An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia "endnotes"

Notes

Editor's Introduction

1. Unpublished article by Eugene Lyons, "The Kremlin Conquers an American: A Russian Memoir," n.d., p. 3, in Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

2. Eugene Lyons, The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York, 1927). Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants to America, were philosophical anarchists executed for a murder committed during a robbery. Though the evidence was inconclusive, the judge and jury convicted them, apparently partly on the basis of their beliefs and their evasion of military duty. The case drew worldwide attention as part of the anti-Communist hysteria gripping America after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Though public outcry forced the governor of Massachusetts to order an investigation, and though the trial was found to have involved breaches of legal standards, the conviction was not overturned. Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted in August 1927, to the horror of many in America and throughout the world.

3. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York, 1937).

4. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 1.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

4. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 1.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

6. See Andrea Graziosi, "Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920-1940: Their Experience and Their Legacy," International Labor and Working-Class History 33 (Spring 1988): 38-59.

7. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Boston, 1942; Bloomington, 1989).

8. Andrew and Maria Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker (New York, 1937).

9. Fred E. Beal, Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow (New York, 1937).

10. Peter Francis, I Worked in a Soviet Factory (London, 1939).

11. Walter Arnold Rukeyser, Working for the Soviets: An American Engineer in Russia (New York, 1932).

12. Allan Monkhouse, Moscow, 1911-1933 (Boston, 1934). In the Metro-Vickers trial a large group of Soviet and British engineers was convicted of deliberately sabotaging Soviet electrical generating facilities. The British engineers were deported; the Soviet engineers received terms in the labor camps. See n. 42 to the Memoirs, below.

13. Among the more facile was Alcan Hirsch. In his book Industrialized

Russia (New York, 1934), Hirsch failed to even mention food shortages at the time of the 1932/33 famine and argued that Soviet labor laws were not repressive enough. See also Maurice Edelman, How Russia Prepared: The USSR beyond the Urals (New York, 1942). Edelman was a Russian-speaking British businessman in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1939; his book maintains Stalinism was necessary because it strengthened the USSR's defenses.

14. John D. Littlepage and Bess Demaree, In Search of Soviet Gold (New York, 1937); A. P. Serebrovskii, Na zolotom fronte (Moscow, 1936).

15. Sergei Mironovich Frankfurt, Men and Steel: Notes of a Director of Soviet Industry , trans. S. D. Kogan (Moscow and Leningrad, 1935).

16. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York, 1946).

17. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , p. 514.

18. Lyons, "Kremlin," pp. 9-10.

19. Ibid., p. 13.

18. Lyons, "Kremlin," pp. 9-10.

19. Ibid., p. 13.

20. This is the judgment of Anthony Sutton ("Memorandum on Zara Witkin," apparently dated 2 January 1968, in Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives). Sutton examined several hundred reports by and about Western engineers who had worked in the Soviet Union while researching his Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development , vol. 1, 1917-1930 ; vol. 2, 1930-1945 ; and vol. 3, 1945-1965 (Stanford, 1968-73). See the chapter "Technical Assistance to Planning and Construction Projects," 2:249-61. The Dutch Communist S. J. Rutgers also worked for the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate as a technical consultant on irrigation projects and as a member of its commission on foreign specialists in 1930 and 1931 (Gertruda Trincher and Karl Trincher, Rutgers [Moscow, 1967], pp. 172-73).

21. I am grateful to Professor Holland Hunter for this appraisal and for pointing out the difficulty of making absolute comparisons between the Soviet Union and other countries, or between the Soviet Union and tsarist Russia. Modern attempts to quantify Soviet economic growth include G. Warren Nutter, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1962); Richard Moorsteen and Raymond P. Powell, The Soviet Capital Stock, 1928-1962 (Homewood, Ill., 1962); Abram Bergson, Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); and Abram Bergson and Simon Kuznets, Economic Trends in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). R. W. Davies concludes that Witkin's estimates for Soviet construction may have been somewhat low, but in order of magnitude they were "about right" ("Capital Investment and Capital Stock in the USSR, 1928-1940: Soviet and Western Estimates," in Robert W. Davies, ed., Soviet Investment for Planned Industrialization, 1929-1937: Policy and Practice [Berkeley, 1984], pp. 149-50).

22. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 6.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

22. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 6.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

24. "Mlle. Zessarskaya [ sic ] is excellent as Praskova and acts the part with pleasing restraint. Despite her cumbersome peasant's costume and headgear, she often appears exceedingly attractive and gives evidence of an authentic depth of character" ("Intelligent Soviet Film," review of Her Way of Love, New York

Times , 21 August 1929). In a review of Grain , a critic commented, ''The buxom Emma Tsessarskaia [ sic ] is capable and wholesome, as usual, in the role of the pioneer kolkhoz (collective farm) girl, who is driven out of the fake cooperative group started by the kulaki [rich peasants] as a blind for their nefarious schemes early in the action and who returns later as a skilled tractor operator and helps the real kolkhoz folk make good" ("At the Cameo Theatre," New York Times , 18 January 1936). A Soviet encyclopedia describes her portrayal of Aksinia in the 1931 film Tikhii Don ( The Quiet Don ), based on Mikhail Sholokhov's novel, as "charming, full of life, and vividly temperamental" ( Kinoslovar ', [Moscow, 1970], s.v. "Tsesarskaia, Emma," p. 870).

25. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 7.

26. Ibid.

25. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 7.

26. Ibid.

27. Waldo Frank, Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey (New York, 1932), p. 172. Tsesarskaia was no stranger to prominent foreign visitors. She knew Albert Rhyss Williams and visited Armand Hammer with Witkin. Both Frank and Williams produced books typical of the naive foreigners who visited the USSR in the 1930s and believed everything their tour guides told them. See, for instance, Williams's The Soviets (New York, 1937). The purge trials disenchanted Frank with the Soviet experiment; see Chart for Rough Waters: Our Role in a New World (New York, 1940) and The Memoirs of Waldo Frank (Amherst, 1973).

28. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 8.

29. Ibid., pp. 8, 10-11.

28. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 8.

29. Ibid., pp. 8, 10-11.

30. Witkin and Lyons's tour of Europe is discussed in the chapter "A Tour of Tyrannies" in Lyons's Assignment in Utopia , pp. 610-23. Lyons had been assigned a series of political articles for Cosmopolitan , and the tour was oriented primarily to the investigation of fascism in Western and Central Europe.

31. Lyons wrote the following about the meeting with Rolland:

We tried to speak of Russia. But Rolland would not listen. Tremulously, in genuine panic, he shied away every time, switching the talk to Germany, France, the war and the peace. I stared in unbelieving consternation—not in all my thirty-six years had I seen a clearer show of intellectual and moral diffidence. Here were two earnest young men, reasonably intelligent, who had lived and worked for many years in Russia—who were eager to save a little of the faith they had brought with them to Russia. At the very least, Rolland might have made some inquiries about conditions in that country; about the truth or falseness of the famine reports, the direction in which that nation was tending and the temper of its humanity. He asked nothing and looked distressed each time Zara or I tried to drag the conversation back to Russia.... When we forced him to speak by point-blank questions, Rolland limited himself to a few threadbare formulas about the Soviet Union's hostile surroundings.

Lyons recalled that Rolland's Soviet Russian wife, "an ardent communist of the Stalinesque brand," did her best to "divert the conversation to safer channels" (ibid., pp. 618-19). See also n. 62 to the Memoirs, below.

32. Witkin's disenchantment must have been particularly painful. In the

letter of introduction he and Lyons had sent Rolland before leaving Moscow, they had written that they shared a "profound admiration for the viewpoints you exemplify"; that "the moral integrity and humane qualities in your life's work are especially precious at the present time of cynical abuse of power and ruthless destruction of human values"; and that "searching for the guiding principles needed amid the confusions and threatened dangers of our time ... we have often turned to the fundamental values running through your life and work" (Letter from Zara Witkin and Eugene Lyons to Romain Rolland, 31 January 1934, Fonds Romain Rolland, Département des Manuscrits, Division Occidentale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

33. "The Home of the Future: What Will It Look Like? How Will It Be Built? How Much Will It Cost?" California Monthly , October 1934, pp. 12-15, 42-43.

34. Letters from Zara Witkin to Romain Rolland, lo April 1939, 8 August 1939, 26 December 1939, Fonds Romain Rolland, Département des Manuscrits, Division Occidentale, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

35. Lyons, "Kremlin," p. 14.

36. See David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York, 1973).

37. Freda Utley's memoirs, Odyssey of a Liberal (Washington, 1970), are largely concerned with this issue. See also the chapter "To Tell or Not to Tell?" in Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , pp. 624-36.

38. See n. 20 above.

39. I used the following additional sources in the preparation of the introduction: phone conversation with Bernard Witkin, spring 1988; "Memorandum of conversation with Mr. Zara Witkin," U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 27 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 861.5017, Living Conditions/737, National Archives; "Possible acts of reprisal," dispatch from U.S. Embassy in Warsaw to Secretary of State, 29 December 1933, State Department Decimal File 361.112, Witkin, Zara/1, National Archives; letters of Eugene Lyons to Zara Witkin, 2 December 1937, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Antony Sutton to Eugene Lyons, 14 October 1967, Zara Witkin Collection, Hoover Institution Archives; Who's Who in Engineering: A Biographical Directory of the Engineering Profession (New York, 1937), p. 1530; America's Young Men: The Official Who's Who among the Young Men of the Nation (Los Angeles, 1936), p. 616; ibid. (1938), p. 641; obituaries in Engineering News-Record , 27 June 1940, and Los Angeles Times , 7 June 1940; Certificate of Death for Zara Witkin.

38. See n. 20 above.

The Memoirs of Zara Witkin 1932–1934

1. War Communism (1918-21) refers to the policy of nationalization and centralized industrial control the Soviet government adopted during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. The New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-28) adopted to achieve more rapid reconstruction after the war, replaced grain requisitioning from the peasants with a standardized tax, permitted limited private enterprise in the retail and small-manufacturing sectors, and left

large-scale industry, banking, foreign trade, and other "commanding heights" in state hands. The First Five-Year Plan was adopted in 1928 as a means to recentralize the economy under state control and to speed industrialization; it included the collectivization of much of the land privately owned by the peasants. Collectivization met with violent resistance tantamount to a second civil war. See Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1972). Recent studies of War Communism and the New Economic Policy include Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921 (Cambridge, 1985), and Alan M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, 1987).

2. The Amtorg Trading Corporation, founded in 1924 in New York City, was a Soviet agency for the development of trade and industrial cooperation with American firms and individuals. Though bureaucratic incompetence characterized many of its operations, it successfully covered industrial espionage by the Soviet secret police. (See the testimony of Basil W. Delgass in House of Representatives, Investigation of Communist Propaganda , 71st Cong., 3rd sess., Report No. 22-90, 17 January 1931, pp. 48 ff.) Amtorg was active in the lend-lease program of World War II. An insight into the functioning of the Soviet foreign trade apparatus abroad is provided by the memoirs of Tamara Solonevicha, who worked in the German analog to Amtorg, the Berlin Trade Office ( Moi gody v berlinskom torgpredstva [Sofia, 1938]). An article on the foundation of Amtorg appeared recently in Ogonek ("Glavnyi sovetskii kupets v Amerike," Ogonek 42 [October 2989]: 6-7).

3. The Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a pioneer of the modern film. His most important productions are The Battleship Potemkin , about a sailors' mutiny in 1905; Aleksander Nevsky , about a thirteenth-century prince who defeated the German Teutonic Knights; and Ivan the Terrible , in which Eisenstein was pressured to cast the medieval tyrant as a progressive statebuilder—a clear metaphor for Stalin.

Vsevolod Ilarionovich Pudovkin (1893-1953), who never achieved the international recognition of Eisenstein, made a number of patriotic films about pre-revolutionary military leaders such as Aleksandr Suvorov and Pavel Nakhimov, heroes, respectively, of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. He is best known for his film The Mother , based on Maxim Gorky's novel of the same name.

4. The review was apparently never published. Lyons noted on the manuscript that the journal was The Nation .

5. Hugh Cooper, an American, was the chief engineer at the Dneprostroi Dam construction project. One of the largest single enterprises built during the first of Stalin's five-year plans, and the biggest dam in the world at the time, it symbolized the Soviet regime's industrialization effort, as Cooper came to epitomize American-Soviet industrial cooperation. Unlike Witkin, Cooper was happy with his experience in the Soviet Union. Dneprostroi is the subject of a study by Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi (Oxford, 1988).

6. The plan for the Palace of Soviets failed. The ground began to sink under the foundation and it was replaced with Moscow's largest swimming pool. See

n. 15 below on the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, destroyed to make way for the Palace of Soviets.

7. Vyborg, originally a Finnish city, is located in territory ceded to the USSR after the Winter War of 1939-40. Though architecturally similar to Helsinki, the city has become bedraggled, contrasting sharply with the cleanliness and modernism of the Finnish capital. The railroad station Witkin and his companion photographed is now filthy and decrepit.

8. The Intourist agency was founded in 1929 to promote tourism in the USSR. In the 1930s Intourist specialized in package tours that accommodated gullible foreigners in fancy hotels and showed them model factories and collective farms. The agency helped the secret police by spying on foreigners, monitoring their contacts with Soviet citizens, and intimidating the latter from entering into personal friendships with tourists. Tamara Solonevicha, an Intourist employee who later defected, published a volume of remarkable memoirs about her work with foreign visitors ( Zapiski sovetskogo perevodshchitsa [Sofia, 1937]).

9. This was a misapprehension on Witkin's part. Law and order were maintained in the capitals, but elsewhere life could be extremely brutal. Magnitogorsk, a steel town built during the First Five-Year Plan and initially populated primarily by single men, was "one giant knife fight" according to Steven Kotkin, who recently completed a major study of the city ("Magnetic Mountain" [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988]). The Soviet film Moi drug Ivan Lapshin ( My Friend Ivan Lapshin ) graphically depicts the brutal life of a Volga port town in the mid-1930s. (Directed by Aleksei German and based on a story by his father, Iurii, the film was completed in 1982 and released in 1985.)

10. Valerii Ivanovich Mezhlauk (1893-1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary from 1907 and later a state and party leader. He played an important role in military politics during the Civil War and served as the People's Commissar of Transport and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy in the 1920s. In the late 1920s and 1930s he sat on the All-Union Central Executive Committee, the Council of People's Commissars, the State Planning Commission (he was the chair from 1934), and the Council of Labor and Defense (as the chair from 1934). He replaced Sergo Ordzhonikidze as People's Commissar of Heavy Industry in 1937. Arrested in 1937, he was executed 29 July 1938 as an enemy of the people. He is the subject of an extensive official literature.

11. Part of the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Agro-Joint supported Jewish mutual aid, and especially vocational training and agricultural colonization. In the 1920s and 1930s Agro-Joint raised funds to establish Jewish agricultural settlements in the Soviet Union, most notably in the Ukraine, the Crimea, and Birobidzhan (in Siberia). Its Soviet activities were suppressed during the Great Purge. See Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper: A History of the American Joint Distribution Committee, 1929-1939 (Philadelphia, 1974), pp. 57-104; Joseph C. Hyman, Twenty-Five Years of American Aid to Jews Overseas: A Record of the Joint Distribution Committee (New York, 1939), pp. 27-33; Evelyn Morrissey, Jewish Workers and Farmers in the Crimea and Ukraine (New York, 1937); and Leon Dennen, Where the Ghetto Ends (New York, 1934).

On Jewish agricultural colonization (unrelated to Agro-Joint), see Solomon Lifshitz, History of the Jewish Kolkhoz in Siberia, 1926-1934 (in Russian, with English title) (Jerusalem, 1975).

12. Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov (1881-1969), a Soviet state, party, and military leader, rose to prominence during the Civil War of 1918-21. His important responsibilities during the war included organization of the Red cavalry and coordination with Joseph Stalin of the defense of the key Volga city of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad and subsequently Volgograd). Allied with Stalin, he rose rapidly in the political firmament and became People's Commissar of War in 1925; in this post he helped his master carry out the bloody and destructive purge of the officer corps in 1937. His incompetence in the defense of Leningrad during the early stages of World War II led to his transfer to the State Defense Committee in 1940. Though Voroshilov continued to be politically active during the remainder of Stalin's lifetime and was promoted to the (largely ceremonial) chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet after Stalin's death, he was incapable of effective political initiative on his own and was easily maneuvered out of power by Nikita Khrushchev. Forced from all positions of authority in 1957 as a member of the so-called anti-party group, he held honorary positions in the 1960s and later became the subject of official hagiographical literature. See his memoirs, Rasskazy o zhizni , pt. 1 (Moscow, 1968) and the short biography, "K. Ye. Voroshilov: Red Marshal," in Roy Medvedev, All Stalin's Men (Oxford, 1983), pp. 1-27.

13. Mikhail Markovich Borodin (né Grusenberg, 1884-1953) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet political leader. Born of Jewish parents, he participated in the Jewish Labor Bund, changed allegiances to the Bolsheviks in 1903, took part in the 1905 Revolution, and then emigrated to the United States, where he studied and took part in socialist politics. Borodin returned to the Soviet Union in 1918, where he entered the Soviet diplomatic service. After his expulsion from Britain for subversive activities, Borodin was sent to China as Communist International adviser to the Kuomintang. There he carried out Stalin's line among the Chinese Communists, which led to the disastrous Shanghai uprising of 1927. Returning to the Soviet Union, Borodin took over the English-language Moscow Daily News (see n. 14 below). Borodin occupied a number of other minor posts until his death in 1953. See Dan Jacobs, Borodin (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Lydia Holubnychy, Michael Borodin and the Chinese Revolution, 1923-1925 (Ann Arbor, 1979); and May-ling Soong Chiang (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), Conversations with Mikhail Borodin (London, 1978).

14. The Moscow Daily News was an English-language Soviet newspaper; it became a weekly in 1934 and was renamed the Moscow News . Many American and English Communists and fellow travelers contributed to it, including, most notably, Anna Louise Strong. No longer written by foreigners, the paper appears today in Russian and several foreign languages, maintaining a strong liberal stance.

15. The "church" whose destruction Witkin discusses was the famous Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, built in the nineteenth century with donations collected across Russia to celebrate Alexander I's victory over Napoleon. See the

photographic history by Nina Potapova-Molin'e, comp., Razrushenie Khrama Khrista Spasitelia (London, 1988). Ironically the architect who produced the first plan for the cathedral—approved by Alexander—suffered many of the same tribulations as Witkin a century later; he was falsely accused of misappropriating funds during the early stages of construction by jealous colleagues and was cruelly punished by Alexander's heir, Nicholas I. See Alexander Herzen, Childhood, Youth, and Exile , pts. 1 and 2 of his memoir My Past and Thoughts (Oxford, 1980), pp. 242-54.

16. The Kharkov Tractor Factory was another of the showpiece giants of the First Five-Year Plan. Many foreigners worked here in the early 1930s. A detailed account of life at the enterprise is in the memoirs of Fred Beal, who headed the political instruction apparatus for foreign employees during the same years Witkin was in Russia ( Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow [New York, 1937]).

17. The Soviet regime in the 1930s did emphasize the development of mass sport, but it concentrated resources on highly visible sectors such as the semiprofessional team sports sponsored by the trade union apparatus, the army, and the political police; mass sports spectacles such as the displays of gymnasts in parades; and military-related physical education programs under the control of the civil defense league Osoaviakhim. Access to sport activities for the masses was severely limited by the absence of facilities, shortages of equipment, and incompetent management of trade union-sponsored factory clubs; organized sports were virtually unknown in the countryside. See James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR (Cambridge, 1977), especially pp. 120-52. On Osoaviakhim see William Odom, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, 1973).

18. The Soviet political police, originally called the Cheka, was founded during the Revolution to combat counterrevolutionary organizations, suppress left-wing parties outside Bolshevik control, and enforce the requisition of food, supplies, and labor during the Civil War. Under the innocuous-sounding name of State Political Administration (GPU), and later, the United State Political Administration (OGPU), the political police maintained a low profile during most of the 1920s, concentrating on such tasks as surveillance of foreigners, protection of prominent state and party officials, control over private businessmen during the New Economic Policy, repression of dissident elements, and administration of part of the country's penal institutions. The OGPU was largely responsible for the suppression of peasant resistance following the enactment of the violent "extraordinary" grain collection measures of 1928 and the collectivization of agriculture beginning in 1929; its power grew tremendously at this time, as it developed its own internal security army, a system of mass internal exile, and the notorious archipelago of forced labor camps. The OGPU caused millions of peasants and their families to be deported under deplorable conditions to distant parts of Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far North. Stalin used the OGPU to spy on members of the Communist party who were suspected of opposing his policies. The most frightful chapter in the history of the political police began not long

after Witkin left the Soviet Union. Standard studies include Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1968); Conquest, Inside Stalin's Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (Stanford, 1985); Lennard Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia (Philadelphia, 1976); George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (Oxford, 1981); Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York, 1989); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1974-78), especially vol. 1, chap. 2; and Simon Wolin and Robert Slusser, The Soviet Secret Police (New York, 1957).

19. In the 1920s and 1930s the political police undertook the management of a number of institutions for the orphans created by the Civil War and the collectivization of agriculture. The children's homes run by the OGPU received the greatest financial resources and were run along progressive lines. They were shown to foreigners as showcases of the new regime—127 delegations from thirty countries visited the Dzerzinskii Commune (named after the founder of the secret police) in its first five years. The most potentially dangerous inmates of the "self-governing" children's communes were controlled by their fear of deportation to prisons and labor camps. (See Iurii Solonevich's conversations with a group of children in Povest' o dvadtsati dvukh neshchast'iakh [Sophia, 1938], pp. 169-78.) Still, something of the spirit of utopianism and experimentation of the revolutionary generation seems to have survived into the 1930s in these facilities. Many graduates felt they owed everything to the regime, and some went on to careers in the political police.

Witkin apparently visited the Dzerzhinskii Commune, which was known for the manufacture of electric hand tools and cameras. The reminiscences of its founder, A. S. Makarenko (who from 1935 to his death in 1938 was the assistant director of labor camps in the Ukraine), were published as Learning to Live: Flags on the Battlements (Moscow, 1953). See also Oscar Friche, "The Dzerzhinskii Commune: Birth of the Soviet 35mm Camera Industry," History of Photography 3 (April 1979): 135-55, and René Bosewitz, Waifdom in the Soviet Union: Features of the Sub-Culture and Re-Education (Frankfurt, 1988). The entire March 1934 issue of the Soviet photojournal The USSR in Construction is devoted to children's communes.

20. The soviet building was the seat of government. Soviets were the organs of state, as opposed to party, administration; though the party was theoretically separate from the state, it was actually superior to it. Soviets, or councils, functioned at all levels from district, city, and regional, to republican and all-union. Though the soviets were burdened with most of the mundane matters of civil administration, control over the economy and other important spheres of government activity rested in the people's commissariats, in principle subordinate to, but in practice independent from, the soviet apparatus. Neither the soviets nor the people's commissariats (later called ministries) had genuine authority, however, to initiate policy: all real power rested with the party and its specialized organs.

21. Witkin's negative impressions of a Soviet maternity hospital are confirmed by Freda Utley in Lost Illusion (London, 1949), pp. 88-89, 144-45, and by Tanya Matthews (Svetlova) in Journey Between Freedoms (Philadelphia,

1951), pp. 118-24. Utley, a Communist, was a British economist who resided for several years in Moscow; Matthews was a Russian English teacher from the Caucasus region who married an English journalist during the war. Both describe their own childbearing experiences.

22. Valentina Bogdan, a former mechanical engineer from Rostov, portrays private life and work there in the years immediately after Witkin left in her Mimikriia v SSSR: vospominaniia inzhenera, 1935-1942 gody, Rostov-na-Donu (Frankfurt, 1982).

23. The torgsin stores were originally established to raise funds to finance the First Five-Year Plan. They accepted only hard currency and were frequented primarily by foreigners, but many Soviets were forced to sell family heirlooms in the torgsin shops to obtain money for food and other essentials. Miron Dolot's trek with his mother from their starving village to the torgsin store in the nearest town and their experiences at the store during the famine of 1932/33 are described in his Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (New York, 1985), pp. 177-88.

The OGPU periodically rounded up persons suspected of possessing gold and forced them to "donate" it to the government. Torture was often employed, the most common being to cram suspects into a steam room and to feed them salt fish while giving them nothing to drink. Victims would be brought in on several different occasions, until the police were satisfied they had sweated all their gold or foreign currency from them. Dentists and Jews were frequent targets since some dentists kept gold to fill teeth on the black market and many Jews received gifts of money from relatives abroad. F. E. Bogatyrchuk was briefly interrogated since, as a doctor, he was suspected of having taken payment in precious metals or hard currency for privately rendered medical services; see his Moi zhiznenyi put'k Vlasovu i prazhskomu manifestu (San Francisco, 1978), pp. 96-98. On sweating gold from the population see Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , pp. 415, 447-50, 454-58, and Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago , 1:52-54. For a time the regime allowed foreigners to use hard currency to purchase exit visas for Soviet relatives; Witkin refers to this practice on p. 151 ("I burned at the thought of ransoming human beings from a government").

The torgsin shops have survived, under a new name, as today's berezki , where Soviet citizens generally cannot shop, since they are forbidden to own foreign currency except under special circumstances.

24. It was still common to see a droshky, or horse-drawn cab, in the early 1930s, though mechanized conveyances were steadily replacing them. Waldo Frank, who visited Emma Tsesarskaia in 1932, described one: "The first ride in a droschke [ sic ] was memorable. The cab's upholstery was mildewed, the wood was splintered; the izvostchik [ sic ; driver] looked as if his prime had been the days of Gogol; and his horse, a poor relative of Rosinante, as if the Revolution had murdered all its friends and left it oatless" ( Dawn in Russia , p. 12). As "nepmen," or small capitalists, the drivers were denied ration cards and taxed heavily.

25. This would be the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, the so-called Monastery of the Caves, one of the oldest landmarks of Russian and Ukrainian culture. Dating

from the eleventh century, it burned and was rebuilt in the seventeenth century. Communist authorities closed it as a religious institution in 1926. During World War II most of the architectural features of the monastery suffered heavy damage. Today, largely restored, it is a historical monument and major tourist attraction; recently it began service as a monastery again.

26. The Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, or RKI (Raboche-Krestianskaia Inspektsiia, or Rabkrin), was established during the Civil War and functioned as a unit until 1934, when it was split between the Commission on Party Control and the Commission on State Control. Though technically a people's commissariat, and therefore an organ of the state, the RKI functioned as an investigatory agency of the party with special portfolios for finance and industrial management. The RKI worked closely with semivoluntary "workers' control" brigades organized by the trade unions and the Young Communist League. The latter directed raids on factory stores, cafeterias, and bookkeeping departments to uncover petty theft and incompetence. At the higher levels, the RKI worked hand-in-hand with the OGPU to root out more serious forms of corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement. Few foreigners worked as closely with this agency as Witkin, or at least none has left a record of such collaboration. See the recent study by E. A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1920-1934 (New York, 1987).

27. For a description of James Abbe's activities in the Soviet Union, see n. 56 below.

28. Ernst May (1886-1970) was a German architect and pioneer city planner, famous for his work in Frankfurt and many other German cities. In 1930 May went to the Soviet Union at the government's invitation. His frustrated career in the USSR mirrored Witkin's. He helped develop plans for the general reconstruction of Moscow and for housing in Magnitogorsk, but both plans went unrealized. Later he supervised industrial and residential construction in Novokuznetsk. (After a visit to Novokuznetsk following World War II, George Kennan learned that officials blamed the wretched state of the city's housing on the deliberate "sabotage" of Ernst May [George F. Kennan, Sketches from a Life (New York, 1989), pp. 99-100].) After May left Russia in 1934, he was denied reentry into Germany, then under Nazi domination. After working in Kenya and Uganda, he was interned as an enemy alien in South Africa for two years during World War II. He returned to work in West Germany for several years after the war. See also n. 29 below.

29. The gigantic steel centers of Magnitogorsk and Novokuznetsk were built during the First Five-Year Plan. Both were constructed in remote and difficult locations (Magnitogorsk east of the Ural mountains, Novokuznetsk—then named Stalinsk—in Siberia) under the rudest possible conditions and in the shortest possible time. Their names were synonymous with hardship and heroism, the suffering of thousands of forced laborers, and the selfless enthusiasm of young Communist volunteers. Magnitogorsk was entirely designed by an American firm and both projects extensively employed foreign consultants and skilled workers, though overburdened and inadequately trained Soviet managers frequently ignored their advice. Magnitogorsk is colorfully pictured in John Scott's

remarkable memoir, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Boston, 1942; Bloomington, 1989). More recently, Zaveniagin, the director of Magnitostroi ( stroi = construction) has been pictured as the character Mark Riazanov, along with some of the incidents in the project's history, in a novel by Anatolii Rybakov ( Children of the Arbat [Moscow, 1987; Boston, 1988]). Zaveniagin was demoted during the Great Purge and sent to direct a mining complex north of the Arctic Circle, though technically he went as a free employee. On the history of Magnitogorsk see Kotkin, "Magnetic Mountain," and Tatjana Kirstein, "The Ural-Kuznetsk Combine: A Case-Study in Soviet Investment Decision-making," in Davies, ed., Soviet Investment , pp. 88-106. The director of Kuznetskstroi, Sergei Mironovich Frankfurt, wrote an informative officially published memoir, Men and Steel: Notes of a Director of Soviet Industry , trans. S. D. Kogan (Moscow and Leningrad, 1935). Witkin's friend Ernst May (see n. 28 above) designed housing projects for both Magnitostroi and Kuznetskstroi, facing the same exasperating difficulties as Witkin did.

30. Umberto Nobile's Soviet experiences are recounted in his posthumously published memoir, My Five Years with Soviet Airships , trans. Frances Fleetwood (Akron, 1987). Witkin is not mentioned in the book.

31. On the famine, see Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford, 1986); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger; First Interim Report of Meetings and Hearings of and before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Held in 1986 (Washington, D.C., 1987); Second Interim Report of Meetings and Hearings of and before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Held in 1987 (Washington, D.C., 1988); and Report to Congress of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Washington, D.C., 1988).

32. Pilnyak (the pseudonym of Boris Andreevich Vogau, 1894-1942?), was a prominent writer of the revolutionary period, the 1920S, and the 1930s. Though he supported the Revolution, his work is notable for distinguishing the revolutionary passion of the masses from the calculated political manipulation of the leaders. Pilnyak antagonized Stalin with his 1926 novel Story of the Unextinguished Moon , in which he presents the death of Mikhail Frunze, head of the Red Army, as the result of medical murder. The publication abroad of his novel Red Wood led to his dismissal as head of the Writers' Union. He wrote another novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea , about the First Five-Year Plan. Pilnyak was apparently arrested in 1938 and died, perhaps in 1942, in a labor camp.

33. This was Witkin's perception. Eugene Lyons wrote in the margin of the manuscript, "Only he was!"

34. Walter Duranty (1884-1957), the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times correspondent, was a fellow traveler whose influential articles from 1921 to 1934 helped establish the climate of public opinion necessary for diplomatic recognition of the USSR. Franklin Roosevelt was impressed with his reportage. Duranty used his authority to deny the existence of famine in the Ukraine and elsewhere, even though he conceded in private that as many as ten million people may have died of hunger and disease. As Witkin's memoirs suggest (p. 208), "a few million dead Russians" meant little to Duranty as compared to the experi-

ment in modernizing Russia. Duranty wrote later of the Moscow trials as legitimate juridical processes. See James William Crowl, Angels in Stalin's Paradise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1937. A Case Study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty (New York, 1982), and Sally Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times's Man in Moscow (Oxford, 1990).

35. Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888-1970), a Bolshevik from the 1905 Revolution, occupied a number of public posts throughout a career that spanned more than three decades after the Bolsheviks seized power. He is remembered primarily as head of the trade union movement after 1930, when Stalin defeated the so-called right opposition, which had a strong base in the labor movement. From 1930 a member of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee and from 1939 a member of the Politburo, he retained party posts well into the Khrushchev era and received numerous honors under both Stalin and Khrushchev. As a leader Shvernik was a colorless figure who carried out Stalin's line unquestioningly. He oversaw extensive purges and bureaucratic housecleanings of the trade union apparatus from 1937 to 1938 and was the only member of the trade union secretariat to survive the Great Purge. On the trade unions at this time see Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy (London, 1950).

36. Annual campaigns were mobilized during the Stalin period to pressure people to subscribe to the state loan. Subscription was anything but voluntary: harassment or arrest awaited those who refused. The suggested subscription ranged as high as one month's salary. Few saw any return on their ''investment": maturation was long in the future, and in the 1930s everyone understood the loans to be simply gifts to the state. Numerous other campaigns mobilized the population in the pursuit of regime goals; on labor productivity campaigns, for example, see Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge, 1988).

37. On the economics and politics of output norms in Soviet industry during the 1930s see Lewis Siegelbaum, "Soviet Norm Determination in Theory and Practice, 1917-1941," Soviet Studies 36, no. 1 (January 1984): 45-68, and Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity .

38. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (né Skryabin, 1890-1986), joined the revolutionary movement in 1905 and the Bolsheviks in 1906. He became one of the secretaries of the Central Committee in 1921 and a Politburo member in 1926. A consistent supporter of Joseph Stalin, Molotov helped purge his master's opponents in Leningrad and Moscow in the late 1920s, after which he vigorously supported Stalin's hard line on the collectivization of agriculture. Molotov was appointed Chair of the Council of People's Commissars in 1930, a position he held until Stalin took it over in 1941. In 1939 Molotov replaced Litvinov, a Jew, as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; in this capacity he masterminded the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. During the war, Molotov represented the USSR at the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, and then at the San Francisco conference founding the United Nations. He held various posts after the war. Stalin had Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina (a friend of Emma Tsesarskaia's mother, possibly the engineer of Tsesarskaia's semirehabilitation in 1939), ar-

rested as a "Zionist" and sent into internal exile in 1949. Despite this, he remained a diehard Stalinist. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev eliminated him from positions of power as a member of the so-called anti-party group that had tried to halt his reform program. Khrushchev consigned Molotov to the ambassadorship of the People's Republic of Mongolia, later allowing him to serve as Soviet representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. See Medvedev, All Stalin's Men , pp. 82-112.

39. A leading Bolshevik revolutionary, theoretician, and politician, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938) was a close associate of Lenin's in the early years of the Revolution. He became Stalin's ally during the inner-party struggles of the mid-1920s, but opposed Stalin's policies of forced collectivization of agriculture, crash industrialization, and intensified political repression. Though Bukharin was politically defeated in 1928, his subsequent recantation of views and self-abasing public support for Stalin opened the way for him to continue some political activities in the early and mid-1930s, including editing Izvestiia and promoting technical innovation. Arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938 after the last of the Moscow show trials, he was exonerated of all crimes under Khrushchev but treated in the official literature as a political deviationist until recently. He is currently the subject of an extensive apologetic literature in the Soviet press. See the standard biography by Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York, 1975), and the biography by Roy Medvedev, Nikolai Bukharin (New York, 1980).

40. Adopted in 1932 and 1933 and still in force today, the Soviet passport system was initiated in part as a response to the disastrously high rates of labor turnover during the First Five-Year Plan, though it is not clear how effective it was as a solution to this problem. The system includes official registration in one's place of residence ( propiska ) and information about one's social origins and nationality; as the law was enforced in the 1930s, it placed tremendous control over people's residence in the hands of the state. Peasants were not given passports, which made it illegal for them to leave the collective farms unless they were already hired by some industrial enterprise. Passportization constituted a kind of purge of the entire population because certain categories of people were not reregistered as residents and were forced to leave the major cities, and because information gathered on people's class background or political histories was used to expel many from institutions of higher learning or from certain types of employment. The reintroduction of passports, which had been abolished after the Revolution, was perceived as the abandonment of an important democratic right and a return to tsarist practice. The internal passport and the system of residency registration—as of 1990 the Soviet Union is the only state with such a system—are to be abolished shortly.

41. Grigori Evseevich Zinoviev (né Radomylskii, 1883-1936) was a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician. Though one of Lenin's closest collaborators from 1903, at first he opposed Lenin's plan for a seizure of power in 1917, which he, along with Lev Kamenev, betrayed on the eve of the coup. He later repented and played an active role in Soviet politics during the Civil War and the 1920S. As head of the Communist International from 1919 to

1926 he reduced that agency to an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. He was a member of the Politburo from 1919 to 1926 and head of the Leningrad party organization from 1917 to 1926. After Lenin's death in 1924 Zinoviev and Kamenev joined Stalin to defeat Leon Trotsky (1878-1940), the People's Commissar of War, in a struggle for power. The discovery of a cache of forged letters bearing Zinoviev's name and encouraging revolutionary subversion led to the fall of England's first Labour government in 1924. After the defeat of Trotsky, Stalin began to undermine Zinoviev's power; frightened, Zinoviev, with Kamenev, established a new left opposition in 1925, but was politically outmaneuvered by Stalin and his supporters. He joined with Trotsky in 1926 and was expelled from the party, with Trotsky, in 1927. Readmitted in 1928 after a self-abasing recantation, he was expelled once more in 1932 and readmitted a second time in 1933. Convicted in 1935 of "moral complicity" in the December 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov (almost certainly arranged by Stalin to eliminate a powerful rival), he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. Zinoviev's arrest in 1935 was the signal for the wholesale expulsion of his supporters and alleged supporters from positions of authority. Retried in August 1936 at the first of the Moscow show trials of former party leaders, he was sentenced to death and executed, the first time the leadership had shed the blood of a party member. The news of the execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others must have shocked even Witkin; he understood the confessions had to have been extorted. Under Khrushchev Zinoviev was posthumously exonerated of all crimes, but official literature continued to depict him as a political deviationist. Recent reconsiderations in the Soviet press have restored Zinoviev's place in the history of the Revolution and the Soviet state.

42. The Metro-Vickers case was one of a series of show trials held between 1928 and 1933 in which innocent engineers, economic planners, and foreign specialists were made scapegoats for economic problems (the foreigners were deported, the Soviets sent to the Gulag). While Soviet authorities have now admitted the earlier trials were fraudulent, the defendants of the Metro-Vickers trial have not yet been officially exonerated. On the trials of industrialists and technicians, see Conquest, The Great Terror (1968), pp. 222-58, 730-40; Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1928-1941 (Princeton, 1978), pp. 69-140; Bailes, "Stalin and the Revolution from Above: The Formation of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1928-1941" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), pp. 10-215; Medvedev, Let History Judge , pp. 110-39 (in the more-complete Russian edition, K sudu istorii [New York, 1974], see pp. 236-74); and Monkhouse, Moscow , pp. 268-317.

43. Monkhouse, Moscow, 1911-1933 (Boston, 1934).

44. This explanation of the trial remains hearsay. Where a genuine crime did not exist the Stalinist government was not above fabricating a case out of whole cloth. The need to offer scapegoats to the masses was "cause" enough for the Metro-Vickers affair.

45. The Central Control Commission, a disciplinary organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, undertook investigations of corruption,

incompetence, and oppositional attitudes among party activists and officeholders. It played a role in certain purges and carried out some minor purge operations on its own. In 1935 the Central Control Commission merged with one branch of the newly divided Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and became the Commission on Party Control. This commission took over the duties of the RKI and not only participated in the purges of the later thirties, but also carried out efforts to limit their effect on the party rank and file. See also n. 26 above.

46. Ian Ernestovich Rudzutak (1887-1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet leader who served on the Central Committee from 1920, became one of Central Committee's secretaries in 1923, and held the position of People's Commissar of Transport from 1924 to 1930. After 1930 Rudzutak headed the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and the Central Control Commission and played a key role in the 1933 party purge; he chaired the Central Purge Commission and reported on the results of the purge at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. Rudzutak was something of a faceless bureaucrat, and to the degree that his personality emerges from the grayish blur of inner-party politics, it is only as a hard-core Bolshevik stalwart. Despite his loyalty to Stalin, Rudzutak was arrested in 1938 and disappeared into the Gulag. A recent Soviet consideration is in G. Trukan, "Ian Ernestovich Rudzutak," Agitator 8 (1988).

47. The party purge of 1933-34 was called a chistka , or "cleansing." Garry's prediction that it would eliminate a third of the party's membership proved too high, as the figure was closer to 22 percent (including those reduced from "candidate" membership to "sympathizer" and not including those whose expulsions were overturned on appeal). Though many oppositionists and "class-alien elements" were hounded out during this operation, equally strong goals were to expel those who were not models of hard work at their jobs as well as anyone who failed to fulfill statutory membership requirements, such as payment of dues, attendance at meetings, and carrying out of regular party assignments. Eugene Lyons wrote a perceptive article about the chistka when he left the Soviet Union; see "The 'Purging' of Russia's Communists,'' Literary Digest 117 (17 March 1934): 14, 30-31. See also J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, the Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 38-57. A different interpretation is offered in Michael Gelb, "Mass Politics under Stalin: Party Purges and Labor Productivity Campaigns in Leningrad, 1928-1941" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 21-109.

48. The Revolutionary Council of Labor and Defense (STO), was a state commission subordinate to the Council of People's Commissars. Founded in 1920 (and reorganized in 1923) to coordinate and supervise the work of party and state agencies involved in industrialization and military development, its broad powers and responsibilities were vaguely defined, though it could issue decrees binding on all agencies except the Council of People's Commissars. It was abolished by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR in 1937.

49. Witkin's analysis of the forces supporting and opposing Soviet recognition suggests his sympathy with the former; but many American engineers and technical specialists who had worked in the USSR testified against recognition on the basis of the widespread use of forced labor in Soviet industry and agriculture.

See House of Representatives, Prohibition of Importation of Goods Produced by Convict, Forced, or Indentured Labor: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means on H.R. 15597, H.R, 15927, and H.R. 16517 , 71st Cong., 3rd sess., 27 and 28 January 1931; House of Representatives, Embargo on Soviet Products: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means on H.R. 16035 , 71st Cong., 3rd sess., 19, 20, and 21 February 1931; Prohibition of Soviet Imports: Remarks of Hon. Tasker L. Oddie of Nevada in the Senate of the United States , 15 March 1932 (with fifty-six pages of appended documents); and Barring Importation of Russian Anthracite: Conference of Treasury Department , Bureau of Customs, 24 March 1932. Unpublished depositions of American engineers are in the Hoover Institution Archives, Clarence T. Starr Collection. Apparently, neither the moral nor the protectionist argument outweighed the temptation of doing business with such a large country. Similar debates raged in other countries. See also Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 211-40.

50. William Henry Chamberlin (1897-1969) was the Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor from 1922 to 1934. At first a sympathizer with the Soviet regime, Chamberlin later grew embittered at the suffering he witnessed. He authored many books, including the classic The Russian Revolution , 2 vols. (Princeton, 1987 [1935]). See also Russia's Iron Age (Boston, 1937), and Soviet Russia: A Living Record and a History (Boston, 1930). Journalists were among the best-informed experts on Soviet affairs in Witkin's day, and they had relatively greater influence on public opinion and government policy than they do today. Witkin's accounts of his relationships with several American journalists are a valuable sidelight to his story.

51. Clara Zetkin (née Eissner, 1857-1933) was a German-born feminist, socialist, and later, Communist. As a member of the left wing of the German Social Democrats, she fought for a greater role for women in the party as well as for broader citizenship rights such as the vote; she opposed World War I. She adopted Marxism under the influence of the Russian émigré Ossip Zetkin, later her common-law husband. With Rosa Luxemburg she was one of the founders of the Spartacus League and later of the German Communist Party. She was elected regularly to the Reichstag from 1920 to her death but spent most of her time in the USSR, where she collaborated with Lenin in the Communist International, took part in the International Society in Aid to Revolutionaries, and supported official Soviet women's organizations. Her influence in Russia declined with that of the women's movement in general in the years after Lenin's death, but she actively opposed the growing Nazi movement in Weimar Germany. To the end of her life faithful to Marxism and the goal of a Soviet Germany, Zetkin was buried in the Kremlin wall.

52. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (1869-1939) was Lenin's wife and comrade in the revolutionary underground. Though primarily known for her association with Lenin, Krupskaya's work was significant in its own right. One of her early assignments in the post-revolutionary years was to create a system of restricted sections in Soviet libraries. Later she emerged as a sponsor of the anti-illiteracy campaign and as one of the architects of the Soviet educational system.

Krupskaya made feeble efforts to restrain Stalin's rise in the mid-1920S, but in 1927 she abandoned the opposition. In addition to acting a ceremonial role as Lenin's widow and working in the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, Krupskaya helped to create the Soviet scouting organization, the Young Pioneers, and enthusiastically promoted the cult of Pavlik Morozov, the little boy who turned his father in to the secret police. Despite her faith in the Revolution, Krupskaya's last years would appear tragic, as she watched many of Lenin's (and her) closest comrades perish in Stalin's purges. See her Reminiscences of Lenin (New York, 1960) and Soviet Woman: A Citizen with Equal Rights (Moscow, 1937). See also Robert H. McNeil, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, 1972); Lev Goncharov and Ludmila Kuznetskaya, "Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Founder of Soviet Public Education," School and Society 94 (April 1971): 235-37; and Bertram Wolfe, "Krupskaia Purges the People's Libraries," in Wolfe, Revolution and Reality: Essays on the Origin and Fate of the Soviet System (Chapel Hill, 1981), pp. 98-112.

53. Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872-1952) was a revolutionary, party official, and diplomat. She joined the revolutionary movement before the turn of the century and was eventually attracted to the moderate wing of Russian socialism; during World War I she was drawn to the Bolsheviks by their anti-war stance. Despite her strong interest in "the woman question," Kollontai criticized "bourgeois" feminism, arguing that only a proletarian revolution could liberate women. Though she wrote extensively on women's problems, her pleas for the party to establish special organs devoted to women workers fell on deaf ears. After the Bolshevik Revolution Kollontai worked on legislation that eliminated women's legal disabilities, protected women workers, and restricted child labor. Kollontai joined the opposition to the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, but was drawn back into party politics by an invitation to organize women's departments ( zhenotdely ) in the party apparatus; she also worked in other programs to help integrate women into public life. After Kollontai's participation in the "Workers' Opposition" of 1921, the leadership assigned her to a diplomatic post in Norway to remove her from affairs in Moscow. Subsequently Kollontai served as ambassador to Mexico, Norway, and Sweden. She retired in 1945. See The Love of Worker Bees , a novel (London, 1977); The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (New York, 1971); and Selected Writings , edited by Alix Holt (Westport, 1977). See also Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington, 1979), and Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: The Lonely Struggle of the Woman Who Defied Lenin (New York, 1980).

54. Since the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship, the secret police has had offices at all significant Soviet enterprises and institutions, whose purpose is to maintain a network of informers and keep records on the attitudes of employees. Under Gorbachev their number and activities have been curtailed.

55. Where membership was not tied to a particular geographical locality, or when either security considerations or severe resistance to Communist methods required the heightened presence of the OGPU, the party organization in certain institutions was headed not by an ordinary party committee but by a politotdel , or political department. Politotdely were found in the military, on the railroads,

in maritime and riverine transport, and in the countryside in the machine-tractor stations (MTS). Created after it was found during the initial stages of collectivization that the collective and state farms were not reliable instruments for extracting grain, the MTS allocated all machinery and fuel upon which the collective and soviet farms depended; those farms which did not turn in enough produce might find themselves without fuel or equipment. Because supporters of the regime in the countryside were few and far between, the MTS, where most rural Communists were concentrated, served as bastions of the regime. Party members at the MTS were united under politotdely rather than under ordinary party committees. Witkin's description of the politotdely as organs of the OGPU is technically incorrect, as they were party agencies; nonetheless, they were reinforced with the toughest OGPU men and were feared in the villages as extensions of the secret police. See R. Miller, One Hundred Thousand Tractors: The MTS and the Development of Controls in Soviet Agriculture (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), and Daniel Thorniley, The Rise and Fall of the Rural Soviet Communist Party, 1927-1939 (New York, 1938).

56. For more on the varying responses of Western journalists to the famine and to Soviet efforts to cover it up, see Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow , pp. 308-21, and Report to Congress of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine , pp. 151-84. On Louis Fischer, see Crowl, Angels in Stalin's Paradise . Maurice Hindus produced many books about his Soviet experience, all of them justifying collectivization as necessary, if cruel. Interesting personality sketches of Lyons, Chamberlin, Barnes, Duranty, and others are in James Abbe, "Men of Cablese," New Outlook 162 (December 1933): 27-32. A fellow traveller, Abbe was appointed to a commission of sympathetic foreigners who were to visit the Don industrial region and testify they had seen no forced labor. Abbe later explained to Lyons, "Sure, we saw no forced labor. When we approached anything that looked like it, we all closed our eyes tight and kept them closed. We weren't going to lie about it" (Lyons, Assignment in Utopia , p. 367). After being expelled in 1933 for photographing in restricted areas, Abbe published a noteworthy album, I Photograph Russia (New York, 1934).

57. Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich (b. 1893), a Bolshevik revolutionary and prominent Soviet state and party official, was, with Molotov, one of Stalin's most loyal lieutenants. Kaganovich became a member of the Central Committee in 1924 and of the Politburo in 1934. In that year he was appointed head of the Commission on Party Control, in which capacity he helped carry out the purges of the mid-and late thirties. At various times Kaganovich also served as head of the Ukrainian party organization, head of the Moscow party organization, People's Commissar of Transport, and People's Commissar of Heavy Industry. Known as Stalin's fixer, Kaganovich instituted a reign of terror on the railroads during his tenure as transport commissar. As Witkin noted, Kaganovich was one of the few Bolshevik leaders besides Stalin to have a sense of humor (though a cruel one) and his pronouncements are often eminently quotable. A diehard even after Stalin's death, Kaganovich was removed from power in 1957 by Nikita Khrushchev. Though since that time Kaganovich has led a reclusive life, he recently granted an interview in which he advocated extreme Russian nationalist and anti-Semitic views (his own Jewish background notwithstanding); see "'Pamiat' Kaganovicha"

in Argumenty i fakty , 9-15 June 1990. On Kaganovich's biography see Medvedev, All Stalin's Men , pp. 113-39. Stewart Kahan's Wolf of the Kremlin (New York, 1987) is poorly written and historically inaccurate, but it is based in part on interesting information from an interview with Kaganovich, a distant relative of the author's.

58. Maxim Gorky (pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868-1936), a novelist and playwright, first drew world attention as a young man for his stories of the ordinary folk he met on his wanderings through Russia. His 1902 play, The Lower Depths , is a classic portrayal of Russia's destitute. Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, In the World , and My Universities (1913-23), is considered a masterpiece. Arrested for his support of the revolutionaries in 1905, Gorky was released in response to world outcry. He traveled in Europe and America and then settled in Italy. His negative portrayal of New York in City of the Yellow Devil (1906), a fruit of these early travels, served as anti-American propaganda during and after the Stalin years (favorable comments about Herbert Hoover and American relief during the Russian famine of 1921 and 1922 were expunged from all editions of his works). Though not himself a Bolshevik, Gorky channeled financial support to Lenin. He returned to Russia before World War I at the invitation of the government. After 1917 he adopted a critical stance toward the Bolshevik dictatorship, and he organized relief for destitute writers during the Civil War. Embittered, Gorky left Russia again in 1921, but remained unhappy in Italy, and, beginning in 1928, he returned to Russia for increasingly lengthy stays. He seems to have been converted to the Stalinist line—perhaps by the seeming successes of Stalin's Five-Year Plan—and played a leading role in Soviet literary politics, serving as head of the new Union of Soviet Writers from 1934. Gorky led an authors' collective that produced a justification of forced labor as a means to reeducate criminals, Belomor: An Account of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (1934). Though Gorky is considered the founder of socialist realism, his only explicitly revolutionary novel, The Mother (1906), is tendentious; his novels The Artamanovs' Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (4 vols., 1927-36) are known for their convincing characters. Gorky died during an operation in 1936. The doctors and the head of the secret police, Genrikh Iagoda, were later accused of his murder and executed. Rumors that Stalin arranged Gorky's death persist; though apocryphal, they are the theme of a novel, The Fall of a Titan , by Igor Gouzenko (New York, 1954). Gorky is the subject of an extensive biographical and critical literature.

59. Grigori Konstantinovich ("Sergo") Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937), a Bolshevik revolutionary from Georgia, helped subdue the Caucasus during and after the Civil War. He served on the Central Committee from 1912 and in the Politburo from 1930. While head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and the Central Control Commission (from 1926 to 1930), he participated in the elimination of inner-party opposition, the party and state purges of 1929, and the first show trials of industrial specialists (he was a strong supporter of Stalin). He chaired the All-Union Council of National Economy and then the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (1930-37), where he showed great organizational ability and even statesmanship. Fragmentary evidence suggests Ordzhoni-

kidze, as one of the implementors of the five-year plans, eventually comprehended the staggering cost of breakneck industrialization under Stalin and the foolishness of the Stalinist policy of intimidating, repressing, and scapegoating technical and managerial specialists. By many accounts Ordzhonikidze strove to protect numerous individuals from harassment and repression. Apparently driven to suicide by the purges of his subordinates, the arrest of his brother, and his despair at the gathering destruction of the political, technical, and cultural elite of the country, he is the subject of extensive hagiographical literature. Ordzhonikidze's failure to answer Ernst May's letter about housing at Magnitogorsk contradicts the experience of other engineers and specialists who appealed to him; it is possible that May's request was deflected, or that it simply disappeared in the flood of similar requests.

60. The perjorative term kulak originally applied to wealthy peasants and village moneylenders. In the Marxist literature of the 1920s it denoted the more affluent class of peasants. During collectivization the term came to be applied to all peasants who had over two cows, more than the bare minimum of land, a brick house, or a tin roof. Eventually any peasant who spoke out against the collective farms or resisted collectivization in any way might also be labeled a kulak. Those too poor to be categorized as kulaks came under the newly invented term subkulak . A policy of "dekulakization," or liquidation of the kulaks as a class, was adopted in 1930 and led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of peasant families to labor camps or exile in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far North. Hundreds of thousands perished in cattle cars en route or in the miserable conditions they were forced to live in when they arrived. Dekulakization was a historic disaster that destroyed the most industrious elements in the countryside. Kulaks and their children suffered civil disabilities, such as exclusion from higher education, until the 1936 constitution gave all classes equal rights. See Moshe Lewin's essay "Who Was the Soviet Kulak?" in his The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985).

61. Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov (né Wallach, 1876-1951), a Bolshevik revolutionary, and later a state and party official, served as Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs in the 1920s and as Commissar of Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1939. Known for his disarmament proposals, advocacy of collective security against Nazi aggression, and for negotiating U.S. recognition, he was replaced by Molotov during the discussions leading to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, since he was a Jew. He served as ambassador to the United States from the Nazi invasion in 1941 until 1943, when he once again was appointed Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Litvinov was also a member of the Central Committee and deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He retired in 1946. See Hugh Phillips, Between Revolution and the West: A Political Biography of Maksim M. Litvinov (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1985; forthcoming as a book). See also Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930-1933: The Impact of the Depression (New York, 1983), and The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security (New York, 1984). The published diary, Notes for a Journal (New York, 1955), is spurious; on reminiscences Litvinov is known to have written, but

which were subsequently lost, see Elena Danielson, "The Elusive Litvinov Memoirs," Slavic Review 48, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 477-83.

62. Romain Rolland (1866-1944), the French novelist, Nobel Prize laureate, pacifist, and social critic, wrote numerous plays, as well as studies of Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Jean Jaurès, and others. His most famous work is the multi-volume novel Jean Christophe , based in part on the life of Beethoven, in part on the author's. One of the most popular writers of his day, Rolland is no longer widely read. Much of his fame derived from his outspoken condemnation of European civilization during and after World War I. His defense of the Soviet Union was part and parcel of this condemnation. It was natural that an idealist such as Witkin should come to regard Rolland highly. In 1937 the American novelist and literary critic Waldo Frank suggested that Rolland form an international commission with Bertrand Russell (see n. 63 below) and others to investigate the charges against the accused in the Moscow show trials (Frank, Memoirs , p. 186). Such a commission was indeed formed, under the direction of the American philosopher John Dewey, but Rolland not only refused to take part, he also denounced efforts to defend Trotsky (who was assassinated in his Mexican exile in 1940) and the other accused. (Frank himself turned down Dewey's invitation to take part in the countertrial because he felt "they were all convinced beforehand" of the defendants' innocence, and their verdict would "mean nothing"; in any case he soon broke with the Communists in disgust at the Stalinist witch-hunts [ibid., p. 192]). Not long after Witkin and Lyons left him in 1934, Rolland journeyed to Russia, where he met not only his friend Gorky, but also Stalin himself. In private he successfully interceded on behalf of the Trotskyist novelist Victor Serge, then in Siberian exile. But he remained enamored of the USSR's "invincible ascent" and stifled his urge to speak out, fearing "reactionaries'' would exploit his words. In 1938 Rolland wrote Stalin twice on behalf of a Leningrad doctor (a friend of twenty years) imprisoned eight months without being charged. Gorky was no longer alive, and Stalin failed to reply. In public Rolland continued to express orthodox Communist opinions on the witch trials and even in private correspondence wrote, "I have no occasion to doubt the condemnations, which strike down Kamenev and Zinoviev, persons long despised, twice renegades and traitors.... I do not see how one can reject as invented or extorted the declarations made publicly by the accused." But in his private journal he noted, "This is a regime of the most absolute uncontrolled arbitrariness," with no trace of liberty or human rights (cited in Caute, Fellow Travellers , pp. 130-31). Only in 1939, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, did Rolland break quietly with his Communist and fellow-traveling associates. See David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley, 1988). On the Dewey Commission and various left-wing responses to it see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 (New York, 1963), pp. 363-82, 393. See also n. 32 to the Introduction.

which were subsequently lost, see Elena Danielson, "The Elusive Litvinov Memoirs," Slavic Review 48, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 477-83.

63. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), an English ethical and logical philosopher, and from the 1920s an internationally recognized pacifist, dissenter, and social critic, was an insightful observer of Soviet affairs from the Revolution onward. Freda Utley, a British Communist who lived in the USSR for many years before the arrest of her Soviet husband in 1936, recalls that Russell tried to dissuade her

from Marxism and Leninism: "Nor would I accept the truth of his Theory and Practice of Bolshevism . This book, written in 1920, is uncannily prophetic of the Russia I was later to know." On a visit home in 1931, Utley argued that the terrible outcome of the Revolution was the fault of Stalin's deviation from the Leninist path. "But Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say, 'No! Freda, can't you understand, even now, that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin's premises and Lenin's acts?'" (Utley, The Dream We Lost: Soviet Russia Then and Now [New York, 1940], pp. 10-11). Utley's memoirs, Lost Illusion , offer a highly interesting picture of life in the USSR at the time Witkin lived there. Russell wrote the introduction.

64. Sergei Mironovich Kirov (né Kostrikov, 1886-1934), a Bolshevik revolutionary and subsequently a Soviet state and party leader, worked and was arrested several times in the revolutionary underground in the Caucasus. He helped establish Soviet power in the Caucasus and Astrakhan (on the Volga) during the Civil War. He served on the Central Committee from 1922 and as party leader of Azerbaidzhan from 1921 to 1925. In 1925 he was sent with other Stalin supporters to Leningrad to destroy the Zinoviev opposition. In 1926 he replaced Zinoviev as the head of the Leningrad party organization, after which he was promoted to deputy member of the Politburo; he became a full member in 1930. Known as a tough but accessible leader, Kirov enjoyed the reputation of a populist. An effective orator, highly popular in party circles, at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 Kirov received more votes than Stalin for Central Committee Secretary. His assassination on 1 December 1934 was most likely arranged by Stalin, who feared Kirov as a man around whom discontented party members might rally. Kirov's assassination provided the occasion for emergency legislation giving the secret police broad new powers, and for a campaign against supposed enemies of the state. It is often considered the beginning of the Great Purge. Witkin's description of Kirov as the "virtual dictator of the northern region" should read "northwestern region," since the area included vast territories extending from Murmansk in the north to Pskov in the south but extended no further east than the western shores of the White Sea. Kirov aggressively promoted development of the resources of Karelia and the White Sea region. He is the subject of an extensive official hagiography. See Robert Conquest's study of the assassination, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Oxford, 1989).

65. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was a Bolshevik revolutionary, a participant in the October Revolution, and from 1919 Chair of the All-Russian (later All-Union) Soviet Executive Committee, or titular head of the government. He became a member of the party Central Committee in 1919 and joined the Politburo in 1926. From 1938 to 1946 he served as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Thus, Kalinin was often referred to as the president of the Soviet Union. Kalinin remained a loyal supporter of Stalin, though he was reputed to have privately sympathized with Bukharin's "right opposition." Kalinin was popularly regarded as "a man close to the people," and he listened to thousands of appeals on behalf of individuals arrested during the Great Purge; in a few cases he assisted, but, as little more than a helpless pawn himself, for the most part he had to acquiesce in Stalin's repressions. In 1937 Kalinin's wife was arrested and

tortured into signing false depositions against him. For several years he was held under virtual house arrest, with agents of the NKVD living in his apartment, allegedly "for his own protection." But Kalinin was never arrested, and his wife was released a few days before his death; after his death she was re-arrested and sent into exile. Kalinin died of natural causes. Under Stalin as under all of his successors, the official literature has treated Kalinin as a hero.

66. Konstantin Aleksandrovich Umansky (1902-1945), a Soviet journalist and diplomat, worked for TASS (Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union) in Rome, Paris, and Geneva from 1923 to 1930. In 1931 he was promoted to chief of the Press Department of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, in which capacity he was responsible for censoring the reports of Western journalists. From 1936 to 1939 he was counselor and then chargé d'affaires at the Soviet embassy in Washington. From 1939 to 1943 he served as ambassador first to the United States, and subsequently to Mexico. He died in a plane crash on 25 January 1945 during a flight to Costa Rica.

67. G. E. Prokofiev (d. 1938), the Second Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, was one of the most important officials of the secret police and a close associate of Genrikh Iagoda (1891-1938), who headed the secret police from 1934 to 1936. When Iagoda was demoted to People's Commissar of Communications, Prokofiev was demoted to First Deputy People's Commissar of Communications. Arrested as a member of the "rightist conspiracy," he was executed along with his boss. Witkin's contact with him remains unclear.

68. Harpo Marx's Russian adventures are recorded in his reminiscences, Harpo Speaks! (with Rowland Barber; London, 1961), pp. 299-337. The most amusing was his dubious reception at Soviet customs:

From the trunk they removed four hundred knives, two revolvers, three stilettos, half a dozen bottles marked POISON, and a collection of red wigs and false beards, mustaches, and hands.... Would I please explain why I was transporting weapons and disguises? I told them they were all props for my act. Act? What act? I said I had come to Russia to put on a show. Americans do not entertain in Russia, they said. [Marx was the first American entertainer booked after U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1933.]

Marx had further difficulty explaining his harp and the three hundred rubles given to him earlier by a fellow passenger (it is forbidden to bring rubles into the USSR). When the growing crowd of inspectors and guards began to shake their heads and argue heatedly among themselves, Harpo "didn't need an interpreter.... They were debating whether to have me shot now or wait for morning, when the firing squad would have clearer aim and would waste fewer bullets" (ibid., pp. 302-3). Marx was befriended by Eugene Lyons and Walter Duranty during his stay in Moscow (ibid., pp. 314, 330). He performed in a number of Russian cities.

69. Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev (1888-1935) was expelled from school when he joined the revolutionary movement in 1904; he was subsequently arrested many times. During the Civil War he served as military commissar on several fronts. He supported Stalin against Trotsky and was promoted to the

Politburo in 1927. He headed the party's Central Control Commission from 1923 to 1926, the Supreme Council of National Economy from 1926 to 1930, and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) from 1930. He died of natural causes in 1935, but persistent rumors suggest Stalin had him killed. Official historiography from Stalin's day to the present treats Kuibyshev as a hero of socialist construction.

70. Grigorii Fedorovich Grinko (1890-1938), a Ukrainian revolutionary and Bolshevik from 1920, held a series of positions in the Ukrainian government and party apparatus, as well as all-union positions during the 1920s. He became People's Commissar of Finance in 1930 and wrote a famous pamphlet for foreign consumption, The Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union: A Political Interpretation (New York, 1930). Dismissed from his posts in 1937, he was tried in 1938 with the "right oppositionists" Bukharin, Rykov, and others. Forced to confess to being a "direct agent and spy of the fascist powers," Grinko was shot, probably on 15 March 1938. He has been rehabilitated posthumously.

71. Eugene Lyons, Moscow Carrousel (New York, 1935), pp. 347-48. This book contains many interesting vignettes but reflects the author's continuing reluctance to "tell."

Before submitting it to the publishers, I went through the manuscript carefully and deleted words, phrases, entire sections which might offend communist sensibilities too sharply. I was still under compelling psychological pressure to save face for the revolution. There was scarcely a hint in the book of the towering horrors which I have recounted in the present volume. More than that, I wrote in pages of apology, putting them into the mouths of fictitious Russians, to blunt the effect of "unfriendly" passages. The book stands as a monument to my indecision and cowardice; I soon came to feel ashamed of its mealy-mouthed evasions.

Despite this, liberal reviewers were "appalled" at Lyons' book, and "what the communist reviewers did to me can well be imagined!" ( Assignment in Utopia , pp. 630-31).

72. The Seventeenth Party Congress, also known as the "Congress of Victors," was an epochal political event at which the triumph of Stalinism was celebrated after the completion of the First Five-Year Plan, the collectivization of agriculture, the end of the famine of 1932/33, and the defeat of all organized opposition groups. Sergei Kirov received more votes than Stalin to the party secretariat (there were several secretaries), potentially making him eligible to replace Stalin as General Secretary. A few months after the congress, Kirov was assassinated, most likely at Stalin's behest. A majority of the delegates to the congress, and two-thirds of the Central Committee they elected, perished in the Great Purge.

73. See n. 50 above.

74. Witkin wrote these lines before the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, after which the Red Army occupied the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and parts of Romania, Poland, and Finland. Despite this, Witkin's characterization remains partly correct, for the USSR was most persis-

tent in its efforts to prevent war in the 1930s. Stalin turned to Germany only after efforts to secure an alliance with Britain and France proved fruitless, largely due to these countries' obstructionism, procrastination, and appeasement of Hitler.

75. Karl Bernardovich Radek (n2 Sobelsohn, 1885-1947?) was a revolutionary who joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, held a succession of significant posts in the new Communist administration, and gained prominence as one of the Soviet Union's most prolific and wittiest foreign affairs commentators. An adherent of the Trotskyist opposition in the 1920s, Radek was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 but reinstated after renouncing his former views and publishing an abject panegyric to Stalin. Brought to trial during the 1937 purge of former Trotskyists, Radek was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. His subsequent fate remains cloaked in mystery. See biographies by Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford, 1970) and Jim Tuck, Engine of Mischief: An Analytical Biography of Karl Radek (New York, 1988).

76. The last page of Witkin's manuscript was damaged. Eugene Lyons retyped the page, adding a note at the end: "After 30-odd years, thank God, only the last page has been damaged. I have just copied it as best I could.—Eugene Lyons, Oct. 14, 1967."