(Militant 401, 14 April 1978, p. 8-9)
In the second part of his review of ‘The Great Game’, Peter Taaffe covers Trepper’s recollections of the great purge of ‘Old Bolsheviks’ and Stalin’s disastrous military policies at the beginning of the second world war.
In ‘The Great Game’, Leopold Trepper provides a graphic picture of how Stalin undermined the conquests of the October Revolution through his murder of the flower of the Red Army on the eve of the second world war. He produces sensational material on the frame-up and murder of the commander of the Red Army, the brilliant Tukhachevsky Trotsky pointed out at the time that the mass discontent with Stalin’s regime was bound to be reflected within the army.
Stalin was afraid that the bureaucracy, or a section of the bureaucracy, in this case the army, would take fright at the impasse which the country was in and move to replace him as the God-head. The hero of the Civil War, Tukhachevsky, could easily have become a pole of attraction for this opposition to Stalin. The danger had to removed, even if this meant enormously weakening the military defence of Russia. Thus Tukhachevsky and 30,000 Red Army officers were murdered in Stalin’s dungeons.
In the place of Tukhachevsky, who developed the theory of blitzkrieg before the German High Command, were put mediocre nonentities who were creatures of Stalin, like Voroshilov. What “evidence” was used by Stalin to convict Tukhachevsky? Trepper shows that in organising the frame-up, Stalin called on the services of the Gestapo. Giering, later Trepper’s Gestapo jailer, explained to him how the frame-up was concocted:
“The scene was Berlin, 1936. Heydrich, chief of Intelligence, received a visit from a former officer in the czarist army, General Skoblin. It was not difficult to show that Tukhachevsky had had contact with the chiefs of staff of the Wehrmacht, since before the Nazi rise to power regular encounters were organised between the two armies, and the Soviet government had even established military schools for the training of German officers. A dossier was prepared that revealed, with the aid of altered documents, that Tukhachevsky was preparing a military coup in liaison with the German military leaders. The preparation of these revealing documents was not the work of a day. After the “proof” was assembled by Hitler’s entourage, it was a spy’s mission to get it into the hands of the leaders of the USSR. If we are to believe the memoirs of Schellenberg, then head of German counter-espionage, the house the documents were in was burned and a Czech agent who had been alerted supposedly found the papers among the ashes. Another version has it that the Germans sold the documents to the Russians, using the Czechs as intermediaries.
By the end of May, 1937, the Tukhachevsky file had found its way to Stalin’s desk. The moustachioed Georgian had every reason to be satisfied. At his request, the Germans had provided him with all the material necessary for eliminating the man he had sworn to kill.”
The present-day attorneys for Stalin, now admittedly only a few, take refuge in the fact that Stalin was at least a “great war leader”. This is a myth. This was shown clearly in the disastrous and shameful Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. From 1933 onwards, Trotsky had predicted that the axis of Stalin’s foreign policy was an attempt to avoid war – not by spreading the revolution but by attempting to arrive at agreement with the capitalist states, and particularly with the Nazi régime. If this meant trampling in the mud all the principles of socialism and elementary class solidarity, so be it.
To the indignation of the Stalinists, Trotsky had characterised Stalin as “Hitler’s Quartermaster”. In their attack on Ethiopia, for instance, the Italian fascists had used Russian oil! Under the German-Soviet Pact the Nazi regime gained Russian neutrality and the bonus of Russian raw materials for the plunder of Europe. Trepper records the cynical comments of SS officers in the middle of the invasion of Belgium: “If we have succeeded in our offensive beyond all hope, it is thanks to the help of the Soviet Union, which has provided us with gas for our tanks, leather for our shoes, and wheat for our granaries.”
The amity between Stalin and Hitler had reached such dizzying heights that “A directive was sent to Russia’s concentration camps forbidding the guards to call the political prisoners ‘fascists’!” One of Trepper’s Gestapo interrogators, Berg (who had been Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop’s body guard in 1939), described the “jubilant atmosphere” in the Kremlin on 24th August 1939:
“Everyone was guzzling champagne in celebration, and Stalin had raised his glass and made an unforgettable toast: “I know how much the German people love their Führer, and that is why I have the pleasure of drinking to his health” – a pleasure that was certainly not shared by thousands of German communists crouching in concentration camps by the grace of their beloved Führer.”
Stalin’s blindness to the Nazi’s plans for the invasion of Russia resulted in a military catastrophe. Leopold Trepper and his “Red Ochestra” had gathered conclusive proof of Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa”. The famous and heroic Richard Sorge, who had penetrated into the very heart of the Nazi machine from Tokyo, on 12th May 1941, gave the exact date – 21st June – of the invasion. But as Trepper comments: “The generalissimo preferred to trust his political instinct than the secret reports piled up on his desk.” The reports of Richard Sorge and Leopold Trepper were only acquired at colossal risks and sacrifices. Sorge paid with his life.
But Trepper maintains that he could have been saved by Stalin. He was captured by the Japanese in 1941 but only executed in November, 1944 – because Stalin refused to arrange an exchange! Sorge’s radio operator, like Trepper himself, was rewarded with imprisonment for his heroism when he returned to Russia from a Japanese prison following the end of the war!
Stalin’s refusal to heed the warnings of the invasion cost Russia dearly at the beginning of the war. At the outset of the war, the firepower of the Russian army was actually greater than that of the German armies. But within the first day of the invasion, 95% of the Russian planes were destroyed while still on the ground! Stalin, moreover, was paralysed with fear and refused to order the Russian counter-attack for 24 hours! Millions of Russian workers were murdered and enslaved by the Nazi beasts because of Stalin’s blunders. Unlike Lenin and Trotsky during the Civil War, who fought a revolutionary war with propaganda aimed at winning over the troops in the invading imperialist armies, Stalin fought a war just of men and material. The colossal advantages of the planned economy resulted in the defeat of the Nazis, but at enormous cost.
Hammer and Anvil
Leopold Trepper was conscious of the crimes of Stalinism throughout his period as leader of the Red Orchestra. Indeed, his book makes it clear that with many others he perhaps unconsciously agreed with the criticisms made of Stalinism by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Why then did he not openly break from Stalinism? Ignace Reiss, another GPU agent openly and courageously broke from the seemingly mighty Stalinist machine to join the tiny minority who supported Trotsky in order “to begin all over again, in order to save socialism.” He returned his “Order of Lenin” with a letter to the Ukrainian Communist Party which said: “It is below my dignity to wear it together with the executioners of the best representatives of the working class.” He was subsequently kidnapped and murdered by the GPU in Switzerland in 1937. Unfortunately, Leopold Trepper had not at this time been able to draw all the necessary conclusions from the events he witnessed in Russia during the 1930s. Moreover, as a Jew, his first concern was to bring down the monstrous regime of the Nazis while at the same time defending the main conquests of the Revolution, the planned economy:
“We were ready to sacrifice our youth so that some day the world might have the face of youth again. The revolution was our life; the party was our family, in which brotherhood transcended every private action.
“We wanted to belong to a new race of men. In order that the proletariat could be freed of its chains, we were prepared to wear chains ourselves. What did we care about our little share of personal happiness? We had offered our lives to history so that it might at last cease to be one long tale of oppression. The road to heaven is not strewn with roses – who could know that better than we, who had come to communism from childhoods in a world dominated by imperialist barbarism?
But if the road was strewn with the bodies of workers, it did not, it could not, lead to socialism. Our comrades were disappearing. The best of us were dying in the cellars of the NKVD; Stalin’s régime was distorting socialism to the point where it was unrecognisable. Stalin, the great gravedigger, was liquidating ten times, a hundred times, more communists than Hitler.
Between the hammer of Hitler and the anvil of Stalin, the path was a narrow one for those of us who still believed in the revolution. Over and above our confusion and our anguish was the necessity of defending the Soviet Union, even though it had ceased to be the homeland of the socialism we had hoped for. This obvious fact forced my decision, and General Berzin’s proposition allowed me to save my conscience. As a Polish citizen, as a Jew who had lived in Palestine, as an expatriate and as a journalist on a Jewish daily paper, I was ten times suspect in the eyes of the NKVD.
My path was decided. It might end in a prison cell, a concentration camp, or against a wall. Yet by fighting far from Moscow, in the forefront of the anti-Nazi struggle, I could continue to be what I had always been: a militant revolutionary.”
Trepper and his comrades did indeed fight. His account of the ingenious organisation of the “Red Orchestra” and the underground struggle against the Nazis is enthralling. The contemporary, fictional “spy novels” are tame by comparison! These “spies” fought not for narrow egotistical reasons but for the noblest cause of all: to free mankind from the yoke of capitalism through the establishment of a socialist world. Trepper, however, is not given to boasting about the worth of his intelligence network. He clearly explains that it was merely an adjunct and subordinate to the military struggle. Nevertheless, the information which his agents, and others like Richard Sorge, were able to gather enormously assisted the deployment of Russian troops during the war. Thus Sorge’s information from Tokyo that Japan would not attack Russia in the East allowed Red Army divisions to be switched to the Western Front to repel the Nazi invaders. The value of the “Red Orchestra” and its “pianists” (agents) was recognised by the Nazis. They organised a massive manhunt for Trepper and his comrades, eventually succeeding in capturing them.
Faith in Socialism
Trepper gives a vivid and chilling account of the vengeance which was wreaked on the organisers of the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. The chapter on the Gestapo torturers at the Belgian Breendonk concentration camp is enough to make the blood run cold. Prisoners were greeted by an SS sadist with the words: “This is hell and I am the devil” – and he was not exaggerating! Indescribable tortures were inflicted on Trepper’s collaborators and the organisers and perpetrators of these crimes escaped with virtual impunity after the war.
Trepper provides an appendix on the subsequent fate of his persecutors: many of whom ended up as mayors and dignitaries of German towns today. This book provides invaluable evidence to reinforce the recent excellent ‘Panorama’ programme which showed that less than one per cent of the Nazi war criminals were prosecuted by the “Allies” in the post-war period, because they were the most reliable tools in the crusade against “Communism”. Trepper fortunately managed to escape from the clutches of the Gestapo, and participated in the battle which liberated Paris from the Nazis in 1944.
He subsequently returned to Russia. But he went straight from the airport to an NKVD cell in the notorious Lubianka prison! The same fate befell thousands of prisoners-of-war and others whose heroic behaviour was thus rewarded by Stalin and his NKVD minions. Those who had “allowed themselves” to be captured at the beginning of the war were suspect; but so, too, were those “not courageous” enough to be captured!
He cites the example of two Jewish doctors who were working in Belorussia and wondered what attitude to adopt in the face of the German advance:
“In the end on of the two, who was the head doctor, could not bring himself to abandon his patients, and decided to stay and take care of them under the enemy occupation. In this way he saved many lives. The other brother, who wanted to avoid falling into the hands of the Nazis at any price, fled – along with all the hospital’s doctors except for his brother – and joined the partisans. The head doctor was accused of collaborating with the enemy, the other one of having fled and abandoned his patients.”
This insane policy, ordained by Stalin himself, was not at all accidental. Stalin and his régime feared all those talented and independent elements who had developed during the war, or who, as in the case of Trepper, may have picked up a revolutionary virus during the underground struggle against the Nazis and during the liberation of Paris. But his courageous refusal to “confess” even affected one of the NKVD officers interrogating him. This individual applauded his conduct and subsequently resigned from the ranks of the secret police!
Following Stalin’s death in 1952, Trepper was “re-habilitated” and returned in 1959 to his native Poland which he had left 43 years before. He worked among the small Jewish community which had survived the Nazi holocaust. But in the aftermath of the 1968 student demonstrations and strikes, the Stalinist régime of Gomulka, with the gangster General Moczvar and his so-called “Partisans” leading the pack, fanned the flames of antisemitism Trepper raised his voice against this vile campaign and was once again rewarded with police harassment and imprisonment, this time at the hands of the “socialist” police of Poland.
Only a world-wide campaign secured his release and permission to emigrate to the West. He thus joined the growing list of those opponents of Stalinism who have been evicted from Russia and Eastern Europe. But unlike many of those – like Solzhenitsyn and company – his revulsion from Stalinism has not led him to become intoxicated by capitalism in the West.
And yet, because of his suffering, he would be more justified than most if he had been poisoned by Stalinism against socialism. But his experiences seem only to have convinced him that a world purged of capitalism and the horrible excrescence of Stalinism can solve the problems of mankind. His message is one of optimism and hope that the youth will learn from the painful experiences of his generation.
“A final word: I belong to a generation that had been sacrificed by history. The men and women who came to communism in the glow of the October Revolution carried along by the great momentum of the rising revolution, certainly did not imagine that fifty years later nothing would be left of Lenin but the body embalmed in Red Square. The revolution has degenerated and we have gone down with it.
What? Half a century after the storming of the Winter Palace, with “deviations” being treated by electric shock, the Jews persecuted, Eastern Europe “normalised” – with a system of coercion of this kind, people dare to talk about socialism!
Is this what we wanted, was it for this perversion that we fought, sacrificing our lives in the search for a new world?
We wanted to change man, and we have failed. This century has brought forth two monsters, fascism and Stalinism, and our ideal has been engulfed in his apocalypse. The absolute idea that gave meaning to our lives has acquired a face whose features we no longer recognise. Our failure forbids us to give advice, but because history has too much imagination to repeat itself, it remains possible to hope.
I do not regret the commitment of my youth, I do not regret the paths I have taken. In Denmark, in the fall of 1973, a young man asked me in a public meeting, “Haven’t you sacrificed your life for nothing?” I replied, “No.”
No, on one condition: that people understand the lesson of my life as a communist and a revolutionary, and do not turn themselves over to a deified party. I know that youth will succeed where we have failed, that socialism will triumph and that it will not have the colour of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague.”
Trepper looks towards the youth to redeem the hopes of his generation. That faith is not misplaced. Stalinism, like capitalism in the West, has completely outlived itself. In the first period, it was a relative fetter. At the cost of enormous overheads, it was capable of developing the productive forces, science, technique and the organisation of production. The advantages of a planned economy have, despite the errors and crimes of the bureaucracy, resulted in the development of Russia and Eastern Europe as major industrial powers.
At the same time, a powerful and highly cultured working class now exists in the Stalinist states. They are rising against the regime of bureaucratic absolutism. Stalinism is now an absolute fetter on the development of these societies. The working class, with the youth in the vanguard, is in revolt.
Revolution
Conditions have been prepared for earth-shattering upheavals, for political revolutions along the line of the Hungarian Revolution, and the establishment of workers’ democracy. And as fate would have it, Trepper’s native Poland is in the forefront. Who knows, perhaps the honour of a new uprising and elimination of Stalinism will fall on the shoulders of the mighty Polish working class?
A successful political revolution in any of the countries of Eastern Europe and particularly in Russia itself would detonate revolutions throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. It would also lead to the downfall of capitalism. When that day arrives, the Polish working class will accord Leopold Trepper and his kind their full due as steadfast opponents of capitalism and Stalinist barbarism.
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