Panopticon posted:

Crow posted:

its really funny that Panopticon's family are like nazis or whatever and that he still playacts a communist

no my GRANDparents were nazis rescued from the clutches of the kgb during operation paperclip. get it right

...and the course of the Great Terror certainly confirmed Stalin's position of power. Having called a halt to the mass operations in November 1938, Stalin once again replaced his NKVD chief. Lavrenty Beria succeeded Yezhov, who was later executed. The same fate awaited many of the highest officers of the NKVD, blamed for the supposed excesses, which were in fact the substance of Stalin's policy. (107-8)

Snyder is wrong. We know now, from primary source evidence, that Ezhov acted directly against "Stalin's" - the Soviet leadership's - "policy", i.e. intentions. This information was available when Snyder was writing his book. Either he was ignorant of this research and evidence or he knew about it but suppressed any discussion of it from his book. If the former, Snyder is incompetent and had no business writing about the subject at all. If the latter, he has deliberately deceived his readers.

We now have the telegram sent on June 17, 1937, just prior to the June Central Committee plenum, in which Ezhov transmits the request of S.M. Mironov, NKVD chief in Western Siberia, reporting the threat of revolts by subversives in concert with Japanese intelligence. In it Mironov reports that Robert I. Eikhe, Party First Secretary of Western Siberia, will request the ability to form a "troika" to deal with this threat. Vl. Khaustov, Lennart Samuelson. Stalin, NKVD, I repressii 1937-1938 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, 332-333. (Вл. Хаустов, Леннарт Самузльсон. Сталин, НКВД, и репрессии 1937-1938 гг. М.: РОССПЭН, 2009). Online at http://istmat.info/node/24544 We also have at least one of the reports Mironov sent to Ezhov to justify this request. Danilov, et al., eds. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni t. 5,1, pp. 256-7.

Apparently Eikhe, and then a number of other First Secretaries, approached Stalin and the Politburo after the Plenum and asked for these special powers to deal with conspiracies, rebellions, and revolts in their areas. This led to the Politburo Decree "On Anti-Soviet elements" of July 2, 1937, which authorized all First Secretaries to arrest "kulaks and criminals" who had returned to their areas, shoot the "most dangerous" of them, and exile the rest to other areas. At http://istmat.info/node/14917 ; widely reprinted in Russian. Available in English in Getty & Naumov Doc. 169 pp. 470-471.

This vision of organized internal revolts in conjunction with foreign powers (Japan, in the case of Western Siberia) occurred in the context of the Tukhachevsky Affair of less than a month earlier. In that case the top commanders of the Red Army were convicted of collaboration with foreign powers and a plot to overthrow the Soviet government. The loyalty of the military commanders was in grave doubt - rightly so, as we now know. The NKVD appeared to be the only force that Soviet power could rely upon. It did not become clear until much later that Ezhov himself was conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the government and Party leadership, and was using massive executions of innocent people to stir up resentment.

The document authorizing the NKVD to proceed on a virtual war footing against the rebels is Order No. 00447 of July 30, 1937. It is available in Russian in many places, and (in excerpt) also in English. English translation in Getty & Naumov, Doc. 170 pp. 473-478 (in excerpt). Hereafter G&N.

This document authorizes actions only against those involved in rebellions and criminal activities:

I. GROUPS SUBJECT TO PUNITIVE MEASURES.

1. Former kulaks who have returned home after having served their sentences and who continue to carry out anti-Soviet sabotage.

2. Former kulaks who have escaped from camps or from labor settlements, as well as kulaks who have been in hiding from dekulakization, who carry out anti-Soviet activities.

3. Former kulaks and socially dangerous elements who were members of insurrectionary, fascist, terroristic, and bandit formations, who have served their sentences, who have been in hiding from punishment, or who have escaped from places of confinement and renewed their anti-Soviet, criminal activities.

4. Members of anti-Soviet parties (SRs, Georgian Mensheviks, Dashnaks, Mussavatists, Ittihadists, etc.), former Whites, gendarmes, bureaucrats, members of punitive expeditions, bandits, gang abettors, transferees, re-emigres, who are in hiding from punishment, who have escaped from places of confinement, and who continue to carry out active anti-Soviet activities.

5. Persons unmasked by investigators and whose evidence is verified by materials obtained by investigative agencies and who are the most hostile and active members of Cossak-White Guard insurrectionary organizations slated for liquidation and fascist, terroristic, and espionage-saboteur counterrevolutionary formations. In addition, punitive measures are to be taken against elements of this category who are kept at the present under guard, whose cases have been fully investigated but not yet considered by the judicial organs.

6. The most active anti-Soviet elements from former kulaks, members of punitive expeditions, bandits, Whites, sectarian activists, church officials, and others, who are presently held in prisons, camps, labor settlements, and colonies and who continue to carry out in those places their active anti-Soviet sabotage.

7. Criminals (bandits, robbers, recidivist thieves, professional contraband but not yet considered by the judicial organs.
{{{SWAMPMAN NOTE: This is the text in the book. I've been correcting the occasional stray punctuation and obvious typo; this is the first significant lapse in formatting without explanation. It's not clear if the error is from Furr, or Getty & Naumov.}}}

8. Criminal elements in camps and labor settlements who are carrying out criminal activities in them.

9. All of the groups enumerated above, to be found at present in the countryside - i.e., in kolkhozy, sovkhozy, on agricultural enterprises - as well as in the city - i.e., at industrial and trade enterprises, in transport, in Soviet institutions, and in construction - are subject to punitive measures. (G&N 474-5)

For the next year or more Stalin was flooded with reports of conspiracies and revolts from all over the USSR. A large number of these have been published (in Russian). Undoubtedly a great many more remain unpublished in former Soviet archives throughout the former Soviet Union. According to Khaustov, a very anti-Stalin researcher and one of the compilers of several of these invaluable document collections, Stalin believed these reports.

И самым страшным было то, что Сталин принимал решения, основываясь на показаниях, которые являлись результатом вымыслов конкретных сотрудников органов госбезопасности. Реакция Сталина свидетельствовала о том, что он воспринимал эти показания в полнй мере серьезно.
Lubianka golgofa, p. 6.

Translated:

And the most frightening thing was that Stalin made his decisions on the basis of confessions that were the result of the inventions of certain employees of the organs of state security. Stalin's reactions attest to the fact that he took these confessions completely seriously.

It is important to ideologically anticommunist researchers that these mass murders be seen as Stalin's plan and intention. Khaustov is honest enough to admit that the evidence does not bear this out. Some, and no doubt many, of the confessional and investigative documents Ezhov sent on to Stalin and the Soviet leadership must have been falsifications. But in reality Khaustov has no idea which were fabrications and which were not.

What is important here is that Khaustov admits the existence of a major conspiracy by Ezhov and concedes that Stalin was deceived by him. Ezhov admits as much in the confessions of his that we now have. Khaustov admits that Stalin acted in good faith on the basis of evidence presented to him by Ezhov, much of which must have been false.

Russian historian Iurii Zhukov suggests that after Eikhe got these special powers for Western Siberia the other First Secretaries asked Stalin for the same powers, and received them. Evidently there was a connection between this campaign of repressions, carried out as a virtual war against rebellious anti-Soviet forces throughout the country, and the cancellation of the competitive elections that had been stipulated under the new 1936 Soviet Constitution. Stalin and his supporters in the central Soviet government and Party fought for such elections but failed to win the Central Committee to approve them. Zhukov has traced the final decision not to hold such elections to October 11, 1937. He also located a draft or sample ballot for contested elections - a ballot never used but preserved in a Soviet archive.
See Grover Furr, "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform, Part One", in Cultural Logic 2005, paragraphs 60 - end. At http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html Much of this material is summarized from IUrii N. Zhukov, Inoi Stalin. Politicheskie Reformy v SSSR v 1933-1937 gg. Moscow: Vagrius, 2003.

Ezhov's Conspiracy Gradually Uncovered

Beginning perhaps at the January 1938 Central Committee Plenum Stalin and the Politburo began to uncover evidence of massive illegal repressions, first of all against Party members. Politburo member Pavel Postyshev was dismissed from his post on the grounds that he was killing off the Party infrastructure. On Postyshev see Furr, Khrushchev Lied, 45ff; 282-288. From what we can tell from the documents now published the suspicions continued to grow in the Politburo that massive, unauthorized repressions were going on. In August 1938 Ezhov's second-in-command, Mikhail Frinovskii, was replaced by Lavrentii Beria. Evidently Beria was chosen as a reliable person to keep watch over Ezhov, as Ezhov himself later stated.

In November 1938 Ezhov was convinced to resign his position as Commissar of the NKVD. We are not sure exactly how everything happened. There is some evidence that Ezhov and his men planned one final desperate effort at seizure of power by assassinating Stalin and others at the November 1938 celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution but that timely arrests forestalled this. See "transcript of the interrogation of the arrested person Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich of April 26 1939," Lubianka 1939-1946 at pp. 68 ff. English translation at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov042639eng.html Zhukov claims to have seen Ezhov's actual resignation and claims that it was done in a rushed way, on any scrap of paper available. Zhukov concludes from this that Ezhov was only persuaded to resign with difficulty. IU.N. Zhukov, "Zhupel Stalina", Komsomolskaia Pravda 20 November 2002.

As soon as Ezhov resigned, to be replaced by Beria, orders were given to immediately stop all the repressions, to repeal all the NKVD Operational Orders that enabled them, to stop the work of the troikas, and to re-emphasize the need for oversight by the Prosecutor's Office of all cases of arrest. This document is available in English. Getty & Naumov Doc. 190 pp. 532-537.

After this there began a flood of reports to Beria and the central Party leadership concerning massive illegitimate repressions and shootings on the part of local NKVD groups. We have many of these documents now, and no doubt there are many more of them. The central Party leadership began to investigate.

On January 29, 1939 Beria, Andreev, and Malenkov signed a report about the massive abuses during Ezhov's tenure. Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. "Stalinskii pitomets" - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, pp. 359-363. Russian text online at http://istmat.info/node/24582 English translation at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/beria_andreev_malenkov012939eng.html It begins as follows:

We consider it essential to report to you the following conclusions about the situation of cases in the NKVD USSR:

1. During the period of time that com. Ezhov headed the Narkomvnudel {People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD} of the USSR right up until the moment he left the duties of People’s Commissar a majority of the leading positions in the NKVD USSR and in the organs under its supervision (the NKVDs of union and autonomous republics, the UNKVDs of the krais and oblasts) – have been occupied by enemies of the people, conspirators, and spies.

2. Enemies of the people who penetrated the organs of the NKVD have consciously distorted the punitive policy of Soviet power, have carried out massive, unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons, while at the same time covering up real enemies of the people.

3. The methods of conducting investigations have been perverted in the most brutal manner. They had recourse to beatings of prisoners on a massive level in order to force them into false confessions and "admissions." The quantity of admissions that each investigator was supposed to obtain from prisoners in the course of 24 hours has been decided upon in advance. In addition, the quotas have often reached several dozen "admissions."

Investigators have widely made use of the practice of fully informing one another concerning the content of the confessions they obtained. This gave the investigators the ability, during interrogators of "their" prisoners, to suggest to them by one means or another facts, circumstances, and names of persons about whom confessions had earlier been given by other prisoners. As a result this kind of investigation very often led to organized false slanders against persons who were completely innocent.

In order to obtain a greater number of admissions in a number of organs of the NKVD had recourse to direct provocation: they convinced prisoners to give confessions about supposed espionage work for foreign intelligence services by explaining that these kinds of fabricated confessions were needed by the party and government in order to discredit foreign states. They also promised the prisoners that they would be liberated after they gave such "admissions."

The leadership of the NKVD in the person of com. Ezhov not only did not put a stop to this kind of arbitrariness and extremism in arrests and in the conduct of investigations, but sometimes itself abetted it.

The slightest attempts by Chekist party members to oppose this arbitrariness were stifled.
.....
Com. Ezhov concealed in every way from the Central Committee of the ACP(b) the situation of the work in the NKVD organs. Besides that he hid from the CC ACP(b) materials that compromised leading NKVD workers.
.....
In addition we believe it essential to note that all the above disgraceful actions, distortions and excesses <in the matter of arrests and the conduct of investigation> were carried out with the sanction and knowledge of the organs of the Procuracy of the USSR (coms. Vyshinsky and Roginsky). Assistant Procuror of the USSR Roginsky has been especially zealous in this matter. Roginsky’s practice of work raises serious doubts about this political honesty <and reliability>.

The report continues in this vein. Reports and investigations of NKVD abuses continued rapidly.

In April Mikhail Frinovskii, Ezhov's "zam", or deputy commissar, and Ezhov himself were arrested. They immediately began to confess. All the confessions published so far are now available online in both the Russian original and in English translation. See "Additional Bibliography - Documents" at the bottom of the following page: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/trials_Ezhovshchina_update0710.html These confessions revealed the broad outlines of Ezhov's conspiracy against and deception of the Soviet leadership and of Stalin. During the next few years, up to beginning of the war, further investigations and prosecutions of guilty NKVD men proceeded. Over 100,000 persons were released from camps and prisons after reviews of their cases. Okhotin and Roginskii of the "Memorial Society", both highly anticommunist and anti-Stalin researchers, estimate "about 110,000 persons formerly accused of counterrevolutionary crimes" were freed during 1939 as a result of Beria's investigation of NKVD crimes under Ezhov. Tragedia sovetskoi derevni t. 5, 2 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), p. 571

The "Polish Operation"

The "Polish Operation" of the NKVD was enabled by NKVD Order No. 00485 of August 11, 1937. It has been published many times in Russian and is also online. We have now made it available in English translation for the first time.

The following are the major scholarly works on the Polish Operation. The second and fourth are cited by Snyder.

* James Morris. "The Polish Terror: Spy Mania and Ethnic Cleansing in the Great Terror." Europe-Asia Studies 56, 5 (July 2004), 751-766.

* A. Ie. Gur'ianov, "Obzor sovetskikh reressivnykh kampanii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan," in A. V. Lipatov and I. O. Shaitanov, eds., Poliaki i russkie: Vzaimoponimanie i vzaimoneponimanie, Moscow: Indrik, 2000, 199-207.

* A. Ie. Gur'ianov, "Obzor sovetskikh reressivnykh kampanii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan," in Massovye repressii protiv poliakov. Memorial Society. At http://www.memo.ru/history/polacy/vved/index.htm {This is a brief summary of Gur'ianov's longer article above.}

* N. V. Petrov and A. B. Roginskii, "Pol'skaia operatsiia' NKVD 1937-1938 gg.," in A. Ie. Gur'ianov, ed., Repressii protiv poliakov i pol'skikh grazhdan, Moscow: Zven'ia, 1997, 22-43.

All these studies agree in the following conclusions:

* The "Polish Operation" was aimed at Polish spies only, not at Poles as such. This can of course be seen from the text of Operational Order No. 00485 itself.

The intention of the regime was not to terrorize or murder minority populations... (Morris 759)

... it {NKVD Order No. 00485, the "Polish Operation" order} did not concern Poles as such, but Polish spies... (Petrov & Roginskii)

Least of all was the massive nature of the repression "along Polish lines" the result of some kind of special personal hatred by Stalin of Poles. It was not a matter of Poles as such, but of Poland.

...their nationality was not a criterion of "criminal guilt" (prestupnosti) ...

...to equate the concept of "Poles" and "Polish operation" would be a mistake. (Petrov & Roginskii)

* Many of those arrested and either executed or imprisoned were not Poles or of Polish background at all.

These numbers show that many of the victims were not ethnic Poles. (Morris 762)

* Petrov and Roginskii stress repeatedly that nationality itself was not a criterion for arrest or execution. The central NKVD did not keep records of the nationality of those arrested.

* Ezhov confessed that he and his men had arrested people who were not Poles on the pretext that they were Poles:

As a result of this pressure the practice of repressions without any incriminating evidence whatsoever on the sole basis of one criterion alone, that the person repressed belonged to such-and-such a nationality (Pole, German, Latvian, Greek, etc.), was broadly expanded.

However, that was not enough. The practice of including Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, et al. in the category of Poles, Finns, Germans, et al., became a rather mass phenomenon, especially in certain oblasts.

Of those who especially distinguished themselves in this manner were the People's Commissars of Internal Affairs of such republics as: the Ukraine, Belorussia, Turkmenia, and the heads of the UNKVDs of such oblasts as the Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, and Moscow.

So for example Dmitriev, former head of the NKVD of the Sverdlovsk oblast included a great many Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and even Russians under the category of repressed Polish refugees. In any case for every arrested Pole there were no fewer than ten Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians.

There were many cases in which Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians generally were made into Poles with falsified documents.

The practice in Leningrad was the same. Instead of Finns Zakovsky arrested many native inhabitants of the USSR - Karelians, and "transformed" them into Finns.

Uspensky, under the pretence of their being Poles, arrested many Ukrainian Uniates, that is, selected them not on the basis of national origin but according to their religion. I could multiply many times examples of this kind. They are characteristic for the majority of oblasts.

(Ezhov interrogation of August 4, 1939. Emphasis added)
This was published for the first time in Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. "Stalinskii pitomets - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, pp. 367-379. Russian original online at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov080439ru.html; English translation at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov080439eng.html

* There were few guidelines from Stalin and the Politburo - if, indeed, there were any at all. The whole operation was run by Ezhov and his men, who themselves gave little specific guidance to the local NKVD men. (Petrov & Roginskii)

Through neglect of his responsibilities the Soviet Prosecutor (Prokurator) Vyshinskii was partly responsible for the fact that Ezhov and his men were able to get away with these immense crimes. In his 1939 confessions Ezhov claimed that the Prosecutor's Office failed to conduct the oversight it was supposed to, and Ezhov and his men could shoot and imprison people with virtually no hindrance from Vyshinskii's office. This passage from Ezhov's interrogation of August 4, 1939 illustrates this negligence of Vyshinskii's office:

Question: Confess in what manner you managed to deceive the organs of prosecutorial oversight in implementing this clear, obvious, and criminal practice of repression?

Answer: I can't say that we had any special thought-out plan to consciously deceive the organs of the Procuracy.

The prosecutors of the oblasts, krais, and republics, and also the Procuracy of the USSR could not have been unaware of such a blatant criminal practice of mass provocational arrests and falsification of investigative facts, since they bore responsibility, together with the NKVD, for the review of such cases.

This inactivity of prosecutorial supervision can only be explained by the fact that in charge of the Procuracy in many oblasts, krais, and republics were members of various anti-Soviet organizations who often practiced even more widespread provocational repressions among the population.

Another group of the prosecutors, those who were not involved in participation in anti-Soviet groupings, simply feared to argue with the heads of the UNKVDs on these questions, all the more so since they did not have any directives on these matters from the center, where all the falsified investigative reports that had been mechanically signed by themselves, i.e. the prosecutors, went through without any kind of restraint or remarks.

Question: You are talking about the local organs of the Procuracy. But didn't they see these criminal machinations in the Procuracy of the USSR?

Answer: The Procuracy of the USSR could not, of course, have failed to notice all these perversions.

I explain the behavior of the Procuracy of the USSR and, in particular, of Prosecutor of the USSR Vyshinsky by that same fear of quarreling with the NKVD and by {the desire} to prove themselves no less "revolutionary" in the sense of conducting mass repressions.

I have come to this conclusion also because Vyshinsky often spoke to me personally about the tens of thousands of complaints coming in to the Procuracy and to which he was paying no attention. Likewise, during the whole period of the conduct of the operations I do not recall a single instance of a protest by Vyshinsky concerning the mass operations, while there were instances when he insisted on more severe sentences in relation to some persons or other.

This is the only way I can explain the virtual absence of any prosecutorial supervision at all during the mass operations and the absence of any protests from them to the government against the acts of the NKVD. I repeat, we the conspirators and specifically, I myself did not have any kind of thought-out plans.

The first document issued after Ezhov had been induced to resign from office stressed the lack of Prosecutorial oversight. In 1939 Vyshinskii was replaced as Prosecutor. It seems likely that this was because he had failed to do his duty during the Ezhovshchina.

* The notion that the Ezhovshchina and the "Polish Operation" of which it was a part were undertaken to forestall a potential "fifth column" is false. This theory was evidently first state by Oleg Khlevniuk in 1996 and has been uncritically repeated ever since, including by Snyder.
Note 14 in Petrov & Roginskii states this as fact. Khlevniuk's only evidence is an off-the-cuff statement by an aged Molotov to his biographer Felix Chuev.

Bukharin, Not Stalin, Was To Blame for the Massive Repressions

One interesting fact that emerges from the primary sources now available - and, we note, available during the time Snyder was writing Bloodlands - is that Nikolai Bukharin, leading name among the Rightists and one of its leaders, knew about the Ezhovshchina as it was happening, and praised it in a letter to Stalin that he wrote from prison.

Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a member of the Rightist conspiracy, as he himself was. No doubt that is why he welcomed Ezhov's appointment as head of the NKVD - a view recorded by his widow in her memoirs. Anna Larina (Bukharina), Nezabyvaemoe. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo APN, 1989, 269-70.

In his first confession, in his now-famous letter to Stalin of December 10, 1937, and at his trial in March 1938 Bukharin claimed he had completely "disarmed" and had told everything he knew. But now we can prove that this was a lie. Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a leading member of the Rightist conspiracy - but did not inform on him. According to Mikhail Frinovsky, Ezhov's right-hand man, Ezhov probably promised to see that he would not be executed if he did not mention his own, Ezhov's, participation. This is documented in Mikhail Frinovskii's confession of April 11, 1939. Frinovskii was Ezhov's second-in-command.

An active participant in investigations generally, Ezhov kept himself aloof from the preparation of this trial. Before the trial the face-to-face confrontations of the suspects, interrogations, and refining, in which Ezhov did not participate. He spoke for a long time with Yagoda, and that talk concerned, in the main, of assuring Yagodo that he would not be shot.

Ezhov had conversations several times with Bukharin and Rykov and also in order to calm them assured them that under no circumstances would they be shot.
See the English translation at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/frinovskyeng.html

If Bukharin had told the truth - if he had, in fact, informed on Ezhov - Ezhov's mass murders could have been stopped in their tracks. The lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people could have been saved.

But Bukharin remained true to his fellow conspirators. He went to execution - an execution that Bukharin himself swore in his appeal for clemency that he deserved "ten times over" - without revealing Ezhov's participation in the conspiracy.

This point cannot be stressed too much: the blood of the hundreds of thousands of innocent persons slaughtered by Ezhov and his men during 1937-1938, is on Bukharin's hands.

Bukharin's two appeals for clemency, both dated March 13, 1938, were reprinted in Izvestiia on September 2, 1992. They were rejected, and Bukharin was executed on March 15, 1938. I have translated them and put them online in English.

Ezhov's Confessions

All ideologically anticommunist accounts suppress the evidence of Ezhov's conspiracy against the Soviet government. None of them refer to the confessions of Ezhov and his men, though these confessions were all available to them.

The apparent reason for the failure to discuss Ezhov's conspiracy is the desire on the part of ideologically anticommunist researchers to falsely accuse the Soviet leadership, Stalin most of all, of having ordered all the huge number of executions carried out by Ezhov. However, Ezhov explicitly states many times that his repressions and executions were carried out in pursuit of his own private conspiratorial goals and that he had deceived the Soviet government. Thus Ezhov's own confessions are evidence that Stalin and the central Soviet leadership were not responsible for his massive executions.

Ezhov's confessions that he deceived the government for his conspiratorial purposes are not contradicted by any other evidence. In addition, we now have the judgment of Khaustov, an anticommunist researcher himself, who concludes on the basis of massive evidence at his disposal that Stalin believed the false reports Ezhov was sending him.

Thus, the only conclusion supported by the evidence contradicts the "anti-Stalin" ideological aims of these anticommunist researchers. It is important to them that Stalin and the Soviet leadership be "guilty" of "mass murders." By omitting evidence that tends to disprove this conclusion - Ezhov's confessions - their assertions may be accepted by their readers.

All of the confessions of Ezhov that the Russian government has seen fit to make public to date, plus one of Ezhov's "zam" or Deputy Commissar Mikhail Frinovskii, are available online in both Russian and English.

In his confession of August 4, 1939 Ezhov specifically states that he deceived the Soviet government about the extent and nature of espionage:

Question: Did you succeed in obtaining a government decision to prolong the mass operations?

Answer: Yes. We did obtain the decision of the government to prolong the mass operation and to increase the number of those to be repressed.

Question: What did you do, deceive the government?

Answer: It was unquestionably essential for us to prolong the mass operation and increase the number of persons repressed.

However, it was necessary to extend the time period for these measures and to set up a real and accurate account so that once we had prepared ourselves, we could strike our blow directly on the most dangerous part, the organizational leadership of the counterrevolutionary elements.

The government, understandably, had no conception of our conspiratorial plans and in the present case proceeded solely on the basis of the necessity to prolong the operation without going into the essence of how it was carried out.

In this sense, of course, we were deceiving the government in the most blatant manner. (Emphasis added.)

Was Ezhov a Polish Spy?

Of the sources on the Polish Operation only Morris mentions this fact:

Ironically, Ezhov was accused of being a Polish spy when he was arrested a short time later. (763)

Morris cites no evidence or source at all here. He may well have taken it from Jansen & Petrov (2000, p. 187), where it is briefly stated as one of the charges against Ezhov at trial on February 1, 1940. But we now know somewhat more about this. Pavliukov had access to some of Ezhov's confessions including those of April 18-20, 1939, shortly after his arrest. After a brief verbatim quote Pavliukov (520-521) summarizes thus:

Ezhov related that he was drawn into espionage work by his friend F.M. Konar, who had long been a Polish agent. Konar learned political news from Ezhov and gave them to his bosses in Poland and on one occasion told Ezhov about this and proposed that he volunteer to begin working for the Poles. Since Ezhov had in fact already become an informant of Polish intelligence, since he had transmitted to them via Konar many significant party and state secrets, he supposedly had no other choice than to agree with this proposal.

The Poles supposedly shared a part of the intelligence received from Ezhov with their allies the Germans, and so after a time an offer of collaboration from the latter was also made.

According to Ezhov Marshal A.I. Egorov, first assistant Commissar for Defense, acted as the middleman {between Ezhov and the Germans}. He met with Ezhov in the summer of 1937 and told him that he knew about the latter's ties with the Poles, that he himself was a German spy who on orders from the German authorities had organized a group of conspirators in the Red Army, and that he had been given a directive to establish close working contact between his group and Ezhov.

Ezhov agreed with this proposal and promised to protect Egorov's men from arrest.

This corresponds generally to other evidence we have about the military conspiracies and the charges against Egorov.

Objectivity and Evidence

I agree with historian Geoffrey Roberts when he says:

In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin ... has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. ... I don't think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it.
"Stalin's War", February 12, 2007. At http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35305.html

The conclusions about the Ezhovshchina outlined here will be unacceptable to persons motivated not by the pursuit of the objective truth bsions out of any desire to "apologize" for the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government but because they are the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.
{{{SWAMPMAN NOTE: This paragraph appears this way in the book.}}}

Because the film (although not the book)* begins with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 rather than the joint German-Soviet invasion and division of Poland in 1939... the Soviet state had just months earlier been an ally of Nazi Germany... (* "Defiance")

The Public Broadcasting System's documentary "Behind Closed Doors" (2009) describes the invasion as an unproblematic fact:

After invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis and the Soviets divided the country as they had agreed to do in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact…

The Wikipedia article: "Soviet invasion of Poland", undoubtedly composed by Polish nationalists like virtually all Wikipedia material on Poland and the USSR:

… on 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east…

The Soviet Union Did Not Invade Poland in September, 1939

The truth is that the USSR did not invade Poland in September, 1939. However, so completely has this non-event passed into historiography as "true" that I have yet to find a recent history book from the West that actually gets this correct.

And, of course, the USSR had never been an "ally" of Nazi Germany. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (henceforth "M-R Pact") was a non-aggression pact, not an alliance of any kind. The claim that the USSR and Hitler's Germany were "allies" is simply stated over and over again but is never backed up with any evidence.

The present chapter and the one preceding it present a great deal of evidence in support of this statement. There is a great deal more evidence to support what I say - much more than I can present here, and no doubt much more that I have not yet identified of located. Furthermore, at the time it was widely acknowledged that no such invasion occurred.

The Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany Were Never "Allies"

Strictly speaking, it is impossible to prove a negative - in this case, that no "alliance" existed. The burden of proof is on those who use the terms "alliance", "allies", and "ally" with respect to the USSR, Germany, and the M-R Pact. The complete text of the Pact is online at the Modern History Sourcebook. It is short. Anyone who reads it can see that there is no "alliance" of any kind.

The truth about these matters is another victim of the post-WWII Cold War, when a great many falsehoods about Soviet history were invented and popularized. The truth about this and many other questions concerning the history of the first socialist state has simply become "politically incorrect." In "respectable academia" it is "taboo."

Some time ago a colleague on an academic mailing list tweaked me for supposedly "defending Stalin." He wrote:

I could make a crack about what defenses of Stalin have to do with a 'sensible materialism,' but that would be beneath me.

My colleague thinks he knows something about Stalin and the USSR during Stalin's time. He doesn't! But you can't blame him too much, since almost none of us do. More precisely: We "know" a lot of things about the Soviet Union and Stalin, and almost all of those things are just not true. We've been swallowing lies for the truth our whole lives.

Demonizing - I use the word advisedly; it is not too strong - the history of the communist movement and anything to do with Stalin has become de rigeur, a shibboleth of respectability. And not only among avowed champions of capitalism but also among those on the left and opponents of capitalism generally, including many Marxists, the natural constituency of a movement for communism.

The Nonaggression Treaty between Germany and the USSR of August 1939
For a discussion of the events that led up to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 an excellent account is still Bill Bland, "The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939" (1990) at http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Bill%20Bland/german%20soviet%20pact.htm I have checked every citation in this article; most are available online now. It's very accurate, but far more detailed than the present account requires.

Before examining the question of the invasion that did not take place, the reader needs to become familiar with some misconceptions about the Nonaggression Treaty and why they are false. These too are based on anticommunist propaganda that is widely, if naively, "believed."

The most common, and most false, of these is stated above in the PBS series "Behind Closed Doors:"

...the Nazis and the Soviets divided the country as they had agreed to do in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact...

This is completely false, as any reading of the text of the M-R Pact itself will reveal.

The Secret Protocols to the M-R Pact Did NOT Plan Any Partition of Poland

Up to at least September 7 Hitler was considering making peace with Poland if Poland sued for peace. General Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the Army (Chef des Generalstabs des Heeres), wrote in his "War Diary" - Halder F. Kriegstagebuch. Tägliche Aufzeichnugen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939-1942. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1962-1964. I have used Band I. Vom Polenfeldzug bis zum Ende der Westoffensive (14.8.1939 - 30.6.1940).

OB beim Führer (7.9. nachmittag): 3 Möglichkeiten:

1. Polen kommen zu Verhandlungen: er bereit zur Verhandlung: Trennung von Frankreich und England, Restpolen wird anerkannt. Narew - Warschau = Polen. Industriegebiet wir. Krakau, Polen. Nordrand Beskiden wir. Ukraine selbständig. (I, S. 65)

7 September 1939

The High Command with the Fuehrer (second half of the day 7 September): Three different ways the situation may develop.

1. The Poles offer to begin negotiations. He {Hitler - GF} is ready for negotiations {on the following conditions}: {Poland must} break with England and France. A part of Poland will be {preserved and} recognized. {The regions from the} Narev to Warsaw - to Poland. The industrial region - to us. Krakow - to Poland. The northern region of the Beskidow mountains - to us. {The provinces of the Western} Ukraine - independent.

So on September 7 Hitler was considering independence for Western Ukraine even though, according to the "Secret Protocol" of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the Western Ukraine lay within the Soviet sphere of influence. This shows that:

* The Secret Protocol about spheres of influence was not about the "partition of Poland."

* Hitler was prepared to negotiate over the Western Ukraine with the Poles, not with the Soviets. The Western Ukraine lay entirely within the Soviet "sphere of influence" as defined by the Secret Protocol of the M-R Pact.

* As late as September 7 Hitler was planning to preserve a shrunken Polish state.

In his entries for September 9 and September 10 Halder repeats that the Germans are discussing the formation of an independent state in the Western Ukraine. This is further evidence that the Secret Protocols of the M-R Pact did not concern any "partition of Poland."

September 9:

OB vormerken: ... b) Selbständigkeit der West-Ukraine. (I, S. 67)

Bring to the attention of the Supreme Command: b) The independence of the Western Ukraine.

September 10:

Warlimont: a) Aufruf Westukraine kommt. (I, S. 68)

Warlimont: a) A call to the Western Ukraine is imminent.

Col. Water Warlimont was deputy head of operations at the German High Command. A note in the annotated text of Halder's diary reads:

Nämlich für die Errichtung eines selbständiges Staates aus der polnischen Ukraine. (I, S. 68 Anm. 6)

Translated:

That is, for the setting up of an independent state out of Polish Ukraine.

Under September 11 Halder noted that:

Grenzübertritt polnischer aktiver Soldaten nach Rumänien hat begonnen. (I, S. 71)

Translated:

The flight of active Polish soldiers {= combat troops} into Rumania has begun.

On September 12 Halder noted: "Talks between the High Command and the Fuehrer" and said:

ObdH-Führer: Russe will wahrscheinlich nicht antreten.... {Russe} halt Friedenswunsch Polens für möglich. (I, S. 72)

Translated:

The Russian apparently does not want to come in.... {The Russian} believes it is possible that Poland wants {to conclude a} peace {with Germany}.

This is further proof that the Germans had no agreement with the USSR to partition Poland. It is also evidence that the USSR expected that a negotiated settlement would leave a rump Polish state in existence between Germany and the Soviet border.

Halder also noted:

Rumänien will polnische Regierung nich aufnehmen; {Grenzen} zumachen. (I, S. 72)

Translated:

Rumania does not wish to accept {the entry of} the Polish government; will close {its borders}.

Halder:

{Hitler} denkt an sich bescheiden mit Ost-Oberschlesien und Korridor, wenn Westen wegbleibt. (I, S. 72)

Translated:

He {Hitler} is prepared to be content with the Eastern part of Upper Siberia and the Polish Corridor, if the West doesn't interfere.

This would have meant that most of Western Poland would have remained part of a shrunken Poland. This is additional evidence that Hitler did not plan on liquidating the Polish state.

By September 12 the issue of whether the Polish government might try to flee to Rumania had obviously been raised, but it had not yet happened. This means that on September 12 Hitler still believed the Polish government would stay in Poland - because he assumed he would have someone to negotiate peace with.

The same date General Wilhelm Keitel, Head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (Chef des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht) ordered Admiral Canaris to activate units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) on Polish territory with the aim of forming an independent Polish and Galician Ukraine. This was to be accompanied by a general massacre of Poles and Jews. During post-war interrogation by Soviet authorities General-major Erwin von Lahousen of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) confirmed this:

Oberst Amen: Was, wenn überhaupt etwas, wurde über eine mögliche Zusammenarbeit mit einer Ukrainischen Gruppe gesagt?

Lahousen: Ja, es werde - und zwar vom damaligen Chef OKW als Weitergabe einer Rechtlinie, die er offenbar von Ribbentrop empfangen hatte, weil er sich in Zusammenhang mit dem politischen Vorhaben des Reichsaußenministers Ribbentrop bekanntgegeben hat - es wurde Canaris aufgetragen, in der Galizischen Ukraine eine Aufstandsbewegung hervorzurufen, die Ausrottung der Juden und Polen zum Zi ele haben sollte...

Nach den Eintragungen im Tagebuch von Canaris fand sie am 12. September 1939 statt. Der Sinn dieses Befehls oder der Anweisung, die von Ribbentrop ausging, von Keitel und Canaris weitergegeben war und dann in kurzer Unterredung nochmals von Ribbentrop Canaris gegenüber aufgezeigt wurde, war folgende: Die Organizationen nationaler Ukrainer, mit denen das Amt Ausland / Abwehr im militärischen Sinne, also im Sinne militärischer Operationen zusammenarbeitete, sollten in Polen eine Aufstandsbewegung hervorrufen - in Polen mit den Ukrianern. Die Aufstandsbewegung sollte den Zweck haben, Polen und Juden, also vor allem Elemente oder Kreise, umdie es sich ja bei diesen Besprechungen immer wieder drehte, auszurotten.
Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus. Berlin: Vlg. der Nation. 1971, 122; 124.

Translated:

Colonel Amen {Interrogator}: What, if anything, was said about possible collaboration with a Ukrainian group?

Lahousen: Yes, and it was given by the then Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht {General-Fieldmarshal Keitel} as the transmission of a straight line, which he had evidently received from Ribbentrop, because he had announced it in connection with the political project of Reichs Foreign Minister Ribbentrop - Canaris was assigned to bring about an insurgency in the Galician Ukraine, which should have as its goal the extermination of Jews and Poles....

According to the entries in Canaris' diary this meeting took place on September 12, 1939. The purpose of this command or the statement that came from Ribbentrop, was passed by Keitel and Canaris and was in a short conversation again assigned by Ribbentrop to Canaris, was as follows: The organizations of national Ukrainians {i.e. the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists} with which the Office Ausland / Abwehr was collaborating in a military sense, that is in the sense of military operations, should produce an insurgency in Poland - in Poland, with the Ukrainians. The insurgency should have the purpose of exterminating Poles and Jews, that is, in particular the elements or circles that were repeatedly the subjects of these meetings.

The Soviets Wanted to Protect the USSR - and Therefore to Preserve Independent Poland

Is is conventionally stated as fact that the M-R Pact was an agreement to "partition Poland", divide it up. This is completely false. I've prepared a page with much fuller evidence.

No doubt a big reason for this falsehood is the inconvenient fact that Britain and France did sign a Nonaggression Pact with Hitler that "partitioned" another state - Czechoslovakia. That was the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938.

Poland also took part in the "partition" of Czechoslovakia. Poland seized a part of the Teschen (Polish: Cieszyn) area of Czechoslovakia, even though only a minority of the population was Polish. This invasion and occupation was not part of the Munich Agreement. But neither France nor Britain did anything about it. Therefore, they consented to it. Later, in March 1939 Hitler seized the remaining part of Czechoslovakia. This had not been foreseen in the Munich Agreement either. Once again Britain, France, and Poland did nothing about it.

So the anticommunist "Allies" Britain, France and Poland really did participate in the partitioning of a powerless state! Perhaps this may explain, at least in part, why the anticommunist position today is that the USSR did likewise. But whatever the reason, it is a lie.

The Soviet Union signed the Nonaggression Pact with Germany not to "partition Poland" like the Allies had partitioned Czechoslovakia, but in order to defend the USSR. The Treaty included a line of Soviet interest within Poland beyond which German troops could not remain in the event that Germany routed the Polish army in a war.

The point here was that, if the Polish army were beaten, it and the Polish government could retreat beyond the line of Soviet interest and so find shelter, since Hitler had agreed not to remain further into Poland than that line. From there they could make peace with Germany. The Polish state would still exist.

The Soviets - "Stalin", to use a crude synecdoche (= "a part that stands for the whole") - did not do this out of any love for a ferociously anticommunist and anti-Soviet Poland that was rapidly becoming fascist. The Soviets wanted a Polish government - any Polish government - as a buffer between the USSR and the Nazi armies. The betrayal by the Polish Government of its own people frustrated this plan.

In the event that, as all military experts expected, its army was smashed by the German army the Polish government had two alternatives:

* It could stay inside the country, moving its capital to the East, away from the advancing German army into the Soviet sphere of influence. From there it could have sued for peace.

* Or the Polish Government could have fled to either France or England, Allied countries that were at war with Germany.

But the Polish government did neither. Instead, the Polish government and General Staff fled into neighboring Rumania. Rumania was neutral in the war. By crossing into neutral Rumania the Polish government became "interned." Under internment it could not function as a government from Rumania, or pass through Rumania to a country at war with Germany like France. To permit the Polish government to do either would be a violation of Rumania's own neutrality and a hostile act against Germany. I discuss "internment" and the international law on this question extensively below.

The USSR did not invade Poland - and everybody knew it at the time

When Poland had no government, Poland was no longer a state. That meant that Hitler had nobody with whom to negotiate a cease-fire, or treaty. Furthermore, the M-R Treaty's Secret Protocols were void, since they were an agreement about the state of Poland. But no state of Poland existed any longer.

Unless the Red Army came in to prevent it, there was nothing to prevent the Nazis from coming right up to the Soviet border. Or - as we now know they were in fact preparing to do - Hitler could have formed one or more pro-Nazi states in what had until recently been Eastern Poland. That way Hitler could have had it both ways. He could claim to the Soviets that he was still adhering to the "spheres of influence" agreement of the M-R Pact while in fact setting up a pro-Nazi, highly militarized fascist Ukrainian nationalist state on the Soviet border. {{{SWAMPMAN NOTE: The second part of this plan was never abandoned}}}

Once the Germans had told the Soviets that they, the German leadership, had decided that the Polish state no longer existed, then it did not make any difference whether the Soviets, or some hypothetical body of international jurists, agreed with them or not. In effect the Nazis were telling the Soviets that they felt free to come right up to the Soviet border. Neither the USSR nor any state would have permitted such a thing. Nor did international law demand it.

At the end of September a new secret agreement was concluded. In it the Soviet line of interest was to the East of the "sphere of influence" line decided upon a month earlier in the Secret Protocol and published in Isvestiia and in the New York Times during September 1939. In this territory Poles were a minority, even after the "polonization" campaign of settling Poles in the area during the '20s and '30s.

How do we know this interpretation of events is true?

How do we know the USSR did not commit aggression against, or "invade", Poland when it occupied Eastern Poland beginning on September 17, 1939 after the Polish Government had interned itself in Rumania? Here are nine pieces of evidence:

1. The Polish government did not declare war on USSR.

The Polish government declared war on Germany when Germany invaded on September 1, 1939. It did not declare war on the USSR.

2. The Polish Supreme Commander Rydz-Smigly ordered Polish soldiers not to fight the Soviets, though he ordered Polish forces to continue to fight the Germans.

3. The Polish President Ignaz Moscicki, interned in Rumania since Sept. 17, tacitly admitted that Poland no longer had a government.

4. The Rumanian government tacitly admitted that Poland no longer had a government.

The Rumanian position recognized the fact that Moscicki was lying when he claimed he had legally resigned on September 30. So the Rumanian government fabricated a story according to which Moscicki had already resigned back on September 15, just before entering Rumania and being interned (NYT 10.04.39, p. 12). But even Moscicki himself did not make this claim!

Rumania needed this legal fiction to try to sidestep the following issue: once Moscicki had been interned in Rumania - that is, from September 17, 1939 on - he could not function as President of Poland. Since resignation is an official act, Moscicki could not resign once he was in Rumania.

For our present purposes here's the significant point: Both the Polish leaders and the Rumanian government recognized that Poland was bereft of a government once the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania and were interned there. Both Moscicki and Rumania wanted a legal basis - a fig-leaf - for such a government. But they disagreed completely about this fig-leaf, which exposes it as what it was - a fiction.

5. Rumania had a military treaty with Poland aimed against the USSR. Yet Rumania did not declare war on the USSR.

The Polish government later claimed that it had "released" Rumania from its obligations under this military treaty in return for safe haven in Rumania. But there is no evidence for this statement. It is highly unlikely that Rumania would have ever promised "safe haven" for Poland, since that would have been an act of hostility against Nazi Germany. Rumania was neutral in the war and, as discussed below, insisted upon interning the Polish government and disarming the Polish forces once they had crossed the border into Rumania.

The real reason for Rumania's failure to declare war on the USSR is probably the one given in a New York Times article of September 19, 1939:

The Rumanian viewpoint concerning the Rumanian-Polish anti-Soviet agreement is that it would be operative only if a Russian attack came as an isolated event and not as a consequence of other wars.

- "Rumania Anxious; Watches Frontier." NYT 09.19.1939, p. 8.

That means Rumania recognized that the Red Army was not allied with Germany in its war with Poland.

6. France did not declare war on the USSR, though it had a mutual defense treaty with Poland. See this page for the reconstructed text of the "secret military protocol" of this treaty, which has been "lost" - which probably means that the French government still keeps its text secret.

7. England never demanded that the USSR withdraw its troops from Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, the parts of the former Polish state occupied by the Red Army after September 17, 1939. On the contrary, the British government concluded that these territories should not be a part of a future Polish state. Even the Polish government-in-exile agreed!

8. The League of Nations Covenant required members to take trade and economic sanctions against any member who "resorted to war." But no country took any sanctions against the USSR. No country broke diplomatic relations with the USSR over this action.

However, when the USSR attacked Finland in 1939 the League did vote to expel the USSR, and several countries broke diplomatic relations with it. This very different response tells us that the League viewed the Soviet action in the case of Poland as qualitatively different, not as a "resort to war." The League of Nations Resolution is reproduced here.

9. All countries accepted the USSR's declaration of neutrality.

All, including the belligerent Polish allies France and England, agreed that the USSR was not a belligerent power, was not participating in the war. In effect they accepted the USSR's claim that it was neutral in the conflict. Here is President Franklin Roosevelt's "Proclamation 2374 on Neutrality", November 4, 1939:

...a state of war unhappily exists between Germany and France; Poland; and the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa,...

FDR's "Statement on Combat Areas" of November 4, 1939, defines

belligerent ports, British, French, and German, in Europe or Africa...

The Soviet Union is not listed among the belligerent states. That means the United States government did not consider the USSR to be at war with Poland.

For more detail on the Soviet Union's claim of neutrality see the texts reproduced here.

Naturally, a country cannot "invade" another country and yet credibly claim that it is "neutral" with respect to the war involving that country. But no country - not the United States, or Britain, or France, or any country in the world - declared the USSR a belligerent. Even the Polish government-in-exile, at first in Paris, did not declare war on the Soviet Union.

In 1958 UCLA Professor George Ginsburgs published an article examining the Soviet Union's claim of neutrality in the German-Polish war. With reference to international law and the statements of the parties at the time Ginsburgs concluded that the USSR was indeed neutral and that this neutrality was internationally recognized.

In spite of the doubtful legality of its action, the Soviet Government succeeded in not losing its status as a neutral. Even after the invasion of Eastern Poland by the Red Army the USSR continued to be treated as a neutral both by the belligerents and by third parties. No municipal neutrality laws were applied to Soviet-Polish hostilities. The major reason for the Narkomindel's success lies, of course, in the political decision of France and Great Britain who found it politically inexpedient to challenge the Soviet action. Questions of law apart, Soviet neutrality was confirmed simply because the belligerents thought it impractical to question it.

It emerges quite clearly that the main preoccupation of the Soviets was to act so as not to jeopardize Soviet neutrality, or, in Molotov's words, to act so as not to 'injure our cause and promote unity among our opponents.' Thus the march of the Red Army was held up until Warsaw had fallen, until the military disintegration of Poland was far advanced and its total collapse was clearly imminent. In these circumstances the action of the USSR, buttressed by not unreasonable legal arguments, took upon itself less and less of the appearance of a full-fledged military intervention on the side of Germany. To many Poland's doom already appeared to be sealed by 17 September 1939, and, by and large, it was thought that in the East the war had already come to an end with Poland's defeat. For all these various reasons, the Soviet move did not assume the proportions of a flagrant violation of its duties as a neutral and the USSR succeeded in maintaining the legal status quo.

From 1939 to 1941 it seems to have been in the interests of the USSR to pursue a more or less scrupulous policy of neutrality and to have this policy recognized by the world at large de jure and de facto."The Soviet Union as a Netural, 1939-1941." Soviet Studies 10 (1) (July 1958), pp. 12-35. At pp. 25, 25-6; 33.

The Collapse of the Polish State

By September 17, 1939, when Soviet troops crossed the border, the Polish government had ceased to function. The fact that Poland no longer had a government meant that Poland was no longer a state. On September 17 when Molotov met with Polish Ambassador to the USSR Grzybowski the latter told Molotov that he did not know where his government was, but had been informed that he should contact it through Bucharest. The last elements of the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania and so into internment during the day of September 17, according to a United Press dispatch published on page four of the New York Times on September 18 with a dateline of Cernauti, Rumania.

Without a government Poland as a state had ceased to exist under international law. This fact is denied - more often, simply ignored - by Polish nationalists, for whom it is highly inconvenient, and by anticommunists generally.

We take a closer look at this issue in the next section below. But a moment's reflection will reveal the logic of this position. With no government - the Polish government was interned in Rumania and had not appointed a successor before interning itself - there was no Polish body to claim sovereignty over those parts of Poland not yet occupied by Germany; no one to negotiate with; no body to which the local police, local governments, and the military were responsible. Polish ambassadors to foreign countries no longer represented their government, because there was no government. See the page "Polish State Collapsed" cited in a previous footnote, and especially the NYT article of October 2, 1939 quoted there.

Germany No Longer Recognized the Existence of the State of Poland

By September 15 German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was writing to Friedrich Werner von der Shulenburg, German ambassador to Moscow, that if the USSR did not enter Eastern Poland militarily there would be a political vacuum in which "new states" might form:

Also the question is disposed of in case a Russian intervention did not take place, of whether in the area lying to the east of the German zone of influence a political vacuum might not occur. Since we on our part have no intention of undertaking any political or administrative activities in these areas, apart from what is made necessary by military operations, without such an intervention on the part of the Soviet Government there might be the possibility of the construction of new states there. (Emphasis added)

Ribbentrop no longer referred to "Poland", only "...the area lying to the east of the German zone of influence..." This shows that he considered that the Polish government was no longer functioning and so no longer had sovereignty even in the East where there were no German forces and where the Soviets had not yet entered.

Schulenburg reported this to Molotov and summarized Molotov's reply (to Ribbentrop) the next day, September 16:

Molotov added that he would present my communication to his Government but he believed that a joint communiqué was no longer needed; the Soviet Government intended to motivate its procedure as follows: the Polish State had collapsed and no longer existed; therefore all agreements concluded with Poland were void; third powers {i.e. Germany} might try to profit by the chaos which had arisen...

So even if the USSR had disagreed with the Germans and had held to the position that a Polish state still existed, the Soviets would have to deal with the fact that Germany no longer did. Germany considered that a Polish state no longer existed. Therefore the Secret Protocol about spheres of influence, agreed upon in the Secret Protocol to the M-R Pact a few weeks earlier, was no longer in effect.

Germany felt it was now free either to occupy what had been Eastern Poland right up to the Soviet border or - as we now know Hitler was planning - to form one or more pro-Nazi, anti-Soviet puppet states there. The USSR simply could not permit either of these outcomes.

German General Kurt von Tippelskirch, in his Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Bonn, 1954) wrote:

When the Polish government realized that the end was near on September it fled from Warsaw to Lublin. From there it left on September 9 for Kremenetz, and on September 13 for Zaleshchniki, a town right on the Rumanian border. The people and the army, which at that time was still involved in furious fighting, were cast to the whim of fate. (Emphasis added)
I have used the Russian edition of Tippelskirch's book. The passage in question is online at http://militera.lib.ru/h/tippelskirch/02.html

The Question of the State in International Law

Every definition of the state recognizes the necessity of a government or "organized political authority." Once the Polish government crossed the border into Rumania, it was no longer a "government." Even the Polish officials of the day recognized this by trying to create the impression that the government had never been interned since it had been handed over to somebody else before crossing into Rumania. See the discussion concerning Moscicki and his "desire to resign" on September 29, 1939, also cited above.

Everybody, Poles included, recognized that by interning itself in Rumania the Polish government had created a situation whereby Poland was no longer a "state." This is not just "a reasonable interpretation" - not just one logical deduction among several possible deductions. It was virtually everybody's interpretation at the time. Every major power, plus the former Polish Prime Minister himself, shared it.

Once this problem is squarely faced, everything else flows from it:
* The Secret Protocol to the M-R Pact was no longer valid, in that it was about spheres of influence in the state of Poland. By September 15 at the latest Germany had taken the position that Poland no longer existed as a state. We have discussed this further at this page.

Once Poland ceased to exist as a state this Secret Protocol did not apply any longer. If they wanted to the Germans could march right up to the Soviet frontier. Or - and this is what Hitler was in fact going to do if the Soviet Union did not send in troops - they could facilitate the creation of puppet states, like a Pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist state.

In any case, once Hitler had taken the position that Poland no longer existed as a state and therefore that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's agreement on spheres of influence in the state of Poland was no longer valid, the Soviet Union had only two choices. It could send the Red Army into Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia to establish sovereignty there. Or it could stand paasively by and watch Hitler send the Nazi army right up to the Soviet border.

* Since the Polish state had ceased to exist, the Soviet-Polish non-aggression pact was no longer in effect. The Red Army could cross the border without "invading" or "committing aggression against" Poland.

By sending its troops across the border the USSR was claiming sovereignty, so no one else could do so - e.g. a pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist state, or Nazi Germany itself.

* Legitimacy flows from the state, and there was no longer any Polish state. Therefore the Polish Army was no longer a legitimate army, but a gang of armed men acting without any legitimacy. Having no legitimacy, the Polish Army should have immediately laid down its arms and surrendered. Of course it could keep fighting - but then it would no longer be fighting as a legitimate army but as partisans. Partisans have no rights at all except under the laws of the government that does claim sovereignty.

Some Polish nationalists claim that the Soviets showed their "perfidy" by refusing, once they had sent troops across the Soviet frontier, to allow the Polish army cross the border into Rumania. But this is all wrong. The USSR had diplomatic relations with Rumania. The USSR could not permit thousands of armed men to cross the border from areas where it held sovereignty into Rumania, a neighboring state. Imagine if, say, Mexico or Canada tried to permit thousands of armed men to cross the border into the USA!

The Soviet Position Was Valid Under International Law

In a 1958 article in The American Journal of International Law UCLA professor Ginsburgs determined that the Soviet claim that the State of Poland no longer existed was basically a sound one:

For all these various reasons, it may safely be concluded that on this particular point the Soviet argument was successful, and that the "above considerations do not allow for any doubt that there did not exist a state of war between Poland and the U.S.S.R. in September, 1939."

In spite of scattered protests to the contrary, the consensus heavily sides with the Soviet view that by September 17, 1939, the Polish Government was in panic and full flight, that it did not exercise any appreciable control over its armed forces or its remaining territory, and that the days of Poland were indeed numbered.

De facto, then, one may well accept the view that the Polish Government no longer functioned as an effective state power. In such a case the Soviet claim that Eastern Galicia was in fact a terra nullius may not be unjustified and could be sustained. (Emphasis added)
"A Case Study in the Soviet Use of International Law: Eastern Poland in 1939." The American Journal of International Law 52 (1) 69-84, at pp. 72 and 73. The term "terra nullius" is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning "land belonging to no one," which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished sovereignty.

Re-negotiation of "Spheres of Influence" September 28 1939
For more documentation and a map see http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/new_spheres_0939.html

All this is referred to directly in Telegram No. 360 of September 15-16 1939 from German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Graf Werner von Schulenburg, German ambassador to Moscow, with its reference to "the possibility of the formation in this area of new states."

Note that Ribbentrop was very displeased with the idea that the Soviets would "tak{e} the threat to Ukrainian and White Russian populations by Germany as a ground for Soviet action" and wants Schulenberg to get Molotov to give some other motive. He was unsuccessful; this was exactly the motive the Soviets gave:

Nor can it be demanded of the Soviet Government that it remain indifferent to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland, who even formerly were without rights and who now have been abandoned entirely to their fate.

The Soviet Government deems it its sacred duty to extend the hand of assistance to its brother Ukrainians and brother Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland.
TASS, September 17, 1939; quoted in New York Times September 18, 1939, p. 5; also Jane Degras (Ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy 1933-1941, vol. III (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 374-375.

Polish Imperialism

We should try to understand the Soviet explanation regarding the reference to "the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland."

At the Treaty of Riga signed in March 1921 the Russian Republic (the Soviet Union was not officially formed until 1924), exhausted by the Civil War and foreign intervention, agreed to give half of Belorussia and Ukraine to the Polish imperialists in return for a desperately-needed peace.

We use the words "Polish imperialists" advisedly, because Poles - native speakers of the Polish language - were in the minority in Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, the areas that passed to Poland in the treaty. The Polish regime then encouraged ethnic Poles to populate these areas to "polonize" them (make them more "Polish"). The Polish government put all kinds of restrictions on the use of the Belorussian and Ukrainian languages.

Up till the beginning of 1939, when Hitler decided to turn against Poland before making war on the USSR, the Polish government was maneuvering to join Nazi Germany in a war on the USSR in order to seize more territory. As late as January 26, 1939, Polish Foreign Minister Beck was discussing this with Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Warsaw. Ribbentrop wrote:

... 2. I then spoke to M. Beck once more about the policy to be pursued by Poland and Germany towards the Soviet Union and in this connection also spoke about the question of the Greater Ukraine and again proposed Polish-German collaboration in this field.

M. Beck made no secret of the fact that Poland had aspirations directed toward the Soviet Ukraine and a connection with the Black Sea...
Original in Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik... Serie D. Bd. V. S. 139-140. English translation in Documents on German Foreign Policy. 1918-1945. Series D. Vol. V. The document in question is No. 126, pp. 167-168; this quotation on p. 168. Also in Russian in God Krizisa T. 1, Dok. No. 120.

Polish Foreign Minister Beck was telling Ribbentrop that Poland would like to seize ALL of the Ukraine from the USSR, for that was the only way Poland could have had a "connection with the Black Sea."

In occupying Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine the USSR was reuniting Belorussians and Ukrainians, East and West. This is what the Soviets meant by the claim that they were "liberating" these areas. The word "liberation" is conventionally used when an occupying imperialist power withdraws. That is what happened here.

Ginsburgs wrote:

...theoretically the U.S.S.R. still retains a better claim than Poland to the incorporated territories on the basis of the principle of national self-determination, if the ethnic composition of the area's population is taken into account. For, though the Soviet title rests on a plebiscite of doubtful validity, the Polish one derives from a direct act of force and military conquest, not even remotely claiming parentage with the concept of national self-determination.
Ginsburgs, Case Study, 80.

The Polish Government-in-Exile

At the beginning of October 1939 the British and French governments recognized a Polish government-in-exile in France (later it moved to England). This was an act of hostility against Germany, of course. But the UK and France were already at war with Germany. The US government wasn't sure what to do. After a time it took the position of refusing to recognize the conquest of Poland, but treated the Polish government-in-exile in Paris in an equivocal manner.

The USSR could not recognize it for a number of reasons:

* Recognizing it would be incompatible with the neutrality of the USSR in the war. It would be an act of hostility against Germany, with which the USSR had a non-aggression pact and a desire to avoid war. (The USSR did recognize it in July 1941, after the Nazi invasion).

* The Polish government-in-exile could not exercise sovereignty anywhere.

* Most important: if the USSR were to recognize the Polish government-in-exile, the USSR would have had to retreat back to its pre-September 1939 borders - because the Polish government-in-exile would never recognize the Soviet occupation of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine. Then Germany would have simply marched up to the Soviet frontier. To permit that would have been a crime against the Soviet people as well as against all residents of these areas, including Poles, because they would have been abandoned to Hitler. And, as the British and French soon agreed, a blow against them, and a big boost to Hitler as well.
See the further discussion at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/should_the_ussr_have_permitted.html

The Polish Government Was Uniquely Irresponsible

No other government during WW2 acted as the Polish government did. Many governments of countries conquered by the Axis formed governments in exile to continue the war. But only the Polish government interned itself in a neutral country, thereby stripping itself of the ability to function as a government and stripping their own people of their existence as a state.

What should the Polish government leader have done, once they realized they were completely beaten militarily?

* The Polish government should have remained somewhere in Poland - if not in the capital, Warsaw, then in Eastern Poland. If its leaders had set up an alternative capital in the East - something the Soviets had prepared to do East of Moscow, in case the Nazis captured Moscow - then they could have preserved a "rump" Poland. There it should have capitulated - as, for example, the French Government did in July 1940. Or, it could have sued for peace, as the Finnish government did in March 1940. Then Poland, like Finland, would have remained as a state. It would certainly have lost a great deal of territory, but not all of it.

* Or, the Polish government could have fled to Great Britain or France, countries already at war with Germany. Polish government leaders could have fled by air any time. Or they could have gotten to the Polish port of Gdynia, which held out until September 14, and fled by boat.

Why didn't they do either of these things?

* Did Polish government leaders think they might be killed? Well, so what? Tens of thousands of their fellow citizens and soldiers were being killed!

* Did they perhaps really believe that Rumania would violate its neutrality with Germany and let them pass through to France? If they did believe this, they were remarkably stupid. There is no evidence that the Rumanian government encouraged them to believe this.

* Did they believe Britain and France were going to "save" them? If so, that too was remarkably stupid. Even if the British and French really intended to field a large army to attack German forces in the West, the Polish army would have had to hold against the Wehrmacht for at least a month, perhaps longer. But the Polish Army was in rapid retreat after the first day or two of the war.

Perhaps they fled simply out of sheer cowardice. That is what their flight out of Warsaw, the Polish capital, suggests. Warsaw held out until early October, 1939. The Polish government could have simply remained there until the city capitulated.

Everything that happened afterwards was a result of the Polish government being interned in Rumania. Here's how the world might have been different if a "rump" Poland had remained after surrender to Hitler:

* A "rump" Poland might finally have agreed to make a mutual defense pact that included the USSR. That would have restarted "collective security," the anti-Nazi alliance between the Western Allies and the USSR that the Soviets sought but UK and French leaders rejected.

That would have:

* greatly weakened Hitler;

* probably prevented much of the Jewish Holocaust;

* certainly prevented the conquest of France, Belgium, and the rest of Europe;

* certainly prevented the deaths of many millions of Soviet citizens.

Poland could have emerged from WW2 as an independent state, perhaps a neutral one, like Finland, Sweden, or Austria. All this, and more - if only the Polish government had remained in their country at least long enough to surrender, as every other government did.

Panopticon posted:

Why didn't they do either of these things?

* Did Polish government leaders think they might be killed? Well, so what?

I'm glad that this is the biggest issue you have with Furr's line of reasoning. Furr describes ways the Polish government could have fled and avoided death without losing legitimacy.

Sneak preview of the upcoming chapter:

The USSR only recognized the Polish government-in-exile, which had by that time having moved to London, once Germany had invaded and the USSR was at war with Germany. The USSR withdrew its recognition of the London Polish government when that government took Hitler's side on the "Katyn massacre" issue despite its formal alliance with the USSR. The USSR severed relations with the London Polish government on April 25, 1943 and then recognized another, pro-Soviet Polish entity, the Union of Polish Patriots. After the war the UPP became the basis of the pro-Soviet socialist government of Poland.

Why doesn't Snyder explain this issue for his readers? That is the responsibility of an historian. Instead, he simply "assumes what is to be proven" - that the London-based Polish government was the "legitimate" one.

Great Britain and the United States withdrew recognition of the London Polish government on July 6, 1945, and recognized the pro-Soviet Polish government in Warsaw. Thereafter the self-proclaimed London-based "Polish government" remained in the U.K., recognized by no major country.

I'm going to bet Furr doesn't eventually make this next point: what the Polish government did is exactly what they would have done if their aim was to assist Hitler in conquering the USSR, in exchange for being restored to power after a Nazi victory. I don't have any evidence for this though, it's just a thought.

Constantignoble posted:

Thanks for the continued efforts, swampman. i think the presentation here is stronger than the original essay. the Ginsburgs excerpt is a nice touch (or Ginsburg? google's giving mixed results)

Yeah I had started in hoping to paste a lot of their first draft directly into my transcription - but most of it has been significantly expanded, and cleaned of the tabloid style typical of old people writing online. Shoutout to themselves for http://winrus.com/keyboard.htm I am learning to type Cyrillic pretty quick actually bc I'm genius.

swampman posted:

I'm glad that this is the biggest issue you have with Furr's line of reasoning

What almost no one knows about is the Anti-Imperialist League, of which Twain was Vice-President. While he had been neutral during the 1860-65 Civil War, the mature Twain was an increasingly radical man. He described his steady move to the left in a note about the French revolution:

When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.

But it was the brutal American war to seize the Philippines that turned him into an anti-imperialist campaigner. He confessed to having once been a “red hot imperialist”, but declared that on this too, he had changed his mind:

I had wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines …We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more… and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem….And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

In the face of the Philippines war, the greatest satirist of his time archly suggested a new American flag, with the stripes painted black, and skull and crossbones to replace the stars. His criticism wasn’t confined to the US though. Twain condemned imperialism of all stripes.

He couldn’t always find outlets for these radical ideas. Twain’s anti-war story The War Prayer went unpublished until 1923, and remained obscure until activists brought it out during protests against the Vietnam conflict.

Words being his tools of trade, he despised imperialist propaganda – in which politicians planning to invade another country “invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities…and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” Mark Twain could have been writing about the Bush-Obama onslaught on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twain fought for women’s suffrage, making a celebrated speech about it. He supported the labour movement, telling a union audience: “Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.”

And there is more. Though a maverick suspicious of political parties, Mark Twain expressed revolutionary sentiments. From an initial sympathy for the Russian tsar, Twain changed his views on this too, announcing at an 1888 public meeting that “were he a Russian he would be a revolutionist”. In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, he said he was “always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt.” Fine, fighting words, from one of our great writers.

Also found this while navigating web
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1936/10/27/page/1/article/mark-twain-outdone-by-dictator-stalin-on-report-of-death

Panopticon posted:

because the latter interpretation seems to be how opinion coagulates when stalinists like swampman and petrol accept that stalin was pretty keen on certain classes of people dying

What the fuck are you talking about? Are you unable to remember context from sentence to sentence? The Polish government chose the path that resulted in the greatest possible loss of life. The entire criticism of Poland interning itself in Rumania is that it was a callous, destructive act that resulted in millions dead, possibly most of the dead of World War 2. it left the Polish army without a leader, the USSR without a diminished Polish state to prevent sharing a border with the Nazis, and the Nazis themselves with total mobility through the Polish countryside. The Polish government was keen on "certain classes" of people dying, Russian and Ukrainian people in their territory. Are you now referring to the Polish government officials who interned themselves in Rumania, without setting up any sort of successor government or government-in-exile - basically the most irresponsible thing a government can do - as a "class" that communists wanted dead?

Panopticon posted:

according to grover furr, lecturer in medieval english literature

come on. that must be the worst response ever.

that is less than lazy.

kruki posted:

Panopticon posted:
according to grover furr, lecturer in medieval english literature


come on. that must be the worst response ever.

that is less than lazy.

1. it's a large claim to make with what appears to be no citation whatsoever

2. if furr himself were an expert on the second world war i might believe him without a citation but he's not

3. this is also a counterfactual he is coming up with (that there were possibilities the polish government could have taken that would result in fewer deaths)

so there's 3 reasons to dismiss the argument.

Panopticon posted:

when stalinists like swampman and petrol accept that stalin was pretty keen on certain classes of people dying

keep talking shit mother fucker

glomper_stomper posted:

furr mentions that trotskyist conspiracies were corroborated in his archives. are there any essays on this?

There's this book here that came out last year... http://www.amazon.com/Trotskys-Amalgams-Evidence-Commission-Conspiracies/dp/069258224X
From an Amazon review

In this brilliant book, Professor Furr shows that “on the evidence, by means of an objective verification process, the only legitimate conclusion is that the Moscow Trials testimony is genuine, in that it represents what the defendants themselves chose to say.”

He shows that “there is not now, nor has there ever been any evidence that the Moscow Trials defendants were in reality innocent, compelled or persuaded by some means (threats to them or against their families, loyalty to the Party, etc.) to testify falsely.” He sums up, “Every time we can check a statement made in Moscow Trials testimony against independent evidence, we find that the Moscow Trials testimony or charge is verified.”

Furr notes that “The earliest and most dramatic discovery emerged from the Harvard Trotsky Archive within months of its opening to researchers on January 2, 1980. This was the proof that the bloc of oppositionists inside the Soviet Union had really existed.”

He explains, “Very soon after the TA was opened Broué and his team began to discover that Trotsky had deliberately lied in his published works. First they found evidence that the bloc of Oppositionists, including Trotskyists, Zinovievists, Rights, and others, had really existed. The activities of this bloc were the major allegation in all three of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky and Sedov always denied that any such bloc existed and claimed that it was an invention by Stalin. Broué identified documents in the TA that proved that Trotsky and Sedov had lied: the bloc had indeed existed.”

In a letter preserved in Trotsky’s archive, Sedov wrote in 1932 that the bloc “has been organised. In it have entered the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group and the Trotskyists (former ‘capitulators’).”

On 22 January 1937, Sedov said in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Het Volk, “The defendants in the first trial were in their hearts not in agreement with Stalin, even though they capitulated to him. They had been exiled or arrested years before the start of the trial for their criticism and political activity: Smirnov 3½ years earlier, Zinoviev and Kamenev one and a half years before. Radek and Piatakov were two of the last supporters of Stalin and were totally committed to his ideas. The Trotskyists have had much less contact with them than with the others.” This slip of the tongue revealed that the Trotskyists had indeed communicated with all these oppositionists, contrary to Trotsky’s persistent claims that there had been no communication with them.

Furr examines Trotsky’s testimony to the Dewey Commission. He shows that Trotsky lied to the Commission, claiming that he had never communicated with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Sokol’nikov, Preobrazhensky, Piatakov and Smirnov. Documentary evidence proves he made contact with all these Oppositionists. Why? To reminisce about the old days? No. The bloc’s aim was to overthrow the Soviet government by killing its leadership.

Trotsky’s secretary Jean van Heijenoort said that plotting to kill Stalin was the right thing to do, as he stated to his biographer Anita Burdman Feferman. Mark Zborowski testified that on 22 January 1937 Sedov stated, “Now there is no reason to hesitate. Stalin must be killed.” Zborowski testified that Sedov explained that “since the whole regime in the USSR is held up by Stalin, it would be enough to kill Stalin for it all to fall apart.”