Stalinist episodes in Brazil

Image: Karolina Grabowska
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By ANGELA MENDES DE ALMEIDA*

A story woven together with untruths, but which, much later, ended up coming out into the light of day

The communist insurrection attempt of November 1935 was sealed by the tragedy of police repression by the Getúlio Vargas government. Repression that took lives and mutilated bodies, through the barbarity of the Federal District Police Chief, Filinto Müller, and the pusillanimity of Getúlio Vargas, handing over Olga Benário and Elise Ewert to Gestapo, which meant condemning them to death. However, while the tragedy unfolded in Brazil, mainly during 1936, the intrigues of the Stalinist apparatus continued to take place. In December 1935, the Soviet leader Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad, which was the signal to begin what was called the “Great Terror”, with the Moscow trials and the massive repression of Iejovschina.

As for the attempted insurrection, it would be useless to repeat here its chimerical character, expressed even in the titles of the books that specifically dealt with this event.[I] Illusion, dream... Unnecessary controversies have been waged around the question of whether this movement emerged from specific social struggles in Brazil, or whether it happened under the dictates of the Communist International that made Moscow's voice viable.

If the scenario of the 1935 insurrection was still that of a lieutenant rebellion, a movement that had shaken the country during the 1920s, the strategic plans for after the victorious insurrection had everything to do with the International, including its line “ Attendant". This was materialized in the proposal for a “National Revolutionary Popular Government”,[ii] of the National Liberation Alliance, an organization created on March 23, 1935 by lieutenants and communists, which achieved great popular support, but which, when suspended in July by the Vargas government, became volatile.

The intervention of the Communist International, by sending staff and funds, as well as by detailed monitoring of their work, is already well documented. The question is to know how the interplay between a predetermined strategy in the form of a doctrinal imposition and the application of that strategy occurred in real circumstances. Regarding the form of the Communist International's interventions, their character as an order to be fulfilled whatever the circumstances, the experience of the Chinese revolution, during the events of the late 1920s, has a lot to show.

In 1927, Stalin's order was to revolt Canton (Guangzhou), even if there were no conditions for victory. The insurrection lasted two days in December and covered the city with blood, the repression against the thousands of rebels was unprecedentedly violent, all those arrested alive were executed in the most brutal ways.[iii] This dramatic experience would be remembered by those sent to Brazil.

To collaborate in the Brazilian venture, led by Luiz Carlos Prestes, already legendary in Brazil, the Communist International sent several important activists, some from its structures, others linked to the various Soviet secret services as agents. The most important of them was the German Arthur Ernst Ewert (“Negro”), who traveled to Brazil using a false American passport, which he had already used in China, in the name of Harry Berger. He came with his wife, German Elisabeth Saborovski Ewert, known as Sabo, who was traveling with false American documentation in the name of Machla Lenczycki.[iv]

They had spent the First World War years in Canada, where they became fluent in English. They returned to Germany, and in 1920 Arthur Ernst Ewert joined the KPD (German Communist Party). In 1925 he was elected to the Central Committee.[v] Before that, he had been part of the left-wing trend led by Ruth Fischer and Arkádi Maslow, but he moved away from it, along with other activists such as the Austrian Gerhard Eisler, Ruth Fischer's brother, and Heinz Neumann. The three converged into the so-called “conciliators” trend.[vi]

In 1928, at the 9th Plenary of the Communist International, the international leaders took a clear position against the “conciliators” of the KPD Central Committee and they were excluded. They then carried out the protocol self-criticism and were reinstated. But they did not give up opposing the line that considered social democracy as the worst enemy, giving little importance to the fight against Nazism. To do this, they tried to use the “Wittorf case”, the discovery of an act of corruption by a brother-in-law of leader Thälmann, leader of the KPD Central Committee. However, Stalin intervened directly on his behalf and the corruption case was hushed up. In 1928, Ewert was elected deputy of the Reichstag, the German Parliament, for the KPD and served until 1930. At the end of 1928, he was also appointed as the KPD representative on the Executive Committee of the Communist International.[vii]

Jan Valtin describes his various encounters with Arthur Ernst Ewert, one of the few communists he refers to with respect and even affection. First found him as a teacher at the International Lenin School in Moscow during the winter of 1925 and 1926, beloved by students for his “indefatigable serenity”. Then, in 1929, he crossed paths with him in Paris. Ewert asked them to meet privately and opened up to him. He said he was telling you because he was young and had a chance to return to Germany.

Arthur Ernst Ewert was in conflict with the line applied in his country, which considered that the greatest enemy was “social fascism”. On the contrary, he argued that the greatest enemy was Nazism and proposed a front with the Social Democrats. He said he was being forced to make a self-criticism, later published in the magazine Inprekorr, from the IC, in February 1930. He also confided that the international management was isolating him, sending him to South America, about which he knew nothing. As a disciplined activist, Valtin defended the German party and the International.

Soon after, his contact in France, Roger Walter Ginsburg, actually Pierre Villon,[viii] demanded that he report in detail everything that Ewert had told him. He then forced him to stay in the house where he was staying, without the possibility of transmitting to Ewert what he had revealed. Despite having denounced the conversation, its content was deeply marked in his consciousness. Jan Valtin was also sent to South America, in 1930, to take orders for the South American Bureau in Montevideo and envelopes with money for Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, delivered to Arthur Ewert's messengers.[ix]

He had been responsible, together with the Latvian Abraham Iákovlevitch Guralski (“Rústico”), for winning Luís Carlos Prestes over to communism during that season in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In 1932, Ewert was sent to China to be the representative of the Communist International in the Chinese Communist Party. He traveled with his wife Elise and they stayed in that country until 1934, then returning to the Soviet Union, from where they left for Brazil.[X]

The second strong activist was the Argentine Rodolfo Ghioldi (“Indian”, “Altobello”), leader of the Argentine Communist Party. He had been part of the South American Bureau together with Arthur Ernst Ewert. He came with a passport in the name of Luciano Busteros. With him came his wife, Carmen de Alfaya Ghioldi, who contrary to the minimum rules of conspiracy, traveled with her personal passport bearing Ghioldi's name.[xi] The Soviet couple Pável Vladimirovitch Stuchevski and his wife Sofia Semionova Stuchevskaia also came, who used false Belgian passports in the name of Léon-Jules and Alphonsine Vallée, names by which they were known in the history of the 1935 uprising until the implosion of the USSR, in 1991.

Pável Stuchevski, from a Jewish family, was born in Ukraine and studied in Geneva before the First World War, where he acquired French so perfect that not even the French police recognized him. He worked in several countries as a diplomat, but first belonged to the INO (Foreign Intelligence Department), of the GPU,[xii] then to the Fourth Department of the Red Army (Military Intelligence), later being sent as an illegal agent to France, where he was arrested in 1931 and sentenced to three years. Once the sentence was served, he was deported to the Soviet Union, integrated into the WHO (International Liaison Section) of the IC and sent to Brazil, with the functions of communications, finance and control of the South American network.[xiii]

His wife, Sofia Semionova, also born in Ukraine to a Jewish family, was employed in the Fourth Department. They had met during the Russian civil war, when Pavel Stuchevski was injured and taken to a hospital in Kharkov. On the occasion of Pavel Stuchevski's deportation to the USSR, Sofia stayed a little longer, enough to place her son, Eugène, in a boarding school in Geneva. In addition to these, the International also sent a radio communications technician trained in Moscow, the American Victor Allen Barron, who came with the name James Martin and used the nom de guerre “Raymond” in Brazil.

His mission was to assemble a radio transmitter-receiver, which he managed to complete shortly before the insurrection and the repression that followed. They also sent a specialist in explosives and sabotage, the German Johann de Graaf, called “Jonny”, who used a false Austrian passport in the name of Franz Paul Gruber, pretending to be an industrialist. With him came the young German Helena Kruger, his companion, who was not a militant, who was given a false passport in the name of Erna Gruber. She became known in Brazil as “Lena”.[xiv]

They also sent as a “military instructor” the Italian activist Amleto Locatelli, “Bruno”, nominated and defended by Palmiro Togliatti in the face of criticism from the Italian party, that he was “not solid” enough, a euphemism to designate homosexuality.[xv] Other militants sent from Argentina occasionally participated, such as the Argentine-Polish Marcos Youbmann, known as “Arias” and among Brazilians as “Ramón”. He had the role of a messenger and had a dramatic ending.[xvi]

Finally, as Luiz Carlos Prestes' bodyguard, came the woman who would later become his wife, the German Jew Olga Gutmann Benario. She was an agent of the Fourth Department of the Red Army and had already done a courageous and important action in freeing the leader Otto Braun, her boyfriend at the time, from Moabit prison, in Berlin, in 1928. She entered Brazil with a real Portuguese passport, matching that of Prestes, pretending to be his wife. He was named Antônio Vilar and she was named Maria Bergner Vilar, passports obtained at the Portuguese consulate in Rouen, a city in northern France, thanks to the generosity of the consul.[xvii]

The 1935 insurrection was a very short-lived event, centered on the effervescence of military personnel, especially those of low rank. But it had lasting effects. It began spontaneously, without any instructions from the PCB leadership, which had written to Moscow, through a telegram sent by Prestes and Ewert, that they thought they would take “decisive action” only between December and January of the following year. Furthermore, the party had recommended that nothing be undertaken without an express order from it.[xviii] It was in Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, in a climate already agitated by electoral disputes, that the soldiers of the 21st Battalion of Hunters rebelled first, on November 23rd, a Saturday.

In a few hours, they managed to take the barracks and headed towards the city of which they became masters, with broad support from the population. There were rallies, unrest, looting in stores, bank break-ins. They created a Popular Revolutionary Committee and formed two columns sent in different directions to the interior of the state. But, despite this initial success, the rebellion was isolated by the arrival of several troops from other states. The fighting lasted until November 27th.[xx]

Popular power lasted about four days. The news of the rebellion in Natal reached Recife on the same day, at night, and the following day, November 24th, a Sunday, the soldiers from Vila Militar de Socorro, from the 29th Battalion of Hunters, rebelled. There was no popular support despite weapons being distributed. But while in Natal the rebellion was spontaneous, in Recife it was greatly influenced by the PCB's Northeast Secretariat.[xx] Despite the low turnout, there was fighting until Wednesday, the 27th. Considering the delayed and precarious state of communications, news of the rebellions in the Northeast only reached Rio de Janeiro this Sunday, the 24th, and Brazilian and international leaders only took knowledge of them through the newspapers, like everyone else.

The leadership, that is, the leadership of the PCB (Communist Party of Brazil) represented, in this case, by “Miranda” (Antônio Maciel Bonfim), general secretary, and Prestes, together with international leaders Arthur Ewert and Rodolfo Ghioldi, in addition of Locatelli's incidental presence, met on the night of the following day, Monday 25th, and decided, in support and solidarity with the Northeast, to prepare in little more than a day an insurrection in Rio de Janeiro, scheduled to begin in 27th, in the early hours of the morning.[xxx]

The planned centers of rebellion in Rio were the 3rd Infantry Regiment, in Praia Vermelha, and the Military Aviation School, in Campo dos Afonsos, in the west zone, where the rebellion did not even begin. At Praia Vermelha, the rebels, commanded by Lieutenant Agildo Barata, took the barracks, but it was quickly surrounded by several troops mobilized by General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, a fierce anti-communist, who attacked, causing several deaths. The situation got worse between eleven o'clock and noon, when planes arrived from Campo dos Afonsos, strafing, and the barracks were destroyed. The rebels had to surrender.

The attempt lasted around 13 hours. In addition to those killed in combat, thousands of people were arrested: communists, lieutenants, relatives and neighbors of prisoners. The prisons were full and it was necessary to use the ship “Pedro I”, anchored in Guanabara Bay, to receive more people.[xxiii] In Rio de Janeiro alone, more than three thousand people were arrested immediately and in the following months, most of them military personnel.[xxiii] In Rio Grande do Norte, around one thousand and two hundred people were indicted in cases, while in Pernambuco, 415. In Rio de Janeiro, 839 people were indicted, much less than the number of prisoners, as many were detained “for more than one year without guilt.” Around a hundred militants who participated in the uprising were “shot when they surrendered, murdered by the police or buried without a name”.[xxv]

In the days following the suppressed rebellion, the party leadership and international activists had not been affected. And, despite the shock of defeat and above all the danger they were in, there was no clear awareness of the nature of what had happened. The same spirit and intention to continue applying the same line resurfaced. Prestes would have explained, in a much later interview, with historian Marly Vianna, that they “thought that things could take on another shape later on”. In the numbers following the uprising of the party newspaper, A Working class, insisted that the revolution had just begun, the defeat “contained great premises for the next victory”.[xxiv]

When asked by a sympathizer to take him out of Brazil, Prestes replied that he couldn't, as he was “expecting a new uprising from the ANL”.[xxv] The first militant to reach Moscow, the keen observer Amleto Locatelli said, in his narrative, that he had heard Prestes comment that he did not accept Ghioldi's proposal to leave Brazil, because “within a month, the situation could already be different and Within a month there would be surprises.” According to this same narrative, Ewert “also confessed to being surprised by the 'lack of reaction' to the uprising” on the part of the government.[xxviii] Perhaps he was thinking about the brutal repression against the uprisings in Canton, in 1927, who were immediately killed with cruelty.

After the defeat of the rebellion, on November 27th, Ewert and Sabo, as well as Prestes and Olga remained in the same houses located in the Ipanema neighborhood, the first on Paul Redfern Street, the Prestes couple on Barão da Torre Street, a few blocks away from the other. They continued to visit each other, as they had previously done dangerously, they continued with their respective maids, friends with each other. The Ghioldis, as well as Barron, lived in nearby Copacabana and the Stuchevskis nearby. Only Pavel Stuchevski took the action, after the day of the defeat, to change the telegraphic and correspondence addresses, also sending Barron to warn Moscow and turn off the radio.

Prestes and Ewert kept copious material in their homes, consisting of documents, declarations, communist newspapers, etc., the former perhaps believing that the device for exploding the closet they were in worked, as promised by Gruber, but later repeating the error when he moved to the Meier neighborhood.[xxviii] It seemed as if they were in a tropical delirium, numb from the heat, walking on the edge of the precipice, in a wonderful Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s.

This numbness was brutally interrupted with the arrest of Ewert (Harry Berger) and his wife Sabo, on December 26th. In a short time, the result of these improvidences would be an internationalist militant of the caliber of Arthur Ewert, tortured until he lost his mind. Filinto Müller, head of the Federal District police, used a member of the Gestapo to arrest and torture Ewert and his wife Sabo with electric shocks, pulling out nails with pliers and using a blowtorch to injure and burn their skin. She was raped in front of him several times. Neither of them handed over any data.

Another victim of Getúlio's executioners and these improvidences was Victor Allen Barron, tortured to death and “suicided”, thrown from the second floor of the Central Police building. He was 26 years old. The Argentine “Arias”, Marcos Youbmann, simply disappeared, and weeks later it was published in São Paulo newspapers that he had “committed suicide” while in police custody.[xxix] In September 1936, Olga Benario and Elisabeth Saborovski Ewert were deported by the Vargas government to Nazi Germany.

This is what Margarete Buber-Neumann, one of the German communist militants arrested in the Soviet Union and handed over by Stalin to Hitler, reports: “It was in the Ravensbrück camp that, on a certain day in 1941, a tall woman with brown hair and large eyes arrived. blue. I remembered meeting her in Moscow, at the “Lux” restaurant. It was Olga Prestes-Benario who, together with Elisabeth Sabo, Arthur Ewert's wife, had been handed over to Germany after her arrest in Rio de Janeiro. Elisabeth Sabo had died in 1940, in Ravensbrück, shortly before my arrival in the camp. Olga was a victim, in 1941, of the first campaign to exterminate “racially and biologically inferior individuals”. She was murdered, along with all the Jewish women who had been interned in Ravensbrück for racial and political reasons.”[xxx]

In fact, the gas chamber executions took place in the Bernburg hospital, although the deaths were announced as having taken place in Ravensbrück, from an invented medical cause. In Olga's case, the alleged reason was “heart failure caused by intestinal occlusion and peritonitis”. As for Elisabeth Sabo, she was already tubercular when she arrived at the camp in 1939, and weighed about forty kilos. Despite this, she was placed on a work detail that carried heavy rocks. In the winter of 1939-1940, she contracted pneumonia and died.[xxxii]

In turn, Ewert had been so mistreated during his time in prison that the famous criminalist Heráclito Sobral Pinto, Prestes' lawyer, would invoke the Animal Protection Law to defend dignified treatment for him. He reported that Ewert (Harry Berger) was kept “under a ladder, in the Special Police”. He had been for months “without sanitary facilities, without bed, fresh air or sunlight, without clothes to change or space to move, without reading or writing material”.[xxxi] In 1936, when Ewert became a living dead man, he was 46 years old.

At the end of the world war, in 1945, all arrested communists were amnestied by Getúlio, including Prestes and Ewert. He, however, never recovered his senses. In recent years, he was admitted to the Rio de Janeiro Judicial Asylum,[xxxii] known place to manufacture madmen. After the amnesty was granted, he was taken to the GDR (German Democratic Republic, that is, East Germany). There he remained until his death in 1959, hospitalized for mental problems.

Some authors say that Ewert's arrest on December 26, 1935, the first event that triggered a tragic succession of others, is not clear. Or they attribute this arrest to that of two PCB members captured a little earlier. This despite insistent evidence known at the time, that the Vargas government had general information, provided by the English secret services through ambassadors, about an action by the Comintern in Brazil in those days. O British Intelligence Service he is even cited as having helped the DOPS, in December 1935, to study reports and interrogations.[xxxv]

This lack of knowledge remained, even after a suspicion, always repeated by various sources over time, came to be confirmed. The suspicion focused on an infiltrated agent in the Soviet secret services, mistakenly called a “double agent”, when in fact he was a British agent within the Soviet secret service. Confirmation came with the publication of the biography of the infiltrator himself, the supposed Austrian Franz Paul Gruber, in fact, the German Jonny de Graaf. Of course, if Jonny was an English agent, who but him would have provided Ewert's exact address? Who else but he could also give the precise address of Victor Allen Barron, with whom he always met? After all, he was there to do this. His arrest and that of “Lena,” for one night, his release with an apology and his return to the police to obtain an exit visa, easily obtained, already spoke volumes.[xxxiv]

Going back in time a little: after the arrest of the participants in the uprising and the public activists and supporters of the ANL, the party apparatus and the international apparatus had not yet been affected, when, in mid-December, “Bagé” (José Francisco de Campos). It is known that he mentioned having seen, in a meeting, a foreigner who spoke in English. It was not information that led to a precise address. Later, an unidentified militant was arrested who had taken, together with the member of the leadership, “Martins” (Honório de Freitas Guimarães), the grenades not used in the uprising to the party’s “arsenal”, “a family house in Grajaú”. , where the Spanish activist, who came from São Paulo, Francisco Romero, his wife and five children, lived.

At the time, there were still large quantities of dynamite, detonators and weapons on site. It was obvious that the device had to be dismantled. They got a small truck for this purpose and parked it some distance away while they arranged the move. It was December 24th, Christmas Eve. An unidentified militant, who was helping with the move, while descending a staircase, was hit by an explosion that threw him far into the garden. The explosion injured Romero's wife and two children. Neighbors rushed to help, but when they saw plenty of weapons and ammunition, they called the police. The militant who was thrown into the garden fled, almost naked and singed, but managed to warn the party. Romero and his family were arrested.[xxxiv]

What better expert than Jonny de Graaf/ Franz Paul Gruber could prepare the explosives in such a way that they would explode easily at an undesired time? More than once there had been small accidents in the sabotage courses he taught, burning the face and hands of a student and himself, Romero had lost three fingers.[xxxviii] And who would be better able to prepare for Prestes a cabinet to store documents that, if opened by someone else, would explode, but which did not explode? Romero and his family were greatly tortured, however, although they knew Ewert, they were far from knowing his address, as far as we know.[xxxviii] All these logical conclusions assume that the English agent was there for that reason, his job was to sabotage the communist insurrection.

At the time, there were many suspicions about Jonny de Graaf/Franz Paul Gruber. According to historian Marly Vianna, the leader “Miranda” (Antonio Maciel Bonfim), arrested, had sent word through Elza, his companion, that “a foreigner was arrested and then released”, which he found very strange. Later, Elza repeated that “Miranda” had sent word that “a foreigner had given the police a lot of information and that it seemed like he was German”.[xxxix] In fact, the Gruber couple spent only 12 hours in prison.[xl] Shortly before falling into the hands of the police, Prestes received a message from the writer Eneida de Moraes, warning that Caio Prado had seen a twelve-page report on the PCB in the office of Macedo Soares, Minister of Justice.

Macedo Soares would have said that the author was someone who was directly linked to him. Caio thought the author was a foreigner, apparently German.[xi] Pável Stuchevski also distrusted Jonny/Gruber and on the way back to Moscow, Argentina, he set up a trap for him, asking him if he had met Barron before his arrest. From the answer, he realized that he was lying and concluded, in a telegram sent to Moscow, that he was a spy. In a report later presented to Moscow, he described him as a spy, but for the White Russians.[xliii]

The American historian Robert Levine cited, for the first time, in 1970, a copy of a telegram from the Brazilian ambassador in London, Sousa Leão, to Getúlio, mentioning a request from the Brazilian Foreign Office English to avoid, in 1940, Gruber's deportation to Nazi Germany.[xiii] Journalist Waak, who cites this data, considers it impossible, because, relying on the last record about Jonny/Gruber's interrogation in Moscow, he deduced, with great probability, that he had disappeared in the bloody purges of the Great Terror.[xiv] But the English agent was “reborn from the ashes” in 2010.[xlv]

The doubt established in the 1930s remained, and the arrests continued to be attributed to confessions of brutally tortured Brazilian militants, especially “Miranda”. Many came to the conclusion that this mystery would never be solved. This is why the publication in the United States, in 2010, of a biography of Jonny de Graaf, with autobiographical excerpts, was surprising. The book was quickly translated and published in Brazil.[xlv] In the historiography dedicated to the English secret services, the agent's name is “Jonny X”, without h, as it is also in Brazilian historiography, which does not happen in the biography.[xlv]

Its main author is the academic DS Rose, who started from a discovery made in the archives of the Brazilian political police in 1991. The second author is the writer Gordon D. Scott who, as a boy, lived with the illustrious English spy in Montréal, Canada , marveled at his story and, between 1975 and 1976, he handcrafted interviews, obtaining “a mountain of tapes”, the transcription of which was partially lost. Jonny died aged 86.

DS Rose, who writes the “Introduction”, recognizes that the biographer has a complicated path. “He avoided Jews, could be vindictive and probably murdered one of his wives. […] But what he did for Her Majesty's government overcomes the flaws and justifies telling the story.”[xlviii] So much respect for His Majesty makes the biography a hagiographic narrative of the English agent's memorable exploits.

The book is essentially based on interviews recorded by Rose and the interrogation that Jonny was subjected to by the FBI, in 1952, in Montréal, when he was unemployed from the English MI 6 (Military Intelligence – 6), offered his services to the Americans. It has the merit of elucidating the chronology of Jonny's travels. Other than that, the English agent's indigestible narrative is a pile of lies and nonsense, where the immoral side of the character shines through: vengeful, mercenary, intriguing, with pedophile tendencies, always on the side of the strongest, praising himself in every episode narrated. .

He went to the USSR for the first time, in 1930, and since then his hatred for the communist regime was born, a mantra he repeats on every occasion, perhaps to impress FBI interrogators.[xlix]  After some attempts to become a “double agent”, he finally found at the British embassy in Berlin, in June 1933, the secret service that would employ him until shortly after the Second World War: MI 6 – SIS (Secret intelligence service), in the figure of the SIS agent, Frank Foley, who formally carried out the function of passport control.[l]

Jonny had many revenges to execute, especially against Artur Ewert. Telling about his disagreements with him, as if justifying having handed him over to a bloodthirsty police, Jonny mentions episodes of confrontation in Germany, in 1923, and then in China, where he had also been sent. He takes the opportunity to make several serious accusations against Ewert about this period, unverifiable, relating to money complications and the attempted murder of him.[li] For those who still doubt that Ewert's fall was due to Jonny/Gruber, it is even noted in the historiography dedicated to the English secret services.[liiii]

In addition to Ewert, Jonny also turned in “Miranda”, Chinese communists and the Central Committee of the Argentine Communist Party.[iii] Jonny de Graaf/Gruber's undisguised pedophile tendencies cannot be eradicated, despite the condescension of his biographers. As he told Scott, Jonny, aged 33, in 1927, saw, at a rally, the girl Helena Krüger, aged 9. She found a way to stay close to the family, remotely linked to the KPD, for sums of money. He took her to England as a companion when she was just 14 years old. As if morally justifying her subsequent murder, he points out his tiredness of “Lena” and his inclination towards his younger sister, Gerti, also 9 years old, whom she began to seduce in 1931.

However, he ends up with “Lena” for the Brazil venture. Soon after the tragedy of the prisons that followed the 1935 uprising, Jonny and “Lena” went to Argentina, in January 1936. They settled in luxury in a house in Florida street. In November of that same year, Jonny received orders from Moscow to return with Helena. On December 3, according to her account, she committed suicide with her Winchester rifle. Or rather, he killed her with his rifle, as can be concluded from elements of the biography itself, reported below. In his memoirs, collected by author Scott, he does not talk about Helena's death. With university students from Montréal, he once said that he killed a woman who Moscow had infiltrated to spy on him.

During his interrogation by the FBI, in 1952, Jonny was not going to say anything to the investigators, when he was surprised by their question about whether Helena had committed suicide. The most cited version, among the many he gave, was that she had committed suicide after he discovered that she had a lover, a doctor in the Argentine army. The explanation has no logic as a cause of suicide. His biographers do cartwheels to count all the absurd versions that circulated and come to the conclusion that Jonny “may have killed” Helena. She was 19 years old. In all this, the mystery remains of how the Argentine authorities swallowed the story of the suicide, just asking him to leave the country, how nothing was published about this case in any newspaper and how the corresponding police records were burned.[book] These are miracles that can only be attributed to the strength of the English MI 6 – SIS in that country.

If she had arrived in Moscow, “Lena” would have had a lot of interesting things to tell the commission that interrogated Jonny, formed, according to him, by Stella Blagoeva, Gevork Alikhanov and another member of the Staff Department of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. After all, she was Prestes' driver before and during the 1935 uprising. Jonny arrived in Moscow on March 5, 1937. There were many interrogations and months of waiting, according to him. She only managed to leave on May 18, 1938. Alikhanov even pointed out ten unlikely points in Jonny's trajectory, according to Russian documents.

The most intriguing thing is the fact that he only reported “Lena”’s suicide when he got there. Furthermore, the Soviets were impressed by the fact that his passport, in the name of Gruber, did not have an exit visa from Argentina.[lv] But Jonny managed to get rid of all the questions and leave the USSR. It is a miracle, even greater than that of Argentina, that Moscow let an MI 6 – SIS agent infiltrated into communism, who had ruined the Brazilian party, slip through its fingers. How did Moscow, so demanding and detailed with the Stuchevski couple,[lv] Faced with the twisted and aberrant stories told by Jonny, did you fall for this trick?

Everything Jonny tells about his stay in the USSR is more for English to see. Even the characters he cites as his protectors had already been swallowed by the Great Terror. According to him, they served as a positive reference for his case, Pavel Vasiliev, his teacher at the sabotage school in the USSR, and General Berzin, who was with him from the first days of his stay until the last, as he claims. Now, Berzin was in Spain and was recalled, as we have already said, in May 1937. He was awarded the Order of Lenin but soon after was involved in the Great Terror. The following November he was arrested and was shot in July 1938.[lviii]

As for this Pavel, it must, in fact, be Boris Afanássevich Vassíliev, who since 1925 worked in the apparatus of the Comintern and who directed, until 1935, the organization department, also dealing with technical military training. In fact, he participated in the preparations for the Brazilian insurrection, together with Piátnitski and Sinami (pseudonym of Georgi Vassílievich Skalov). But he was struck by the Great Terror, in the process which led to Piatnitski's fall from grace in 1937. Sinami was shot earlier, in 1936.[lviii] It is quite difficult to imagine that Jonny's release happened because of his two supposed protectors, already in prison.

It was after this survival offered by Moscow that Jonny returned to Rio de Janeiro, now serving only the English MI 6, to act as a provocateur within the Nazi groups in Brazil. It was this time, in 1940, that he experienced some of the painstaking torture to which he had dragged Ewert, at the hands of the ferocious torturer Cecil Borer.[lix] He was saved by the SIS, which intervened directly with President Getúlio Vargas, through his ambassador in London.

On the other hand, two characters stand out in the set of dramatic events in the repression of the Vargas government, which followed the defeat of the 1935 uprising: “Miranda” (Antonio Maciel Bonfim), who used the name Adalberto de Andrade Fernandes, “ Américo”, or “Keirós” in the USSR, general secretary of the PCB, the most important position in the communist parties; and her companion “Elza Fernandes” (Elvira Cupello Calonio), the “Garota”, a young girl whose age varies, depending on the source, between 16 and 21 years old, illiterate or precariously literate, sister of three worker activists from Sorocaba[lx] and that the general secretary took to all meetings and meetings.

On January 13, 1936, the couple was arrested. It was the first important arrest of Brazilian communists. From that date on, the rest of the National Secretariat communicated with Luís Carlos Prestes, living in a small house in Meier, a neighborhood then far from Rio de Janeiro, through letters and notes several times a day. The main theme was the “Girl” case. And this continued until Prestes' arrest, on March 5, and the police confiscation of his archive, including this correspondence.[lxi]

What happened in this interregnum remained, and to a certain extent still remains, shrouded in the greatest mystery. It is there, in this period of fear, uncertainty and misunderstanding, that Stalinist militancy procedures reached a paroxysm. For a long time, the events relating to the “Garota” case were omitted by a story that claims to be serious and does not deal with crimes in everyday life, or by party corporatism typical of the Stalinist method of erasing photos and rewriting stories. These events were also, when it was difficult to hide, revealed in pieces, consolidating untruths that were repeated over decades. In this trajectory of stories, “Miranda” was chosen as a scapegoat, a typical procedure of Stalinism.

He wasn't an easy guy. After his arrest, the most diverse characterizations possible rained down. In Moscow, where he participated in the so-called “Conference of Communist Parties of South America,” he impressed by his ability to argue in French about the maturity of the revolution in Brazil.[lxii] Internal judgments were harsh. For some, he was a “braggart”, “a braggart, too much of a Bahian”, “a braggart, well-spoken, vain and adventurous”.[lxiii]

In prison, Graciliano Ramos was impressed by the boast that “Miranda” made about the marks of his torture, a “professional of boastfulness”. Over time, he saw in him “inconsistency, fatuity, prudence. He was always moving, talking too much, in noisy, unjustifiable satisfaction”. He criticizes him, in his speech, for “numerous errors in syntax and prosody […] distorting periods and distorting verbs”. From criticism to the lack of quality in his prose, Graciliano Ramos moves towards amalgamation. An unfortunate comment from “Miranda” convinces him “that we were not faced with a simple charlatan. Who should we trust? Fortunately, that one revealed itself quickly.”

And from amalgam to amalgam, it came to slander. For example, with the militant Leôncio Basbaum, for whom “Miranda” was, since 1932, when he was elected to the new leadership of the PCB, a “professional provocateur”, “the infamous Américo Maciel Bonfim, a typical adventurer who, as we learned more later, after the uprising of November 27, 1935, he was a police officer”. And this version was not just his, it had spread, taking on the appearance of verified truth, for example, in the footnote of the book by Brazilianist Chilcote.[lxiv] Blaming “Miranda” served to justify, a posteriori, the murder of his companion, the young “Elza”, the “Girl”, or hiding this fact in a tangle of suspicions that have never been proven.

But with time and new information, without the passion of antipathies, the judgment moderated. Even the clear proof that “Miranda” collaborated with the police – a letter from the police files, supposedly from him to the police chief, Filinto Müller, dated July 11, 1942 – protesting oaths of loyalty and criticism of Bolshevism in a style more typical of government leaders – was demystified by the 93-year-old communist activist, Sara Becker, a contemporary of “Elza”.

Interviewed in 2009 by journalist Sérgio Rodrigues, she found the terms used in a letter from a former militant incoherent and noted that the signature at the bottom of the letter was from a name different from his: he was not “from Bonfim”, but Bonfim . “Who gets their own name wrong?” she exclaimed. For her, “Miranda was a good man”. In the book about “Elza”, the journalist also discussed the moment of the letter: at the beginning of July, the faction of the Vargas government, in favor of an alliance with the Allies in the war, was winning over the faction that was pulling the government into an alliance with the Nazi-fascists. of the Axis, among them, Filinto Müller, who was on the verge of losing his leadership of the police. He was interested in reviving the danger of communism.[lxv]

For historian Marly Vianna: “Antônio Maciel Bonfim was very tortured. He adopted, before the police, the position of confirming everything she already knew and keeping quiet about anything that could provide him with new information. […] There were no arrests on Miranda’s orders, but there were names and addresses in his file – as, in fact, in those of Berger and Prestes – and people were arrested. […] It was only after learning of her companion’s murder that “Miranda”, transformed into a human rag, began to collaborate with the police. […] When he was released, with the amnesty of 1945, Antônio Maciel Bonfim was tubercular, without a kidney – which he had lost in the beatings suffered in prison – and in absolute poverty. […] He returned to Bahia, where he died in Alagoinhas shortly afterwards”.[lxvi]

The story that was wanted to be hidden began when “Elza” was released, on January 26, 1936. According to her account, the police told her that she could visit “Miranda”, which she did, bringing messages from him and little pieces of paper with messages about what was happening in prison. Normally, “Miranda” should have been incommunicado, but the police probably hoped to extract some information from the situation. This led to suspicion: “Elza”, the “Girl”, as they called her in the letters exchanged between Prestes and the party's National Secretariat, worked for the police. The tickets were not from “Miranda”.

How could they be if he was supposed to be incommunicado? The falls, which continued, were attributed to her. A house collapsed in Copacabana whose address was only known to “Miranda” and two other managers: Prestes, who thought that managers don't break down, concluded that the “Garota” must also know the address. The released militants then decided to take “Elza” out of circulation, a true kidnapping, even though it seemed like accommodation and protection for someone who had nowhere to live. She was taken to the house of “Tampinha” (Adelino Deícola dos Santos), who was from the National Secretariat, in Deodoro.

A frantic exchange of letters and notes about the “Girl” ensued. On one side, the members of the National Secretariat – “Martins” (Honório de Freitas Guimarães), “Bangu” (Lauro Reginaldo da Rocha), “Abóbora” (Eduardo Xavier) and “Tampinha”, excluded from the leadership “Brito” (José Lago Morales), who was outraged by the procedures that were announced. From another Prestes, at Meier's house, where Olga and the Stuchevskis were also present. They wanted proof that “Elza” worked for the police and tried to confuse her into betraying herself, which did not happen. There was hesitation at a certain point, but the call for firmness typical of every communist, evoked by Prestes, and the call to put aside sentimentality of any kind resolved the issue.

After all, in the first days of March, with the presence and manual assistance of all those already mentioned, members of the National Secretariat, plus “Gaguinho” (Manuel Severiano Cavalcanti), “Elza” was strangled by “Cabeção” (Francisco Natividade de Lyre) with a clothesline. They buried the body in the backyard of the house. Says historian Marly Vianna: “They weren’t even convinced of the girl’s guilt.”[lxv] The little story goes that “Pumpkin” couldn’t handle the brutality of the scene and, in a corner, started vomiting.[lxviii]

When the set of letters exchanged about the “Garota” case fell into the hands of the police, their meaning and the fact itself were not clear. But in 1940 the members of the National Secretariat were arrested and savagely tortured. The murder of “Elza” and the place where her body was buried were discovered and sensationalism spread across the newspaper pages.[lxix] It was at this time that another communist crime, attributed by them to the police, also became clear. In 1934, in Rio de Janeiro, there was great unrest and decomposing corpses began to appear in the Gávea forest, of “numerous proletarian elements”, according to the communists.

One of the bodies found, riddled with bullets, on October 26, was that of student Tobias Warchavsky, from the Communist Youth. He was the son of Jewish immigrants, considered a radical communist and with a great talent for drawing. His death was denounced by the communists as the work of the Vargas government.[lxx] But in 1940 it was clarified that the author was the PCB, who had considered him a spy. The executioner was the same “Cabeção” (Francisco Natividade de Lira), but “Martins” (Honório de Freitas Guimarães) was considered responsible and sentenced to 30 years.[lxxi]

A PCB bulletin from December 1940 condemned the Trotskyists for exploiting the “farce” of these trials, stating that Prestes and the six communists had been convicted of crimes that had, in fact, been committed by the police.[lxxiii] This was not the opinion of Stela Blagoeva, the Bulgarian from the Staff Department of the Communist International. At the end of 1936, learning from “Abóbora” (Eduardo Xavier), who had recently arrived in Moscow, that in addition to Elza, the party had murdered Warchavsky, he gave him some advice: it was not right to liquidate provocateurs and attribute this merit to the police. .[lxxiii] Settlement was a glory that should be assumed with pride. This is how a story was created, stitched together with untruths, but which, much later, ended up coming out into the light of day.

*Angela Mendes de Almeida is a history professor at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of From the single party to Stalinism (Mall). [https://amzn.to/3SuChJB]

Notes


[I] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, Revolutionaries of 35 – Dream and reality. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1992; Paulo Sérgio Pinhero, Illusion strategies. The world revolution and Brazil (1922-1935). São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1991.    

[ii] Michael Löwy (org.), Marxism in Latin America. An anthology from 1909 to the present day. São Paulo, Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2000, p. 127.

[iii] Margarete Buber-Neumann, The global revolution. Histoire du Comintern (1919-1943) racontée par l´un des ses principales témoins. Tournai: Castermann, 1972, pp. 191, 193, 202.

[iv] Fernando Morais, Olga. The life of Olga Benario Prestes, a communist Jew handed over to Hitler by the Vargas government. São Paulo, Editora Alfa-Omega, 1985, p. 68.

[v] Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent – ​​The life and death of Alexander Orlov. Oxford: University Press, 2015, p. 595.

[vi] Margarete Buber-Neumann, The global revolution…, op. cit., pp. 100, 211-213.

[vii] Ossip K. Flechtheim, Le parti communiste allemand sous la République de Weimar. Paris: Maspero, 1972. pp. 132, 167, 185, 312, 314. 

[viii] Dictionnaire Biographique des Cominterniens. Belgique, France, Luxemburg, Switzerland. Collection Maitron, Les Éditions de l'Atelier.

[ix] Jan Valtin, Sans patrie ni frontiers. Paris: JCLattès, 1975, pp. 141,183-184, 187-189, 194, 228.

[X] Fernando Morais, op. cit., pp. 71-73.

[xi] Ibid., P. 68.

[xii] William Waak, Comrades: in the secret archives of Moscow. The secret history of the Brazilian revolution of 1935.São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1993, pp. 105-106.

[xiii] Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent..., op. cit., pp. 513-514.

[xiv] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 77, 105-106, 154; R. S. Rose and Gordon D. Scott, Johnny. The life of the spy who reported the 1935 communist rebellion. Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2010, p. 292. In Brazilian and English historiography the name is written without the h.

[xv] William Waak, op. cit., pp.172-173.

[xvi] Ibid., pp. 154, 290

[xvii] Fernando Morais, op. cit., pp. 37 and 56-57.

[xviii] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 174, 215.

[xx] Daniel Aarão Reis, Luís Carlos Prestes. A revolutionary between two worlds. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2014, pp. 183-184.

[xx] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 217-218.

[xxx] Daniel Aarão Reis, op. cit., pp. 184-185.

[xxiii] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 258-259, 267.

[xxiii] Fernand Morais, op. cit., p. 175.

[xxv] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., 217, 270, 300.

[xxiv] Ibid., pp. 277, 280-281.

[xxv] John W. F. Dulles, O. communism in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1985, p.19.

[xxviii] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 244, 254.

[xxviii] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 139, 285; William Waak, op. cit., 176, 247, 251.

[xxix] Daniel Aarão Reis, op. cit., p.191; William Waak, op. cit., p. 300.

[xxx] Margarete Buber-Neumann, The global revolution …, op. cit., p. 353.

[xxxii] Anita Leocádia Prestes, Olga Benario Prestes – A communist in the Gestapo archives. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2017, pp. 75-78; Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish women of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. São Paulo, Edusp, 2009, pp. 44, 62.

[xxxi] Quoted by John W. F. Dulles, op. cit., pp.97-101.

[xxxii] William Waak, op. cit., p. 343.

[xxxv] John WF Dulles, op. cit., p. 19.

[xxxiv] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 273-277, 282.

[xxxiv] Ibid., pp. 248-250, cf. specific report by “Martins” (Honório de Freitas Guimarães); John WF Dulles, op. cit., p. 17.

[xxxviii] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 135-136, based on a report by “Martins”; John W. F. Dulles, op. cit., p.18.

[xxxviii] Willaim Waak, op. cit., p. 258.

[xxxix] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 293, 297.

[xl] William Waak, op. cit., p. 276.

[xi] Marky de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., p. 299.

[xliii] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 307, 321.

[xiii] Robert Levine, The Vargas regime, published in 1980, cited by ibid., p. 366.

[xiv] Ibid., P. 277.

[xlv] Dainis Karepovs, “Lies and Deaths,” Theory and debate, August 30, 2011 – https://teoriaedebate.org.br/estante/johnny-a-vida-do-espiao-que-delatou-a-rebeliao-comunista-de-1935/.

[xlv] R. S. Rose and Gordon D. Scott, Johnny. The life of the spy who reported the 1935 communist rebellion. Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2010.

[xlv] See Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service (1909-1949) London, 2010, cited by Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent …, op. cit., pp. 192, 594.

[xlviii] RS Rose and GD Scott, op. cit., pp. 21, 22 and 23.

[xlix] Ibid., pp. 154, 166, 226, 496, n.19.

[l] Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent..., op. cit., p. 192.

[li] RS Rose and GD Scott, op. cit., pp. 139, 150, 221, 241, 245, 247, 248, 251.

[liiii] Boris Volodarsky, Stalin's Agent …, op. cit., p. 193.

[iii] RS Rose and GD Scott, op. cit., pp 251, 278-9, 284.

[book] Ibid., pp. 147, 210, 285, 291-294, 519.

[lv] Ibid., pp. 297-298, 302.

[lv] William Waak, op. cit., pp. 329, 331-332.

[lviii] Boris, Volodarsky, The Orlov case …, op. cit., pp. 206-207.

[lviii] Pierre Broue, History of the Communist International (1919-1943). 2 volumes. São Paulo: Sundermann, 2007. t. 2, p.1336.

[lix] RS Rose and Gordon D. Scott, op. cit., pp. 351-354.

[lx] Sergio Rodrigues, Elza, the Girl – The story of the young communist that the party killed. Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 2009, pp. 8-10; Leôncio Martins Rodrigues, “Syndicalism and the working class (1930-1964)” in: General History of Brazilian Civilization – III Republican Brazil – 3 – Society and politics. São Paulo, Difel, 1986, p.379.

[lxi] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 287, 292, 300.

[lxii] Raimundo Nonato Pereira Moreira, Thiago Machado de Lima, Letícia Santos Silva, Iracélli da Cruz Alves and Cláudia Ellen Guimarães de Oliveira, “The famous Miranda: adventures and misadventures of a communist militant between history and memory”. Praxis - Electronic magazine of history and culture. http://revistas.unijorge.edu.br/praxis/2011/pdf/62_oCelebreMiranda.pdf.

[lxiii] Quoted by Sérgio Rodrigues, op. cit., p. 73.

[lxiv] Leôncio Basbaum, Sincere history of the Republic – vol. 3 From 1930 to 1976. São Paulo, Alfa-Omega, 1975-1976, pp. 75-76; Ronald H. Chilcote, Brazilian Communist Party – Conflict and integration. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 1982, p. 79, no. 59.

[lxv] Sérgio Rodrigues, op. cit., pp. 112-114.

[lxvi] Marly de Almeida Gomes Vianna, op. cit., pp. 288, 297-298.

[lxv] Ibid., P. 297.

[lxviii] Fernando Morais, op. cit., p. 160.

[lxix] John W. F. Dulles, op. cit., pp. 200-204.

[lxx] Claudio Figueiredo, Enter without knocking – The life of Apparício Torelly, the Baron of Itararé. Rio de Janeiro, Casa da Palavra, 2012, p. 233. 

[lxxi] John W. F. Dulles, op. cit., pp. 205, 207, 209.

[lxxiii] Quoted by ibid., p. 209.

[lxxiii] W. Waak, op. cit., pp. 319, 324, 332.


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