Female Comintern Insiders by Mette Skak
”You are, of course, familiar with the fact that due to the
war conditions the Comintern was dissolved. But the
cadres – our magnificent cadres – were kept. War is
drawing to a close. Upon its end the Communist and
workers’ movement will gain unseen strength. An
enormous number of specialists will be needed […]”.
GEORGI DIMITROV, CA. FEBRUARY 1945; QUOTED FROM
POLIAKOV 2003: 108 (TRANSLATED BY THIS AUTHOR).
Following the eminent American historian John Lewis Gaddis (1982: vii) history is a discipline
of lumpers and splitters. Lumpers ”try to make sense of whole epochs” by making linkages in
order to arrive at a synthesis, whereas splitters ”like to point out exceptions, qualifications,
incongruities, paradoxes” hereby elevating ”quibbling to a high historical art” (ibid.). Gaddis
identifies himself with the former, but only after having stressed the vital dialectic between
both methodological instincts. What follows bends in the direction of the lumper’s take on
history: I want to make linkages between the unfolding of the Cold War in the 1940s and the
continued activity of the Communist International – hence the Comintern – even after the
organization was formally closed down in May 1943. The vehicle for this analytical venture,
however, is biographical evidence about some remarkable Comintern insiders who happened
to be women. By contributing to this volume on Frauen im Kommunismus I do not seek to
embrace feminism and gender studies as such, rather I seek to demonstrate how the personal
history of three remarkable female Comintern actors including their testimony about the
Comintern - sheds light upon the evolution of Stalinism during the 1940s. Writing such
collective biographies may be a fruitful and certainly fascinating way of researching the inner
workings of Communism as one key variety of 20th century totalitarianism.
My argument about the Comintern is that it was and remained a vital and fairly intact carrier
of Leninist strategic culture beyond its formal dissolution; hence that the outbreak of the Cold
War followed logically from the hidden agendas and conspirational, repressive features of
Soviet political life (cf. Skak, 2012). The analytical substance below will be three subchapters
rich on ideographic detail which hopefully will satisfy splitters despite some evidence of
tentative nature. Those whom I want to portray are:
•Stela Dimitrova Blagoeva (1887-1954) from Bulgaria.
•Wanda Bronska-Pampuch (1911-1972) from Poland.
•Ana Pauker (1893-1960) from Romania.
The first personifies the classical Stalinist era of the Comintern, the second the highly
transformational 1940s and the last woman the implementation of Stalin’s postwar policies.
In order to properly contextualize the personal history of these Comintern activists I shall
begin the analysis by briefly presenting the Leninist strategic culture of the Comintern,
notably its metamorphosis into the more Gramscian doctrine of ’popular fronts’/’national
fronts’ as well as presenting the Comintern’s conspirational organizational features
culminating in Comintern’s 1943 metamorphosis. I shall bring data about the size of the
1
Comintern staff including its female component and reflect upon what motivated men and
women to serve as Comintern agents; regarding the latter I shall draw upon the MICE concept
taken from the study of espionage in the concluding part of the analysis.
As for strategic culture as political science framework for my inquiry, the concept here refers
to Lenin’s and Stalin’s attitude to the use of force for political purposes (cf. Gray, 1999: 50), in
other words the peculiar political culture and strategic designs that characterized Bolshevik
decision-makers before and after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The term ’culture’
implies inertia to change, but cultures may change, for instance when they have proven
dysfunctional for the decision-makers themselves (ibid.: 65 f.; Lantis and Howlett, 2013). The
point below is that Leninism and hence the Comintern did change its revolutionary tactics.
The strategic culture and organizational history of the Comintern before
and after 1943
The Communist International or Comintern was launched by Lenin in 1919 not merely for the
sake of turning his struggle against capitalism universal, but also in order to fight moderation
among socialists in the shape of social democrats (Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 1972: 420 ff. and
passim; McKnight, 2002: 48; McKenzie 1964). Lenin thus personified a radical strategic
culture of violently overthrowing the bourgeois political order including institutions like the
rule of law, parliamentarism as well as civil and political liberties for the individual (Skak,
2012). Lenin’s achievement as a statesman was to reconceptualize conventional raison d’etat
into an additional layer of ’raison de revolution’ as I have argued elsewhere (ibid.). His
Marxism – Bolshevism in his own terminology - poised the vanguard party as the key
revolutionary actor and combined party initiative with the ambiguous notion of the
revolutionary situation (ibid.). This was his recipe for establishing the dictatorship of the
proletariat by which he meant the hegemony of the Communist party (Jowitt, 1992; McKenzie
1964). Lenin imposed his radicalism upon the Comintern climaxing in the formulation of the
notorious 21 conditions for admission into the Comintern adopted by the organization’s
Second World Congress in 1920. Among other things, the 21 conditions urged the foreign
Communist parties – the ’sections’ of the Comintern - to combine legal forms of political work
with illegal, conspirational activity as a powerful way of mobilizing mass discontent
(McKnight, 2002: 25 ff.; 38). The conspirational strategic culture was path-dependent in that
it grew out of the specific repressive circumstances of Czarist Russia and was useful for other
illegal Communist parties (ibid.: 6 ff.). However, it corrupted legal Communist parties such as
the Danish DKP because the 21 conditions committed the sections to iron discipline as well as
to ruthless struggle against social democracy (cfr. ibid.: 198).
Leninism amounted to a deliberate rupture with Czarist, liberal and any other non-Marxist
strategic cultures. Lenin saw foreign and domestic policy as intimately linked in that the
otherwise ’imperialist’ World War I could be exploited for domestic revolutions by
transforming the fighting into civil war. His thinking entailed a Social Darwinian ontology of
utter conflict – class struggle and ’kto kogo’ (who crushes whom?) – and a corresponding
revolutionary epistemology which legitimised the use of any means furthering the overthrow
of bourgeois states and institutions. Biographers cite Lenin’s fondness of Nechaev’s
Cathechism of a Revolutionary as his moral compass (Jacobsen, 2012). Lenin was utterly
2
cynical about Comintern’s penetration of bourgeois states (Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 1972:
549-550) and personally drew up the first shortlist of Comintern agents to be sent abroad on
January 4th 1920: ”Abramovich, Kopp, Rutgers, Bronski […]” among which the Polish Socialist
Mieczyslaw Bronski will be reiterated later (ibid.: 145). Lenin seems to have been carried
away by revolutionary romanticism at the time of the Polish-Soviet war in 1920 (ibid.: 275), a
fiasco that arguably inspired his lieutenant Stalin to later modify the Leninist recipe for
revolution via armed insurrection towards revolution by stealth – i.e. by disguising the
capture of power by incrementally establishing a hegemony of the Communist party
(McKenzie, 1964: REF.!; cf. Pons, 2008; Neuberg, 1970  a radical Comintern manual).
This marked an evolution towards ’hegemony’ in the subtler sense of consent invented by the
Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci about bourgeois rule in the West1. In any event, the
notoriously sectarian Third Period of Comintern activity from its Sixth Congress in 1928 was
followed by a most remarkable change in strategic culture prior to its final Seventh Congress
in 1935. Already in 1921 Lenin himself adapted his own strategy into united front tactics
designed to lure Social Democrats towards supporting the work of Communists in addition to
a new focus upon revolutionary options in Asia (Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 1972; 543 ff.).
Gramsci (1891-1937) was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party (CPI) and took
part in the work of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (dubbed ECCI) in
1922 and talked to Lenin on 25th October 1922 about the prospects for CPI. In 1925 he went
to Moscow again, worked for ECCI, and he captured the CPI leadership from Bordiga with the
backing of the Comintern in January 1926 (Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 1986). He did not
defend Trotsky in his letter to the Comintern on Stalin of 1926 which Togliatti (’Ercoli’) – the
subsequent CPI leader - kept for himself (Wikipedia on Gramsci). When imprisoned by the
Italian Fascists from November 1926 till 1934 he wrote his Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1999).
His concept of (cultural) hegemony referred to the exercise of power through ideology and
non-economic institutions as reason for the ebb of revolution in Western Europe. He was thus
no Social Democrat, but a firm believer in the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois order
like Lenin who – like Gramsci excplicitly – was very much a Machiavellian (Jacobsen, 2012).
Interestingly, the Gramscian political scientist Robert Cox (1984: 163) attributes
Gramsci’s idea not to himself, but to contemporary thinking ”[…] in the circles of the Third
International: the workers exercised hegemony over the allied classes and dictatorship over
enemy classes” adding that Gramsci’s origanality lay in his application of this logic upon the
bourgeoisie – hereby seen as having tricked the working classes into not wanting Leninism.
Similarly, Colletti (1971) highlights the clash between Gramsci’s thought and the 1928
sectarianism of the Comintern indicating that Gramsci welcomed the subtler 1935 tactics. In
March 1937, Georgi Dimitrov, Secretary General of the Comintern, sent a congratulation to the
PCI’s theoretical journal Stato Operaio which contained ”special greetings to the PCI’s famous
fighters, Gramsci, Terracini, Parodi; to all comrades who languish in the dungeons of Fascism,
whose fighting spirit was not broken […]. The Communist International is proud of these
comrades. Communists and the toiling peoples all over the world will never forget that the
struggle to free these leading proletarian fighters is a duty for all who hate Fascism […]”
(Dimitrov, 1938: 286; translated by the author; italics in the original). A rare accolade, yet
given in the annus horribilis 1937 when Stalin’s terror against ”infidel” cadres climaxed!
Stalin expressed himself in the following Gramscian way on 7th November 1937: ”The English
party, after all, has what we consider the correct policy, but it can accomplish nothing because
the middle cadres are on the side of the Labourites” (Stalin quoted from Dimitrov, 2003: 66f.).
1
3
Stalin invented Leninism as synonym for Bolshevism to highlight the path-dependency to his
mentor. He was more aloof to Comintern activity than Lenin, but was responsible for the 1928
sectarianism and was de facto boss of the organization (McDermott and Agnew, 1996; cf.
Dimitrov, 2003). Moreover, Stalin did identify with the raison de revolution of this ’General
Staff of the World Revolution’ as he swore loyalty to the cause of the Comintern in the same
solemn manner as he swore loyalty to Lenin upon the latter’s death (Morgan, 1949: 202.). Yet,
it is also the case that he would never sacrifice Soviet state interests in order to push for
communist takeovers at a particular place if forced to choose (Pons, 2008). He was thus less
romantic about revolution than Lenin, but above all he was motivated by ideology (Morgan,
1949; Diplomaticus, 1952; Nigel-Davies 2001; Seton-Watson, 1950: 374 f.). It was via
Dimitrov – the Bulgarian Communist accused of having set fire to the German Reichstag in
1933 who was exiled to the Soviet Union to become the Comintern’s Secretary General – and
the succesful anti-Fascist united front tactics of French Communist in 1934 that Stalin came to
embrace the idea of popular fronts (McDermott and Agnew, 1996: 120-142). Hereby he could
simultaneously pursue Soviet security policy interests in the face of the increasingly acute
threat from Nazism and open for decisive Communist political influence in Western states.
It cannot be proven that Stalin explicitly embraced Gramsci’s subtle criticism of Lenin’s recipe
for revolution via armed insurrection (Drabkin, 1998: 27; passim). But Stalin did so de facto
by abondoning his own 1928 sectarianism for the benefit of Dimitrov’s formula of ’revolution
by stealth’ which in turn may have been inspired by Dimitrov’s veneration for Gramsci. If true,
then Gramsci’s role as intervening variable sheds new light upon Stalin’s onslaught upon
Trotskyites – diehard Leninists in their outlook upon revolution - cf. figure 1 below:
Fig. 1: Conceptual steps in the evolution of Stalin’s approach to world revolution:
LENIN's
recipe for
revolution:
armed
insurrection
GRAMSCI's
concept of
HEGEMONY
via 'consent'
STALIN's recipe:
Revolution by
Stealth: 'consent'
via popular
fronts (1935-39)
or national fronts
(1941-47)
4
Dimitrov ’s speech at the 7th Comintern congress in 1935 made it clear that Communists now
had to abandon sectarianism and establish broad ’united fronts’ – specifically an ’Anti-Fascist
People’s Front’ (Dimitrov, 1951: 66 f.) - in order to more powerfully fight fascism: ”We must
[…] put an end to […] our […] contempt of the various organizations and parties of the peasants,
artisans, and the mass of petty bourgeoisie in towns” (ibid.: 67); ”We must not confine ourselves
to bare appeals to struggle for the proletarian dictatorship […]” (ibid.: 63). Here and elsewhere
he made it clear that the new tactic was merely a tactic, not a strategy of abandoning Soviet
power. However, he instructed the Comintern sections to cooperate with established Social
Democratic parties in order to enhance ”the confidence of the working class in its own forces”
with a view to heighten ”the influence of the Communist Party” (ibid.: 71). He quoted Stalin
for the following Gramscian insight: ”What constitutes the strength of Social-Democracy in the
West? Asked Comrade Stalin ten years ago. Answering […] he said: The fact that it has its
support in the trade unions.” (ibid.: 84f.). On this account Communists were notoriously weak
Stalin pointed out. All these deliberations led Dimitrov to argue the case for e.g. a ”Workers’
and Farmers’ Party” in the USA, not a Socialist party to be sure, just definitely not an antiCommunist Party and definitely anti-Fascist party (ibid.: 68 f.). The experience from France
played an important role in Dimitrov’s vision of the Popular Front TO BE CONTINUED 
Stalins equally Trojan vision of national fronts (Mark etc.); Comintern’s conspirational
organization and secret reorganization in 1943 (source e.g.: Adibekov et al. 1997)
[DATA]. At its height of activity, the Comintern Cadre Section had files covering 28,626
persons of which only a minor part happened to be women. The size of the Comintern staff
thus matched the size of the United Nations’ headquarters in New York which numbered
some 30,000 in 2012. (REF. United Nations total staff numbers) making it a significant
international organization by any standard. Only a tiny fraction of Comintern’s female staff
made it to the top: 24 out of 576 leading cadre happened to be women according to data
provided by the Hannover project (REF Buckmiller & Meshkat/Peter Huber? TJEK & HUSK)
5
Figure 2: The metamorphosis of the Comintern from mid-1943
NII-100
NII-99
(1941-)
NII-205
OMI
[IO]
OVP
DATA on number of Comintern cadre including its female component/ MICE reflections here?
Stela Dimitrova Blagoeva (1887-1954):
Stela Blagoeva is one of the less well-known Comintern personalities who pops up in the
Black Book of Communism as ”an obscure employee in the cadre section” of ECCI. There she is
quoted for her denunciation of the leading Hungarian Communist Frigyes Karikás along with
her wholesale denunciation of political emigrants in the Soviet Union (Courtois et al. 1999:
296). She thus jeopardized the lives of thousands having escaped political repression at home.
[INSERT PHOTO about HERE!  Bulgarian stamp /her centenary: portrait of Stela Blagoeva]:
6
Stela Blagoeva was born in Bulgaria 1887 as daugther of the famous revolutionary Dimitur
Blagoev whose fatal 1923 uprising and subsequent death in 1924 paved the way for Dimitrov
(Crampton, 2007: 237). Her association from 1915 with her father’s Tesniak-wing (the
Narrows) and her early career as secretary for her father (1921-24; CD-ROM, 2007) haunted
her and may have kept her somewhat in the shade at the apex of the Comintern despite the
fact that she was entrusted the honourable task of introducing Dimitrov’s early public works
which, by the way, included meticuluous reprinting of his criticism of her father as being ’unBolshevik’ (Dimitrov, 1938: 15). Her formal profession was a teacher of music and history, but
she stopped teaching after the 1923 events and was arrested in 1925. She exiled to the Soviet
Union in 1926 and came to serve in ECCI from 1927 till 1930 at the women’s secretariat and
instructed at KUNMZ, the Communist ”University” for Western National Minorities (e.g. Poles)
while simultanously helding posts representing the Bulgarian section. She began to serve as
referee in ECCI’s Agitprop department in 1930 and became cadre officer in the Romanian
Ländersekretariat. Then she was promoted to the vital cadre section of ECCI in 1931 where
she served as referee until the formal dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 (CD-Rom, 2007;
RGASPI Fond 17, Opis 120, file 297, page 237). When occupying these offices she was not just
denunciating other Communists, but perhaps close to be purged herself; more on this below.
Telling for the continuity of Comintern activity, Blagoeva is depicted as an employee of
Comintern’s successor OMI by the Russian expert on Comintern and early post-Comintern
affairs Natalia S. Lebedeva (1998: 506); in OMI she continued to ”play a remarkable role in the
management of cadre issues” (’igrala zametnuiu rol’ v rassmotrenii kadrovich voprosov’; ibid.).
At the same time she served as an employee of the Bulgarian section – zagranbiuro in the
post-Comintern parlance - and was senior referee for Vasil Kolarov according to another
Russian expert on post-Comintern affairs (Adibekov et al. 1997: 236) while also working for
the Soviet Communist party VKP(b) (CD-Rom 2007). The latter source mentions her as an –
7
obviously senior – editor (’Redakteurin’) at the Comintern successor institute NII-205 that
combined propaganda with serious analytical work and – apparently – some cadre work. In
other words she personifies the multiple manipulations and agendas of Stalin during his finest
hour as revolutionary, namely the mid-to-late 1940s when he was capable of pursuing Soviet
state interests and sovietization beyond the Soviet borders at the same time (Kramer, 2009).
Also in another way did Blagoeva personify Comintern continuity, namely when she was
elected to the Presidum of the All-Slavic Committee in 1942 in the Soviet Union of which she
was later apponited president (Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 1986). Prior to the formal
dissolution of the Comintern – a measure helping Communists to convert themselves into
ostensibly sincere anti-Fascist patriots – Stalin launched various such regional platforms: the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Free Germany Committee etc. – as tools for exploting
ethnic sentiments in his postwar foreign policy designs (ibid.; cf. Morre, 2001; Rubinstein and
Naumov, 2001). Soviet-sponsored Pan-Slavism worked well in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia,
but not so in Poland and Hungary (Service, 2007: 222), so eventually Blagoeva’s committee
was dissolved. Indicative for the significance of Stalin’s Pan-Slavic initiative is the fact that the
Committee pops up in several ISCOT messages in which the Moscow headquarters serve as
hub for secret communication from its branches in New York, Montevideo; Auckland (New
Zealand) or Ontario (Canada) to e.g. Tito’s headquarters in Yugoslavia; another contains
messages from Tito urging the Moscow headquarters to congratulate his fellows in Slovenia
and the latter express their anti-Fascist determiniation via Moscow (cf. ISCOT No.s 438, 439,
440, 441 all of 18th March 1944 and ISCOT No.s 121, 1044 and 1224 all from spring 1944).
Until she returned to Bulgaria in 1946 (where she officially served as vice-president of the
Bulgarian branch of the All-Slavic Committee until 1949) Blagoeva may – or may not - have
been among the ”[…](five to six persons) of the former ECCI cadre department” whom the
senior Soviet party official Malenkov on 14th June 1943 asked Dimitrov to put into a new
special (’osobyi’) cadre section under the Soviet VKP(b)’s Cenral Committee to be in charge of
foreign Commmunist cadres staying in the U.S.S.R. (RGASPI, Fond 495, opis’ 73, file 174, p. 6973; Mar’ina: 1994: 27). In any event, from the mid-1940s Blagoeva became even less visible,
yet her submerged activity was most likely intact as argued by Lebedeva (loc. cit.) just like the
rest of the Comintern iceberg to use the apt metaphor of Mar’ina (ibid.: 28). Telling for her
role is the fact that she was among the nine invited to Dimitrov’s dacha on 24 September 1944
to discuss Bulgarian affairs in the format of the second Comintern successor Inostrannyi Otdel
(Dimitrov, 2003: 336f.). Obviously, she was not a key figure in the sovietization of Bulgaria
from 1944 and onwards (cf. Nikova, 2009; Crampton, 2007 and Mark, 2001). Her position as
deputy in the Bulgarian Pan-Slavic Committee 1947-49 may have been tricky following the
Tito-Stalin rupture in 1948 or she was smart enough to come out on the side of Stalin in time.
In mid-1949 she was appointed ambassador to Moscow and later to Ulan Baator (Mongolia)
in 1952 (CD-Rom, 2007). When delivering her diplomatic credentials on 26th July 1949 she
asked the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinski for Soviet help in her handling of inquiries
by journalists about the Traicho Kostov show trial (AVP RF Fond 07, opis’ 22, papka 24, delo 5,
pp. 20-21; Sovetskij faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope […], vol. 2, 2002: 138-139). A week later she
paid a protocol visit to the director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and amid seemingly trivial
affairs she asked him to provide her with kharakteristiki – i.e. personal dossiers – for all
foreign diplomats and missions in Moscow! (ibid.: 149-151; AVP RF Fond 074, opis’ 38, papka
151, delo 8, pp. 1-3). A month later and on behalf of her government she requested the Soviet
8
government to send advisers to help Bulgaria shape up management of the planned economy
as an urgent matter for building socialism there (ibid.: 173; AVP RF loc. cit., pp. 9-10).
Regarding Blagoeva’s activity in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Dimitrov (2003) mentions
her several times as interpreter whenever he talked to Spanish comrades, and the leading
Spanish Communist José Diaz in turn used Blagoeva to report his distrust of Ercoli (Togliatti;
Dimitrov, 2003: 178 about 12th July 1941). Archivals from RGASPI document her presence
during secret ECCI Secretariat meetings before Hitler’s attack upon the Soviet Union on 22nd
June 1941 and during a couple of ECCI Secretariat meetings in mid-1942 (Lebedeva, 1994: 9596, 468-469; 1998: 234-235, 240-241 ). Blagoeva was the cadre department official to whom
the French Communist Maurice Thorez confided his trust in a notorious carreerist, Maurice
Tréand, from within his own rank son 20th November 1939 whereupon the latter used
Blagoeva to denounce a French comrade for his Social Democratic past (Firsov, 2007: 88, 90)
to mention but one of Tréand’s dubious acts at the apex of the French party. Blagoeva herself
described Tréand’s downfall in a handwritten note from 13th September 1940 as follows:
”Comrade Guliaev [the boss of the cadre department] and I drew the attention of M [Thorez]
to the disturbing news about the concentration of party power in his hands: [international]
liaison, cadres, org[anizational] work, communications, youth.” (ibid.: 103). In itself an
interesting shortlist of vital party activity from a senior Comintern insider’s point of view!
Blagoeva’s vast portfolio within ECCI’s cadre section was the Roman section where she was
empowered to investigate biographical data and ”certificates of political good conduct”
(Huber, 1998: 43). Accordingly, in 1937 she was entrusted with the task of examining the
failed 1935 revolution in Brazil in relation to which the historian William Waack (1993)
displays Blagoeva’s puzzling accusations against ”someone” who in her judgement was ”not a
fugitive”. He portrays her not just as Comintern’s main unquisitor, but as ”unsympathetic,
reckless, badly dressed and evil” (anti-pática, malcuidada, mal-vestida e mal-intencionada;
ibid.: 323). On behalf of ECCI she reiterated its fierce criticism of the Portuguese Communist
Party from 1936 - its ”… corroding provocations and factionalism” because of its hesitancy in
adopting the 1935 popular front strategy (Madeira, 2011: 691). Indeed, Blagoeva’s person is
frequently invoked when scholars want to portray ”the atmosphere of mistrust” inside the
Comintern during the Great Terror during which she repeatedly transgressed her Roman
portfolio. Thus she wrote on 14th November 1937 to Belov, another cadre boss: ”Die
mitgeteilten Fakten über die Verbindungen Smoljanskis mit dem erschossenen Lipschitz, über
den Ingenieur Schapiro and andere sind den Personalakten beigefügt worden, aber es gibt
keine Spuren, dass diese Angaben dem NKWD übermittelt worden sind.” (German quotation
from Tutotschkin, 2007: 189-190).
According to archival sources reprinted in Chase (2001: 240 ff.) a closed meeting of VKP
members and candidayes among the ECCI Secretariat was held on 22nd June 1937 - when the
Great Terror climaxed - during which Blagoeva almost ended up on the bank of the accused.
According to testimony from other Comintern insiders the vital Communications Service was
”in the enemy’s hands”, and Blagoeva herself said she was ashamed because of her failure to
respond to the signals, and she closed by laying her fate in the hands of those present: ”The
party group has the right to raise the question of whether I should remain a party leader […]”
(ibid.: 244). A certain Nusberg accused her for friendship and familiyness with her colleagues
in the Cadre Department who were about to be purged and punished, so her tactic appears to
have been one of surrender once she realized the acute danger surrounding her. Indeed, her
9
entire career and personality as a survivor reminds of the opportunism of the old Menshevik
Andrei Vyshinski who came to serve as prosecutor general during the infamous show trials of
those years and who was later instrumental in the sovietization of Romania beginning in
1944. Blagoeva survived her eternal master Stalin and died while serving as a Bulgaria’s most
senior diplomat in Moscow in 1954. Her native country Bulgaria reciprocated among other
things by issuing a stamp celebrating her centenary in 1987 – the one displayed above.
Wanda Bronska-Pampuch
Wanda Bronska-Pampuch is an ever lesser known Comintern insider as she was more of a
junior cadre who attended the KUNMZ, Comintern’s Communist University for Poles, Balts,
Yugoslavs, Germans as well as Soviet citizens preparing themselves for Comintern missions
abroad to the Soviet Western rim (Burmeister, 1955: 5). What makes her uniquely interesting
is her in-depth testimony about the organizational evolution of the Comintern from the time
of Great Terror until and beyond the formal dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. She
published her insider account after Stalin’s death, but under the pseudonym Alfred
Burmeister (publisher: the Research Program on the U.S.S.R. of New York City). She was
arrested in 1938 for espionage for the Polish leader Pilsudski (Bronska-Pampuch, 1959)2.
This source contains her review of Merle Fainsod’s seminal work Smolensk under Soviet
rule. It opens in an anecdote about her own release from the Soviet concentration camp at
Kolyma in 1945. A footnote specifies: ”Mrs. Bronska-Pampuch, who has also written under the
pen-name of Alfred Burmeister, is a German journalist of Polish descent”.
2
10
Now, what might have motivated her to take this step of disclosing what was still highly
classified knowledge about her former place of employment? I guess the answer lies in her
and her family’s tragedy as victims of Stalin’s terror and her decision – after having returned
to post-war Poland – to defect to Western Germany in 1949. There she worked as a journalist,
for Radio Free Europe’s service in Polish (according to her entry in Polish Wikipedia), as a
translator of Polish literature and author of autobiographical fiction offering details about life
in the Soviet Arctic labor camp Kolyma (Bronska-Pampuch, 1963). The latter work seeks to
rehabilitate her parents as she alone was rehabilitated in 1957 by the Soviet authorities. Her
father – Mieczyslaw Bronski - was a close Bolshevik associate of Lenin’s during his pre-1917
years in Zürich and happened to accompany him in the sealed railway wagon across the
German Empire amidst World War I (Der Spiegel, “Ein Glas Wasser”, 04-12-1963). So it was no
coincidence that Bronski appeared on Lenin’s formerly cited short list from early 1920 of
Comintern agents to be sent abroad. She was born in 1911, so while still a baby and a child
she met Lenin. According to Bronska-Pampuch’s files in the Comintern archives her familiy
returned to Poland during 1919-1920 – mainly as Comintern agents - whereupon they went
to Germany to conduct party activity from 1920 till 1931 (CD-Rom, 2007). Bronska-Pampuch
thus joined the youth branch of the German Communist party in 1926 and the KPD itself in
1931. In 1931 when the parents settled in the Soviet Union she became a Soviet citizen (ibid.)
Her own direct Comintern activity began with services as both “Reporterin und Instrukteurin
unter Arbeitern” from 1931. She received both cadre and party school education from 1933
till 1936 at KUNMZ’s German office whereupon KUNMZ was closed (like later the Lenin
School for slightly higher cadres). From 1936 she served with EKKI, and her Comintern files
tells of service in the Press- and Propaganda Department until 23rd April 1937 when she was
sacked at the behest of Ercoli (Togliatti; ibid.). She herself sets 22nd May 1937 as her last day
at the office: “When I came on night duty that evening my Comintern pass was taken away
from me” with no reason given (Burmeister, 1955: 1). It turned out that her immediate
superior was arrested plus Krajewski, the head of the Department. When she called the head
of the Cadre Department (where Blagoeva sat) she found out that both he – Alikhanov – and
later his deputy – Chernomordik – were removed as was Angaretis of the dreaded
International Control Commission, Comintern’s Spanish Inquisition. Later Bronska-Pampuch
learned of the arrest of her mother while in Sverdlovsk on official duty which did scare her,
but she decided to approach the Cadre Department to sort things out (ibid.). But here a senior
official, the German Grete Wilde demanded that Bronska-Pampuch denounced her mother
which she declined and wrote quite another declaration.
Only later in 1937 dared she pass it over to Wilde, who in the meantime had been arrested,
too; she ultimately died prematurely in a concentration camp (ibid.: 2). Bronska-Pampuch
herself was interrogated in 1938. As for her editorial work for the Comintern, the investigator
just cited Stalin’s dictum of the time: “So you’ve worked in the Comintern – the nest of spies!”
(ibid.: 3; cf. Dimitrov, 2003: 52). She was bold enough to ask if Dimitrov belonged to this
category to which the answer was: “No, not Dimitrov”. Bronska-Pampuch’s conclusion from
all this anecdotal evidence is that the actual liquidation of the Comintern took place already
then, not in 1943. The authority of the Comintern suddenly dwindled, she says – which may
indeed have seemed so – but then, Stalin’s frenzy hit all institutions which he depended upon:
the Soviet Communist party; the German, the Polish and other sections of the Comintern as
well as the officers of the Red Army and the NKVD bosses. True, the repression of Polish
Communists was extreme - Stalin apparently saw them all as Pilsudski’s spies. But there was a
11
perverse logic to it - of preparing for what Stalin perceived as the coming military cataclysm
(Rosenfeldt, 2006: 221 ff.). This he almost certainly perceived as “his” revolutionary situation
just as World War I was for Lenin (cf. Musial, 2008: 421-467). So there was an acute need for
terrorizing foreign Communists into utter loyalty towards whatever party line he took3.
Bronska-Pampuch’s 40 pages’ long narrative thus establishes that she and her Comintern
fellows were subject to a strange mix of terror and then pragmatism in the mid-1940s when
Stalin was to reap the harvest from the war. Her remembrances mixes her personal
knowledge with information from fellow-inmates in Kolyma and colleagues at the post-war
Polish embassy in Moscow where she worked for a while and from other acquaintancies.
Under the headline “From Soviet Internment to Careers in the People’s Democracies” she writes:
“At the end of September 1946 I returned from the forced labor camp in Kolyma to
Moscow. This happened at the request of the Polska Partia Robotnica [The Polish
“coalition” Workers’ Party] and the Polish Communist government. Similar requests were
made by the Hungarian and Bulgarian Communist parties […]” (Burmeister, 1955: 28).
She explains her release by the acute lack of communists in Poland due to the fact that the
precious few survivors among the first rate Communists – Bierut, Ochab, Zawadski, Gomulka
etc. – were those who spent 1937-38 in a Polish prison. Once in power, Bierut came to be seen
as the Polish Stalin, whereas Gomulka had a subtler - yes, Gramscian - approach I would add.
“Neither Stalin nor Bierut worried about whether the people summoned in this way from
the camp after eight or nine years of forced labor would be suited to work again for
Communism immediately. Apparently no one had doubts about it […] Unfortunately, they
were not mistaken […]” (ibid.: 30).
Bronska-Pampuch goes on to cite examples of peoples in high positions in very early postwar
Poland known to her as both ex-inmates and lower-ranking Communists. Altogether Polish
ex-inmates numbered “sixty to one hundred people” (ibid.: 31). She confirms the pertinence
of Dimitrov’s remark about “our magnificent cadres” quoted as opening for the present work
when stressing that the new “confidence was dictated by the necessity of finding cadres abroad
for work at any cost” (ibid.: 36).
She offers an additional reason why “these scraped-together remnants of the old Comintern
Sections, along with the prisoners of war who had been superficially made into Communists [in
the NII-99 mentioned earlier!], were put to use by the Soviets” (ibid.: 39). Namely, that “[t]he
war had deeply shaken the [Soviet] regime’s internal power” (ibid.) on top of which came the
famine of 1946 causing “the Russian masses to be more rebellious than ever”. She elaborates:
“Anyone who was in the Soviet Union during those first postwar years knows that it was
certainly the most democratic period in the history of the Soviet Union, and this brief aura
of democracy, combined with the inner uncertainty of the Soviet regime itself, was the
reason that the foreign Communist parties received the right to proclaim “their own way
Arguably, Stalin’s terror served to ”solve” what Max Weber identified as the industrial era’s
in-built agent-principal problem of information asymmetry to the detriment of the latter. One
scholar perceives Stalin’s practice of raison de revolution as nothing less than Stalin’s curse
(Gellately, 2013: 8). The author, however, fails to examine the deeper Comintern intricacies.
3
12
to socialism”. The admission of other parties, the postponement of collectivization, the
stress on nationalist factors and other temporary concessions were urgently necessary in
order to neutralize the masses of the population in these countries at least until the Soviets
stood firm again at home […] only then, in 1948, could one return to the attack.”
(Burmeister, 1955: 39; cf. Kramer, 2009: 72 ff.).
This amounts to what is known in the political science jargon for international affairs as a
second image explanation for the very Gramscian machinations surrounding the Comintern in
the 1940s – when domestic factors and considerations determine foreign policy making. In
any event, Bronska-Pampuch accurately depicts the operational contents of Stalin’s national
front tactics known to scholars of the Cold War as the transformation of genuine coalitions
into bogus coalitions in Eastern Europe and East Asia (Hugh Seton-Watson, 1950: 169 f.).
What is more, Bronska-Pampuch offers intriguing details on the secret reorganization of the
Comintern during World War II – details more or less matching the descriptions based on
recently declassified archival evidence by Russian historians like Grant M. Adibekov et al.
(1997) and Natalia S. Lebedeva (1998). She mentions how the Comintern media were subject
to control by the Central Committee of the Soviet party already prior to mid-1943 when the
Comintern as such became a branch of that body (Burmeister, 1955: 11). She mentions the
removal of the Comintern headquarters from Mokhovaia Street in downtown Moscow to the
Lenin Hills south of the city in November 1937 (ibid.: 14). After Hitler’s attack in mid-1941,
the Comintern headquarters moved into the main building of the Soviet agricultural fair (later
known as VdNKh) in the north-eastern Ostankino region of Moscow. Since then, “the name
Comintern was no longer used for the organization’s headquarters, Instead the Comintern was
now officially called “Institute No. 205”” (ibid.)4. According to her, the junior staff of the
Comintern apparatus was forcibly evacuated to Engels on the Volga where their daily rations
were less generous than those she received in Kolyma; they lived in the houses of Germans
seized by the NKVD. Dimitrov’s diary confirms that Comintern’s printing base in July 1941
became the city of Engels (2003: 181). So it was mainly senior people like himself who went
to Kuibyshev and Ufa in today’s Bashkortostan as the twin operational headquarters of the
Comintern until its formal liquidation in 1943 (Burmeister, 1955: 16 f.: Dimitrov, 2003: 200).
Bronska-Pampuch mentions the set-up of a successor the Lenin school near Ufa and highlights
a “special “super-secret” section, a fortress within the fortress” (ibid.: 17) namely the Korean
section; information confirmed by another junior Comintern insider who attended the new
Lenin school at Kushnarenkovo and published his memoirs at the same time - Wolfgang
Leonhard (1955/2011: 238). Maybe it was here that North Korea’s future leader Kim Il-Sung
received his cadre education? In any event, Kim was known to the ECCI since early 1941 and
he did spend some ultra-secret war years in the Soviet Union (Skak, 2012: 188 f.). The young
students were being trained to carry out communist policies abroad, but few of them were
members of Communist parties, a fact underscoring Stalin’s need to improvise (ibid. 18). The
upside was their ignorance of the West due to their upbringing in the U.S.S.R. as children of
Comintern apparatchiki and other foreign cadre who had not been subject to repression. She
A footnote disputes her accuracy on this point, citing Comintern’s name as ””Central Institute
301” and that it became ”Institute 205” only upon moving to Ufa” in wartime evacuation.
Adibekov et al. (1997: 224 f.) insist that Institute no. 301 was a part of the Secretariat from
June 1942. But it disposed of its own mini-apparatus akin to the overarching Comintern.
4
13
describes how the message of Comintern’s dissolution was conveyed to them in dialectical
terms as resulting from a clash between the Comintern’s institutional constraints and the
revolutionary energy accumulated in the national parties tempered by the war. Like Leonhard
(1955: 310) she highlights considerations of helping the British Communists penetrate the
Labour party; indeed, it cannot be excluded that Leonhard was her source on this key point.
Under the headline “PREPARATIONS FOR POSTWAR SOVIET EXPANSION” she describes the
NII-205 in Moscow as a propaganda institution under direct Soviet management although
staffed by ex-Comintern personel (Burmeister, 1955: 22). Also Yuri Poliakov (2003), a Soviet
official at the NII-205, points to the crucial role played by Dimitrov and via him the Kremlin.
Bronska-Pampuch refers to the “highly secret “Institute No. 100”” (Burmeister, 1955: 24) as
another key successor to the dissolved Comintern. According to her it was thought to be
another school. Some of NII-100’s activity consisted in training foreign radio experts as it was
the successor to the most conspirational parts of the Comintern (Adibekov et al. 1997: 234 f.).
She realized that the “Institute No. 99” was roughly identical to the National Committee “Free
Germany” and dwelt on the continuous role played by Comintern’s hotel Lux as residence for
much ex-Comintern personel (as does Leonhard). Thus, the notorious Försterling died in his
hotel room at Lux as late as 1948. But national party cadres had little influence over media
servicing their comrades at home. Conversely, the Polish party representative, Sylberman, had
regular contact to the deputy at the Polish embassy in Moscow (ibid.: 23 f.,26 and 28). About
Innostrannyi Otdel, the Central Committee’s “ghost-Comintern” of late 1943 she concludes:
“The chain of control went from the Foreign Department of the Central Committee to the
Party representatives. The latter directed the activity of their Party as well as of the
“diplomatic representatives” of the given Communist government, as I was able to establish
when I worked in the Polish embassy in Moscow in 1946-47. Part of the money for the
activity of the Polish party came from the Central Committee. I don’t know to which extent
its work may have been influenced by the NKVD, but I have the impression that the NKVD
penetrated the Party representation only by means of individual agents” […](ibid.: 24; cf.
Dimitrov, 2003: 336 f.).
In short, while dissolving the Comintern, Stalin continued to invest great effort in controlling
foreign communists to ensure that they carried out his “Gramscian directives” of the time. The
Cold War, in turn, exploded in his face because of the ingrained brutality of the Red Army etc.
Bronska-Pampuch herself married several times and got the name Pampuch from her first
husband Bernhard Pampuch according to her file in the Comintern archive (CD-Rom 2007).
She may have chosen to write under pseudonym after learning of the dangers surrounding
defectors like her. In late 1953, Józef Swiatlo, a notorious Polish secret police agent was on a
mission to seek the help of Stasi to get rid of her or kill her (Wikipedia: Wanda Bronska). On
this occasion he, too, decided to defect to the West and came to work for Radio Free Europe.
Ana Pauker
Ana Pauker was a Romanian Jew, born into a poor rabbi family as Ana Rabinovici (CD-Rom,
2007). The front page of the American Time magazine 20th September 1948 displayed below
displayed her portrait as one of Stalin’s then well-known lieutenants in charge of gradually
sovietizing her native country. She was one of the co-signators to the formal Resolution of the
14
ECCI Presidium of 15 May 1943 dissolving the Comintern. She pops up every now and then in
Dimitrov’s diary; he even considered her one of his and his wife’s closest private friends at the
time of the funeral of their little deadly sick son (Dimitrov, 2003: 268), a warmth never
bestowed upon his countrywoman Blagoeva. In postwar Romania she held very high posts
and obviously enjoyed the sympathy of Stalin. Yet, suddenly she fell from grace in 1952 and
was stripped of all her functions, expelled from the party and placed under house arrest.
15
Why did her life take such an ominous turn even in Stalin’s time? After all, Pauker was seen as
the personification of Stalinist ruthlessness and cunning to quote the jacket of her biography
written by Robert Levy (2001). What was her Comintern career? These two questions drive
the political mini-biography that follows. Levy places her fate into the context of European
Jewry and, indeed, when in power in her native country she played a role in Romania’s
curious stop-go-policy of tolerating Jewish emigration (ibid.: 163 ff.). He speaks of her
exceptional intelligence and of her galloping climb into the Comintern hierarchy (ibid.: 46).
In the 1920s, as a member of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), she had to flee to the
Soviet Union and even succeeded in bypassing the RCP when entering the Lenin school in
1928. There she learned about Marxism, creating and using party cadres, revolutionary
methods, espionage and sabotage as the head of the Romanian students (ibid.). In the early
1930s Dmitri Manuilsky, the Deputy of the Comintern, with whom she was on good terms,
sent her on secret missions to France as a Comintern instructor. Prior to that she was
befriended with a fellow Jew and charismatic Romanian Communist, Marcel Pauker, whom
she would marry. She returned to Romania in March 1934 (CD-Rom, 2007) leaving Marcel
behind in the Comintern apparatus in Moscow, while she herself was arrested again in 1935.
Marcel, too, was arrested under the Great Terror and convicted as an enemy of the people in
1938. According to Levy’s narrative, Ana never denounced him notwithstanding rumours in
Romania. She appears to have been deeply shocked by his fate, and later she confided that she
thought the Soviets had “unjustly set up” Marcel. Levy treats the episode as a formative event
for her occasional defiance (ibid.: 66 f). Still, she was just as convinced about the infallibility of
the Party as was Lenin, Stalin and even Trotsky as powerfully documented by Levy (ibid.: 57).
In a move that was telling for her standing as a top-notch Comintern apparatchik, the Soviet
Union arranged for her release from prison in 1940. Levy describes her return to the Soviet
Union in May 1941 and her subsequent war years under the heading “In Power”. In October
1941 during the Comintern apparatus’ evacuation to Ufa she was a celebrated Soviet
propaganda symbol - well-known even among simple villagers in the Russian countryside
(Levy, 2001: 68). Like other Comintern celebrities like Dolores Ibarurri (“La Pasionaria”)
Pauker was now entrusted with radio broadcasts in her native Romanian; a frustrating work,
however, due to her isolation from what happened on the ground at home. Together with
Vasile Luca, and Manola H. Manole (both RCP) she went from Ufa to Moscow in 1942 to design
a Romanian National Democratic Front. She was one of just a handful of foreign Comintern
insiders whom Dimitrov told about the pending dissolution of the Comintern and as earlier
said, she co-signed the resolution (Dimitrov, 2003: 272-273). Seamlessly, she continued her
radio propaganda now under the aegis of the Comintern successor NII-205 and was
simultaneously involved in the PoW activity at NII-99. Dimitrov confided to his diary:
“7 July 1943: - Manuilsky and Pauker to see me. Pauker reported on her work with
Romanian prisoner-of-war officers. Gave instructions regarding preparations for
forming a Romanian antifascist committee. Determined that the Romanian committee
(somewhat unlike the German committee) is to have a broader platform, one that will in
fact unite all parties, both opponents and supporters of Antonescu [the Romanian
dictator, executed in 1946] who are speaking out against Romania’s waging war on the
side of Hitler […]” (ibid.: 282-283].
16
Arguably, this was another formative event emboldening Ana Pauker to take on a Gramscian
approach of working through consent and policies of inclusion upon her return to Romania.
At any rate, the striking thing about Robert Levy’s account is the repeated evidence of her
loyal, but creative effort of implementing Stalin’s cautious line of rule by national fronts. True,
her biographer treats her zig-zagging between Stalinist repression and retreat as mainly
stakes in her rivalry with the homegrown Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. But her
firm belief in Stalin and his tactics along with sheer fear of not performing according to his
wishes suggests that Levy (op. cit.: 84) hits the nail on its head when concluding that she was
not an extreme leftist as otherwise held by certain Russian historians. For one thing, she was
not that cunning and ruthless towards Dej and blew one obvious chance of ousting him (ibid.).
Levy (op. cit.: 69) reports that her secretary observed an overnight change of Pauker’s mood
in September 1943 when she was presiding over the Congress of Romanian PoWs. There she
proposed to name the new Romanian division after a national hero; an initiative taken after
the Comintern boss Dimitrov instructed her to act on a broad platform. In late August 1944,
Dimitrov received her twice to give her further instructions in the context of Antonescu’s fall
from power and the approach of the Red Army towards Bucharest (Dimitrov, 2003: 328). He
also received her twice prior to her departure for Romania in September 1944 – for instance,
when he “arranged with Shcherbakov” – the senior Soviet official boss of OMI also monitoring
the NII-99 - to move her close associate, the Hungarian Luca from the Soviet PoW scene to
Romania (ibid.: 331 f.). No wonder, then, that she soon came to be despised as the Iron Lady of
Romania and branded together with Luca as hyenas and Godless foreigners although she tried
to keep a low profile doubly handicapped by being a woman and a Jew.
Significantly, she was again received by Dimitrov in his dacha during a brief visit to Moscow in
the company of Dej and another RCP cadre on 4th January 1945. To quote Dimitrov’s diary:
“They recounted a discussion with Stalin. The latter had offered advice as follows: 1.
Concentrate attention on agrarian reform […] Leave court and monastery domains alone
for now. (America developed because it had no landowners […]) […] 4. Do not bring up
nationalization at present […] 5. Try not to scare and not to alienate the bourgeois (antiGerman) elements […] 6. Use the Vladimirescu divison as internal support for the
national-democratic front. 7. Work toward establishing a national-democratic front
government. 8. Develop the argument that if such a government comes about, the USSR
will help in having North Transylvania end up Romanian. […]“ (Dimitrov, 2003: 350-351,
italics and parentheses in the original)
Thus, in early 1945 Pauker moved to the right “out of fear of public opinion” in support of a
very broad coalition government, because she realized the extreme weakness of RCP which
claimed a mere 700 members in August 1944 (Levy, 2001: 74). She said she pursued “a type
of Social Democratic policy” modeled after the French and Italian Communist parties’ mass
recruitment campaigns (ibid.: 73). However, she was no gentle Social Democrat, but culpable
for harsh repression including the dismissal of some 60,000 government officials. On March
7th 1945, she told her RCP activists that “immediate tasks are […] purges – but not by leaving
people on the streets to become active enemies, but by eventually taking them to camps where
they’ll be sorted out and put to work, and by immediately arresting war criminals.” (Pauker
quoted from Levy, 2001: 75; cf. Mark, 2001: 29). She plainly moaned the lack of efficiency
displayed by the Romanian Minister of the Interior who in her view was not fulfilling his
17
quota of arrests of Nazi collaborators compared to standards set in France (Levy, loc. cit.).
Levy adds that she afterwards moderated herself by unilaterally dismantling all the camps.
There are other examples of such zig-zagging not unlike the zig-zagging of her principal,
Stalin, as vividly shown in Dimitrov’s diary (2003) and elsewhere. Pauker opened her house
to the upper strata of the Romanian bourgeoisie and other people who were afraid of being
persecuted according to her secretary and had no objections when Dej approached the West
for grain at the end of 1946 (Levy, 2001: 76, 84). She even distanced herself from Luca, when
he was pressing for nationalization informing him “that the Soviets advising her thought it
was still too early for Romania to nationalize”, an opposition she would only abandon in 1948
when the Soviets ordered the RCP to nationalize assets (loc.cit.). One key point in Levy’s
reconstruction is her pragmatic, benign policies towards the peasant majority in Romania as
Minister of Agriculture from 1948 – for which she was purged by Dej in 1952. According to
Levy (p. 111) it was Dej and the deputy Minister of Agriculture, Nicolae Ceausescu – yes, who
later became the last Communist dictator of Romania – who were the main culprits regarding
Stalinism in the Romanian countryside whereas Pauker actively resisted collectivization. Even
so, she lacked legitimacy whereas she, conversely, earnestly identified with the Romanian
people (ibid. 4). This paradox was satirically depicted by the Danish cartoonist Bo Bojesen in a
drawing published 16th February 1948 reproduced below. According to him Pauker was a
monster-bride not being carried, but herself bent on carrying her powerless, sceptical groom
across the threshold to their wooden hut having portraits of Stalin and Molotov on the wall:
18
Source: Boet efter Bo Bojesen
The headline sounds: “Alone at last” and is elaborated by the following text: “Anna Pauker
said in her latest speech: “We comply with the wishes of the our people. And our people likes
the regime”. Given the eternal jealousy of Dej and her vulnerabilities and inconsistencies it is
not surprising that she was removed from power in 1952 and put under house arrest. It all
coincided with Stalin’s anti-Semitic frenzy culminating in the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia.
Worth noticing, however, is the fact that Dej dared not execute her as she still enjoyed some
Soviet protection (Levy, 2001: 222). Yet she has never been rehabilitated, not even by today’s
post-Communist Romania, whereas e.g. Gomulka nowadays enjoys some respect in Poland.
Concluding thoughts
To recapitulate, this contribution to Frauen im Kommunismus tried to strike a balance
between lumpers and splitters. My ambition is clearly that of a lumper – to adjust Cold War
historiography regarding Stalin’s policy by going into the evolution of Comintern doctrine and
19
practice in the 1940s. But the novelty of the effort lies in its micro-level inquiry into the life
and work of three remarkable female Comintern insiders. The first Comintern cadre, Stela
Blagoeva, illustrates the conduct of the survivor personality amidst Stalin’s Great Terror. She
was influential behind the scenes in Comintern’s 1943 transformation into a submerged
submarine of devoted cadres - cadre issues being her Comintern portfolio before and after
May 1943 – but came to play a less visible, less significant role in postwar Bulgaria. The
second Comintern cadre was the KUNMZ alumne Wanda Bronska-Pampuch whose testimony
shed light upon Stalin’s improvised cadre recruitment on the ruins of the old Comintern
hereby preparing for his revolution by stealth via the discreet tactic of national fronts. The
third Comintern cadre was Ana Pauker representing the absolute elite among foreign
Cominterners, a fact used against her by her rival Dej in his purge of her in 1952. But there is
more to her story than just that. My reinterpretation of her personage – based on Levy (2001)
along with Dimitrov (2003) – stresses her conversion into a Gramscian power politician as a
most appropriate twist to her Stalinism and Leninism given the norms of the postwar era.
As vividly documented by interviews with East Europeans who experienced the sovietization
of their country on the ground – cf. Applebaum (2013) – Gramscianism worked at least for a
while. But the in-built tension between the façade of inclusion and the increasing reality of
repression combined with the lure of sophisticated, truly liberal policies of the West brought
about collapse and the onset of full-scale Cold War. Paradoxically, the catalyst for the collapse
of Stalin’s subtler approach was the defiance of Tito in 1948. Tito happened to personify not
Stalinist right-wing Gramscianism, but Stalinist left-wing sectarianism in combination with an
assertive foreign policy (REF. Perovic – TJEK!). So the key concept uniting my leaps up and
down the levels of abstraction inherent in the integration of the twin principles of lumping
and splitting is that of Gramscianism, in casu Stalin’s push for ensuring Communist hegemony
as far as he could in postwar Europe and Asia5. As for this venture into the biographical turn
within history and political science, a few words of teleological nature are warranted. What
drove these obviously brilliant intellectuals into the arms of Lenin, Stalin and utter repression
– be it as denunciator (Blagoeva), victim (Bronska-Pampuch) or decision-maker (Pauker)?
Here the MICE concept taken from the study of espionage (Taylor, 2010) comes in handy. The
acronym refers to possible personal motives for engaging in espionage and subversion for the
benefit of a foreign principal: M for money-seeking, I for ideology, C for compromise (i.e. being
an easy target for blackmail in case of non-compliance with one’s recruitment for espionage)
and, lastly, E for ego – an ambition of playing a role in history. Consensus prevails that moneyseeking is a rare operational motive despite some fringe benefits - dry Martinis “stirred, not
shaken” or whatever. The I, however, appears to be the clue to any instance of efficient Soviet
recruitment of agents (Klehr and Haynes REF.), so this logic obviously applies to Lenin’s and
As for Lenin’s and Stalin’s pivot to Asia as it were, Lenin opted for it upon the fiasco of
sovietizing Germany via the 1920 war with Poland in a drive for sovietization there. Mongolia
was Lenin’s exercise in pragmatic sovietization. After his death Stalin first drew towards
sectarianism as Comintern doctrine upon his disastruous experiment with tactics á la Gramsci
in China in 1927. But upon the arrival of Dimitrov in Moscow and in the face of an acute threat
from Fascism and Japanese militarism, Stalin opted for popular/national fronts – hereby
anticipating Mao’s doctrine of New Democracy of January 1940 intact in contemporary China.
Lastly, Kim Il-Song, too, displayed loyalty to Comintern doctrine and practice in North Korea
like Ho Chi Minh, co-author of Neuberg (1970), did. All points elaborated Skak (forthcoming).
5
20
Stalin’s disciples inside the Comintern (cf. Chase, 2001). Blagoeva, Bronska-Pampuch, and
Pauker were all devoted Leninists – in the case of Bronska-Pampuch until she defected to the
West and began working for the cause of anti-Communism. Compromise was a possible factor
in the case of Blagoeva because of her father and an obvious factor regarding Pauker’s Mosaic
roots. Powerful egos may certainly have driven all three – including Bronska-Pampuch when
leaking her careful compilation of insider knowledge about the Comintern’s evolution beyond
1937. But there is one additional factor stressed by Levy (2001:78 f.) regarding Pauker: fear.
Fear, Obedience, Belief, and Repression – these ominous words make up the headline of the
concluding chapter of the inquiry into the Great Terror inside the Comintern of the U.S.
historian William J. Chase (2001: 404 ff.). Here he examines the possible motives of both
perpetrators and victims of Stalin’s tyranny making it clear that the ‘C’ factor of compromise
applied to each and everyone – all Comintern cadres were vulnerable to political blackmail
once Stalin decided he wanted to get rid of someone, all had some private scores to settle etc.
All in all, then - with or without a Gramscian twist - the history of Communism was one of fear
and indignity due to the vile practices of repression. For this moral reason alone, the classical
Totalitarian school of Sovietology and the Orthodox approach to Cold War studies – which put
the major blame on Stalin and the Soviet side of the conflict - were both right. Besides there is
abundant empirical evidence in support of their basic analytical positions (e.g. Courtois et al.
1999; Kramer, 2009; Applebaum, 2013; Gellately, 2013).
Bibliography: NB! This is an as yet unfinished bibliography, sorry!
Applebaum, Anne (2013). Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe. Penguin Books.
Bronska-Pampuch, Wanda (1959). “A Mirror of Soviet Reality”, Problems of Communism,
January, pp. 49-52.
Bronska-Pampuch, Wanda (1963). Ohne Mass und Ende. Munich: Piper & Co. Verlag.
Burmeister, Alfred (1955). Dissolution and Aftermath of the Comintern. Experiences and
Observations, 1937-1947. Research Program on the U.S.S.R., New York City. Mimeographed
Series No. 77.
CD-Rom (2007). Biographisches Handbuch zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale.
Ein deutsch-russisches Forschungsprojekt (Datenbank of Buckmiller and Meschkat, 2007);
entries with RGASPI file data on Blagoeva, Bronska-Pampuch, and Pauker, respectively.
Colletti (1971)
Courtois, Stéphane et al. (1999). The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression.
Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, Consulting Editor Mark Kramer.
Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Cox, Robert (1984)
Crampton, (2007).
21
Dimitrov, Georgi (1938). Georgi Dimitroffs liv og kamp for Folkefronten. Artikler og Taler. Med
en Levnedsskildring af Stella Blagojeva. København: Mondes Forlag A/S.
Dimitrov, Georgi (2003). Dimitrov’s Diary, 1933-1949. Translated and Edited by Ivo Banac. Yale
University Press.
Diplomaticus (1952)
Drabkin, (1998)
Firsov, Fridrikh (2007). Sekretnye kody istorii Kominterna 1919-1943. Moskva: Airo-XXI Kraft.
Gaddis, John Lewis (1982)
Gramsci, Antonio (1999).
Gray, Colin S. (1999).
Huber, Peter (1998). ”Structure of the Moscow apparatus of the Comintern and decisionmaking”, pp. 41-64 in Tim Rees & Andrew Thorpe (eds.). International communism and the
Communist International 1919-43. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press.
ISCOT decryptations, i.e. the full copy available at the National Security Agency Library and
Museum of Cryptology at Fort Meade, MD, USA.
Jacobsen, Kurt (2012). Lenin biografi. Informations Forlag.
Kramer, Mark (2009). ”Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in
Eastern Europe, 1944-53”, pp. 51-101 in Vladimir Tismaneanu (ed.). Stalinism Revisited. The
Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe. Budapest & New York: Central
European University Press.
Lantis, Jeffrey and Darryl Howlett (2013).
Lazitch, Branko and Milorad Drakhkovitch (1972)
Lebedeva, Natalia S. (1994) Komintern i Vtoraia Mirovaia Voina (1994). Chast Pervaia: Do 22
iunia 1941 goda. Moskva: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli
Lebedeva, Natalia S. (1998) Komintern i Vtoraia Mirovaia Voina (1998). Chast Vtoraia: Posle 22
iunia 1941 goda. Moskva: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli.
Levy, Robert (2001). Ana Pauker. The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist. Berkeley etc.:
University of California Press.
McDermott, Kevin & Jeremy Agnew (1996). The Comintern. A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin. London: Macmillan.
McKenzie, (1964).
McKnight, (2002).
22
Madeira, Joao Manuel Martins (2011). O Partido Communista Portugues e a Guerra Fria:
”sectarismo”, ”desvio de direita”, ”Rumo á vitória” (1949-1965). Dissertation: Universidade
Nova de Lisboa.
Mar’ina, V. V. (1994). ”Komintern: likvidatsia ili modifikatsia? (1939-1943 gg.)”,
Slavianovedenie, No. 5 (Sentiabr’-Oktiabr’), pp. 14-28.
Mark, Eduard (2001).
Morgan, (1949).
Neuberg (1970). Armed Insurrection. HUSK!
Nigel-Davies, (2001)
Nikova, Ekaterina (2009). ”Bulgarian Stalinism Revisited”, pp. 283-303 in Vladimir
Tismaneanu (ed.). Stalinism Revisited. The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central
Europe. Budapest & New York: Central European University Press.
Poliakov, Yuri Aleksandrovich (2003). ”Posle rospuska Kominterna”, Novaia i Noveishaia
Istoria, No. 1 (Ian’var’-Fevral’), pp. 106-116.
Pons, Silvio (2008).
RGASPI
Seton-Watson, Hugh (1950).
Skak, Mette (2012).
Der Spiegel.
Taylor, Stan A. (2010). “The Role of Intelligence in National Security”, pp. 299-319 in Alan
Collins, Contemporary security studies, 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Waack, William (1993). Camaradas. Nos arquivos de Moscou: a história secreta da revolucao
brasileira de 1935. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia (accessed in December 2013) entry: Wanda Bronska
23