wants to avoid war at any cost. He fears war most. If Hitler will assure him peace, even at the price of important economic concessions, he will give Hitler a free hand in all these directions. . . .
The above account of Stalin’s hidden policies toward Hitler’s Germany was written and published in the Saturday Evening Post several months before August 23, 1939, when the world was astounded by the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact. It is needless to say that the pact was no surprise to the author. Both Molotov and Von Ribbentrop assert that the Nazi-Soviet pact inaugurates a new epoch in German-Russian relations, which will have profound consequences for the future history of Europe and the world. That is absolutely true.
II. The End of the Communist International
THE Communist International was born in Moscow on March 2nd, 1919. It received its death blow in Moscow on August 23, 1939, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact by Premier Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. But its decay was apparent in many things that happened years before.
On a May morning in 1934, I was with Volynski, the chief of the counter-espionage section of the Ogpu, in his office on the tenth floor of the Lubianka building in Moscow. Suddenly, from the street below, we heard the sound of music and of singing men. Looking down we saw a parade going by. The marchers were three hundred members of the Austrian Socialist Army, the Schutzbünd, who had fought heroically on the barricades in Vienna against the Fascist Heimwehr. Soviet Russia had given refuge to this small battalion of Socialist fighters.
I shall always remember that May morning: the happy faces of the Schutzbündler as they marched, singing their revolutionary song, Brueder Zur Sonne, Zur Freiheit, the spontaneous fellowship of the Russian crowds as they joined the march. For a moment I forgot where I was, but Volynski brought me down to earth.
“How many spies do you suppose there are among them, Krivitsky?” he asked in the most natural tone of voice.
“Not one,” I replied angrily.
“You’re making a big mistake,” he said. “In six or seven months seventy per cent of them will be sitting in the Lubianka prison.”
Volynski was a good judge of the way the Stalin machine functioned. Of those three hundred Austrians not a single one remains today on Soviet territory. Many of them were arrested soon after their arrival. Others, although they knew what awaited them at home, came flocking to the Austrian embassy for their passports and returned home to serve long prison sentences.
“Better behind bars in Austria,” they said, “than at liberty in the Soviet Union.”
The last of these refugees were shipped by the Soviet government to the International Brigade in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was moving swiftly on the road to totalitarian despotism, and the Comintern had long since outworn its original purpose.
The Communist International was founded by the Russian Bolshevik Party* twenty years ago in the belief that Europe was on the eve of world revolution. Lenin, its moving spirit, was convinced that the Socialist and labor parties of Western Europe by supporting the “imperialist war” waged by their governments from 1914 to 1918, had forfeited the support of the working masses. He believed that the traditional labor parties and Trade Union Federations of Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States with their faith in representative government and peaceful evolution to a more equitable social order, were completely outmoded; that it was the task of the victorious Russian Bolsheviks to provide revolutionary leadership to the workers of all nations. The vision which guided Lenin was a Communist United States of Europe and ultimately a world Communist order.
Lenin was certain that the Bolsheviks, despite their enthusiasm in the first flush of victory, could not build a Communist society in Russia unless the working classes of advanced countries came to their aid. He saw his bold experiment doomed to failure unless backward agricultural Russia was joined by at least one of the great industrial states. He put his biggest hopes in a speedy revolution in Germany.
The last twenty years indicate that Lenin underestimated the significance of existing labor organizations, trade-union as well as political, and over-estimated the adaptability to Western Europe of Russian Bolshevism, with its battle cry of the immediate overthrow of all governments, democratic as well as autocratic, and the establishment of an International Communist Dictatorship.
For two decades the Communist International—the Comintern—founded, inspired and directed by the Russian Bolsheviks, sought to implant their methods and their program beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. It established its Communist parties everywhere, patterned them closely after the highly centralized and disciplined Bolshevik model and made them responsible and obedient to the general staff in Moscow.
It sent its agents to every corner of the earth. It planned mass insurrections and military uprisings in Europe, in the Far East, and in the Western Hemisphere. And finally, when all these efforts failed, it embarked in 1935, upon its last course of political action, the Popular Front. In this final period, with the new weapons of camouflage and compromise, it made its greatest drive, penetrating into the organs of public opinion and even the governmental institutions of the leading democratic nations.
I was in a position from the very beginning until 1937 to observe closely the workings of the Comintern. I took a direct political and military part in its revolutionary actions abroad for eighteen years. I was one of the executive arms of Stalin’s intervention in Spain, during which the Comintern sent its forces into battle for the last time.
My work with the Comintern began in 1920 during the Russo-Polish war. I was then attached to the Soviet Military Intelligence for the Western Front which had its headquarters in Smolensk. As the Red Armies of Tukhachevsky moved toward Warsaw it was the function of our department to operate secretly behind the Polish lines, to create diversions, to sabotage the shipment of munitions, to shatter the morale of the Polish army by propaganda, and to furnish the general staff of the Red Army with military and political information.
As there was no clear line separating our work from that of the Comintern agents in Poland, we cooperated in every possible way with the recently formed Polish Communist Party, and we published a revolutionary newspaper Svit (Dawn) which we distributed among the soldiers of the Polish army.
On the day that Tukhachevsky stood before the gates of Warsaw, Dombal, a peasant deputy, declared in the Polish parliament: “I do not see in the Red Army an enemy. On the contrary, I greet the Red Army as the friend of the Polish people.”
To us this was an event of great importance. We printed Dombal’s speech in Svit, and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies throughout Poland, especially among the Polish soldiers.
Dombal was immediately arrested and confined in the Warsaw Citadel, the dreaded Polish political prison. After three years the Soviet government finally obtained his release by exchanging him for a number of Polish aristocrats and priests held as hostages. He then came to Moscow where he was acclaimed as one of the heroes of the Comintern. Lavish honors were heaped upon him and he was raised to a high position. For more than a decade, Dombal was one of the most important non-Russian officials of the Communist International.
In 1936 he was arrested on a charge of having been a Polish spy for seventeen years—ever since his speech in the Polish parliament. The Ogpu decided that Dombal’s greeting to the Red Army, as well as his three-year prison term, had been part of a prearranged plot of the Polish Military Intelligence. Dombal was executed.
During the Russo-Polish war the Polish Communist Party worked hand in hand with our department, and we prepared that party for action in cooperation
