Russia's Secret Revolutionaries

When Frank Howley first arrived in Berlin in July 1945, he had no idea that the Russians had spent the last ten years training a small but dedicated group of German revolutionary communists.

The role of this group, which had spent a decade of exile in Moscow, was to wrest control of all the key institutions in Berlin. Working in secret, they were to place every institution under Communist control, while keeping up the pretense that power was being shared between the four occupying powers.

The leader of the German revolutionaries was Walter Ulbricht, a Communist who had impeccable revolutionary credentials. “I seldom saw him laugh,” said one in his circle, “and I do not remember ever having detected any signs of personal feelings.”

The leader of these German revolutionaries was Walter Ulbricht, a Communist down to his fingertips, who had impeccable revolutionary credentials. He had fled to the Soviet capital eight years earlier, when life in Hitler’s Germany grew too tight for comfort, and he was soon smuggling anti-Nazi agents back into Berlin. In Moscow, Ulbricht became known as “Comrade Cell,” on account of his gift for organizing networks of underground agents.

Some questioned if he was the right man for a mission that would require charm and charisma. Attired in the shapeless suit of a party apparatchik, Ulbricht was chillingly deficient in both. “I seldom saw him laugh,” said one in his circle, “and I do not remember ever having detected any signs of personal feelings.” Another concluded that he was “not a nice man . . . [and was] a tireless weaver of intrigues.”

This intriguing had left Ulbricht a loner: “from his schooldays onwards, he never had a single personal friend.” He had managed to acquire himself a wife, known as “Comrade Lotte,” but she was loathed by everyone at the Hotel Lux.

Ulbricht had the dogmatic asceticism of a desert monastic. He didn’t drink, didn’t socialize, didn’t eat meat or fish. His mealtime preference was for raw vegetables, a dietary regime that even his most diehard comrades found hard to stomach. According to one, “he never gave cocktail parties, never had affairs and even gave up smoking as a drain on his revolutionary activities.”   

He was the prototype for so many future leaders of Eastern Europe: grim, ashen-faced, and entirely devoid of humor.

When he spoke, he did so in a curiously high-pitched voice, dispensing revolutionary wisdom in his singsong Saxon dialect. His judgment was final and irrevocable. “He has the last word always, interrupting everybody [and] heckling speakers he dislikes.” He was the prototype...

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