Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin (, Aleksandr Grigoryevich Barmin; August 16, 1899 – December 25, 1987), most commonly Alexander Barmine, was an officer in the Soviet Army and diplomat who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era for France and then United States, where he served the US government (including the OSS, VOA, and USIA) and also testified before congressional committees (including the SISS).
Background
Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin was born on August 16, 1899, in Mogilev, Mogilev Government, Russian Empire (now Belarus). His father, whose surname was originally Graff, was a teacher and came from an ethnic German colonist family, while Alexander's mother was Ukrainian. Alexander attended a state gymnasium in Kiev, followed by St. Vladmir University also in Kiev, Infantry Officer's School in Minsk, M. V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, and the Oriental Languages Institute in Moscow.
Career
USSR government
In 1919, Barmine joined the Red Army and participated in the Russian Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution; he stayed with the Red Army until 1935. Sent to a Red Army officer's academy, he served in several battles. In 1921, he served as a military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Bukhara.
By the age of 22, he had risen to the rank of brigadier general in the Red Army.
As a member of the Soviet GRU, Barmine was assigned in 1935 to work abroad under diplomatic cover with the Soviet Foreign Office and Trade Ministry Commissariat under various diplomatic and trade representative titles. Late that same year, Barmine moved to Athens, Greece to take up an appointment as chargé d'affaires to the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece.
According to Barmine, Stalin's Great Purge began with the assassination of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov. Kirov was widely admired in the Communist Party for his efficiency as administrator of the Leningrad District, and his willingness to stand up to Stalin (Kirov gave orders that Leningrad party dissidents were not to be persecuted by the police). As a result, he drew the unwelcome attention of Stalin. Viewing Kirov's growing popularity as a threat to his hold on power, Stalin ordered the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, to arrange Kirov's assassination; the GPU used a fanatic with a history of mental illness to accomplish the deed, Leonid Nikolaev. On December 1, 1934, Nikolaev shot Kirov in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. After his funeral, Stalin blamed Kirov's assassination on reactionary elements within the Communist Party. Later, in an act of supreme irony, Stalin had the Leningrad opposition leaders and many other party officials executed on the grounds that they had plotted with the assassin to kill Kirov. This act began the series of prosecutions, assassinations, and disappearances of Soviet military and government officials at Stalin's direction, known as the Great Purge.
Barmine had been a protege, co-worker, subordinate, or confidant of many of the Soviet Union's leading generals, diplomats, and government officials, nearly all of whom were arrested, imprisoned, and shot during the Stalin's purges during the late 1930s. During this time, Barmine was serving in the Foreign Office, and was posted to the Soviet legation in Athens, Greece. When Barmine's immediate superiors in the military and diplomatic corps began to disappear, or were announced to have been arrested and shot, Barmine began to fear that a similar fate was in store for himself. In July 1937, after discovering co-workers rifling his desk and searching his offices in the dead of night, he received a letter from his 14-year-old son Boris, who wrote his father that he, his brother, and Barmine's mother were going "far, far away to bathe in the sea." Boris also wrote: Dear Papa, they read to us in school the sentence passed on the Trotskyist spies, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Kork, Uborevich, and Feldman ... Wasn't it Feldman who used to live in our apartment house? That same month, Barmine received an insistent invitation to dine aboard a Soviet ship, the Rudzutak, which suddenly docked at Piraeus (Athens's port) without prior notification to the Soviet legation. Barmine declined to go aboard but agreed to dine with the captain at a local restaurant, where he was strongly urged to return home. Constantly followed by NKVD agents, Barmine decided to defect to the West. He wrote in One Who Survived that "if I should be imprisoned as the result of some vile, lying charge ... [My family] would believe the official communiqué. Nobody would dare speak for me, and I would never be able to clear myself. I would lose them as sons forever."