Valentin Olberg

In this name that follows East Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Pavlovich and the family name is Olberg.

Valentin Olberg
Prison photograph, January 1936.
Born	1907 (1907) Zurich, Switzerland
Died	25 August 1936(1936-08-25) (aged 28–29)
Occupations	Revolutionary, journalist
Relatives	Paul Olberg (sibling)

Valentin Pavlovich Olberg (Russian: Валентин Павлович Ольберг; 1907 – 25 August 1936) was a Russian, Latvian and Jewish Communist, member of the Communist Party of Germany, activist of the Trotskyist opposition, history teacher at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute, and a main defendant in the first Moscow trial. His testimony played an important role in the arrests and executions of oppositionists in the USSR during the Great Purges. Olberg was sentenced to death after the trial, along with almost all the other defendants. He was executed on 25 August 1936.

Early life

Valentin Olberg was born in Zurich in 1907. His father was the prominent Menshevik Pavel Karlovich Olberg, a Latvian émigré from the Russian Empire. Pavel Olberg was highly active in European Menshevik and Social Democratic circles, often cited as an expert on Russian affairs. His mother, Paulina Izrailevna Beskina, was a midwife and masseuse. His younger brother, Paul Olberg was born in 1909 in Helsinfor (now Helsinki), Finland. While not a defendant in the first Moscow trial, Paul was referenced throughout the proceedings as a terrorist and Trotskyist. He was convicted by a closed military court and shot along with other minor oppositionists on 2 October 1936.

Assigning a concrete nationality to Olberg is difficult. As a result of Pavel's journalistic and revolutionary activities across Europe before and after World War I, he and his family spent time in Riga, Stockholm, Berlin and Helsinki. In the personnel form he filled out for the Gorky Pedagogical Institute, he listed his spoken languages as Russian, German, and Spanish.

Interwar activities

1928: Latvian Communist Party

After graduating from a German high school some time in the 1920s, Olberg travelled to Latvia. He met up with his brother in Riga, and from 1928 Olberg was closely associated with the Communist Party of Latvia, specifically its Trotskyist wing. Later that year police pressure against Marxists in Latvia escalated, forcing Olberg and his brother to emigrate to Germany. Many of their closest comrades followed them, including the daughter of Menshevik Alex Braun, Sulamif Braun, who later became Olberg's first wife.

Late 1928-1936: Berlin and the KPD

Valentin and Paul Olberg arrived in Germany in late 1928. Although Pavel managed to obtain German passports for Paulina and Paul the next year, Valentin was unable to receive a passport, since he had already already reached adulthood and was likely known as a Communist. Thereafter he carried only a Nansen passport, a document issued to stateless post-WWI refugees by the League of Nations.

After arriving in Berlin, Olberg and several comrades from Riga joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

1933-1936: Travels in the USSR

Olberg travelled to the USSR on two or three occasions. The first was from March to July 1933, when he travelled from Moscow to Stalinabad. Him and his wife were forced to leave the country after prospective employers in Stalinabad asked him for documents proving he had completed compulsory military service.

The final time Olberg visited the country was in August 1935, a few months after which he was arrested.

Role in the Moscow Trials

After being notified that Trotskyists were active in Gorky, the NKVD arrested Olberg, his wife and brother on 5 January 1936.

NKVD investigators claimed that Olberg was an emissary of Leon Trotsky, sent to prepare terrorist acts against the leaders of the USSR. Olberg confessed to these allegations, possibly under the influence or threat of torture, and his testimony was subsequently used by the NKVD to arrest many alleged oppositionists in the USSR. The information he provided convinced Stalin to make him a crucial defendant in the Moscow trials.

Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, claimed that Olberg was an NKVD provocateur who was not close to Trotsky, Sedov or the Trotskyist movement. However, their archives make clear that the pair, Sedov in particular, were in regular contact with Olberg, and frequently trusted him with highly important tasks.

Many years later, the prominent Soviet defector Alexander Orlov also repeated the accusation of Olberg being an NKVD agent, but offered no evidence. Orlov's reliability on various topics has been harshly criticised by many researchers. According to Russian historian Vsevolod Vikhnovich, on the post-arrest personnel forms filled out by Paul, Valentin and his wife Betty Olberg, there is written: "There is NO INFORMATION in the Central file cabinet. Head of the 3rd branch of the OSU, GUGB of the NKVD." That is, the NKVD had no record of Olberg having worked for the Soviet state.

Execution

After the first Moscow trial's conclusion, the Soviet court found each of the defendants guilty and sentenced them to be executed. After his pardon was denied, Olberg was shot with other defendants on 25 August 1936.

Personal life

Olberg's first wife, Sulamif Olberg-Braun, divorced him in 1931, and lived in Moscow from 1932. She was arrested a few weeks after Olberg on 23 Febuary 1936, and sentenced to ten years in jail on 10 November. She was later re-sentenced and shot in October 1937.

His second wife, Betty Olberg, suffered a far lesser fate, possibly as part of a deal Olberg negotiated with the NKVD. After the first Moscow trial, Betty also received the comparatively lenient sentence of ten years in jail. In February 1940, she was transferred to Germany along with other German prisoners. Margarete Buber-Neumann wrote that she and Betty met in Moscow around this time, after which Buber-Neumann was sent to a concentration camp. Unlike Buber-Neumann and other Communists, Betty Olberg was not sent to a concentration camp: instead, she was allowed to live in peace with her parents in Germany, dying on 18 October 1945.

Sources

• Blomqvist, Håkan (2014). "Lost Worlds of Labour: Paul Olberg, the Jewish Labour Bund, and Menshevik Socialism". In Götz, Norbert (ed.). The Sea of Identities: A Century of Baltic and East European Experiences with Nationality, Class, and Gender. Södertörn Academic Studies, 60. Huddinge: Södertörn University. pp. 139–172. ISBN 978-91-87843-00-6. ISSN 1650-433X.
• Chase, William J. (2001). Enemies within the gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist repression, 1934-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300082428.
• Chase, William J. (2024). "Wrestling With Aspects of Interwar Stalinism". In Getty, J. Arch; Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (eds.). Reflections on Stalinism. Oxford: Cornell University Press. pp. 100–115. ISBN 9781501775543.
• Chase, William J.; Novikova-Monterde, Olga (2026). The Many Faces of Antifascism: Interwar Marxist Militant Networks and the Divided Response to Fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/9780198994428.001.0001. ISBN 9780198994428.* Getty, J. Arch (1999). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300104073.
• Vikhnovich, Vsevolod (2012). "Валентин Ольберг — Жертва Двух Мифов (Эпизод Эпохи Большого Террора)" [Valentin Olberg — A Victim of Two Myths (An Episode From the Era of the Great Terror)]. 2000 лет истории евреев России [2000 Years of the History of the Jews of Russia] (in Russian). St. Petersburg. pp. 371–379. ISBN 978-5-94396-117-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)