Exposition - the Route to the Soviet Union

The principle of granting political asylum was firmly anchored in the Bolshevik consciousness. Many had themselves flown from the persecution of the tsarist empire and found refuge in other countries of Europe. As early as March 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had ordered by decree that persons who were persecuted for political reasons in their home countries would be granted asylum. This decision was codified in Article 21 of the Soviet Constitution of July 1918. For the Bolsheviks, naturally, ‘political reasons’ meant revolutionary activity, as a constitutional amendment of 1929 made clear. The punishment threatened, however, had to be unusually high in order for the right of asylum to go into effect. The new Soviet constitution of 1936 recapitulated the requirement regarding the asylum law.1 The guarantees in this law had already gained significance in 1919 with the defeat of revolutionary uprisings in Hungary and Bavaria, when a number of the participants fled to Soviet Russia to escape persecution in their homelands. In the course of the twentieth century, more than 10,000 ‘revolutionary fighters’ were welcomed in the USSR as political emigrants by the International Red Aid of the USSR (MOPR SSSR) founded in 1922.2 Most of these emigrants came from Poland, Bulgaria, Latvia, Germany and Rumania.3

Although some of the refugees stayed quite some time in the Soviet Union, the goal was not to grant permanent residence, but rather to take the persecuted away from the action for a period of time. They were often sent to recuperate and were armed with new revolutionary enthusiasm, and in some cases with new documents, in order to take up the fight again in their former countries. Some also completed classes at the Lenin School in Moscow, founded in 1926. The school focused particularly on the German section, since the Bolshevik revolutionaries still set their hopes on the German proletariat as Marx had - in spite of the defeat of the 1923 Hamburg Uprising.

With the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933 the Soviet position of only granting asylum to those facing a long prison sentence or even the death penalty did not initially change. Since the Soviet leaders, like those of the German Communist Party (KPD), succumbed to the erroneous view that the National Socialists would only be in power for a short time, a mass emigration of those communists at risk was not regarded as desirable. Quite the contrary, both the Russian and German communist parties expected the revolutionary fervour to escalate in Germany, i. e. the cadres were needed in the country. Not long thereafter, however, the KPD leadership changed its mind. As the annihilation of the Communist Party progressed and the leaders themselves left the country, it was recognized that the emigration of Communist Party members should be supported.4

Acquiring entry permission to the Soviet Union was difficult, due to the visa requirement and the slow bureaucratic wheels of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat - but not hopeless. In the end, the asylum policy of the Soviet Union - at least as it pertained to the emigration of Communist Party members - was not as restrictive as was suggested by contemporary opinion and, consequently, also for a time in academic literature.5 The propaganda of the Soviet Union itself helped propagate this image since the fear that events in Germany could lead to mass migration to the Soviet Union did not only worry the officials of the foreign ministry. Economically speaking, the Soviet Union was not in a position to offer accommodation and subsistence to a large number of German refugees. The great movement of foreign skilled labourers - mainly from Germany, but also from America - who were recruited in the industrialization period following 1929, had shown that it was not sufficient to merely offer a job; it was also necessary to offer living conditions and wages at a level that would meet the expectations of workers from the West. The cost of the negative message from disappointed workers returning to the West was higher, from the Soviet Union’s perspective, than the benefits gained from the foreign labour. But a housing shortage as well as a hard currency shortage continued to dominate the Soviet economy. In addition, the economic and social isolation of the Soviet Union from the early 1930s had an effect on opinions. This development, taken together with immigration pressure from Germany and the overly burdensome Soviet bureaucracy, led to the perception that Soviet policy was restrictive.

This was indeed what the largest group by far of immigrants from Germany, the Jews, experienced. And although the Soviet Union as a country was not of much interest to German Jews who wanted to leave their home, the scant employment opportunities in Germany and other Western countries to which they could emigrate kept the USSR as an option. As they had generally not fought for revolutionary change, they were denied the status of political emigrants in the USSR. Apart from the special case of a group of about sixty doctors and their family members, who were granted admission through the intermediation of the Commissioner for Health, Kaminskii, no Jewish organization succeeded in persuading the USSR to receive a large number of refugees.6

In contrast, a number of individuals - Jews and non-Jews alike - succeeded in seeking asylum in the Soviet Union by other means than through the party. In most cases they already had professional connections with Soviet institutions or advocates who had contacts to prominent or influential Soviet figures. to the earnings from their activity, especially in the areas of science and culture which they promised to the USSR, they obtained entry visas and were assigned occupations corresponding to their education. On this basis, mathematicians, physicists, medical practitioners, musicians, architects and others made their livelihoods in the Soviet Union. The exact number of such people is not known, but it may have been around a hundred.

By far the largest group of emigrants was made up of KPD members and their families. The requirement that only those threatened with a death or prison sentence could have the status of political emigrants was soon abandoned. In addition the rule that one could emigrate only with the permission of the Central Committee lost its validity with the break-up of the party structure. KPD members took various routes to the Soviet Union: writers, for example, stayed in the country after participating in the Writers’ Congress of 1934; those involved with theatre stayed after the Theatre-Olympiad; tourists looked for a job at their own expense and requested emigration permission ex post; children of illegal workers in Germany were sent alone to the Soviet Union; and Party functionaries participated in conferences or congresses and were assigned new tasks. Entreaties to the Red Cross by simple Party members and their families were approved and visas were prepared through the diplomatic offices of other countries. For Party functionaries, the Comintern regulated the formalities. The numerous people who had worked in the most diverse institutions before 1933 and became emigrants against their will also deserve mention. These included many German technical experts, who had been attracted to the expanding Soviet market during the world-wide Great Depression and no longer wanted to return to Nazi Germany. All in all, the biggest German communist exile colony arose in the Soviet Union in the first three years after 1933. Based on estimates, the KPD representation at the Comintern suggested there were about 4,600 emigrants in mid-1936. In contrast, the estimated number of exiled communists in the remaining European countries at this time amounted to only 2,000 people.7