Gulag

Some of these categories were relatively specific—engineers and specialists in the late 1920s, kulaks in 1931, Poles or Balts in occupied territories during the Second World War—and some were very vague indeed. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, for example, “foreigners” were always considered suspect. By “foreigners,” I mean people who actually were citizens of other countries, people who might have contacts abroad, or people who might have some link, imaginery or real, to a foreign country. No matter what they did they were always candidates for arrest—and foreigners who stood out in any way, for any reason, stood a particularly high chance. Robert Robinson, one of several black American communists who moved to Moscow in the 1930s, later wrote that “Every single black I knew in the early 1930s who became a Soviet citizen disappeared from Moscow within seven years.”²

Diplomats were not exempt. Alexander Dolgun, for example, an American citizen and a junior employee of the American Embassy in Moscow, describes in his memoirs how he was picked up off the street in 1948 and accused, unjustly, of spying; suspicion fell upon him partly because of his youthful fondness for evading the “tails” that the secret police set on him, and because he was skilled in persuading embassy chauffeurs to lend him cars, leading the Soviet secret police to suspect that he might be more important than his rank would indicate. He spent eight years in camps, returning to the United States only in 1971.

Foreign communists were frequently targets. In February 1937, Stalin ominously told Georgi Dmitrov, General Secretary of the Communist International—the Comintern, the organization dedicated to the fomenting of world revolution—that “all of you there in the Comintern are working in the hands of the enemy.” Of the 394 members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in January 1936, only 171 remained in April 1938. The rest had been shot or sent to camps, among them people of many nationalities: German, Austrian, Yugoslav, Italian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Baltic, even English and French. Jews appear to have suffered disproportionately. In the end, Stalin killed more members of the pre-1933 German Communist Party Politburo than did Hitler: of the sixty-eight German communist leaders who fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power, forty-one died, by execution or in camps. The Polish Communist Party may have been even more thoroughly decimated. According to one estimate, 5,000 Polish communists were executed in the spring and summer of 1937.³

But it was not necessary to be a member of a foreign communist party: Stalin also targeted foreign fellow travelers, of whom the 25,000 “American Finns” were probably the most numerous. These were Finnish-speaking Finns, some had emigrated to America, some had been born there, all of whom came to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression in the United States. Most were factory workers, and most had been unemployed in the United States. Encouraged by Soviet propaganda—Soviet recruiters traveled around Finnish-speaking communities in the United States, speaking of the wonderful living conditions and work opportunities in the USSR—they flocked to the Finnish-speaking Karelian Republic. Almost immediately, they caused problems for the authorities. Karelia was not, it turned out, much like America. Many loudly pointed this out to anyone who would listen, then tried to return—and wound up in the Gulag in the late 1930s instead.⁴

Soviet citizens with foreign connections were no less suspect. First in line were the “diaspora nationalities,” the Poles, Germans, and Karelian Finns who had relatives and contacts across the border, as well as the Balts, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Afghans, Chinese, and Romanians scattered across the USSR. According to their own archives, between July 1937 and November 1938, the NKVD convicted 335,513 people in these “national” operations.⁵ Similar operations would be repeated during and after the war, as we shall see.

But it was not even necessary to speak a foreign language in order to come under suspicion. Anyone with a foreign connection was suspected of spying: stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone with a pen pal or with relatives abroad. The NKVD also arrested all Soviet citizens who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway, a railway line across Manchuria whose origins dated from the Czarist era, and accused them of having spied for Japan. In the camps, they were known as the “Kharbintsy,” after the city of Harbin, where many had lived.⁶ Robert Conquest describes the arrests of an opera singer who had danced with the Japanese ambassador at an official ball, and of a veterinarian who attended to dogs belonging to foreigners.⁷