Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

American charges. An NKVD case officer cabled Moscow from New

York about Julius Rosenberg: “The state of LIBERAL’s health is noth-

ing splendid. We are afraid of putting LIBERAL out of action with

overwork.”

These were not political sycophants: they were brave and competent

men doing their duty—if in a bad cause. We also have the memories of

many of these case officers. Among the memoirists are Aleksandr Fek-

lisov, the case officer who ran the Rosenbergs.^9 Other former officers

have been interviewed and have written articles and books.

Founded in the last years of the Soviet Union, the Memorial organi-

zation investigates the crimes of the communist era and seeks to me-

morialize its victims. Memorial and other Russian nongovernmental or-

ganizations have mined the archives to give us a better understanding of

the victims of repression. At the local and national levels, chapters of

Memorial have valiantly sought the painful truth of their nation’s past.

Their work has allowed historians to paint a more complete picture of

the Stalinist repression.^10 While many of the early histories of Soviet re-

pression centered on the suffering of the Russian intelligentsia, a class

with whom many Western intellectuals sympathize, the vast majority of

the “injured and insulted,” the dead and imprisoned, were peasants.

Peasants have had few historians, and so far less is known about the fate

of Russian villages than about the fate of the Stanislavsky movement in

the Russian theater during the years of repression. Perhaps the best me-

morial for those who died is the words of Anna Akhmatova, Russia’s

great poet who lost a husband and a son to Lenin and Stalin’s terror.

During the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina, I spent 17 months in the

prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone recognized me. Then a

woman with lips blue with cold, who was standing behind me and of

course had never heard my name, came out of the numbness which af-

fected us and whispered in my ears (we all spoke in whispers there), ‘Can

you describe this?’

I said, ‘I can!’

Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been a

face.

Akhmatova, who Stalin contemptuously called “our little nun,” waited

16 years before she published this vignette of the terror. Her son, for

whom she waited months in a prison queue to find news of, survived to

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