In July 1937, Mari received a recall order from Moscow. On his way Home, he met a colleague in Paris and they talked about the ongoing purge of the Cheka in the country (which was natural at the Time). Mari’s mood was very depressed because it was at such a moment that he had to return to Moscow. He had already learned that three of his best friends in the NKVD – Steinbruck, Sili and Bodsko – had been arrested. Like him, they had all joined the revolution after being captured in World War I. Sensing that he was on the verge of disaster, Mari said somberly, “I knew that I, a priest from the past, had no hope of surviving. But I am determined to go back, and I must not let anyone say that this priest is really a spy.”
I never understood what compelled Mari to go back to Moscow. You know, unlike many of his colleagues in Paris, he had nothing to bind his hands. Loyalty to his country and fear for the fate of his relatives played no role for him, because his homeland was Hungary, not Russia. He had no relatives in the Soviet Union, so was he desperate enough to take the risk out of his professional habit of dying? Or did he think that a man who had gone from priest to Cheka and spy had no place in capitalist society?
Anyway, Mari returned to Moscow. For the first three months, he was safe and sound in the Foreign Service. Many people thought that he had miraculously escaped the inevitable death and had overcome his fate. However, in November 1937, Mari suddenly disappeared. Since then, no one has heard anything about him.
The destruction of the other bureaus of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was carried out with great speed and rapidity, but the arrest of the staff of the Foreign Service was meticulous and unhurried. Until Slutsky, the head of the bureau, was killed, many thought that Stalin would not purge the bureau of its professional cadres in order to retain a force that was fluent in foreign languages and international affairs.
By the beginning of 1938, the majority of the older Cheka cadres abroad had been called back to the Soviet Union. Thus, Stalin no longer had to keep a decoy like Slutsky. On February 17, after going to work, Slutsky was invited by his old friend Mikhail Frinovsky, who had by now been promoted to deputy to Yezhov. Half an hour later, Slutsky’s deputy Shpigelglias received a call from Frinovsky: “Come to me, please!” When Shpigelglias entered the spacious office of Frinovsky, the first thing he saw was Slutsky lying on the floor. From the scene, Slutsky slid off the floor from the chair, and on the table in front of him, there was a cup of tea and a plate of snacks. Slutsky was out of breath. Shpigelglias immediately realized that his chief had been poisoned, but he knew that it was best not to “meddle” at this point. He simply suggested to call a doctor, but Frinovsky replied that the doctor had already come, and “the Medicine won’t help”. “It’s a heart attack”, he added in a very insider tone, without thinking.
Frinovsky appointed Shpigelglias as head of the Foreign Service and asked him to inform all intelligence stations abroad about Slutsky’s “death”. He also instructed that the obituary should describe Slutsky as a “loyal, Life-long, working Stalinist” and “an outstanding lost activist of the Ministry of Internal Affairs”. The whole purpose of these beautiful words was to keep the few old Cheka personnel abroad from becoming suspicious. In order to finish this scandalous play of “cats crying”, Yerev ordered that Slutsky’s body be laid to rest in the central auditorium of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and that guards be kept overnight so that people could “say goodbye to the dead”.
However, these “crocodile tears” did not achieve their purpose, but rather to cover up the situation. The mourners with a little medical knowledge would have noticed at a glance the obvious stains on the face of the deceased – traces of potassium cyanide poisoning.
Shpigelglias quickly prepared Slutsky’s obituary at the behest of Frinovsky, but Yerev was in no hurry, he did not allow telegrams, but only ordinary diplomatic mail. Thus, most of the NKVD staff working abroad received the obituary and learned of Slutsky’s death three weeks later. For example, by the time I received the obituary, Slutsky had been dead for twelve days. In those twelve days I had sent him several telegrams, and I actually got a telegram signed by him in return. Along with the obituary came a copy of Pravda with a short article in memory of the deceased, signed by “a group of comrades”. Obviously, neither Yerev nor his deputies saw the need to sign the article themselves.
Chapter 20: The army without a head
After the two Moscow trials, the shooting of a large number of old Bolsheviks, and then the massive purge of the Ministry of the Interior, it seemed that the wave of terror Stalin had unleashed should now be brought to an end. Even the most pessimistic people could not have imagined that the catastrophe would continue. However, the sophisticated Stalin was always a surprise, and even those who knew him best could hardly have predicted his plans.
On June 11, 1937, a short government notice appeared in the Soviet press. It stated that Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking generals of the Red Army had been arrested for acting as spies in the service of a “foreign country” and would be brought before a military court. Another charge against them was that they had caused the defeat of the Red Army in the war against the Soviet Union, which the capitalist countries were planning to wage. The next morning, a new official notice appeared in the newspaper: the trial was over, and all the accused were sentenced to be shot and executed immediately. At the same time, the notice mentioned that the military tribunal was made up of a group of high-ranking generals.
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