Walter Krivitsky, head of Soviet Military Intelligence for western Europe, who defected in 1938, confirms this in In Stalin's Secret Service (1939), 'Their sole remaining service to the party and revolution is to defend the hated regime of Stalin as the last faint gleam of hope for that better world to which they had consecrated themselves in early youth.'
This is a telling analysis of the logic of revolutionary correctness, though it is a standard literary device. How many saints were falsely crucified, but stood fast? K denies knowing about Krivitsky at the time, but he knew first hand what was happening. Bukharin was a friend, and his confession in 1938 was so over-the-top that K felt he had to act. K's close friend from German party days, Otto Katz, sounded as if he were quoting K and Bukharin in his 1952 confessions during a similar trial in Czechoslovakia.
In his memoirs Special Tasks: The memoirs of an unwanted witness -- a Soviet spymaster (1994), Pavel Sudoplatov also states that he was arrested, tortured. But he miraculously survived, kept his personal grudges to himself, and remained an unapologetic OGPU/ NKVD/ KGB officer, uncorrupted to the end, despite his travails.
Confessions of an apostate
In his resignation letter to the party in 1937, K professed his belief that the foundations of the Workers' and Peasants' State had remained solid and unshaken, and that the nationalisation of the means of production was a guarantee of her eventual return to road of Socialism; and that in spite of everything, the Soviet Union still represented 'our last hope on planet in rapid decay.
He clung tenaciously to this belief for another year and a half, until the Hitler-Stalin pact destroyed this last shred of the torn illusion.* He pushed ahead with Darkness at Noon.
Almost all his friends who went to the Soviet Union were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, killed. Willi Muenzenberg was assassinated by agents of Stalin while trying to escape the Germans in France in 1940. Only Margarete Buber-Neumann, imprisoned in Kazakhstan, survived, only because the NKVD (updated OGPU) eventually arranged for her to be handed over to Hitler in 1940, inadvertently saving her life. She wrote her memoirs Under Two Dictators (1949) at K's urging, as a prisoner of both Stalin and Hitler.
In his memoirs, The Invisible Writing (1954), K ridicules FDR's view of Stalin's regime as a kind of uncouth, Asiatic New Deal, and the belief that after the war, the US would 'get on very well with Stalin and the Russian people.' By now a solid Cold Warrior, he assumed that Stalin was expansionist and would topple Europe's bourgeois governments if given the chance.
Life of an apostate
Both Orwell and K were spurned during their radical youth by Britain (K only allowed entry in 1940 by pressure from The Times correspondent in Lisbon), but both were drawn into a fervent patriotism during WWII, K not yet a British citizen, working as propagandists for the cause of democracy.
Orwell betrayed his communist acquaintances to MI5 in 1945, and was feted by British society as he lay dying.
K? Well, his attack was arguably more important during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s than Orwell's now legendary dystopias, helping keep communists out of power in Europe, despite their popularity, until the bitter end in 1990-1.
Soviet communism was the big loser to Stalinist terror, with a huge chunk of the faithful killed, or, like Sudoplatov and Korolev (the father of the Soviet space program), merely imprisoned, tortured, throw out on the street, sometimes in the depths of winter without a kopeck or coat, and miraculously surviving. Not to mention the revolutionary left in Europe.
And what solace did K's cash cow Darkness at Noon and his subsequent crusade against communism provide to his fallen comrades, martyrs to the cause? How could K be so despicable? Serving the devil and making a fortune to boot!
K was not surprised that former comrades Joliot-Curie and Picasso denounced him in 1945, but was disappointed that he lost all his leftists friends, that there were no western campaigns to expose the Stalin purges.
When you are critical inside the party, that's okay. But ex-communists are tiresome cassandras, fallen angels returned from heaven with bad news. Losing faith is embarrassing. Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, who had saved his life in Spain in 1938, told him in 1941: 'What a pity you sold yourself for thirty pieces of silver.' K ridicules the aristo: Sir Peter liked people who changed their Clubs even less that the Stalin-Hitler pact.
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