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Abstract. The article is devoted to the consideration of the issue of the probability of the creation of the case of the “Anti-Comintern Bloc” — a trial against a number of leading figures of the Comintern: O.A. Pyatnitsky, V.G. Knorin, A.L. Abramov-Mirov, B.N. Melnikov and others. The goal pursued by the author was to study the available assessments of the preparation of this process in domestic and foreign historiography, as well as documentary sources, including “execution lists” and to summarize the obtained material in the article. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that this issue has not been comprehensively studied in domestic historiography; its relevance is due to the fact that the arrest of Comintern employees was included in the list of Stalin’s repressions, which are an integral part of the history of our country in the 20th century; also, this case is associated with the international organization itself, without whose activities it is impossible to comprehensively study the foreign policy of the USSR in the first half of the last century. The article is based on the principle of consistency, using chronological and historical-comparative approaches. The author came to the conclusion that the trial of the Comintern figures could well have taken place, but Pyatnitsky’s refusal to testify about the existence of the “Anti-Comintern Bloc”, the excessive number of arrested «Comintern members», as well as the excessive overload of the NKVD and the removal of N.I. Yezhov from the post of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs did not allow a new Moscow trial to take place.
Keywords: Comintern, NKVD, Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Georgi Dimitrov, Dmitry Manuilsky, Michail Trilisser, Vilhelm Pik, Executive
Committee of the Communist International, OMS, Communist Party of Germany.