Stalinist Tactics Come to America

What follows below is excerpted from Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography by Harlow Robinson. It describes the arrest of Lina Prokofiev, who was married to composer Sergei Prokofiev. Lina was not a spy, but she had been consulting with foreign diplomats in her attempt to escape Stalin’s Soviet Union.

This awful story is distressingly similar to what is happening in Trump’s America. (I learned only tonight that the administration has deported children who are American citizens.) ICE agents, sometimes masked and showing no identification or warrant, are grabbing people off the street and deporting or trying to deport them.

WAKE UP AMERICA! THE FATE OF THE REPUBLIC IS IN YOUR HANDS!

Lina’s arrest—“on suspicion of spying”—was tragically typical of thousands (perhaps even millions) of others that occurred during 1948.

On February 20, as she was lying in bed with a cold, Lina received a telephone call from a friend in Leningrad. The friend told Lina she had sent her a package via another friend who was arriving that day in Moscow by train. She asked if Lina could meet this person at the railroad station not far from Lina’s apartment. When Lina explained that she was sick, and asked if the person couldn’t come to the apartment with the package, her friend insisted that Lina needed to go herself. Reluctantly, Lina agreed. Since she thought she would return in a few minutes, she didn’t even bother to dress very warmly.

As she was waiting in front of the station, a dark-colored car suddenly drove up right in front of her. Someone got out and asked Lina whom she was waiting for.

“What business is that of yours?” she replied indignantly.

“Do you know that you’re waiting for a criminal?” the man asked her.

“You must have made a mistake,” Lina replied, beginning to feel uneasy. “You have the wrong person.”

The men in the car were very insistent that she was the person they wanted, however. Finally they instructed her to get into the car.

“Come with us and we’ll explain everything,” they said. “If we’ve made a mistake, you can go—we’ll even bring you back home.”

They forced Lina into the car and drove off. As they passed the apartment building on Chkalov Street, Lina was hoping desperately that Oleg or Sviatoslav [her two children] would appear. She asked where they were taking her.

“We’ll explain everything in a minute,” they said.

But there was no need to explain when the car passed through the gates of the Lubyanka, Moscow’s most infamous prison, on Dzherzhinsky Square across the street from the Children’s World Department Store. When they were inside, Lina immediately recognized a man sitting there as someone she had seen in the subway and on the streets. He had been following her. There had been a few other subtle signs that she was being watched, but Lina had failed—or refused—to take serious notice.

Lina was to spend years in the Gulag, only being released after the death of Stalin.