Alexander Gregory Barmine


Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin, most commonly Alexander Barmine, was an officer in the Soviet Army who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era for France and then United States, where he served the US government and also testified before congressional committees.

Background

Alexander Grigoryevich Barmine was born on August 16, 1899, in Mogilev, Mogilev Government, Russian Empire. He attended a state gymnasium in Kiev, followed by St. Vladmir University also in Kiev, Infantry Officer's School in Minsk, M. V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, and the Oriental Languages Institute in Moscow.

Career

USSR government

In 1919, Barmine joined the Red Army and participated in the Russian Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution; he stayed with the Red Army until 1935. Sent to a Red Army officer's academy, he served in several battles. In 1921, he served as military attached at the Soviet consulate general in Bukhara.
By the age of 22, he had risen to the rank of brigadier general in the Red Army.
As a member of the Soviet GRU, Barmine was assigned in 1935 to work abroad under diplomatic cover with the Soviet Foreign Office and Trade Ministry Commissariat under various diplomatic and trade representative titles. Late that same year, Barmine moved to Athens, Greece to take up an appointment as chargé d'affaires to the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece.
According to Barmine, Stalin's Great Purge began with the assassination of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov. Kirov was widely admired in the Communist party for his efficiency as administrator of the Leningrad District, and his willingness to stand up to Stalin. As a result, he drew the unwelcome attention of Stalin. Viewing Kirov's growing popularity as a threat to his hold on power, Stalin ordered the Soviet Secret police, the NKVD, to arrange Kirov's assassination; the GPU used a fanatic with a history of mental illness to accomplish the deed, Leonid Nikolaev. On December 1, 1934, Nikolaev shot Kirov in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. After his funeral, Stalin blamed Kirov's assassination on reactionary elements within the Communist party. Later, in an act of supreme irony, Stalin had the Leningrad Opposition leaders and many other party officials executed on the grounds that they had plotted with the assassin to kill Kirov. This act began the series of prosecutions, assassinations, and disappearances of Soviet military and government officials at Stalin's direction, known as the Great Purge.
Barmine had been a protege, co-worker, subordinate, or confidant of many of the Soviet Union's leading generals, diplomats, and government officials, nearly all of whom were arrested, imprisoned, and shot during the Stalin's purges during the late 1930s. During this time, Barmine was serving in the Foreign Office, and was posted to the Soviet legation in Athens, Greece. When Barmine's immediate superiors in the military and diplomatic corps began to disappear, or were announced to have been arrested and shot, Barmine began to fear that a similar fate was in store for himself. In July 1937, after discovering co-workers rifling his desk and searching his offices in the dead of night, he received a letter from his 14-year-old son Boris, who wrote his father that he, his brother, and Barmine's mother were going "far, far away to bathe in the sea." Boris also wrote:
Dear Papa, they read to us in school the sentence passed on the Trotskyist spies, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Kork, Uborevich, and Feldman... Wasn't it Feldman who used to live in our apartment house?
That same month, Barmine received an insistent invitation to dine aboard a Soviet ship, the Rudzutak, which suddenly docked at Piraeus without prior notification to the Soviet legation. Barmine declined to go aboard but agreed to dine with the captain at a local restaurant, where he was strongly urged to return home. Constantly followed by NKVD agents, Barmine decided to defect to the West. He wrote in One Who Survived that "if I should be imprisoned as the result of some vile, lying charge... would believe the official communiqué. Nobody would dare speak for me, and I would never be able to clear myself. I would lose them as sons forever."

Defection

Barmine fled Athens in 1937 to Paris. It was at this time that Soviet agents assassinated the former chief of the Soviet intelligence service in Western Europe, Ignace Reiss. It was later revealed that the Soviet NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov spent 300,000 French francs to accomplish the wet business.
In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers describes the impact of the defections and assassinations of fellow spies:
Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the G.P.U. close on their heels—Barmine from the Soviet legation in Athens, Raskolnikoff from the Soviet legation in Sofia, Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Reiss from Switzerland. Not that Reiss fled. Instead, a brave and a lonely man, he sent his single-handed defiance to Stalin: Murderer of the Kremlin cellars, I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action. But defiance is not enough; cunning is needed to fight cunning. It was foredoomed that sooner or later the door of a G.P.U limousine would swing open and Reiss's body with the bullets in the defiant brain would tumble out—as happened shortly after he deserted. Of the four I have named, only Barmine outran the hunters.

USA government

In New York City, Barmine applied for political asylum and citizenship as one of the earliest high-ranking Soviet government defectors to the United States. In the days before the formation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Barmine does not appear to have been debriefed at all by the United States government regarding his extensive knowledge of Soviet leaders and policies.
In 1941, Barmine joined a U.S. Army anti-aircraft unit as a 42-year-old private soldier. In 1942, he obtained his U.S. citizenship. In 1943-44, Barmine worked for the U.S.Office of Strategic Services, the wartime agency responsible for external intelligence and sabotage against Axis countries.
After a period of writing articles for various journals as well as his second book in 1945, Barmine joined the Voice of America in 1948, serving for sixteen years as chief of its Russian branch.

Testimony

On 14 December 1948, after an interview with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Barmine revealed that Soviet GRU Director Yan Karlovich Berzin had informed him prior to his 1937 defection that American professor and former Office of War Information director Owen Lattimore was a Soviet agent. In 1952, Barmine testified under oath before a Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security that he was told by Soviet GRU Director Berzin that Lattimore was "one of our men".
In his memoirs, Barmine related how he and fellow members of the Soviet GRU were surprised to learn of the burgeoning support for Soviet communism among intellectuals in the Western democracies after release of Soviet propaganda on the Five Year Plan, just when he and other commanders had begun to lose hope in the Bolshevik revolution. This revelation soon inspired a massive espionage and propaganda effort worldwide, with particular emphasis on nations with democratic governments.

Later years

From 1964 to 1972 Barmine served as senior adviser on Soviet affairs at the U.S. Information Agency. Barmine won three awards for outstanding public service while in the federal government.

Family

After attending the Red Army's general staff school, he was eventually assigned to the Soviet Foreign Office and Commissariat of Trade. He married a widow with prominent connections in the Communist Party, Olga Federovna, and the two traveled to Soviet Turkestan to work in the party apparatus. There they both became ill with severe cases of malaria. Returning to Moscow, the couple had two twin boys, but his wife died in childbirth.
In 1948, Barmine married Edith Kermit Roosevelt, granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. They had one daughter, Margot Roosevelt. In 1952, they divorced. Barmine then married Halyna Barmine.
Alexander Barmine died at age of 88 on December 25, 1987, in Rockville, Maryland.

Writings

Barmine began publishing anti-Stalinist, anti-Communist writings within less than a month of his defection. He also published a short treatment of the Moscow trials, dated 22 December 1937, in an American foreign affairs magazine.
He published his first book on Stalin's Terror, Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat, in 1938.
After the assassinations and questionable accidental deaths of several exiled Soviet citizens in Western Europe, including Trotsky's own son, Lev Sedov, he and an unidentified person left Europe for the United States in 1940. Barmine's aging mother and his two sons remained behind in the Soviet Union; unable to get them out of the country, he never saw them again.
He published a second book, One Who Survived, in 1945, in which he wrote:
When I work on my book, I feel as though I were walking in a graveyard. All my friends and life associates have been shot. It seems to be some kind of a mistake that I am alive.

By making his revelations public, Barmine felt the book might help frustrate Stalin's immediate desire to silence him. Upon its release, the Soviet government made no comment on Barmine's revelations, though they had denounced earlier works by other Soviet émigré authors.