Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One).

Where to begin? It’s a troubling, ultimately tragic part of the story and some of it is truly inexplicable. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to set out the information as simply as I can.

What we knew was this. At some point in the early 1930s Bob Stewart’s daughter, Annie (my dad’s Aunt Nan) married a ‘Russian’ and they went to live in Moscow. We didn’t know his name nor had we ever seen a photograph of him. At some point Nan gave birth to a baby boy – my dad’s cousin Greg. Soon after this Nan’s husband was killed in Stalin’s purges. Nan fled with their infant child back to London. Information about her husband was almost impossible to come by. I have no idea how they managed to escape. In the years that followed, Nan remarried, had two more children and remained a member of the Communist Party until 1956.

For me, all of this was rather abstract. Dad had a lot of family somewhere out there but was rarely in contact with them. Until recently, apart from visits to my grandfather when I was a toddler, the only other person I’d ever met from my father’s side was Greg. That was at my brother’s wedding just over a decade ago. I only spoke to him briefly as I was on best man duties. All I can really remember is how strange it was to be speaking to somebody who bore such a strong resemblance to my dad and yet was someone who was to all intents and purposes a complete stranger. I never made the effort to remain in touch. I wish I had.

After my father died, I started reading through the security files on Bob Stewart that the National Archives had digitised and put online. Trying to find glimpses of who he was before he was our dad. To begin with, I knew very little about the Communist Party or our family. I tended to focus on the later files as during that period MI5 weren’t simply intercepting Bob’s post and tailing his movements but bugging his offices and tapping his phone. Rather than squinting at spidery 1920s handwriting and trying to work out what it all meant I could easily read the transcripts of conversations and, through their voices, almost begin to get to know these people who were long gone.

I started looking at the files collected during 1956. The year that Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech condemning the crimes of Stalin and the first official recognition about what had gone on in the decades before. At this time Nan was living in a large house in North London with her family and also her father who was nearing eighty but still involved in the secret side of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most of the documents in that file focus on the general disquiet about the revelation in ‘secret speech’ felt by those at the CPGB’s HQ at Covent Garden. However, a more personal impact is outlined in the transcript of a phone call Nan made to her sister in law Margaret on 10th August 1956.

O/G call from NAN CAPLAN to MARGARET STEWART, BOB’S daughter in law. HARRY is back, and DRONA, (the father of NAN’s son GREGORY CAPLAN) was definitely shot in 1941. They are both shattered by it. HARRY came to see BOB and NAN insisted on seeing him. She says there is not one of the five brothers in KRONA’s (sic) family left. She threatened that if HARRY does not give her justice she’ll follow him to every meeting at which he speaks. BOB’s threatening to leave (The house? The party?) She would like her brother RAB STEWART to come and see her. BOB is going away next week so they will arrange it.
(KV2/2790 – Security File on Robert Stewart held at the National Archives.)

‘HARRY’ was Harry Pollitt, the leader of the CPGB, who had gone to Russia in part to find out what had happened to the family members of several of his own colleagues and friends. Of course, this transcript raises so many questions. How had they lived with this trauma for so long? How had they maintained their commitment to the CPGB in all that time in the face of it? What had they already known?

At this stage I still did not know the identity of Nan’s husband. From the battered suitcase that had been up in the loft, every old photograph or letter in Russian that I sifted through proved a dead end. So too did the references to KRONA or DRONA in the transcript- a nickname that didn’t seem to crop up elsewhere. However, later on in the files I did find a reference that linked Greg’s father to Grigory Kaminsky and this was the first real breakthrough in my search.

Grigory Kaminsky was the People’s Commissar for Health of the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1937. He set up the Soviet health system, improved the production of medicine and medical training and battled malaria in the USSR. Evidently, he was also Nan’s brother-in-law. However, in 1937 he made speech in which he condemned the wrongful arrests of people and accused Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, of counter revolutionary activities. As a result, he was arrested and then executed by firing squad in February 1938. Then, it seems, the NKVD went for the rest of his family.

Now I had a surname I went back to the earlier files from the 1920s and 1930s and managed to find documents that linked Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky and Annie Stewart together which speculated about whether they were married. So, now I knew who he was but still no idea of what he looked like or any real details of what had happened to him. My first port of call would have been to search for him through the Memorial website. Memorial is the Russian human rights organisation set up to investigate the crimes of the Stalin era and beyond. They’d amassed records of all known victims in a ceaseless effort to record every human rights violation. However, last year it was closed down after years of intimidation by the Putin regime. During one court hearing the state prosecutor announced that Memorial was “creating a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.”

Despite Memorial being closed down I think I’ve still managed to find a record of what exactly had happened to Anatole. It appears that there are several websites that have ‘backed up’ the information held by Memorial and similar agencies and these have not all been shut down yet. Not being a Russian speaker, I can’t fully judge the reliabilty of the website I found but, as key parts of the information held on Anatole Kaminsky match what’s held in the MI5 files, I am reasonably sure that this is what happened.

On June 20th 1938 NKVD officers arrived at Anatole Kaminsky’s Moscow flat on the St. Malaya Dmitrovka. They arrested him on charges of espionage and participation in counter revolutionary organisations. He remained in custody for the next three years and was eventually convicted on 8th July 1941 shortly after the Nazis invaded the USSR. His sentence was noted down as ‘VMN’. This stood for ‘Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya’ which translates as ‘the supreme measure of punishment’. In other words, the death penalty. On July 28th the sentence was carried out. They took him to the Kommunarka shooting ground on the outskirsts of Moscow where his body lies alongside thousands of other victims to this day. He was 34 years old.

Anatole was rehabilitated by the Khrushchev regime in 1956. Rehabilitation would have had to have been requested and I assume it was Harry Pollitt who put that in motion or it might have been Bob on his visit to Moscow in August that year. That’s as far as justice stretched.

In November this year I finally saw some photographs of Anatole, one of which is reproduced at the top of this article. They were attached to his MI5 security file held at the National Archives. I spent the morning reading all about the six years he spent in Britain before he returned to the Soviet Union and the dreadful fate that awaited him. That afternoon I met, for the very first time, another of my dad’s cousins. It was Rab and Margaret’s daughter Linda. It had been Margaret who Nan had rang up after discovering what had happened to her husband in that summer in 1956. It was an emotional meeting and we covered a lot of ground in the few hours we were together. She could not believe I had found photographs of ‘Natte’ as he’d been known. He’d died long before she was born and she’d never seen a picture of him either. Of course she was familiar the story and knew that her aunt and cousin had got away by “the skin of their teeth.” When I showed her the photographs on my phone she was instantly struck by the resemblance to Greg who she’d known well and who died in 2019. I was glad I was able to show her these images. I wish that I could have shown them to my father. Above all, I wish I could have shown them to Greg.

Alan Stewart.

Thanks to Linda Stewart, Ian Stewart, Ruth Holliday and Maurice Casey for all their help.