By Janet Levy
As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears. Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved. She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris. She’d told doctors she suspected she’d been poisoned. Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her.
For Soviet émigrés of the time, the empty stage, the melancholic music, and the spotlight sans performer were poignant symbols of the hundreds of thousands of “liternoye” killings — secret, disguised liquidations staged as natural deaths or suicides — ordered by Joseph Stalin. His targets were not just rivals in the USSR, but also dissident writers, intellectuals, artists, and performers living abroad. In fact, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, while Stalin was carrying out purges in the USSR, the émigré community witnessed several mysterious deaths and disappearances.
Stalin worked by the dictum “communism must eliminate what it cannot control.” “Liternoye” killings were different from the genocides and massacres he oversaw: the liquidation of kulaks, the Holodomor — deaths caused by famine-related decisions in Ukraine — and the purge of nationalities. Unlike those, “liternoye” killings resulted in deaths from seemingly natural causes. They would be followed by hasty disposal of bodies and either advantageous glorification (as for Lenin, a presumed victim of Stalin) or damnatio memoriae (complete erasure from the records and history). Quite often, hard-to-detect poisons and bioweapons were used for these murders.
