PEDIGREE

In his study of Soviet and Russian forgeries, Paul Blackstock wrote that the first questions to be answered about a suspect document were "How was it acquired, from whom, and under what circumstances?" (10) Yet after presenting several well-known cases, including the Protocols of Zion and the Zinoviev Letter, he concluded that the investigation of a document's pedigree is the least reliable method of evaluation. "Investigation of the background or pedigree of a suspect document is, of course, a useful first step, and may produce convincing circumstantial evidence that it is either genuine or fraudulent." (11) But no more than that.

In his book-length treatment of the Eremin letter, Stalin's Great Secret, published a few months after the article in Life, author Isaac Don Levine spent some time developing the document's "pedigree." (12)

Levine recounted hearing of the letter for the first time in September 1946. He visited the summer home of Clare Booth Luce in Connecticut, where he was introduced to Vadim S. Makaroff, son of Admiral Stepan Makaroff of Russian Imperial Navy fame. Makaroff told Levine that, together with Boris Bakhmeteff and Boris Sergievsky, he had acquired an original document of great interest.

Bakhmeteff was the former Russian Provisional Government's Ambassador to the U.S. and was, at the time, a businessman and professor of international relations at Columbia University. Sergievsky was "a noted flyer who had been a pioneer in Russian aviation." "The three gentlemen," concluded Levine, "were of unimpeachable reputation."

Levine reported having been "dubious but interested."

The aviator Sergievsky held the original letter. Levine met with him and received the paper for authentication and safekeeping. Life magazine published a photo showing Makaroff and Sergievsky, in April 1956, presenting the document to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy—on behalf of the Tolstoy Foundation—in the "mirrored vault of Chemical Corn Exchange Bank of New York." (13) That same year, the heads of the Tolstoy Foundation were also among the petitioners to the U.S. Congress to grant American citizenship to General Alexander Orlov, whose involvement in the Stalin/Okhrana controversy will be discussed in the next chapter. (14)

As this author has recently learned, the Tolstoy Foundation was not entirely reliable when it came to keeping the Eremin letter safe. The Foundation's current Executive Director reports that the Foundation does not own the letter and "that some previous Board member, whose name we cannot recall, is the possessor of this letter." In other words, the document may now be considered lost. (15)

Levine was told that the letter was brought to the U.S. from Shanghai by Professor M.P. Golovachev, described as "a former deputy minister in the democratic Far Eastern government during the Russian civil war." Kennan later added the detail that the professor was paid $300 for the letter. (16) Professor Golovachev returned to China in the interim. The three Russians claimed to have known him "as the son of a noted Moscow jurist."

Levine obtained an original letter in 1948 signed by the French cultural attache in Shanghai, Ch. Grosbois, stating that he had known Professor Golovachev and his wife for more than twenty years. He wrote: "Mr. Golovachev is a highly cultured man who in Shanghai intellectual circles has made good use of his intelligence and knowledge, always keeping above the melee of politics."

Levine located another witness who also would vouch for Golovachev, Michel N. Pavlovsky, "a highly reputable Russian engineer," who was passing through New York on his way to Paris. Pavlovsky testified to having known Golovachev since the latter's association with Valeryan Moravskii of the Far Eastern republic. Pavlovsky also told Levine that he had tried to authenticate the document.

According to Professor Golovachev's original account, the letter had come to him from certain Siberian comrades who had escaped Soviet Russia to China. Pavlovsky added to this "the gratifying information" (in Levine's words) that the original source of the letter was Colonel Victor Nikolayevich Russianov of the Siberian Gendarmerie. Colonel Russianov took the Eremin letter and other papers from the files of the Siberian Okhrana with him to China. He gave the letter to Professor Golovachev "who was a writer on international affairs for North China publications."

Russianov almost didn't make it. In 1917, Boris I. Nicolaevsky, who would later become the biographer of super-agent Azef and an authority on provokatsiia, was living in exile in Siberia. He reached Eniseisk a few days after the fall of the monarchy and was elected chairman of the local Committee of Public Safety. Years later, when Isaac Don Levine told him that Colonel Russianov had brought the Eremin letter from the files of the Siberian Okhrana to China, Nicolaevsky replied: "Why, I myself signed the order for the arrest of Colonel Russyanov [sic] in Yeniseisk at the request of the Mayor. When they came to get him, they found him trying to burn the files in his office."

Levine commented: "Then there was an Okhrana section in Yeniseisk." And Nicolaevsky replied: "There was some kind of an Okhrana post, but I don't believe it was called a section." (17) The question of whether there was an Okhrana section in Eniseisk is one we will return to later in this chapter.

In one of the remarkable coincidences of history, a leading investigator of Okhrana infiltration into the revolutionary movement (Nicolaevsky) crossed paths with the very same Okhrana officer (Russianov) who would take the Eremin letter out of Russia. Had Nicolaevsky's men arrived earlier (presuming that the Eremin letter was authentic), Stalin's career might have ended then and there, in March 1917.

In 1956, in a reply to a critical review of his book, Levine recounted the story of Russianov's arrest and added, "Incidentally, the colonel's son is living in Australia and I have taken steps to communicate with him." (18) Fifteen years later, H. Montgomery Hyde confirmed that Colonel Russianov was arrested in March 1917, later released and then found his way to Shanghai where he worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy American family. "There," wrote Hyde, "he parted with the letter no doubt for a financial consideration." (19)

Smith found a document entitled "The Work of the Okhrana Departments in Russia," written by one Russianov in the Moravskii collection of the Hoover Institution archives. (Moravskii appears, therefore, to be a link between a Colonel in the Siberian Okhrana and Professor Golovachev of the Russian emigre community in China.) Smith noted that Russianov was chief of the Okhrana in Eniseisk from 1914-1917. Later he became chief of State Security in Omsk for the Kolchak government. Russianov fled to China after Kolchak's defeat.

The manuscript was probably written in China in 1925. Smith wrote: "Perhaps his most important contribution is his description of the Moscow Okhrana organization prior to 1918 and his near-psychoanalytic analyses of the motivation of double agents and agents-provocateurs." Russianov "knew the intrigues, gossip, and plots which troubled his 'service.'" (20)

The author has obtained a copy of pages from the Russianov manuscript, but unfortunately these are typewritten and in English. This is unfortunate because had they been handwritten, it might have been possible to compare Russianov's handwriting to the handwritten elements in the disputed Eremin letter. (As we shall see, Russianov has been proposed by several scholars as the most likely author of the document.) Hoover Institution Archivist Ronald M. Bulatoff writes that "it is my opinion that this manuscript is a translation from the Russian and was edited at a much later time (possibly in the early 1960s) by another person"—not Colonel Russianov himself. (21)

As for Professor Golovachev, his Russian friends working with Levine were able to arrange his escape from the advancing Chinese Communist forces and his emigration to America. He worked for a time in San Francisco as a chauffeur and died there in the mid-1960s.

Levine concluded, "My inquiries had convinced me that the history of the document's passage from Siberia to the United States was beyond suspicion." However, he waited ten years before publishing the letter. "I felt that it would have fallen on deaf ears," he explained.

The dazzling halo built around the Soviet dictator by the Western heads of state who had dealt with him as well as by his own self-glorification machine remained unbroken until last February [1956] when Khrushchev and Mikoyan opened the Kremlin's barrage against Stalin's pyramid of fame. My soundings about Stalin's great secret convinced me as late as 1955 of the futility of presenting the shocking case against him to the world. (22)

At the press conference held by the Tolstoy Foundation on April 18, 1956, its President, Alexandra Tolstoy, made the same claim. "This is a document which we tried to publicize many times both here and in England," she asserted. "It was completely authenticated. But until now, with the current international climate, at last it is being presented by Life Magazine." (23)

Levine's explanation did not convince his critics. "This is a surprising statement," commented Columbia University Professor Michael T. Florinsky. "Since 1947, especially following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the popularity of the USSR and Stalin declined markedly and there is nothing to indicate that the revelation of his betrayal of the Revolution, supported by adequate evidence, would have been ineffective." (24)

Decades later, Roy Medvedev noted that Levine's "account of the document's history fails to explain how it could have passed through several owners over a thirty-year period without being published." (25) As one critic pointed out in 1956, "The Japanese or Germans would have been willing to pay exorbitantly for such a document. But it remained unknown to them." (26) It might be added that the emigre Russian press would certainly have publicized such a document—whether it were genuine or not. The Mensheviks and others had also shown interest in the subject of Stalin and the Okhrana for several decades.

Levine explained only his own ten year delay. He did not tell us why Colonel Russianov and Professor Golovachev held onto the letter until 1946. Certainly they were not waiting for its value to rise to the astronomical sum of $300 before selling it to the New York Russians. Levine claimed that the Russian owners of the Eremin letter "for years tried in vain to publish the document." (27) He explained, "Although I did not see the document until 1947, my associate Mr. Makaroff saw a photostat as early as 1934 and began negotiations at that time. There was hardly any international interest in Stalin before 1930." (28)

Kennan suggested additional evidence regarding the document's "pedigree," though his account has not been cited elsewhere. In the 1920s, "before Stalin was well-known," Kennan reported, a book was published called Agenty tsarskoi Okhrany. It included a chapter on Stalin, "with a document very similar to this one." The author of the book, whom Kennan did not name, "died in Yugoslavia during the [second world] war." Nor did Kennan himself admit to having seen the book. But the book was seen in the Prokopovich Institute Library in Prague "by two very serious witnesses" (who remain nameless). If this is true, it is the earliest reference by far to the Eremin letter. (29)

While we do not know the whereabouts of the document during the thirty years from the fall of the tsarist regime until it was turned over to Isaac Don Levine, we do know that from 1946 publication was delayed another ten years. It is possible to speculate on the reasons. Though Levine made efforts to authenticate the document, he was not entirely successful. Later, according to Hyde, he even acknowledged that he believed the document to be spurious. (30) His predecessors might also have had their doubts about the authenticity of the letter. Pavlovsky's efforts to authenticate it, like Levine's, were not crowned with success.

Nevertheless, nothing in the document's "pedigree" proves fraud. On the contrary, the story of its origin in Siberia and eventual appearance in the United States in the 1940s, is consistent and plausible.

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

The famous "Zinoviev letter" reached the British Foreign Office on October 10, 1924. Comparisons would later be made between the Eremin letter and this proven forgery. (31) But the "Zinoviev letter" was "a typewritten copy of either an alleged English original or a translation of the original," noted Blackstock. "Hence the usual rigorous tests, such as physical examination of the paper and ink used, examination in search of erasures or alterations, etc., could not be applied. The probability of fabrication in such cases is much higher than in the case of alleged original documents or photocopies of originals." (32)

The Americans had a "Zinoviev letter" of their own ten months before the British forgery was to bring down the Labour Party government. The main effect of the American "Zinoviev letter" was to delay American recognition of the Soviet regime until 1933. The original of this famous anti-Soviet forgery was never published or displayed. Physical tests could not be performed on it. No copy of it seems to exist anywhere. (33)

The "Hitler diaries," on the other hand, were exposed within days of their initial publication in April 1983. Experts in the West German Bundesarchiv were able to pronounce the diaries "grotesquely primitive forgeries" after establishing that the paper, ink, glue and even the binding threads were all of post-war manufacture. (The New York firm of Osborn and Osborn, experts on spurious documents, was approached by the owners of the Hitler diaries for their evaluation, but refused to take on the project. Osborn's name will come up again in the story of the Eremin letter.)

The Eremin letter appears to be an original document. Experts examined it in the 1950s and it can be examined again today. The debate surrounding the physical evidence has focused on three points: the paper and letterhead, the typewriter, and Eremin's signature.

The Paper and Letterhead

"The heavy smudges, found upon examination to be in the same ink as the signature, indicated that the paper was genuine," Levine wrote. "A forger would have avoided such an unsightly blot upon an important paper." (34) But common sense tells us that good forgers probably will put "unsightly blots" on their work just as would appear in real historical documents.

Levine was also impressed by the typing itself. "The fact that the indentation of the second paragraph in the original is so little out of line that it is hardly noticeable also pointed to a slovenliness which no forger could afford to let stand." Levine seemed to believe that forgers generally give themselves away through excessive neatness.

As for the paper stock, Levine asked: "Was the paper on which the letter had been typed of recent or pre-World War I vintage, and where had it been manufactured?" He brought the letter to Albert D. Osborn, Examiner of Questioned Documents, who he called "America's and perhaps the world's leading expert in the field." But Levine's summary of the laboratory test results, revealed only that the paper "was not of American nor of Western European origin, and not of recent manufacture."

Kennan, who reviewed the document for the U.S. State Department in 1949, was somewhat more specific about studies done on the paper stock. "Its age (at least earlier than 1930) can be proven by physical tests," he wrote. "That means that it was created before Stalin achieved his greatest prominence in Russia." (35) But this is not necessarily the case. The paper itself may be old, while the writing on it might be more recent.

In unpublished seminar notes of a discussion Kennan conducted in 1966, more information is revealed about the physical inspection of the Eremin letter. The "ink and typing showed it to be" of pre-1930 vintage.

Back in the 1940s, Kennan suggested to the three Russian emigre owners of the document that they locate a scholar to analyze and authenticate the document. "They instead found a journalist," Kennan noted, referring to Isaac Don Levine. (36)

Smith, who was firmly convinced that Stalin worked for the Okhrana, rejected the Eremin document as a forgery. "It is easy to dismiss this letter as a fraudulent document produced in the nineteen-forties by one of the individuals specializing in this activity in many places from Harbin to Buenos Aires," he wrote. "Indeed, that is the conclusion of some reputable scholars acquainted with the crazy-quilt pattern of emigre forgeries." (37) Apparently Smith was not aware of the results of the physical inspection of the letter, which showed that it could not have been produced in the 1940s.

Florinsky, commenting on the paper stock and typewriting, wrote, "These findings which Mr. Levine calls 'gratifying' were hardly unexpected because the Russian origin of the document was not seriously questioned." (38) Another reviewer, David J. Dallin, concluded: "The document in question was fabricated, probably in the Far East. The forger was probably a person previously connected with the Russian police and in possession of its letter-heads and signatures, but otherwise unsophisticated and unskilled." (39)

Dallin's views on the "Eremin letter" were undoubtedly influential and he had occasion several times to discuss the controversy in print. A respected Sovietologist, his confident pronouncements helped create a climate of disbelief in Levine's discovery.

But in 1993, evidence emerged that Dallin might not have been totally frank about his expertise in Soviet matters. In the text of a secret CIA debriefing held nine years after Dallin's critique of the Eremin letter, NKVD General Alexander Orlov named Dallin as a one-time Soviet agent. The CIA officer who wrote up the debriefing went so far as to suggest that "Dallin's work and [sic] the history of Soviet espionage activity in the West . . . may have been part of a damage assessment process in which the Soviet Service was directly interested." In Orlov's view, Dallin's wife Lydia was a long-term Soviet agent. "In his activity in the US Professor Dallin could have been unwittingly controlled and manipulated by the Soviet service," concluded the CIA debriefer. (40)

John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, who published the full text of the April 1965 debriefing in their extraordinary book on Orlov's career, wrote of Dallin, who authored Soviet Espionage, that he "was in a position to know," having once served Stalin's secret police.

Decades later, Roy Medvedev criticized the process used to examine the Eremin letter: "the expert analysis was carried out by an American chosen by Levine; for objectivity's sake a commission of international experts having no stake in the matter should have been established." (41)

Medvedev was apparently unaware of the examination carried out by Martin K. Tytell. Tytell's findings were publicized in a 1956 paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and again in hearings before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1957. (42) Nor did Medvedev—or anyone else— question Osborn's credentials or his work.

In his popular biography of Stalin, Hyde made a vigorous attack on the Eremin letter in a special appendix. But Harford Montgomery Hyde was hardly an expert on Stalin. He was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects, including a 1964 book entitled A History of Pornography. At the age of eighty, in 1987, he was still knocking off works with titles like George Blake: Superspy. Politically, he belonged to the Right; he served as an Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament in the 1950s. Though briefly a Professor of History in Pakistan's Punjab University, he seems utterly lacking in academic credentials and some critics questioned whether he knew any Russian. When Hyde decided to write a critique of the Eremin letter, he based it exclusively on the work of Tytell, and is totally uncritical of that work.

Hyde's passage on the paper and letterhead (see Appendix D) deserves to be quoted in full:

What conclusively establishes the spuriousness of the letter in the present writer's opinion is the printed heading or letterhead. This particular style was not adopted by the Okhrana headquarters until 1914 or 1915, after the existing stocks of stationery had been exhausted. A search conducted by the present writer in the collection of Okhrana papers at the Hoover Institution revealed a genuine letter of identical date, which clearly shows the difference. For one thing in the genuine letter the name of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del) appears in full instead of being abbreviated as MVD. In the Eremin letter the words 'Police Department' and 'Special Section' are transposed. Finally, in the Eremin letter the number under the date is typed rather than impressed by means of a rubber stamp, the usual practice in all office correspondence of the period. (43)

Hyde had not proved that the stationery was counterfeit, but only that it came into use after the Eremin letter was supposedly written. He did not say when this letterhead was actually printed. It is possible to infer from what he wrote that the Eremin letter stationery already existed in 1913 but was not being used because stocks of the old letterhead were still in use. That does not necessarily mean that every official in every office of the Okhrana always used the old stock until supplies ran out. Finally, the term "usual practice" regarding the stamping of the date does not, once again, preclude the possibility of this document being handled a little differently.

Schleifman was also suspicious about the appearance of the letterhead. Of the hundreds of such documents which she examined in the course of her research on the Okhrana, none looked like this Special Section letter. As for the letter's serial number, Schleifman was of the opinion that this was usually done by hand and certainly not typed. (44)

Dr. R.B. McKean of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who did extensive research in the Department of Police archives in the TsGAOR, added: "The letterhead arouses my suspicions. . . . I do think all MVD documents bore the ministerial title in full—they certainly did for Ministry of Justice or Ministry of Trade and Industry papers." (45)

Western critiques of the document's letterhead are echoed in the recent Russian literature on the subject. Kaptelov and Peregudova wrote:

"Instead of 'Chief of Special Section of Department of Police' we have 'MVD. Chief of Special Section of Department of Police.' In examined documents dated 1906-1913 from the Special Section of the Department of Police, there wasn't one stamp that was identical to the above-mentioned in location of the lines or the type of print." They concluded that "documents with this blank were not used for internal correspondence within the Department of Police." (46)

The paper on which the Eremin letter was typed was probably not genuine Okhrana letterhead. That is clear because of the lack of similar stationery in the Okhrana archives in Moscow and Stanford, California. It is difficult to reconcile this finding with Kennan's recollection of the document's pre-1930 origins. One explanation might be that the letter was created not long after the revolution and was, as has been suggested, a copy made from memory of an authentic document from the police files. Another possibility is that the letterhead Hyde declared came into use in 1914 was already being used by Colonel Eremin a year earlier—before "the existing stocks of stationery had been exhausted."

Some students of the Eremin letter continue to believe that it was typed on genuine Okhrana stationery, probably by former Okhrana personnel. And in spite of all the criticisms made, as recently as 1991, Kennan believed that "paper, ink and typography of the document all support the thesis that, whether genuine or not, it came out of the Tsarist police files." (47)

The Typewriter

Levine was well aware that "the make and age of the typewriter on which it was written had to be established." Document examiner Osborn "took a deep interest in the matter . . . There was no dearth of pre-revolutionary typewritten letters and official communications to compare with the typing of the document." (48)

But these official communications could not include the extensive Okhrana collection in the Hoover Institution, whose existence was not revealed to the public until 1957. "It is hardly necessary to add," wrote Hyde, "that the disclosure came as a complete surprise to the Soviet authorities, who believed that the collection had been destroyed many years previously." (49) Levine was probably surprised as well, having recounted in his book the how hard it had been to locate authentic Okhrana documents.

"It was established that Russia had no typewriter manufacturing plants before the Revolution, and that Remington exported to Russia two models which were in general use," reported Levine. Osborn wrote to him: "I have looked up Remington Model No. 6 and that, no doubt, is the right one." (50)

Knowing the make of the typewriter, Levine now needed another Okhrana document written on the same machine. Had he found one, the Eremin document might today be considered convincing proof of Stalin's employment by the tsarist secret police. But he had no such luck.

The general [Okhrana General Spiridovich] had in his files no correspondence or other private papers originating in the Special Section of the Okhrana. As for the typing, it was certainly familiar to him. He knew that Remingtons and Underwoods had been in use in Russia before World War I. He did produce a copy of a multigraphed typewritten memorandum of sixty one pages, prepared before World War I as a survey of the Social Democratic Party by the Special Section of the Department of Police for the use of the Okhrana corps. This manuscript, which he turned over to me, had been done on a typewriter similar to that of the Stalin document, but subsequent examination showed that it was not a product of the identical machine.

But Levine did discover a document at the Hoover Institution: "It came from the Acting Director of the Department of Police, was dated November 5, 1912, some eight months prior to the date of the Stalin document.

He asked Osborn to compare the typing in both documents. Osborn replied that the authentic Okhrana document "is certainly very close to the typing in the document in question. But it is just not the same. It could be the same machine, however, of perhaps a different model." Levine concluded: "Since it was impossible to locate outside the Soviet Union a communication from the Special Section of the Department of Police, typed on the identical machine, it seemed gratifying to have made so much progress. The Stalin document was at least a twin of another Department of Police document of absolute authenticity belonging to the same period." (51)

Levine's evidence for the authenticity of the typing was flimsy indeed. His own expert, Osborn, would not confirm the identity of the typing on the Eremin letter and on the genuine Okhrana document with which he was provided. General Spiridovich was prepared to declare that he was "certainly familiar" with the typing—whatever that means, coming from a man who is not an expert in typewriting.

Fifteen years later, Hyde wrote his evaluation of the Eremin letter which, though it is based entirely on Tytell's research, remains the most serious critique of the document available to the general public. Though Hyde's book was criticized by most experts, his treatment of the Eremin letter won him praise.

Robert H. McNeal, for example, wrote that "one area in which Hyde has contributed some critical comment is the question of Stalin's alleged service to the Okhrana. In an appendix he convincingly expounds the reasons for concluding that the Eremin letter, published in good faith by Isaac Don Levine, is a forgery." T.H. Rigby wrote: "Mr. Hyde, in a careful review of the evidence surrounding this document, acknowledges it as a forgery." And Robert C. Tucker added: "Mr. Hyde has an appendix in which he reproduces the Eremin document and adduces convincing evidence that it is a forgery." (52)

But Hyde's "careful" and "convincing" work was largely based on research carried out by Martin K. Tytell in the 1950s. None of the reviewers of Hyde's book, and none of the subsequent biographers of Stalin, has taken a careful look at Tytell's work. It is time that we do so.

Tytell asserted that the typewriter used to produce the Eremin letter "was an Adler, manufactured by a German company which first supplied machines with Russian characters in 1912." The document, therefore, "could not possibly have been written in 1913, because the type, instead of being comparatively fresh, which one would expect from a machine of 1912 or 1913 vintage, was worn and battered, which suggested that it was written many years later." (53)

Even if this was the whole story, Tytell's case is hardly airtight.

If he could have shown that the Adlers were introduced to Russia after the Eremin letter had been written, that would have been convincing proof. But the fact remains that such typewriters were already in place. The question of how worn the letters had become, is a second-best attack on the typewriting; the wearing down of a typewriter would seem to be a function of the frequency of its use and how well it was maintained.

But the whole story was not told by Hyde, nor by any subsequent reviewers of the case.

Tytell's argument was first presented on the afternoon of December 29, 1956 at the AAAS annual meeting, at a session co-sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Criminology. Tytell described himself then as an "Examiner of Disputed Documents" and a "Lecturer on Questioned Document Examination, New York University and Brooklyn College." His paper was entitled "Exposing a Documentary Hoax." Some two hundred people were in attendance, mostly criminologists with a sprinkling of reporters. One of those was David Cort, a regular writer for the left-wing American weekly, The Nation, who gave us this account:

Martin Tytell, a typewriter expert, proved with slides that the typewriter was not a Remington but a German Adler, that this model was first manufactured in 1912, that it showed the wear of many years before the letter was typed, and that the signature was demonstrably not Yeremin's . . . .

Yet Levine rose to defend himself in an imposing demonstration of courage or effrontery. . . . Finally, Levine was roaring like a stuck pig. He had an idea, undocumented and unproved, that the Adler Cyrillic typewriter had been first produced in 1909, not 1912, that Yeremin had had two wholly disparate signatures (physically impossible) and so on. Levine dealt exclusively in lovely surmises. Tytell dealt exclusively in facts. (54)

But Tytell was not to have the final word in the case. Working with the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which held hearings on the subject throughout 1957, Levine demolished Tytell's account.

Levine demonstrated that Tytell, rather than being an independent expert, was in fact working (as he later admitted) for the attorneys for accused Soviet agent Alger Hiss. Hiss' lawyers were, in fact, deeply interested in "the genuiness or spuriousness of a typewritten document sponsored by Mr. Isaac Don Levine" because of Levine's role in introducing Hiss' accuser, Whittaker Chambers, to White House officials in 1939. The Hiss lawyers paid Tytell $1,000 for his services. When Tytell first testified before the Senate committee, he was accompanied by one of the Hiss attorneys.

In testimony before the committee, Tytell summed up his case as follows:

In Frankfurt, I found that the questioned document was in fact written on an Adler—a machine manufactured in Germany. The Adler factory was demolished by bombing, and therefore a determination of the date of the machine used for the questioned document was impossible. However, company employees who had been manufacturing typewriters for many years stated that Russian type which produced the questioned document was first manufactured in the year 1912. But the questioned document could not have been typed in 1912 or even 1913, but much later since the type is worn and battered. The questioned document must have been written many years after the manufacture of the machine used. I have taken samples of type taken from the 1912 Adler, which may be compared with the questioned document in support of my identification.

During subsequent questioning, Tytell made several curious statements. He admitted that he did not know the name of the superintendent at the Adler plant whom he interviewed. He did not take an affidavit from him. Furthermore, the assertion that the typewriters were first manufactured in 1912 is based on the "more or less" unanimous opinions of veteran workers in the plant, who were questioned by Tytell. Nevertheless, Tytell stood by his claim that the typewriter had to have been a 1912 Adler.

But Benjamin Mandel, the Subcommittee's Director of Research, also visited the Adler plant in Frankfurt. "He had no trouble," wrote Levine, "securing a sworn statement signed by the manager of the export division of the Adler Works, Mr. Hans Abend, and notarized by U.S. Vice Consul Thomas A. Kelly, stating unequivocally: 'The first machine with Russian-Cyrillic type, the Model 8, was built in 1903.'" (55)

Subsequent research by Hiss case investigators (on both sides of the controversy) added several uncomplimentary details about Martin K. Tytell which are not at all clear from the summary given by Hyde or the account published in The Nation.

In the 1930s Tytell was the owner of a typewriter repair business in New York City. He serviced the machines for the Communist periodical New Masses, and received in exchange for his work free advertising which, according to one source, brought him much business. (56) He later joined the American Labor Party at a time when it was under Communist domination—he denied this to the Senate committee, but subsequent testimony given by Benjamin Mandel proved otherwise.

In the early 1950s, he offered to help Alger Hiss by attempting, over the course of a year and for the sum of $7,500, to build an exact duplicate of the Woodstock typewriter which Hiss allegedly used to betray American secrets to the Russians. His attempt failed and Tytell became the butt of severe criticism by genuine experts on the question of suspect documents.

Hiss' attorneys had appealed to several of these men, including Osborn (who helped Levine with the Eremin letter) but they all refused to accept the outlandish idea that Hiss was framed because someone had built an exact duplicate of his typewriter. One of those the Hiss lawyers approached—and who turned them down—was Ordway Hilton, whose standard study in the field, Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents, demolished Tytell's "forgery by typewriter" efforts. (57)

Tytell himself approached Osborn for help, but was rebuffed. In a sensationalist account written for True magazine, Tytell praised Osborn as a leading authority on suspect documents and acknowledged that he refused cooperation on the Hiss case.

Nevertheless, Tytell's testimony on the Stalin case made him, briefly, a hero in the pages of the Communist Daily Worker, which devoted articles in four consecutive issues to this "distinguished scientist."

When confronted with details of Tytell's real involvement in the Hiss and Eremin cases, some of the Stalin experts retreated from their earlier endorsements of his critique, as publicized by Hyde. T.H. Rigby of the Australian National University, for example, today writes that "Hyde's review of the evidence on the 'Eremin letter' was far from being 'careful,' as I had described it." (58)

To quote Tytell's testimony today as if it were scientific evidence is irresponsible. On the issue of the typewriter, Levine seems to have demonstrated at least the possibility that the Eremin letter was authentic.

Eremin's Signature

Levine understood that one of the "crucial points to check" was the signature at the bottom of the document. "Could one absolutely verify his signature?" he asked. (59) But in this case, wrote Florinsky, "unlike that of the paper and the typewriter, expert advice was not sought." (60) Or to be more precise: if expert advice was sought, Levine chose not to publicize the results.

Levine travelled to Paris to meet with General Spiridovich. The general "agreed that the crucial point to settle was the verification of Yeremin's signature."

The courtly general then produced a silver set which included a decanter on a tray. He took the decanter, some seven inches tall, and held it so I could read the engraved description on it:

'This was presented to me by my subordinates after my recovery from the assassination attempt and upon my appointment to Tsarskoye Seloe,' General Spiridovich said as he pointed to the engraved signatures of the officers of his squad.

I found myself in possession of the bit of evidence which clinched the authenticity of the document and which proved that Stalin had indeed been a Czarist spy. (61)

Levine's testimony was confirmed by Smith, who noted that the general "wrote a long letter on the subject dated January 13, 1950 (in possession of the author) . . . It is Spiridovich's opinion that Eremin's letter is authentic, his signature genuine." (62)

Yet in the photograph published accompanying the original Life article, there are obvious differences between the two signatures. "Decanter signature has additional flourishes for ceremonial occasion," explained the anonymous caption writer. (63) Levine said nothing about the differences between the two signatures.

Roy Medvedev was skeptical. "It is hard to rely on the memory of a man past eighty," he commented, ignoring the fact that Levine was not relying solely on Spiridovich's memory, but on the physical evidence of a silver decanter. (64)

The strongest case made yet against the signature was reported by Hyde in his account of Tytell's discoveries in the National Archives of Finland, in Helsinki, "where he found eighty-five examples of Eremin's signature in official correspondence. He showed five of the archivists the letter of 12 July 1913, and their opinion which he corroborated by his own expertise was that the signature to the letter in question was not in Eremin's hand." (65)

The author inquired into this matter and learned from the Helsinki archives that it was not possible to determine if Tytell had, in fact, done research there. However, the Finnish archivists were able to provide ten examples of Eremin's signature from 1914 documents. (66) (See Appendix C.) The signature is clearly different from the one on the July 1913 letter. In the authentic documents, Eremin's signature is not so easy to decipher. He links the first two letters of his name together, and begins writing the first letter backwards. In the 1913 document, the name "Eremin" is clearly decipherable.

Antti Kujala of the University of Helsinki did some further checking on Eremin's letters in the Finnish archives. "I compared Eremin's signatures in the doklady from 1913," he writes. "None of the signatures I saw resemble the signature of the Eremin letter. I am almost certain that this signature is a forgery. The capital letter E is different from its authentic counterparts. The upper part of the r (p) should be almost as high as the preceding letter E. There should be a round loop in the r (p). There is a marked difference in the end of the signature."

Kujala concludes: "If the signature on the Eremin letter is a forgery, the same goes for the letter as well." (67) Furthermore, if the signature is not Eremin's, that eliminates (as we shall see) one of the candidates suggested for the role of forger of this document.

In conclusion, the signature was probably not Eremin's. From this we learn two things of importance. First, the document is therefore probably not an original. And second, E.E. Smith's suggestion that Colonel Eremin himself may have forged the document, seems highly unlikely.

TEXT

Though lacking original copies to work with, historians and researchers were able to demonstrate that both the British and American Zinoviev letters were clearly forgeries. They were able to do this because the texts of the letters betrayed the forgers. Paul Blackstock commented: "Comparative content analysis of equivalent texts will frequently demonstrate conclusively that one was taken from the other, as was the case with successive drafts of the Testament of Peter the Great and the Protocols of Zion. Sometimes the personal style and idiosyncracies of an individual forger will serve to identify the probable source of successive forgeries." (68)

This was not the case with the Eremin letter. To date, no one has produced a document from which the forger copied, nor has anyone pointed out the "personal style" of any known forger in its text. Yet questions have been raised about nearly every sentence of this short letter.

Could Eremin have written a letter from St. Petersburg on that date?

Levine set out to confirm that a Colonel Eremin in fact existed. He quoted a letter sent by General Spiridovich in 1949:

I knew A.M. Yeremin well. After I was shot in Kiev in 1905, Yeremin was appointed upon my recommendation Chief of the Kiev Special Section, when he was transferred to the Department of Police. Having served then brilliantly in the Caucasus, Yeremin, beginning on January 21, 1910, became Director of the Special Section of the Police Department . . . Yeremin knew and understood the 'business' which it was his duty to direct. (69)

The ellipse is Levine's, and I wonder if it comes in place of additional information about Eremin's career following his posting to the capital. That information was brought out by Levine's opponents.

Veteran Russian Social Democrat Gregory Aronson declared bluntly that "the signature on the document . . . is obviously a forgery, inasmuch as Yeremin had been chief of the Finnish Police Administration since June 11, 1913, a month before the alleged document was written (cf. Vol. 7, The Fall of the Tsarist Regime, prepared by the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government, Moscow, 1927)." (70)

Hyde added that "there is evidence from the Finnish Archives in the shape of a document dated 19 July which suggests that by this date Eremin was deeply immersed in his new duties and had been en poste for several weeks." (71)

It was an interesting point. If Eremin was already in Finland on the date the letter had been written, the letter could not be genuine.

Hyde and other critics seemed unaware of the 1956 exchange between Levine and Aronson in the pages of The New Leader over the question of whether Eremin was in Helsinki or St. Petersburg on the date of the letter. In this author's opinion, Levine's rebuttal to Aronson was devastatingly effective:

How is it . . . that Aronson failed to discover in Volume 5 (pp. 94-97) of the same work a memorandum on agent provocateur Yekaterina Shornikova stating that she 'called last on Deputy Director Yeremin on June 20' when he 'gave her 50 roubles'? The point is that June 11 was merely the date of Yeremin's appointment; it is a long way from receiving an appointment to assuming a new office in another city.

An original document preserved in the state archives in Finland (a facsimile is available for examination) settles the whole argument. It is a communication from the headquarters of the Gendarmerie Corps, dated June 21, 1913, notifying the Governor General of Finland that Colonel Yeremin had been appointed on June 11 to serve under him. The stamp of the Governor General's chancellery records the official receipt of this notice only on July 7. Since St. Petersburg got around to informing the Governor General on June 21 that on June 11 Yeremin had been appointed chief of his Okhrana, obviously Yeremin could not have assumed his new office on June 11. (72)

Aronson's only comment on all this was: "It is remarkable that Levine quotes neither Spiridovich's letter nor other documentation." (73) It appears that Levine had scored a point.

Kennan saw the dating of the letter as a point in favor of its authenticity. "Eremin . . . was leaving his position at just this time," he wrote, "It would have been natural before leaving the job for him to have written to pass this information along to the man in whose custody Stalin now found himself." (74)

In 1992 Antti Kujala succeeded in checking the various Finnish archival documents and reaching definitive answers to the question of where Colonel Eremin was on July 12, 1913. Kujala reviewed the Archive of the Chancellery of the Governor-General and found documents signed by Colonel K.K. Utgof, Eremin's predecessor as head of the Finnish Gendarmerie Administration. He writes:

The last doklady signed by Colonel Utgof are from 12 July 1913 OS [Old Style]. In some of them his title is still chief of the Finnish Gendarmerie Administration (Nachal'nik FZhU) as before but for the first time also Vr. i. d. Nachal'nika FZhU (acting chief). Eremin has signed his first doklad as chief of the Administration on 19 July OS. . . . There is nothing in its contents that supports Hyde's assumption that 'by this date Eremin . . . must have been en poste for several weeks.' Eremin must have assumed his new duties sometime between 12 and 19 July but not before or on 12 July. It is out of question that he could have done this as long as his predecessor was still in office.

Kujala concludes: "Eremin could have sent the well-known Eremin letter as [head of the Special Section of the Department of Police] on 12 July OS from St. Petersburg. It is evident that we cannot exclude this possibility." (75)

What began as an attack on the authenticity of the Eremin letter has, over the years, turned into one of the arguments in its favor. Whoever authored the letter apparently knew that Eremin was still at his post—despite published documentary evidence to the contrary—on July 12, 1913. In fact, that might have been his very last day on the job in St. Petersburg—but he was certainly not yet in Helsinki. It would have been much safer for a forger to have dated his letter to May or June of that year. How could he have known—unless the letter is based on a genuine document—that Eremin had not yet reached his post in Finland?

Was there an Okhrana section in Eniseisk headed by a Captain Zhelezniakov?

Levine posed this question himself in Stalin's Great Secret. Eremin turned out to be fairly well-known, his successes in Kiev and Tiflis leading to his being named head of the Special Section in 1910. But Zhelezniakov, the recipient of the letter, was an unknown.

General Spiridovich once again came to Levine's rescue. He "expressed satisfaction that the identity of Zhelezniakov, a minor official stationed in faraway Yeniseisk, had been established. General Spiridovich had received word from New York that there were several Siberian refugees in the United States who had known Zhelezniakov personally." (76)

But within a few weeks, Aronson challenged this point too, in the pages of The New Leader. "Mr. Levine's document," he wrote, "was allegedly sent to the Yeniseisk Section of the Okhrana. There is every reason to believe, however, that the Okhrana had no Yeniseisk Section." Aronson footnoted this claim with references to M. Moskalev's book, The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, published in Moscow in 1947, and an article by A. Baikalov published in the Paris newspaper Russkay Mysl. (77)

In response, Levine quoted a letter written by A. Mikhailovsky and published in Aronson's own newspaper: "In the city of Yeniseisk, there was an Okhrana section. It administered the affairs of several counties in the Yenisei River basin." The same newspaper later carried another letter signed this time by V.I. Maximovich which stated: "To carry out the distribution and surveillance of the exile elements, there existed in the city of Yeniseisk an Okhrana section headed by Captain Zhelezniakov . . . I was personally acquainted with him for several years. I last saw him at the beginning of 1914. His further fate is unknown to me." In addition, Levine cited the letters of one "V.C." who he identified as a "former high officer of the Okhrana" who was living in Canada: "There was a Yeniseisk Okhrana section with two headquarters in charge of gendarmerie captains, in Yeniseisk as well as in Krasnoyarsk, where I was stationed in 1912 and 1913 . . . I knew personally all the officers of the Yeniseisk Province gendarmerie in the years 1912-13 and maintained constant relations with them." Levine asserted that his anonymous witness "would submit his testimony in confidence to any impartial inquiry." No such inquiry has ever been held.

Boris I. Nicolaevsky's testimony, mentioned earlier, also confirms the existence of an Okhrana section of some kind in Eniseisk.

Aronson replied to Levine's argument by referring to letters published in the Novoye Russkoye Slovo calling these "mere assertions, unsupported by any sort of proof." Aronson added, "I, in my turn, wonder why Levine ignored M. Moskalev's book . . . in which pages 149 to 160 are devoted to the various administrative and police organs in Yeniseisk at the time of Stalin's last exile. The book does not once mention the existence of a Eniseisk Okhrana section." (Of course not mentioning the existence of an Okhrana section in this book does not mean that it does not exist.) Aronson continued: "And why, too, does Levine speak scornfully of A. Baikalov, who wrote . . . that there was never a section in Yeniseisk? Baikalov lived in that city and, at the time of the Revolution in 1917, was charged with liquidating the Tsarist secret police there." (78) But Aronson ignored the testimony of Nicolaevsky who, it seems, was in charge of liquidating the Okhrana in Eniseisk.

The allegation that there was no section of the Okhrana in Eniseisk (and, therefore, no Captain Zhelezniakov to receive the Eremin letter) seems to have died off with the Levine-Aronson exchange in The New Leader.

It surfaced again in Russia during the glasnost era. The TsGAOR archivists, who considered the Eremin letter a forgery, concluded: "There was an Eniseisk investigative station, and its chief had the status of an assistant to the chief of the Eniseisk county gendarmerie." (79)

But the existence of an Okhrana section in Eniseisk was not the only problem with the letter's addressee. Hyde pointed to "a number of suspicious features about the letter which lend weight to the conclusion of fraudulence." (80) First among these is Captain Zhelezniakov of the Eniseisk Okhrana. Hyde reported that Zhelezniakov's Christian name was Vladimir and not Alexei. Smith, who was the source of Hyde's information, called this "a fact ascertainable from the Gendarme officers' biographical register available in Eremin's office at the time." (81) Smith also put this error at the top of his list of "unlikely errors for an officer of Eremin's caliber." (82)

The point was brought up again in 1989 by Kaptelov and Peregudova, who asked if it was possible that more than one Zhelezniakov served in the Eniseisk investigative section? "No it is not," they answered. "The existing documents show that in the year 1913 only Zhelezniakov Vladimir Fedorovich, born 1881, Captain, attached to the Eniseisk county gendarmerie in October 1911 served there." (83)

A few years earlier, when the debate focused on whether there was an Okhrana section at all in Eniseisk, the research Smith had done in the Okhrana archives of the Hoover Institution, as well as the research produced by the TsGAOR archivists, would have been seen as confirming the authenticity of the Eremin letter. After all, not only was there an Okhrana branch in that town, but there was a Captain Zhelezniakov there too.

Was Stalin arrested in 1906?

The first sentence in the letter makes reference to Stalin's 1906 arrest, upon which he turned informer for the Okhrana. Of all the strange aspects of this letter, this is perhaps the strangest.

A brief recounting of what happened in Tiflis in 1906 will make matters clearer.

For several years, the Mensheviks, who dominated the Social Democratic movement in Georgia, had operated a secret printing plant in Avlabar, a suburb of Tiflis. Following the reunification of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which was decided upon in the euphoria of the 1905 revolution, the Tiflis Mensheviks were compelled to allow Lenin's Georgian supporters to share in the secret of Avlabar. This was in early 1906. It was only at this time that Stalin would have learned the location of the press.

On March 29, 1906, several weeks after Stalin and the Bolsheviks were initiated into the secret of Avlabar, the plant was betrayed to the police. Police reports gave "agent sources" (ot agenturnik istochnikov) as the source of information, without naming the agent. (Recent Russian sources indicate that this may not have been the case. The plant may have been discovered by accident.)

If Stalin was arrested in 1906 in Tiflis, as the Eremin letter asserts, and if he was the source of Okhrana knowledge of the Avlabar plant, then we can reasonably date his arrest to March 29. This is the case because we know that Stalin had enough time to get to Stockholm, where he attended the congress of the Social Democratic Party.

The police waited more than two weeks before moving in on the Avlabar operation. Smith considered it suspicious that the Okhrana would delay at all in making the raid. He saw this as evidence of an effort to protect an agent in place. (84)

In the raid on April 15, 1906, the plant was discovered (including its arms cache, laboratory for manufacturing bombs, and document forging materials). Twenty four Social Democrats were arrested.

Stalin's police record and the official biographies published in the USSR said nothing about his involvement in the raid. Beria's account mentions Avlabar only in a footnote. Yaroslavsky's volume does mention the raid, but fails to name those arrested. According to the official Soviet chronology, Stalin escaped Siberian exile in 1904 and was not rearrested until the spring of 1908. (85) The Eremin letter's reference to a 1906 arrest is therefore prima facie evidence of forgery.

That was the conclusion reached by, among others, Roy Medvedev, who called the reference to the arrest "entirely unsubstantiated." Stalin was not really involved in the printing press, and had he been arrested, he would have been part of a group of two dozen revolutionaries, some of whom would certainly have known about his arrest. Therefore, Levine's belief that the report of the arrest was true, and that Stalin was promptly released by the police in order to attend the Stockholm Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) "stretches credibility." (86)

The Russian archivists today reject the idea that Stalin was arrested in connection with the Avlabar raid in 1906. There are several files concerning the arrests at that time, they report, and these include "names of seventeen people arrested at different times (from 15 April to 21 May). The name of Dzhugashvili is not one of them." (87) But they did not look into arrests made before April 15 -- which is the time when Stalin might have been briefly in police hands. We know that Stalin attended the Stockholm congress and that if he was arrested, it had to have been around March 29 -- and certainly not after April 15.

A recent biography concluded that while the evidence on this matter was "extremely skimpy," one could not dismiss the allegation out of hand, because of the "extraordinarily touchy and incoherent way in which the affair was later treated in the Soviet press—until, indeed, a new Stalinist version emerged in the 1930s, which gave a perfectly clear account, with Stalin the founder and organizer of the underground press and its chief hero (which is, of course, a complete invention)." (88)

The first hint that there may be something to the suspect document's account of a 1906 arrest was noted by Levine. In an anthology Beria published in honor of Stalin on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, on December 21, 1939, he is recorded has having eight arrests, seven banishments and six escapes in his early revolutionary career. The problem is that in Beria's 1935 account, published in millions of copies, Stalin had only six arrests, six banishments and five escapes. This remarkable discrepancy was nowhere explained. To Levine, it added plausibility to the report of a previously-unknown 1906 arrest. (89)

Levine also believed that early Bolshevik memoirs published before Stalin had achieved supreme power might confirm the account of the arrest. But, he noted "in the Soviet Union their works were taken out of circulation, and even in leading Western libraries many of these original publications were mutilated or destroyed by unknown hands." (90) Levine did not name the authors of these memoirs.

But he did discover a remarkable confirmation of the 1906 arrest in Trotsky's biography of Stalin. There, in the chronology for the year 1906 it read: "April 15 - Stalin arrested and released in raid on Avlabar printing plant." At this point, Levine felt he could rest his case. Beria had implied the possibility of a hitherto unknown arrest and Trotsky had confirmed the date -- 1906. (91)

There was, however, a problem with this fortuitous discovery:

Trotsky was murdered by one of Stalin's agents before he completed his book. The chapter dealing with this period in Stalin's career says nothing about an arrest in Tiflis or anywhere else in 1906. But a glance at the first page of Trotsky's book explains what happened: "Of course, the captions, arrangement and selection of the frontpiece and of all the other illustrations; the lists of Stalin's aliases, of Communist Party Congresses, the glossary and chronological guide are entirely the work of the editor." (92) So wrote the editor/translator, Charles Malamuth of Columbia University.

Within days of the original publication of the Eremin letter, Bertram D. Wolfe stressed this very point in a letter to Life. (93) Fifteen years later, Kennan added: "No one knows, to this day, where Mr. Malamuth got this information." (94) Kennan was convinced that Trotsky was the original source of Malamuth's information.

It is possible that Trotsky saw the Eremin document, which, according to Levine, was floating around in the West as early as 1934. In any event, biographers of Stalin continued to cite Trotsky (and not Malamuth) as the source of our knowledge of the 1906 arrest. (95)

A more substantial testimony on behalf of the authenticity of the report of the 1906 arrest came from Razden Arsenidze, a veteran Georgian Menshevik whose confused and confusing testimony is discussed in the following chapter.

In 1966 it appeared that further evidence might confirm the account of the 1906 arrest and Stalin's subsequent recruitment by the Okhrana. Newsweek reported that Kennan had "learned that the passport Stalin used to attend a party Congress in Stockholm in 1906 was issued by the secret police." (96) Kennan denied the story to the press, calling the Newsweek account "not entirely accurate." (97) A quarter century later, he would write, "The only instance I can recall . . . where Stalin carried a passport clearly provided for him by the Tiflis Okhrana was in his 'escape' from Vologda in 1910 or 1911." (98) (This incident will be discussed in Chapter 6.) It turns out that the source of the Newsweek story was a telephone interview conducted with Kennan by the magazine's Moscow correspondent, Leon Volkov. Volkov's story was only two pages long and the only direct quote from Kennan read: "The material is very complicated and must be explained in an extensive study." (99) Neither Newsweek nor Kennan were able to provide additional details of this intriguing report.

Stalin's biographers who reject the Eremin document as a fraud sometimes accept as valid its account of the 1906 arrest. For example, Hyde wrote "it does not necessarily follow that the information which it [the Eremin letter] contains is false: it may well have been written by a former Okhrana officer who embodied in it particulars from Stalin's file which he remembered." (100) For this comment, Hyde was severely criticized by reviewers of his book. He was attacked for his "series of logical leaps" and for retracing the work of Smith and "the prior flights of fancy of Isaac Don Levine." "A breath of skepticism," concluded one critic, "suffices to tumble the house of marked cards in Hyde's initial chapters." (101)

Smith also seemed to accept the story of the 1906 arrest while rejecting the Eremin letter as a forgery. So did Alex de Jonge in his 1986 biography of Stalin. Though de Jonge called the Eremin letter a "clumsy forgery," he wrote that "there is nothing farfetched about the notion that Stalin had reported its [Avlabar's] whereabouts to the authorities. The motive? A combination of pleasure and of profit." (102)

Kennan saw in the reference to the 1906 arrest the single most interesting aspect of the document, evidence of what he called its "semi-authentic" character. He explained, "It is not likely to have been entirely by accident that mention was made of an arrest of Stalin in Tiflis in 1906." After reviewing the evidence, he concluded:

Now all this, of course, proves nothing; and nothing, I am sure, will ever be conclusively proven, in the legal sense. To my mind, the weight of the evidence does not suggest that Stalin was the person who betrayed the plant, but, rather, that he was arrested in this connection and contrived, in some way, that neither he nor his successors wish to have known, to purchase his release, the privilege of going to Stockholm, and perhaps other privileges as well. This is just one example of the partial but tantalizingly suggestive sort of evidence on which any judgement about Stalin's early career has to be based. (103)

Was Stalin arrested and promptly released at the end of March 1906?

If that is the case, the Eremin document must be viewed in a new light. Even if it is not an original document, it would appear to be based on genuine Okhrana archives. The evidence on this point is not clear.

Beria's "confusion" regarding the number of Stalin's arrests; the mention of a 1906 arrest in the Trotsky biography; Arsenidze's eyewitness testimony; the intriguing 1966 Newsweek report; and finally, the failure of the Russian archivists to investigate arrests from before April 15, 1906, all indicate at least the possibility that Stalin was in fact arrested in 1906.

The use of the "Stalin" pseudonym

Levine himself noted the repeated references to "Stalin" throughout the Eremin letter. "The very redundance of the references to Stalin's name, which is mentioned six times [actually, seven—EL] in the course of the fairly brief letter, attested to the authenticity of the document. Surely a forger would have avoided such repetitiousness." (104) Why? Levine did not tell us.

He was well aware of the problem with the use of the recently-adopted alias "Stalin" in this document. "By the summer of 1913," he explained, "Stalin had already published his most important work, Marxism and the National Question, under the signature of K. Stalin, and as the editorial director of Pravda had become widely known in underground revolutionary and police circles as Stalin." (105) But critics were soon to pounce on this obvious weakness in the Eremin letter.

Wolfe listed "several points to check" about the authenticity of the document. The first read: "The repetition of the pseudonym Stalin. Djugashvili's first recorded use of that name is on Jan. 12, 1913." (106)

One-time Soviet agent Dallin wrote that "careful analysis leads me to the conclusion that the document . . . cannot be accepted as genuine, and that it was fabricated, probably after the last war, somewhere in the Far East." (107) His first criticism is not of the physical evidence, but the use of "Stalin." "This is surprising," he explained, "for the Russian police department used only legal names, never aliases, although it might have referred to "Djugashvili (alias Stalin)." (108) In a subsequent review published in The New York Times, Dallin took the point one step further:

The practice of hyphenating names, combining the real and assumed names of revolutionaries, did not come into use until 1917, and then mainly by the rightist press. Within his party and to the police Stalin was known for many years as 'Koba;' other aliases were 'Soso,' 'Vasili,' 'Ivanovich,' etc. He did not come to be called Stalin until 1912.

In Krasnoyarsk (Siberia) there exists a 'state archive' of old documents relating to the exiles of the Yeniseisk province, some of which have been published. There are numerous references to Djugashvili in these documents ('take measures against his possible escape,' etc.) but none to 'Stalin.' (109)

Smith, who had been reading through the Okhrana files (which were not available in 1956) could address the issue with some authority. He called the reference to "Stalin" odd: "in none of the previous Special Section reports was the pseudonym 'Stalin' noted, although he had adopted it in late 1912 -- and 'Stalin' recurs here seven times."

Smith also noted that "the use of 'Vissarionovich' is also curious; normally Okhrana letters and reports would drop the 'ich,' spelling the patrynomic 'Vissarionov.'" (110) Adam Ulam, who rejected the idea that Stalin was an Okhrana agent, and completely ignored the Eremin document in his biography of Stalin, confirmed this: "The very language of the police reports breathed archaism. . . . The male patrynomic was given in its antiquated form: thus Joseph Vissarionov (instead of Vissarionovich) Djugashvili." (111)

The most recent research by Russian archivists confirms the criticism mae by Dallin, Smith and Ulam. Kaptelov and Peregudova noted that "according to the rules of grammar used before the revolution, in the documents of the Department the middle names ended with -ov instead of -ich, for example: Ivan Ivanov, Mikhail Petrov, Iosif Vissarionov." (112)

It appears that there are three problems with the name given to Stalin in this document. First, the pseudonym "Stalin" was apparently too new and not very well-known to the police in July 1913. Second, the hyphenating of the name Dzhugashvili-Stalin is anachronistic. And third, Stalin's patrynomic is given with an unnecessary "ich" suffix. All of these contributed to the impression that the Eremin letter was a forgery.

Back in 1956, Levine had the opportunity to rebut several of these criticisms. "I have consulted many Okhrana documents in my work," he wrote, "and there is no set style for referring to prisoners by name. Sometimes the proper name is used, sometimes the alias, sometimes both." (113)

The alias of "Stalin," he added, "was well known to the Okhrana at the time the letter was written. There are notes signed 'Stalin' dated two years before the letter, and for 15 months 'Stalin' had been signing articles in Pravda." (114) Yet Levine acknowledged that this question "is one of the most serious points against the document." (115) He explained: "Actually, the name Stalin first appeared in print in Pravda on December 1, 1912 under an article signed 'K. Stalin,' the K. standing for Koba; while the signature 'K. St.' appears in the Social Democrat of May 25, 1910. Pravda carried three successive pieces signed 'K. St.' on October 19, 24 and 25, 1912." (116)

The evidence produced by Levine hardly confirms his statement that the pseudonym was "well known"—or even that it had been in use for two years before the Eremin letter was written. According to his own account, the name "Stalin" had first appeared in print seven months— and not two years—before the Eremin letter was supposedly written.

Aronson was aware of this weakness and returned to it. He referred to the use of the pseudonym as "the question which first cast doubt on the document's authenticity." He noted that "Levine tells us that Djugashvili first signed that name to an article in Pravda on December 1, 1912, but one appearance of the signature in a Bolshevik newspaper could not have been enough to cause its use in official Tsarist police documents." (117)

Schleifman believes that the naming of Stalin as such is highly suspicious for a number of reasons. Not only did the Okhrana refrain from using revolutionary aliases in its correspondence, it routinely identified its agents only by their police code names. If Stalin was an agent, correspondence referring to him would have called him by his code name (which was certainly not "Stalin"). If he was not an agent, he would have been called by his legal name, Dzhugashvili.

If he was an agent of the police, and if his real name was to be mentioned at all, it would have been done in handwriting. Okhrana officers did not even allow their secretaries to have knowledge of the real names of agents. They would type in blank spaces, which were filled in by their superiors, who were privileged to know the real names of agents.

Furthermore, if Stalin had broken from the police and Eremin, for whatever reason, chose to call him by both his real and underground party names, he would not have continued to use "Stalin" throughout the letter after mentioning it in the first sentence. (118)

McKean shares this view. "In the many original Okhrana documents I have seen, not once have I ever come across the real identity of an agent in the document. Always the police used code names, e.g. agent 'Lemon.' This fact in my view is in itself enough to throw the gravest of doubts on the authenticity of the document." He adds: "Nor have I ever seen a police document which set out the service history of an agent, as the Eremin document does." (119)

But according to the text of the letter, Stalin may have been at the time something between an agent and a revolutionary. Smith speculated that the purpose of such a letter might have been to encourage the Eniseisk Okhrana to re-enlist Stalin in the ranks of the Internal Agency. As we have mentioned, it would have been quite unusual for the Okhrana to have simply allowed Stalin to defect to the revolutionaries. And if he was neither agent nor revolutionary in July 1913, the simple rules guiding the use of real names and pseudonyms would have been of necessity complicated.

Had the document been dated eight months earlier, before the Pravda article with the pseudonym "Stalin" appeared, it would clearly have been fraudulent. Had it been dated later, the use of "Stalin" would appear less suspicious. As with some of the physical evidence, this points circumstantially to forgery. But dated as it was—July 1913 -- makes it possible, though not likely, that the pseudonym "Stalin" might already have been known to, and in use by, the police.

The document's file numbers

The Okhrana was fanatical about keeping records, and kept accurate log books listing all outgoing correspondence. It was once suggested to me that to solve the mystery of the Eremin letter, all that was necessary to do was to check the document's serial numbers against the Department of Police logs. But this turned out not to be a simple matter.

"The file number," wrote Kennan, "was that on which Stalin's file was indeed kept in that particular office." (120) This is a strange assertion, made nowhere else in the literature on the Eremin letter. In fact, no one else even mentions the document's second file number, the one ostensibly stamped by the Eniseisk office. The whole debate has focused on the first number, the one Eremin's office apparently typed in.

Most experts saw the document's numbering as suspicious. In 1989, Kaptelov and Peregudova did painstaking work on the problem of the numbering of Okhrana documents. They located an order by the Okhrana director giving each department its own set of serial numbers. For the Special Section, those numbers began with 93,001. For completely secret documentation, Colonel Eremin's department would have used numbers beginning with 111,001 and above. "That is why a document numbered '2898' couldn't have come from the Special Section," they conclude.

Furthermore, they checked to see what document number 2898 actually was, looking at the journals of Okhrana correspondence. It turns out that such a document number did exist in 1913, but it came out of Section 1, clerical work, and was a letter to the chief of the Ekaterinoslav police, was dated March 16, and dealt with "an incident between three unknown hooligans and police guards stationed near the city water supply." (121) Nothing about Stalin, or the Special Section, or Colonel Eremin.

Because the document actually bears two file numbers—the one from the Special Section and the other from the local Eniseisk Okhrana -- it is necessary to check both numbers against existing log books. But can the Okhrana journals stored in Stalinist archives for seventy years be considered accurate? Or were the journals and other documents doctored to suit Stalinist objectives?

As we have already suggested, archival evidence—including log books of Okhrana correspondence—are certainly suspect. Therefore the question of file numbers will probably never be completely settled.

Other stylistic problems

"Petersburg": Former Soviet agent Dallin pointed out that Eremin used the expression "Petersburg" when referring to Russia's imperial capital. He called this "colloquial" and wrote that it "would have been highly irregular in an official document or letter, although the abbreviation SPB would have been permissible." (122) Levine replied that the Eremin document was an "informal exchange between two officials" and that the use of the colloquial "Petersburg" was "thoroughly in keeping with this fact." (123)

Aronson returned to this criticism, declaring the expression "Petersburg" "a usage unknown in 1913." (124) Levine replied to this criticism as well, noting that Aronson had made it first in the Novoye Russkoye Slovo, "whereupon an exceptionally well-informed correspondent, A. Mikhailovsky, replied in the issue of May 6 that 'some persons did not observe this formality in letters of minor importance.' It is also the opinion of many former Tsarist officers that 'Petersburg' was often employed in informal official correspondence." (125)

When Dallin had the opportunity to enlarge upon his criticisms in The New York Times, he neglected to add the "Petersburg" issue. Aronson, in his "Reply" to Levine in The New Leader, also decided not to rebut on this point.

"Agent": Aronson noted the reference to Stalin as an "agent" of the Okhrana in the Eremin letter. "Agents of the Okhrana were usually denoted 'secret collaborators,'" he explained. (126) Levine took up this point in his reply, citing an August 20, 1913 document sent to the Governor General of Finland by the Department of Police in which he found the following passage: "In connection with locating and trailing the contraband, there were assigned to the command of the officer in question 20 secret agents." (127)

Aronson did not return to this point in his answer to Levine. Nevertheless, Schleifman believes it highly unusual to call Stalin an "agent" when the standard term was "secret collaborators" (sekretnye sotrudniki). (128)

Which party?: Aronson pointed out that Stalin was described in the Eremin letter as a member of the Central Committee of the party— "without specifying which party." In the Russian empire of July 1913, he pointed out, "there were a number of parties, socialist and otherwise, legal and semi-legal." (129)

Levine replied by noting that "the document does carry on its face the handwritten notation 'po S.-D.'—'re Social Democrats.'" This appears in red pencil on the document original. In addition, noted Levine, "Stalin's own name and known party affiliation would serve to identify the Central Committee." (130) Aronson replied that this was "hardly convincing." (131)

Schleifman believes that the more usual way of writing about undercover agents would have been to have referred to Stalin as an agent among the Bolsheviks within the text of the letter. The exception would have been if the Eremin letter was part of a correspondence between two officials who had been discussing Stalin. In that case there would have been no need to refer to his party membership. The whole tone of the letter, including the absence of any reference to party membership, implies that Stalin was quite well-known in 1913, which was not the case at all. There is also no internal evidence in the letter than Eremin and Zhelezniakov had been discussing Stalin in a series of letters. (132)

Stalin breaks from the Okhrana

Several critics brought up the strange mention of Stalin's breaking off his relationship with the police in 1912. The letter states that after six years of working as an agent, Stalin chose to go into opposition to the Government.

This sentence, according to Dallin, "is more than strange coming from the old Department of Police. The author does not try to explain this extraordinary transformation of a police spy into a revolutionary, nor why the police did nothing to prevent the development." (133) (The letter does not say that the "police did nothing" but merely recites the fact of Stalin's having switched allegiance.)

Smith was more interested in why one Okhrana officer was telling this to another. "It is curious," he wrote, "that the information is being relayed for Zhelezniakov's 'personal appreciation in operational matters.' Having broken with the Okhrana, was it hoped that Stalin might be induced to renew the old relationship? If so, the letter could be expected to be more specific, particularly about the control factor previously used in Stalin's case." (134)

Schleifman sees in this aspect of the letter perhaps its most suspicious feature. The Okhrana usually recruited agents following their arrests. The new recruits would sign a confession and together with written reports and other documentation, the Okhrana would have enough material to expose any agent who tried to return to the ranks of his party.

When agents broke from the police, the Okhrana would immediately send a circular letter to all its branches and offices warning that this particular person was no longer reliable. Furthermore, it was standard operating procedure to leak to the revolutionary parties information about the treason of agents who had turned. It was essential for the Okhrana to follow this procedure. Otherwise, every arrested revolutionary would agree to cooperate and then following his release, promptly return to the underground.

The Okhrana held onto its agents by the threat of exposure. In 1912-13, rumors were flying among the Bolsheviks about the penetration of their upper ranks by an Okhrana spy. If Stalin had been an agent, and had betrayed the Okhrana, the natural thing to have done would have been to expose him. Such a move would have helped to provide cover for agents like Malinovsky, Zhitomirsky and Chernomazov, who were still loyal to the police. The Eremin letter, according to Schleifman, is not the way the Okhrana would have exposed an agent who had broken from its ranks and returned to the revolutionaries. (135)

CONCLUSION

In 1960, Kennan summed up his views on the Eremin letter as follows:

[I]f it is not genuine—and it is true that certain aspects of it make a somewhat odd impression—there is still a great deal to be explained as to how and where it could have come into existence at all . . . [T]he early mills for the fabrication of anti-Bolshevik documents—the ones that operated just after the Revolution and in the '20s—were run, without exception, by reactionary White Guard elements. These people had a poor knowledge of the history of the revolutionary movement, and this ignorance was generally visible in their work. Whoever wrote this particular document, however, had an intimate knowledge of the affairs both of the revolutionists and of the police. If, then, the authenticity of the document has not yet been demonstrated beyond challenge, nobody has yet offered a plausible theory as to by whom, when, and why it should have been concocted as a forgery. (136)

But within a few years, two biographers of Stalin would put forward candidates for forgers of the letter, as well as their possible motivation. Smith proposed his candidate in 1967:

It is evident that Colonel Eremin neither wrote nor signed the letter in 1913. The mystery of Colonel Eremin's disappearance from his post as Chief of Finland's Gendarme Administration after the February events of 1917 remains perplexing. Possibly he and his family perished, but this was not noted in the Finnish or Russian emigre press. [Eremin had a wife and three daughters. - EL] We do not find Eremin in the rather detailed lists of officers who fought in the Civil War on the side of the White Armies. It may be that he decided to jettison his identity and disappear after the February events in Petrograd, when the Okhrana suffered disintegration; he had every plausible reason to do so. . . . It must have been clear to him that his knowledge of secret operations in revolutionary organizations would shortly mean that a number of former agents would be vitally interested in forever silencing him. It would have been only prudent for Eremin to go underground for the protection of his person and the safeguarding of his family. Perhaps he made his way abroad and, after adopting an alias, attempted to construct for himself a new career. Many former officers of the Department of Police in their diaspora of 1917 took with them official stationery, stamps, seals and, above all, their confidential knowledge of agents and operations. Wherever Eremin found himself, his need for money would not have lessened as he became older and he would have been well aware of the value of his knowledge of Stalin's affiliation with the Okhrana. The letter in question was produced by someone (not a novice at operational intelligence matters) who had knowledge of Stalin's Okhrana dossier and who comprehended the interactions of the Okhrana and revolutionary organizations. (137)

Smith concluded: "Most important, he was convinced that Stalin had been an agent of the Okhrana." This is not necessarily true. The author of the forged letter was trying to convince others that Stalin was an Okhrana agent. What his own thoughts were on the matter, we cannot know.

In any event, the problems with Eremin's signature on the document seem to preclude the possibility of him being the forger. It is surprising that Smith, who was certainly aware of the doubts regarding the signature, should have ignored this in suggesting Eremin himself as the forger.

Hyde's one original contribution to the debate on the Eremin letter was his proposal of Colonel Russianov as candidate for forger. "It should be noted that he also had with him a supply of Okhrana stationery, so that there is a possibility that he fabricated the letter and incorporated in it what he remembered seeing in the files at Yeniseisk which he had tried to burn," he explained. (138) (How he knows that Russianov had a supply of Okhrana stationery with him, he does not tell us. Perhaps he inferred this from Smith's previously published speculations regarding Eremin.)

TsGAOR archivist Peregudova today shares Hyde's view, and considers Colonel Russianov the author of the Eremin letter. (139)

But in this author's opinion, Colonels Eremin and Russianov do not exhaust the list of candidates for forger of the Eremin letter.

It was at one time considered possible that the British "Zinoviev letter" was a GPU forgery designed to embarrass Zinoviev—part of Stalin's bid for power in the mid-1920s. (140) Might not the Eremin letter also be a product of the Soviet secret police?

Perhaps the document was produced by anti-Stalin elements in the GPU, aiming to discredit the Soviet dictator. Certainly the Soviet secret police, with their control over the Okhrana records and their knowledge of the history of the revolutionary movements, and their experience forging evidence linking revolutionaries to the Okhrana (for example, during the Moscow trials) cannot be excluded from the list of potential forgers. As we shall see in the next chapter, there were high-ranking NKVD officers who believed that Stalin had been an Okhrana agent—or at least wanted others to believe that. The weakness of this hypothesis seems to be that the GPU would have done a better job of forging such a letter, especially regarding the letterhead, signature, serial number and other details.

However, it is possible that the author of the forgery, whatever his own views on Stalin's relationship to the police, was not trying to convince others of Stalin's guilt. Perhaps errors were deliberately introduced into the document for that purpose. If that is the case, then the origin of the document may be attributed to Stalin himself. Perhaps he instructed the forgery experts in the GPU to prepare just such a document. To my surprise, the possibility of the Eremin letter having been a Stalinist fabrication has never been proposed. Yet such an explanation resolves a number of questions raised about the document.

Russian experts tend to reject this hypothesis. Dr. McKean calls it "inherently improbable." (141) As one critic put it, "The idea that Stalin did it himself—it's almost too devious." (142)

In this author's opinion, nothing seems too devious for Stalin to have considered. And we shall probably never know what Stalin thought of the charges, first brought up while he was still alive, that he was an Okhrana agent. We know that he read Souvarine's book. He almost certainly read Trotsky's biography as well (Stalin's interest in Trotsky was out of all proportion to Trotsky's own influence in the world). He probably read much more. Stalin certainly knew that he had been accused by several sources of working for the Okhrana.

We do not know what strategy he devised to counter those allegations. Could it have included the creation of "clumsy forgeries" in order to discredit those who were asserting that he worked for the tsarist police?

Both of the leading proponents of the Eremin letter backed down from their support over the years. Levine wrote, as early as late 1956:

My Stalin's Great Secret is but an opening chapter in the search for the solution to the mystery in Stalin's life. Numerous fresh sources of information have come to light since the publication of the original Life expose. In the light of all the evidence, the Yeremin document is of but secondary importance. Even if that document should prove, for reasons other than those suggested by Aronson, to be of dubious origin, the accumulating body of historical evidence, which I shall publish in due course, will leave not a shadow of a doubt that Stalin was a Tsarist agent. (143)

But Levine did not produce any of "the accumulating body of historical evidence" which would have left the Eremin document as an item of "secondary importance." He went on to other things, such as his own independent investigation of the Kennedy assassination, in the course of which he befriended Marina Oswald, widow of the accused assassin.

In his 1973 memoir, Eyewitness to History, Levine avoided all mention of the Life article, the 1956 book, or the ensuing debate. He did, however, recall his earlier book on Stalin, published in 1931, which "became a best seller and was widely published abroad in various translations . . . During the entire Stalin era, I fought his cult with unflagging zeal in the public prints and from the lecture platform. It earned for me a legion of enemies and a stream of slander in the Communist press." (144) Levine died in 1981 at the age of 89 -- without having published another word about the Eremin letter. (145)

Kennan also began to back down, over the years, from his earlier interest in the Eremin letter. In 1991 he wrote, "I am inclined to attribute to the Eremin document, even if it should not be genuine, a higher circumstantial significance than has been given to it" by Stalin's biographers of recent years. (146) Nevertheless, after reading about many of the problems researchers have found with the letter, Kennan wrote in 1992: "It would seem to be quite clear, from all that you say, that the document was not an original one. . . . If admittedly not an original, it still seems to me to be a most interesting and suggestive piece of paper." (147) Echoing Levine, Kennan eventually de-emphasized the importance of the Eremin letter, calling it "only a portion of the material on Stalin's career as a revolutionist in the first years of this century" and suggested further research in other subjects—among them, Stalin's arrest in 1906. (148)

The case against the Eremin document is weighty indeed. The long delay in its publication, first by the Russian emigres and later by Levine himself, have led some to believe it was a fraud. Questions have been raised about the typewriter, the letterhead and Eremin's signature. Doubts have been expressed that Colonel Eremin could have written the letter on the date indicated. Some critics find flaws with the addressee, Captain Zhelezniakov of the Eniseisk Okhrana. The mysterious reference to Stalin's 1906 arrest in Tiflis cast suspicion on the authenticity of the document as a whole. The seven references to the newly-adopted pseudonym "Stalin" are problematic. The serial numbers on the document do not jibe with what is known about the Okhrana filing system. Finally, a number of small stylistic problems have been raised concerning the terminology and text.

The sheer number of questions raised about the Eremin letter has deterred some biographers of Stalin from looking further. After all, if even one of the charges raised is true (for instance, if Eremin's signature is not valid) -- then the whole document is a forgery. This was, I believe, the intention of some of the critics who, within days of the document's appearance in Life, were pointing out numerous problems, several of which were easily rebutted by Levine. The more problems that were raised, the harder it would be for Levine to find answers. One might guess that the beleaguered author eventually just grew tired of answering all the charges, and gave up.

In reviewing the most recent evidence, one finds that—as before some of it leads in one direction, some in another.

The numerous samples of Colonel Eremin's signature obtained from the Finnish archives by this author, for example, point clearly to forgery. So does the research regarding the Okhrana document numbering system published in Rodina in 1989. The consensus among mainstream historians in post-Communist Moscow—as reported to this author by two different sources in 1992 -- is that the document is a forgery. Dr. Zinaida I. Peregudova, who runs the Okhrana archive in Moscow, shares this view, and wrote to the author in 1992 suggesting that Colonel Russianov was probably the forger.

On the other hand, archival documents recently unearthed in Helsinki confirm that Eremin was probably still at his desk in St. Petersburg on the date the document was ostensibly written. And the recent confirmation by Russian archivists that there was an Okhrana section in Eniseisk adds credibility to the document too. The revelation first published in 1993 that critic David Dallin might have been serving the Soviet intelligence service, albeit "unwittingly", certainly undermines the credibility of his evaluation of the Eremin letter. The opinions of the Russian historians Arutiunov and Volkov in Moskovskaia Pravda in 1989, cannot be easily dismissed either.

Other recent revelations cannot be categorized so simply as "pro" or "con". The opinion of General Alexander Orlov, which appeared in print for the first time in 1993, and who considered the document to be a forgery, is hard to evaluate. Was Orlov, like Dallin, serving the Kremlin—or in the interests of scholarship?

And some of the recent evidence seems to point in both directions at the same time. KGB archivist Oleg Tsarev found evidence of a Politburo-ordered investigation of Stalin's connection to the Okhrana following the publication of the Eremin letter in 1956. But he reported, as did Sergo Mikoyan in 1992, that the search produced no results. Mikoyan, however, seemed to imply a Stalinist cover-up rather than a genuine failure to find material.

In conclusion, the eyewitness accusations against Stalin, the circumstantial evidence, the cover-up regarding his early career, and the thousands of Okhrana agents who survived the revolution unexposed, convince some historians that whether the Eremin letter is genuine or not, the story it tells is basically true.

NOTES

    1)   Elwood, p. 35. 
    2)   Costello and Tsarev, p. 470. 
    3)   Sergo A. Mikoyan, Arlington, Virginia, letter, November 1, 1992, to the author. 
    4)   Costello and Tsarev, p. 411. 
    5)   Comment made in the discussion period following presentation of this work at the April 1992 annual conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution, Christ Church College, Oxford. 
    6)   Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    7)   Ibid. 
    8)   Kennan, Russia and the West, p. 233. 
    9)   Kennan, Historiography, p. 167. 
    10)  Blackstock, p. 23. 
    11)   Ibid. p. 246. 
    12)   Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, pp. 78-82. 
    13)  Levine, "A Document", p. 49. According to Hyde (p. 613), the Eremin letter was "eventually acquired" by the Tolstoy Foundation in New York for a sum of nine thousand dollars. 
    14)  Costello and Tsarev, p. 351. 
    15)  Alexis S. Troubetzkoy, letter to the author, April 1, 1994. 
    16)  Kennan, "Certain Questions." 
    17)  Levine, "Stalin as Police Spy," pp. 26-27. 
    18)  Levine, "Was Stalin a Spy?," p. 19. 
    19)  Hyde, p. 613. 
    20)  Smith, The "Okhrana." 
    21)  Ronald M. Bulatoff, letter to the author, April 6, 1994. 
    22)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 120. 
    23)  Press release, Tolstoy Foundation, 18 April 1956. 
    24)  Michael T. Florinsky, Review of Stalin's Great Secret, Saturday Review, September 15, 1966, p. 43. 
    25)  Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 576. 
    26)  David Dallin, letter to Life, May 14, 1956. 
    27)  Levine, "Was Stalin a Spy?", p. 19. 
    28)  Isaac Don Levine, reply to letters, Life, May 14, 1956, p. 21. 
    29)  Kennan, "Certain Questions." The author's efforts to locate this book with the assistance of the National Library in Prague have so far proven unsuccessful. 
    30)  Hyde, p. 616. 
    31)  For example, Hyde. 
    32)  Blackstock, p. 118. 
    33)  Ibid. pp. 81-102. 
    34)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 77. 
    35)  Kennan, "Historiography", p. 168. 
    36)  Kennan, "Certain Questions." 
    37)  Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 308. 
    38)  Florinsky, loc. cit. 
    39)  David J. Dallin, "The Letter in the Case," Review of Stalin's Great Secret, The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1956, p. 46. 
    40)  Costello and Tsarev, pp. 410-411. 
    41)  Medvedev, loc. cit. 
    42)  The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) informed me, in a letter dated February 4, 1992, that it could not provide the text of any papers delivered prior to the 1970s. The U.S. Government Printing Office was not able to provide a copy of the text of the Senate Hearing testimony (letter to the author of October 18, 1991.) However, copies of Tytell's AAAS lecture, his testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1957, and other materials relating to his expertise were made available to the author by the Congressional Information Service. 
    43)  Hyde, pp. 615-616. 
    44)  Dr. Nurit Schleifman, Tel Aviv University, personal interview with the author in Jerusalem, March 4, 1992. 
    45)  Dr. R.B. McKean, University of Stirling, Scotland, letter, August 21, 1992, to the author. 
    46)  Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    47)  George F. Kennan, Princeton, New Jersey, letter, December 2, 1991, to the author. The emphasis is mine - EL. 
    48)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 98. 
    49)  Hyde, p. 618. 
    50)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 99. 
    51)  Ibid. p. 100. 
    52)  McNeal's review appeared in the Slavic Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, December 1972, p. 201. Rigby's was published in Canadian Slavonic Papers, XV (1973), 3, pp. 401-402. Tucker's essay appeared in the New York Times, March 19, 1972. 
    53)  Hyde, p. 615. 
    54)  Cort, p. 33. 
    55)  Levine, "The Perjury Record". 
    56)  John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976) p. 409. 
    57)  Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) p. 571 and p. 575. 
    58)  T.H. Rigby, Australian National University, letter, July 3, 1992, to the author. 
    59)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 78. 
    60)  Florinsky, loc. cit. 
    61)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, pp. 104-109. 
    62)  Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 411. 
    63)  Life, April 23, 1956, p. 49. 
    64)  Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 576-577. 
    65)  Hyde, p. 615. 
    66)  Aila Narva, Senior Archivist, National Archives of Finland, letter, February 19, 1992, to the author. 
    67)  Antti Kujala, University of Helsinki, letter, May 13, 1992, to the author. Dr. R.B. McKean concurs, writing: "I am no expert on handwriting but the signature from the Eremin document does not, to me, look anything like the other two—above all from the 1914 Finnish document. The final Russian H (= N in English) are wildly different from the Eremin document and the archival signature." (McKean, loc. cit.) 
    68)  Blackstock, p. 245. 
    69)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 103. 
    70)  Aronson, "Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?". 
    71)  Hyde, loc. cit. 
    72)  Levine, "Stalin as Police Spy," pp. 26-28. 
    73)  Gregory Aronson, "Reply," p. 28. 
    74)  Kujala, letter. 
    75)  Kennan, "Certain Questions," p. 8. 
    76)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 104. 
    77)  Aronson, "Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?". 
    78)  Aronson, "Reply." 
    79)  Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    80)  Hyde, loc. cit. 
    81)  Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 307. 
    82)  Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    83)  Ibid. 
    84)  Ibid., p. 161. 
    85)  Cited in Levine, "A Document on Stalin," p. 48. 
    86)  Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 577. 
    87)  Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    88)  Conquest, p. 39. 
    89)  Levine, "Stalin as Police Spy," p. 28. 
    90)  Levine, "A Document on Stalin," p. 48. 
    91)  Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 85. 
    92)  Trotsky, Stalin, p. ix. The emphasis is mine - EL. 
    93)  Bertram D. Wolfe, letter to Life, May 14, 1956. 
    94)  Kennan, "Historiography," p. 168. 
    95)  See, for instance, Hyde, Smith and de Jonge. 
    96)  "A Czarist Spy Named Stalin," Newsweek, November 7, 1966. 
    97)  The New York Times, October 31, 1966. 
    98)  George F. Kennan, letter, October 22, 1990, to the author. 
    99)  Peter J. Salber, Library Director, Newsweek, letter, May 28, 1992, to the author. 
    100) Hyde, p. 75. 
    101) Harvey S. Fireside, Review of Stalin by H. Montgomery Hyde, The Russian Review, October 1972. 
    102) De Jonge, p. 6. 
    103) Kennan, "Historiography," p. 168. 
    104) Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 77. 
    105) Ibid. 
    106) Wolfe, loc. cit. 
    107) Dallin, letter to Life. 
    108) Ibid. 
    109) Dallin, "The Letter in the Case." 
    110) Smith, The Young Stalin, p. 307. 
    111) Ulam, p. 111. 
    112) Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    113) Levine, reply to letters in Life. 
    114) Ibid. 
    115) Levine, "Stalin as Police Spy," p. 26. 
    116) Ibid. 
    117) Aronson, "Reply." 
    118) Schleifman interview. Dr. R.B. McKean adds: "The top echelons of the Okhrana, as far as I know, never divulged agents' names or case histories to lower ranking subordinates." (McKean, loc. cit.) 
    119) McKean, loc. cit. The emphasis is mine - EL. 
    120) Kennan, "Certain Questions," p. 8. 
    121) Kaptelov and Peregudova. 
    122) Dallin, letter to Life. 
    123) Levine, reply to letters in Life. 
    124) Aronson, "Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent," p. 23. 
    125) Levine, "Stalin as Police Spy," p. 26. 
    126) Aronson, loc. cit. 
    127) Levine, loc. cit. 
    128) Schleifman interview. 
    129) Aronson, loc. cit. 
    130) Levine, loc. cit. 
    131) Aronson, "Reply." 
    132) Schleifman interview. 
    133) Dallin, "The Letter in the Case." 
    134) Smith, The Young Stalin, pp. 307-308. 
    135) Schleifman interview. Dr. R.B. McKean expressed full agreement with this analysis, adding: "The Malinovsky case in 1914 is a prime example of the dangers the police faced in handling their top agents." (McKean, loc. cit.) 131) 
    136) Kennan, Russia and the West, p. 233. 
    137) Smith, The Young Stalin, pp. 308-309. 
    138) Hyde, p. 613. 
    139) Peregudova, letter. 
    140) Blackstock, pp. 123-124. 
    141) McKean, loc. cit. 
    142) Comment made in the discussion period following the presentation of this chapter to the conference. Unfortunately, I cannot identify the voice of the participant in this case. 
    143) Levine, Stalin's Great Secret, p. 28. 
    144) Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness to History (1973), p. xii. 
    145) Hyde reported that Levine eventually decided that the Eremin letter was, in fact, spurious. He did not cite a source for this report.  Hyde, p. 616. 
    146) George F. Kennan, letter, December 2, 1991, to the author. 
    147) George F. Kennan, letter, January 30, 1992, to the author. 
    148) George F. Kennan, letter, December 2, 1991, to the author.