I must admit I initially questioned the book's authenticity. I had never heard of Krivitsky, and I thought that if he really was who he claimed to be, and really did experience everything he described, he would have been much better known. Then there is the tone of the book. Its language is contrived and melodramatic, and there is no information about translation or editorship in the places one would normally find them. There are a couple of obvious inconsistencies, one example being the reference to the Deuxieme Bureau of Soviet Intelligence on p. 140, the only such reference. Why French all of a sudden, and without a proper accent mark to boot? Might this have been cobbled together, haphazardly, from a variety of sources written by different people in different languages?
The most unbelievable, however, is the actual fact that Krivitsky escaped. He was the head of Soviet Military Intelligence at the time when the OGPU, later the KGB, was systematically taking over all domestic and foreign spying functions, and eliminating internal competitors. He was in Moscow at the height of Stalin's purges, specifically when Stalin decapitated the Red Army by executing all of its top brass, most notably Marshal Tukhachevsky and General Voroshilov. He witnessed a few interrogations himself, and talked personally with several political prisoners. He was scheduled to return to Holland, where he was stationed at the time, but a few hours before departure time, he still had not received his passport. He had resigned, he claims, to the idea that he would not be permitted to leave, and was keenly aware that at the very least, he would lose his job, and that a bullet to the head in the basement of the Lubianka was not out of the question. Yet, at the last possible moment, he was summoned to the office of an OGPU big shot, who shoved Krivitsky's passport into his hand and barked, "Your train leaves at ten o'clock!" If that's not a set-up worthy of Hollywood, I don't know what is. Yet a bit of research on the 'net proved, or at least indicated with a reasonable degree of confidence, that Krivitsky's bona-fides check out, and that his story really is true. That makes the book a priceless historical document.
Krivitsky lasted roughly two years in the West, making his way through France to the US, then to Great Britain, then back to the US. He was found dead in a Washington, DC hotel room in February 1941 with a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide by the Washington Metropolitan Police after a botched and half-hearted investigation, and the case quickly closed. Yet Krivitsky, and a small handful of close friends he had in the West, knew that he was a hunted man, and had in fact had several close calls both in Europe and the US. All this was described, rather well I thought, in a long article by Flora Lewis, published in the Washington Post in 1966 and titled Who Killed Walter Krivitsky. The article is included at the end of my edition of the book, and I wish it had been included at the beginning instead, by way of an introduction. The article goes a long way towards explaining why the book reads the way it does, in particular its tone and language.
Krivitsky was not happy in the US. In France, where he was at the moment of his defection, he found it relatively easy to obtain official protection from the government of Leon Blum, a well-advertised Socialist with strong sympathies for Trotsky. Krivitsky - and this bears emphasizing - never abandoned the cause of Socialist Revolution. It was Stalin he reviled, and believed that Stalin betrayed the Bolshevik's original idea. Any Russian Socialist who was anti-Stalin was assumed to be pro-Trotsky in the West, and even though Krivitsky was forthcoming about the fact that he had no plans to join Trotsky, Blum was easily placated and provided around the clock bodyguards, bodyguards that saved Krivitsky at least once from assassination. Even with official protection, however, France was too close to Russia and Nazi Germany for comfort, and Krivitsky made his was to the US.
Here, he found himself in a different situation. Few people cared about who he was, what he had to say, or, most importantly, what would happen to him. Roosevelt's government had bigger fish to fry than to protect an unknown Russian defector. The fact that Krivitsky claimed to know so much but told so little didn't win him many friends in the State Department, then consumed with its own political infighting. Once, when Krivitsky realized he was being followed on the street by an OGPU agent he recognized, he sought help from the police but was told that they were powerless since no crime had actually been committed. To a Russian, even one who was convinced that the criminality of Stalin's violence was beyond the pale, such an attitude simply did not compute.
Mostly, however, Krivitsky needed money. Through friends, he met Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-speaking writer, journalist, an authority on Socialism and Communism and, most importantly, an expert salesman of sensation. He got Krivitsky to agree to write, and arranged to have his memoirs serialized in the Saturday Evening Post at $1,000 per installment. Krivitsky probably knew some English, but not enough to write, and wrote most likely in Russian, or, possibly, German, in which he was fluent, with Levine and/or his people translating. It is to Levine that we owe the inflated tone of the book's prose. Did he embellish it? Possibly, but probably not a lot - Lewis tells of endless arguments between Levine and Krivitsky, the former pushing for grandiosity, the latter preferring a dry, Foreign Policy-style recitation. Had Levine not come along at the right moment, or had Krivitsky been luckier in securing gainful employment in the US, a priceless historical document might never have been produced.
That's the back story, or bits of it, anyhow. To the memoir itself. Krivitsky's purpose is singular - to expose Stalin's evils to a Western reader and to demonstrate, once and for all, how deeply that evil ran, both morally and operationally.
Chapter One is dedicated to Stalin's appeasement of Hitler. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 is well-known, of course, but a casual reader, or even a not-so-casual one like yours truly, would be shocked to discover how long, thoroughly, and consistently Stalin courted Hitler. According to Krivitsky, it was Stalin's goal to establish friendly relations, and preferably some kind of formal agreement, with Nazi Germany practically from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. Every bit of Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1930s was single-mindedly dedicated to achieving this goal. Stalin admired and feared Hitler. Here was someone who thought much like Stalin did, but possessed a far stronger military and a much firmer economic base - a formidable man indeed, and Stalin wanted nothing more than to become the Tabacqui to Hitler's Shere Khan. Sounds odd to our ears that a monster like Stalin could so willingly humiliate himself, but Krivitsky is convincing, and provides ample evidence.
Chapter Three is a thorough examination of Russia's intervention in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It is an accepted fact that Russia helped a fellow Socialist government against a Fascist onslaught. That it was done clandestinely is frequently not mentioned. What few of us realize, however, that Stalin's true aim was never to help the Spanish Republican government. His aim was to overthrow it, and to gain control of Spain, finally establishing a Bolshevik regime in another European country. The Republicans paid for every Russian rifle with complete, unquestioning subservience to the OGPU advisers who occupied every single important post in the Republican forces. Caballero was sacked by the OGPU because he would not toe the line sufficiently. There was absolutely no question what Stalin was attempting to do, and again Krivistky is quick with revealing detail. He is surprisingly silent on the question of why the Russians left Spain unexpectedly, throwing the Republicans to Franco's wolves, but George Kennan has suggested that Stalin suddenly saw an agreement with Hitler to be within his grasp, and did not want to be discovered opposing one of his allies. Given what Krivitsky so painstakingly reveals elsewhere in the memoir, this makes complete sense.
The most outrageous story Krivitsky tells is of Stalin's counterfeiting American dollars. During the first Five Year Plan (1928 - 1932), Russia was broke and desperately needed hard currency. True to his common criminal origins, Stalin decided to print some, about $10 million in all. This sounds unfathomable, I know, but once again Krivistky has the details, and the Western press of the time, which he quotes on several occasions, is certainly full of stories of counterfeit $100 bills showing up all over Europe, and a few arrests of people trying to pass them. Krivitsky's account really begs to be read - it is too fantastic to be paraphrased.
The true value of the book, however, is Krivitsky's account and analysis of Stalin's purges. We have all heard of them of course, but most of us have not studied them. As moral human beings, we should. No, must. And while far more formal historical studies exist, what Krivitsky gives us are names, places, ambiance in the interrogation rooms, the trail of smoke rising from the examiner's cigarette. What's more, he makes plain, to the extent something like this can be made plain to minds like ours that work in a different mental dimension, the thought process that went on during the purges, both those of the perpetrators and their victims. To pick an example at random:
It may seem surprising... that there should be barters in human lives between a lord high executioner and his trapped victims. We of the inner Bolshevik circle always took such negotiations as a matter of course (p. 167).Krivitsky is particularly thorough in his description of the purges of the officer corps of the Red Army (the act that contributed to Hitler's impunity in disregarding the non-aggresion pact and attacking Russia in 1941). I didn't learn that Tukhachevsky was purged until a few years ago, and was shocked at the time, but in Krivistky I found more details I could ever want, and his analysis of Stalin's motivation is faultless. I'm not going to reproduce the whole thing here, of course, but as a summary, this will do:
Once more Stalin demonstrated that he never forgets or forgives. The old differences of opinion... remained in his memory as "opposition." The "opposition," when dragged into the meshes of his OGPU machine, became a "conspiracy." Such "conspiracies" are the rungs in the ladder on which Stalin climbed to absolute power. In the process, critics became "enemies," sincere opponents "traitors," all honest... oppositional opinion - with the exprt aid of the OGPU - "organized plots." (p. 209)Krivitsky has some numbers, too, though that is less of a focus for him: "Within the first five months of 1937, 350,000 political arrests were made by the OGPU..." (p. 215, emphasis mine). This was a secret, and therefore probably accurate, figure given to him by an OGPU section chief.
For all its surface defects, most of them not Krivistky's fault, In Stalin's Secret Service is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand one of the top three tragedies of the twentieth century. Please excuse that pompous, term-paper-like conclusion - I can think of no better. Read it - it will leave an impression.
1 comment:
thanks for your post. It was fascinating read.. Do you still have that article about Walter Krivitsky from the Washington Post? If yes, it might be a good ides to post it here...
Post a Comment