were tried,
and if I had been there I could not have seen their
Trial. Of later Trials which I did see, I can give
you eyewitness description, and I think you will
find it interesting, that the bones take on flesh
and substance and those dead men arise and walk,
as the Prophet saw in the Bible. But I revert to
my original thesis, that this stuff about the Trials
is not wasting your time nor mine, that it really
is essential if one wishes to elucidate the "Why"
of Russia today.

V. THE BUKHARIN-
YAGODA TRIAL

THE LAST AND greatest of the Soviet Treason
Trials was held in March, 1938. It was in
deed the "Trial to end all Trials/ because
by this time the issues were clear, the Prosecution
had marshaled its facts and learned to recognize
enemies, at home and abroad*

Earlier doubts and hesitations were now dis
pelled, because one case after another, especially,
I believe, the case of the "Generals," had gradually
filled in the picture which was so hazy and incom
plete at the time of Kirof s murder. You will re
member that Zinovief and Kamenef, although
later executed, were found guiltless in the sum-
70

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

mer o 1935 of complicity in the Kirof affair.
Now, almost three years later, the wheel had
turned full cycle, and the formula had been
found. As follows:

The Prosecution now sought to prove that
all the groups or individuals, whether sol
diers or civilians, which for one reason or an
other, either personal or public, had been
opposed to Stalin and the Kremlin s central
authority that all these varied and some
times mutually hostile oppositions finally
combined to form a single mass, animated by
a single thought, which was enmity to Stalin
and his regime.

From this main thesis there were developed sec
ondary points:

(a) That the whole series of oppositions and
conspiracies gradually came to revolve,
like planets round the sun, about the
central figure of Trotsky, whom the
Kremlin, to its regret, had permitted to
go abroad. By a singular paradox the
Kremlin, which refuses to believe in

7 1

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

either God or Devil, had thus raised the
person of Trotsky to almost Miltonian
heights o Satanic cunning and power.

(b) That the failure of all or any of the sep
arate or combined oppositions to obtain
any considerable measure of popular sup
port at home forced their movement, or
movements, inevitably to seek foreign
support, and thus run the whole gamut
of treason.

(c) Finally, that Trotsky and his associates
abroad were also thus compelled to feed
from a foreign hand, with the truly
shocking result that Trotsky, whose serv
ices to the Revolution had been magnif
icent and honored as such by Lenin,
became in the last sad end the chief tool
of his country s foes.

It was in 1929 that the Kremlin decided to get
rid of Trotsky. He was sent out of the country to
Turkey, where he was given harborage on the
island of Prinkipo in the Bosphorus. The motives
behind this act of apparent clemency were natural
and reasonable. Such former opponents of the

7*

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

Soviet regime as Kerensky, Martof, and Dan had
been politically castrated by living outside Russia.
They lost contact not only with the undercurrents
of Russian life, but with the central stream itself,
and became no more than voices crying in the
wilderness. But Trotsky was a bird of another
feather, as subsequent events proved. Moreover,
he had exceptional personal charm and unique
ascendancy over his associates, which later bore
bitter fruit. Trotsky s supporters in Russia paid
lip-service to the victorious majority, and many
of them were restored to posts of high importance,
but in spirit they remained loyal to their exiled
leader and were ready to do his bidding when the
occasion should arise.

History furnishes an apt parallel for Trotsky s
case. In the latter part of the fifth century B.C.,
Alcibiades was the idol of Athens, equally bril
liant as orator and military executive. In the strug
gle for power which followed the death of Pericles,
Alcibiades was defeated and exiled. For a time he
brooded, like Trotsky at Prinkipo. Then gradu
ally his own ambition forced this keen and restless
man back to political activity. At first he intrigued
with his partisans in Athens in the hope they

73

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

might arrange some overturn which would restore
him to power. When this proved vain, Alcibiades
went further and made friends with Sparta, the
enemy of Athens. And actually returned to power
for a brief period with the aid of Spartan swords.
When the Spartans withdrew he was exiled
again, and this time, still driven by harsh inner
compulsion, went straight to Persia, the ancestral
foe not only of Athens but of Greece. History
records that he tempted the Persian satrap Tissa-
phenes with honeyed words. "I have friends in
Athens/ he said, "and in Sparta too. With your
support I can win Greece for the Persian Empire.
Of course nominally the country would remain
autonomous, but in practice it would be another
satrapy of Persia." How close was the parallel with
Trotsky was shown by the Trial of Piatakof, Mura-
lof, Radek, and others, January 23-30, 1937. These
three were Trotsky s closest friends, and they said
that they did his bidding. For that, two paid with
their lives, and the third with ten years in prison,
just as Athens showed no mercy to the dupes of
Alcibiades.

I still think that the last Trial was the strangest

74

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

and most thrilling of all. To begin with, the per
sonalities involved. Bukharin, if one may permit
a comparison which has no blasphemous intent,
had been the St. John of Lenin, selfless, sincere,
and devoted: a popular speaker, yet gifted above
others with knowledge of the philosophical foun
dations upon which Lenin had built. Then Rykof,
like Bukharin one of Lenin s closest associates,
who had succeeded him as President of the Coun
cil of Commissars. Other Commissars or "Secre
taries" as they would be called in America such
as Rosengoltz, Commissar of Foreign Trade, and
Grinko, Commissar of Finance. Two leading
members of the Soviet Foreign Service: Rakovsky,
also close friend of Lenin, once Ambassador to
Paris and London; and Krestinsky, Vice-Commis
sar of Foreign Affairs.

Then a number of the highest officials, Presi
dents and Premiers, of the various federations
which compose the U.S.S.R. Next a group of doc
tors, leaders of their profession, who were charged
with the cardinal sin against the oath of Aescu
lapius, that from greed or fright they had betrayed
that sacred oath and caused the death of their
patients by treatment they knew was wrong and

75

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

by medicine they knew was harmful. Last but not
least, came the real villain of all this bloody
drama, Yagoda, the former chief of the OGPU,
who had been termed and perhaps had been the
power behind the Kremlin, and who, it may be,
had dreamed of seizing the Kremlin himself. As
Trotsky had been to Lenin, so Yagoda had been
to Stalin, a force of great aid and service. A man
less noble than Trotsky, without half of Trotsky s
intellect; but far more plastic and sly and cruel
and avid and mean.

The Trial was held in the small hall of the
former Nobles Club (now called House of So
viets), a long, low room with soft dark-blue walls
surmounted by a narrow blue-and-white frieze of
Wedgwood pottery, with little dancing figures
white on blue. The room holds about three hun
dred people, sitting on pew-like benches with an
aisle between. They face a low stage, on which
they see from left to right a small red-draped table
with a water carafe and glass, where the Prosecu
tor and his secretary-assistant will sit. Then, a little
further back, a larger table, also red-draped, with
76

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

a bell on it, backed by three high chairs. These are
for the Judges.

In front of them, near what would be the foot
lights if this really were a theatre, a lower red table
where the two court stenographers, mousy, nonde
script young women, are already sitting. At the
right, a sort of pen with low wooden railing, where
the accused sit on four short rows of benches. In
front of it, three or four chairs and a low table
unexpectedly draped green, for the defense law
yers.

Although this is a court-martial, the lawyers are
civilians, and may be freely selected by all or any
of the accused. As a rule, not more than three or
four accused had lawyers in these Trials. They
probably thought it would do them no good, and
it didn t. Yet the lawyers each make a speech
towards the end of the proceedings on behalf of
their various clients, and sometimes do intervene
usefully in examination of witnesses. Neverthe
less, I am afraid that one of my friends, a distin
guished figure in the forensic world of the United
States, was correct in saying when he read this part
of my story, "From what you tell me, these de
fense lawyers are admitted, or introduced, in order

77

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

to give an appearance of legality to what I am
forced to regard as most arbitrary proceedings/
Like the secretaries, the defense lawyers are al
ready present, fumbling with documents.

High in the background above the Judges table
is something which resembles and indeed is a
window. It is not glass, but some dark material
like opaque mosquito-netting, through which the
spectators can see nothing, save the occasional
lighting of a match and glow of a cigarette, al
though smoking is forbidden in the courtroom. Be
hind this screen is a small square room where one
knows that Stalin and the other Kremlin leaders
are present to watch and hear, seeing without be
ing seen.

The time is now ten o clock, the hour set for
the opening session. The Prosecutor, Vishinsky,
comes in quietly through the wide doorway in the
left background, portfolio under arm; a short,
thickset man with sparse sandy hair and pince-
nez. He wears a dark business suit with a white
shirt, low collar, and dark tie. He is followed by
his secretary who carries more portfolios and files.
They sit at the table on the left and begin arrang
ing their papers. A moment later the Comman-

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

dant of the Court, a Red Army officer in khaki
tunic and breeches, with high brown boots, ap
pears in the doorway and says, "The Court is
coming. Please rise/

The three Judges enter first and take their seats
at the table, the President, Ulrich, in the center.
They also wear khaki uniform, as this is the Su
preme Military Tribunal of the U.S.S.R., and
Ulrich has the rank of General. He is a stocky
man in his fifties, with square bald German head
and dewlaps like a bloodhound. His eyes are blue
and cold under thick blond eyebrows, and his
heavy white face looks hard. He is hard, too, this
Ulrich, a hard judge but a just one. At least I can
only say that he often will intervene to give the
prisoner a chance, if it seems that the Prosecutor
is trying to rush him, or that he is being flustered
by murmurs in the audience. I d hate to have him
try me if I were guilty . . . and of course if I
weren t guilty, or hadn t confessed to guilt, I
should never appear before Ulrich, for that is the
Soviet system, as I said earlier. Nevertheless, sup
posing that I were innocent and yet were being
tried by Ulrich, I d have more hope for my life
than from some other Soviet judges.

79

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Following the Judges enters a file of soldiers
with rifles and fixed bayonets, in khaki, with
magenta hatband and collar-tabs like those of
the Commandant, denoting the long-term-service
troops (sometimes called OGPU troops or special
battalions) which form the garrisons of the great
cities of the U.S.S.R. Then the prisoners, in single
file, watched eagerly by foreigners amongst the
audience to see if any signs of "pressure" can be
detected on their faces, which are pale from long
confinement but otherwise normal enough. They
take their places behind the railing, with the
guards behind them, and the President rings his
bell and declares the court is open. Then every
one sits down, save the sentries, who stand unmov-
ing as bronze.

Now a word about the audience, which is far
from the least part of the performance in the
Soviet Trials. I hope that by this time I have suc
ceeded in conveying three points about the series
of Treason Trials in Russia. First, that the accused
had been found guilty, and had confessed their
guilt, during the preliminary examination before
they were brought to trial. Second, that the Court
80

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

therefore was chiefly engaged in determining the
exact degree of guilt, and in imposing penalties.
Third, that the Trials were public because their
principal purpose was to inform the Soviet masses
of conspiracies and other evil conduct against
their country and its rulers, and to show them how
such crimes were discovered and checked and pun
ished. They thus were, as the Russians called
them, "demonstration processes/* to explain and
demonstrate to everyone how wicked sinners
might be, and that the wages of sin was death.
They thus served as an object lesson, not only for
the loyal majority, but for any sinful minority
that might contemplate misbehavior.

Accordingly the audience is chosen from what
Americans would call "party henchmen" or "ward
leaders," the boys and girls who will go out all
over the country to expound the trial and its
meaning, to say, "I was there and I heard it/ and
say, "I was there and I saw it/ and say, "This is
how it was/ and say, "This was what it meant/ In
addition to them there is a sprinkling of foreign
diplomats and a handful of foreign correspond
ents, and of course, as is only natural, some high

81

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Soviet officials who are not high enough to sit in
the Kremlin s inner sanctum, and a small but vigi
lant crew o OGPU men in civil or military garb.

In earlier days, important trials were usually
held in a much larger hall in the same building,
where there was room for two thousand spectators.
I am not quite sure why the change to the smaller
hall was decided, although it may have been that
it was thought desirable to have a smaller and
therefore more carefully selected audience, in
view of the gravity of the Treason Trials and the
former importance of the accused. And, unless I
am mistaken, the authorities were not quite
pleased by the way things went at what I think was
the last trial to be held in the larger hall.

On that occasion the accused were mostly big
Soviet technical experts charged with sabotage of
enterprises under their direction, and of treasona
ble communications with former owners of said
enterprises now resident abroad. Their leader was
a certain Professor Ramsin, who had been head of
the Soviet Power Trust, a man of European repu
tation. Ramsin made a monkey of the then Prose
cutor, Krylenko, who himself was "liquidated" in
the Purge. Ramsin not merely tangled the re-
8*

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL
doubtable Krylenko in a mass of highly technical
detail, but used, I suppose deliberately, the device
of making the most sweeping blanket confessions
in reply to Krylenko s accusations. Every time,
Ramsin would figuratively beat his breast and cry
loudly, "Yes, of course I am utterly guilty! I am
the worst of traitors, and alas, this was only a part
of my crimes against the State. I deserve, and am
willing to say it, a thousand times any penalty this
Court can inflict upon me/

Then Krylenko would try to pin Ramsin down
and ask, Tor instance, accused, your report on the
so-and-so power project that was doubtless a case
of sabotage?"

Ramsin ran his hands through his cockatoo crest
of white hair, and replied with a look of surprise,
"I fear I can hardly say that; because, you see, that
report was printed in the German technical press
as the best thing of its kind in the past ten years,
and if I may say so, as a tribute to the remarkable
advance of Soviet engineering/ Then, talking like
a professor to a somewhat backward pupil, Ram
sin proved with a mass of facts and figures how
good his report had been.

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Krylenko tried again. "But your scheme for the
thermal furnace you admit sabotage in that?

Ramsin looked still more pained. "I m sorry/
he said, "but that furnace ... I know of course it
was costly . . . but the Leningrad Academy of
Science awarded me a gold medal for that scheme;
and I learned just before my ... er ... arrest,
that ten more furnaces will be built according to
my specifications." Then once more he gave chap
ter and verse with bewildering fluency and detail.

It happened again and again, until Krylenko
was white with fury; and the audience, who were
quick to catch on to the game, could hardly re
frain from laughter.

Ramsin saved his valuable life, and the lives of
most of his friends. He received a term of im
prisonment, but I was told on good authority that
he was back at work again, in relatively comforta
ble circumstances, within a week of the trial. That
kind of thing happens in Russia, and there is rea
son to believe that Karl Radek, for instance, who
also got a heavy prison sentence, has been "serv
ing" it in a villa near Moscow, under surveillance,
it is true, but doing his regular work of reading
the foreign press and making reports on it for the

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

Kremlin, and even, it is said, of writing occasional
(unsigned) articles for Moscow newspapers.

The Ramsin case illustrates a point which has
always struck me greatly about the big Soviet
Trials, their theatrical quality. This factor is al
ways present, and has probably contributed no
little to mistrust of the genuineness of the Trials
in the minds of foreign observers. The truth of
the matter is that the Russians are the most thea
trical (in the good sense of the word) nation on
earth. They have theatre in their blood, and of
all arts it is the one in which they most, and most
readily, excel. There is no bad theatre in Russia,
only good and better and best. To me, who am not
a theatre fan, the Moscow Trials were most sheer
and passionate drama, because I knew, and the
audience knew, and the actors knew best of all,
that these Hamlets died but once, that after the
curtain dropped on their last great scene there
was no rushing off to supper, no excited early
awakening to read what the critics have said. The
curtain to them meant death at dawn in a nar
row courtyard, with rifles leveled like lances, and
the roar of a truck s exhaust to drown the noise of
the shots.

85

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

The Bukharin-Yagoda-Rykof Trial brought out
the full interpretation which the Kremlin had now
reached, and doubtless wished to demonstrate to
the people of the U.S.S.R. and to the world be
yond, of the whole chain of events linked with the
murder of Kirof. The Kremlin s thesis was that
not only all the plots were one plot, all the oppo
sitions one Opposition, but also that the whole
business was connected with, and directed by, hos
tile forces abroad. As the Prosecutor expressed it
in his final speech:

"The bloc of Trotsky ites now in the dock
is only one of the advance detachments of the
Nazi-Fascist provocateurs and war incendi
aries. Under the leadership of Trotsky and of
the German, Japanese, and other intelligence
services, this gang of bandits was working to
help the Nazi-Fascist governments to over
throw the Soviet government and to restore
the power of the capitalists and landlords/ 1

If such was the Kremlin s purpose, the conclu
sion can hardly be avoided that it did not succeed
86

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL
abroad, and succeeded too well at home. Almost
without exception foreign public opinion received
the Trials with skepticism and disgust, and their
effect upon Soviet prestige and reputation was de
plorable, to put it mildly. Internally, it is my opin
ion that the effect was yet more grievous, because
the Trials taught the Soviet public to believe that
the very men, soldiers and civilians, whom they
had most respected and admired, were dastardly
scoundrels and traitors. The public mind was thus
"conditioned" to the highest degree of suspicion-
phobia, and was ripe for the thought that a traitor
might be hiding under every bed. So the Trials
contributed greatly to produce the excesses of the
Purge.

In this last Trial of all, which seemed so well-
rehearsed and complete, so balanced to settle
everything, there were signs that a virus of frenzy
was working in the nation s blood. Side by side
with solid and not unconvincing testimony, there
were passages so strange and horrible that look
ing back I find it hard to believe that my ears
did hear the words I not only heard, but which are
printed in the official stenographic record that lies

87

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
on my desk as I write now. Two instances in par
ticular:

The Case of the Eminent Doctors who mur
dered the Prominent Writer;

The Case o the OGPU Chief who "poison-
flitted" his Successor.

Not Edgar Allan Poe nor Lewis Carroll nor the
wildest of modern crime-writers ever penned
more fantastic stuff.

One day in New York I was talking with Alex
ander Woollcott about the Hauptmann trial,
which he had just been attending. Alec said that
he was sure that Hauptmann was guilty. Perhaps
not the only guilty one, that he might have had an
accomplice, but that he was undoubtedly guilty.
Mr. Woollcott proved his point with eloquence
and skill, then said, "What do you think, Walter?
Don t you see that the fellow was guilty?"

I replied, "No doubt he was guilty, you ve pre
sented a damning case. The only thing that I feel
is that somehow it s just too damning. Let me tell
you what I mean, in terms of the Soviet Trials,
It s just too good to be true. If you have 70 per
88

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

cent evidence of guilt, then the jury agrees and
they hang him, or burn him with electricity, or
stifle him with gas, or cut his head off with an axe,
according to countries and laws. But the thing that
makes me wonder and pause, and doubt, too, is
when the evidence is not 70 but 120 then I say,
I smell a rat."

Before Mr. Woollcott could speak, I hurriedly
continued, "You see what I mean: that there was
too much evidence against Hauptmann it was all
too much to be true. You ve seen the show and I
haven t, but I ve seen all the Russian shows, where
they did the same sort of thing. They overproved
their case. It s like these German and Russian elec
tions. When you get a 60 or 70 per cent vote in
favor of Mr. Roosevelt, you say even the Repub
licans say Well, that s that, the majority favors
Roosevelt/ That sounds fair enough to me. But
when you have 99.9 per cent endorsing Hitler or
Stalin, my nostrils twitch like a rabbit s. And
when, as happened in Russia with some enthusi
astic wards, they got 102 per cent who voted the
Stalin ticket, I really did smell a rat. You know
that I like my Russians and will even forgive them
arson, which, as you may know, is their favorite

89

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
form of crime, but 102 per cent the rat is right
out of the bag. When a case is overproved and
evidence overplayed, I feel that it indicates weak
ness on the part of the Prosecution/

Take, for instance, the thing I have mentioned,
the Case of the Eminent Doctors. Two highly dis
tinguished physicians, Professors Levin and Plet-
nef, were charged with the murder of their pa
tient, Maxim Gorky, the well-known writer, and,
for good measure, of his son, Maxim Peshkof.
Gorky s secretary, Kruchkof, who sat in the dock
beside them, was said to have been their accom
plice in both crimes. All three admitted their guilt
with almost superfluous detail, as the Prosecutor
pressed them step by step and word by word. At
the time I couldn t for the life of me understand
the purpose of this play, which seemed without
rhyme or reason. The Prosecutor, Vishinsky, made
a loud hullabaloo about Gorky s prominence as a
writer and his intimate friendship with Stalin.
Well, Gorky ranks high enough, but not in a class
with Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann today, and as for
his friendship with Stalin . . . I can fathom the
point of it now, on re-reading the record. What
the Doctors and Kruchkof confessed was that they
90

THE BUKHAR1N-YAGODA TRIAL

had caused Gorky *s death at the bidding of
Yagoda, because Yagoda feared or was jealous of
Gorky s influence with Stalin. In short, they were
there to help blacken Yagoda s character, which
seemed unnecessary.

The facts of the case, however, were, as every
one knew, that Gorky had only half a lung as a
result of earlier tuberculosis, that he was approach
ing seventy and couldn t live much longer, and
that his doctors had told him repeatedly that he
couldn t stand a cold climate, so he lived for years
in Sorrento, Italy. Then one day he came back to
Russia, and died there, as might be expected, of
pneumonia. Of course it was all worked out, that
Levin persuaded Gorky to return to Moscow from
the Crimea because Gorky s grandchildren had
grippe, so that Gorky should also catch grippe.
Then when Gorky caught grippe, Levin did some
thing or other, or failed to do it, which induced
pneumonia. Then he gave Gorky the wrong kind
of stimulant, or failed to give him a stimulant, so
Gorky died, and Levin, they said, had killed him.

It didn t sound right to me, but here was this
poor Levin admitting it word by word, with Plet-
nef and Kruchkof confirming him, and all three of

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

them admitting as well that they d induced pneu
monia for Gorky s son, some time sooner, by giv
ing him lots of vodka, of which it seems he was
fond, and letting him sleep it off on a bench in
the garden with his coat off, so he caught pneu
monia too. Then they treated him wrong, and he
died. It was all so preposterous that one might
almost suppose that It was brought In as comic
relief, except that it proved no joking matter for
any of the three, because Levin and Kruchkof
were shot and Pletnef got twenty-five years. I think
that it must be true that they wanted to blacken
Yagoda, but I fear it is also true that over this
strange affair hung the shadow of mass hysteria,

That unhappy Professor Levin. He admitted
this and that, but he might have saved his life had
he not said in one thoughtless moment, "I have
the highest regard and esteem for Maxim Gorky,
whose death was a loss to the world/ And the
Prosecutor snapped back, "But you said that you
murdered Gorky . /*

There came then a sound from the audience, a
sort of low growling noise, so that Ulrich, presid
ing Judge, rang his bell and called for silence. I
myself am not a Russian and cannot think as they

9*

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

do, but in this case I felt clearly enough that the
audience just couldn t bear Levin s saying in al
most the same sentence that Gorky was a wonder
ful person and his death was a loss to humanity,
and that he had murdered him. I don t for a mo*
ment believe that Levin had murdered him. I
thought this part of the Trial was nonsense, and
think so still; but nevertheless it is sure that Pro
fessor Levin dug his grave with those two sen
tences. And was shot.

The case of Professor Kazakof was even more
outlandish. He was the kind of doctor whom other
doctors dislike: he had new smart methods which
made other doctors say "quack/* His particular
specialty was a compound he called "Lysati," a
mixture of hormones or gland extracts or what
have you, which he claimed would revive the dead,
or thereabouts. There had been much controversy
on the subject in Soviet medical journals, and even
the public press, with Kazakof fighting a lone but
not losing battle against what he termed the typi
cal reactionism of the medical profession. If you
are interested in such things you may recall the
case of Professor Koch, with his "tuberculin/*
which proved a flop, and its failure broke Koch s

93

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

heart. Or the other case o Ehrlich, with "606,"
the salvarsan treatment of syphilis, which did
not prove a flop, and made Ehrlich famous for
ever. In both these instances the medical profes
sion was skeptical at first. One worked and the
other didn t, but I fear the world will never know
the merits or demerits of Kazakof s "Lysati," be
cause the sentence upon him read as follows:

"Kazakof, Ignati Nikolayevich, to be shot, with
the confiscation of all his personal property/

This means that his studies and archives and
formulae, and so forth, passed into the hands of
the OGPU, which has interests it believes tran
scend any medical research.

Kazakof was accused of murdering Yagoda s
predecessor as head of the OGPU, Minjinsky. To
me this was somewhat surprising, because I hap
pen to know that Minjinsky, who had been badly
crippled by an automobile accident in Poland in
1920, and had grave maladies in addition, had
always ascribed his continuance in life to Professor
Kazakof and the "Lysati." Like most chronic inva
lids, Minjinsky had his pet doctor and pet remedy,
namely Kazakof and the "Lysati," and told Stalin
so and all his friends. You can see the way he said
94

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

it, the way we now talk about vitamins. You can
hear him talking to Stalin, and saying, "Comrade
Stalin, I hear you ve been having some heart
trouble. What you really need is these Xysati that
Kazakof s been giving me. I mean, my friend, that
they re wonderful, and in fact I don t mind telling
you, they re keeping me alive." That was what
Minjinsky said; but one day Minjinsky died, and
Yagoda, his right-hand man, ruled the OGPU in
his stead. Time passed, and Yagoda fell and him
self was brought to trial. And with him, as a make
weight, was the unhappy Professor Kazakof.

The Prosecutor, Vishinsky, brought Kazakof to
admit that he had deliberately contrived the death
of Minjinsky, at Yagoda s bidding, because
Yagoda wanted the job, by giving him wrong
doses, or hyper-doses, or under-doses, or anything
you like, of "Lysati." It sounded like bunkum to
me, but anyway that s what Kazakof said and ad
mitted.

Then Vishinsky turned to Yagoda, and asked
him, "Is it true that you gave Kazakof instructions
to murder your chief, Minjinsky, in order that you
might take his place and use it for conspiratorial
purposes?"

95

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Yagoda said quietly, "I never saw Professor
Kazakof until this day/ 5

Vishinsky went back to Kazakof and drew from
him the statement that on the sixth of November,
1 933, an OGPU car had called for him at his home
by Yagoda s orders, and taken him to the first
entrance of the OGPU headquarters in Moscow,
and there he d been led upstairs to Yagoda s office.
Where Yagoda had told him, said Kazakof, "Min-
jinsky s a living corpse, why don t you finish him
off? I want his job for myself. So finish him off, or

else "

"You mean, then/ said the Prosecutor, "that
Yagoda frightened you into committing the shock
ing crime of the murder of Minjinsky?"

"That is what I mean/ said Kazakof, "because
Yagoda was so powerful and . . /

At this point the audience shuddered. I felt
them shudder, and shuddered myself, because I
knew and they knew what power Yagoda had
wielded, as head of the OGPU, Lord of the High
Justice and the Low, the most dreaded and terri
ble man since Torquemada of Spain. Except, of
course, Yezhof, who slew Yagoda the Slayer, and
96

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

later himself was slain. Then Vishinsky turned to
Yagoda and said:

"Accused Yagoda, do you deny or confirm the
statement of Professor Kazakof?"

Yagoda said, "I deny/

Vishinsky persisted: "So Kazakof is lying?"

"Yes, lying/ said Yagoda.

"And Levin/ Vishinsky continued, "did he lie
too when he said that you had ordered him to kill
Maxim Gorky, Stalin s friend?"

"He is lying/ said Yagoda.

Vishinsky pointed a finger at him. I still can see
this scene, so vivid it lives in my mind. The audi
ence hushed and tense, and Ulrich, the blood
hound with dewlaps, watching coldly, and the
podgy Vishinsky pointing his finger at Yagoda, a
pallid man with dark hair and harsh eyes.

Vishinsky said, "Did you not lie too, Yagoda?"

At that point Yagoda bit. You might say that he
bit off the finger; you might say that he bit off the
hand; that he bit off Vishinsky s arm. In a voice
that was menace of death, he said:

"Don t dare to ask me that question! That ques
tion I shall not answer."

He spoke with such concentrated venom and

97

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
fury and threat of hell and damnation, that Vish-
insky jumped in the air. I don t mean he really
jumped, but somehow we felt that he d jumped.
And didn t the audience jump! Good Lord, how
all of us jumped!

My friends often ask me why I don t go to thea
tres and movies and so forth. And here is my an
swer now: that I have seen something bigger and
better. I told Noel Coward that once, when he was
grumbling at me because I didn t know enough
to satisfy his interest about some show at the Rus
sian Art Theatre. I said, "Yes, of course, and I m
sorry: I ought to have seen it and didn t. But you
know, I saw the Trials, and they were so much
better theatre and so much more exciting, that
even Moskvin or Kachalof were dull to me by com
parison."

Yagoda s tone of fury and venom far, far more
his tone than his words knocked Vishinsky off his
feet, and knocked the audience too. Myself, I was
sitting close to the "stage," in the second row of
benches, and thus received the full impact. But
I m a reporter, and a philosopher as well, and have

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

seen and heard horror and flames. And known
pain to its uttermost limit.

But the people behind me were hit, and there
came through them the sort of thing you don t
often hear, a gasp of dismay and terror. No, not
just terror and dismay, perhaps it was simply dis
tress, as when the bullet hits a strong young sol
dier charging with fixed bayonet.

The President, General Ulrich, hard old blood
hound, rang his bell and said to Yagoda, "You
don t have to talk like that, I won t let you talk
like that/

Up to now I have been quoting from the offi
cial stenographic record of this Trial, but the lines
which follow were not included therein. I heard
them, though, and remember.

Yagoda looked at Ulrich, the rat that looked at
the Judge. And said:

"That goes for you too you can drive me, but
not too far! Ill say what I want to say . . . but . . .
do not drive me too far!"

Talk about cold shivers!

I ve seen the redoubtable Ulrich in more than
one of these Trials, but this time he met his match.
He knew that Yagoda was done, like a rocket

99

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

whose flare was out. Oh yes, General Ulrich knew
that, and so did the audience, and so did I, and so
did the Prosecutor, Vishinsky. Oh yes, we all of us
knew it, and some of us were soft and some of us
were tough, and some like me were philosophers
and reporters, and some were just folks. But I
assure you that this sentence from Yagoda was the
most thrilling thing I have ever met in a wide and
exciting life. It hit Ulrich himself in his big high
President s chair, socked him hard like a crack on
the chin.

I tell you that it is not without reason that men
like Yagoda or Hitler rise to great heights of
power. They must have an inner strength. They
must have something we haven t. So here was this
cornered rat, who knew he was doomed and knew
it. The Judge knew it, the Prosecutor knew it,
everyone knew it. And yet from the strength
within him he could use a few simple words like
a sword of lambent fire, and honestly, for a second,
make all of them shake in their boots. Especially
the plump Vishinsky, who took no more cracks at
Yagoda. Even Ulrich was careful after that. When
Yagoda flung his thunderbolt, Ulrich blinked a
bit, as we all did, but he is tough Bolshevik
100

THE BUKHAR1N-YAGODA TRIAL

timber, like the boys who are holding the Ger
mans. He blinked and then rang his bell and said,
"Silence: the Prosecutor will continue the exami
nation of Kazakof ."

So quietly ended one of the highest moments of
interest in my life, which has been diligently
passed in search of moments of interest. Yagoda, I
say and maintain, was in that moment terrific. Yet
the next day he confessed to something which
seemed to me purely ridiculous. This demon who
had startled the Court with his sudden blaze of
wrath now came before it to tell the most childish
of stories. About "flitting" Yezhof to death.

One cold evening in the fall of 1937, the
Kremlin caught up with Yagoda. You can imagine
Stalin sitting there with Zdanof, who had taken
Kirof s place as political boss of Leningrad. Stalin
drums his fingers on the table and says, **What
about Yagoda?"

Zdanof, a stocky, youngish citizen, looked hard
at his chief, but said nothing for several seconds.
It was not an easy game, as he knew, but he meant
to play it. Zdanof didn t like Yagoda, and always
had mistrusted the role of the OGPU in the Kirof

101

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

affair. He looked hard at Stalin, and said, "I have
made a report, here it is. Not long, you can read
it in ten minutes, here it is, my report about
Yagoda."

Stalin read the report and frowned. "This . . .
is ... dynamite ..." he said slowly, but I believe
it. Yagoda has done good work, but now he be
comes a danger."

Was Yagoda arrested that night? I still cannot
answer that question, because I received two con
flicting accounts, one dramatic, the other prosaic,
from sources I judged to be equally well informed.
That is one of the greatest difficulties of reporting
in Russia, you hear such vivid stories, told by peo
ple who ought to know, with a wealth of graphic
detail, and the little items and touches which
you d think could never be invented; and yet
these stories are fictions, although the narrator has
come to believe what he says.

After twenty years experience I have made it a
rule to believe little of what I hear in Moscow,
only part of what I read, and not even all that I
see. I never can forget that I saw with my own
eyes, and two thousand others saw with me, the
departure of Trotsky under guard from the Kazan

THE BUKHAR1N-YAGODA TRIAL

Station in Moscow, when he was exiled to Cen
tral Asia. I saw him, we all saw him; the erect,
familiar figure wfth fur cap pulled low on his
forehead and heavy scarf round his neck it was
winter and bitterly cold walking with quick short
steps past the file of guards to the entrance of the
sleeping-car. He was followed by three or four
other civilians, doubtless secretaries or members
of his family. There was little or no demonstra
tion, a few cries of sympathy or derision, then
someone struck up the "Internationale" in which
all joined, and it was over. The crowd went
quietly home, and I rushed back to my office, in
great glee because I was the only American re
porter present, to write my piece. And wrote it,
and got it passed by the censor. But NONE OF
IT WAS TRUE, as I found out two days later.
They d shown us a bogus Trotsky, for some rea
son best known to themselves. The real Trotsky
and his companions were taken by automobile to
a suburban station and there put on the train*
Which perhaps will explain my doubts regarding
Yagoda s arrest.

The first story I heard about it should be writ
ten presumably as follows: Reader, do not forget

103

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

that Yagoda controlled the OGPU forces of Mos
cow, the troops with magenta hatbands, the long-
term-service garrison. Not an easy man to arrest,
and nimble as any rat. So what they did was to
send a platoon of youngsters from the Kremlin
Military Academy for him* Yagoda lived in the
Kremlin, so now you can see how it happened.
Stalin s mind is set; Yagoda, he knows, is a danger.
He takes the telephone and rings the Kremlin
Military Academy the Kremlin is a walled cita
del a mile and a half in circumference.

"I want the Comrade Commander ... is that
you? This is Stalin speaking. Send ten of your boys
right now to Yagoda s apartment, to arrest him
and hold him fast. Pick boys you can trust, you
know, and tell them to shoot if need be. ..."

Can t you hear the gasp of surprise at the other
end of the line? Yagoda, Yagoda arrested, Yagoda
the Chief of the OGPU

That must have been how they did it, using
tough young fearless kids who didn t know nor
care. Like the ones that take their planes and dive
at the Stuka bombers, all hot and reckless of self,
to blast and kill them.

So they took Yagoda that night, and a few days
104

THE BUKHAR1N-YAGODA TRIAL

later there was a small announcement in Pravda
and other Moscow newspapers that Yagoda,
Genrikh Grigorievich (which means Henry, son
of Gregory, as Russians use G for H, and talk
about Goover, Gughes, and Garriman), had been
replaced as head of the OGPU by Comrade
Yezhof. There was no "Comrade" for Yagoda,
and that was a certain tip-off for the foreign re
porters. When a man s in good standing in Mos
cow, he s always described as Comrade, but when
they leave Comrade out it means that he s on the
toboggan.

This version of the arrest sounds plausible, but
the chief objection to it is that Yagoda must have
had a day or two of warning, before his arrest, in
order to do something which I shall shortly de
scribe. Of course it s always possible that he sensed
what was coming and acted accordingly, but I can
not think that he would have waited quietly for
arrest if he had seen it coming. So all things con
sidered, I believe that my second version is the
true one, as follows: Stalin did decide to remove
Yagoda, and it was at Zdanof s suggestion. But,
you see when you talk about Russia, you don t
realize that the answer to the puzzle is the Com-

105

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

munist Party, of which Stalin is the head, and its
terrific discipline. They use the word "mono
lithic/ and a fine, fat word it is. Here you have,
if you want, the secret, the secret of Stalin s suc
cess and the secret of Hitler s setbacks, the iron
clad rigid discipline of the Communist Party in
the U.S.S.R., which could and did overcome the
knavery of traitors and the madness of the Purge.

Stalin had no need to use daring boys on
Yagoda. Instead, he sent a curt message that the
Kremlin had decided that the Commissar of the
Interior, that is, Chief of the OGPU, would hence
forth be Yezhof, not Yagoda, and Yagoda must
move out in twenty-four hours.

Yagoda knew what that meant, but he was pow
erless, just as the "Generals" were powerless,
against the Kremlin, which is the symbol and
center of the Party s will. Yagoda had twenty-
four hours, and used them in a way you can t
guess. I wouldn t believe it myself unless I had
heard it stated, and have it here down in the
record, the official stenographic record of Yagoda s
Trial. You cannot guess what he did. He sum
moned a chemist, whose name is unimportant,
and told him to concoct a liquid containing mer-
106

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

cury in thoroughly lethal degree. Then he and
Bulanof, his personal secretary, who was going to
share his toboggan, and shared his fate in the
Trial, got a flit-gun, and "flitted" their own office
with the thoroughly lethal concoction. They flit
ted the chairs and the table, they flitted the cur
tains and carpets, they flitted the whole room.
Can t you see them flitting away perhaps they
even had two flit-guns, just flitting and flitting and
flitting.

I still can t believe my eyes as I read this
astounding tale, but I heard Yagoda tell it and
heard Bulanof confirm it, and heard that solemn,
painstaking Prosecutor, Vishinsky, inform the
Court and the countless millions of the Soviet
nation, and the rest of the world, if it listened,
that this nefarious flitting had gravely affected the
health of Comrade Yezhof . Who himself was shot
two years later, which cured him of mercury
poisoning. I mean, any child must have known . . .
I mean, if Dostoyevsky could have seen from his
grave ... I mean, Reader, please understandI
hope with sympathy why it was not always easy
to report the U.S.S.R. in an intelligent and intel
ligible manner.

107

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

After this bizarre interlude, Bukharin s "last
words" were a refreshing and salutary attempt to
make sense in the midst of confusion. He refuted
the more extravagant charges against him partici
pation in murder, spying, and sabotage and
denied that the accused were a bloc in the sense
that the Prosecution claimed* He said this was
absurd, because he d never even met some of his
fellow-prisoners until the Trial began. He added
that he had been subjected to no pressure of any
kind, and claimed that he did not look nor talk
like a man who had been drugged or hypnotized.
This he proceeded to demonstrate in a speech of
such clarity and brilliance that the American Am
bassador Joseph Davies, who has had wide legal
experience, declared it was the best he ever heard
in any court.

"What s more/ said the Ambassador, "Buk-
harin put the case for the Prosecution far more
strongly and logically than Vishinsky himself."
This view was shared by many who heard Buk-
harin describe the gradual progress of his opposi
tion to the Kremlin, from the first incipient
doubts to the ultimate treason plot. We noted,
however, that he was careful to maintain the dis-
108

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

tinction between treasonable thought or talk and
treasonable deed. He concluded with three re
markable statements (I quote the official record):

"The extreme gravity of the crime I com
mitted is obvious, the political responsibil
ity immense, the legal responsibility such
that it will justify the severest sentence. The
severest sentence will be justified because a
man deserves to be shot ten times over for
such crimes. This I admit quite categorically
and without any hesitation at all.

"I refute the accusation of having plotted
against the life of Lenin, but my counter
revolutionary confederates, and I at their
head, endeavored to murder Lenin s cause,
which is being carried on with such tremen
dous success by Stalin. The logic of this strug
gle led us step by step into the blackest quag
mire, and it has once more been proved that
departure from the position of Bolshevism
means siding with counter-revolutionary
banditism. That banditism has now been
smashed. We have been smashed, and we re
pent our frightful crimes.

10Q

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

"The point is not this repentance, or my
personal repentance. The Court can pass its
verdict without it. The confession o the ac
cused is not essential. The confession of the
accused is a medieval principle of jurispru
dence. But here we also have the internal dem
olition of the forces of counter-revolution.
I feel it my duty to say that in the combina
tion of forces which went to make up the
counter-revolutionary tactics, Trotsky was
the principal motive force. I may infer that
Trotsky and others will endeavor to defend
us, especially myself. I reject this defense, be
cause I am kneeling before the Court, be
fore the Party, before the whole people. The
monstrousness of my crimes is immeasur
able/

An editorial writer in the London Times, for
which I covered this Trial, pointed out a curious
parallel between the Soviet Trials, especially in
the case of Bukharin, and the treason trials of
England in the Middle Ages. He cited the case of
the Earl of Essex, who was executed in the reign
of Queen Elizabeth on a charge of high treason
no

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

which lay chiefly in the fact that he was indis
creet enough to write a letter of sympathy to
Mary Queen of Scots, then imprisoned and also
executed later. Nevertheless, in his last words Es
sex cried: "I am the most vilest of men, and had
I a hundred lives, they all deserve to be sacrificed
as punishment for my crime against God and Her
Sovereign Majesty the Queen/

The editorial continued that in medieval Eng
land the accused was brought, not necessarily by
torture, to a conviction not only of guilt but of
sin. The Times said acutely that once this "con
viction of sin" was established in the mind of a
believer (who might have been a backslider but
still was a believer), he was psychologically com
pelled to feel and admit that having sinned in one
thing he had sinned in every thing. It was a subtle
piece of English journalism, because the implica
tion was that the U.S.S.R. was still far back in
the Dark Ages, not to mention the hint of tor
ture; but as an explanation of the Trials and the
amazing confessions they produced, I think it
comes near the truth. From Zinovief to Buk-
harin, they all felt that they had sinned against
the Party Line and the Kremlin, just as the Earl

111

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

of Essex abased himself before God and Queen
Elizabeth.

It all is a logical process; the Bukharin-Yagoda
Trial was the prelude to the Purge, and I say
that, without the Purge, Hitler would never have
dared to attack the U.S.S.R. His attack may have
changed the world s fate, may bring him to down
fall and suicide, but I doubt that it would have
occurred had Hitler not felt sure that Russia was
easy to take.

Think, too, of what this Trial tells about the
Russian character, how marked is their difference
from us, and how otherwise their minds work.
Honestly, it really is right, this, and I really am
showing you Russia, far better than if I wrote ten
thick books of facts and statistics.

It s like the old argument about what is
"news," which all reporters discuss. I say, "news *
need not be new look at Tutankhamen. I say
"news" is anything which interests a good re
porter, and which a good reporter thinks will
interest his readers. If he s wrong, the answer is
that he is not a good reporter. Well, I am a good
reporter, although I ve been smacked on the nose

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

by the greatest of managing editors, Carr van
Anda, more times than I like to think. Which
shows that I m not so good, because van Anda was
always right. Incredibly, awfully right, like a god,
an invisible king.

One time during the last war I picked up a
swell air story about an exciting dogfight, with
new and unusual angles. I had it all to myself, and
it wasn t "spot news" as they say, because it had
happened some days before. My orders at that
time were to send everything PQ (that s the
French cable company) triple-urgent from French
Headquarters, at the not unimportant cost of
eighty-one cents per word. (Of course, though I
didn t know it, the Times was syndicating my stuff,
thus covering most of the cost, and advertising it as
news red-hot from the battlefield, by the most ex
pensive route, because ordinary press rate took
twenty-four hours in those days, while PQ triple-
urgent hit New York in an hour from France.)
Anyway, I had an exclusive story, which wasn t
spot news, and not unnaturally thought I might
send it by Western Union press rate at a cost of
five cents per word. In two days I received a cable
from van Anda: WHY YOUR EXCELLENT AIR-FIGHT

"3

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

STORY TRANSMITTED WESTUNION INSTEAD PQ TRIPLE
URGENT AS INSTRUCTED.

You see what a fair man he was. He called it an
"excellent" story, although he was going to scalp
me. I replied, alas so naively: STORY EXCLUSIVE

NOT SPOT NEWS THOUGHT SAVE MONEY. To which

van Anda retorted: OUR BUSINESS CONSIDER MONEY
YOURS OBEY INSTRUCTIONS.. And that, as they say,
was that.

I have drifted away from my subject, though I
still think that story is worth telling, but what I was
trying to say is that these Trials are "news," to
write about and to read. They do give the key to the
problem. All my life I ve been searching for keys,
and one day I shall write a book, I hope I shall
write it soon, called "Search for a Key." The key
of course is happiness, the Greeks found that one
out, and no one in human intelligence has ever
equaled the Greeks. They were tops and absolute
tops, the citizens of Athens, in sculpture and in
theatre. Above all they were tops in philosophy,
the pursuit of the ultimate wisdom, which may,
although I don t know, be the highest form of
happiness. Or perhaps, as they said themselves,
114

THE BUKHARIN-YAGODA TRIAL

the only key is death, to sleep and not to dream.
Socrates said that, as did Shakespeare. Socrates said
(and I know it by horrid experience) that the
greatest of all pleasure is release from pain. And
rest for a weary head, to lay your head down on
a pillow and sleep and sleep and not dream.

But while you are living you live, and I think
that life is fun. I think it is fun to search and to
try to find things out. And to match my guess
against others, to think I am right, not they.
Which is why I have written so much about the
Treason Trials.

VI. THE GREAT PURGE

THE PURGE IN Russian "Chistka" (cleansing)
is a long-standing institution o the Rus
sian Communist Party. The first one I en
countered was in 1921, shortly after Lenin had
introduced "NEP," his New Economic Policy,
which involved a temporary restoration of private
trade and petty capitalism and caused much heart
burning amongst his followers. In that Purge
nearly one-third of the total membership of the
Party was expelled or placed on probation. To the
best of my recollection, the reasons then put for
ward for expulsion or probation were graft, greed,
personal ambition, and "conduct unbecoming
116

THE GREAT PURGE

to Communists/ which generally meant wine,
women and song. But there was too large a pro
portion of "Comrades" found wanting on ideolog
ical grounds, that is, ignorance of Marxist dogma
and doctrine. There were, I remember, far more
suspensions than expulsions, because, as Stalin
once said to Kamenef and Zinovief during their
brief period of alliance with him against Trotsky
in 1925 or 26, when they wanted to have Trotsky
expelled from the Party: "For a Communist, ex-
pulsion from the Party is as bad or worse than
death. A weapon you should not lightly use lest it
turn against yourselves/ Prophetic words.

Stalin has been widely attacked by political ad
versaries, Russian and foreign, as a cruel and
heartless man, but in point of fact he was remarka
bly long-suffering in his treatment of the various
oppositions. This statement may sound surpris
ing, but it is true, as the record shows. The Krem
lin s struggle with Oppositionists began before
Lenin s death, and again and again one or another
of the Opposition leaders admitted his faults and
beat his breast and cried "Mea maxima culpa, *
and the Kremlin forgave him. I say this is all on
record, whatever the Trotskyists may claim. Until

117

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

the murder of Kirof, which hardened Stalin s steel
into knives for his enemies throats.

Kirof s murder brought a change, but even so
the Purge that was held that winter was at first
not strikingly different from earlier Purges. There
was an unusually strict verification of Party tick
ets, which seemed to indicate a fear of wolves in
sheep s clothing, or, as would now be said, of
"Fifth Columnists." This Purge was never wholly
discontinued, and as I have tried to show, it gradu
ally developed into "The Purge" which you have
read of, a state of mass hysteria fanned and mad
dened by the gnome-like Yezhof, who later per
ished himself in the fire which he had lighted.
For two years terror, hatred, and greed ran rife
across hapless Russia in an orgy of slander and
denunciation, when sons sent their fathers to
death and wives destroyed their husbands.

The stories afterwards published in Moscow
newspapers were almost incredible. The para
mount factor was fear. Few adults have an un
stained conscience, and Russians are fluent in
speech. Each man or woman who remembered
rash, foolish words and began to shiver uneasily,
decided to play safe by denouncing somebody else.
118

THE GREAT PURGE

Some boasted that they could count their total of
denunciations by hundreds. Then there was greed
as welL One covets his neighbor s wife, or his
job, or his apartment; it is easy to send an anony
mous note to the OGPU. There was hatredyou
had an enemy. You sent a note to the OGPU, and
the enemy disappeared.

As I said, the Purge had begun just after the
murder of Kirof, but it only hit its full stride
when Yezhof succeeded Yagoda, in the fall of 1937.
From then for a year and a half it raged like a
prairie fire across the Russian steppes and gathered
force as it went. Perhaps after all Yezhof s brain
was indeed affected by the poison Yagoda had
spread; or, more likely, the need to seek and de
stroy in the ranks of the OGPU itself every vestige
of Yagodism produced such a feeling of insecurity
and dismay that all sense and measure were lost.

I was only in Russia intermittently during that
period, but each time that I returned the atmos
phere of terror and suspicion was more stifling and
unbearable. Russian friends whom I had known
for years, men of unimpeachable standing, avoided
me like the plague, or, worse still, just disap
peared. That was the dreadful part, that in only

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

a fraction of cases were there any public announce
ments. Men and women disappeared . . . and no
one knew. Sometimes, but not always, their clos
est relatives would receive a summons from the
OGPU "to remove the personal effects of Citizen
So-and-so" they knew what that meant but more
commonly there was silence. Any relationship with
foreigners, any foreigners, appears to have been
one of the commonest grounds for "disappear
ance."

I should say that nine-tenths of the Russians
who went to diplomatic parties, even in an official
capacity, or were intimate with foreign corre
spondents, thus vanished. The Press Department
of the Foreign Office was purged from top to bot
tom, and we are sure that two of the censors whom
we d known and liked for years were shot. We sus
pect others shared the same fate. The Soviet
Diplomatic Corps suffered terribly. At least 75
per cent of its higher personnel disappeared, and
most of them were known to have been shot. Of
the Soviet Ambassadors and Ministers abroad in
the summer of 1937, I think that only one, Ivan
Maisky in London, still holds his post. Troyanov-
sky, the Ambassador in Washington, survived and
120

THE GREAT PURGE

now lives in Moscow, but he lost his job because,
I was told, his wife had once signed a resolution
in favor of Trotsky s program, in 1924, when such
things were correct and permitted.

The most devastating factor was the way that
suspicion extended. It became a regular thing that
when any man of importance "disappeared" his
subordinates and friends and relatives fell also un
der the ban. Whole departments in every branch
of national life were sometimes emptied from top
to bottom; even office boys and scrub-women met
sudden dismissal after their chiefs removal. Of
course, in cases like this the people were not ar
rested, although generally if they were Commu
nists they were expelled or suspended from the
Party.

But the loss of a job, with a black mark against
your name, is no joke in the U.S.S.R., not to men
tion the terrific disorganization of business which
ensued. Things got so bad that if you telephoned
to some office asking for someone who as it hap
pened had been purged, they d often reply that
they d never heard of him, that no such citizen
had even been employed there at all. This oc
curred to me several times, in the case of men who

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

only a month before had held important posts.
On account of the secrecy it is most difficult to
estimate the "casualties" of the Purge, but I should
think that fully half a million persons were exiled
from their homes in circumstances of distress and
humiliation. The number of those executed is also
quite uncertain, but one of my colleagues kept
a "score sheet" of death sentences published in
Moscow and provincial newspapers, which reached
over two thousand in eighteen months. We reck
oned that this would be about one-fifth of the
total figure. In all fairness I must add that no
small proportion of the exiles were allowed to re
turn home and resume their jobs after the Purge
had ended. On the other hand, some competent
observers place the killed as high as thirty or forty
thousand, and the exiled at a million. One thing
is certain, that from 60 to 70 per cent of the
leaders in every field of Soviet activity and en
deavor were "purged," and of these at least one-
third, and perhaps one-half, were shot. To give
exact figures as later published:

Of the Council of Commissars numbering
21 at the end of 1936, there now remain 5;
122

THE GREAT PURGE

one died, Orjonikidze, and the rest were shot
or disappeared.

Besides the 8 Generals executed in June,
1937, there were their judges numbering 7,
with Ulrich, the eighth, as chairman. Of
them, Ulrich and Budenny are the only sur
vivors, although here too, one, Gorbachef,
Commander of the Cossacks, died in his bed.

In the Central Committee of the Commu
nist Party which is theoretically the highest
unit organism of the U.S.S.R., there were 71
members elected at the beginning of 1934; 21
remained active, 3 died naturally, one, Kirof,
was assassinated, 5 quietly disappeared, 31
were arrested, one, Gamarnik, committed
suicide, and 9 were shot.

In the city of Kiev between August, 1937,
and June, 1938, more than half the members
and candidates of the local Communist Party
were expelled from said Party on one charge
or another.

The Party as a whole had 2,000,000 mem
bers and 1,200,000 candidates in 1933, a total
of 3,200,000 men and women. In December,
1937, there were less than 1,500,000 members

123

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
and candidates together. In January, 1937,
Stalin referred to "our 2,000,000 army" of
Party members and candidates, but in the
spring of 1938, after half a million new mem
bers and candidates had been admitted,
Pravda stated that there were no more than
5,000,000 members and candidates.

By the middle of 1938, matters had reached
a perfectly infernal state of misery and chaos. It
was like the old Russian fairy-tale called "Why the
Sea is Salt." There was a magic mill, and when a
button was pressed this mill would grind out salt
(highly prized in rural Russia), as much of it as
was needed. Someone stole the mill from its owner,
and pressed the button wrong, so that it ground
out salt all right, but wouldn t stop and couldn t
be stopped, and went on grinding salt until there
were mountains of salt all over the landscape.
There was only one thing to do, and they did it.
They took the mill and sailed it out into the mid
dle of the ocean, and there they dropped it over
board, and . . . that s why the Sea is Salt. The
Purge was something like that, and the Kremlin
found a like remedy.
1*4

THE GREAT PURGE

The astonishing thing is that the Kremlin seems
to have been so slow to realize what was hap
pening. That s one of the dangers of dictatorship,
the * Ivory tower" in which a dictator lives, sur
rounded by yes-men who fear to carry ill-tidings. It
shows too how great and widespread was the ter
ror, that even the mechanism of the Party, which
is arranged to pass orders and information up and
down with the greatest possible speed and facility,
should have been as it were frozen and ceased to
function. In the summer of 1938, however, Kagan-
ovich made a trip to the Urals, to Sverdlovsk and
the other large new industrial centers in the neigh
borhood. He was a member of the Politburo and
Commissar of Heavy Industry, and like most of
his colleagues made two or three such trips of per
sonal inspection every year. He found a most ter
rible mess.

The "Ural-Mash," which is the biggest machine
plant in the Union, was running far below sched
ule; everyone was discouraged and worried and
frightened; labor discipline had gone to pieces,
and as my informant expressed it, "We all were
running around like chickens with their heads cut
off." Kaganovich was horrified. He rushed back to

125

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Moscow to see Stalin, and found there Voroshilof,
then Commissar of War, who had just returned
from a similar tour in the Ukraine with exactly
the same impression about his Army there. Stalin
was taking his usual summer rest near Matsesta in
his native Georgia, so Kaganovich and Voroshilof
immediately ordered a plane to fly them south
without losing a moment.

Stalin already had been talking to Beria, one of
the ablest of the younger men he is still under
forty the devoted admirer of Stalin, about whom
he had written a book. Himself a Georgian by
birth, Beria had been for five years Party Secretary
of the Caucasian Federation, and before that had
been head of the Caucasian OGPU under Min-
jinsky. Beria told Stalin that the Commissariat of
Internal Affairs, which is really the same as the
OGPU except for a change of label, had gone hog-
wild under Yezhof, that no doubt a Purge was
needed and traitors must be destroyed, but that
this was far too much of a good thing.

"Do you know," said Beria to Stalin, "that
there s hardly anyone left of last year s Caucasian
governments? I ve tried to stop it, but in vain. Yet
they can t all be Trotskyites and traitors."
126

THE GREAT PURGE

Stalin rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. "Ka-
ganovich says the same thing, and Voroshilof. IVe
just had a wire from Moscow; they ll be here to
morrow by plane."

The next day they all talked it over. Kaganovich
was insistent, and Voroshilof spoke frankly about
the Army. He said, "The foundations of discipline
and comradeship are crumbling. No one dares to
trust his fellow, either superior or subordinate. I
hear it s the same in the Navy. Both forces are
demoralized/

Stalin let them speak, as his fashion is, and
sought other information, which more than con
firmed what they said. Then he made up his mind
and decided: "When I go back to Moscow you
shall accompany me, Beria, and take charge of the
NKVD. Perhaps at first as Vice-Commissar, because
I have no reason to doubt Yezhof s honesty. He is
also Commissar of Water Transport; we can let
him take charge of that, and later you will become
full Commissar/

That seems to have been what happened, be
cause, early in August, Beria s appointment as Vice-
Commissar of the NKVD was announced without
any reference to Yezhof. The first thing he did,

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

some ten days later, was to shoot five of Yezhof s
NKVD officials for killing, ill-treating and un
justly expelling from the Party more than half
of the governmental and economic leaders of the
Moldavian Republic, in the southwestern Ukraine
bordering Bessarabia. A few sharp-eyed foreign ob
servers caught the meaning of this gesture, but
they did not yet realize that it betokened the end
of the Purge and the beginning of the "Purge of
the Purgers" which later cost Yezhof his life or
so it is generally believed, although there has been
no formal statement to that effect. On December
8, Beria was appointed Chief Commissar of the
NKVD in Yezhof s place, but the latter remained
Commissar of Water Transport and was photo
graphed with Stalin and other leaders on the plat
form of Lenin s mausoleum at some function early
in January.

The very same week, a play was produced in
Moscow which convinced the most skeptical for
eigner that the Purge was really ended. It was
called Pavel Grekof, the name of its hero, a
Communist engineer expelled from the Party who
came within an inch of being arrested, and all
his friends deserted him and even his wife was
1*8

THE GREAT PURGE

hesitant, until at last he managed to prove that he
had been slandered.

This play was the joint work of a group of
young Communists from Siberia, and the first the
atre director to whom they showed it in Moscow
leapt from his chair in horror, screaming: "What!
Do you want to destroy me? If I accepted a play
like this, we d all be shot the morning after the
first rehearsal." Other managers struck the same
note, until one, at the Theatre of the Revolution,
more courageous or far-sighted, said: "This is
strong meat indeed, but let me show it to a friend
of mine who is very close to the Kremlin. Per
haps . . ." He d guessed right, and produced the
play. The most interesting thing was the behavior
of the public, which cheered to the echo lines that
six months before would have sent the cheerers
to Kamchatka to cut wood for the rest of their
lives. The show was a raging success, and the
house was sold out two months in advance.

Quick and fast came other signs that the Purge
was really ended. Under Beria s direction the
NKVD and the Party Control Commission depart
ments at once set to work revising all cases of ex
pulsion. In a trice the papers were full of the

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

"almost incredible" stories I referred to earlier
about tried and trusted Communists being ex
pelled and ill-treated for the most fanciful or sa
distic reasons. Figures published about the revision
in the provinces of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Sta
lingrad, and I think Yaroslav, showed that between
50 and 60 per cent of the expulsions had been
made without due or proper cause. The victims
were promptly reinstated and, if exiled, brought
back to their homes and former positions. For the
rest of the country no such figures were made
known, but one presumes that they would corre
spond. Was not this a terrific indictment of Yezhof
and his methods? But who could bring back the
dead?

That the nation s reaction to the Purge had
been one of horror and anguish was clear from its
joy and relief when the shadow at last was lifted.
It was like the break-up of an ice dam on a frozen
river. People walked with their heads in the air,
and talked and smiled, talked actually to for
eigners, instead of looking askance. Then the ex
iles began to return, and some of them came to see
me, men who d been my friends in the past, even
one whom I d mourned as dead.
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THE GREAT PURGE

His tale was the book of Job, unmerited, heavy
suffering, then a turn which set everything right.
He d been head of a department in a Moscow
metal works, was arrested suddenly one night, and
soon found himself willy-nilly in a Siberian lum
ber camp, where I gather he was "not amused."
Six months later there came a call for volunteers
to work in a new armament factory near by. My
friend got employment there, and rapid advance
ment, because he was really competent. After a
few weeks he was put in charge of a shop, and a
little later was told that he had been pardoned
and would henceforth receive full wages. More
time passed, and he became director of a section
which was bigger than the whole plant where he d
worked in Moscow. Meanwhile, though he did not
know it, his case was being revised, and one day he
received the news that he had been reinstated in
the Party and was free to return to Moscow and
resume his position there.

At this point I am bound to confess that I am baf
fled by Russians, although I know them well. True,
my friend was only a young man, say thirty-three
at the most, but even so ... I suppose, however,
that Job must have talked like this one, after his

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

trouble was past, and again he d become a patri
arch, with wives and children and servants and
cattle as before. "I don t want it!" my Russian
cried gaily. "I wouldn t have that old job on a
plate! The East is the place for a man. Why, I tell
you, in five more years that new town of ours will
have two hundred thousand inhabitants. What s
more, by the end of this summer my new apart
ment will be built" he d been living, it seems, in
a dugout "and there s an extra bedroom so you
can come and stay with me, and meet my new wife.
Of course the other divorced me, and I hear that
she s remarried. That s why I came to Moscow, to
get my share of the furniture. I d like you to meet
my new wife. She s the daughter of one of my col
leagues. In fact," he lowered his voice confiden
tially, "she s much prettier and younger than my
other wife, and a better cook/

He spoke so cheerfully that I could not resist a
question. "Tell me, what do you think of the
Purge?"

He looked startled for a moment, then said
firmly: "When you were a kid did you ever have
one of those kaleidoscope toys, where you looked
down a metal tube and saw a pattern of colored

THE GREAT PURGE

glass, like the windows in a church? Then you
turned the other end o the tube and the pattern
fell to pieces, all diving and chasing each other,
like painted stars, until you stopped turning, and
there was another pattern, quite different from the
first one but made of the same old pieces. Our
Russia is like that/

"Not quite the same old pieces," I remarked,
"because a lot of them got smashed.* 5

That didn t faze him at all. "I know," he said,
"that s a pity, but I tell you, this is Russia; and for
every man that is killed or scared or exiled there
are ten more ready to come and shoulder his job
and its risks. Suppose the Purge did hit as high as
a million people. I think it s much less than that,
and many are coming back, and after all, few were
shot. But if it had been ten million, then what?
Russia can stand it. Russia can stand anything, and
the Purge is worth what it cost, because it gave us
unity, and got rid of traitors, and the filth of Op
position.

"I know you Americans have it otherwise and
the same is true of England His Majesty s Opposi
tion, they call it and Republicans can get up in
the Senate and call the President names. But that

133

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

won t do in Russia, dammit man; don t you know
that we re just emerging from feudalism, from the
England of the Tudors? We ve jumped to the
twenty-first century, and of course it isn t easy, and
of course the Purge set us back, and of course it
went too far; but I tell you it had to be done.

"Why, even the Trials were right, whatever you
foreigners may say. I read quite a lot of the stuff
that was written in foreign papers about the mys
tery of the Trials, and why the culprits confessed,
yards of nonsense written by foreigners who d
never heard that in the days of Ivan the Terrible
some nobleman offended Ivan and was seated on
a pointed stick. Impalement, they call it, and it s
more Oriental than Russian, Chinese torture stuff,
and by all accounts extremely unpleasant and
painful. It took this citizen thirty-six hours to die
and he spent the whole time singing God Save the
Tsar. That s Russian for you. Do you think we
care if ten million people were liquidated, pro
vided Stalin stands and the Kremlin and the Party
and our own Soviet Union? Do you think we care?
We re Russians."

No matter what my friend declared, and how
ever resilient Russians may be, I still maintain

134

THE GREAT PURGE

that the Purge did incalculable harm and set back
the country s progress a full five years. Neverthe
less, I cannot forget what a high-placed and sad
dened Frenchman told me recently in Washington
when we were discussing the Purge. "Yes," he said,
"it must have been awful, like a madness, as you
call it. But don t forget, mon ami, that in Russia
they shot the Fifth Columnists, and in France we
made them .Cabinet Ministers. You see both results
today ... at Vichy, and on the Red war-front/

135

VII. THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

IN MARCH, 1939, the Kremlin called a full Con
gress of the Communist Party in Moscow, the
first to be held in five years, although Party
statutes theoretically required a meeting every two
years. The Congress marked historically and defi
nitely the end of the Purge. It adopted a program,
prepared by Zdanof, of reforms in the Party struc
ture- Henceforth everyone, intellectuals, soldiers,
workers, and peasants, could enter the Party on the
same basis, whereas before strictly proletarian can
didates had much easier conditions in regard to
sponsors and length of probation period. The Con
gress also dismissed and approved the new Labor
136

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

Law which had been passed a few weeks before,
inflicting severe penalties on all employees coming
late to their jobs or being absent without good
reason. It was essential to restore and tighten labor
discipline after the Purge let-down, and the result
was soon apparent in a sharp improvement 35
per cent or more in the index of industrial pro
duction, freight-car loadings, mining, and so forth.

The atmosphere of the Congress was charged
with confidence and hope, as far as the internal
affairs of the U.S.S.R. were concerned. The coun
try had emerged from a nightmare and was mov
ing forward united to a better and happier future.
From an external viewpoint, however, the pros
pect was less rosy, and the key speech of the Con
gress, delivered by Stalin, gave full warning of
danger ahead. More perhaps than any European
statesman, Stalin makes what are known as "pro
gram" speeches, that is to say that his rare public
utterances embody not only the Kremlin s views
but the policies it intends to follow.

On this occasion Stalin made one statement
whose importance was tremendous, although none
of us appreciated it at the time. He said that the
U.S.S.R. would hold rigidly to the maintenance of

137

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

peace and opposition to "war-incendiaries/ but
added that the U.S.S.R, would not let itself fee
made a cat s-paw by anyone. Stalin laid down three
cardinal principles of Soviet relations with other
countries:

1. Unflinching resistance to any aggression
against the U.S.S.R.

2. Sympathy for victims of aggression every
where, and such assistance as might be
feasible.

3. Preservation of peace and friendship wher
ever possible.

Had the world but known it, this speech was the
expression of the Kremlin s dissatisfaction with
the Munich Agreement, of its doubts as to the in
tentions of the French and British governments,
and of its conviction that the policy of collective
security, to which the U.S.S.R. had adhered, was
doomed, like its offspring, the policy of appease
ment, to speedy and terrible disaster.

The Munich Agreement seemed to mark the
greatest humiliation which the Soviet Union, had
suffered since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It was

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

so regarded by the Russians, who were not even
consulted in the negotiations which led up to
it. Their suggestions were ignored. They were
treated not as poor relations, nor even as enemies,
but more insultingly they were simply left out of
the picture as unworthy of notice or interest.
True, in one moment of extremity when the Brit
ish fleet was mobilized and it seemed that war
was inevitable, Mr. Chamberlain brought himself
to say that Britain, France, and Russia would fight
to save the Czechs. And flew to Germany the next
day, to throw the Czechs to the wolves.

I shall not readily forget the face of a friend in
the Soviet Embassy in London, on the day of Mr.
Chamberlain s "triumphant" return, with heart
full of hope, pockets full of promises, and the
words, "I bring peace in our time/ flowing unc
tuously from his mouth. The Russian diplomat s
eyes were dark with passion and his lips were bit
ter with scorn. "The most needless surrender in
history. Did they plan it from the first? Again and
again we assured them, both the British and the
French, that the U.S.S.R. would fulfill its obliga
tions and help Czechoslovakia by force of arms.
Litvinof said so at Geneva, yet in the face of our

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

positive statements, M. Bonnet shrugged his shoul
ders and hinted to all and sundry that the French,
who as Russia s ally were in a position to know,
had grave misgivings about Soviet participation
should the crisis end in war. We made repeated
proposals for military consultation to co-ordinate
strategic plans in case of hostilities. They did not
deign to answer. And now they talk of peace, and
call it peace with honor, and put trust in Hitler s
word. I tell you time will show them, and a very
short time too/

"There is one thing you forget/ I replied
slowly. "It is hard for any Russian, even you who
live in London, to realize the effects abroad of
your Purge. I don t mean only what might be
called the moral effects, the horror and bewilder
ment the Purge has caused in the very circles of
foreign opinion that were most sympathetic to
Russia, although that is bad enough. What I speak
of is the widespread, almost universal, conviction
that the U.S.S.R. has been hamstrung by the
Purge, if it is not actually falling to pieces, and
that even supposing its willingness to fight is genu
ine, they do not believe it can fight. Wait a min
ute/ - he tried to protest- I m not saying that
140

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

they are right, I m telling you what they believe;
or how else do you think Lindbergh could have
been believed when he said your air fleet was
worthless? I know there are other reasons, but that
at least was a big one/

Events and Hitler were swift to justify Stalin s
foresight. Ere the echo of his words had died, Hit
ler struck afresh at Czechoslovakia, and at Memel,
and delivered what was virtually an economic ul
timatum to Rumania. In alarm the French and
British governments appealed to the U.S.S.R. to
take joint action on behalf of Rumania s inde
pendence. The Kremlin countered with a pro
posal to hold an immediate conference of the most
interested powers, France, Britain, the U.S.S.R.,
Poland, Rumania, and perhaps Turkey. The rea
son for this proposal was something that was a
vital factor in the relations of the U.S.S.R. with
Britain and France, and therefore of paramount
importance to Europe. It was simply that the
U.S.S.R. did not trust France and Britain, or
rather their governments, and more particularly
their leaders, Messrs. Bonnet and Chamberlain.
The U.S.S.R. had not forgotten Munich.

141

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

The purpose then of the conference proposal
was to force France and Britain out into the open
and to forestall the maneuver which the Russians
suspected they were attempting, namely, the use
by them of the U.S.S.R. as a bogey to frighten
Germany, without committing them to any defi
nite action. The Russians wanted international co
operation against aggressors and a return to a
policy of collective security, but they made it
clear that such co-operation must be genuine and
that they had no intention of being a cat s-paw for
Britain or France.

Perhaps not wholly by accident, although his
visit had been planned some weeks before, the Brit
ish Minister of Overseas Trade, Mr. H. F. Hud
son, reached Moscow two days after the Franco-
British appeal on behalf of Rumania. It was the
first visit of a British Minister since Anthony Eden
came to Moscow in the autumn of 1934, and al
though Mr. Hudson s main purpose was to per
suade the Russians to agree to negotiate a new
trade agreement I am quoting his own words he
did not deny that recent events had given some
political significance to his presence in the Soviet
capital.

142

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

Hudson got what he came for. I was present at
a rather interesting little scene in the British Em
bassy on the night of Monday, March 27. It was
11:45 P.M., and the Hudson party was scheduled
to catch the 12:30 train for Leningrad. In the
courtyard of the Embassy, which overlooks the
river facing the Kremlin, stood big black limou
sines with the British flag on their bonnets. The
main entrance hall was full of baggage and agi
tated servants looking at their watches.

We waited in a long high room profusely deco
rated with carved oak which had once been the
library of Haritonenko, Tsarist Russia s greatest
sugar king, the former owner of the mansion. At
11:47 Hudson bustled in, a tall, thickset ruddy
man with strong features, and at once began to
read a statement which announced the success of
his mission but diverged somewhat curiously, as we
discovered later, from an announcement the same
evening issued by the Soviet Foreign Office. The
latter stressed, which Hudson did not mention,
that he had been received by Premier Molotof,
and laid further emphasis upon the work that had
been done in discussing international problems as
well as purely economic questions. The conclusion

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

was obvious enough, that the British for their own
good reasons were not overanxious to display the
fact they were engaged in discussing such prob
lems with the U.S.S.R., but that this had been part
of Hudson s mission. The Russians on the other
hand were glad to have it known, and above all
knew it themselves. They must have felt sardoni
cally the change that had come since Munich, and
that the "pay-off" from Munich already was be
ginning.

As the Kremlin estimated Munich, an underly
ing purpose then entertained by Mr. Chamberlain
was to leave Hitler a more or less free hand for
expansion eastward. In short, to let him follow the
line laid down in Mein Kampf, and repeated
in his Nuremburg speech in September, 1936, of
attacking the Ukraine with its rich grain-fields and
the coal and iron resources of the Donetz Basin.
Nothing could have been more welcome to British
and French statesmen than to see German Nazism
in a death grapple with Russian Bolshevism, and
if the Japanese would only join in and all three
of them fight each other to a standstill, no tears
would be shed in either London or Paris.

The Kremlin was aware of this naive hope, which
144

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

did not enhance its love for Chamberlain. Unfor
tunately for the latter, Herr Hitler failed to bite,
or rather, preferred to follow his favorite policy of
progress step by step, first to seize Memel and
swallow what was left of Czechoslovakia, then
to consolidate his economic hold upon Rumania
and the Danube, in order subsequently to chal
lenge Poland for the possession of Danzig and the
Corridor. The Kremlin .was far more alive than
Chamberlain or Bonnet to Hitler s real aims, and
to the worthlessness of the promises which he had
made at Munich. It had learned from the Treason
Trials that Nazi Germany was its destined and
ultimate foe, and it was therefore willing to make
a last effort to co-operate with France and Britain,
in the hope of reviving the moribund collective
security. It was on this account that the U.S.S.R.
was the first to issue a vigorous protest against Hit
ler s final rape of Czechoslovakia,

The circumstances in which this protest was
made, or rather received, were colorful. It was
the night of March 18, when Madame Rosso,
the American-born wife of the Italian Ambassador,
gave a costume ball to the whole Diplomatic
Corps, which was easily the peak of the Moscow

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

social season. The Italians had the finest Embassy
in Moscow, a huge mansion where in August,
1918, the German Ambassador Count von Mir-
bach was first bombed and then shot dead by two
Social-Revolutionary assassins who plotted to
break the pane signed at Brest-Litovsk between
Germany anflie Bolsheviks.

The great hMIs were crowded with a mass of
brilliant costumes, and in one of the lower rooms
I noted, because I knew where to look for it, a
small patch high up in the gilded cornice where a
fragment of the Social-Revolutionary bomb once
tore away part of the ceiling. Suddenly one of the
German attaches, resplendent in the uniform of
the Teutonic Knights of the Sword, came hurry
ing to his Ambassador, Count von Shulenberg,
who wore conventional evening dress. Other Ger
man diplomats appeared as if by magic, sought
their hostess hurriedly and left the house in a
body. The incident passed unnoticed, but what
had happened was that the Russian note of pro
test had been delivered at the German Embassy,
and then, as no one was there, brought on to the
Italian party, where Count von Shulenberg re-
146

THE U.S.S.Fl AND MUNICH
ceived it and felt that it must be answered with
out delay.

The tide of world affairs was now rising to the
"high" which culminated in the second World
War. Germany s reply to the Soviet protest was
mild and noncommittal, and there were persist
ent rumors in Moscow that Germany proposed to
send an important economic representative for
the purpose of widening the basis of Soviet-Ger
man trade. It is worth mentioning here that de
spite Hitler s frequent diatribes against "Judaeo-
Bolshevism," none of the political, economic, and
financial agreements between Germany and the
U.S.S.R., which had been made by the two coun
tries in the decade of their close co-operation and
friendship from 1922 (the Rapallo Pact) to 1932,
had ever been canceled or abrogated, Hudson s
arrival in Moscow seems to have forestalled the
German plan, and it leaked out from the German
Embassy that "important negotiations for a new
and more comprehensive Trade Agreement with
the ILS.S.R. would shortly be opened in Berlin/*
The information proved correct, and it was from
these negotiations that later came the Russo-Ger-

147

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

man Pact o August, 1939, which may be said to
have raised the curtain for the war.

In a speech on April 3, Mr. Chamberlain ad
mitted the gravity of the Germano-Polish crisis,
and the virtual failure of his appeasement policy.
He announced the British guarantee of Poland s
territorial integrity a hasty and fruitless meas
ure which rendered no service to Poland and in
dicated that Britain and France might revert to
the policy of collective security on lines desired
by the Kremlin. Put briefly, the Kremlin wanted a
hard and fast agreement of Great Britain, France,
and the U.S.S.R., with such other smaller coun
tries as cared to join it, to oppose aggression any
where, by force of arms if need be.

As Mr. Chamberlain said, such an agreement
would not apply to "frontier incidents or similar
minor squabbles," but would nevertheless be a
concrete barrier to fresh aggressive action. The
Kremlin, as I have said, was none too sanguine
about either the sincerity or backbone of the
French and British governments, but it felt that
if they did at last intend to put teeth into collec
tive security, Hitler might shrink at the eleventh
hour from challenging the combined forces of the
148

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

three Powers, doubtless backed by the smaller na
tions of Europe and the moral support and sym
pathy of the United States.

From the outset the "conversations" or negotia
tions between the U.S.S.R. and the Franco-Brit
ish were cursed by an evil star. To begin with, the
Kremlin was annoyed that no heed had been
taken of its earlier proposal to include Poland,
Rumania, and perhaps Turkey in the talks at Mos
cow, and its irritation was greatly increased by the
British choice of a comparatively unknown For
eign Office official, Mr. William Strang, to act as
their spokesman there. Mr. Strang had formerly
been Counselor of Embassy in Moscow, and dur
ing his service had fallen foul of the Soviet For
eign Office through his spirited, but perfectly cor
rect, defense of the interests of his fellow-coun
trymen accused of sabotage in the Metro-Vickers
Trial.

Mr. Strang spoke Russian fluently and had for
some time been in charge of the Russian division
of the British Foreign Office, but the Kremlin
thought that if the British really meant business
they would have sent a more eminent man* Never
theless, there was a moment in the early summer

149

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

when It seemed that an accord was almost reached v
At that time the Russians wanted no more than a
blanket agreement on the lines I have mentioned
earlier, which they hoped would serve as a red
light to Hitler. It is my own belief, which is shared
by the then French Charge d Affaires, who took
part in the discussions, that such an agreement
was possible, but I am unable to say whether the
Russians are right in asserting that the British
government somehow balked at the last minute.

At any rate the talks proved abortive, and Mr.
Strang returned to London. There were, however,
people in England bolder and more clairvoyant
than Mr. Chamberlain and his friends, and thanks
to their insistence a second British mission was
sent to Moscow. By this time the writing on the
wall was clear for all who had eyes to see, and the
mission was military in character, to prepare and
co-ordinate with the U.S.S.R. resistance to aggres
sion; but again its personnel was not such as to
command the Kremlin s respect or overcome its
doubts.

On this occasion there was a new and harder
tone in the Soviet proposals. The Russians de
manded "territorial guarantees" in the Baltic
150

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

States and Finland, by which they doubtless meant
the right to install their own forces at key points.
They further asked that Poland should agree to
the passage into Polish territory of two Soviet
armies, in the North and South, immediately af
ter the beginning of hostilities, or earlier should
the Kremlin judge it necessary. These armies, it
was stated, would be independent of the Polish
High Command, but would of course co-operate
with it. Obviously there was little chance of these
proposals being accepted, and it is probable that
the Russians had already given the Franco-Brit
ish up as a bad job and decided that unless they
were clever and nimble they would be left, so to
speak, with the Polish baby on their doorstep.

The Kremlin, remember, was suspicious of
France and Britain. It saw that should war break
out, the two Western Powers could do little in aid
of Poland. It knew, moreover, the weakness of
Poland and the strength of the German blitzkrieg,
which its soldiers had seen being perfected in
Spain. Alignment with France and Britain meant
at best, the Kremlin thought, that the U.S.S.R.
must singly defend a shattered Poland against
Germany, with no immediate prospect of Franco-

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

British help. At worst, Bonnet and Chamberlain
would succeed in their design of embroiling Naz
ism and Bolshevism in mortal strife, and were
ready to sacrifice Poland in order to reach that
result.

Faced by these alternatives, the Kremlin, it
claimed, had no choice save to accept the pact
which the Germans were now willing to offer. It
could have had little doubt as to Hitler s ultimate
intentions towards the U.S.S.R., but it may well
have expected that without the support of the
U.S.S.R., Poland and the Franco-British would
give way to Hitler s demands, and that whether
they did or not, whether peace or war ensued, the
U.S.S.R. would anyway have gained further time
for its defense program. I think that the Kremlin
underestimated the martial temper of the Poles, as
later it did that of the Finns, but the curious hesi
tations which preceded the declaration of war by
the Chamberlain and Daladier-Bonnet govern
ments would indicate that they at least were con
templating yet another "appeasement/ and only
decided to fight under public pressure. Be that as
it may, on August 23 the ILS.S.R. startled the
world by signing a pact with the Nazis.

THE U.S.S.R. AND MUNICH

France and Britain at once declared that this
was a great betrayal, and in America it was said,
more vividly, that Russia thus "gave the green
light to Hitler/ It was argued that the Bolshe
viks had craftily played both ends against the mid
dle in order to plunge Europe into the war which
their Marxist dogma proclaimed would be the
prelude to revolution. Another theory was that
the Red and Brown "totalitarian despotisms" had
concluded an unholy alliance to enslave the rest
of humanity, or anyway Europe and Asia. Some
color was lent to this view by the speedy an
nouncement of the Russo-German program for
Poland s partition, and by the Soviet acquisition,
with Germany s aid and blessing, of the coveted
"territorial guarantees" in the Baltic States.

An additional proof that the U.S.S.R. had been
"stringing" the Franco-British all summer was
seen in the replacement on May 4 of the Soviet
Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinof, a
notable champion of collective security and the
League of Nations, by the Soviet Premier Molo-
tof, who was stated to be pro-German. All in all,
a convincing case was made, and most of the world
believed it; but in light of subsequent events, fu-

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

ture historians may judge that the Kremlin played
a most difficult game with no little dexterity, be
cause it had clearer and more penetrating eyes
than its contemporaries, and took what measures
it could to avert or postpone the dangers it dis
cerned far ahead.

154

VIII. THE HEARTS OF THE
RUSSIAN PEOPLE

THE RUSSIANS ARE stout of heart and stub
born in defense, as the British once learned
to their cost in the Crimean War eighty-
five years ago. The siege of Sebastopol, which the
Russians call "Sevastowpol/* with accent on the
"tow," caused the British Army plenty of blood
and sweat, and at that the French, not the British,
took Redan, the key to the fortress. Yes, indeed,
the Russians are stubborn and good at defense-
Life is not easy in Russia; you must learn to de
fend, or die. Survival of the fittest, Darwin called
it, and it is indeed true about Russia, where there
have been many occasions like today when only
the strong could survive.

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

But the Russians are always Russians, and that
means kittle-kattle, if you know what that means.
It s Scotch, and the Scotch are canny. The late
King Alfonso of Spain once said to Colonel de
Vigne, then Military Attache of the French Re
public in Spain, a wise word about the Russians.
It was in the winter of 1916-17, in the midst of the
last World War, when there was peace talk
bruited around, and it seems the King of Spain
was mixed up in it, and the French Military At
tache was trying to sell him a bill of goods about
some great Russian offensive that would make the
Germans stagger. The King said: "My honored
Mother, Her Majesty Queen Isabella, a most in
telligent woman, once told me, You never know
about Russians, the Russian is like a cat, you
never know where he will jump/ "

Those were indeed words of wisdom, because
in the following year the Russians threw out their
"Little Father," the Tsar, whom later they shot
dead with all his family, and made a Red revolu
tion and stepped themselves out of the war
which nearly ruined the Allies, so it seems that
Alfonso guessed right.

On the other hand, Soviet Russians say all that
156

THE HEARTS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE
is ancient history, that they are different Russians,
and can fight to the death and will. But a cat is
always a cat, although I do like the Russians . . *
and also like cats.

The new (Soviet)" Russians declare that the
Kremlin has won the full respect and devotion of
the people. This was denied by many foreign ob
servers in Moscow, including some of the diplo
mats. Almost everywhere in the world there is a
tendency for the Diplomatic Corps to form a sort
of close corporation of its own, or live in an
ivory tower/ Olympian and aloof. This is espe
cially true in countries like the U.S.S.R., Turkey,
Japan, Iran, China, and India, where racial, lin
guistic, or social considerations emphasize the dif
ference between all foreigners and the people of
the country. If a State, then, really wished to find
out about other States, I think its best plan would
be to seek -that information not from diplomats
who are remote and preoccupied, nor from re
porters, too busy chasing the trees of news to be
able to see the wood, but from a dozen, score, or
hundred according to the size of the country-
social workers of both sexes, scattered at various

157

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

points. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and the like,
youngish, to avoid prejudice, keen on their work
and speaking the language fluently. Every three
months each one should make a report on condi
tions, trends, and the other factors which form
public opinion. They would thus give a real cross-
section, and their home government would avoid
such examples of ignorance as occurred about
France in 1939-40, and for that matter Germany,
in the years when the Nazis were stealthily prepar
ing their war machine. Such a system would have
been invaluable in the U.S.S.R., where the gulf
between foreigners and the Russian masses was
both wide and deep.

The fact is that some 90 and more per cent of
the Russian nation had little fun in the old days
and were little better than slaves. It was fun, I ad
mit, for the nobles and the generals and the rich
and cultured people. But not much fun for the
masses who lived like pigs in the dirt and not like
pigs in clover. I ll never forget one day this gives
you the truth about Soviet Russia and why the boys
are fighting when I went to the Moscow Uni
versity to talk to a youngster I knew, and found
him sharing a room about ten feet by ten with
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THE HEARTS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

three other boys. There were only two beds
among them, but there was a telephone, and
steam heat. No sheets, of course, but blankets; and
books piled up everywhere and only one table for
all four of them to work on; and "modern plumb
ing * down the hall, though no bathroom. You did
know about the plumbing, in no very pleasant
way.

So I said to this young man, "It must be hard
for you to work in such conditions."

He gave me an odd look and said slowly, "Do
you know my earliest memory, the first page in
my brain s book of life? It was sucking the teats
of a sow in the place where I was born, which
was a wooden lean-to against the hut of a Kulak
peasant who employed my father. The lean-to was
built as near as possible to the stove of the Kulak
peasant, because we had no stove. Nor anything
save our pig, this big fat sow and her piglings.
There were seven of us children, nearly naked
and always hungry, and I was the fifth. My mother
dragged me away from the pig the first thing I
remember in my life and said, Little pigs are
worth money, but babies are a nuisance/ and
threw me into the corner. You say these are hard

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

conditions? . . . Perhaps they are hard for you, but
to me they are heaven and splendor, they give me
a chance to learn, they teach me engineering, and
let me live rent free; they give me food and cloth
ing, and thirty rubles a month"(about one
American dollar at that time) "for cigarettes and
amusements. They give me a chance in life, to
become a man, not a pig. That s what Lenin and
Stalin have done for me and millions of others.
You foreigners can t understand, but we know
and we understand. I tell you, if ever the test
comes, if ever they strike at our Russia, we shall
fight for it, down to the depths and up to the
topmost heights. The Bolshevik Revolution! It
gave us a chance in life."

That, I thought, was impressive; at least it im
pressed me. And true, I knew it was true. I can
know truth when I hear it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United
States of America, has said his say about freedoms.
He also talked about freedom of religion in Rus
sia, which was not the best of his talks. As I have
said somewhere else in this book, the Russian s idea
of freedom is not the idea we have. They are only
groping for freedom, although in some ways, which
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THE HEARTS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

perhaps are the ways of life, the basic ways of life,
Russians are not less free than we are. It is one of
the strangest things, that the average Soviet Rus
sian honestly believes that the system under which
he lives, which we consider a tyranny, or dictator
ship, or totalitarian regime, or anything save free
domthe average Russian thinks that his regime
is freer than the "plutocratic oligarchy" (as he
terms it) under which, he says, Americans live,
move, and have their being. That s what the Rus
sian says, and that s what the Russian thinks, and
he doesn t believe in our freedoms, but he does
believe in his own. It s amazing, but that s how
it is.

You cannot understand Russia unless you talk
to the people, to the little ones, the men who
never got "purged" because they were unimpor
tant, the little small man in the street the street
or the ragged village the little small humble man
who does not ask for much: first, bread to put in
his mouth,, not bread-and-butter but bread, with
perhaps a piece of meat. And a wife whom he
loves and to love him, and children because they
come. And warmth against the winter, because the
winter is cold. And clothing oh yes, he needs

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

that and o course he wants other things too. He
wants education, first o all, because he s Russian,
the most avid-or-education race of any on this
earth. He wants travel, because his ancestors were
nomads. He may want I am not sure the right
to vote by ballot, the right to worship or not, the
right to talk as he pleases. Of those things I am
not sure, but I know of another right which every
Russian has. The right to fight and die for his
own country, which all Russians love.

The Russians are not like us; I mean they do
not care about "rugged individualism." The mass
of the Russian people want things which Ameri
cans want, and many Americans have, but they
do not like Tsars or landlords or bankers or Ku
laks or traitors. If you wish to know the truth, the
Russian masses applauded when such folk were
shot. That s dreadful but it s true. Having had to
"pig it" together because they were treated like
pigs, they are not aloof from co-operative action.
The bosses had individualism, and the landlords
and the nobles, but the masses did not have a
chance of individualism. Until now.

Until now, when a kid from a village gets out
and flies over the Pole, or does something to earn
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THE HEARTS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

him glory, a simple kid from a village. Then they
give him the Order of Lenin and invite him to
the Kremlin. You don t know what it means to
Russians, to be invited to the Kremlin and meet
Stalin and the others. That is one smart trick
they have done, that anyone who stands out or
invents something or does something new for Rus
sia, they ask to the Kremlin, and put his name in
the papers, and give him the time of his life. Like
Sergeant York.

You can call it political slickness, but really it s
more than that; it s trying to lift your people, to
help them upward and on. And make them proud
of themselves, and give them a reason to live. Not
easy, you know, with slave races. Oh dear, no, it
wasn t easy. Moses faced the same problem with
his Jews who were slaves in Egypt, and solved it
by telling the Jews that Jehovah, the Only God,
was personally interested in how every Jew took
his breakfast and lunch and dinner, and how he
shaved his beard, and how he washed his body.
Moses put manhood into his Jews by ritual, by
the thought that Jehovah was watching the way
they ate and washed, and was interested in them.
That made them feel pretty good, and say what

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

you like of the Jews, I say they still are good, and
have been good for many years and will go on
being good, and neither Hitler nor Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain will stop them. The Lord said,
"My chosen people/ and if you believe the
Bible . . .

The Bolshevik Revolution was made, if you
like, by Lenin. But you can t "make" a revolu
tion, you must have certain conditions. The first
and cardinal one is that the majority of your pop
ulation does not like the way they live. That was
true in the Russian Empire, and that was why
Lenin won. I do not pretend to say that every
living Russian adores the Kremlin today and
thinks Stalin is God Almighty and Russia heaven
on earth. Of course that is utter nonsense, but I
would say that most of the people, especially the
young ones, feel that the Soviet regime is good
enough for them and worth their blood to defend.
I could even give you statistics, about hygiene
and health, and education and sports, and music
and radio, and all sorts of things brought to a
nation which never had any fun. The 5 per cent
had fun, the 5 per cent at the top; oh yes, they
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THE HEARTS OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

had marvelous fun. But the others lived mostly
like beasts and weren t even fed enough.

If I were asked to tell you in one sentence what
the Bolshevik Revolution has done to the Russian
people, I should say it has given them Hope, the
one thing left, you remember, in the box which
Pandora opened.

165

IX. THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

IF THE WESTERN world was outraged by the
vagaries of the Kremlin s foreign policy in
the summer of 1939, the Soviet masses were
frankly bewildered. It is true that they had a con
genital dislike for the English and little regard
for the French, whereas the Germans had always
enjoyed a certain prestige in Russia as industrious,
competent folk; and there was, too, the memory
of ten years recent friendship with Germany
from Rapallo to the advent of Hitler.

On the other hand, there was hardly a man,
woman or child in the U.S.S.R. who did not know
that Hitler and his Nazis were their country s
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THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

deadliest enemy. Like its rulers, the Soviet nation
had learned that lesson from the Trials, and since
the entry o the U.S.S.R. into the League of Na
tions in 1934, it had been taught to regard France
and Britain as potential allies, however lukewarm,
in the struggle with Nazi-Fascism, To find sud
denly that the "Line" and the slogans were
changed, that their country was now ranged be
side Germany in the conflict with " Western plu
tocratic pseudo-democracies" (as Pravda called
them), was startling to say the least. Let the Krem
lin s pipers play never so sweetly, there was many
a Soviet citizen, inside the Party and outside it,
who hated to dance with Germany.

A far more vivid picture of the public state of
mind than any I can give, as suggested before, is
painted by Tolstoy in his masterpiece, War and
Peace, where he describes the effects of similar
changes of policy in the days of Alexander I and
Napoleon. The parallel is amazingly exact. First,
the Russians fought Napoleon as allies of Austria
and Prussia. At the great battle of Austerlitz, more
Russian troops than Austrians were engaged; and
again at Friedland, when Napoleon completed his
conquest of Prussia, there were more Russians

167

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

than Prussians to fight and die in that stubborn
and bloody fray.

Suddenly, almost overnight, the two Emperors
were friends and brothers. Meeting in amity and
pomp on an island in the River Niemen, the
"Corsican upstart, Bonaparte/ became "His Im
perial Majesty Napoleon I," and the Russian
Army, from field-marshal to raw recruit, felt as if
it was standing on its head.

Tolstoy writes a priceless account of a scene at
an Army Staff dinner, when the officers debated
how they should treat the French. A rotund gen
eral declared he would greet French officers, if
forced to meet them, with dignified reserve.
"When they salute me, I shall incline my head
without speaking/ A colonel said he would turn
his back on any Frenchman. A major then vowed
that he would challenge every Frenchman to a
duel. Talk waxed hot and furious, until one of the
senior officers said quietly, "Gentlemen, you must
and will behave with perfect courtesy towards our
recent enemies. Our Emperor has chosen, for
reasons good to His Illustrious and Imperial
Majesty, that our country and France shall be
friends. You have all sworn oaths of allegiance,
168

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

there can therefore be no question about your
conduct/ Alexander I was popular and beloved,
and with a few trifling exceptions his Army and
people stifled their inner doubts and followed the
path he had drawn.

So, in 1939, the Soviet nation took a big gulp
and swallowed the pact with Germany. Without
much liking it either, but the will of the Krem
lin was law. Yet they knew that the respite was
only temporary, as Alexander s officers knew that
sooner or later Napoleon s greed for dominion
over Europe if not, like Hitler s, for world dom
inationwould bring him into conflict with their
country. Historical parallels are proverbially fal
lacious, but this one holds good right through.
Napoleon did attack Russia one day, as Hitler
turned and attacked it, with the same purpose
and in the same week of the year. Both usurpers
saw the same thing, that without the defeat of
Russia their empires were founded on sand. Both
dreamed of a swift campaign and peace on their
own terms. The world knows Napoleon s fate.

Alexander s deal with Napoleon was essentially
political in purpose, but the Soviet-Nazi pact had
also a strong economic aspect. By this and later

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

agreements, the U.S.S.R. agreed to deliver great
quantities o oil, grain, cotton, manganese, and
other raw materials; but this was no mere tribute
or sacrifice imposed by force. The Soviet received
in exchange, through a clearing system, German
machines and spare parts, machine tools, instru
ments of precision, chemicals and drugs. Soviet
industry had run down badly during the Purge,
and most of its machines and tools needed re
placement or repair. It was already beginning to
produce such things for itself, but of all machin
ery imported in the last ten years, more than
60 per cent was of German origin.

It speedily became apparent that British and
American factories would be far too busy with their
own affairs to spare tools or machines for Russia.
This task devolved upon Germany and the coun
tries Germany controlled. Thus Germany received
much-needed raw materials, but the U.S.S.R.
benefited even more by the exchange, and it
is ironical to reflect that the mechanical equip
ment which met and checked the Germans, and
whose rapid development in the twelve months
prior to June, 1941, had perhaps been one of the
factors in deciding Hitler to attack, had been
170

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

largely thus developed and produced by tools and
machines from Germany. In this partnership that
was also a duel, economic as well as political hon
ors were not all on the Nazi side.

In the year which followed the Soviet-German
pact, the Kremlin played its own hand with a dis
regard for public opinion abroad so complete as
to be almost cynical. I suppose that since the days
of Attila the Hun, whom a horrified Europe la
beled "the Scourge of God/ no State has ever
roused such hostility and dislike. In the United
States especially, people felt that this was the cul
mination of the barbarity of the Trials and the
madness of the Purge. To Americans the parti
tion of Poland was like stabbing in the back a man
who is mortally wounded. The savage onslaught
upon little Finland was as unprovoked and base
less as it was provoking and base. Finally, the seiz
ures of Bessarabia and the Baltic States in the
summer of 1940 were acts of ruthless greed that
put even Hitler to shame.

The Kremlin "lay low and said nuffin." Seem
ingly indifferent to the storm of foreign criticism,
it forged grimly ahead along the road it had
chosen. Did Hitler require more grain, or oil or

171

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

cotton, as he saw that the fall of France left the
British undismayed? Well and good, let him have
what he asked, provided, always provided, that he
gave in exchange the machines for which Russian
industry clamored. As for the new territory, the
"recuperated areas/ as the Soviet Foreign Office
termed them, what were they but a skirmish
ground, an outer glacis to aid in the defense of the
"battle zones in depth" which Soviet military en
gineers had been preparing for seven long years
behind the earlier frontiers of the U.S.S.R.?

The case of Finland was peculiar, because in
places its frontier was less than fifty miles from
Leningrad, once St. Petersburg, capital of Rus
sia, now second city of the U.S.S.R., with its huge
Putiloff armament works, its shipbuilding and
other industrial plants. You might say the same of
Detroit, that this vital center of American indus
try lies literally under Canadian guns; but the cir
cumstances are different. Instead of being virtually
frontierless and united by ancient friendship like
Canada and the United States, Finland and the
U.S.S.R. were divided by enmities that dated
much further back than the revolutionary strug
gle of 1918-19, the worst and most bloody of all
172

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

civil wars in history, where the White Finns fi
nally triumphed and vied with the Reds excesses
in stamping the Communists out.

Moreover, Finland was a small, weak country
incapable of resisting foreign influence, and as the
Kremlin knew, its leaders owed no little o their
success in the Civil War to the aid of the German
General von der Goltz and his divisions. In 1938-
39 there had been persistent reports of new Ger
man "commercial" air-lines, air-fields, and other
"commercial" enterprises and agreements in Fin
land. The danger was as obvious as if central Long
Island, or Burlingame, California, were held by
unfriendly little States which might at any mo
ment agree with a great unfriendly Power to
unleash its war-dogs upon New York or San Fran
cisco. Here if anywhere, thought the Kremlin,
"territorial guarantees" were imperative. Accord
ingly, in the late autumn of 1939, there began ne
gotiations between the U.S.S.R. and Finland to
give the former some practical assurance that a
foreign force striking from Finland would not
find itself at the start within gun range of Peter s
City.

I was not in Moscow or Helsinki at the time,

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

but my friend Herbert Elliston, of the Christian
Science Monitor and the Atlantic Monthly,
one of the ablest foreign correspondents I know,
was in Helsinki throughout the negotiations, and
I d take his word as gospel. He told me later in
Stockholm that Finland and the U.S.S.R. were at
one time within an inch of reaching an agree
ment on terms desired by the Kremlin, if they
didn t actually reach it.

Indeed Elliston seemed to think, and this I have
heard from others, that the Finns had agreed to
accept the Soviet conditions in return, don t for
get, for important territorial and other conces
sions in Soviet Karelia, bordering Finland and
that their decision was in process of being com
municated to Moscow, when somewhere some
thing slipped. By one account, it was simply delay
in transmission, which occurs frequently in East-
ern Europe, as reporters know to their cost. By
another, Zdanof, or the Leningrad High Com
mand or someone, grew impatient, and thought to
hurry the Finns by sending a bomb-squadron to
Helsinki. And some of the bombers got excited
and dropped bombs, which did little damage but
made the Finns fighting mad and killed any hope

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY 7

of a deal. Another version is that the Nazis in Hel
sinki kept bolstering the Finns and saying the
Kremlin was bluffing, and that they would take
care of the Finns, and the Kremlin wouldn t
dare. , . .

Perhaps there were parts of truth in every one
of these stories, but I think that the heart of the
truth was an error by the Kremlin, which appar
ently felt sure the Finns couldn t and wouldn t
fight. The Kremlin, it seems, had been led to be
lieve by its diplomatic representatives in Finland,
and by Finnish Communist refugees in Moscow
and their "underground" Comrades in Finland,
that nine-tenths of the Finnish people disliked and
distrusted their rulers to such a degree that they
would welcome a move by the Red Army to help
them throw out said rulers. This would appear to
put the onus for rupture on the U.S.S.R., and I
think that s where it belongs, although it is not
unlikely that the Nazis had somewhere a finger in
the pie. They were sharp enough to suppose that
a clash of the U.S.S.R. with Finland would add
tenfold height to the barrier already existing be
tween the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies.

But now the Kremlin slipped and messed up

175

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
the Finnish affair. It got caught in a needless war
which intensified, if that were possible, its ill-re
nown in France, Britain, and the United States,
and branded it more than before as a co-aggressor
with Hitler.

It was ludicrous to see how the Kremlin
floundered, how its press squeaked feebly about
the danger of Finland as an outpost of possible
Anglo-French attack, when everyone in Moscow,
including the writers of this nonsense, knew that
France and Britain couldn t raise a finger to help
Finland, much less use it as an outpost for attack.
They couldn t help Poland or Finland, and the
help they sent later to Norway was not, shall I say,
much use. We knew and the Russians knew that
the potential foe behind Finland to which Mos
cow newspapers referred was not France or Brit
ain, but Germany. It was fear of a German attack
that compelled the Kremlin to push backward the
Finnish frontier and disarm the Mannerheim
Line, for exactly the same reason that it thrust its
frontiers westward in Bessarabia, Poland, and the
Baltic States.

The Kremlin s greatest mistake in this affair
was a grave misjudgment of the temper, spirit, and
176

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

courage of the Finnish people, which rose as one
man and woman to defend its country s soil.
Great Britain committed the same error forty
years before in its struggle with the Boers, when
it thought that those "ignorant farmers" would be
swept aside like chaff by a couple of British divi
sions, and found to its horror that the Boers had
almost succeeded in driving into the sea the whole
British Army in South Africa.

The Kremlin made an even worse guess; it
thought that the "oppressed Finnish proletariat"
would receive with open arms the "Soviet liber
ators/ 5 I know for a fact that the first Red de
tachments in Finland advanced with bands play
ing and banners labeled "To our Finnish Com
rades, Greeting," and "We Shake the Hand of
Free Finland." They advanced in open order,
straggling along the roads. And were rudely sur
prised to be met by grenades and machine-guns.
They didn t expect a fight, and that is the truth
and the trouble. They also didn t expect the kind
of winter that Finland showed them that year.
Fifty degrees below zero, to freeze tanks and me
chanical transport. It was just like the British and
Boers, or David killing Goliath. And the rest of

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

the world was misled, and said, "Oh, it is just what
we thought, it is all the effects of the Purge. The
Red Army is only a bluff, little Finland is beating
the Giant."

That opinion became so universal and so firmly
established that no one seemed to appreciate what
happened in February and March when the Soviet
mustered its might and drove over the Manner-
heim Line as a tank drives over a pill-box. In fact
it was just like that, and it took them less than
three weeks. They brought from the Far East six
crack divisions, two panzers and four mechanized,
six double divisions, each twenty thousand men,
who had learned the war game in two successive
campaigns against the Japanese.

It may be news to you, Reader, that the battle
of Lake Khasan, or Chanakufeng as the Russians
call it, on the Russo-Manchukuo border south
of Vladivostok, lasted longer and was bloodier
and engaged more men than Gettysburg. Its re
sult was indecisive, except that for the first time
in Russo-Japanese history the Japanese aban
doned a battlefield and later agreed to its posses
sion by the U.S.S.R. So I say these Siberian troops
were "blooded" and knew what war meant, as

178

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

they proved to the Finns in short order. Not only
the Germans in Spain learned how to conduct a
blitzkrieg. General Stern and his Siberians blasted
the Mannerheim Line with dive-bombers and
tanks and guns and infantry trained to follow*

Then Finland sued for peace, and, surprisingly,
the Kremlin asked little more than its terms be
fore the war began a frontier somewhat more dis
tant, the Mannerheim Line disarmed, and the oc
cupation by Soviet units of strategic points like
the island of Hango. The Russians had won
hands down, once they really turned on the heat;
but their final success did not avail to correct the
initial impression of failure. The Western world
believed that the Russo-Finnish campaign had
proved what it always suspected, that the execu
tion of the "Generals" in 1937 and the Purge
afterwards had so demoralized the Red Army that
as a fighting force it was henceforth contemptible.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, like Hitler after him, made
the same mistake about Britain; but Hitler also
made the mistake about Russia, which perhaps
was the graver mistake.

I was in Moscow during the latter part of the
Finnish War, but what with the Soviet censorship

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THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

and the extreme reluctance of American readers
to hear anything but ill of Russia and the Red
Army, I didn t get very far. I did, however, gather
that German military circles failed to share the
American and British opinion of the weakness of
the Red Army, which makes it all the more sur
prising that Hitler attacked so recklessly last June,
and perhaps justifies reports that he acted against
the wish of his military advisers.

I thought too that I detected an interesting
and it seemed to me characteristic reaction of the
Soviet public to the Finnish War. A patriotic re
action. People didn t seem to care for the rights
or wrongs of the case. They said, "We are fighting
Finland; the Finns then are our enemies, and to
hell with them." Everyone knew that behind the
Finns was hidden a greater foe, and most people
seemed to know that he wasn t British or French.
They didn t say openly "Germans"; they said,
"Can t you understand that the frontier must be
pushed back? That Leningrad cannot remain at
the mercy of foreign attack?" They seemed to
sense what was coming, and in their deep preoccu
pation with future danger had no compunction
or pity for Finland s gallant resistance. They
180

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

talked of the Mannerheim Line and said it must
be smashed, and when it was smashed they were
glad, but not unduly surprised.

To me at that time the common people of Mos
cow gave a useful object lesson. I perceived that
they had recovered from the ill effects of the Purge
and had made up their minds in terms of "My
country, right or wrong." I don t much like the
implication of this phrase, but a nation that says
it and means it has guts and will fight for its own.
A nation like that will fight, as the Russians have
fought against Hitler. Whatever foreign observ
ers or military attaches may have thought and re
ported to their governments, the Kremlin must
have been encouraged by the tone of the Soviet
masses during the Finnish War.

As one looks at it all with hindsight, I suppose
that the Finnish campaign must have opened Hit
ler s eyes to the fact that the U.S.S.R., which he
doubtless despised and thought that he could
twist around his finger, had a purpose and will of
its own. Because whether you like him or not, Hit
ler is far from a fool, and never made a mistake
until June s>s>, 1941. Unless you call his "beer-
hall rebellion" in Munich in the old days a mis-

181

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

take. Of course he might have been shot, and
nearly was, in that fracas. And might have been
shot by the Court which instead condemned him
to political imprisonment. But that was a risk to
take, and Hitler has never feared risks. Another
man greater than he far greater and more success
ful, Mohammed, the Prophet of Allahbegan
with a similar flop, a silly, ridiculous flop. But
both of them lived it down.

Hitler cannot have failed to perceive, by this
time, the Kremlin s game, its need for the outer
marches, the skirmish grounds, and the glacis. But
he had other fish to fry. The ink was hardly dry
on the Russo-Finnish Peace Treaty, when Hitler
struck at Norway, the beginning of his drive to
conquer Europe. From Oslo to Brussels ^nd Paris
it was one swift march of conquest, unequaled
since Napoleon and hardly equaled by him. For
a moment it seemed likely that Britain too might
collapse; but Dunkirk answered that, and the fact
that the Nazis were unable or unready to attempt
an invasion of Britain.

How the Kremlin must have sweated during
those summer months, as it watched Hitler racing
ahead to the mastery of Europe! The Kremlin
182

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

acted promptly. In July it issued a decree which
virtually conscripted all Russian labor for war
work. The Kremlin s answer to Hitler, although
no one judged it as such. I mean that the date is
important; this decree was passed in July, when
Hitler seemed to be winning. It ordained that all
Russian workers, employees, and peasants on col
lective farms were henceforth held to their jobs
as tightly as soldiers to duty. Their discipline and
obedience must be no less complete than that of
mobilized troops; the law was so sudden and sharp
that it hardly mentioned penalties.

In substance, the Kremlin said to the labor
unions and the peasants: "We might mobilize you
in this hour of emergency and take you away from
your homes and make you live in barracks and do
what you are told and jump when you hear an
order, and pay you five cents a day and your keep
and an allowance for your families. But we don t
want to do it like that. We prefer that you should
live at home and draw your regular wages, with
extra for overtime and a bonus for any shift that
accomplishes more than its quota. The same ap
plies to the peasants, if only they know it and
work. Because that is the point: you must work,

183

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

the whole lot o you, workers and peasants. We
demand the best of your work."

The labor unions and collective farms replied
that they would work their heads off for the
Kremlin and their country, and much preferred
working like that, sleeping at home and drawing
full wages with extra pay for overtime, to mobili
zation and barracks and five cents a day and allow
ances for their families. So that was how it was
settled. But most of the foreign observers in
Moscow still persisted in the thought that this
decree was yet an added yoke upon the neck of
the Soviet masses which surely would increase
their hate and distrust of the Kremlin.

(I should like to mention here, en passant, that
all workers and employees of the Soviet Union
nowadays receive regular wages with extra for
overtime, and bonuses, etc., for good work, just
as in a capitalist country. In fact, the system might
more accurately be described as State capitalism,
rather than socialism. Everyone can spend money
as he or she pleases, except that there is great
shortage of goods and commodities owing to the
terrific pressure of war orders.)

There was one striking exception to foreign
184

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

pessimism about the new labor decree. Sir Staf
ford Cripps, the British Ambassador, paid more
attention than his colleagues to the startling im
provement in all production indexes which took
place in the autumn and winter of 1940-41. At the
end of February he made the most successful
prophecy that I have ever encountered. He had
just returned from Stamboul, from a conference
with the British Generalissimo, Sir John Dill, and
Mr. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Minister, and re
ceived the British and American press for an off-
the-record talk. As we were leaving, the Ambassa
dor said suddenly: "Wait a minute, there is some
thing else I d like to tell you. I am convinced that
Hitler will attack this country before the end of
June."

We all of us gasped for breath; we knew that on
various occasions the Kremlin had indirectly
shown pique over the German occupation of
Rumania and Bulgaria, which meant the north
coast of the Black Sea, but there had been no
serious cause of complaint or friction between the
two countries, either about Soviet deliveries to
Germany or on political grounds. Gripps con
tinued imperturbably, "Hitler will not dare to

185

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

wait, because he knows that the Soviet industrial
progress and defense preparations are advancing
too rapidly. You think he will strike at England
first, and as I told you confidentially, General Dill
appears to agree with you. But I say that Hitler
must deal with this country first, and that he will
launch an attack not later than the end of June/
There were other indications, if I had had the
wit to recognize them. Ominous reports of Ger
man troop movements intothe Germans said
"through" Finland; and a curious communiqu
issued to the Soviet press which purported to ^llay
public anxiety about reported heavy German
troop concentrations in Eastern Europe, but
which might also have served as a warning. Fi
nally, there was something I saw myself on the
journey from Moscow to Vladivostok. For several
days I shared a compartment with a captain in the
Red Army Frontier Guard, the long-term-service
forces which act as permanent garrison for the
Maritime Provinces bordering Japanese-controlled
territory. We became quite friendly talking about
this war and the last, and he gave me a vivid de
scription of the battle of Lake Khasan in which
he had taken part. One day, somewhere near
186

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

Chita, I remarked, "I ve seen several troop trains
going westward. I suppose the boys are going
home for Easter leave/

"Oh no/ said the Captain simply. "We re mov
ing troops west all the time. The Japs, you see,
will be good, we ve taught them a lesson two les
sonsand besides, they re bogged down in China.
We know we can hold this section with the Fron
tier Guard and the territorial divisions."

I stared at him in surprise. "Do you mean/ I
asked, thinking of Cripps, "that you expect the
Germans will . . /

"Not just yet, but" he shrugged his shoulders
"it s bound to come sooner or later . . . you know
what Hitler has said/

A week earlier, on the same journey, I had
passed the train of Matsuoka on his way to Mos
cow, Berlin, and Rome. I discovered later that the
chief purpose of his trip was not to reaffirm his
pact with the Axis, which was growing less popu
lar in Japan, but to sign a nonaggression agree
ment with the U.S.S.R. Despite unconfirmed
reports of Japanese troop movements northward
since Hitler invaded Russia, there has been no at
tempt by the Japanese to attack the Maritime

187

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Provinces, although I think this may be due less
to the Frontier Guard and territorials than to the
Japanese fear of giant bombers from Vladivostok,
which could burn up the flimsy wood and paper
cities of Japan in one windy night.

Cripps called the turn to a week. On June 22
Hitler struck without warning, ultimatum, or any
preliminary discussion, to the amazement of the
world. I was staying on Long Island that night,
and I confess that when John Gunther rang me
up after midnight from the N.B.C. headquarters
to tell me the news and say that they wanted me
to come in and make a broadcast which I was un
able to do I could hardly believe my ears. I had
deduced from the history of Napoleon and the
general historical parallel that an ultimate clash
between the Soviet and the Nazis was inevitable;
but never for a moment did I suppose, nor did
any of us in Moscow who heard the British Am
bassador s statement, that it would really come so
soon. Later, when I happened to be talking with
the Soviet Ambassador, Konstantin Umansky, in
Washington, I told him that and said: "Weren t
you surprised yourself?"
188

THE PERIOD OF "NEUTRALITY"

He replied, "I certainly was, although I knew
that the clouds were darkening."

"But was there no ultimatum?" I persisted. "No
grumbling about Soviet deliveries and so forth?"

"To the best of my knowledge, none," said
Umansky firmly. "The attack was made without
warning, in Hitler s own treacherous manner. But
he will pay for this wicked deed. I have full con
fidence in the might and courage of the Red
Army, and you can tell everyone that I said so."

189

X. THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

My SUBSEQUENT INQUIRIES have confirmed
what Mr. Umansky said. There had been
no apparent rift in Soviet-Nazi friend
ship, no complaints about the quality or quantity
of Soviet deliveries, no political recriminations,
nor any preliminary warning. Indeed, it is a
fact that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotof,
and the German Ambassador von Shulenberg,
dined together in Moscow only one or two nights
before the Nazi invasion. The atmosphere was
cordial, and toasts were exchanged to the continu
ance of friendship and co-operation. Strangely
enough, the Kremlin, with all its proneness to
190

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

suspicion, is inclined to believe that von Shulen-
berg was acting in good faith and was unaware of
Hitler s intention to strike.

In fact, I think no one knew it save Hitler and
his nearest advisers, military and civil, until
twenty-four hours before "zero." You know how
general staffs operate: they work out a series of
plans for any presumed contingency. Hitler s
armies were in position, massed and ready across
Europe, from Norway and the Channel coast,
along the Russian frontier, to the gates of Turkey.
His Staff would have, say, "Plan A," all prepared
for invasion of Britain; "Plan B," for invasion of
Turkey; "Plan C," for invasion of Russia; and
perhaps in the background "Plans D and E," for a
dash through Spain at Gibraltar, or a drive from
Tripoli at Suez. When once his mind was made
up, he had only to press the button and say, "Plan
C in effect at such-and-such an hour."

With all due respect to Sir Stafford Cripps and
the time-accuracy of his forecast, I still do not be
lieve that the reason he gave was Hitler s principal
motive for attacking the U.S.S.R. I think that Hit
ler felt sure, like Napoleon before him, that Rus
sia was a "pushover," and that he would have

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

forced the Kremlin to sign an ignominious peace
ere the leaves had fallen from the trees of Mos
cow s parks. Cripps was doubtless right in part,
that Hitler recognized the Soviet industrial prog
ress, although perhaps he esteemed it less highly
than did the British Ambassador, and that he also
realized that his plans for a New Order in Europe
could not successfully be carried out without the
full support or submission of the U.S.S.R., rather
than a tolerance which was gradually becoming
more negative, as Soviet action in Bessarabia, Po
land, the Baltic States, and Finland had already
shown.

He was not blind, moreover, to the significance
of the Soviet nonaggression pact with Japan and
the earlier, if abortive, agreement with Yugo
slavia. The Soviet note of reassurance to Turkey,
and the curt reminder to Bulgaria that its admis
sion of German troops would not make for peace
in the Balkans, were also marks of restiveness
which Hitler could not ignore. He may perhaps
have felt that an all-out blow against Britain was
dangerous so long as the U.S.S.R. retained full
liberty of action, although, with all deference to
Sir John Dill and Mr. Churchill, it is my opinion
192

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

that Hitler abandoned the plan of British inva
sion, except maybe as a last despairing coup or for
lorn hope, when he moved his armies southward
against Greece and Yugoslavia.

If Hitler knew as he did how hard Britain now
was to crack, and saw as he did the "majestic mo
mentum" of the United States, he must have
known that his plans for a rapid victory were un
feasible, and that henceforth he must face a long,
stern struggle, for which the resources of Western
Europe, however surely he controlled them,
would be inadequate. In that case he would need
free access to Soviet foodstuffs, oil, and other raw
materials. All that is probable enough, and doubt
less served as secondary motives in Hitler s mind,
but I am sure that the dominant factor was his
conviction that the Russians would break like the
French.

What if his generals voiced doubts? He had
proved them wrong before, from the days of his
march into the Rhineland. If his calculations were
right they always had been he might rapidly
secure the real Lebensraum which Germany cov
eted, not in lands across the seas, but in a region
which adjoined his own possessions.

193

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

My friend John Cooper Wiley, lately U.S. Min
ister to Latvia and Estonia, one of the ablest Amer
ican diplomats, who knows Prussia backwards, has
told me his opinion that a cardinal reason for Hit
ler s attack on the Ukraine was land-hunger of the
Prussians, who contrasted their sparse and sandy
acres with the boundless expanses of the Soviet
black earth region. What prospect could be more
delectable a collective farm with Soviet helots to
work it, as the prize of each Prussian officer, and
plump jobs as stewards and bosses for Prussian
non-coms and soldiers?

Here Hitler, he thought, might win his war,
and win it quick. To shatter the Red Army, as he
had shattered the armies of France; to blast Mos
cow, Leningrad, and Kiev with bomb-planes as he
had blasted Rotterdam; to take if need be the
Soviet capital as he had taken Warsaw, Copen
hagen, Oslo, Brussels, the Hague, Paris, Bucha
rest, Sofia, Belgrade, and Athens. To occupy the
Ukraine and the Donetz Basin and the rich grain
and cattlelands of the North Caucasus, with the
oilfields of Baku beyond; then to turn and say to
the British, It s enough. I offer you peace/ A
rosy and tempting vision, with nothing to prevent

194

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

its coming true save the Red Army, which Hitler
and for that matter the most renowned military
and diplomatic experts of Britain and the United
Statesbelieved to be impotent and demoralized.

Once more there creeps a note of fantasy into
this sober historical narrative. I refer to the Hess
affair. As everybody knows, Rudolf Hess was
closer to Hitler than anyone, except perhaps Goer-
ing, and had been appointed Vice-Fuehrer. Yet
suddenly, in the second week of May, this eminent
Nazi grabs a plane and flies headlong westward,
to crash on the Scottish coast. How much ink has
been spilled over Hess, what far-fetched and friv
olous conjectures!

But the truth is simple enough. Hess surely was
flying to Ireland, the one place in all the world
that he could reach in a Messerschmitt plane with
out loss of his personal liberty, or any fear that he
would be handed back to the tender mercies of
Hitler. The facts can speak for themselves. There
were bullet-holes in Hess s plane, although he had
encountered no British fliers on his way. The Ger
man Propaganda Ministry announced his flight
with incoherent claims that he d gone mad, had
been mad some time, had finally proved his mad-

195

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

ness by leaving the sort of letter for his Fuehrer
that no sane Nazi could write.

At that season of the year the prevailing winds
at high altitudes are westerly. So they were head-on
against Hess s plane, and its tank when it crashed
was empty, although only forty miles, a quarter-
hour s flying, remained to the Irish coast. Why
Hess fled is another story, but Otto Tolischus, now
New York Times correspondent in Tokyo, who
knows Germany better than most, was convinced
that his hurried exit must be connected with the
arrest a few days earlier of Friedrich Minoux, the
greatest coal operator in Germany since the death
of Hugo Stinnes. "In short," said Tolischus, "Hess
fled to escape the fate of Ernst or Roehm or von
Schleicher, who perished in Hitler s Purge."

But this Hess was a crafty dog, and when he
looked at the gauge and saw he must land in Scot
land, he began to think and thought quick. He
may really have known or guessed that Hitler was
nibbling at the bait of a drive into Russia. He cer
tainly must have felt that if he presented himself
as Hitler s emissary to the British, whether they
believed him or not, he would receive more con
sideration than if he came as a fugitive. That
196

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

might mean a concentration camp, and Hess as a
leading Nazi knows what concentration camps can
be like in Germany at least, and the countries
Germany rules.

So Hess landed and broke his ankle, and when
they picked him up and examined him, he told
them his tale. It was cunningly thought out, about
Hitler s plans against Russia, which might be good
news to the British, and on this unsure foundation
Hess built an elaborate scenario for the sort of
peace talk to which Mr. Chamberlain might have
listened, such as, "Allow us to smack the Russians;
England never liked the Russians, either Tsarist
or Bolshevik Russians. You will find the Fuehrer
reasonable. He will be ready, you can count on it,
to restore Europe to prewar conditions or nearly
so, an independent Poland and Czechoslovakia,
somewhat reduced no doubt in territory, but inde
pendent, and of course the withdrawal of German
troops from Norway and Denmark, France, Hol
land, Belgium, and Greece." Chamberlain might
have bitten, but Churchill didn t bite, although
he did say later that he warned the Russians,

When the Russo-Gennan War began, there
were self-styled experts on Soviet affairs who pro-

197

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

fessed to doubt whether the Russians would fight
at all, and at least one of my former colleagues
from Moscow committed himself to the statement
that only two blows would be struck: first, Hitler
hitting Stalin, second, Stalin hitting the floor. I
treated this rubbish with scorn, because it was
clear that resistance depended in the first instance
upon morale, the morale of the Kremlin, the
morale of the Army, and the morale of the Soviet
people; and I had no cause to detect weakness in
any of the three.

Stalin and his associates may be less brilliant
talkers, writers or theorists than Lenin and the
"Old Guard/ but they had given ample proof of
doggedness and courage under years of terrific
pressure. If there is one quality above others
which distinguishes Stalin, it is tenacity or perse
verance: an almost inhuman capacity to take
punishment and bide his time and await the psy
chological moment. I had no misgivings about the
Kremlin. It had been expecting this war and pre
paring for it since 1933, and I knew that Stalin
and his Politburo were the last men in the world
to shrink from resolute action or flinch in the face
of danger.
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THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

In regard to the Red Army, I had taken pains
to collect all possible information about the Fin
nish campaign, and it soon became obvious that
however the High Command might have erred in
its estimate of Finnish resistance and in the dura
tion of the struggle, the Red Army, especially
General Stern and his Siberians, had fully re
deemed its errors in the final onslaught. All in all,
it can be reckoned that fully three-quarters of a
million Red troops were engaged in the Finnish
War, and every soldier knows the enormous dif
ference between veteran or blooded troops and
a force which has never heard shots fired in anger.
The first battles of the American War of Seces
sion illustrate this factor beyond cavil, yet the
armies of both sides later fought with a stubborn
ness and gallantry that has few parallels in history.

In addition, I had gathered from my train com
panion, the Frontier Guard captain, that upwards
of another three-quarters of a million must have
seen action in the Far East in the two "incidents"
on the Manchurian and Mongolian borders.
There would doubtless be overlapping, but the
Russians must have at least a million, perhaps a
million and a quarter troops with war experience.

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE
Then, too, there was the lesson of Spain, where
Red Army staff officers, airmen, artillerists, tank-
ists and transport units served in relays for more
than two years.

The vital factors in the morale of an army are
experience and discipline. The Red Army had
had the first in plenty, and from what I had seen
at parades and learned from foreign military ob
servers at Soviet maneuvers, there were no com
plaints about discipline. The Red Army was
better clothed, fed, and housed than the average
civilian, and whereas in Tsarist days the depar
ture of recruits summoned annually from the vil
lages was a day of national mourning, it had now
become a joyous occasion celebrated with feasting,
songs, and banners. I have no doubt that the Army
had been seriously affected by the Purge, but three
years had elapsed since then, and at that it is not
so sure that the average doughboy sheds tears
when he learns that one of his officers, even so high
as a general, has been "axed." Indeed, one of the
first moves of General Pershing as Commander-
in-Chief of the A.E.F. was to "axe" a large number
of ranking officers, which caused a certain uproar,
but not in the ranks of the Army.
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THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

Finally, the Red Army, like the Kremlin, had
been awaiting this war for years and preparing for
it intensively, especially in the areas behind the
former frontier from Odessa to Leningrad, where
literally millions of men had worked to organize
a defense zone, not a steel-and-concrete line like
the "Maginot," but an elastic system of fortifica
tions, artillery positions, land-mines and tank-
traps and great underground depots, from twenty
to fifty miles deep.

The Red Army had received, moreover, the
cream of a nationwide campaign of patriotic
propaganda which began in 1935 or thereabouts
and gained in strength with every year. Through
the press, radio, theatre, schools, speeches, and
every available medium, the idea of patriotism
was impressed upon the Soviet public. To il
lustrate my meaning, in 1934-35 the word "Ro-
dina" "birth land" was substituted for the
phrase "Socialist Fatherland" which had been
current since the Revolution. Thenceforward the
idea of international socialism and the universal
brotherhood of workers was not wholly abandoned
but increasing stress was laid upon the duty of
each Soviet citizen to love and work for his coun-

201

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

try and fight for it when the time came. Music,
theatre, and motion pictures took a progressively
nationalist tone.

A picture was made o Tsar Peter the Great,
who first tried to modernize Russia, and who con
quered the Swedish invader, Charles XII, at
Poltava. And o Prince Alexander Nevsky, who
defeated the Teutonic Knights of the Sword in a
battle near Novgorod. Both films were greeted
with enthusiasm by packed houses throughout the
country. The most potent of all agencies was radio,
through which could be gauged most readily the
steadily rising effect of patriotic appeal.

I think too that a great but not unnatural mis
take was made by foreign observers who believed
that the severities and miseries of the collective
farm campaign, which cost countless lives, had
alienated the peasants irreparably from the Krem
lin. I had one foreign friend who repeated like a
parrot that full mobilization would be impossible
in the U.S.S.R. because the Kremlin would never
dare to arm soldiers mainly drawn from the peas
antry lest they turn their guns against their rulers.
He did not understand the sad but realistic fact
that all those who had opposed collective farming
202

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

in the villages were dead or exiled, and that the
collective farms were now owned by those who
had not opposed them, or had been for them from
the outset.

Once more it was the old story, that "Dead men
cannot bite/ and in the border regions especially,
the very deportations and arbitrary removal of
"doubtful elements" which roused the indigna
tion of foreigners, proved a source of strength
when the test came. The Kremlin had followed a
policy of settling young reservists and their fam
ilies in these areas in communal or collective
farms whose buildings were made of concrete,
well adapted to defense, with prepared "fields of
fire" for machine-guns, and barbed-wire fences.
Thus a network of something like "blockhouses"
was established near the frontiers, and the col
lective or communal farmers in these regions,
from adults to boy and girl scouts, were regularly
trained for the guerilla warfare which has proved
so costly to the Germans. By this time, too, the
collective farm system was beginning to function
smoothly and efficiently. This was chiefly done by
education and an ingenious method of control
through the Machine Tractor Stations. It is

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

enough to say that the harvest of 1940 had far
surpassed all previous records in everything, grain,
cotton, flax, sugar, meat, fruit, and vegetables.

What foreigners failed to realize, and Hitler
amongst them, was the deep and abounding love
of Russians for their country, their Rodina, their
birth land. All Russians, not only Soviet Russians.
I have talked with scores of emigres, from the
Grand Duchess Marie to drivers of Paris taxicabs,
and every one of them has said, often in the midst
of the most violent outbursts against the Bolshe
viks, "If only I could go back, do you think I
could ever go back?" Right here in America there
are tens of thousands of ex-Russians, many of
whom suffered dreadfully from the Revolution,
in person and property and loss of relatives and
all that they held dear; but I know that there are
few today who do not sympathize with Russia in
its struggle and whose hearts have not been ex
alted by its dogged resistance to Hitler.

Not long ago I addressed an audience of ten
thousand people in a San Francisco auditorium
on behalf of British and Russian War Relief. A
bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, in full
canonicals, was sitting on the platform with rep
204

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

resentatives of a dozen different Russian organi
zations and societies. When I said, with full
conviction, that every Russian was a patriot at
heart, and that even those who had had to leave
their country were, I felt sure, in sympathy with
its gallant struggle, I was startled hy the roar of
applause. Although I had not known it, a fifth or
more of the audience were so-called " White" Rus
sians or their children, and dozens of them flocked
to the platform afterwards to tell me how right I
had been about their sentiments.

An unsuspected source of Soviet strength has
been the U.S.S.R., Union of Socialist Soviet Re
publics, as compared with the Russia of the Tsars,
The States or Federations of the Union are sov
ereign to a degree beyond those of America, in
that they possess the constitutional right of seces
sion. But they are held together unbreakably by
the cement of the Communist Party and its junior
affiliations, which control everything so thor
oughly that I imagine any "national chauvinist/ 5
as the Russians term overzealous local patriots,
would have, and indeed has had, an abrupt and
sticky end. The States do enjoy, however, local
autonomy and the use of national customs (and

205

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

costumes), language, press, theatre, and so forth,
to an extent no Tsar would have countenanced.
In the drive for national patriotism, local patriot
ism was not ignored, and I make bold to say that
the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, of
the farthest North and East, feel that this is their
own war against Hitler with no less fervor than
the "Great Russians" of Leningrad, the "White
Russians" of Smolensk (White Russia is the name
of a region Byelorussia and has nothing to do
with "white" as applied to "White" exiles), or the
"Little Russians" of the Ukraine, who are bearing
the brunt of the battle.

Apropos of this rather confusing business about
"Whites" and "White Russia," may I cite a plain
tive remark by one of the Soviet diplomats in
Washington. He said, "Really, Mr. Duranty, I
don t think your newspapers are quite fair to us.
Why is it they always insist on calling us the
Reds? I fear that despite the President s speeches
and the visits to Moscow of Mr. Hopkins and Mr.
Harriman, your newspapers are still possessed by
a reactionary and unfriendly spirit."

I replied without a smile, "You will forgive me,
but you are wrong. The fact of the matter is that
206

THE US.S.R. AT WAR

the short word Reds* fits perfectly into headlines.
No caption writer in the country could resist a
word like that. Besides/ I added, "don t you call
it Red Army yourselves? Not just the Soviet
Army/ or ILS.S.R. Army/ but Red Army?"

That held him, but I may add that the word
"red" in Russian has no revolutionary connota
tion. The word in Russian is "krasny," which has
the same root-derivation as the word "kraseevy"
"beautiful" because red is the color of life, and
sun, and warmth in the blood, on the ice-bound
Russian plains; and white is the color of death and
mourning and frozen snow. To this day non-
Communist funerals in Moscow are driven by
white-draped horses, and the coffins and flowers
are white, although Communists have adopted red
and black as their mourning symbol; and the
famous Red Square of Moscow means "lovely" or
"beautiful" square, not the square that ran red
with blood as once it did when Tsar Peter slaugh
tered the Streltsi, nor "Square of Revolution."
That is why they call it "Red Army," meaning
"splendid and glorious Army," the same meaning
as Stephen Crane s, when he wrote his book, The
Red Badge of Courage.

207

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Not long before the Russo-German War began,
Edgar Mowrer, of the Chicago Daily News, who
for many years was the best of the American cor
respondents in Europe, especially in Germany,
said to me in Washington, "I ll begin to say Hit
ler s slipping when the communiques of German
General Headquarters start telling lies about op
erations on land. I discount Nazi air and sea stuff,
and of course the rantings of Goebbels and the
D.N.B., but taking it by and large the Staff tells
the truth about land." I was therefore rather
alarmed when I read in the first week of the So
viet-German War bombastic reports from Ger
man Army Headquarters of immense captures or
destruction of planes, tanks, heavy artillery, and
other valuable equipment.

I did not yet realize that Hitler had taken com
mand in person and that he, not the General Staff,
was issuing communiques in accordance with the
principle which he invented and taught to Goeb
bels, that if you lie loud enough and often enough
there ll always be mugs to believe you. I was afraid
that the Red Army had yielded to overconfidence
a marked Russian trait which does not accord at
all with the prevailing theory that they re all a

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

people of slaves and have been so since time im
memorialand had moved their heavy stuff out
into the "skirmish zones" of the newly occupied
territories. But I couldn t reconcile this with the
character of Marshal Timoshenko, a farsighted
and prudent strategist, nor of his Chief of Staff,
Shaposhnikof, who was one of the most brilliant
graduates of the Tsarist Staff College. I knew they
had planned their war to utilize the skirmish zones
for breaking up the panzer attack and slowing
down the blitzkrieg, then to fight their real battle
in the zones of prepared defense.

Yet those Nazi communiques scared me, until
I learned they were written by Hitler. After that
I saw the picture more clearly. The ever-lengthen
ing line of German communications and their
tank columns driving through to claim town after
town which they had reached but did not securely
hold because the mass of their infantry was unable
to keep pace. The Russians, it seems, had learned
the same defense against tanks as the Romans used
against Pyrrhus and his elephants, some three
hundred years before Christ.

I like historical parallels, although I profess to
distrust them; but this one truly enchants me. The

209

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

Roman legions outclassed the Greek soldiers of
Pyrrhus, but they were thrown into such confu
sion by the charge of his elephants, which they
labeled the "two-tailed monsters/ that the
Greeks were able to win two stiffly contested bat
tles. Then the Romans thought of a plan. They
ceased to oppose the elephants, but opened their
ranks and let them through, and had special de
tachments ready to harass the elephants with
lances and flaming arrows. Then the lines closed
up, and the legions charged on the Greeks and
beat them in equal combat.

The Red Army handled the panzers in nearly
the same manner. Of course it had elephants too
(I mean tanks), in numbers and size that ap
proached the German total. But the Germans had
the advantage of initiative and knowing where to
attack, and the greater advantage of superior mo
bility through better transportation. Poor trans
portation has always been the weakness of Russian
armies. I have talked with high-ranking officers of
the last war, both Russian and German, and they
agreed that there was hardly a major engagement
where the Germans did not outnumber the Rus
sians at the actual point of attack. Superior mo-
210

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

bility again, or as General Forrest remarked,
battles are won by the side which "gets there the
fustest with the mostest men." So there were many
occasions where Nazi tanks went right through,
to be harassed by "Molotof cocktails/ or "bread
baskets," or similar "flaming arrows," while the
Russians closed behind them to check the German
infantry.

At this point I feel bound to question the ac
curacy of ex-Colonel Lindbergh s information
about the Soviet Air Force. I happened to be in
Moscow when the then Colonel Lindbergh ar
rived for a visit of five days. I know that he went,
as I did, to a Soviet air meet and saw a lot of
planes, which in Germany or the United States
would have been considered obsolete, perform
cumbrous evolutions. He visited, I was told, one
of the aviation factories in Moscow and the central
Soviet air experimental station. He talked with
Soviet airmen, who entertained him royally. Of
course mostly through interpreters, but some of
them spoke English.

And that was all, just all. The rest of Lind
bergh s time was spent in banquets or sightseeing.
Now I have known army fliers and civilian fliers

211

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

too, in many countries and in peace and war, and
I say without fear of contradiction that in no coun
try and in no circumstances is there any group of
men so patriotic everywhere, so enthusiastic and
so utterly hostile to any thought of defeatism.
Therefore, Lindbergh did not get and could not
have got his pessimistic story about the Soviet Air
Force from the Soviet fliers, any more than he got
it from his personal observations. If you wish to
know, he got it from the Germans, who doubtless
knew better themselves, but wished for their own
reasons to have him say what he did. The Red Air
Force has shown in battle that it can vie with the
Nazis in numbers, skill, and courage.

As I have said, it soon became clear that the
Russians had not risked too much of their heavy
equipment in the skirmish zones. As their armies
slowly fell back, there came into play a factor
which Hitler had not foreseen, the savage guerilla
warfare of the men and women and boys and girls
from the collective or communal farms. Seven-
tenths of them were Communists, adult Party
members, Komsomols (Communist Youth) or Pio
neers (Communist boy and girl scouts). As the

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

German lines swept past them, they maintained in
the woods and fields the ceaseless guerilla war for
which they d been put there and trained. Now far
behind the Front, they are nibbling at the Nazi
rear and at Nazi communications, with the same
stealthy, tireless persistence that broke the hearts
of Napoleon s marshals in Spain. It was on this ac
count that the Kremlin re-introduced the system
of Commissars in the Red Army, which had been
abandoned after the Finnish War, in order that
these half-military, half-civil officers might co-ordi
nate and direct civilian guerilla warfare.

Resistance of this kind was naturally most effec
tive in the thickly-wooded areas of the North and
Northwest, which explains why the major Nazi
successes have been gained in the Central and
Southern Ukraine, one vast fiat open grain-field,
where planes have full visibility and there is no
cover for counter-attacks or guerilla fighters.

In this section the Russians are exposed, but
soon there will come to their aid Russia s best and
oldest allies, General Mud, General Slush, and
greatest, old General Winter. From West Poland
right on to the Urals, all Russia is as flat as your

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

hand, without a mountain barrier to check the
icy blasts which sweep down from the Arctic
Ocean. The first snows in Moscow fall in the latter
part of September, and then the winter begins
with gathering intensity. October and November
are the months of bitter blizzards, when a dozen
hours can pile snowdrifts high as a man.

It isn t bitterly cold, not lower than zero Fah
renheit, but the wind can cut like a knife on those
desolate endless plains. I know it, I have felt it,
and still feel cold at the thought. A climate like
Minnesota, and if you don t know what that is,
ask your friends from Minnesota how they would
define a blizzard. In October and November
weather alternates, colder and warmer, and the fat
black earth of the Ukraine turns to slush and
gumbo waist-deep. The real cold comes after
Christmas, January and February, way below zero,
thirty or forty below; but by that time the streams
and marshes and lakes are frozen solid, to carry the
heaviest tank. If the Nazis have furs enough, and
food enough, and heart enough, they may find
that the coldest months are the best for their
panzer attacks; but let them never forget an
other stout ally of Russia, General Cootie, the

314

THE U.S.S.R. AT WAR

prevalent louse, who bears typhus in his bite, I
only the truth were known, it was he who defeated
Napoleon.

I regard prophets with distrust, and prophecy
with dismay, but I am tempted, in conclusion, to
say something about the prospects of the Soviet-
German War. I know, as I said before, that the
Kremlin has been preparing for this war for full
seven years; that it has starved its people of con
sumers* goods in order to equip the Red Army
and build new munition and armament plants.
And build them eastward, remote from any pos
sible attack by land or air. In the Ural Mountains
they have built huge factories, the "Ural-Mash" at
Sverdlovsk, the greatest agricultural machinery
plant in Europe, now of course producing tanks
and war materials. A steel plant which Gary might
envy, at NovotagiL The metallurgic giant, iron
and steel, at Magnetogorsk in the Southern Urals,
and a chain of chemical factories, constructed un
der American supervision, in the Western Urals,
which rivals Nazi Leuna or American Dupont.
Behind that, far off in the East, is a bigger steel
plant yet, which is greater than Krupps or Skoda
Kuznetsk, or Stalinsk as it s now called, fifteen

THE KREMLIN AND THE PEOPLE

hundred miles east of the Urals. And farther still
beyond that, the new cities of the coast, Khaba
rovsk, Koinsomolsk, and Voroshilovsk, open steppe
or fishing villages ten years ago, and today indus
trial centers that already have inhabitants by the
hundred thousand and think that they soon will
rival Pittsburgh or Detroit.

If the Russians are forced to retreat, which per
sonally I rather question, they not only can retire
upon their Ural and eastern industry, but towards
the Volga and its tributaries, which is the most
vital artery in all of the Soviet Union and ranks
with the Mississippi as a vehicle of transport.
Right now, as I write, every barge and boat on the
Volga is bringing oil from the South, to provide
there, if needs must be, the backbone of Soviet re
sistance should Moscow fall, and Leningrad and
Kharkof.

In any case I know and the Russians know that
they are the only people in history who can look
back and declare with truth that the voluntary
sacrifice and destruction of their national capital
was the penultimate step to victory over a greater
soldier than Hitler.

216

INDEX

Alexander I (of Russia),
167, 169

Alexander, King of Yugo
slavia, 21

American Relief Associa
tion, 10

Andreyef, 19

Bakayef, I. P., 25, 32
Baltic countries, 18, 52,

150-151, 153, 171, 176,

192

Banthou, 21

Beria, L., 16, 20, 126-129
Bessarabia, 18, 52, 171, 176,

192

Bonnet, Georges, 22, 140,

141, 145, 152
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 8,

138, 146

Budenny, S,, 19, 63-65, 123
Bukhanin, N. L, 11, 32, 44

trial of, 75, 86, 108-112
Bulanof, P. P., 107
Bulgaria, 185, 192

Cement, i

Chamberlain, Neville, 22,
141, 144, 145, 148, 150,

i5*> 197
Chanakiifeng (see Lake

Khasan, battle of)

INDEX

Chekov, 2

Churchill, Winston, 192,

197
Commissariat for Internal

Affairs (see NKVD)
Commissars, political, 56-

60, 213

Communist Manifesto, 6
Communist Party of the

U.S.S.R., 19-20, 32, 37,

56, 105-106, 116-118,

121, 123, 136, 205

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 185,
187, 188, 191, 192

Czechoslovakia, 22, 138,
141, 145

Daladier, Edouard, 152

Dan, 73

Danube River, 145

Davies, Ambassador Jo
seph, 108

Dill, Sir John, 185, 186, 192

Djugashvilli, Josef Vis-
sarionovich (see Stalin,
Josef Vissarionovich)

Dostoyevsky, 2, 44, 46, 106

Eastman, Max, 34, 35
Eden, Anthony, 142, 185
Eideman, General, 63

5>l8

Elliston, Herbert, 174
Engels, Friedrich, 6
Ernst, 196

Finland, 18, 52, 59, 68, 151,

171-182, 186, 192, 213
Five Year Plan, 28

Gamarnik, Marshal, 61, 62,

$5> 123

Generals, trial and execu
tion of, 54-70, 123, 179
Germany, plots against
U.S.S.R.,39, 4 o,48, 5 2,
55, 61-62, 67-70, 86
Gestapo (see Germany,
plots against U.S.S.R.)
Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 208
Goering, Hermann, 195
Goltz, General von der,

173

Gonbachef, 64, 123
Gorky, Maxim, 90-93, 97
Great Britain, plots against

U.S.S.R., 52
pre-war negotiations

with U.S.S.R., 141-144,

148-152
Greece, 193
Grinko, G. F., 75
Guerrilla warfare, 212-213

INDEX

Hammer stein, General

von, 61
Hango, 179
Haritonenko, 143
Harriman, W. Averill, 206
Hess, Rudolph, 195-197
Hitler, Adolf, 22, 61, 62,
68, 89, 100, 106, 112,
140, 141, 144, 145, 147,
148, 150, 152, 164, 166,
169, 171, 176, 179-183,
185, 187-189, 191-198,

204, 206, 208, 209, 212,

216

Hoover Relief, 10
Hopkins, Harry, 206
Hudson, H. F., 142-144,

Izvestia, 36

Japan, border conflicts -with

U.S.S.R., 178, 186-188

non-aggression pact with

U.S.S.R., 187, 192
plots against ILS.S.R-,

52,86

Judicial process, nature of,
in the U.S.SJU 40-43,
79-So

Kaganovich, L. M., 16, 17,

20, 22-24, 35, 125-127
Kamenef, L. B., 32,33, 117

Trial of, 32, 38-53, 70
Kapital, Das, 6
Kazakof, Professor I. N.,

93-97* 101
Kerensky, 73
Khabarovsk, 215
Kirof, S. M., 7, 21, 22, 24-

32. 3 6 -39> 46 60- 7>
71, 86, 101, 1 18, 119,
123

Komsoraolsk, 215
Krestinsky, N. N., 75
Kruchkof, P. P., 90-92
Krylenko, 82-84
Kulans, 23, 28

Labor Decree (1940), 183-

185

Labor Law (1939), 136-137
Lake Khasan, battle of,

178, 186

Laval, Pierre, 22
League of Nations, 23, 153,

167
Lenin, V. L, 4-7, 11, 13, 16,

*3 3* 3 6 > 43. 4 6 > 47>
56, 72, 76, 109, 116,
117, 128, 160, 164

2*9

INDEX

Leningrad, proximity to
frontier, 172-173, 180
Levin, Professor I. G., 90-

93*97
Lindbergh, Colonel

Charles A., 141, 211-

Litvinof, Maxim, 139, 153

Magnetogorsk, 215
Maisky, Ivan, 120
Mannerheim Line, 176,

178, 179, 181
Martof, 73
Marx, Karl, 6
Matsuoka, 187
Mein Kampf, 144
Memel, 141, 145
Metro-Vickers Trial, 149
Mikoyan, 16, 19, 20, 33, 35
Minjinsky, 94, 95
Minoux, Friedrich, 196
Mirbach, Count von, 146
Molotof, V. M., 16, 33, 143,

Mowrer, Edgar, 208
Munich Agreement, 138-

141* 144
Muralof, N. L, 48, 49, 52,

74
22O

Napoleon, 2, 56, 167-169,
182, 191, 213, 215

New Economic Policy, 116

Nicoleyef, 24, 26-28, 30

NKVD, 16, 126-129
(See also OGPU)

Novotagil, 215

OGPU, 16, 24, 28-31, 38,
39, 41, 58, 61, 62, 76,
80, 82, 94, 101, 104,
106, 119, 120, 126
(See also NKVD)

Ordjonikidze, 51, 123

Paylenko, Piotr, i
Peshkof, Maxim, 90, 92
Piatakof, Y. L., Trial of,

48, 49, 51, 52, 74
Pletnef, Professor D. D., 90,

92
Poland, 18, 52, 141, 145,

148, 149, 151-153* I 1 l >

176, 192

Polish Corridor, 145
Possessed, The, Dostoyev-

sky, 44, 46

Pravda, 36, 105, 124, 167
Prinkipo, 72, 73
Purge, the, 7, 16, 22, 39, 64,

65, 68, 86, 106, 112,

INDEX
116-137, 139-140, 171, Schleicher, General von,

178, 179, 181
(See also Trials)
Putna, General, 63

Quiet Flows the Don, i

Radek, Karl, 15, 33, 84

Trial of, 48, 74
Rakovsky, K. G., 75
Ramsin, Professor, 82-85
Rapallo, Treaty of, 61, 147,

166
Red Army, 54, 175, 178-

180, 189, 194, 195, 199-

201, 207, 208-211, 215
civilian control of, 56-60
Red Planes Fly East, Piotr

Pavlenko, i
Roehm, 196

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 160
Rosengoltz, A. P., 75
Rosso, Madame, 145
Rumania, 141, 142, 149,

61-62, 196
Shulenberg, Count von,

146, 190, 191
Shaposhnikof, General

Boris, 18, 209
Social Revolutionaries, 46,

146

Sokolnikof, G. Y., 48
Spain, Civil war in, 67-68,

200
Stalin, J. V., i, 6, 11, 12-15,

19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28-

3 1 * 33-35* 3 8 > 39> 43*
4 6 > 5 1 * 5*> 58, 60, 65,
71, 76, 78, 89-91, 94,
95, 97, 101, 102, 104-
106, 109, 117, 118, 124,
126-128, 134, 160, 163,
164, 198
on Soviet foreign policy,

137-138
Stalinsk, 215
Stern, General, 179, 199
Stinnes, Hugo, 196
Strang, William, 149, 150
l $5 Sverdlovsk, 125, 215

Russo-German Pact (1939),

147-148, 152-154, 169, Timoshenko, Marshal, 18,

170
Rykof, A. I., 32, 33, 75,

209
Tolischus, Otto, 196

INDEX

Tolstoy, Count Leo, i, 90, Voroshilof, Marshal, 16-18,
167, 168 22-24, 29* 33> 35* 65,

Trials, 7, 22, 30, 38-115, 126, 127

167, 171 Voroshilovsk,
(See also Purge, the

Trotsky, L. D., 11, 23, 32- War and Peace ^ Tolstoy, i,

71-74, 76, 86, 102, 103, Wileyj John Coop ^ IM

109, 117, 121 Wilson ^ Sir Horace ^ 22

Troyanovsky, 63, 120

Tukhachevsky, Marshal, xr , _

11 w *4 KG 62 63 Ya S d a> G. G., 11, 28, 31-

Turkey, Russian note to, 39 4 6 47- & 60, 63

arrest and Trial of, 76,

86, 91, 92, 94-107, 112,

Uborovich, General, 63 __ .

Ukraine, 19, 61, 62, 69, 144 v /V .^ ?

Ulianof, V. I. (see Lenin, Yevdokiinofc G E - *$

v , i.) Yezhof, 31, 47, 58, 96, 101,

Ulrich, 39, 63, 64, 79, 92, 105-107, 118, 119, 126-

97, 99, 100, 123 15?8 > 1 3
Umansky, Konstantin, 188- Yugoslavia, 192, 193

190

Urals, 125, 215-216 Zdanof, 15, 16, 20, 101, 105,

Uritsky, 37 136, 174

Zinovief, G. E., 25, 32, 33,

Vishinsky, A. Y., 78, 90, 95- 117

98, 100, 107, 108 Trial of, 32, 38-53, 70,
Volga River, 215 111

101 186

03 <

5m

ll