Barmin, Alexander Grigorievich

Born on August 16 (28), 1899 in the village of Valyava, Gorodishchensky volost, Cherkasy district, Kiev province, into a wealthy family of a German colonist, by profession of a teacher; mother was a local Ukrainian peasant.

Parents divorced early, grew up and brought up in the village with his mother and grandfather until the age of nine. Then he studied at the 4th Kiev gymnasium . During the First World War, he lost his father, his mother remarried, her stepfather drove 15-year-old Alexander out of the house. In order to pay for his studies at the gymnasium, he gave lessons, took job-related correspondence from the council, chopped firewood, unloaded barges on the Dnieper , worked as a boatman, in the lumberjack artel in the tributaries of the Dnieper ... Nevertheless, he was forced to drop out several times.

Until February 1917, he took no part in the revolutionary movement; after the February Revolution , being a student of the last class of the gymnasium, he joined the circle of gymnasium students who studied socialist literature. At the end of April 1918 , when the Germans carried out mass arrests of “unreliable” people of Kiev, the whole circle was arrested at the expense of peers; Barmin managed to escape.

In 1919, he studied at Kiev University , but left him and joined the Red Army ; in the same year he joined the RCP (b) . In 1920, he studied at command courses, in 1923 he graduated from 3 courses of the Military Academy (in 1920-1921 he studied at the eastern branch of the Military Academy ). In 1921 he was authorized by the PBC of the Turkestan Front ; then consul to Karshi ( Bukhara ).

During the years of the internal party struggle, he sympathized with the Left Opposition , primarily personally to L. D. Trotsky , never in its ranks.

In 1923-1925 , he was the manager of the consulate general, and the consul general of the USSR in Gilan ( Persia ). He held large diplomatic posts, including the Consul General in Rasht ( Iran ). Since 1935 he was the 1st secretary of the embassy in Afghanistan . Then in France he was a resident of the Main Intelligence Directorate , in 1937 - the charge d'affaires of the USSR in Greece .

Defector

At the beginning of 1937, Barmin spent several months in Moscow, where he learned about how open trials against oppositionists are being fabricated. Returning to Greece, he shared with some colleagues his doubts about the authenticity of the charges against these people. Soon he felt that the content of these conversations was already known in Moscow. After which he became aware of the intention of the authorities to recall him from Athens back to Moscow. After informing the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs with a telegram that he decided to take a vacation, Barmin defected on July 18, 1937 and, together with his mistress, went to France from among the embassy staff ^[1] .

Contradictory feelings gripped me ... It seemed that, despite these crimes of the renegades who had betrayed the revolution, they still stood behind the still not destroyed, albeit greatly disfigured and disfigured building of socialism ... Along with apathy was the readiness to destroy this tense situation and moral loneliness - to go to to your homeland, to listen to the accusations ... and accept the punishment due for your "guilt" ... It seemed nevertheless clearer and simpler than a painful break, disaster and collapse of the meaning of your entire conscious life. But events developed and increased with monstrous speed, mercilessly crowding out these thoughts. The reactionary dictatorship, making a counterrevolutionary coup in the country's politics, destroyed the entire layer that could not serve new purposes. It was impossible to deceive anymore ... Thoughts themselves fell away by submissively surrendering themselves to the slaughter, for any internal meaning of this step was lost, which would become only a moral justification for the renegades and executioners ... The killers of Raiss miscalculated. Death will not stop him or intimidate him. She just pushed.

- Barmin subsequently wrote ^[2]

In exile

Having become a defector, Barmin turned to the French government for asylum and received it. He declared himself a supporter of Leon Trotsky, appeared in the press with articles exposing the policies of JV Stalin , and called on Western countries to save Soviet diplomats who wanted to follow his example.

Since 1940 he lived in the USA. During World War II, from 1942 he served in the US Army as a private. Then he worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), US military intelligence (until 1944).

Since 1953, he led the Russian service of the American government radio station Voice of America .

In 1964, he was responsible for the affairs of the USSR at the US News Agency. In 1969 - special adviser to the agency. In this position, he worked until his retirement in 1972.

Died December 25, 1987 in Rockville, Maryland.

He was married four times, from three wives (first, third and fourth) had six children - three sons and three daughters. In 1948, he married Edith Kermit Roosevelt (b. 1926), the granddaughter of US President Theodore Roosevelt; the marriage broke up in 1950. In 1952 he married again and for the last time - to Galina Domanitskaya (d. 1997), from whom he had three children.

• Barmin A. Falcons of Trotsky. - M .: Sovremennik, 1997. - (Biographies and memoirs) - ISBN 5-270-01174-3
• A Russian View of the Moscow Trials. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of Intercourse and Education (1938)
• Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat: Twenty Years in the Service of the USSR, London: L. Dickson Ltd. (1938), reprinted Hyperion Press (1973), ISBN 0-88-355040-7
• One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets. New York: GP Putnam's Sons (1945), reprinted Read Books (2007), ISBN 1-406-74207-4 , 9781406742077

• Barmin, Alexander Grigorievich at the Rodovod . Tree of ancestors and descendants

Notes

Links

• Chronos biography

• Barmin A.G. Twenty years in intelligence. - M .: Algorithm, 2014 .-- 368 p. - 2000 copies - ISBN 978-5-4438-0763-8 .