Abstract
According to their convictions, foreign communists in Stalin’s Russia should have felt at home in Soviet Party life. Although they shared the internationalist Weltanschauung of the world movement and consumed the Stalinist culture surrounding them, foreign cadres differed from their Soviet counterparts in how they lived, acted and thought. Adjusting to a strange and mystifying political environment also entailed coming to terms with expressions of ritualised Party life such as purge-sittings and lengthy sessions where “criticism and self-criticism” (kritika i samokritika) were on the agenda. For the perplexed foreigner, these meetings seemed to violate Western notions of individuality and ignore boundaries between what were private and public domains, for presenting oneself for intense scrutiny at a public forum was relatively unknown in Western communist parties (CPs) of the period. Apart from the expulsion of so-called oppositionists, the term “purge” (chistka) was a vague concept outside the VKP(b), especially in the form it was intended to take: the periodical “self-cleansing’’ of the Party rank-and-file. Moulding party cadres according to Soviet criteria had not established itself in an organised fashion within Western CPs by the mid-1930s, with the French and German Comintern sections providing possible exceptions to this general rule.1
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Notes
The French Communist Party (PCF) had set up a cadres commission by the early 1930s. For details, see Annie Kriegel, Les communistes français (Paris, 1968), pp. 158–65
Robert Robrieux, Histoire intérieure du parti communiste 1920–1945 (Paris, 1980)
Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, ‘La “verification” (l’encadrement biographique communiste dans l’entre-deux guerres)’, Genèses (Paris), no. 23 (1996), pp. 145–63. For insights into cadre control in the German CP before 1933, see Herbert Wehner, Zeugnis (Cologne, 1984), pp. 54–70
Reinhard Müller, ‘Permanenter Verdacht und “Zivilhinrichtung”. Zur Genesis der “Säuberungen” in der KPD’, in Hermann Weber and Dietrich Staritz (eds), Kommunisten verfolgen Kommunisten. Stalinistischer Terror und ‘Säuberungen’ in den kommunistischen Parteien Europas seit den dreißiger Jahren (Berlin, 1993), pp. 253–4.
Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, 16th edn (Frankfurt am Main, 1978), pp. 182–6, here p. 182.
Paolo Robotti, La Prova (Bari, 1965), p. 60.
Reinhard Müller (ed.), Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1991), p. 422.
Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (Munich, 1978), p. 37.
For a detailed description of such chistka sessions in Moscow during the Great Terror, see also Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau. Stationen eines Irrweges (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 394–5.
S. M. Kirov, Selected Articles and Speeches (in Russian), (Moscow, 1944), p. 103.
Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris, 1975), p. 254.
For a strict distinction between party purges and State terror, see the theses in J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, 1985).
L. M. Kaganowitsch, Über die Parteireinigung (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), p. 30.
The concepts of “sound” or “unhealthy” attitudes were used by the NKVD when reporting to the Politburo on popular opinion. See Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 11.
Hans Schafranek (in co-operation with Natalia Mussienko), Kinderheim Nr6. Österreichische und deutsche Kinder im sowjetischen Exil (Vienna, 1998), pp. 74–5.
Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927–1941 (London, 1985), p. 342.
Hans Günther, ‘Der Feind in der totalitären Kultur’, in Gabriele Gorzka (ed.), Kultur im Stalinismus. Sowjetische Kultur und Kunst der 30er bis 50er Jahre (Bremen, 1994), p. 93.
Barry McLoughlin, Hans Schafranek and Walter Szevera, Aufbruch-Hoffnung-Endstation. Österreicherinnen und Österreicher in der Sowjetunion 1925–1945 (Vienna, 1997), p. 357.
Ibid., Letter of Franz Koritschoner to NKVD, 10 April 1936. Koritschoner later recanted, but received a ten-year sentence to the Pechora Gulag none the less. He was gassed in Auschwitz in June 1941, following his extradition to Nazi Germany at the request of the Gestapo. For details of the case, see Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo. Die Auslieferung deutscher und österreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an Nazideutschland 1937–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 76–7.
Francesco Bigazzi and Giancarlo Lehner, Dialoghi del Terrore. I processi ai comunisti italiani in Unione Sovietica 1930–1940 (Florence, 1991).
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Unfried, B. (2003). Foreign Communists and the Mechanisms of Soviet Cadre Formation in the USSR. In: McLoughlin, B., McDermott, K. (eds) Stalin’s Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523937_8
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