When Stalin learned about the incident, he immediately ordered the Georgian “authorities” to arrest all the inhabitants of the village, except for children and the elderly and infirm, and send them to Kazakhstan on charges of “rebellion against the government”.
“We will show them to whom this lake belongs.” The “father of the people” said gloatingly.
Bokor did not take part in the preparation of the Moscow trial, the work of defending Stalin and other Politburo members was more important. But presumably believing that the NKVD staff who participated in the trial would be awarded medals, Pauker was determined to get a piece of the action for himself. He volunteered to arrest several former members of the opposition.
In the summer of 1937, when most of the leaders of the Ministry of the Interior had already been arrested, I happened to meet a secret spy of the Foreign Office in a Paris café. This was also a man of Hungarian origin, an old friend of Bokel. I thought he had just arrived from Moscow, and since I wanted to get the latest news about the purges in the country, I went over and sat down at his table.
“How is it going with Pauker, is everything all right?” I asked jokingly, although I by no means believed that the wave of arrests would touch Paokel.
“How can you make such a joke?” The Hungarian fought with a sense of aggravation and anger. “Bokor is more important to Stalin than you think. Stalin was closer to him than a friend …… than a brother!”
By the way, this led the Hungarian to tell me also about such an incident. On December 20, 1936, to commemorate the establishment of the purge committee – the State Political Security Directorate – the Department of the NKVD, Stalin hosted a small banquet for the leaders of this department. Among those invited to the banquet were Yerev, Frinovsky, Pauker and several other Cheka personnel. When the attendees were almost drunk, Pauker did an improvisation for Stalin. He asked two of his colleagues to pretend to be prison guards and hold him hostage, while he himself played the role of Zinoviev, who was being taken to the basement to be executed by firing squad. The desperate “Zinoviev” hanging on the shoulders of two “guards”, legs dragging on the floor, mouth loudly wailing, full of fear in the eyes. When he reached the middle of the room, “Zinoviev” fell to his knees and clung to the boots of one of the guards, calling out in terror: “Please …… For God’s sake, comrades …… please call Joseph Visarionovich!”
Stalin watched the show and laughed. The guests, seeing how much he enjoyed the play, scrambled to ask Paulkle to do it again. Paul Kerr did so. This Time, Stalin was laughing like crazy, holding his stomach and bending over. Instead of kneeling down, he stood up straight, stretched out his hands to the ceiling and shouted: “Listen to me, Judea, our God is the same God!” Stalin could not support himself any longer, and he broke into laughter and had to gesture to Bockel to stop the show.
In July 1937, we heard rumors abroad that Bockel seemed to have been relieved of his duties as head of Stalin’s guard. At the end of the year, I heard that the heads of the Kremlin Guard had all been replaced. At that time I thought that Stalin would spare Paokel, who not only shared his appetite, but also had effectively defended his Life for fifteen years. However, even with this man, Stalin did not show any humanity. In March 1938, during the third Moscow trial, Yagoda said in his own confession that Paul Kerr was a German spy. When I heard this, I understood: Paul Kerr was no longer on earth.
Postscript
It is clear from the introduction to this book that the author feels fully condemned himself. He left the Stalinist regime only in 1938, when Stalin’s bloody purges had reached their peak. For Orlov, who had been involved in Stalin’s secret politics, it was not a bad thing after all to be able to separate himself from his past misdeeds. …… However, he would obviously have continued to work for that regime, even though he had realized that it was committing crimes, had Stalin’s and Yezhov’s butchers’ knives not directly threatened his life. From this point of view, Orlov (and also Balmin, Raskolnikov, and Krivitsky) is less honorable than Stalin’s enemies like Viktor Kravchenko, who broke away from Stalin’s regime not because of the danger to his life.
However, can we blame Orlov for cowardice and procrastination? No, it is thanks to Orlov’s sway that we now have such precious incriminating evidence about those bloody years. Moreover, it is with these rare evidences that we can today learn the secrets of a series of major events from the inside, from the heart of that unparalleled terrorist organ in human history.
In fact, Orlov knew much more in his heart than what he wrote out in his book. Taking this into account, we can better understand why he feared for his life at all times. He knew, for example, about the Soviet Union’s creation of counterfeit currency to flood the American market; he contributed to Stalin’s theft of Spanish Gold reserves; he knew about an attempted assassination of Trotsky and reported it to the latter by anonymous letter. In the same way he was able to warn other people who were on Stalin’s blacklist.
In general, he was apparently well aware of all the major operations carried out by Stalin abroad, and they were carried out in exactly the same way as by Hitler. The only difference was that Hitler carried out these terrorist activities only in countries that were at war with Germany, whereas Stalin was not even subject to such restrictions.
In 1953, after Stalin’s death, Orlov intended to publish his book in the United States, and at the same time wrote an afterword that was not included in the Russian edition. In the postscript; he gave a basic analysis of the situation that emerged in the Soviet Union with the Malinkov-Belia-Molotov-Khrushchev group in power.
“Not possessing the great prestige and authority of Stalin, Malinkov was bound to be busy trying to consolidate his power and cobble together a powerful empire composed of diverse peoples and meant to govern a third of humanity. History has given the Western democracies a respite during which the free world can be transformed in its favor. If the West had let this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity pass, it would have faced the danger of the total destruction of the entire human civilization.”
As you can see, Orlov was still very perceptive when it came to major political issues. However, when he had just left the Soviet Union and became a full-fledged individual among 150 million Americans, he showed a strange naivete in his behavior and dealings, despite the fact that he had worked for decades in the secret reconnaissance agency and had successfully completed various responsible tasks entrusted to him by the State Political Security Directorate and the Ministry of the Interior.
This strange naiveté began to manifest itself in the first active act taken by Orlov after his arrival in the United States. Readers will recall that he wrote a letter to Stalin and Yezhov. Orlov, who had a cousin who had moved to New York before the revolution, took the letter, drifted across the ocean to Paris, and delivered it to the Soviet Embassy in France. The letter was forwarded to its recipient. A fugitive, a former member of the State Security Committee, a general in the Soviet secret intelligence service, promised not to expose Stalin’s crimes as long as his mother and mother-in-law were not persecuted by the NKVD.
How surprising is this “agreement”! You know, Orlov, unlike Stalin, could not check whether the latter had fulfilled the conditions he proposed. I have no doubt that Stalin, immediately after receiving the letter from the fugitive, gave the order to dispose of his mother. Did he not know Stalin well enough? It is unbelievable!
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