In Stalin's Secret ServiceCONTENTS Introduction vii I. Stalin Appeases Hitler 1 II. The End of the Communist International 26 III. Stalins Hand in Spain 75 IV. When Stalin Counterfeited Dollars 116 V. TheOgpu 139 VI. Why Did They Confess 1 81 VII. Why Stalin Shot His Generals 21 1 VIII. My Break with Stalin 244 Introduction I HE evening of May 22, 1937, 1 boarded a train in Moscow to return to my post in The Hague as Chief of the Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe, I little realized then that I was seeing my last of Russia so long as Stalin is her master. For nearly twenty years I had served tie Soviet government. For nearly twenty years I had been a Bolshevik. As the train sped toward the Finnish border I sat alone in my compartment, thinking of the fate of my colleagues, my comrades, my friends arrested, shot or in concentration camps, almost all of them. They had given their entire lives to build a better world, and had died at their posts, not under the bullets of an enemy but because Stalin willed it. Who is there left to respect or admire What hero or heroine of our revolution has not been broken and destroyed I could think of but few. All those whose personal integrity was absolutely above question had gone down as traitors, spies, or common criminals. Pictures flashed through my mind pictures of the Civil War when these same traitors and spies faced death a thousand times without flinching of the arduous days that followed, of industrialization and the superhuman demands it made upon all of us, of collec tivization and famine when we barely had the rations to keep us alive. And then the great purge sweeping all before it, destroying those who had kbored hardest to build a state in which manshould no longer exploit his fellow man, vii Through the long years of struggle we had learned to re peat to ourselves that a victory over injustices of the old society can only be attained with moral as well as physical sacrifice, that a new world can not come into being until the last vestige of the habits of the old has been destroyed. But could it be necessary for a Bolshevik Revolution to destroy all Bolsheviks Was it the Bolshevik Revolution that was destroying them, or had that revolution itself long since perished I did not answer these questions then, but I asked them . . . At the age of thirteen I had entered the working-class movement. It was a half-mature, half - childish act. I heard the plaintive melodies of my suffering race mingled with new songs of freedom. But in 1917 1 was a youngster of eighteen, and the Bolshevik Revolution came to me as an absolute solu tion of all problems of poverty, inequality and injustice. I joined the Bolshevik Party with my whole soul. I seized the Marxist and Leninist faith as a weapon with which to as sault the wrongs against which I had instinctively rebelled. During all the years that I served the Soviet government I never expected anything more than the right to continue my work. I never received anything more. Long after the Soviet power had been stabilized, I was sent abroad on assignments that exposed me to the danger of death, and that twice landed me in prison. I worked from sixteen to eighteen, hours a day, and never earned enough to cover the most ordinary living expenses. I myself, when traveling abroad, would live in moderate comfort, but I did not earn enough, even as late as 1935, to keep my apartment in Mos cow heatedproperly or pay the price of milk for my two year-old son... |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | In Stalin's Secret Service |
| Author | W.G. Krivitsky |
| Publisher | Read Books, 2007 |
| ISBN | 1406715433, 9781406715439 |
| Length | 292 pages |
| Subjects | › Biography & Autobiography / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |