Between 15 December 1935 and 1 June 1936 Schulte was placed in charge of the "Agitation and Propaganda" office at the "Profintern" ("Red International of Labour Unions " / "Красный интернационал профсоюзов"), an offshoot of the Comintern tasked with international coordination of communist activism in trades union movements. He was then removed and sent to work in a large Moscow-based company. Naturally, during what was a period of great paranoia on the part of the Soviet leadership, especially in respect of all the foreign political exiles living in Moscow, he was kept under surveillance. There are indications that the new leadership of the exiled German party may have been plotting his further degradation ("Zersetzung") and destruction. It later emerged that one of those reporting on Schulte and his allegedly dubious "connections" to the Soviet security services was Herbert Wehner, a fellow communist exile living in Moscow who much later came to prominence in West Germany as a canny pipe-smoking Minister of Intra-German Relations and long-standing leader of the Social Democratic parliamentary group in the West German Bundestag. One of Wehner's reports that survives (and which may, of course, have been dictated to him only under duress)) identifies Schulte as the "leader of the sectarian opposition in the Communist Party of Germany".
