Immediately upon arriving in Canada, I wrote a long letter to Stalin and sent a copy of the reply to Yezhov at the same time. In the letter I told Stalin, whom I had known since 1924, what I thought of his system. But the main point of the letter was not this. My purpose was to save the lives of our two mothers. I knew that it would be impossible to plead with Stalin not to do anything to them, to arouse his compassion. I chose another path, one that would be suitable for dealing with Stalin. I summoned up all my courage and issued a warning to Stalin: if he dared to take out his evil on my mother, I would publicize all his crimes to the world. To prove that this was not just empty words to frighten him, I drew up a list of his crimes and attached it to the letter.
In addition to this, I reminded him that even if I were to be killed by his agents, my lawyers would be quick to disclose his crimes. As I knew Stalin well, I was sure that he would not dare to regard my warning as child’s play.
I was involved in a gamble, a gamble that endangered my own life and the lives of my entire family. But I was convinced. Stalin would certainly postpone his revenge on me. He would not dare to take revenge until he had achieved his goal, that is to say, until he had kidnapped me and forced me to hand over the secret book, and of course he would spare no effort to satisfy his thirst for revenge, but only after he was convinced that his crime would never be exposed.
On August 13, 1938, exactly one month after fleeing Spain, I arrived in the United States of America with an entry visa given to me by the head of the American chargé d’affaires in Ottawa.
When I arrived in the United States, I immediately went to Washington with my lawyer. I submitted a statement to the head of immigration there, declaring my disassociation from the government of my native country and applying for political asylum.
On the other hand, Stalbrand’s pursuit of me began immediately. And it continued for fourteen years. In this contest, Stalin used both a strong political offensive and a large number of secret agents. My side, on the other hand, coped only with my own foresight and ability to recognize traps, and the fearlessness and bravery of my loved ones, my wife and daughter, who were not afraid of sacrifice.
For all these years I have avoided writing to the mother of both of us and to our friends in the Soviet Union, lest their lives be endangered. We knew nothing about their situation either.
At the beginning of 1953, my wife and I both concluded that our mother was no longer alive, so we decided to take the book for publication. In February, I began to negotiate with an editor of Life magazine to publish certain chapters. But while I was negotiating, Stalin died. I was dismayed that he could not live a little longer, so that he could see his crimes made public and realize that all his efforts to conceal them had been in vain.
Stalin’s death doesn’t mean I’m safe for the rest of my life. The Kremlin, in order to preserve its secrets, will still spare no effort to come after me, if only to police those who want to follow my example.
Alexander Orlov.
New York, June 1952.
Chapter 1 – Defiance
On December 1, 1934, a young communist, Leonid Nikolaev, infiltrated the Smolny Palace and killed Sergei Milonovich Kirov, a member of the Central Politburo and a leading figure in the Leningrad party organization, with a single shot from a revolver. The murderer was arrested on the spot. The Moscow authorities immediately set up a special task force, headed by Stalin himself, which travelled to Leningrad to investigate the circumstances of the murder.
The details of this assassination have not been made public to this day. Who was this Nikolayev? How did he manage to blend into the heavily guarded Smolny Palace without anyone noticing? How did he manage to get close to Kirov? What compelled him to take this desperate step: a political murder or a personal vendetta? The case is shrouded in secrecy by a variety of questions.
The Government’s first communiqué asserted that Kirov’s murderer was one of many White Guard terrorists who had fled to the Soviet Union from Finland, Lithuania and Poland. A few days later, the Soviet press reported again. The Ministry of the Interior had arrested and executed one hundred and four White Guard terrorists. A campaign against the White Guard organizations “harboring in the West” was launched like a storm, encouraged by the press (the first of which was the Union of All Russian Soldiers). These organizations are said to have sent agents to the Soviet Union more than once to carry out terrorist acts.
Such categorically worded communiqués, and especially the execution of 104 terrorists, cannot but lead one to believe that the investigating agencies had established with certainty the involvement of the White Russian exile organization in the Kirov murder. However, on the sixteenth day after the murder, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. New accounts in the Belgian press placed the blame for Kirov’s murder on the party’s Toddy opposition. On the same day, as if on command, all the newspapers mercilessly opened fire on the leaders of the original opposition. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and many other members of the former opposition were all arrested. The journalist Karl Radek, who was never far from Stalin’s right and left in those days, wrote in the “News” newspaper, “Every member of the party understands that the party will crush these remnants with an iron fist …… they will be crushed, destroyed and swept off the face of the earth!”
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