ABSTRACT
After Stalin’s Okhrana file fell into his hands in May 1937, he was able to conjecture through whose hands it had passed. By a strange coincidence, the major roles in the history of this file were played by persons of Polish descent, or, more precisely, by people whom Stalin considered to be Poles because of their Polish family names, although some of these ‘Poles’ had been Russified generations back. Of such remote Polish descent was the director of the Department of Police, S.P.Beletsky, who, after having investigated the Stalin-Malinovsky feud, had ordered Stalin’s exile and placed his file in the archive. Elena Rozmirovich came from a prominent military family of Russified Polish gentry. Stalin’s arch rival in the Okhrana, Roman Malinovsky, was a Pole also. In the summer of 1926, when Stalin’s Okhrana file was discovered in the old archives, it fell into the hands of the chief of the secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, another Pole. Then, after Blumkin’s arrest, the file was intercepted by Dzerzhinsky’s successor, V.P. Menzhinsky, yet another Pole. Finally, the file wound up in the hands of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who came from a long-Russified Polish family.1 V.A.Balitsky, S.V.Kossior and other Russified Poles played an important role in the Tukhachevsky conspiracy. Stalin ordered executions not only of the participants in the conspiracy but of the families and relatives of Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Tukhachevsky, all four Kossior brothers, Stanislav Redens-the NKVD chief in Moscow and Dzerzhinsky’s nephewand many other ‘Polish spies’.2
