[robowombat]

Interesting. Stalin aside being a clinical paranoid was obsessed with eliminating anyone in the Communist movement who had experience living and working outside the USSR. The killing of almost every Soviet officer who served in Spain during the Civil War is a good example. These men had real time experience in commanding military forces outside the control net of the Soviet Union so to Stalin they were doubly not to be trusted.

During the Great Purge most foreign Communist who had taken refuge in the USSR were either shot or disappeared into the GULAG. What was left were to be totally subservient Staliniods such as Walter Ulbricht who would be simply Stalin's loyal puppets. Hardly surprising that Stalin would get rid of some of these ‘unreliable’ elements in this fashion. I'm sure he got a chuckle out of it.

[jmacusa]

What you describe is what hard core Russian Communists called ‘cosmopolitanism''. The accusation of having lived among the ''bourgeois'' and having become ''infected'' with ''bourgeois ideals''.

[dfwgator]

Stalin also looked upon anyone from Leningrad with contempt.

The Leningrad Affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_affair

[EC Washington]

Same with any Russian official who was in China helping Mao. Stalin killed every Soviet who was in Mao’s inner circle.