a herd of cattle from one prison camp to another. The scene was so frightful that for a fleeting instant I thought I saw bats flying over these tortured beings. Many of them lay almost naked in the cold room. Others were manifestly dying of typhus fever. Hunger, pain, desolation, or just dumb half-dead submissive suffering, were on every face. While I stood there, hard-faced militiamen of the Ogpu undertook to rouse and herd them out like a drove of cattle, pushing and kicking the stragglers and those almost too weak to walk. One old man, I saw as I turned away, would never rise from the floor. This was but one mournful detachment, I knew, of the horde of millions of honest peasant families whom Stalin, calling them “kulaks,” a name which no longer means much more than victim, had rooted up and transported and destroyed.
I also knew, however, that at that very moment—it was February, 1934—Fascist field pieces in the streets of Vienna were shelling the model workers’ apartment houses which the Socialists had built. Fascist machine guns were mowing down the Austrian workers in their last desperate stand for socialism. Everywhere Fascism was on the march. Everywhere the forces of reaction were gaining ground. The Soviet Union still seemed the sole hope of mankind. I remained in the service of the Soviet Union—that is, of Stalin, its master.
Two years later came the Spanish tragedy, and I saw Mussolini and Hitler pour their men and munitions to the aid of Franco, while Premier Léon Blum of France, a Socialist, was drawn in on the hypocritical game of “nonintervention” which doomed the Spanish republic. I saw Stalin—belatedly to be sure, and timidly, and not enough—come to the aid of the beleaguered republic. I still felt that, as a choice between evils, I was fighting on the right side.
But then came the turning point. I watched Stalin, while collecting hard cash for his belated help, drive a knife into the back of the Loyalist government. I saw the purge assume insane proportions in Moscow, sweeping away the entire Bolshevik Party. I saw it transported to Spain. And at the same time, from my vantage point in the Intelligence Service, I saw Stalin extend the hand of secret friendship to Hitler. I saw him, while thus paying court to the Nazi leader, execute the great generals of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, and the other chiefs with whom and under whom I had worked for years in the defense of the Soviet Union and of socialism.
And then Stalin made his final demand upon me—the demand he made upon all responsible officials who wished to escape the firing squads of the Ogpu. I must prove my loyalty by delivering a close comrade into its clutches. I declined the offer. I broke with Stalin. I forced my eyes to remain open to what I had seen. I forced my mind to know that, whether there was any other hope in the world or not, I was serving a totalitarian despot who differed from Hitler only in the Socialist phrases, the relic of his Marxist training—Socialist phrases to which he hypocritically clung.
I broke with Stalin, and began to tell the truth about him, in the fall of 1937, when he was successfully deceiving public opinion and the statesmen of both Europe and America with his insincere denunciations of Hitler. Although advised by many well-meaning people to remain silent, I spoke out. I spoke for the millions who had perished in Stalin’s compulsory collectivization and compulsory famine; the millions still living at forced labor and in concentration camps; the hundreds of thousands of my former Bolshevik comrades in prison, the thousands and thousands who had been shot. It took the final overt act of Stalin’s treachery, his pact with Hitler, to convince a large public of the madness of humoring him, of closing eyes to his monstrous crimes in the hope that he might carry a gun in the armies of democracy.
Now that Stalin has shown his hand, it is time for others who remained silent for shortsighted or strategic reasons, to speak out. A few have already done so. Luis De Araquistain, former ambassador to France of the Loyalist government, has helped to disabuse world opinion as to the character of Stalin’s “help” to the Spanish Republic. Largo Caballero, the former Spanish Premier, has also spoken.
There are others upon whom rests an obligation to speak. One of them is Romain Rolland. The help that this renowned author gave to totalitarianism by covering the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship with the mantle of his great prestige, is incalculable. For many years Rolland conducted a correspondence with Maxim Gorky, the noted Russian novelist. Gorky, who was at one time comradely with Stalin, and even exercised a restraining hand upon him, no doubt played a part in bringing Rolland into the camp of the fellow travelers. During the last months of his life, however, Gorky was a virtual prisoner. Stalin refused him permission to go abroad for his health. His mail was censored, and by special order the letters from Romain Rolland were intercepted by Stet-sky, then Stalin’s head secretary, and filed in Stalin’s cabinet. Rolland, disquieted at his friend’s failure to answer his letters, wrote to another friend, the assistant director of the Moscow Art Theater, asking what was the matter. During the last Moscow treason trial the world was told that Gorky, supposedly still Stalin’s friend, was poisoned by Yagoda. At the time of this trial, in an interview with the eminent writer Boris Souvarine published in La Flêche, I explained to Romain Rolland why his letters had not been delivered. I asked him to make a statement on the fact that his letters to Maxim Gorky were intercepted by Stalin. He remained silent. Will he speak now that Stalin has openly joined hands with Hitler?
Eduard Beneš, the former president of Czechoslovakia, has also an account to settle. When Tukhachevsky and the Red Army chiefs were executed in June, 1937, the shock to Europe was so great, the disbelief in their guilt so stubborn, that Stalin was forced to seek a channel to convince Western democratic governments that the conqueror of Kolchak and Denikine was a Nazi spy. At Stalin’s direction the Ogpu, in collaboration with the Intelligence Service of the Red Army, prepared a dossier of the alleged evidence against the Red generals for transmission to the Czech government. Eduard Beneš was then so certain that Stalin would fight for Czechoslovakia that he apparently took this evidence at its face value, Let Beneš now recall and re-examine, in the light of present events, the character of the evidence prepared by the experts of the Ogpu and decide whether he is free to remain silent.
Now that it has become painfully clear that the worst way of fighting Hitler is to mitigate the crimes of Stalin, all those who were maneuvered into that folly ought to speak. If these last tragic years have taught us anything, it is that the march of totalitarian barbarism cannot be halted by strategic retreats to positions of half-truth and falsehood. While no one can dictate the method by which civilized Europe will restore to man his dignity and worth, I think that all those not destined for the camp of Hitler and Stalin, will agree that truth must be the first weapon, and murder must be called by its real name.
New York, October, 1939W. G. KRIVITSKY
In Stalin’s Secret Service
I. Stalin Appeases Hitler
DURING the night of June 30, 1934, when Hitler’s first blood purge broke out and while it was still going on, Stalin called an extraordinary session of the Politbureau in the Kremlin. Even before the news of the Hitler purge reached the wide world, Stalin had decided upon his next move in relation to the Nazi regime.
I was then at my post in the Intelligence Department of the General Staff of the Red Army in Moscow. We knew that a crisis was impending in Germany. All our confidential dispatches had prepared us for an outbreak. As soon as Hitler launched his purge, we began to receive constant bulletins from Germany.
That night I was working feverishly with a staff of assistants, summarizing our information for War Commissar Voroshilov. Among the non-members summoned to that meeting of the Politbureau were my chief, General Berzin; Maxim Litvinov. Commissar for Foreign Affairs; Karl Radek, then director of the information bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and A. C. Artusov, chief of the Foreign Division of the Ogpu.
The emergency meeting of the Politbureau had been called to consider the probable consequences of the Hitler purge, and its effects upon Soviet foreign policy. Confidential information in our possession showed that two extreme wings of Hitler’s opponents were involved. There was the group led by Captain Roehm, consisting of Nazi radicals dissatisfied with Hitler’s moderate policies. They were dreaming of a “second revolution.” The other group was composed of officers of the German army, under the leadership of Generals Schleicher and Bredow. This circle had looked forward to a restoration of the monarchy. It joined hands with