Mikhail Jefimowitsch Koltsov

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Mikhail Jefimowitsch Kolzow (1938)

Mikhail Koltsov ( Russian Михаил Ефимович Кольцов ; born May 31, jul. / 12. June  1898 greg. In Kiev , † 2. February 1940 in Moscow ) was a Soviet columnist and journalist. Known, but controversial as a historical source, are his reports from the Spanish Civil War . He was the older brother of the cartoonist Boris Efimovich Efimov . As the leading propagandist of Stalin , he himself fell victim to the Great Terror .

Life

youth

Michail Kolzow was born under the name Michail Haimovich Friedland as the first son of a Jewish shoemaker. When he was two years old, his family moved to the city of Białystok, which was then part of the tsarist empire . There he attended secondary school . Together with his brother Boris, who later became a cartoonist, he published a school newspaper.

In 1915 the family returned to Kiev. In 1916 he began training at the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute . In the capital of the tsarist empire, he began to write for various newspapers. In comments, he condemned all forms of anti-Semitism .

After the February Revolution of 1917 , which Koltsov welcomed, he worked as an editor for a cinema magazine published by the People's Commissariat for Education.

"Journalist No. 1"

In 1918 Friedland was accepted into the Bolshevik Workers' Party on the recommendation of the People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky . In the same year he began to publish under the pseudonym "Michail Kolzow". In 1921 he reported as a reporter on the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' uprising . A few months later he joined the editorial staff of the Pravda party organ and was employed there as a reporter from the start.

In the following years he was also involved in the creation of several magazines, including Abroad (За рубежом) , Behind the wheel (За рулём) and Soviet Photo (Советское фото) . He also founded the satirical magazine Kauz (Чудак) , in which he himself regularly wrote the column Calendar of a Kauz . In it he impaled the difficulties of adapting a fictional philistine to the new living conditions in Soviet society.

In 1927 Kolzow won 25 young authors to write a satirical impromptu novel for the magazine Ogonyok, which he re-founded . Each of the authors took over a chapter. They included Isaak Babel , Alexander Grin , Wera Inber , Weniamin Kawerin , Alexei Tolstoy and Mikhail Soschtschenko . The editorial offices headed by Kolzow also organized flying competitions. He himself took part in a flight from Moscow via Ankara and Tehran to Kabul , and his reports on it and the weekly news report met with a strong response.

Kolzow relied on the party secretary Stalin at an early stage and repeatedly praised him in his texts. When Stalin had secured sole rule, he in turn promoted Koltsov. He also headed the editorial staff of Krokodil and pushed through the Stalinist line. Kolzow was given the unofficial title of "Journalist No. 1" because of his numerous journalistic and organizational activities as well as his ubiquity in the media.

Cultural functionary

Kolzow took over the management of the foreign department of the Writers' Union of the USSR founded in 1932 , which was completely under the control of the NKVD party and secret police . He was thus involved in approving business trips for writers abroad, but the final decision rests with the Central Committee . He was also responsible for looking after writers who visited the Soviet Union. In this capacity he accompanied the French Louis Aragon , André Gide and André Malraux on their travels to Moscow and other cities in the Soviet Union.

In 1935 he was one of the organizers of the anti-fascist "Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture" (Congrès international des écrivains pour la défense de la culture) in Paris, which was partially financed by Moscow . Together with Louis Aragon and Henri Barbusse he fought in the backdrops of the congress for adherence to the party line. They stood against a group of sympathizers of the Soviet system around André Gide and André Malraux and the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg , who wanted to build a large bipartisan movement against fascism . On the days he presided over, the polyglot Koltsov led the congress dogmatically and aggressively, as attendees noted.

Spanish Civil War

From August 1936 to November 1937 he reported on the Spanish Civil War . There he met Ernest Hemingway , who was also reporting on the war on the side of the Republican troops. Hemingway created a literary monument for him in his novel Whom the Hour Strikes (1940) with the figure of the Soviet journalist Karkow. Hemingway's Karkow is extremely intelligent, cunning and at the same time a charming womanizer. The novel says of the picture the narrator had of Karkow - and Hemingway confirmed that he meant Kolzow: “The most intelligent of all the people he had the opportunity to meet - he had such a good head, such a good one inner dignity and such esprit. ”According to the novel, he cheated on his German wife Maria Osten , who was used as an interpreter for the republican troops, in Spain.

Kolzow also took on tasks for the NKVD under the pseudonym "Miguel Martínez". He was involved in coordinating the struggle of the Stalinists against other left groups, especially against the Catalan anarchists and the Trotskyist alliance POUM . In letters to Stalin himself, he boasted of his role in the fighting in the left camp.

But Koltsov was himself in 1937 in a letter from the French Comintern -Funktionärs André Marty denounced Stalin as a Trotskyist, as it became known only after opening of the archives in the 1990s. Marty also accused Maria Osten of being a German spy. The conflict between Marty and the protagonist Karkow alias Kolzow is also the subject of Hemingway's civil war novel.

It is disputed whether Kolzow was involved in the Paracuellos massacre . In the late autumn of 1936, units of the left shot around 2,500 representatives of the bourgeois order, including politicians and priests as well as captured soldiers from the rebellious groups under Franco , and buried them near the village of Paracuellos de Jarama, northeast of Madrid . One thesis is that Kolzow personally gave the order for the mass execution. The opposite thesis is that it was not he, but the Spanish Politruk Santiago Carillo who gave the decisive order.

Further ascent

After his return to Moscow, Koltsov was received by Stalin in the Kremlin in early 1938. For three hours he reported to him and the Prime Minister Vyacheslav Molotov , the People's Commissar for Defense Kliment Voroshilov and the NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov on the situation in Spain. Kolzow did not skimp on criticism of the Soviet military advisors. After the meeting, he expressed concern to his brother, cartoonist Boris Efimov, that Stalin would not have liked his appearance. The Kremlin Lord said goodbye to him with a look that said: "Too cheeky!"

In Moscow in 1938 his Spanish Diary appeared in large numbers , in which he praised the struggle against Trotskyists and other "deviants". In the same year he was elected a deputy to the Supreme Soviet and appointed to the Academy of Sciences . The Pravda took him to the chief editor.

Koltsov reported on the third Moscow show trial , defending the judgments in an agitational and polemical style. In private he expressed his satisfaction that Ehrenburg, whom he had repeatedly denounced to Stalin as a deviator, had been forced to attend the trial of the disgraced former political bureau member Nikolai Bukharin . Ehrenburg and Bukharin were close friends.

Arrest and execution

On December 12, 1938, Koltsov gave a lecture to the assembled elite of the country in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on the new textbook on party history - Short Course in the History of the CPSU (B) . He was then asked to work in the Pravda editorial office . There he was arrested on charges of "counter-revolutionary activity". Defense Commissioner Voroshilov was identified as one of the masterminds behind the action against him. He was deeply angry about Kolzov's criticism of the Soviet military advisers deployed in Spain. Voroshilov prevented Koltsov from publishing it and received Stalin's backing for it.

Kolzow was severely tortured by the NKVD interrogators. Incredible statements about Ehrenburg, Hemingway and Malraux were pressed from him. He confessed that the long-imprisoned former editor-in-chief of Pravda Karl Radek had recruited him as a terrorist. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold was also involved in the preparation of terrorist attacks . He was also tortured in custody.

At the beginning of the closed-door trial, Kolzow retracted the confession of being a French, British and German spy ; it came about through torture. According to the court record, he shouted, "My confession was made by sticking when I was hit in the face, teeth, and all over my body." But on February 1, 1940, he was sentenced to death by shooting . The sentence was the following day enforced . Meyerhold died with him. Both of them were shot by the NKVD executioner Vasily Blochin , who was also used with other celebrities.

Koltsov's brother Boris Yefimov, now one of the country's best-known caricaturists, was truthfully told that the accused had been sentenced to ten years in a camp without the right to correspondence. Yefimov did not find out more about his fate until the 1990s.

Afterlife

A year after Stalin's death, Koltsov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1954 without any details being disclosed. From 1956 a selection of his works appeared; the short satires from the 1920s on the inadequacies of the new social order were initially excluded. His involvement in the NKVD apparatus did not become known until the 1990s.

family

Koltsov's younger brother, the illustrator and caricaturist Boris Jefimow (1900–2008) was not affected by the Stalinist terror and reached the biblical age of 108 years.

Kolzow was married three times: his first wife was the actress Vera Jurenewa (1876–1962), who was one of the first silent film stars in the Soviet Union. His second wife, Yelisaveta Ratmanova, spied on him on behalf of the GPU and NKVD. His third wife Maria Osten (1908–1942) was also a victim of the Stalinist repression, she was shot as an alleged German spy.

Works

German editions

  • And set up the rifles , Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinternationale 1932
  • Acting persons ; Moscow (among others): Verl. Cooperative of Foreign Workers in the USSR 1933
  • The man in the soldier's coat: sketches ; Moscow (among others): Verl. Cooperative of Foreign Workers in the USSR 1933
  • Guadalajara: a defeat of fascism ; Zurich: Verlag Freie Schweiz 1937
  • Spanish diary ; Berlin: Military Publishing House of the German Democratic Republic 1986 (3rd edition)
  • The Red Battle (above. By Rahel Strassberg); Berlin: Publishing house of the Ministry for National Defense 1960
  • Ivan Vadimowitsch - a man of format: sketches, feature pages ; Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg 1974

Work editions (Russian)

  • Izbrannye proizvedenija v 3 tomach (selected works in 3 volumes); Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Chudožestvennoj Literatury 1957; (Tom I: Fel'etony i očerki (feature sections and essays); Tom II: Zarubežnye očerki (essays from abroad); Tom III: Ispanskij dnevnik (Spanish diary))
  • Vostorg i jarost ': očerki i fel'etony; stat'i; vospominanija sovremennikov (enthusiasm and anger: essays and features ; articles; recollections of contemporaries); Moskva: Izdatel'stvo Pravda 1990; ISBN 5-253-00094-1

literature

  • Gleb Anatol'evic Skorochodov, Michail Kol'cov: kritiko-biografičeskij očerk (Michail Kolzow: Critical-biographical essay); Moskva: Sovetskij Pisatel '1959
  • N. Beljaev (ed.); Mikhail Kol'cov: kakim on byl; sbornik vospominanij (Mikhail Koltsov : as he was; collection of memories); Moskva: Sovetskij Pisatel '1990; ISBN 5-265-01068-8
  • Arkadi Waksberg : The Persecuted Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 17-36. ISBN 3-499-19633-6
  • Viktor Fradkin: Delo Kol'cova . Moscow 2002.
  • MB Efimov: On byl "sliškom prytok". Žizn 'i kazn' Michaila Kol'cova. Moscow 2013.
  • Amanda Vaill: Hotel Florida. Truth, Love and Treason in the Spanish Civil War. Translated from the English by Susanne Held. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2015, ISBN 978-3-608-94915-5 .
  • Ursula El-Akramy: Transit Moscow - Margarete Steffin and Maria Osten , European Publishing House , Hamburg 1998, ISBN 978-3-434-50446-7 .

Web links

Commons : Michail Kolzow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The birth history of Moses Fridland in the metric book of the Kiev rabbinate for 1898 ( ЦГИАК Украины. Ф. 1164. Оп. 1. Д. 442. Л. 138об — 139. )
  2. ↑ a b Information about Kolzov's youth according to: Kol'cov Michail Efimovic (biography on the website of the Moscow Sakharov Center ).
  3. ↑ Calendar 'čudaka
  4. ^ Criticism in Brief , Die Zeit, December 17, 1982.
  5. ↑ The great fires. A novel by 25 authors. Edited by Fritz Mierau. Berlin / Frankfurt / Vienna 1982.
  6. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 21.
  7. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski : The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 85.
  8. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, pp. 373-376, 451.
  9. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, pp. 358-392.
  10. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski: The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 69.
  11. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg: Stalin's prosecutor. The life of Andrei Vyshinsky. New York 1991, p. 196.
  12. ↑ The most intelligent of all the people he had the occasion to meet ... who had such a good head, so much inner dignity and such wit.
  13. ↑ Frezinsky, p. 458 f.
  14. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 23.
  15. ↑ This thesis is represented by Jan Gibson: Paracuellos: cómo fue. Madrid 1983; Antony Beevor: The Spanish Civil War. London 1999; César Vidal: Paracuellos - Katyn: Un ensayo sobre el genocidio de la izquierda. Madrid 2005.
  16. ^ Paul Preston: El holocausto español. Barcelona 2011, pp. 472-474.
  17. ^ Julius Ruiz: Paracuellos. Una verdad incómoda. Barcelona 2015, p. 83.
  18. ↑ Frezinsky, p. 457.
  19. ↑ Cлишком прыток! , Arkadij Vaksberg: Neraskrytye tajny. Moscow 1993, p. 14.
  20. ↑ WArkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 20.
  21. ↑ Frezinsky, p. 201.
  22. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 25-26.
  23. ↑ Покозания мои родились из-под палки, когда мне били по лицу, по зубам, по всему телу in: Vitali Šentalinskij : Donos na Sokrata. Documental'nye povesti. Moscow 2011, p. 529.
  24. ↑ Viktor Fradkin: Delo Kol'cova. Moscow 2002, pp. 321–329.
  25. ↑ NI Lebedeva (Ed.): Katyn '1940-2000. Documenty. Moscow 2001, pp. 35-36.
  26. ↑ MB Efimov: On byl "sliškom prytok". Žizn 'i kazn' Michaila Kol'cova. Moscow 2013, pp. 8-10.
  27. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 31.
personal data
SURNAME Koltsov, Mikhail Efimovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Кольцов, Михаил Ефимович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet columnist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 1940
Place of death Moscow