Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ house urging Muscovites to ‘strengthen the sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the OGPU’. In 1934 OGPU was reincorporated into the NKVD. The later permutations were the NKGB (February 1941), NKVD again (July 1941), NKGB again (1943), MGB (1946), MVD (1953) and, from March 1954 until December 1991, the KGB. These bodies had a counterpart in the military intelligence section, which was known as the Fourth Department until it was renamed the GRU in 1942. The breaking or foiling of Fourth Department activities in Austria in 1931, in China in 1931–2 and in Latvia, Germany and Finland in 1933 was a chain-reaction caused by weak security between different cells. It proved ruinous for the department’s standing with Stalin, who transferred it in 1934 from the superintendence of the Red Army to INO and limited its remit to Finland, Poland, Germany, Romania, Britain, Japan, Manchuria and China. As Jonathan Haslam reminds us, the KGB ‘may have been the largest intelligence service in the world, but it was heavily weighted in favour of its domestic role, a role never played by its military counterpart, the GRU, the second largest intelligence service in the world’. KGB sources give a valuable if incomplete sense of events: the Fourth Department archive is unavailable to historians.¹⁹

      The career of one Fourth Department man must represent hundreds of his colleagues. Ivan Zolov Vinarov @ Josef Winzer @ MART was born in 1896 to a family of prosperous Bulgarian landowners. He fled to Soviet Russia in 1922 to escape arrest for his part in the Bulgarian communist party’s arms-smuggling. He was trained in military intelligence, sent on clandestine missions and involved with the communists who detonated an ‘infernal machine’ beneath the dome of a cathedral in Sofia during the state funeral of an assassinated general in 1925. A total of 123 people (including thirteen generals and seven children) were killed in the atrocity, which failed in its objective to liquidate Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Prince Alexander Tsankov, and his political cadre. Nor did it spark the intended communist revolution. The outcome was thousands of arrests, hundreds of executions and bitter destabilizing misery.

      Two Labour MPs visiting Bulgaria, Josiah Wedgwood and William Mackinder, failed to dissuade Tsankov’s government from reprisals. Returning to Bradford, Mackinder told journalists that he would not revisit Bulgaria under Tsankov’s government for a million pounds, but was not quoted as condemning the communist bomb outrage. Wedgwood contributed a report on ‘Bulgarian vengeance-politics’ to the Manchester Guardian. ‘A Communist is outside the law, and the hunt is therefore up for Communists,’ he told liberal-minded readers. Torture was being used to obtain confessions and denunciations: ‘prisoners come back from Bulgarian prisons maimed for life, the bones of the feet all broken with the bastinado [caning the soles of feet]’. Wedgwood judged that Bulgaria’s leaders were less frightened of Bolshevism from Russia than of western European radicalism. He found patriotic solace, amid the reprisals following the explosion, in noting that the English community in Bulgaria ‘are doing their best to stem the spate of horrors. It is on occasions such as this that even the Labour member may thank God for an English gentleman.’²⁰

      The Communist International, abbreviated to Comintern, was established in Moscow in 1919–20 to act as the ‘global party of the proletariat’ organizing communist revolutionary activism across Europe and America. From the outset it stipulated that its affiliates must expel moderates, conform to Leninist domination and obey Moscow’s orders. Disbursements to foreign communist parties in the Comintern’s first financial year exceeded five million rubles: far more than was allotted for famine relief in 1921–2 when some five million Russians starved to death or died in epidemics. In accordance with Leninist paranoia, it developed its own spy network during the 1920s. The Comintern’s enforcement of the ‘Bolshevization’ of foreign Marxist parties, its inordinate demands of fealty and its rejection of collaboration with European social democrats all proved major obstacles to the spread of socialism, enabling left-wing parties to be depicted by their opponents as the dupes or fifth columnists of Moscow. The insistence on mental submission certainly alienated intellectual members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the late 1920s, and caused defections from the party. The Comintern made headway in colonial territories with predominantly peasant economies. Factory workers in European capitalist economies proved averse to risking their limited prosperity and security by rising in support of revolutionary socialism, which had proved so impoverishing in Bolshevist Russia. Until 1934 the Comintern forbade cooperation with anti-fascists in Mussolini’s Italy or with anti-Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; thereafter it accepted a Popular Front policy, of which the first great achievement was the formation in 1936 of a French government supported by communists. The Comintern became Stalinized in the 1930s, it received directives from the Politburo and its officials and agents increasingly cooperated with Soviet diplomats in Europe and the USA.²¹

      ‘In our era,’ the Comintern propounded, ‘imperialist wars and world revolution, revolutionary civil wars of the proletarian dictatorship against the bourgeoisie, wars of the proletariat against the bourgeois states and world-capitalism, as well as national revolutionary wars of oppressed peoples against imperialism, are unavoidable.’ Many of the officers and agents in the Comintern’s international department were able linguists and seasoned travellers of central or eastern European birth. Cities like Prague produced alert, responsive men who noticed changing tendencies and were effective in getting what they wanted because their ambitions and insular pride were never as exorbitant as those of Londoners, Berliners and Muscovites brought up in imperial capitals. They were resourceful in selecting targets, laying plans and reading motives. By contrast, many of their counterparts in INO, OGPU and the NKVD were ill-educated, with the guile and brutality that fitted them for suppressing dissidents in provincial Russia and harassing counter-revolutionaries overseas, but less apt for collecting foreign intelligence material.²²

Stalinist Russia

      Shrewd appraisals of Marxism-Leninism were provided by Sir Robert Hodgson, Britain’s resilient diplomatic representative in Moscow during 1921–7. He chronicled the Bolshevik government’s continuous conflicts with its founding principles, and the pressures which forced it to forsake the revolutionary ideals of 1917. It was a huge challenge to misdirect attention so that ‘a trusting proletariat’ could continue to cherish the illusion that they, rather than a hefty, humdrum bureaucracy, governed Russia, Hodgson reported after the May Day celebrations of 1926, when Lenin had been dead for two years. ‘Moscow, however much nonsense is exhibited on red banners, stuffed into youthful brains, or poured out through loud-speakers to the populace, has to deal with precisely the same problems as any of its neighbours – and is dealing with them in very much the same way.’²³

      This focus became less helpful in assessing events after Stalin achieved undisputed supremacy in the Soviet Union in 1928–9. Wars, civil wars, threats of foreign wars and domestic class warfare were constant factors in the political careers and personal experiences of all Bolshevik leaders. Marxist-Leninist theory propounded the inevitability of wars between empires, of socialist revolution as a result of these imperialist wars, and of warlike interventions by capitalist powers against socialist states. Fears of internal adversaries and external encirclement were never assuaged. Stalin, though, intensified and invigorated this aspect of the Bolshevik mentality. He convinced the party cadres and general membership that he was a relentlessly industrious pragmatist who could manage the domestic and foreign crises that threatened the Soviet Union. He gained a well-deserved reputation for achievement. ‘He was assiduous in consolidating his power base throughout the party, state, secret police and military hierarchies,’ writes the historian of deStalinization Kevin McDermott. ‘His increasingly radical policies in the years after 1928 proved attractive to the new brand of militant unschooled proletarians who formed the base of the party at that time.’²⁴

      Stalin’s supremacy was characterized by crisis-paroxysms of socialist modernization. He sought to transform a ravaged agrarian economy into a global industrial power. The upheaval of forced agricultural collectivization and accelerated manufacturing capacity was akin to social and economic mobilization on a war footing. The first of Stalin’s Five Year Plans for headlong economic СКАЧАТЬ