In 1935 he was one of several exiled German Communists who relocated from Paris to Moscow , where by March 1935 he had accepted an invitation to become a teacher at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West and at the International Lenin School . The decision to close down the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West was taken in May 1936 . In August 1936 Oelßner was dismissed from his teachings posts on account of alleged ideological deviations . The years 1936 - 1938 saw the Stalinist purges at their peak . Many hundred German political refugees from Nazism were arrested and accused of Trotskyite sympathies . Some were shot . Some were sent to labour camps and/or banished to remote regions of the Soviet Unions for many years . Oelßner experienced the period as an unemployed refugee in Moscow , supporting himself as best he could with freelance translating and writing . There are suggestions that he was fortunate to suffer nothing worse . In September 1938 he obtained work in charge of the planning department at the so-called " Bop " Paper Mill in Moscow . He retained this job till June 1941
Stalinist purges
Great Purge
Fred Oelßner