Flies Drawn to Fire

...Yet it was precisely this frame of mind that made her the chosen instrument of Reiss' death...

...The killers themselves, unfortunately, got away...

...Her last was to help an nkvd agent, Francois Rossi, execute an important "mission," whose precise nature she did not bother to ascertain...

...Reviewed by Abraham Brumberg Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies...

...But she does provide us with vivid and moving descriptions of the circumstances leading up to the murder, as well as of some of its major protagonists...

...Within a few days, it was disclosed that the victim was one Ignace Reiss, a disillusioned Soviet Communist...

...Shortly after returning to Paris, she asked the Soviet Embassy for another visa...

...She recounts, for instance, how one of the interrogators of Karl Radek, an old friend by the name of Felix Gorski, suddenly exploded in a stream of invective, calling Radek a "whore" for "torturing the investigators for months" and then suddenly writing out his own confession...

...The pressures the nkvd brought to bear on her were twofold: a promise of marriage (the accomplished M. Rossi), and the acid test of her devotion to the USSR...

...I had to run away somewhere and even resurrect my own past...

...But as I mentioned earlier, the story of Reiss' murder, for all its gripping drama, is not the heart of this book...

...Then, with the help of Renata Steiner (who was unaware of her actual role in the assassination) and of another woman, Getrude Schildbach, they managed to learn of Ludwik's whereabouts and to lure him to Lausanne, where he was murdered...

...Perhaps if he had been next to her as I was he might have noticed her unusual gesture and the sob...

...In the 1920s and early '30s, the Soviet intelligence agencies attracted men and women who genuinely believed that they were aiding a noble cause--as did the thousands of Communist party members throughout the world who served in far less dangerous and dramatic capacities...

...An idealist to the end, however, he was repelled by the thought that Western intelligence agencies would try to approach him...

...Their disillusionment took different forms: some became bitter and cynical, several found suicide the only way out of their anguish...

...Here are Maly's words as recounted by Mrs...

...Mrs...

...The Ludwiks, Krivitskys, and all the other idealists manques are no more...

...Poretsky's words) "a true proletarian rising...

...She was told to apply at the Union for Repatriation of Russians Abroad, an emigre organization secretly financed by Moscow, and heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents...

...She has little to add to the story of the assassination itself...

...I could not bear to live in the Soviet Union any more...

...The initial service consisted of befriending Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, who was living in Paris at that time, and reporting on his movements...

...For many the moment of decision came when they were ordered to report back to Moscow, ostensibly for "consultation...

...Krivitsky sought refuge in the United States, published his famous expose (I Was Stalin's Agent, London, 1940), and on February 11, 1941, committed suicide in a Washington hotel room...

...She made a full confession and, it would seem, abandoned her matrimonial and political interest in the USSR...

...To collect arms for Republican Spain, or to help organize anti-government resistance in Italy, Germany or Bulgaria was one thing, but to return to Moscow to face certain death was quite another...

...If there is one thing this book makes clear, it is that people like Ignace Reiss, though they served one of the most ruthless organizations in contemporary history, were no different from thousands of other idealists who joined the Communist movement at its inception...

...And instead of the generation of 1917, it is now their sons and grandsons who are sent to prisons and insane asylums for trying to undo the evils brought about--however unwittingly--by their elders...

...the Stalinist concentration camps have also been largely denuded of their former inmates...

...Ludwik, facing us, said hardly a word...

...She adds, in a grim footnote: "Felix was right...

...By so doing, he signed his own death warrant: The nkvd intercepted the letter, and hired a few White Russian emigres and professional, killers...

...Poretsky describes the fateful luncheon at Lausanne: "She was deadly pale and seemed extremely nervous, but perhaps we gave the same impression--the circumstances hardly warranted a relaxed get-together...

...Poretsky devotes some of the most chilling pages in her book to these hundreds of men and women who, like flies drawn to a fire, came to hand themselves over to their executioners...

...Yet the vast majority of them did return...

...Yes, I asked for a foreign assignment, having turned down many in the past...

...A few weeks later, in August, the first of the three Great Purge Trials took place in Moscow...

...Mrs...

...He decided to throw in his lot with the small, dissension-ridden group of European Trotskyites, postponing his meeting with them--until it was too late...

...Shall I hide now also...

...Now, more than 30 years after the deed, his widow has written a book that traces the tragedy of Poretsky's death against the deeper tragedy of his life, and against the still more profound tragedy of the life and death of a whole generation of misguided idealists...

...Nor is the book filled with startling and significant political revelations...

...The case of Theodore Maly is a striking illustration...

...There are fascinating pages on Walter Krivitsky, one of Reiss' closest friends, also a Soviet intelligence agent, who broke with Moscow shortly after Reiss' assassination...

...By 1936-37, all six had become sickened by Stalin's terror, by the rigged trials and executions of the entire Old Bolshevik guard, and the gradual decimation of their friends, colleagues and comrades...

...Beside her on the window sill was a pretty candy box, and I touched it, but she tore it roughly from my hands and said: 'It is not for you.' Only later, much later, did I remember that there was a sob in her voice...

...Poretsky, that make up the bulk of the book and give it an unmistakable quality of candor and authenticity...

...A Hungarian and a priest, Maly was so horrified by the brutalities and human misery he had seen during World War I that he broke completely with his past, became a Communist, and joined the Cheka, "the organization created to 'protect the revolution' from the Whites, from the enemies of the people, from the clergy...

...I could not even say that he had been following our conversation...

...Some were afraid to refuse lest their relatives in the Soviet Union pay for it with their lives...

...He resisted, but the three of them, with the help of Schildbach, dragged him into the car and riddled him with machine gun bullets...

...Poretsky writes unaffectedly, with restraint, achieving both detachment and remarkable warmth...

...That night, he had dinner with Schildbach, then both of them strolled down a lonely road together...

...Ignace Reiss (alias Ludwik, ne Ignace Poretsky), it turned out, was a Soviet intelligence agent who had recently broken with Moscow...

...It is astonishing that Reiss (as I shall henceforth refer to him), more than adequately familiar with the mentality and techniques of Stalin's apparat, might have saved his life had he published his letter openly six weeks earlier, thus "paralizing the efforts of the nkvd to kill him...

...When they came to arrest him, so a friend of ours learned from Slutsky [head of the nkvd's foreign section], he shot himself...

...A large number of the agents abroad remained at their posts for a while, in the belief that the Soviet Union was still the one "bulwark against fascism" and that sooner or later Stalin and his entourage would be swept from power by (in Mrs...

...But the most fascinating pages concern the two women involved in the assassination, Renata Steiner and Getrude Schildbach...

...He was somehow far away...

...More specifically, it deals with six men from a small town in northern Galicia (part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire before World War I, then annexed to Poland), childhood friends whose fervent faith in communism led them to join the Communist movement, work for Soviet intelligence agencies, and eventually achieve important positions in the secret police...

...Renata Steiner's new friends (and would-be suitors) promised to help her if she would agree to render a few "services" to the Soviet Union...

...He swore that he would try to atone for his deeds, and he almost got his chance to do so during the collectivization drive, by saving a man sentenced to death for stealing a small bag of potatoes...

...The story of Getrude Schildbach is in some respects similar, though its denouement was far more sordid...

...Her aborted love affairs--and there were quite a few--merely heightened her twin passions...

...There is, first of all, the portrait of a man stalked by unknown enemies, painfully grappling with his past while trying to carve out a new life for himself and his family...

...I sat next to her...

...Poretsky returned the same day to the village in the Alps, while her husband stayed on...

...But one person involved in the assassination--a 30-year-old woman by the name of Renata Steiner--was apprehended and her deposition led to the untangling of the bloody mystery...

...editor, In Quest of Justice On September 6, 1937, the Swiss newspapers carried a brief item about the bullet-ridden body of a man by the name of Hans Eberhard, found on a lonely road near Lausanne...

...What Mrs...

...She succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of doom, terror and suspicion that hung over Moscow like a heavy cloud, the fear and futility that infected everyone...

...M. Rossi, after all, was a dedicated and trustworthy man, and a tender lover to boot...

...Others, she says, were simply "too terrified to put up any resistance"--perhaps the natural reaction of those whose lives are based, almost exclusively, on faith...

...It was not until after her arrest, in Berne, that she realized what that "mission" had been all about...

...In Moscow she met almost all of their old friends and colleagues, some of whom were involved in obtaining confessions from the arrested Old Bolsheviks, while waiting for their own turn to come next...

...Several weeks earlier, he had composed a letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party denouncing Stalin's crimes and vowing to devote himself "to the cause of Lenin" and "the proletarian revolution [that] will free humanity of capitalism and the USSR of Stalinism...

...After Reiss' letter was intercepted by the nkvd, she was told to write to him and beg that he meet her in Lausanne to discuss her political doubts and torments...

...Despite his orders, though, the man was shot...

...The first was what could only be termed a "dupe": Born in Switzerland, she had spent a short time in the Soviet Union as a tourist, as much in search of an ideal as of a husband...

...By mid-1937, there was no doubt any longer that "consultation" meant arrest and execution...

...Here is how Mrs...

...A German Communist and unsuccessful actress, she lived in a world filled with fictitious academic degrees and lovers desperate but unable to marry her (a role for which her grotesque appearance hardly qualified her...

...She was also given a box of strychnine-filled candy for his wife and son, but at the last minute she balked at using it...

...Schildbach's despair and confusion reached new heights, as did her dependence on Reiss...

...When the police discovered his body a few hours later, they found a strand of gray hair clutched in his hand...

...In 1936, she visited the Soviet Union, and came back shattered by what she had seen and heard...

...But the "organization" remains...

...Her conversations with high-ranking nkvd officials, her thumbnail sketches of people like Richard Sorge, George Mueller and many others who met with untimely deaths either at the hands of their former friends, or their enemies'--or their own--are among the most compelling that I have ever read...

...She was inordinately attached to Reiss, as well as to his wife and son, depending on him as much for moral support as for occasional small time intelligence jobs...

...He himself, Gorski declared, taking out a gun from his desk drawer, would never be taken alive...

...A car pulled up, and three men emerged from it, quickly pouncing on Reiss...

...Poretsky: "Next day I went to the foreign division of the nkvd and asked for an assignment abroad...

...As a Cheka officer during the Civil War, however, he was forced to witness and to paticipate in atrocities no different from those that had so repelled him in the past...

...He did not have to confess...

...It belonged to Getrude Schildbach--who disappeared, never to be heard of again...

...It is perhaps for this reason that one reads this book with a sense of mounting melancholy: What a waste of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives, all of them crushed and sacrificed in the name of--what...

...The Swiss police moved rapidly...

...Her face was turned towards the window, so that Ludwik could not have seen it...

...Possibly the most haunting chapter of her book is the one where she relates her experiences and observations during a three-month stay in Moscow in the winter of 1937...

...Although her husband had been requested to go, she succeeded in persuading him and his superiors to let her take his place...

...Don't you see that I must go back to be shot...

...that has already been told a number of times, most extensively in L'Assassinat d'Ignace Reiss, by Pierre Tesne (Paris, 1938...

...He wrapped the original copy of his letter in the Order of the Red Banner that he had received in 1928, mailed it to the Soviet Embassy in Paris (which was to forward it, unopened, to Moscow), and then withdrew with his wife and son to a village in Switzerland...

...Poretsky has written, basically, is a volume of reminiscences about her "own people"--that is, young men and women who gave their best to the cause, only to fall victim to it in the end...

...It is vignettes such as this, most of them cast in the form of conversations with Mrs...

...He kept on looking at her and perhaps wondered at her changed appearance more than I who was talking to her, answering her questions about our boy, asking how long she was going to stay in Switzerland and what her plans were...

...Others made their decision deliberately, as an expression of well-nigh religious atonement...

...Why should she...