The Post-Beria Papers
SHUB, ANATOLE
The Post-Beria Papers Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness ??A Soviet Spymaster By Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter Little,...
...His wife Emma, an NKVD captain, supervised the stool pigeons in the writers' unions...
...The Schecters interviewed the senior Sudoplatov for 20 hours and, using various notes, documents and archival materials compiled by his son, produced Special Tasks as a first-person narrative...
...24.95...
...Sudoplatov's wife Emma originally hailed from the Gomel shtetl...
...In 1943, when the Nazis first uncovered Polish officers' remains in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, Sudoplatov was running operations behind German lines...
...who had him arrested as a Beria accomplice in August 1953...
...In rejecting Sudoplatov's main thesis, the critics have called attention to numerous errors of fact??e.g...
...I found Sudoplatov's denials of NKVD responsibility for the death of Trotsky's son Leon Sedov in Paris in 1938, and of the defector Walter Krivitsky in Washington in 1941, totally unconvincing...
...Footnotes, paragraphs, occasionally pages on end have the assurance of a well-scrubbed Time cover story, and a number of interesting documents are appended to the text...
...in recent conversations with former colleagues...
...some clearly aim at a succes de scandale in the West...
...For example, in denying that Stalin might have been done in at his dacha by personnel Beria controlled (perhaps using Uncle Gregori's poisons), Sudoplatov avoids the testimony of some of the personnel that Stalin's paralyzed body was discovered at night and Beria kept doctors away until the next day...
...Nor was I persuaded by his absolving Stalin of responsibility for the murder of Sergei M. Kirov in 1934, and his blaming Stalin's purge of the Red Army on Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky's criticism of Defense Commissar Kliment Y. Voroshilov...
...These and other dubious passages fortify one's a priori skepticism toward Sudoplatov's claims that Oppenheimer, Fermi, Leo Szilard and Niels Bohr acted as "friendly sources" of atomic intelligence for the Soviets...
...Sudoplatov majored in "special tasks," including "wet affairs," i.e...
...The documents in the appendix support no such claims...
...In Moscow last spring, I saw a TV documentary that not only interviewed surviving eyewitnesses but identified??with names and photos??a number of NKVD commanders who, stricken by remorse, committed suicide...
...the killing of Stalin's foes at home and abroad...
...The old GRU veteran believes that the FBI had more material on Hiss than was revealed, and that perhaps there was a deal between Truman and [J...
...Sudoplatov portrays Harriman, Harry Hopkins and Alger Hiss as peas in a pod...
...The Schecters choose to consider this statement a "confirming denial...
...My own father witnessed an attempt by NKVD men to corner Krivitsky in the 42nd Street Cafeteria in New York, and it was not the only such attempt...
...This is all too reminiscent of the early 1950s, when "Atom Spies" made for as terrifying a headline as "AIDS" does today...
...Ambassador as concerned with "the supply of vodka and caviar" at the coming Yalta conference, prospects for postwar business ventures, and "the involvement of Jewish capital...
...Since historians regard none of those cases as "closed," it is striking that in dealing with each of them (and others) Sudoplatov, while exonerating Stalin, demeans the victims: Kirov is said to have been a womanizer, Krivitsky a victim of "nervous depression," etc...
...Constitution...
...Those that mention Szilard, Fermi and other scientists, including Edward Teller, are explicit requests to obtain copies of their writings published in 1939 and 1940...
...He cites a former GRU (military intelligence) officer who told him that President Roosevelt, suspicious of the OSS and the FBI, "set up his own informal intelligence network during the War" and that "Hiss, Hopkins, and Harriman were in this trusted group...
...Where he speaks of Western politicians, Sudoplatov is often absurd...
...Hiss allegedly "knew too much that was damaging to the prestige of both Roosevelt and Truman...
...Edgar] Hoover that the charges should be confined to perjury...
...The book seems very much a palimpsest...
...In this sense, of course, all of them were "sources...
...and in a memorandum on his wartime operations that was commissioned by the KGB in 1990...
...Thus, he presents a Kremlin scene in which Stalin personally orders the murder of Trotsky...
...Surely, if their book were an automobile, it would have to be recalled...
...The Post-Beria Papers Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness ??A Soviet Spymaster By Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter Little, Brown...
...The last may be a personal hobbyhorse...
...Fiercer criticism has come from Western experts, including Niels Bohr's son Aage (eyewitness to a Soviet approach to his father), Hans A. Be the (head of the theoretical lab at Los Alamos, 1943-45), Roald Sagdeev (former head of the Soviet civilian space program), Richard Rhodes and Patricia Johnson McMillan (authors of works on the making of the atomic bomb), Thomas Powers (expert on the CIA), and Amy Knight (biographer of Beria...
...None of the documents mentions Oppenheimer...
...These "memoirs" have their origins in a vita Sudoplatov submitted to the Party Control Commission in 1970...
...Sudoplatov still admires Stalin and Beria ("despite their crimes") as "statesmen," "successful rulers" who made the USSR a nuclear power...
...Informally, he assured full support by the American Administration for plans to use Jewish funds for the restoration of the Gomel area in Byelorussia...
...Sudoplatov, it says, had access to atomic matters only from September 1945 to October 1946 (not from February 1944, as he claims) and the department he then headed "had no direct contact with the agents' network...
...509 pp...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope " BORN IN MELITOPOL, Ukraine, in 1907, Pavel Sudoplatov followed an older brother into the Cheka at the age of 14, moved up to the Moscow OGPU in 1933, and performed secret NKVD missions in Western Europe in the mid-1930s...
...But other passages recall the classic parody of the genre, The Beria Papers, by Alan Williams (1973...
...Although there is much new information here, there is enough demonstrable misinformation, along with pointed omissions, to make the reader doubt anything that cannot be otherwise verified...
...Vernadsky, he said, was evacuated to Central Asia in the summer of 1941 and did not return to Moscow until mid-1943...
...Szilard never worked at Los Alamos, he never had a secretary, etc...
...This was certainly reported to Beria...
...Challenged by critics, they now call it a contribution to "oral history...
...His account of an alleged meeting with W. Averell Harrimanin 1945 depicts the U.S...
...In both cases, Stalin's remarks are given in quotation marks...
...One may well speculate as to what political or institutional interests are being served by a book that simultaneously portrays the KGB as virtually omnipotent and deceased leaders of the Western liberal establishment as virtual traitors or utter fools...
...For himself, Sudoplatov takes the Nuremberg defense: He was "obeying orders" in what he considered "war...
...Heruncle, Gregori M. Maironovsky, ran the agency's poison laboratory...
...Vernadsky in October 1942...
...Andropov's reaction to this is not known...
...Although the book has not been published in Russia, an extract published by Moskovskoye Novosti prompted a reader to challenge the account of a supposed meeting at Stalin's dacha involving Academician VI...
...The repeated linkage of Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard with the Stalinists Fuchs, Pontecorvo and Alan Nunn May, is as indecent as the amalgam "Hiss, Hopkins and Harriman...
...Similarly, while conceding his role in various murders in Ukraine in 1946-47, Sudoplatov says they were ordered by Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...They imply that any thought of international control of atomic energy, "sharing our secrets with the Russians," was ipso facto subversive...
...Sudoplatov claims it was not until 1988 that he began to suspect NKVD responsibility for the 1940 murder of 21,000 Polish officers, a crime formally proposed to Stalin by Beria...
...in his further appeals for rehabilitation...
...This book started taking shape the same year, when Sudoplatov's son Anatoly, a Moscow University professor, approached Jerrold Schecter, a former Time correspondent, and his wife Leona, a literary agent...
...Stalin is justified by invoking Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great...
...In any event, Sudoplatov was only rehabilitated in February 1992, with the certificate issued by an official of the Procuracy of the USSR after the latter had ceased to exist...
...The Schecters say all these errors are ''minor," but the list keeps growing...
...The book's several co-authors have reason to be grateful for the freedom of Boris N. Yeltsin's Russia and the First Amendment to the U.S...
...Under Lavrenti P. Beria, between 1938 and 1953, he rose to the rank of NKGB/MGB lieutenant general, heading several State Security departments...
...Rather, on their behalf as well as his own, he admits only those crimes that can no longer be denied...
...However, Sudoplatov escaped the death penalty meted out to Beria's top lieutenants...
...He was decorated for his role in organizing Leon Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940, and again for running guerrilla, sabotage, disinformation, and punitive operations behind enemy lines during World War II...
...Sudoplatov disregards facts adverse to his line by simply not mentioning them...
...Russia's Foreign Intelligence has described Special Tasks as "a mosaic of truthful events, half-truths and open inventions...
...That recounted his participation in acquainting Soviet scientists with "the latest materials on the atomic bomb, from such sources as the famous nuclear physicists R[obert] Oppenheimer, E[nrico] Fermi, K[laus] Fuchs and others...
...They merely confirm what has long been known: namely, that in 1941-42 the main Soviet informant was Donald Maclean, reporting on research in Britain, and that, starting in 1944, the Soviets learned much about the Manhattan Project from the Communist physicists Klaus Fuchs (who later fled to East Germany) and Bruno Pontecorvo (who fled to Moscow...
...Some sections appear to be aimed at proving Sudoplatov's devotion to the Communist Party cause...
...One need not be an expert to resent the polemical style of the atomic chapter...
...In the Tukhachevsky case, Sudoplatov goes to some lengths ??including a number of obvious factual errors??to slander Eduard Benes, the former President of Czechoslovakia (as he tries to dispute the contention that Gestapo disinformation Benes had passed on to Stalin is what provoked the Red Army purge...
...Sudoplatov also sent a petition to the party Central Committee in 1982, when Yuri V Andropov briefly ruled...
...in an earlier scene, Stalin orders him to kill a Ukrainian general...
...Solicitous of their image, he adds nothing to the catalog of their misdeeds...
...The authors conflate the hydrogen bomb debate of 1949 with World War II days to cast retroactive suspicion on those who opposed a "crash" H-bomb program...
...He does not mention the arrest of 16 Polish resistance leaders invited to Moscow, although at the time of their trial (June 1945)he was very much in the inner circle...
...He then had the charges against him reduced in 1958, began appealing for rehabilitation in 1960, and was released from prison on August 21, 1968 (as Soviet forces occupied Czechoslovakia...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
