(The following article appeared in the October 24 issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
Elsa Reiss, whose book Our Own People was published under the name Elisabeth K. Poretsky, died several days ago in Paris. A Pole born at the beginning of the century, she was a student in Petrograd (Leningrad) in 1917 and became a supporter of Bolshevism at that time.
In that period she met another young Polish militant, Ludwig Poretsky, with whom she shared a joint life until 1937 when, at age thirty-six, he was assassinated by the NKVD. She herself, and her son, barely escaped attempts by the NKVD, on Stalin's orders, to murder them.
Ludwig (Ignace Reiss) was from Galicia, a Polish province that had been divided between tsarist Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire. After taking part in the revolutionary battles of the early years of the October revolution and in the struggles in Western Europe, he was part of a small group of Poles, all from Galicia, who were assigned to various special missions, first for the Communist International and later for the Soviet state. As a result he lived for several years in various Western European countries, holding a high post in the security service.
Elsa knew and shared the lives of these men. In her book she describes the contradictions they felt, how their lives were torn apart by the problems arising from the degeneration of the revolution, caught as they were between the work they were doing and the revolutionary beliefs that had led them to Bolshevism and to the posts they held. These men had not chosen their positions out of a taste for adventure or for venal reasons. They had been placed there because of their ability to carry out useful tasks, tasks that were indispensable to the young workers state they had helped to found.
Their reactions varied greatly during this period of step-by-step degeneration of the Soviet state. A person like Sorge was able to totally immerse himself in his espionage work in Japan until he was executed there, pretending all the time to be totally ignorant about what was going on in the Soviet Union. Others became Stalinist executioners, even carrying out these crimes against their own comrades. Most became disoriented, helpless, some
Wichard/Rouge
ELSA REISS
trying to flee, others delivering themselves up to the executioner.
Ignace Reiss himself not only retained his revolutionary convictions, but also all the vigor of his personality and a lucidity that allowed him no doubt about the mortal dangers facing him on the road he was to embark upon. He was the only one to write to Stalin and his crew: "Up to this moment I marched alongside you. Now I will not take another step. Our paths diverge!... For it will indeed be necessary to begin everything all over again to save socialism. ... Forward to new struggles. For the Fourth International!" (July 17, 1937)
On September 3 of that year he was murdered on the outskirts of Lausanne. This assassination was part of the orgy of counterrevolutionary crimes committed by Stalin in that period, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, particularly in Spain during the civil war. Crimes that reached their apogee, if such a word can be used, in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Counterrevolutionary crimes that today's post-
Stalinists attempt neither to deny (they no longer can) nor explain politically.
Some would have us think that these crimes were due to mental illness on the part of Stalin. Actually, in that period of Thermidorian reaction in the Soviet Union and of movement toward a new world war, Stalin was determined to ally himself with a group of capitalist states, whether the a group or capitalist states, whether the imperialist democracies or the Nazis.
As it turned out he was allied first with one side and then with the other during the war. But he had to provide guarantees to his future allies, to assure them that he was in no way seeking the victory of the world revolution, that "socialism in one country" was enough for him. The best show of good faith, the best guarantee he could offer was to suppress the revolutionists and those who might be nostalgic for the years 1917-1923. The example of Reiss might be contagious.
Having survived, Elsa had to live under a different name. She wrote her book so people would know about the lives of Ludwig and those of his group who were
" to take up the killed by "our own people, expression used in advance by one of these men.
When Elsa was writing, and until her death, she relived with undiminished intensity her personal drama and the drama of the terrible period of the "Yezhov terror," during which Stalin exterminated more revolutionary militants than the capitalist world, including Hitler.
Her aim was not to create a work of literature or a sensationalist account, but rather a testimony whose eloquence lay solely in its tragic truthfulness. Two or three years after the publication of the book, she was approached to make it into a movie. She asked me to accompany her to a meeting with the director who had developed the idea for the film: "Help me make sure they don't make it into a 'James Bond."" For strictly material reasons this proposal for a film never saw fruition.
She followed with enormous interest the events taking place in the states dominated by the Kremlin, especially, as might be expected, in her native Poland. She was confident that they would extend into the Soviet Union. One day, smiling, she remarked to me: "We Poles had our own workers party before the Russians."
In Elsa we have lost one of the last survivors of a period which, although dating back some forty years, still exerts considerable weight on the workers movement because of the crimes and falsehoods that filled it, a period that still hampers the political development of the workers movement.
She had no personal pretensions other than to having been one person among many who dedicated her life to the cause of socialism. Circumstances caused her to write a book that is part of the history of the workers movement.