Our Own People, A Memoir of 'Ignace Reiss' and His
Friends, by Elisabeth K. Poretsky. Oxford University
Press, London. 278 pp. 42s. 1969.*
['Ignace Reiss" (one of the pseudonyms of Ignace Poretsky) held a high post in the Soviet secret service network in Europe before World War II. In 1937, in protest against Stalin's purges, he resigned. Through Henryk Sneevliet, a member of the Dutch parliament and well-known figure in the Communist movement, he sent a warning to Leon Trotsky that Stalin had marked left oppositionists for liquidation outside, as well as inside, the Soviet Union.
(On July 18, 1937, Reiss, then in Paris, sent a message to the Central Committee of the Communist party, declaring that he had broken with Stalinism and was joining the Trotskyist movement.
["The day is not far," he wrote, "when international socialism will sit in judgment over all the crimes committed in the last ten years. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing forgiven ... The 'Leader of genius, Father of the peoples, Sun of Socialism' will have to give account for all his deeds."
[Reiss sought to persuade some of his friends and comrades in the secret service to join him in his political course. Among them was Gertrude Schildbach, a Soviet agent stationed in Italy. He went to meet her in Lausanne on September 4. The appointment turned out to be a trap. The dissident Communist was machinegunned by Stalin's agents.
(The following review of the French edition of the book, Les Nôtres, has been translated from the September 1969 issue of Quatrième Internationale.]
The most powerful personal document I have read in a long time, a book modest in tone, sober in language, has just been published without any fanfare under the gray cover of the "Dossiers de Lettres Nouvelles" series.
The author's name means nothing to anybody, not even political activists. The man who bore it and whose wife today tells his tragic story, had not only to live under a false name but died and made his mark in history under pseudonyms. He was the man we knew as Ignace Reiss. In the Communist International, he was "Ludwik."
He was dear to us, little as we knew him, because he lost his life in the perilous move that took him from the secret service of the Soviet Union, which had become Stalin's secret service, into the ranks of the Fourth In-
We suggest ordering it from Pioneer of some trade agreement. Book Service, 8 Toynbee St., London, E.1, England. 20
ternational. He will remain forever one of the honored dead of the Trotskyist movement- one of our own people.
The woman who was his companion has succeeded in writing today something quite different from a mere biography. She has written the tragedy of a "lost generation," the tragedy of the young Communists of the buffer countries that came into existence or were turned topsyturvy following the first world war-Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.
Most of their lives these young Communists had been members of national minorities. For them only the road of October seemed to offer any future- the future of the world revolution that would abolish all borders. The ebbing of the revolutionary tide in the 1920s left them only one "home"-the USSR, the fatherland of all workers. For them this bulwark was a solid base from which to wage the struggle- most often under clandestine conditions- in Europe where reaction was triumphant... temporarily, they hoped.
But already things were changing in the Soviet Union. The best of these upright young fighters were asked to become... spies. They were reluctant to accept, because while no work useful to the revolution can be rejected, it was a hard thing for them to follow the routine of breaking with the party - and to break in fact with their comrades — pretending to be traitors to the party in order to better serve it.
Reluctant to join the ranks of the INO (Inostrannyi Otdel - Foreign Department], the foreign service of the NKVD (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del— the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the police agency), most of these young militants preferred to join the Comintern or Red Army foreign services.
They were, then, unwilling secret agents, but they were excellent ones. Sorge attests to that, the only one to be glorified, the only one of that generation to be rehabilitated. Elisabeth Poretsky, who knew him better than did the official historians, punctures the myths woven around his achievements; still, in the chapter she devotes to him, Sorge emerges as an example of the qualities of this generation.
The meaning of the book naturally escaped Le Monde's critic, who was disappointed at not finding any interesting spy stories. On this score, so far as I am concerned, allusions about "Krivitsky's helping to break the Japanese code or Ludwik's placing an agent high in the British services" (page 71) are sufficient. This British agent might well be Philby in view of the dates and facts cited.
These first generation agents, who acted out of conviction, were selfless. This virtue had a negative side in the period of bureaucratic degeneration; they were neither blind tools nor declassed elements without strong ties to the proletariat. In each of their sojourns in the USSR, they saw with dismay how much the gulf had widened between the early aspirations and perspectives and the catastrophic reality.
Elisabeth Poretsky does justice to the shoddy spectacle of a Russian worker, who, defeated, sank unresistingly and unthinkingly into Stalinism, following a guide accepted as Lenin's brilliant continuator. She calls this epoch by its right name- the terror.
And it is clear that this was not revolutionary terror but Thermidorian terror against a backdrop of chilling poverty for the workers and moral annihilation for the Communists preparatory to their physical annihilation. This situation left the most courageous Communists no way out but suicide.
A characteristic page of the book portrays a party among foreign Communists in Moscow in 1929 where the festivities were dampened by the unexpected appearance of a Russian colonel close to the inner circle. His presence made the hosts tremble when a Ukrainian described the state of "Russia's breadbasket":
"He began to tell us about the Ukraine, the famine in the cities, the bloated corpses in the streets, the hordes of abandoned children hanging around the railway stations, the ghostly villages where people were dying of starvation and typhus.
"Listening to this terrible tale, we completely forgot our red-headed friend. He sat throughout the recital, his head bent, then suddenly started to sob. Between sobs he said: 'He, he is doing this, he, that'— followed a string of obscenities — 'he is ruining the country, he is destroying the party.' Then he got up, opened the one movable pane of our window, stuck his head out and was sick." (Page 103. )
The guests at the party who ran into the colonel again did not remind him of this scene, and he himself said nothing about it. Such was the climate of the period of forced collectivization.
A few years later, the disappearances began. In Victor Serge's phrase, it was the midnight of the century. Elisabeth Poretsky portrays the demoralization that descended over the Communist world. In the Soviet Union, no one believed in the hideous rigged trials but everyone felt powerless. Trotsky's way seemed to lead nowhere, to be unrealistic.
Most Communists looked to a different star of hopethe Spanish revolution that was beginning. The meaning of volunteering for Spain did not escape the Thermidorians. The volunteers were allowed to sign up; they departed. They were intercepted near the frontier and deported to labor camps.
Spain was not a permissible way out for secret agents. They had to maintain their roles. Madrid and Barcelona were swarming with police. They had to continue to do a job whose meaning was changing. In this work some were corrupted. Also, appearing in ever greater numbers and ever more powerful were their own, the agents of the new generation, the products of an opposite kind of selection, ignorant, brutal, unscrupulous individuals — killers and séum like Ramón Mercader and Marc Zborovski.
Some, perhaps, might wonder why agents who had the relative good fortune to be on a foreign assignment did not stay far away from the Stalinist hell. They tried A simple call home, to report, often meant a one-way trip. Run away? They carried secrets of too great an im- January 12, 1970
portance. If the NKVD did not get them, these Communists to the marrow could not imagine seeking the protection of the enemy — as the present day spies who "choose freedom" do.
Later Krivitsky, "in safe keeping" in the United States, committed suicide in his hotel room, probably sunk in shame and despair. This dilemma held back most of them. Some, again, preferred to die in the USSR, wandering for months in the streets of Moscow with bitterness on their lips and hatred of Cain Dzhugashvili in their hearts until the inevitable arrest and bullet in the back of the neck.
Ludwik alone was more clear-sighted and more heroic. He understood that the way out was the straight and narrow path taken by Trotsky. The infernal machine for killing revolutionists, which was so powerful that it was to trap Trotsky himself, after his own son, could not miss Ludwik. The stakes were too vital for the Stalinist reaction.
The revolutionists' very virtues worked against them. Ludwik made two errors- one out of the rectitude of a Communist militant, the other out of humanity, friendship (it is choice to see the astonishment of the bourgeois critics over an experienced secret agent being so naïve as to send a declaration to the Central Committee of his party, expecting friendship and gratitude in return).
Ludwik was tracked down and killed as one of "their own people." If he had gotten away then, his escape would probably have meant only a reprieve. The NKVD had been able to plant in our own ranks the unspeakable Marc Zborovski, who organized the murders of Leon Sedov and Rudolf Klement (and who is still alive today... in the United States).
At least Ludwik did not fall as a victim resigned to despair but as a Communist fighter equal to the greatest fighters for our cause. His name will shine in golden letters on the future monument to the defamed heroes of the revolution and will live in the memory of the working people of the entire planet.
Garaudy's Book Draws CP Fire
Roger Garaudy, the French Communist party's leading intellectual spokesman and a member of the Political Bureau since 1956, has drawn heavy fire from his party's Stalinist leadership for his recent book Le Grand Tournant du Socialisme (Socialism's Great Turning Point).
In his new book, Garaudy raised many far-reaching questions about the character of the Soviet block states and parties, and about the future of the international Stalinist movement.
Garaudy wrote that although the CPs in power claim to speak for the working class, they have reduced the workers to silence and passivity. He voiced the feeling that because of the undemocratic structures in these countries and the absence of free debate for many years the system could be changed only by "an explosion or a palace revolution."
Garaudy lamented that in all parts of the world, revolutionary forces are frequently "bypassing" the old bureaucratic Stalinist parties.
Notes
* The book is not yet for sale in the U.S., probably because