ABSTRACT
On the night of 19 May 1937, during a routine search of the apartment of one of the arrested Red Army officers, NKVD operatives happened upon a photocopy of a document from Stalin’s Okhrana file. It was a copy of Colonel Eremin’s report in 1913 to the director of the Department of Police, S.P.Beletsky, with a brief description of Stalin’s Okhrana career.1 The copy was handed over to Karl Pauker, the chief of the NKVD Operations Department, a man of limited intelligence and poor knowledge of the Russian language. Pauker, a drinking companion of Stalin for many years, radiated a dog-like devotion to him and had no idea about the danger this document posed to him. He at once brought it to Stalin.2
