Commie Dearest

The Eitingons

Freud and his coterie (1922). Max Eitingon, standing second from right.

Photo Credit: Getty

A Twentieth-Century Story
by Mary-Kay Wilmers
Verso, 496 pp., $34.95

The history of Soviet communism resembles a hall of mirrors. The juxtaposition of the real horrors of the gulag and the common entertainment of the circus and funhouse may seem provocative, but it’s appropriate. You have to look into Communist history knowing that much is distorted, much is hidden. If you have a past of active involvement with communism—as I confess to have had—you will perceive personalities in its chronicles both familiar and unexpectedly strange. Yet the mirrors convey truth, even when their images are deformed and shocking. The dictators of Communist Russia and, especially, the heads of its domestic and foreign spy services, understood this convoluted reality, and exploited it to their maximum advantage. They mastered the art of disinformation.

That sense of a hall of mirrors came into full play for me when I learned that a certain Mary-Kay Wilmers had published The Eitingons.

You could say that the story of this book begins with a 1988 article I wrote for the New York Times Book Review entitled “Intellectuals and Assassins: Annals of Stalin’s Killerati.” In it I described how, in the latter half of the 1930s, a gang of killers appeared in Western Europe whose accumulated crimes—considering their impact on history—are perhaps unequaled in the annals of homicide. They were agents of the Soviet secret police—then called the NKVD, later the KGB—operating in a special “mobile unit” dedicated to terrorism.