Abstract
For foreign communists, Soviet political developments in the 1930s were sometimes inexplicable. Especially alienating for many was the grotesque rhetoric of the enemy within that was put into circulation by the regime. Jirí Weil gives expression to this sense of the outlandish in his semi-autobiographical Moskva-hranice (Moscow-Border), when he has his literary alter ego say
Here too the struggle is fought, relentlessly and pitilessly, every day, every minute, every second. This struggle is however governed by laws, and these are known only to those subject to them. Jan Fischer came from a foreign land, ready to subject himself, but he knew them only from books. If production fell in the Donbass, Fischer would say “Laziness, bad organization, technical backwardness”. The country though said “the enemy”, and mobilized all its forces for the struggle. It had a right to do that, and Fischer bowed to it, for he had taken it as his country, after all, but he did not find it an easy road.1
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Jirí Weil, Moskva-hranice (Prague: Druzstevní práce, 1937);
Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York and London: Norton, 1990).
Victoria E. Bonnell, ‘The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art’, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds, Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 341–375,
David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 51–95,
Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Boston: Polity, 2012).
Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Alexander Vatlin, ‘Kaderpolitik und Säuberungen in der Komintern’, in Hermann Weber and Ulrich Mählert, eds, Terror. Stalinistische Parteisäuberungen 1936–1953 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998), pp. 33–119,
Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence. Le Parti communiste suisse, une section du Komintern, 1931 à 1939 (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1994), pp. 277–279.
Michael Buckmiller and Klaus Meschkat, eds, Biographisches Handbuch zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale. Ein deutsch-russisches Forschungsprojekt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), pp. 346–360.
David Pike, German writers in Soviet exile, 1933–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982);
Klaus Jarmatz, Simone Bark and Peter Diezel, Exil in der UdSSR. Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 1933–1945, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1979).
Natalja Mussienko and Alexander Vatlin, Schule der Träume: die Karl-Liebknecht-Schule in Moskau (1924–1938) (Stuttgart: Julius Klinkhardt Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2005), pp. 155–167.
Hans Schafranek, ‘Kontingentierte “Volksfeinde” und “Agenturarbeit”’, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1 (2001), pp. 1–76.
Wladislaw Hedeler, ‘Die Präsenz staatlicher Gewalt inmitten einer urbanen Umwelt. Das Beispiel Moskau’, in Karl Schlögel et al., eds, Mastering Russian Spaces: Raum und Raumbewältigung als Probleme der russischen Geschichte (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), pp. 199–252, here p. 214.
János M. Rainer, Imre Nagy. Vom Parteisoldaten zum Märtyrer des ungarischen Volksaufstandes. Eine politische Biographie 1896–1958 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2006), pp. 48–51.
Barry McLoughlin and Hans Schafranek, ‘Die österreichische Emigration in die UdSSR bis 1938’, in Traude Horvath and Gerda Neyer, eds, Auswanderungen aus Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 163–185, here p. 177
Wolfgang Ruge, Gelobtes Land. Meine Jahre in Stalins Sowjetunion (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), p. 85.
Meinhard Stark, ‘Wenn Du willst Deine Ruhe haben, schweige’. Deutsche Frauenbiographien des Stalinismus (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1991), p. 100.
Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau. Stationen eines Irrweges (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1957), pp. 411–413.
Elisabeth K. Poretski, Les nôtres. Essai (Paris: Denoël, 1969), esp. pp. 178–179.
Jules Humbert-Droz, Dix ans de lutte antifasciste, 1931–1941 (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1972), pp. 234–235.
Quoted in Annette Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette. Biographie du couple Thorez (Paris: Fayard, 2010), p. 281.
Boris Starkov, ‘The Trial that Was Not Held’, Europe-Asia Studies 46:8 (1994), pp. 1297–1315;
Herbert Wehner, Zeugnis (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982), p. 189.
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Studer, B. (2015). From Comrades to Spies. In: The Transnational World of the Cominternians. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510297_8
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