The Whisperers

the people’. She was a committed Bolshevik, but she did not know whether to believe the Soviet press, which had named Piatnitsky as a ‘traitor’ and a ‘spy’, or the man she had loved for nearly twenty years. Osip was the father of her two children, but after his arrest she was no longer certain if she really knew her husband. ‘Who is Piatnitsky?’ Julia wrote in her diary. ‘A true revolutionary or a scoundrel?… Either could be true. I do not know. That is the most agonizing thing.’1

Julia had met Osip in 1920, when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-nine. Julia was born into a Russian-Polish family in Vladimir. Her mother was a Polish noblewoman who had broken all the customs of her caste and religion by marrying a Russian Orthodox priest without her parents’ permission. Julia, who was six when her mother died, inherited her romantic and rebellious temperament. Passionate and beautiful, at the age of just sixteen Julia ran away from her father’s home to enrol as an nurse in the Russian army during the First World War. She married a young general, who disappeared in action in 1917. During the Civil War, Julia joined the Bolsheviks. She worked for the Red Army as a spy, infiltrating the military headquarters of Admiral Kolchak, the White Army leader on the Eastern Front. Eventually, her cover was blown. Narrowly escaping with her life, she fled to Moscow, had a nervous breakdown, and while recovering in a hospital met Osip, who was visiting a friend. Julia was highly strung and volatile, emotional and poetic. She had a strong sense of justice, rooted in her strict religious upbringing, which profoundly influenced her politics. She was kind and warm, adored by everyone who met her, according to the daughter of one of Osip’s comrades. ‘We children were always calm in her presence. When she was there, we forgot our worries… She was always full of life.’2

Osip, by contrast, was stern and taciturn. A stocky man, with soft, attractive features, he was a model of the professional revolutionary. Modest to the point of selflessness, he rarely talked about his private life (many of his oldest Party comrades had no idea he had a family). Osip had been one of the most important activists in the Marxist underground before 1917. He was in charge of smuggling illegal literature between Russia and Europe. He spent a great deal of time abroad, especially in Germany, where he was known by the pseudonym ‘Freitag’ (Friday), or ‘Piatnitsa’ in Russian, from which the name Piatnitsky was derived (his real Jewish surname was Tarshis). When he married Julia, Osip was the Secretary of the Moscow Party’s Central Committee. But he was soon transferred to the Comintern, the international organization of the Communist Party, where he ran the crucial Organization Department and effectively became the leader of the entire Comintern. Piatnitsky oversaw a huge expansion in the Comintern’s activities, as it tried to spread the Revolution to all corners of the world. His Memoirs of a Bolshevik (1926), a handbook of the Party’s organizational and ethical principles, was translated into more than twenty languages. Piatnitsky was exhausted by his work. ‘I was in the Comintern from morning until night,’ he recalled.3 In the middle of the 1920s – when he was still in his early forties – his hair went white and then fell out.

Osip’s work also placed a heavy burden on his family life. The Piatnitsky apartment in the House on the Embankment was always full of foreign visitors. Osip missed out on the childhood of his two young sons, Igor (born in 1921) and Vladimir (in 1925). His constant absence was a source of many arguments with Julia, who also became increasingly disillusioned with the bourgeoisification of the Party and Stalin’s dictatorship during the 1930s. Igor recalls an argument between his parents – it must have been in 1934 – when she began to recite in a loud and angry voice the seditious verses of the early nineteenth-century poet Dmitry Venivitinov:

The dirt, the stench, the cockroach and the flea

And everywhere the presence of his lordly hand

And all those Russians who babble constantly –

All this we must call our holy fatherland.

Osip and Julia (seated on the right of the front step) with their sons Igor (next to Osip) and Vladimir Piatnitsky (on Julia’s knee) and neighbours’ children at their dacha near Moscow, late 1920s

Terrified of their neighbours overhearing, Osip pleaded with his wife: ‘Keep your voice down, Julia!’4

By 1935, Piatnitsky’s standing in the Comintern had made him known to Communists throughout the world (Harry Pollitt, the British Communist, said that Piatnitsky was the Comintern). At this time, Stalin’s foreign policy was geared towards the containment of Nazi Germany by strengthening relations with the Western democratic states (‘collective security’). In 1934, the Soviet Union had even joined the League of Nations, which it had denounced only two years previously as an ‘imperialist conspiracy’. The Comintern was subordinated to this foreign policy. Led by its new General Secretary, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern’s task was now to build alliances with the European socialists and steer them into coalition governments (‘Popular Fronts’) with the centre parties to counteract the Fascist threat. The policy had some success in France and Spain, where Popular Front governments were elected in 1936. But there were critics of this strategy within the Comintern, among them Piatnitsky. Many Communists, including former members of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky in the 1920s, saw it as a betrayal of the international revolutionary cause, which in their view could only be advanced by ‘United Fronts’ of Communists and socialists, excluding the centre parties of the bourgeoisie; they found common cause with former members of the more moderate Right Opposition, led by Rykov and Bukharin, who were increasingly opposed to Stalin’s abuse of power. Both these groups regarded Stalin as a ‘counter-revolutionary’.By 1936, the Comintern was full of whispered discontent with Stalin’s foreign policies. Leftists linked the Stalinist rapprochement with the Western powers to the bourgeoisification of the Soviet elite. Deeply committed to the ideal of world revolution, they were afraid that the Soviet Union, under Stalin’s leadership, was becoming not an inspiration to the proletarians of the West, but a guardian of order and security. They were particularly disillusioned by Stalin’s failure to give adequate support to the various left-wing defenders of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, when, in the autumn of 1936, General Franco’s Nationalists – with massive aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – advanced to the outskirts of Madrid. Even some of Stalin’s loyal supporters sometimes found it hard to go along with what they saw as the betrayal of their ideological commitment to revolutionary internationalism. As one Old Bolshevik explained to William Bullitt, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1935: ‘You must understand that world revolution is our religion and there is not one of us who would not in the final analysis oppose even Stalin himself if we should feel that he was abandoning the cause of world revolution.’5

Stalin grew increasingly mistrustful of the Comintern, which he feared was slipping out of his control. At its Seventh Congress, in August 1935, he engineered a radical reshuffle of its leadership. Piatnitsky was dismissed from the executive and placed in charge of a new department in the Central Committee to supervise the work of the Party bureaucracy. The show trial of the former oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, in August 1936, was a clear warning from Stalin to his critics that all policies would be decided at the top. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Comintern, where the opposition was identified by Stalin with the work of ‘foreign spies’. ‘All of you there in the Comintern are playing right into the enemy’s hands,’ Stalin wrote to Dimitrov in February 1937. Several thousand Comintern officials and foreign Communists were arrested in 1937–8. The German, Polish, Yugoslav and Baltic Communist parties were practically wiped out. At Comintern headquarters and the Hotel Lux in Moscow, where many of the Comintern’s officials lived, there was so much panic that, in the words of one official, ‘many are half mad and incapable of working as a result of constant fear’.6

Piatnitsky was denounced by Stalin as a Trotskyist. He was later implicated in a ‘Fascist Spy Organization of Trotskyists and Rightists in the Comintern’. But according to the version of events related by his sons, the real cause of his arrest was a brave speech they believe he made at the Plenum of the Central Committee in June 1937.* Apparently, Piatnitsky had been shocked by what he had discovered in his work at the Central Committee. He was particularly troubled by the enormous personal power of Stalin and his unbridled use of the NKVD to eliminate his enemies. At the June plenum, it is believed, Piatnitsky accused the NKVD of fabricating evidence against ‘enemies of the people’ and called for the establishment of a special Party commission to oversee the work of the NKVD. It was a suicidal speech, as Piatnitsky must have realized. When he finished speaking there was silence in the hall. The tension was palpable. A recess was called. On instructions from Stalin, several Party leaders, including Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov, attempted to persuade Piatnitsky to withdraw his statement and thus save his life.