elements within the Communist Party. Later, in an act of supreme irony, Stalin had the Leningrad opposition leaders and many other party officials executed on the grounds that they had plotted with the assassin to kill Kirov. This act began the series of prosecutions, assassinations, and disappearances of Soviet military and government officials at Stalin's direction, known as the Great Purge. Barmine had been a protege, co-worker, subordinate, or confidant of many of the Soviet Union's leading generals, diplomats, and government officials, nearly all of whom were arrested, imprisoned, and shot during the Stalin's purges during the late 1930s. During this time, Barmine was serving in the Foreign Office, and was posted to the Soviet legation in Athens, Greece. When Barmine's immediate superiors in the military and diplomatic corps began to disappear, or were announced to have been arrested and shot, Barmine began to fear that a similar fate was in store for himself. In July 1937, after discovering co-workers rifling his desk and searching his offices in the dead of night, he received a letter from his 14-year-old son Boris, who wrote his father that he, his brother, and Barmine's mother were going "far, far away to bathe in the sea." Boris also wrote: Dear Papa, they read to us in school the sentence passed on the Trotskyist spies, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Kork, Uborevich, and Feldman ... Wasn't it Feldman who used to live in our apartment house? That same month, Barmine received an insistent invitation to dine aboard a Soviet ship, the Rudzutak, which suddenly docked at Piraeus (Athens's port) without prior notification to the Soviet legation. Barmine declined to go aboard but agreed to dine with the captain at a local restaurant, where he was strongly urged to return home. Constantly followed by NKVD agents, Barmine decided to defect to the West. He wrote in One Who Survived that "if I should be imprisoned as the result of some vile, lying charge ... [My family] would believe the official communiqué. Nobody would dare speak for me, and I would never be able to clear myself. I would lose them as sons forever." Defection Barmine fled Athens in 1937 to Paris. It was at this time that Soviet agents assassinated the former chief of the Soviet intelligence service in Western Europe, Ignace Reiss. It was later revealed that the Soviet NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov spent 300,000 French francs to