The Great Terror

4

OLD BOLSHEVIKS CONFESS

“In what did his fascism show itself?”

“His fascism showed itself when he said that in a situation like the present we must resort to the use of every possible means.”

Exchange between Vyshinsky and Zinoviev at the August 1936 Trial

The six months following the Medved—Zaporozhets Trial is one of the most obscure periods of the Purge. It starts with the death, in circumstances which are still unknown, of another member of the Politburo, and ends with another trial, of which even the charges were only made public in 1989, of Kamenev and others. But the pattern is clear, and much of the detail can now be reconstructed.

After the first wave of terror following the Kirov murder, the “moderate” faction in the Politburo continued to urge the policy of relaxation. It could, after all, equally well be argued that the assassination was the sign of tensions which might best be dealt with by a more popular policy, as the opposite, that it indicated the need for further terror.

In the Politburo, Valerian Kuibyshev, Head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), is believed to have been particularly active along Kirov’s line, and is said to have opposed the January Zinoviev—Kamenev Trial.¹ Outside, the influence of Maxim Gorky and of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was of importance. The Society of Old Bolsheviks, which had long acted as a sort of Party conscience, strongly opposed the idea of death sentences for the opposition. Among Stalin’s immediate entourage, Abel Yenukidze, who was Secretary of the Central Executive Committee and (among other duties) responsible for the administration of the Kremlin, urged the same view.

Yenukidze was the first target of Stalin’s counter-measures. As if to emphasize the connection, he was required on 16 January 1935, the very day Zinoviev and his adherents were sentenced, to perform a significant though minor act of self-denunciation--on the always thorny theme of the origins of Georgian Bolshevism. In a half-page of Pravda, he wrote of his errors in articles in the encyclopedias and elsewhere, where he had attributed too big a role to himself.² This marked the beginning of his rapid decline.

The next great blow to moderation was the death of Kuibyshev on 26 January. Most of his subordinates in Gosplan, including his deputy, Professor Osadchy, had been purged for opposing ill-prepared crash programs in the first years of the decade. Although Kuibyshev’s death was at first described as being from natural causes, it was later to be alleged that he was murdered by willful medical mistreatment on the orders of Yagoda. It is still difficult to be certain about the Kuibyshev case. Common sense gets us nowhere. There are, in fact, two different “commonsensical” ways of looking at it. The first would say that what appears to be a natural death should be taken as such if there is no absolutely firm evidence to the contrary. After all, Kuibyshev had to be ill in the first place if he was being treated medically; people do die naturally, and we should not strain to fit every death into a preconceived pattern. The other view is that Kuibyshev had, as is now officially said, been one of three Politburo members who had blocked Stalin; that of this group one had been shot just before Kuibyshev’s death and the other was to perish later of a faked heart attack; and that, moreover, Stalin was making moves against other advocates of moderation, such as Gorky and Yenukidze, at precisely this time. Against a member of the Politburo, at once more dangerous and less vulnerable, what sanction was left except the one that had succeeded with Kirov? At any rate a certain amount of suspicion seems reasonable when we consider that all the other nine Politburo members (and ten ex-Politburo members) to die in the years 1934 to 1940 were victims of Stalin; that all those of his own supporters who opposed him on the Purge perished; and, perhaps most important, that the others of his own Politburo supporters who died before 1938 were disposed of by him, but in ways not easily attributable to his own actions.

Kuibyshev was photographed at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars on 22 January.³ On 26 January, his death was announced—of heart disease. The signatories to the medical bulletin included Kaminsky, Khodorovsky, and Levin, all of whom were to sign the certificate of Ordzhonikidze’s equally sudden death from the same cause, which is known to be a fake.

Kuibyshev seems to have had a bad heart, and to have been under treatment at least since August 1934. An attack of tonsillitis and an operation weakened him still further. But he was not at this stage particularly ill, and was still at work within an hour or two of his death.⁴

The account of his death given at the Bukharin Trial was that he had some sort of angina pectoris attack while at his office at the Council of People’s Commissars, was allowed to go home unaccompanied, and climbed to his flat on the third floor. There chanced to be a maid at home who telephoned his secretary and the doctor on duty, but by the time they arrived Kuibyshev was dead.⁵

It was alleged that it was the purposely incorrect treatment which had been given him which caused his death, and that the doctors should anyhow have insisted on his being in bed.⁶ The doctors (and Kuibyshev’s secretary Maximov) were later accused of working under Yagoda’s orders. They were rehabilitated in 1988, and are thus clearly innocent. If Kuibyshev did not die naturally, he was killed in some other way than that stated—perhaps by another member of the Council of People’s Commissars dropping in from a nearby office with a glass of non-medicine. If so, it is possible that the true facts were known only to a few now dead, and that they are no longer available even to investigators in Russia. However, the most recent Soviet references stress his heart condition.

Among those actively opposed to the persecution of oppositionists throughout this period, another of the most forceful was Maxim Gorky. Moreover, his great ambition was to assist in a reconciliation between the Party and the intelligentsia—to lead the Soviet regime, of which he had originally disapproved, into the socialist humanism he believed it capable of. It was partly for this reason that he had compromised himself by returning from Italy in 1928 and defending the regime against its external critics.

Gorky is said to have personally worked to reconcile Stalin with Kamenev and to have apparently succeeded in doing this early in 1934,⁷ even securing a friendly personal meeting. Kamenev was given a job in the Akademia publishing house.

Gorky is said to have at first been greatly enraged against the supposedly anti-Party assassins of Kirov, but soon to have reverted, as far as general policy went, to his “liberal” position. Stalin’s resentment at his stand was expressed by the appearance, for the first time, of articles highly critical of him. For example, one by the writer Panferov in Pravda of 28 January 1935. However, Gorky continued in his efforts to reconcile Stalin with the oppositionists. So did Krupskaya, who had been Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s main ally in 1924.

Krupskaya, up to a point, represented a moral threat to Stalin’s plans. But unlike Gorky, she was a Party member and subject to that same Party discipline which had led her to acquiesce in the suppression of her husband’s Testament. Her sympathies with the Zinovievite opposition over the years had been common knowledge in the Party. By now she had as a result lost most of the prestige she had once enjoyed on the higher levels, even though her name was still useful with the Party masses. The exact methods by which Stalin silenced her are unknown. He is said to have once remarked that if she did not stop criticizing him, the Party would proclaim that not she, but the Old Bolshevik Elena Stasova, was Lenin’s widow: “Yes,” he added sternly, “the Party can do anything!”⁸

This story (from Orlov) has, not unnaturally, often been doubted; but it was confirmed by Khrushchev in his memoirs, where he says that Stalin “used to tell his inner circle that there was some doubt whether Nadezhda Konstantinovna was really Lenin’s widow, and that if the situation continued much longer we would begin to express our doubts in public. He said that if necessary we would proclaim another woman Lenin’s widow.”⁹ He named the replacement, of whom Khrushchev says only that she was a solid and respected party member who was still alive as he dictated the memoirs. Stasova, or possibly Lenin’s secretary Fotieva, seems the only plausible candidate.

In any case, there was little Krupskaya could do. It was not difficult to keep’ foreigners away from her, to surround her with NKVD men, and at the same time to call on her to obey the Party’s orders—a situation quite different from that of Gorky. It is said that she was in fear for her life in her last few years.

On 1 February 1935, a plenum of the Central Committee elected Mikoyan and Chubar to the posts on the Politburo left vacant by the deaths of Kirov and Kuibyshev, and promoted Zhdanov and Eikhe to candidate membership. To the extent that Mikoyan, at least, was to support the extreme Stalinist line throughout the Purge period (as, of course, was Zhdanov among the candidate members), this was a gain for Stalin. But he was not yet ready wholly to overwhelm the “moderates” in the leading policy bodies.

In the key organizational posts in the Party and Purge machinery, it was another matter. Nikolai Yezhov, a tested and ruthless operator, became a member of the Secretariat, and on 23 February was appointed in addition to the key post of Head of the Party Control Commission.¹⁰ Another prominent young Stalinist, Kaganovich’s protégé Nikita Khrushchev, was made First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization a few days later.¹¹ Andrei Vyshinsky had been made Prosecutor-General by June. And by 8 July 1935 Georgi Malenkov was Yezhov’s chief deputy as Assistant Director of the Cadres Department of the Central Committee.¹²

Thus by mid-1935, Stalin had men of his personal selection, who were to prove themselves complete devotees of the Purge, in control of Leningrad and Moscow, and in the Transcaucasus, where Beria ruled; in the Control Commission and the key departments of the Party Secretariat; and in the Prosecutor-Generalship; and if the leadership of the NKVD was later to prove unsatisfactory to him, it was at least totally under his control.

In the formal organs of Party power, the Central Committee and the Politburo, he had not yet achieved the same total grip. Many of the provincial committees were still headed by men who dragged their feet. And the Ukraine was under the control of the same style of leadership which it had been necessary to remove in Leningrad by an assassin’s bullet. But a firm basis for attack on these old cadres had been established.

A quiet purge of the ex-oppositionists now in jail continued. The leading ex-Trotskyite, Ivar Smilga, arrested on 1 January 1935, was secretly sentenced on 26 March 1935 to imprisonment in the Verkhne-Uralsk isolator (later, apparently on 10 January 1937, to death) by the Military Collegium.¹³

In March and April 1935 came a secret trial of the “Moscow Counter-Revolutionary Organization—‘Workers’ Opposition’ Group.” A. G. Shlyapnikov, Lenin’s chief representative in Russia during the First World War, had headed the intra-Party Workers’ Opposition, which had opposed the bureaucracy until Lenin banned such groupings in 1921. He spent his later years sometimes free, sometimes in jail, sometimes in exile in the Arctic, or working on the Lower Volga Shipping Line. Like Smilga, he was rearrested on 1 January 1935. Shlyapnikov, his chief henchman S. P. Medvedev, and thirteen others were now sentenced by the Special Board to various terms of imprisonment, though worse faced them later.¹⁴ Shlyapnikov’s wife was sent to labor camp.¹⁵

The same piecemeal progress was being made, during this outwardly quiet period, in thought control and in the Party purge. A circular of 7 March 1935 ordered the removal from libraries of all the works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Another, dated 21 June, extended the list to include Preobrazhensky and others.¹⁶

A secret letter dated 19 May 1935 from the Central Committee called for the special investigation of “enemies of the Party and the working class” who had remained within the Party. On 27 June, a special (and evidently typical) Central Committee resolution on the Western province censured the local officials in charge of the Party purge for insufficient vigilance.

In the Smolensk rayon, 455 out of 4,100 members examined were expelled, after 700 oral and 200 written denunciations.¹⁷ One member was denounced for having admitted that he had in his possession “a platform of the Trotskyites.” A professor had given a favorable character reference to a Trotskyite and now “never expressed his attitude toward the Trotskyite counter-revolution.” A group of worker members of the Party wrote denouncing their local leadership for refusing to listen to denunciations. Typical of remarks at Party meetings were such attacks as “There is information that Smolov is married to the daughter of the merchant Kovalev, and that the Party organizer of the second group of the Institute is the son of a person who was given a strict reprimand.”¹⁸ By 1 August, as a report signed by Yezhov and Malenkov noted, 23 percent of the Party cards in this representative area had been withdrawn or held pending investigation.¹⁹

Even more striking were some of the changes in Soviet law. A decree of 30 March made the illegal carrying of a knife punishable by five years’ imprisonment. A decree of 9 June, later incorporated into the Criminal Code (Article 58 [i.a, i.b, ix]), was a much more startling departure, exemplifying in full the style of the Stalin epoch. It provided the death penalty for flight abroad by both civil and military; in the case of the military, members of the family aware of the intended offense were subject to up to ten years’ imprisonment, while (the real novelty) those who knew nothing whatever about it—“the remaining adult members of the traitor’s family, and those living with him or dependent on him at the time”—were made liable to a five-year exile.

A Soviet law book, justifying this, speaks approvingly of

the application of special measures in respect of the adult members of the family of a serviceman-traitor in the event of the latter’s flight or escape across the frontier in those cases where the adult member of the family in no way contributed to the act of treachery that was being prepared or executed and did not even know of it…. The political significance of it consists in the strengthening of the overall preventive action of the criminal law for the purpose of averting so heinous a felony as the action of a serviceman in crossing or flying across the frontier, as the result of which the guilty party cannot himself be subjected to punishment.²⁰

In fact, we have a crude and frank institution of the hostage system—a sign of the way Stalin was thinking in other cases as well.fn1

More extraordinary still, and just as relevant to Stalin’s general plans, was the decree of 7 April 1935 extending all penalties, including death, down to twelveyear-old children.²¹

This decree was noted in the West, where it made very bad anti-Soviet propaganda. Many people wondered why Stalin had made such a law public. Even if he meant to shoot children, this could be done without publicity. Indeed, an NKVD veteran tells how the bezprizorniye—homeless orphans of the wars and famines—had been reduced by indiscriminate shooting two or three years earlier.²²

Stalin’s motives, as it turned out, were centered elsewhere. He could now threaten oppositionists quite “legally” with the death of their children as accomplices if they did not carry out his wishes. The mere fact of his accepting the disadvantages of publicizing the law gave it a sinister seriousness.

Why the age limit of twelve was chosen is uncertain. Presumably, there were oppositionists whose children were just within that limit. On the other hand, it might be suggested that Stalin had a rough precedent to which the opposition had made no objection. The youngest member of the Tsar’s family, executed in the cellar at Ekaterinburg on 16 July 1918, was the Tsarevich Alexis, aged thirteen.

As to the precise timing, while it is true that Stalin often showed great foresight in his maneuvers, it seems that we must associate this decree with another case that was just coming up.

Almost nothing was published on the matter. But in effect, it was an attempt to link the opposition with an alleged plot against the life of Stalin in the library of the Central Executive Committee, by a young woman.²³ Starting in January 1935, there were scores of arrests: eventually, according to a recent Soviet account, 110 in all. Nine cleaners, a porter, a twenty-year-old telephone girl, eighteen librarians, six persons working in the Secretariat of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, sixteen from the Kremlin Commandant’s administration, and other army men. In fact, there were two main “terrorist groups,” one in the library, the other in the Commandant’s headquarters, linked by the fact that one of the librarians was the sister of the leading victim from the Komendatura; and a “White Guard” counter-revolutionary group of five, all from non-Kremlin jobs, was thrown in for good measure.

The rest had various personal connections with the Kremlin accused, though they also included Trotsky’s son Sergei Sedov, and five of Kamenev’s relatives, his ex-wife, Tatiana Glebova, among them.²⁴

For once again, Stalin determined to involve the opposition. Kamenev had a brother, the painter Nikolai Rosenfeld, whose Armenian ex-wife, Nina, worked in the Kremlin library. The case was first referred to in Soviet articles in 1988 and 1989, which describe it as the “Kremlin Affair.” Rosenfeld, after interrogation, implicated Kamenev. Others giving such evidence (though not charged) included Pikel, Zinoviev’s secretary; the prominent Zinovievite S. M. Zaks-Gladnev; and Zinoviev himself.²⁵ Yezhov, as Chairman of the Control Commission, demanded the death penalty. Opposition remained strong. Gorky was particularly outspoken.

Yenukidze’s job as Secretary of the Central Executive Committee included general supervision of the Kremlin. It was easy to accuse him of negligence in the plot formed in the old palace. Moreover, he had long been giving a certain amount of protection to minor nonpolitical survivors from the pre-Revolutionary classes—with, of course, Stalin’s concurrence. This, too, was now turned against him. He seems to have been removed from his posts as early as March, with the promise of an important position in the Caucasus, which never materialized.

Another prominent Kremlin figure and confidant of Yenukidze also went. The Latvian Peterson, who had commanded Trotsky’s train²⁶—the celebrated mobile G.H.Q. of the Civil War—was Commandant of the Kremlin. He was not arrested, but was transferred in September 1935 to a post in the Kiev Military District, which he held until 1937, when he was liquidated.²⁷ He was later (in 1938) to be named as one of the military conspirators who had been thinking in terms of a Kremlin coup, having allegedly been selected for the purpose by Yenukidze.²⁸

Yenukidze was not the only Party veteran who had experienced qualms at the fierceness of the assault on the opposition. The Society of Old Bolsheviks, and the equally distinguished Society of Former Political Prisoners, had been collecting signatures in influential circles for a petition to the Politburo against the death penalty for the opposition.²⁹ This was now treated as factional activity. On 25 May, a brief decree by the Central Committee abolished the Society of Old Bolsheviks and appointed, to deal with its dissolution, a commission headed by Shkiryatov and consisting mainly of Stalin’s young adherents, including Malenkov .³⁰

The Society had its own publishing house, which printed the memoirs of its members and certain theoretical works. It was almost impossible that these, particularly the memoirs, should not have been offensive to the new regime. In fact, Stalin was, as usual, combining a political move with the settlement of a personal grudge. Starting at the end of July, Pravda itself prominently serialized an example of what was now to be the only right sort of record of the Party’s past, a “History” of pre-Revolutionary Bolshevism in the Caucasus by Beria, which is simply Stalinist hagiography. The facts had previously been distorted, with hostile intent, it was said, by Yenukidze and Orakhelashvili. They had not given due prominence to Stalin, though in their time their works had appeared to strain facts in his favor rather than not: standards of adulation were changing.

Yenukidze’s fall has been attributed entirely to Stalin’s desire to inflate his own role in the history of Caucasian Bolsheviks, and the responsibility put on “the notorious falsifier of Party history, the provocateur and adventurist, Beria.”³¹ Beria’s role and the whole question of these memoirs can only have been secondary, and this sort of interpretation anyhow takes too superficial a view of Stalin’s motives. But still, this concern with suppressing and transforming the past certainly played its part. In fact, Old Bolshevik memoirs now ceased to be published. Kossior, who had evidently thought of writing some, was told by Petrovsky that Stalin was opposed to this.³²

Early in June, Yenukidze was politically outlawed. He was denounced, in one of the main items of the agenda at a Central Committee meeting held on 5 to 7 June, for “political and personal dissoluteness.³³ Yezhov reported on his errors, and the former Secretary of the Central Executive Committee was expelled from the Central Committee and from the Party.fn2 Over the following weeks, the papers printed violent attacks on him by Stalin’s young Party Secretaries in Leningrad and Moscow, Zhdanov and Khrushchev. He was accused of taking “enemies” under his wing—“former princes, ministers, courtiers, Trotskyites, etc … a counter-revolutionary nest”³⁴—and in general of “rotten liberalism.”

These “former princes” and so on seem to have been represented by a quasi-aristocratic woman who tended the Kremlin antiques³⁵ and who was now inflated into an agent of the class enemy. In one account, the girl alleged to have plotted against Stalin’s life was a countess.³⁶ In any case, the link with the case boiling up in the Kremlin is undoubted. Yenukidze was not put on trial at this time, being presumably charged with negligence only. But he seems to have been under arrest not later than early 1937.³⁷

The next blow was at the Society of Former Political Prisoners, which was dissolved on 25 June, in the same way as the Society of Old Bolsheviks had been. A commission headed by Yezhov was appointed to deal with its effects. A number of its members who had been especially closely involved in the campaign for clemency were already, or were shortly to be, under arrest.

If the old revolutionaries had been offering a certain resistance, the main revulsion from Stalin and his new line was to be found in the very youngest generation of Communists. As we have seen, openly seditious remarks were noted in their ranks by the NKVD. More threatening still, the Kirov murder inspired various groups to talk of, and even to plan, in an amateurish fashion which was no match for the police of the new regime, the killing of Stalin. Either way, such circles were now invariably arrested and shot. But the Komsomol as a whole also needed thorough purging. Its reorganization, with a view to eliminating “enemies of the Party,” was announced at the end of June.³⁸

In general, Stalin’s moves over the past six months had strengthened his position in obvious ways. Even so, they had not broken down the resistance to a death sentence on Kamenev. It was clear that that could only be done by a massive purge of the Stalinist moderates. And for this, the ground had not yet been adequately prepared. For the moment, Stalin abandoned the project.

And so, on 27 July, Kamenev was sentenced, at a secret trial by the Military Collegium of the “Kremlin Case,” to ten years’ imprisonment under Article 58 (viii) of the Criminal Code, dealing with terrorist actions against Soviet officials.³⁹ Two of his fellow accused, A. I. Sinelobov, Secretary for Assignments to the Kremlin Commandant, and M. K. Chernyavsky, head of a sector in the Intelligence Administration of the Red Army, were sentenced to death. The two Rosenfelds and six others got ten years’ imprisonment, and another nineteen various shorter terms. Of those so sentenced, fourteen, including Kamenev, pleaded not guilty; ten pleaded guilty only to “anti-Soviet” talk; and six, including the two Rosenfelds, guilty to terrorist intentions against Stalin.

In addition, the NKVD Special Board sentenced eighty more to imprisonment (forty-two) or exile (thirty-seven), though Olga Kameneva, Party member since 1902, was only forbidden to live in Moscow or Leningrad for five years. Sergei Sedov was among those sent to labor camp for five years.⁴⁰ All concerned have lately been rehabilitated.

The heavy pressure exerted by Stalin over the summer had to some degree advanced his plans for a purge. The dissolution of the Society uniting the Old Bolsheviks, the campaign against the “rotten liberalism” of Yenukidze, and the fresh sentence on Kamenev had taken things a step further. Nevertheless, the going had been hard, and it had been impossible to produce a public trial or even a death sentence for Kamenev. Further and more thorough preparation was evidently necessary. The next months were spent in consolidating the gains achieved and laying the groundwork for an NKVD set piece to crush the opposition.

THE NKVD PREPARES A TRIAL

From the point of view of the purges, the period from July 1935 to August 1936 was to all outward appearances something of an idyllic interlude. In the sense that nations without any history are the happiest, it seemed a greatly improved time. There were no deaths of Politburo members, no trials of important oppositionists, no removals of leading political figures. The harvest, too, was reasonably good.

A plenum of the Central Committee held in December 1935 passed a long resolution on checking Party documents, which was later to be the organizational basis of the Purge at the grass roots. But in itself, it appeared harmless. Moreover, it was announced at the same time that the purge of the Party ordered in 1933 was now complete.

The draft of a new Constitution had been occupying the minds of Bukharin and Radek, as the active members of a Commission set up for the purpose in February 1935.⁴¹ It was ready in June 1936, and Bukharin, in particular, thought of it as a document which would make it impossible for the people any longer to be “pushed aside.”⁴²

It was indeed a model document, giving, for example, guarantees of freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 127), the inviolability of the home and secrecy of correspondence (Article 128), and indeed freedom of speech, of the press, of meetings, and of demonstrations (Article 125). That Bukharin, who was mainly responsible for it, thought that it might be implemented shows that even he now imagined that a genuine relaxation was taking place.

Bukharin’s view of the Communists at this time was “They are all good people, ready for any sacrifice. If they are acting badly now, it is not because they are bad, but because the situation is bad. They must be persuaded that the country is not against them, but only that a change of policy is necessary.” He had come around to the view that Bolshevism needed humanizing, and had looked to the intellectuals—in particular, Ivan Pavlov and Gorky—to help him. Pavlov, the great physiologist, was strongly opposed to the Communists. When Bukharin’s name was put up for election to the Academy of Sciences in the mid-1920s, Pavlov spoke against him as “a person who is up to his knees in blood.” Eventually, however, the two men had become friendly. Pavlov himself was indeed now dead. But Bukharin is even quoted as wanting the intelligentsia to put up candidates under the New Constitution as a sort of “second party,⁴³ not to oppose the regime, but to give constructive criticism.

In reality, Stalin had simply changed his tactics. Under the calm façade, there was furious activity. He had ready all the ingredients which he was to bring together into the set pieces of the Great Purge. First, he had developed direct control of the Secret Police and had set up other mechanisms of power responsible to himself alone and capable, given careful tactics, of overcoming the official hierarchy of Party and State. Second, the tradition of faked trials for political purposes had been established and not objected to in the Party, whose tradition of maintaining flat untruths for political purposes was in any case of still longer standing. Third, the former oppositionists had, under the particular pressures available in Communist life, already been induced to make admissions of error which they did not sincerely believe to be correct, in what they took to be the Party’s interest. Fourth, his operatives were accustomed to the use of torture, blackmail, and falsification—if as yet mainly on non-Party figures.

If his technical arrangements were complete, the same was evidently not so of his political preparations. It was still quite possible that he might have met with formidable opposition if he had set about the problem in the same way again. He chose a different method. The case was to be prepared in secret—not too difficult a matter, as the doomed Zinovievites and Trotskyites were already under arrest. It would take its course during the summer vacation, and in the absence of Stalin in particular. The death sentences would not be mentioned until they were pronounced, and even then every indication would be given that they would be commuted. But they would, on the contrary, be carried out without discussion.

When Stalin was retreating on the question of a death sentence for Kamenev, he was taking the first steps to gain the same result by his alternative method. A group of Komsomol students in the town of Gorky, said to have planned an attempt on Stalin, was one of many arrested at this time. They had not actually done anything beyond discussion, but already even this made the death penalty a foregone conclusion. This group was confessing to the plots to kill Stalin by early November 1935, though without implicating any of the Zinovievite or other accused of the August 1936 Tria1.⁴⁴ The trial routine was about to be gone through when the case was held for “further investigation,” under instructions from the Secretariat.⁴⁵

The NKVD selected this particular group because it had a ready-made way of linking the students with Trotsky, and hence of building a political conspiracy around them. The link was through one of its own men, Valentin Olberg.

Olberg was a former agent of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and had worked in Berlin as a secret informer among the Trotskyites. In 1930, he had attempted to get a post as Trotsky’s secretary, one of the first of the many NKVD attempts to penetrate Trotsky’s ménage (which ended in success in 1940). Since 1935, Olberg had been working for the NKVD Secret Political Department, exposing Trotskyite tendencies in the important Gorky Pedagogical Institute, where the students in question worked: his appointment had been opposed by the local Party officials, in particular Yelin, Head of the Provincial Committee’s Propaganda and Education Section, since Olberg lacked qualifications and was a foreigner. Yelin, moreover, rightly complained that his documents seemed forged, and appealed to the Central Committee; but Yezhov then personally imposed Olberg.

By the beginning of 1936, the NKVD had made a good beginning in extending the scope of this Komsomol plot. Olberg and some professors at the Institute were arrested. Olberg, interrogated on 25 to 28 January, denied all the charges. Eventually, he is reported ordered as a matter of Party and police discipline to confess to being a link between the Gorky group and Trotsky. He was told that this was simply an NKVD assignment, and that whatever the verdict of the court he would be freed and given a post in the Far East. He then signed whatever was required of him.⁴⁶ This was, in brief, that he had been sent by Trotsky to arrange the assassination of Stalin, recruiting professors and students to make the attempt when they went to Moscow for the 1936 May Day Parade.

The processing of the Olberg case was not straightforward, and took time. Yelin, who knew too much, was executed without tria1,⁴⁷ though he was to be mentioned several times during the public hearings. Olberg’s brother, P. Olberg, was implicated, and his evidence was to be quoted in court, though he was not produced. Other accused included the Head of the Pedagogical Institute, I. K. Fedotov. He confessed, but perhaps did not seem reliable enough to present in public, for he was not brought to trial. Nelidov, a teacher of chemistry who was required as the hypothetical maker of bombs, was not a Communist and, in spite of violent pressure by one of the most vicious of the interrogators, the younger Kedrov, was not broken.

But by late February 1936, Olberg’s story had been worked up into a usable version,⁴⁸ and the NKVD definitely selected it as the basis of the “plot.”

The Head of the Secret Political Department, G. A. Molchanov, now held a conference of about forty NKVD executive officers. He told them that a vast conspiracy had been uncovered and that they would all be released from their ordinary duties and set to investigating it. The Politburo regarded the evidence as absolutely trustworthy, and the task was therefore simply to discover the details. The question of any accused being not guilty did not arise.⁴⁹

The officers at once realized that the whole business was a frame-up, since they themselves were the men who had for years been in charge of supervision of the oppositionists, and they had detected no such activity. Moreover, if such a plot had come into being without their discovering it, they would clearly have been reprimanded at the very least. How little Stalin himself must have believed in the existence of any real plots was shown by the mere fact of his withdrawing so many of the most experienced officers from all the active departments of the Secret Police into what he knew to be an investigative farce.

In the NKVD as it was now, Stalin had a powerful and experienced instrument. At its head stood Yagoda. His deputy in security matters was Stalin’s crony Agranov, who had finished his special operations at Leningrad and handed over that city to the dreadful Zakovsky, who is said to have boasted that if he had Karl Marx to interrogate he would soon make him confess that he was an agent of Bismarck.

The Secret Police machine proper was concentrated in the NKVD’s Chief Administration of State Security. This consisted of a highly organized array of departments, skilled in the ways of their trade, and practiced in all modes of investigation, interrogation, and falsification. Almost all its leading officers had been with it for a decade, and had coped with the great cases of the late 1920s and early 1930s. (The NKVD controlled, in addition to this Secret Police machine, the “militia” [ordinary police], the frontier guards, its own internal troop formations, the fire service, and the labor camps, whose main administration, Gulag, under Matvei Berman, was already receiving a vast number of assorted purgees.)

Yagoda and Agranov themselves, and Yezhov representing the Central Committee, played a prominent part in the organization of the trial, and Stalin personally conducted the key conferences. Under them, the Secret Political Department was technically responsible for the whole operation, though it now had at its disposal the services of a number of officers from the other departments of State Security, including their chiefs.

The Secret Political Department, which had been the kernel of the Cheka from the beginning,⁵⁰ was still the key center of Secret Police operations. That is, it had the overall responsibility of supervising all the country’s organizations and carrying on the political struggle against all hostile political elements. It was headed by G. A. Molchanov, an unscrupulous careerist, and his deputy, G. S. Lyushkov.

The Economic Department had security responsibility for all industry and agriculture (except for transport, dealt with by the Transport Department). In Soviet conditions, this gave it a role as weighty, in a general way, as that of the Secret Political Department, and it had had the main responsibility for trials such as the Shalchty, which, though in a general sense political, were centered on economic crimes. Its Head, L. G. Mironov, was a man with an extraordinary memory, which was to be of great use in composing and mastering the details of the first two trials. At the same time as he ran his vast department, he acted as assistant to Yagoda in the whole of the State Security side of the NKVD. He is described as a conscientious Party man who was depressed by the prosecution of the Old Bolsheviks.⁵¹ Previous cases that he had organized, and which do not seem to have depressed him similarly, included the “Industrial Party” and the Metro-Vic Trials—cases, with all their political importance, definable as “economic.” The Zinoviev Trial had no economic component. Nevertheless, Mironov was given an important role.

The Operative Department was responsible for guarding leading personnel and installations and investigating terrorist acts against them. Its main concern at this time was the protection of Stalin. Its Head, K. V. Pauker, or his deputy, A. I. Volovich, was almost continually with him except when he was actually in his heavily guarded offices, and L. I. Chertok, one of their chief subordinates, also spent much time organizing his local defense.

Pauker was a sort of evil buffoon. He had been a barber and valet to opera stars in Budapest, and had himself a turn for comic acting. Taken prisoner by the Russians in 1916, he had become one of the group of Communists which emerged from that milieu. An ignorant and uneducated man without any political convictions, he was recruited to the Cheka, like so many other foreigners in those days, to work on searches and arrests. He rose by becoming a personal attendant again, this time to Menzhinsky, who came to rely on him and finally appointed him head of the Kremlin bodyguard and chief of the Operative Department. He was on close terms with Stalin, who even allowed him to shave him.⁵²

The Special Department in general covered the armed forces. Its Head was M. I. Gay.

The Foreign Department dealt with espionage and terror abroad. Its Head, A. A. Slutsky, was a sly intriguer who played an important role in the major interrogations. His deputies were Boris Berman and M. Shpigelglas.

The Transport Department, under A. M. Shanin, was the only one not deeply involved, having its hands full with Kaganovich’s endless purges on the railways.

There was a good deal of flexibility in these arrangements. Postings between departments were fairly frequent. And reorganization involving the transfer of lesser matters between the departments was also quite common.

Such was the order of battle of the shock troops of repression that Stalin was now launching on the helpless prisoners in the Lubyanka.

They were assisted by another organization: the Prosecutor’s Office. This had not been centralized on an All-Union basis until 1933, when it became one of the most centralized bodies in the USSR, having all its legal agencies completely and uniformly subordinate to the Prosecutor-General in Moscow, who was now Vyshinsky. He announced his operative principle—that any discrepancies between the commands of the law and those of the Revolution “must be solved only by the subordination of the formal commands of law to those of Party policy.”⁵³ His chief assistant was G. Roginsky, a fanatic who was to defend mass liquidation even after he himself had been purged and sent to a penal camp.

By the end of February, the testimony of Olberg and others was satisfactory. One of those confessing, I. I. Trusov, had some of Trotsky’s archives from the 1920s; Stalin now proposed to the Politburo that Yezhov should examine these and that “the NKVD should question the accused together with Comrade Yezhov.” From now on, Yezhov plays a major role in the investigation.⁵⁴

A former oppositionist, Isak Reingold, Chairman of the Cotton Syndicate, had been arrested as a Trotskyite in January or February. He was a friend of Sokolnikov’s and was connected with Kamenev. A strong man, still only thirty-eight, he proved hard to break. He was interrogated for three weeks, often for periods of forty-eight hours at a time without sleep or food, by Chertok. The order to arrest his family was given in his presence. Finally, he was handed a death sentence and told it would be carried out automatically if he did not testify at once. He still refused to do so, but said that he would sign anything if so instructed by the Party. Yagoda refused to accept these terms, and the interrogation dragged on. Finally, Yezhov intervened and personally ordered Reingold in the name of the Central Committee to provide the evidence required.⁵⁵

The confessions had been obtained with some difficulty. Stalin is said to have brought about 300 former oppositionists from prisons and isolators⁵⁶ for the NKVD to test for suitability as accused. By May, about fifteen suitable confessions had been obtained, and more were coming in.

In mid-May, Stalin held a conference with a number of the leading NKVD officials, and ordered the NKVD to produce further links with Trotsky. Molchanov, much to the anger of the Foreign Department, nominated two more NKVD agents, who had been working as its representatives in the German Communist Party and in the Comintern, Fritz David and Berman-Yurin.⁵⁷ They were arrested in June⁵⁸ and had no choice but to accept their instructions. They, too, claimed that they had each visited Trotsky and received orders from him to kill Stalin.

Two more figures, Moissei Lurye, a scientist, and Nathan Lurye, a surgeon, whose conduct in court led even Western journalists to suspect them of being agents provocateurs, are also reported by fellow prisoners, in on different charges, as scarcely bothering to conceal this .⁵⁹ They, too, were supposed to be Trotskyite terrorists. With their evidence, a mass of material was now accumulating.

“THE TROTSKYITE–ZINOVIEVITE CENTER”

In March, Yagoda had reported to Stalin on “the liquidation of the Trotskyite underground and the exposure of the terrorist groups.” On 31 March, Stalin instructed Yagoda and Vyshinsky to submit a concrete proposal on the trial of these Trotskyites, of whom they shortly gave eighty-two names. By April, the leading Trotskyites accused—I. N. Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan—were under interrogation.⁶⁰

As was later pointed out, the “Center” contained “not … a single one of the old political leaders” from the Trotskyite side.⁶¹ Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan were all, however, men of repute in the Party. (Trotsky’s Army Inspector-General, the heroic giant Muralov, had been arrested on 17 April, and it was doubtless intended to use him too; but he held out until December, and this plan had to be postponed.)

Smirnov alone had been a member of the Central Committee, but he at least was a most distinguished Old Bolshevik. A factory worker, he had been an active revolutionary from the age of seventeen, and had often been arrested.⁶² He had spent many years in Tsarist prisons and in Arctic exile. He had fought in the 1905 Revolution, and in the Civil War had led the Fifth Red Army to its victory over Kolchak. Known as “the Lenin of Siberia,” he had ruled there for some years after the Revolution.

Smirnov had been proposed as the leading Secretary of the Party in 1922, just before the job went to Stalin.⁶³ After being exiled with the other Trotskyites in 1927, he had recanted but, during the Ryutin period, had spoken approvingly of the proposals to remove Stalin and had been in jail ever since. Stalin thus had a particular grudge against him.

Perhaps it was this that led Stalin to insist on his inclusion in the “Center” in spite of the physical impossibility of his having participated in anything of the kind. For, as even Agranov is said to have tentatively objected, there would be some difficulty in making the charge plausible, since Smirnov had been held in jail throughout the period of the alleged plot. Stalin “gave Agranov a sullen look and said, ‘Don’t be afraid, that’s all.’”⁶⁴

Mrachkovsky had also fought in Siberia. He had run Trotsky’s underground printing press in 1927, and had been the first oppositionist to be arrested. He was regarded as simply a “fighter.” He had been in jail since 1933. Ter-Vaganyan, an intellectual Armenian described as both honest and unambitious, had fought with great distinction in the Revolution and Civil War, and afterward had reverted to ideology and journalism. He, too, had been in exile in Kazakhstan since 1933.

A fourth Trotskyite was thrown in for some good measure—Dreitzer, the former head of Trotsky’s bodyguard and prominent in the 1927 demonstrations. He was not accused of being a member of the “Center,” but rather as the head organizer of assassin groups.

The first examinations of the leading prisoners were a total failure. Smirnov had gone on hunger strike for thirteen days on 8 May, and on 20 May was still replying, “I deny that; again I deny; I deny.” Ter-Vaganyan also twice undertook hunger strikes and wrote to Stalin that he had decided on suicide.⁶⁵ Mrachkovsky’s key interrogation is said to have lasted ninety hours, without result, though Stalin rang up at intervals to inquire how things were going.⁶⁶

So far the case was entirely Trotskyite. Stalin now ordered the implication of the Zinovievites. Yagoda was later to be accused of rejecting the evidence against them, and Agranov (or so he was to say when attacking Yagoda and Molchanov in 1937) went behind his back to the Moscow Provincial NKVD. He and Yezhov composed the full plan of the “United”—that is Trotskyite and ZinovieviteCenter, and with A. P. Radzivilovsky and other leading figures in the Moscow NKVD he obtained the necessary confessions. Radzivilovsky wrote later that “extraordinarily difficult work for three weeks on Dreitzer and Pikel” was needed before they gave testimony. Although Yagoda at first rejected it, Agranov said that it was only thus that the investigation was put on the right track. Richard Pikel, formerly Zinoviev’s secretary, had already given evidence in the “Kremlin Affair.” A writer and playwright who had served in the Civil War, he became more cooperative when transferred to the central NKVD, where a number of the leading figures were old friends of his. They promised him his life, an offer later confirmed by Yagoda.⁶⁷

It was only in late June or early July that Zinoviev and his leading supporters were brought to Moscow from their isolators.⁶⁸ At first Zinoviev made “obdurate denials.”⁶⁹ Bakayev made “persistent denials.”⁷⁰ In general, all the genuine oppositionists refused to confess and pointed out that they had been in prison or exile in the remotest parts of the country during most of the period, and under close NKVD supervision during the rest of it. Molchanov then gave the interrogators to understand that earlier orders about not using unlawful means of interrogation were not to be taken too seriously.⁷¹

The interrogation of Zinoviev and Kamenev was put in charge of the most senior officials: Agranov, Molchanov, and Mironov. Zinoviev was ill at the time with a liver ailment, and the routine interrogation was postponed.⁷² He had once again written to the Politburo vaguely accepting “responsibility” for the assassination of Kirov. This was returned with an insistence on “greater sincerity.”⁷³

With Kamenev, the attempt was made to secure a confession by ordinary interrogative methods. Mironov conducted it. But Kamenev resisted him in spite of all his efforts, exposing Reingold at a “confrontation” and in general standing firm.

Mironov reported to Stalin that Kamenev was refusing to confess, and later gave an account of the conversation to a close acquaintance:

“You think that Kamenev may not confess?” asked Stalin, his eyes slyly screwed up.

“I don’t know,” Mironov answered. “He doesn’t yield to persuasion.”

“You don’t know?” inquired Stalin with marked surprise, staring at Mironov. “Do you know how much our state weighs, with all the factories, machines, the army, with all the armaments and the navy?”

Mironov and all those present looked at Stalin with surprise.

“Think it over and tell me,” demanded Stalin. Mironov smiled, believing that Stalin was getting ready to crack a joke. But Stalin did not intend to jest. He looked at Mironov quite in earnest. “I am asking you, how much does all that weigh?” he insisted.

Mironov was confused. He waited, still hoping Stalin would turn everything into a joke, but Stalin kept staring at him and waited for an answer. Mironov shrugged his shoulders and, like a schoolboy undergoing an examination, said in an irresolute voice, “Nobody can know that, Yosif Vissarionovich. It is in the realm of astronomical figures.”

“Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?” asked Stalin sternly.

“No,” answered Mironov.

“Now then, don’t tell me any more that Kamenev, or this or that prisoner, is able to withstand that pressure. Don’t come to report to me,” said Stalin to Mironov, “until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev!”⁷⁴

The transfer of Kamenev’s case to the third-rate bully Chertok also produced no results, though the usual pressures of sleeplessness, semistarvation, and general bullying must have begun to wear him down.⁷⁵

THE DEATH OF GORKY

Stalin planned to carry through the execution of the oppositionists regardless of possible revulsion in the Party. For, as ever, he was prepared to deal with this by his usual combination of hardness and maneuver. The only figure who could not be handled in this fashion and who, if alive, would be difficult to silence, was Maxim Gorky, who “remained until his death the only person whom Stalin was compelled to take into consideration, to some extent at least.”⁷⁶ It is possible that had he lived, the August Trial might have had a different denouement. He had become ill on 31 May,⁷⁷ and died on 18 June.

When Gorky had opposed the October Revolution in 1917, Stalin had attacked him in a tone more venomous than any other Bolshevik’s. He had even said (quite falsely), in an assault on an article of Gorky’s entitled “I Cannot Keep Silent,” that Gorky and his type had “kept silent” when landlords and capitalists were attacking the peasantry and the proletariat, that they reproached only the Revolution and not the counter-revolution. Gorky’s work had of course been one long blast at the ruling classes, and he had been associated with the Social Democrats from the start. Stalin went on to write that the Revolution was quite prepared to throw away “great names,” including Gorky’s, if necessary.

Gorky’s own views were by no means lacking in pugnacity. He several times remarked that if “the enemy” did not surrender “he must be destroyed.” Nevertheless, he had protected both Pilnyalc and Zamyatin during the outcry against those writers in 1930—and this alone must have been very galling to Stalin, particularly in the case of Pilnyak (see here). And since then, more significantly still to our point, he had intervened strongly in favor of the policy of reconciliation and been an outspoken opponent of the earlier attempts to destroy Kamenev and Zinoviev.

His mere existence was a factor strengthening the morale of Kamenev and others in their ordeal. His voice, they could be sure, would be raised against the new persecution of them, as soon as this became publicly known. To some degree, knowledge of this must have fortified their resistance. By the same token, his death at this particular time must have been a moral blow and must have made Stalin’s task easier.

As with Kuibyshev, we have a case of a death at a time very convenient to Stalin. Most deaths at times convenient to Stalin were so for the obvious reason.

The doctors attending Gorky were later to be accused of murdering him on Yagoda’s orders. When we come to the Bukharin Trial of 1938, at which this charge was made, we shall consider the evidence (see here). Meanwhile, we may note that the current trial was held as soon after the necessary confessions as was feasible, and, moreover, seems to have been dated to suit the absence on holiday of some of the Politburo. If Gorky had hung on for even a few months, he would certainly have represented an impediment to Stalin’s plans. The indefinite postponement of the trial would have been at the least awkward, and time would have been given for the mustering of opposition in the Central Committee. To have proceeded with the trial and not executed the oppositionists would have been contrary to Stalin’s whole plan. But to have carried this out regardless would, with Gorky alive, have had disadvantages. A powerful voice would have supported and heartened the already restless elements in the leadership; and while it might have been possible, it would not have been easy to silence the writer.

All such considerations are merely logical, and prove nothing. But Stalin was, in his way, a logical man. He was not averse to having people murdered, and his respect for literature was not such as to prevent his disposing of many other Russian writers of repute. We shall consider this suspicion later.

ZINOVIEV SURRENDERS

It now seemed suitable for Stalin to make a direct political approach to Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov gave them what were represented as the Politburo’s instructions, to “disarm in a manner that will preclude any hope on your part of raising your head against the Party ever again.” The alternative was a trial by military court behind closed doors and the execution of the entire opposition, including the thousands in the camps.

Zinoviev refused, and a similar attempt on Kamenev was also unsuccessful, though Yezhov this time directly threatened that Kamenev’s son would be shot if he did not give in.

A tighter interrogative routine was then inflicted on them. Yagoda had the heat put on in the cells, though the weather was now hot. Zinoviev’s physical condition was very bad, and Kamenev was beginning to weaken under the threats to his son, whose arrest was finally ordered in his presence. In July, Zinoviev, after an all-night interrogation, asked to speak to Kamenev, and when they had discussed the matter they agreed to go on trial on condition that Stalin would confirm his promises to them, of executing neither themselves nor their followers, in the presence of the whole Politburo.

This was accepted. However, when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present. Stalin explained that they formed a “commission” of the Politburo authorized to hear the case.⁷⁸

This appeal to the Politburo and Stalin’s partial evasion of it present some interesting points. Both appeal and evasion suggest that there were still some men in the Politburo who might have been relied on to try to have its guarantees respected. In fact, it is curious that as late as the execution of Rudzutak in 1938, some attempt at a similar appeal is suggested when we are told that “he was not even called before the Central Committee Political Bureau because Stalin did not want to talk to him.”⁷⁹

Although shaken by the absence of the other Politburo members, the prisoners, after some argument, finally accepted Stalin’s terms, which guaranteed their lives, the lives of their supporters, and the liberty of their families. (A member of Zinoviev’s family told Krivitsky that one reason for capitulation was “to save his family,”⁸⁰ and in Kamenev’s case the same is obviously true—and can be seen in his final plea.)

With the surrender of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the game was in Stalin’s hands. The trial was on. The lesser political figures were expendable at a pinch, and in any case no stronger argument could be put to them than the willingness of their seniors to go along with the trial and accept Stalin’s promises.

Kamenev’s own confession was under way on 13 July (and presumably Zinoviev’s too). Bakayev was confessing by 17 July; Dreitser, by 23 July.⁸¹ Mrachkovsky was confessing by 20 July, and on 21 July he had a “confrontation” with Smirnov. There are two slightly different accounts of this.⁸² One of them, evidently based on the official record, has these old friends quarreling because of what Smirnov regarded as Mrachkovsky’s weakness in surrendering. The other shows them as still on good terms at the end. In any case, Mrachkovsky made some such remark as “Why, Ivan Nikitich, you want to get out of a sordid bloody business with a clean shirt?” And Smirnov’s firm comment was “invention and slander!”⁸³

In spite of Smirnov’s recalcitrance, the political preparation for the case could now go forward. On 14 January 1936 there had been a ruling from the Central Committee that all members should turn in their Party documents for new ones, with a view to screening unworthy members. Now, on 29 July, a top-secret letter of the Central Committee was sent out to Provincial, Territory, Republican, City, and District Committees. It quoted confessions, some of them dated as late as 25 July, by Zinoviev, Kamenev, Mrachkovsky, Bakaev, Pikel, Dreitzer, BermanYurin, N. Lurye, M. Lurye, and Reingold—but not Smirnov—among those who were to appear in court, together with Karev, Motorin, Esterman, Kuklin, and others to be implicated but not produced. The picture presented was of a detailed array of assassinations planned by the Trotskyite–Zinovievite bloc, to be carried out by numbers of named accomplices, and in particular the Kirov murder. In some respects, it gave a fuller account than that of the official publication of the trial itself.⁸⁴ The letter also pointed out that several of those now under arrest had, in spite of all previous measures, managed to keep their Party cards, though “all boundaries have been obliterated” between “spies, provocateurs, White Guards, kulaks” and “the Trotskyites and Zinovievites.” It called for a renewal of “revolutionary vigilance,” and asserted firmly the main duty of the Party membership in the forthcoming period: “The inalienable quality of every Bolshevik under present conditions should be the ability to recognize an enemy of the Party, no matter how well he may be masked.”⁸⁵

On receiving the circular, local officials began a further round of feverish delation. The First Secretary of Kozelsk rayon, for example, wrote to the Provincial Committee denouncing not only local inhabitants, but also people he had met in previous posts and now thought suspicious, commenting in each case, “It is possible that up to this time he has not been unmasked.”⁸⁶

This was, in fact, the political preparation of the Party branches throughout the country for the campaign about to be launched, in connection with the Zinoviev Trial, against all the enemies of the General Secretary. As one result, even longer lists of anti-Soviet elements than those already in existence were compiled everywhere, and the mass Purge began to get under way.

Meanwhile Smirnov, incriminated in the Secret Letter, was still giving trouble. A Soviet periodical has lately printed excerpts from Smirnov’s NKVD interrogations. He denied that his alleged “organization” existed. When told that he had sent out directives through his mother when in prison in 1935, he replied, “A lie.” He admitted that he had (evidently in 1932) received a letter from Trotsky, and had answered it. Trotsky had written about the rise of Fascism, and Smirnov had written back about the situation in the Soviet Union, and nothing more.⁸⁷

Further pressure was brought on Smirnov through his former wife, Aleksandra Safonova, also implicated. She was brought to a “confrontation” with him in Gay’s office, where she pleaded with him to go to trial. Since Kamenev and Zinoviev had already confessed, she is also said to have argued, it would be best for him to stick with them and go to public trial, in which case there would be no question of shooting them.⁸⁸ Safonova had accepted the argument that the opposition must “disarm” when Yezhov, as Secretary of the Central Committee, had told her that her evidence was needed by the Party, and she followed instructions. She now said that in 1930 and 1931 Smirnov, Ter-Vaganyan, Mrachkovsky, and she had formed a “Trotskyite Center” with terrorist aims; that Trotsky had sent directives with that purpose; and that Smirnov had spoken in their home of the need to kill Stalin.

Smirnov replied, as before, that he had met Trotsky’s son in Berlin and had exchanged letters with Trotsky, but that there had never been any terrorist plans, and that no “Center” ever existed.

Safonova then said, “You, Ivan Nikitich, want to hide in the bushes. You don’t want to disarm.” Smirnov answered, “Oh, Shura, Shura. I want to die at peace.”⁸⁹

Smirnov seems also to have been “confronted” with Zinoviev, who said he was confessing and argued in favor of Smirnov doing so too. Zinoviev said that he really believed that his admissions would open the way to his returning to the Party, and that Stalin—whom he referred to by his old Party nickname of Kobawas at present the focus of the Party’s will, and would come to a compromise with the opposition, since in practice he could not do without the “Lenin guard” in the long run. Smirnov replied that, on the contrary, it was obvious that the Politburo wanted the physical annihilation of the opposition; otherwise there was no point in the case.⁹⁰

The interrogator told Smirnov that it was useless for him to resist, as there were plenty of witnesses against him. And, moreover, it was not only Smirnov but his family too that would suffer—as the assassin Nikolayev’s had suffered. Smirnov knew nothing of the arrest of his family and took this simply to be a disgusting threat by the interrogator. But shortly afterward, on his way to an interrogation, he saw his daughter Olga at the other end of the corridor, held by two guards. She is reported later in prison. (Her mother, Smirnov’s wife Varvara, was sent to a women’s camp at Kotlas and was shot in the camp in April or May 1938, during a mass execution of 1,300 undesirables. However, his former wife, Safonova, who had testified against him, remained alive but imprisoned, until 1958, when she described her testimony as “ninety percent lies.”)⁹¹

Under all these pressures, Smirnov finally gave way, but he would only consent to make a partial confession. This would not have been accepted from anyone else, but time was getting short and Stalin wanted Smirnov in the trial at all costs. Smirnov also managed to have Safonova removed from the list of defendants, and she only appeared as a “witness.” All this rankled with Stalin, and Yagoda and Mironov were later charged with having shielded Smirnov.⁹² By 5 August,fn3 Smirnov was well into his confession. Even now, a final decision on who would appear in the trial had not been taken. On 7 August, Vyshinsky presented a formal indictment of twelve named accused. Stalin corrected some of the phraseology, and added “Lurye” twice, upon which the two Luryes were included. The revised indictment, presented to Stalin on 10 August, thus had fourteen names. He then added those of Ter-Vaganyan and Evdokimov. Neither had been mentioned in the Secret Letter of 29 July; Evdokimov had not even been questioned about the case: he is said to have been treated with particular brutality, in view, doubtless, of the short notice.⁹³ On 11 August, the official orders for holding the trial were given by the Central Executive Committee, and the final indictment is dated 14 August. On the same day, Ter-Vaganyan, who had vaguely admitted the existence of the “Center” on 16 July, was making a full confession.

The last confessions were eased, and the earlier ones fortified, on 11 August by a decree which (going back, to some extent, on that of 1 December 1934) reestablished public hearings and the use of lawyers, and allowed appeals from the accused for three days after the sentence.⁹⁴ The timing of this decree is decisive. While clearly intended to strengthen the accused’s hope that a reprieve would be granted, it was also designed, of course, to put the same idea about among the apprehensive Party membership. These included some of the interrogators themselves. It seems that reassurances that no death sentences would be carried out were believed by, for example, Boris Berman, and that this led him to quite sincere advice to Ter-Vaganyan that the best course open to him was to surrender.⁹⁵ And with the publication of the indictment on 15 August, it was at last necessary to take such measures as would best put the case over to the Party as a whole. The preparatory work had been done in great secrecy. There was no preliminary discussion in the Politburo. “The trial came as a complete surprise not only for the rank and file of Party workers but also to members of the Central Committee and some members of the Politburo,” in the sense that they were only informed about it when the Secret Letter of 29 July reached them.⁹⁶

To objectors in the current leadership, Stalin now had a simple answer: the matter was in the hands of the Prosecutor and the court. It was they who were so keen on legality, after all. They must let justice take its course. And the 11 August decree was a considerable reassurance.

Opposition to the trial would in any case have been very difficult to organize once confessions had been obtained. But Stalin played safe by springing it on the country when he himself was on holiday, and many of the rest of the leadership were also scattered around the country. Molotov and Kalinin, for example, are said to have gone on holiday in ignorance of the forthcoming massacre.⁹⁷

Whether this is true of Molotov in quite this form seems dubious. However that may be, there now came a startling proof that Stalin was discontented with him.

In the Party when the Secret Letter arrived, and among the public when the indictment came out, a sensation was caused by the omission from the list of those the conspirators were planning to kill of one important Soviet leader—Molotov. Stalin, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kossior, Postyshev, and Zhdanov were named (the last three specifically as the targets of local terrorist branches in the Ukraine and Leningrad), but not the Soviet Premier. Right through the trial, the confessions gave the same listing, and it was repeated in Vyshinsky’s final speech for the prosecution. In Soviet conditions this was taken to mean, and without any doubt at all really meant, that Molotov was in disfavor. An NKVD defector account says that Stalin crossed Molotov’s name out of the early evidence (where it had naturally been included) with his own hand, and that Yagoda then instructed the interrogators not to bring it in again.⁹⁸ This story must be substantially true. Without a personal decision of Stalin’s, Molotov could not have been omitted.

There seem grounds for supposing that Molotov had in some way dragged his feet about the plan to destroy the Old Bolsheviks. And the episode lends at least some credence to the reports that in the discussions about the Ryutin Case in 1932 he had not wholeheartedly supported Stalin in calling for extreme measures. Thus from around May 1936 until the end of the trial in August, Molotov faced elimination. He went on his holiday under careful NKVD supervision.⁹⁹

Some weeks after the Zinoviev Trial, he seems to have returned to favor. His name was included as a target of the conspirators in the 1937 and 1938 Trials—even though this raised the anomaly that the later batches of conspirators had allegedly plotted with Zinoviev and Kamenev for this purpose, but Zinoviev and Kamenev had inexplicably omitted to confess it.

Stalin’s pressure had brought Molotov to heel. Henceforth, there were no reports of anything but enthusiastic complicity on his part in the Great Purge. Why Stalin saved him cannot be more than guessed at. He was, of course (or was to be after Ordzhonikidze’s removal), the only Old Bolshevik of any repute at all among Stalin’s ruling group.

Meanwhile, it was impossible for Molotov, or anyone else, to interfere with the trial, through they could hope that it would end merely with prison sentences.

THE TRIAL BEGINS

At ten minutes after midday on 19 August 1936, the trial opened before a session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in the little October Hall of the Trade Union House—chosen in preference to the huge Hall of Columns, which had been the scene of earlier show trials. A large, high, bright room, decorated rather floridly in the Russian nineteenth-century style with white Corinthian columns and light blue walls, it had formerly been one of the ballrooms of what was then the Nobles’ Club. In this small hall there was room for no more than 150-odd Soviet citizens and 30-odd foreign journalists and diplomats. The foreign audience was crucial to the show. Unanimously hostile criticism might have prevented further performances. Too many of these privileged witnesses allowed themselves to be taken in by an improbable plot and incredible details. The Soviet spectators were all selected by the NKVD and were, in fact, mainly NKVD clerks and officials.¹⁰⁰ Many officials of the Central Committee and the Government were not able to get in. Nor were relatives of the accused:¹⁰¹

We are told of a later trial (Bukharin’s) that “the first five rows were occupied by members of the NKVD.”¹⁰² At such trials, we hear, the NKVD officers responsible for the accused sat “in front of” them.¹⁰³ This apparently means facing them closely, in the first row of the audience—we are definitely told this of one later accused.¹⁰⁴ This crowd is reported to have been under instructions to raise a commotion at a given signal, which might be necessary if any untoward outbreak from one of the prisoners took place.¹⁰⁵

The court commandant, in uniform tunic and breeches, and wearing the magenta hatband and collar tabs of the NKVD, called the court to order. Everyone stood, and the judges took their seats. Presiding was Ulrikh, a fat man, with dewlaps like a bloodhound and little pig eyes. His shaven head rose to a point. His neck bulged over the collar of his uniform. His voice was soft and oily. He had much experience in political cases.

On his right was another veteran of these trials, Matulevich, who had presided over the mass slaughter of the Leningrad “White Guards” in December 1934. On his left was a figure of great interest to Westerners, the unimpressive, thin-faced Divisional Military Jurist I. I. Nikitchenko. Ten years later, he was to appear on the Supreme Allied Tribunal at Nuremberg, with the most distinguished judges of Britain, America, and France, to preside over the trial of Goering and others.fn4 He represented a judicial tradition so different from that of the rest of the Tribunal that his mere presence may be thought to have made a mockery of those proceedings.

One important respect in which Soviet justice differed from that practiced by his future colleagues in Nuremberg was that sentences had been prepared beforehand by nonjudicial authorities. “The vicious practice was condoned of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons whose cases were under jurisdiction of the Military Collegium and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the proposed punishment … He approved these lists.”¹⁰⁶ It was even the case that “Kaganovich, before court sittings on various cases had come to an end, would personally edit the draft sentences and arbitrarily insert charges that suited him, such as allegations that acts of terrorism had been planned against his person,”¹⁰⁷ while Molotov is described as personally changing a sentence on a “wife of an enemy of the people” from imprisonment to death when the list when through his hands.¹⁰⁸ In the case now before Nikitchenko and his colleagues, there is no reason to doubt that the sentences were part of the original script, and had been imposed by the General Secretary himself.fn5

Three large and healthy NKVD soldiers, with rifles and fixed bayonets, escorted the prisoners to the dock, behind a low wooden bar along the right-hand wall of the courtroom, and took up positions guarding them. The accused had gained a little weight and caught up on their sleep in the few days past. But they still looked pale and worn.

Just before the trial, Yagoda and Yezhov had a conference with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, Bakayev, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan. Yezhov repeated Stalin’s assurance that their lives would be spared, and also warned them that a single attempt at “treachery” would be regarded as implicating the whole group.¹⁰⁹

Now they sat, ill at ease among the agents provocateurs scattered among them and separating them. The practice of trying a group of important political prisoners with various second-rate crooks (or alleged crooks), as though they formed one group, is an old technique. At the trial of Danton and the Moderates on 13 and 14 Germinal, he and his four closest followers were mingled in with men accused as thieves and common spies, and each was carefully linked with the others by joint accusations. The Soviet press was doing just such a job. An angry and violent campaign filled the papers in which, meanwhile, other and contrary themes were appearing—in particular, almost daily photographs of a series of airmen, like those of the astronauts a generation later. These were men like Chkalov, who with his crew flew a new Soviet plane on a round tour of the country to the Far East and back, and Kokkinaki, who produced a series of altitude records. They were photographed with Stalin and others, being received in the Politburo, being awarded Orders, and simply on their own. Through them, an air of youth and progress, of the triumph of the young Stalinist generation, was projected at the same time as the forces of darkness represented by the Old Bolsheviks were being dissipated.

At the side of the room, opposite the doomed representatives of anti-Stalinism, Vyshinsky sat at a small table, with his trim gray moustache and hair, neatly dressed in stiff white collar and well-cut dark suit.

Ulrikh went through the formalities of identification and asked if there were objections to the court and if the accused wanted defending lawyers. The answer to both questions was a unanimous negative. The secretary of the court then read the indictment. This based itself on the trial of January 1935, at which, it said, Zinoviev and his colleagues had concealed their direct responsibility for the Kirov murder. The since-revealed circumstances showed that they and the Trotskyites, who had practiced terrorism earlier still, had formed a united bloc at the end of 1932. The bloc had been joined also by the Lominadze group. They had received instructions, through special agents, from Trotsky. In fulfilling them, they had organized terrorist groups which had “prepared a number of practical measures” for the assassination of Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Zhdanov, Kossior, Postyshev, and others;¹¹⁰ one of these terrorist groups had actually murdered Kirov. They had no program other than murder.

Trotsky had sent written instructions to Dreitzer, who had passed them to Mrachkovsky, to assassinate Stalin and Voroshilov. The five junior accused, together with Holtzman, had been personally sent by Trotsky or his son Sedov to assist in these acts. Olberg, in addition, had contacts with the Gestapo. All the accused had fully admitted their guilt, with the exception of I. N. Smirnov, whose full guilt was, however, proved by the confessions of the other accused. He had made only a partial confession: of belonging to the “United Center” and being personally connected with Trotsky up to the time of his arrest in 1933; and of having received, in 1932, instructions from Trotsky to organize terror. He had denied, however, taking part in terroristic activities.

The indictment concluded by mentioning various names of accused who were to be tried separately: “The cases of Gertik, Grinberg, Y. Gaven, Karev, Kuzmichev, Konstant, Matorin, Paul Olberg, Radin, Safonova, Faivilovich, D. Shmidt and Esterman, in view of the fact that investigation is still proceeding, have been set aside for separate trial.”¹¹¹ Matorin, who had been Zinoviev’s private secretary, was elsewhere said to be still under investigation with a view to later trial “in connection with another case.”¹¹² None of them was ever to come to public trial, and in most cases we know nothing whatever of their fate.

After the reading of the indictment, the accused pleaded guilty on all counts, with the exception of Smirnov and Holtzman. Smirnov admitted to having belonged to the “Center” and to having received terrorist instructions from Trotsky, but again denied participation in preparing or executing terrorist acts. Holtzman, too, though admitting having brought terrorist instructions from Trotsky, denied himself participating in terrorism. After a fifteen-minute recess, Mrachkovsky was called upon to testify.

Under Vyshinsky’s questioning, he recounted the formation of the “Center” and the planning of terrorism under instructions from Trotsky and his son Sedov, partly passed through Smirnov and partly by a letter from Trotsky in invisible ink sent to him through Dreitzer. Under Smirnov there had been formed a Trotskyite group consisting of himself (Mrachkovsky), Ter-Vaganyan, and Safonova. Dreitzer joined them, and they had a number of lesser agents.¹¹³

When Mrachkovsky implicated Smirnov in direct terrorist activity, Smirnov several times denied the evidence, and there were warm wrangles between him and Vyshinsky. Zinoviev, called on to confirm the story, added that the murder of Kirov had been a joint enterprise involving both Zinovievites and Trotskyites, including Smirnov. Kamenev also confirmed this. The joint terror network was thus sketched out right at the start of the trial. For good measure, Mrachkovsky also implicated Lominadze (who had committed suicide the previous year),¹¹⁴ and a Red Army group of assassins headed by Divisional Commander Dmitri Shmidt. This latter charge was to be of far-reaching significance.

Mrachkovsky was followed by Evdokimov, who said he had deceived the court in January 1935. He then explained how he, Bakayev, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had organized the Kirov assassination. The plan had been to get Stalin at the same time: “… Bakayev warned Nikolayev and his accomplices that they must wait for Zinoviev’s signal,” said Evdokimov, “that they must fire simultaneously with the shots to be fired in Moscow and Kiev.”¹¹⁵ (Mrachkovsky had been quoted in the indictment as having said at the preliminary examination that “Stalin was to be killed first,” but in any case Kirov was not supposed to precede the General Secretary to the grave.) Evdokimov for the first time involved the Old Bolshevik Grigori Sokolnikov, former candidate member of the Politburo and still a candidate member of the Central Committee.

In the course of Evdokimov’s evidence, Smirnov, once more implicated, again denied the testimony.

At the evening session, Dreitzer recounted his connections with Sedov and his organization of two other terrorist groups for killing Stalin and Voroshilov, respectively. As to Smirnov, “Trotsky’s deputy in the U.S.S.R.,” Dreitzer remarked harshly, “There could be no acting on one’s own, no orchestra without a conductor among us. I am surprised at the assertions of Smirnov, who, according to his words, both knew and did not know, spoke and did not speak, acted and did not act. This is not true!”¹¹⁶ Smirnov again denied the evidence, and said he had not discussed terrorism with Dreitzer. Zinoviev was again called to confirm Smirnov’s role, and did so at length.

Reingold, who followed, extended the conspiracy further, speaking of negotiations with Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky, and mentioning yet two more terrorist groups, headed by the “Rightists” Slepkov and Eismont. He went on to tell of a plan of Zinoviev and Kamenev to put Bakayev in charge of the NKVD on their coming to power so that he could kill all police officials who “might be in possession of the threads of the controversy,” and also “all the direct perpetrators of the terroristic acts”—an interesting sign, as we have noted, of the way Stalin’s mind was working.

Bakayev, who followed, confessed to having organized the Kirov murder and planned that of Stalin:

Vyshinsky:

Did you take a number of practical measures to carry out these instructions, namely, to organize several attempts on the life of Comrade Stalin, which failed through no fault of yours?

Bakayey:

That is so.

¹¹⁷

But he introduced a note of reservation, of a type to be found in later cases, when he said that the other plots now attributed to the accused he had learned of for the first time when he read the indictment.¹¹⁸ He also had some lesser reservations, saying, for example, that he did not go to Leningrad to meet Vladimir Levin (one of the Nikolayev “group”) for terrorist reasons.¹¹⁹ These minor denials could count for nothing against the major admissions. Nevertheless, they can still perhaps be treated as slight and pathetic signals that the evidence was not to be relied on.

Pikel came next. He had agreed, he said, to take part in an attempt on Stalin’s life. He mentioned a tragedy of 1933, when Zinoviev’s secretary, Bogdan, had committed suicide as a protest against the Party purge then going on. A new interpretation was now imposed on this, through Piker s mouth. Bogdan had indeed “left a note making it appear that he was a victim of the Party cleansing,” but in fact he had been ordered by Bakayev either to attempt Stalin’s life or to commit suicide. Even this extravagant tale roused no incredulity from some of those present in the press box.

Pikel had been away in Spitzbergen; as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, he had been on assignment to do some work on the Soviet mining concession there. This was represented as an attempt to keep clear in order to avoid discovery.¹²⁰ Thus when a man was away, this proved that he was a terrorist trying to escape discovery, and when he came back (as Pikel did), he was a terrorist resuming work—in this case further attempts on the lives of Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and others.

Next morning, 20 August, Kamenev gave his evidence. He spoke at first with a certain dignity, but as the cross-questioning went on, this began to collapse. He made an almost complete confession, repudiating only the idea that the plotters had intended to cover the traces of their crimes by physically exterminating NKVD men and others who might know about them. About Smirnov’s denials, he said, “It is ridiculous wriggling, which only creates a comical impression.”¹²¹

In Reingold’s evidence, Sokolnikov had been named as a full member of the “Center.”¹²² However, Kamenev now put it slightly differently:

Kamenev:

… Among the leaders of the conspiracy another person may be named who in point of fact was one of the leaders, but who, in view of the special plans we made in regard to him, was not drawn into the practical work. I refer to Sokolnikov.

Vyshinsky:

Who was a member of the Centre, but whose part was kept a strict secret?

Kamenev:

Yes. Knowing that we might be discovered, we designated a small group to continue our terroristic activities. For this purpose we designated Sokolnikov. It seemed to us that on the side of the Trotskyites this role could be successfully performed by Serebryakov and Radek.

He also extended the conspiracy to include the former Workers’ Opposition group of Shlyapnikov.

On the involvement of the Rightists he said:

In 1932, 1933 and 1934 I personally maintained relations with Tomsky and Bukharin and sounded their political sentiments. They sympathized with us. When I asked Tomsky about Rykov’s frame of mind, he replied: ‘Rykov thinks the same as I do.’ In reply to my question as to what Bukharin thought he said: ‘Bukharin thinks the same as I do, but is pursuing somewhat different tactics: he does not agree with the line of the Party, but is pursuing tactics of persistently enrooting himself in the Party and winning the personal confidence of the leadership.’¹²³

This was not a complete incrimination, in theory at least, but it could hardly be regarded as meaning anything other than an intention by Stalin to bring Bukharin and his associates into dock.

A “witness,” Professor Yakovlev, was next produced, to corroborate the testimony. Kamenev, he said, had put him in charge of a terrorist group at the Academy of Sciences.¹²⁴

Zinoviev was now called on for his evidence-in-chief. He appeared cowed. The formerly eloquent orator was hardly able to speak. He looked puffy and gray, and gasped asthmatically. His confession was complete, involving him not only in the Zinovievite terrorist groups, but also with M. Lurye, allegedly sent by Trotsky. He invoked Tomsky’s name unambiguously, and also named Smilga, the veteran member of Lenin’s Central Committee who had led the Baltic Fleet in the seizure of power. He asserted that he was in constant communication with Smirnov,¹²⁵ adding:

… In this situation I had meetings with Smirnov who has accused me here of frequently telling untruths. Yes, I often told untruths. I started doing that from the moment I began fighting the Bolshevik Party. In so far as Smirnov took the road of fighting the Party, he too is telling untruths. But it seems, the difference between him and myself is that I have decided firmly and irrevocably to tell at this last moment the truth, whereas he, it seems, has adopted a different decision.’¹²⁶

Next came—as witness only—Smirnov’s former wife, Safonova. She said that Smirnov had transmitted Trotsky’s instructions on terrorism and strongly supported them. Smirnov firmly denied both assertions, but others of the accused backed her up. Vyshinsky then questioned Smimov:

Vyshinsky:

What were your relations with Safonova?

Smirnov:

Good.

Vyshinsky:

And more?

Smirnov:

We were intimately related.

Vyshinsky:

You were husband and wife?

Smirnov:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

No personal grudges between you?

Smirnov:

No.

¹²⁷

At the afternoon session, Smirnov was the first to be questioned. He continued with his partial confession. He had passed on Trotsky’s and Sedov’s ideas about terrorism; but he had not shared them, and he had done nothing else:

I admit that I belonged to the underground Trotskyite organization, joined the bloc, joined the centre of this bloc, met Sedov in Berlin in 1931, listened to his opinion on terrorism and passed this opinion on to Moscow. I admit that I received Trotsky’s instructions on terrorism from Gaven and, although not in agreement with them, I communicated them to the Zinovievites through Ter-Vaganyan.¹²⁸

Vyshinsky:

(ironically) When did you leave the Centre?

Smirnov:

I did not intend to resign; there was nothing to resign from.

Vyshinsky:

Did the Centre exist?

Smirnov:

What sort of Centre …?

Vyshinsky:

Mrachkovsky, did the Centre exist?

Mrachkovsky:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Zinoviev, did the Centre exist?

Zinoviev:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Evdokimov, did the Centre exist?

Evdokimov:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Bakayev, did the Centre exist?

Bakayev:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

How, then, Smirnov, can you take the liberty to maintain that no centre existed?

¹²⁹

Smirnov again said that no meetings of such a Center had taken place, and again three of the other members of it were made to bear him down. After the evidence of the others that it was he who had been head of the Trotskyite side of the conspiracy, he turned to them sardonically and said, “You want a leader? Well, take me!”¹³⁰

Even Vyshinsky commented that this was said “in rather a jocular way.”¹³¹ Smirnov’s partial confession was a rather difficult position to maintain, but on the whole he succeeded in confusing the issue. When the contradictions in his stance became awkward, he simply did not answer the questions.

Olberg, next, told of his long membership in the German Trotskyite organization, through which he had met Sedov and by means of a forged Honduran passport had got to Russia. He gave no explanation of how, with a tourist visa on a Central American passport, he had got a job at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute; but there he had organized the terrorist act to be committed in Moscow on May Day 1936. Olberg’s plan to assassinate Stalin failed because he had been arrested. A peculiar item in Vyshinsky’s closing speech (not given in the compressed English version) was a piece of material evidence involving Olberg. This was the visiting card of Wladimir Tukalevsky, Director of the Slavic Library of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Tukalevsky wrote in the Prague press that Olberg had indeed done work in the library at various dates from 1933 to the spring of 1935.) The visiting card, Vyshinsky said, had on it “the letters ‘P’ and ‘F’ and the date ‘1936,’ which served as a code or password previously agreed on between Olberg and Tukalevsky.” This was supposedly discovered in Stalinabad, where Olberg had earlier worked in the Pedagogical Institute. What it was supposed to prove is unclear, and its omission in the English version is understandable.¹³² Olberg was one of those of whom it was noted even at the time that his evidence was given in an almost jaunty fashion: Fritz David and the two Luryes made the same mistake. Several observers at once concluded that they were agents provocateurs.

Following Olberg, Berman-Yurin gave evidence that Trotsky had personally sent him to shoot Stalin at a Comintern plenum. He gave a very detailed account of meetings with Trotsky and his entourage in Copenhagen in November 1932. This evidence had been constructed by the NKVD as follows. Jack Soble, the Soviet spy whose career only ended with his arrest in 1957 in New York, had infiltrated Trotsky’s circle in 1931. He met him for the last time in Copenhagen in December 1932 when Trotsky had been admitted there on a short lecture tour. Soble then lost Trotsky’s confidence. But his account of Trotsky’s moves in Copenhagen, as transmitted to the NKVD, was edited to form the basis of BermanYurin’s evidence.¹³³

Berman-Yurin concluded by saying that he had been unable to get a ticket for the XIIIth plenum at the Comintern, and so could not shoot Stalin after all.

Ever since the publication of the indictment, the Soviet press had been violently demanding the death penalty. Resolutions from all over the country came in and were printed. Workers in the Kiev Red Flag Factory and the Stalingrad Dzerzhinsky Tractor Works, Kazakh kollchozes and Leningrad Party organizations, calling for the shooting of the accused, day by day made an overwhelming build-up. Now, on the morning of 21 August, Pravda carried something new. There were still dozens of mass resolutions, and the usual hack verses by the poetaster Demyan Bedny, with the title “No Mercy.” But, in addition, there were manifestos from Rakovsky, Rykov, and Pyatakov, which showed another aspect of Party discipline. They, too, all demanded the death penalty. Rakovsky’s was headed “No Pity.” Rykov insisted that no mercy be shown to Zinoviev. The tone of all may be judged from Pyatakov’s contribution, which said:

One cannot find the words fully to express one’s indignation and disgust. These people have lost the last semblance of humanity. They must be destroyed like carrion which is polluting the pure, bracing air of the land of the Soviets; dangerous carrion which may cause the death of our leaders, and has already caused the death of one of the best people in our land—that wonderful comrade and leader S. M. Kirov…. Many of us, including myself, by our heedlessness, our complacency and lack of vigilance toward those around us, unconsciously helped these bandits to commit their black deeds.

… It is a good thing that the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had exposed this gang.

… It is a good thing that it can be exterminated.

… Honor and glory to the workers of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.¹³⁴

Under these mounting pressures, the accused continued with their evidence. For 21 August, the last day of testimony, only one leading figure—Ter-Vaganyan—remained. Otherwise, there were three more “assassins” and Trotsky’s alleged emissary, Holtzman.

Holtzman, a genuine ex-Trotskyite of junior rank, was a personal friend of Smirnov’s. His evidence turned out to be highly unsatisfactory to the prosecution, on two grounds.

First, no doubt under the influence of Smirnov’s example, he had already reverted from the complete confession the indictment had attributed to him to a refusal to admit that he was implicated in terrorism. He now said flatly that though he had passed it on, he (like Smirnov) “did not share” Trotsky’s point of view about the necessity of terror. Vyshinsky was only able to get him to admit that he had remained a member of the Trotskyite organization, and alleged that this amounted to the same thing.

The second point was different. Holtzman confessed that he had met Sedov in Copenhagen. In that city, he had arranged to “put up at the Hotel Bristol” and to meet him there. “I went to the hotel straight from the station and in the lounge met Sedov.”

When Holtzman’s testimony was published, Trotsky declared it false, and immediately published a demand that the court ask Holtzman on what sort of passport and in what name he had entered Denmark—a point which could be checked with the Danish immigration authorities. This was a matter that had not been prepared, and naturally the court paid no attention to it. But soon after the trial ended, the organ of the Danish Social Democratic Party pointed out that Copenhagen’s Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917.¹³⁵ Soviet propaganda had some difficulty with this point and belatedly settled for a story that Holtzman had met Sedov at a Café Bristol, which was near a hotel of a different name at which he was staying, a version inconsistent with the original testimony. There was, in addition, convincing evidence that Sedov had been taking examinations at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin at the time when (in 1932) he was supposed to have been in Copenhagen.¹³⁶

The “Hotel Bristol” error is said to have arisen as follows. Yezhov decided that the alleged meeting should take place in a hotel, and asked Molchanov to provide a name. Molchanov referred to the Travel Section of the Foreign Department of the NKVD. To cover the inquiry, he asked the names of several hotels in Oslo as well as Copenhagen, ostensibly needed for a group of prominent Soviet visitors. Molchanov’s secretary jotted down the lists telephoned to him, and in typing them out accidentally put the Oslo hotels under the heading “Copenhagen.”¹³⁷

The prosecution case made much of better-established contacts between Smimov, Holtzman, the absent Gaven, Sedov, and others in the early 1930s, and the establishment of a “bloc” between them and the Trotskyists. These contacts had indeed taken place, and in the old sense of the coming together of factions in the prewar party (like the “August bloc”) the Trotskyists certainly thought that an opposition bloc had been established. When the accused were so charged, however, the Trotskyites in exile denied the whole story, apparently on the supposition that this would help the accused and discredit the trial.

And, given the incredibility of much of the other evidence, their calculation was reasonably correct. The result has been that the Trotskyite view has been widely accepted. We need merely note that these agreements, such as they were, between exiles and those still in the Soviet Union were political, with a view to a possible revival of the opposition. Conspiratorial from the NKVD point of view, they had no “terrorist” content whatever.¹³⁸

The two Luryes followed Holtzman. Their relationship is uncertain; they were not brothers. They had worked together. Nathan Lurye, the surgeon, confessed to having been sent by the Trotskyites abroad to make an attempt on Voroshilov’s life. He had worked on assassinating Voroshilov from September 1932 to the spring of 1933, with two accomplices, and “frequently went to Frunze Street and to the adjacent street armed with revolvers.”¹³⁹

President:

So that you would have committed the terroristic act had a favorable moment offered itself? Why did you not succeed in doing so?

N. Lurye:

We saw Voroshilov’s car going down Frunze Street. It was travelling too fast. It was hopeless firing at the fast-running car. We decided that it was useless.

¹⁴⁰

N. Lurye was then sent to Chelyabinsk, where he tried to meet Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze when they visited the city. The plan, a simple one, was as follows. In Ordzhonikidze’s case, Moissei Lurye instructed Nathan Lurye “to take the opportunity of a possible visit to the Chelyabinsk Tractor Works by Comrade Ordzhonikidze to commit a terrorist act against him.” N. Lurye “tried to meet” both leaders, but “he failed to carry out his intention.”

This unpromising assassin was then transferred to Leningrad, where he was put in touch with “Zeidel’s terrorist group” (one of the miscellaneous assassin groups named throughout the trial; Zeidel was a historian). Here N. Lurye’s instructions were to assassinate Zhdanov. He planned to do this at the 1 May demonstration. Ulrikh established in detail the type of revolver (a medium-sized Browning), but as Lurye made no use of it, this point lost some of its significance:

President:

Why did you fail to carry out the attempt on the life of Zhdanov?

N. Lurye:

We marched by too far away.

¹⁴¹

He had now been involved in “assassination attempts” on four leading figures, and no overt action of any sort had been taken—comparing most unfavorably with the efficiency of the killers of Kirov.

Moissei Lurye’s evidence was of the same type. He also had instructions from Trotsky, through the German Communist oppositionist leaders Ruth Fischer and Maslow, and had met Zinoviev too. He had prepared his namesake for his various attempts.

Ter-Vaganyan appeared next. He implicated a new group, the Georgian deviationists, who had been terrorists, “as is well known,” since 1928. This implied Mdivani and his followers, but the only person Ter-Vaganyan named was Okudzhava. He had also conducted the negotiations with his close friend Lominadze and with the Trotskyite historians Zeidel and Friedland.

Ter-Vaganyan also implicated Smirnov, who again put his denials in the record, though eventually conceding that one disputed meeting “may have taken place.”

The last accused, Fritz David, gave evidence of having been sent by Trotsky and Sedov and having attempted to carry out “two concrete plans to assassinate Stalin,” both of which failed, one because Stalin did not attend the meeting of the Comintern Executive Committee chosen as the occasion for action, and the other because, at the Comintern Congress, David had been unable to get near enough. Sedov had (not surprisingly) been furious when he earned of these hitches. Not a single one of all the terrorists sent into the Soviet Union at such trouble and expense had even slightly inconvenienced, let alone killed, any of the Stalin leadership. In spite of this, Vyshinsky remarked that “the Trotskyites operated with greater determination and energy than the Zinovievites”!¹⁴²

Dreitzer was recalled at the end of the evening session on 21 August to implicate Corps Commander Vitovt Putna (see Chapter 7), who had “ostensibly left the Trotskyites” but had actually carried instructions from Trotsky to Dreitzer for transmission to Smirnov. Smirnov here again intervened to deny that Putna was a Trotskyite, but Pikel, Reingold, and Bakayev confirmed it.

This concluded the evidence, but the published record of the case consists only of excerpts from the full record. Other allegations, doubtless also made at the trial itself, are contained in the Secret Letter of the Central Committee of 29 July 1936, mentioned above. There we read, in addition to the plotters in Gorky, of a group in the Ukraine confessing in December 1935 of plotting to kill Kossior and Postyshev (though without implicating the August 1936 accused), and also of planning robberies to obtain funds to support this venture; of various other conspirators not named in the trial report, one (under the leadership of I. S. Esterman) seeking the assassination of Kaganovich, others that of Voroshilov; and of the “nests” of Trotskyites in “a number of scientific-research institutes,” the Academy of Sciences, and other organizations in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk.

At the end of the 21 August session, Vyshinsky issued the following statement:

At preceding sessions some of the accused (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Reingold) in their testimony referred to Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov, Radek, Pyatakov,fn6 Serebryakov and Sokolnikov as being to a greater or lesser degree involved in the criminal counter-revolutionary activities for which the accused in the present case are being tried. I consider it necessary to inform the court that yesterday I gave orders to institute an investigation of these statements of the accused in regard to Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Radek and Pyatakov, and that in accordance with the results of this investigation the office of the State Attorney will institute legal proceedings in this matter. In regard to Serebryakov and Sokolnikov, the investigating authorities are already in possession of material convicting these persons of counter-revolutionary crimes, and, in view of this, criminal proceedings are being instituted against Sokolnikov and Serebryakov.¹⁴³

On 22 August, this announcement was printed, together with a prompt demand by a workers’ meeting at the Dynamo Factory that these charges be “pitilessly investigated.”

Immediately after reading Vyshinsky’s announcement, Tomsky committed suicide in his dacha at Bolshevo. (He left a letter to Stalin denying the charges.)¹⁴⁴The Central Committee, of which he was a candidate member, next day denounced his suicide, attributing it (truly enough) to his having been incriminated.

The morning of 22 August was devoted to Vyshinsky’s speech for the prosecution. First he laid the theoretical basis of the trials, of the whole Purge: “Three years ago Comrade Stalin not only foretold the inevitable resistance of elements hostile to the cause of socialism, but also foretold the possibility of the revival of Trotskyite counter-revolutionary groups. This trial has fully and distinctly proved the great wisdom of this forecast."¹⁴⁵

After an attack on Trotsky, he took the court at length through the history of Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s various recantations and promises. He then gave great prominence to the Kirov murder:

These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of the best of our Soviet land. They killed one of the men of the revolution who was most dear to us, that admirable and wonderful man, bright and joyous as the smile on his lips was always bright and joyous, as our new life is bright and joyous. They killed our Kirov; they wounded us close to our very heart. They thought they could sow confusion and consternation in our ranks.¹⁴⁶

Vyshinsky took some time to deal with Smirnov’s “wrigglings” (and, in passing, condemned Holtzman for having “adopted the same position as Smirnov”); Smirnov had “stubbornly denied that he took any part in the terroristic activities of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite centre.”¹⁴⁷ His guilt was, however, established by the other confessions. One awkward point was dealt with thus:

I know that in his defence Smirnov will argue that he had left the centre. Smirnov will say: ‘I did not do anything, I was in prison.’ A naive assertion! Smirnov was in prison from 1 January 1933, but we know that while in prison Smirnov organized contacts with his Trotskyites, for a code was discovered by means of which Smirnov, while in prison, communicated with his companions outside. This proves that communication existed and Smirnov cannot deny this.¹⁴⁸

In fact, no evidence of any sort on this point had been, or ever was to be, produced.

Vyshinsky, in passing, dealt with an unfortunate idea which had evidently gained popularity:

The comparison with the period of the Narodnaya Volya [People’s Will] terrorism is shameless. Filled with respect for the memory of those who in the times of the Narodnaya Volya sincerely and honestly, although employing, it is true, their own special, but always irreproachable, methods, fought against the tsarist autocracy for liberty—I emphatically reject this sacrilegious parallel.¹⁴⁹

He concluded with the appeal, “I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!”

The evening session of 22 August and the two sessions of 23 August saw the last pleas of the accused.

They spoke in the same order as they had given their evidence. Mrachkovsky started by telling of his background, a worker, son and grandson of workers, a revolutionary, son and grandson of revolutionaries, who had suffered his first arrest when thirteen years old.

“And here,” he went on in a bitter and ironic tone, “I stand before you as a counter-revolutionary!” The judges and Prosecutor looked apprehensive, but all was well. For a moment Mrachkovsky was overcome. He struck his hand on the bar of the dock and regained his self-contro1,¹⁵⁰ going on to explain that he had only mentioned his past so that everyone should “remember that not only a general, not only a prince or nobleman can become a counter-revolutionary; workers or those who spring from the working class, like myself, can also become counter-revolutionaries.”¹⁵¹ He ended by saying that he was a traitor who should be shot.

Most of the other pleas were simple self-condemnations; the accused described themselves as “dregs” undeserving of mercy. But an occasional wrong note was struck, as when Evdokimov said—surely not without meaning—“Who will believe a single word of ours?”¹⁵²

When Kamenev had finished his plea, and had already sat down, he rose again and said that he would like to say something to his two children, whom he had no other means of addressing. One was an Air Force pilot; the other, a boy. Kamenev said that he wanted to tell them, “No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just. Don’t look back. Go forward. Together with Soviet people, follow Stalin.” He then sat down again and rested his face in his hands. Others present were shaken, and even the judges are said to have lost their stony expressions for an instant.¹⁵³

Zinoviev made a satisfactory definition of the whole inadmissibility of opposition to Stalin: “My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at Fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of Fascism, and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism….”¹⁵⁴ But he ended that worse than any punishment was the idea that “my name will be associated with the names of those who stood beside me. On my right hand Olberg, on my left-Nathan Lurye….”¹⁵⁵ And this remark is, in an important sense, incompatible with the idea of the trial: for on the face of the evidence, how was Zinoviev better than the two he named?

Smirnov again denied any direct implication in any terrorist activity. However, he denounced Trotsky, though in comparatively mild terms, as an enemy “on the other side of the barricade.”

When Fritz David had finished, the court withdrew to consider the verdict. Yagoda had it ready for them in the Council Chamber. But a decent interval was allowed to pass, and at 2:30 the following morning the court reassembled and found all concerned guilty on all counts. They were all sentenced to death.

As Ulrikh finished reading the verdict, one of the Luryes shrieked hysterically, “Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!” Then the prisoners were taken out, to the police wagons that were to return them to the Lubyanka.

TO THE EXECUTION CELLARS

As soon as the trial was over, the defect in the bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev had struck with Stalin became apparent. Having carried out their side of it, they no longer possessed any sanction to make him do the same with his.

Under the new law, seventy-two hours’ grace was allowed for the accused to put in their petitions for pardon. Some of these may have been put in and rejected, though Smirnov, at least, seems not to have made an appeal. In any case, the announcement of their execution was made only twenty-four hours after the verdict.

Various accounts of the actual execution have filtered out. They are of course based on unconfirmable NKVD reports.

Zinoviev was unwell and feverish. He was told he was to be transferred to another cell. But when he saw the guards, he at once understood. All accounts agree that he collapsed, yelling in a high-pitched voice a desperate appeal to Stalin to keep his word. He gave the impression of hysteria, but this is probably not fair, as his voice was always very piercing when he was excited, and he was perhaps trying to make a last speech. He was, in addition, still suffering from heart and liver trouble, so that some sort of collapse is understandable. It is said that the NKVD lieutenant in charge, fearing the effect of this scene if prolonged along the corridor and down into the cellar, hustled him into a nearby cell and shot him there and then, later receiving an award for his presence of mind.¹⁵⁶

When Kamenev was called from his cell to execution, he made no complaint and appeared stunned. He was not killed by the first shot, and the NKVD lieutenant in charge became hysterical and kicked the executioner with a cry of “finish him off.” Smirnov was calm and courageous. He is reported as saying, “We deserve this for our unworthy attitude at the trial.”¹⁵⁷

Recent Soviet publications tell us of the fate of some others incriminated in the trial. Gaven, the main link to Trotsky, apparently gave evidence against Smirnov,¹⁵⁸ and so may be presumed to have confessed. His nonappearance at the trial may have been due to illness. He was carried out to be shot on a stretcher on 4 October.¹⁵⁹ The leading Zinovievite, G. F. Fedorov, brought from the Chelyabinsk isolator on 4 September, was shot on 5 October, the day after Gaven. And this may indicate a broader secret trial—though others implicated survived a little longer.¹⁶⁰

We can trace the fate of a few of the relatives of the accused, apart from Smirnov’s, with whom we have already dealt. Evdokimov’s son was shot.¹⁶¹ Kamenev’s wife had been arrested on 19 March 1935 and sentenced to exile by the Special Board. She was retried in January 1938 and shot in the autumn of 1941. As for the sons Kamenev had tried to save, the elder, Alexander, was arrested in August 1936, sentenced in May 1937, and shot in July 1939; the younger was sent to an NKVD children’s home, and his name was changed to Glebov.¹⁶² Zinoviev’s sister, F. A. Radomislskaya, a doctor, is reported in the Vorkuta camps and was shot there later. Three other sisters were sent to labor camp, together with two nephews, a niece, a brother-in-law, and a cousin. Three brothers and another nephew were shot. Zinoviev’s son Stefan, for whom he had made a special appeal to Stalin, was also shot in 1937, as were Bakayev’s wife and TerVaganyan’s brother.¹⁶³ Dreitzer’s wife, Sonia, was also sent to Vorkuta, and is also reported shot there.¹⁶⁴ Olberg’s wife, Betty, was sent to labor camp. In prison, very ill and thin, she had made an attempt to commit suicide by throwing herself over some banisters. She was sent back to Germany with the Communists handed over to the Gestapo by Stalin in 1940.¹⁶⁵

The executions took place when many Party leaders were on holiday. Stalin himself had left for the Caucasus, and only a quorum of the formal State body, the Central Executive Committee, was available to hear appeals, which their general instructions were to reject unless ordered to the contrary by the Politburo. Yezhov had remained in Moscow to see that nothing could interfere with the processes Stalin had set in motion.¹⁶⁶ Nothing did.

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE TRIAL

The trial had on the whole been a success for Stalin. The Communists and the Soviet people could make no overt objection to his version. And the outside world, whose representatives he had allowed in to authenticate it, as it were, was at least inclined not to reject it outright, from the start, as a fabrication. There was very considerable uneasiness about the confessions. But even if they had been obtained by unwarrantable methods, that did not in itself prove that they were untrue. In fact, the one phenomenon which was difficult to reconcile with the complete innocence of the accused was precisely their confessions. Thus to a considerable degree, the confession method justified itself politically.

The case itself must come as something of an anticlimax to us today, who know the falsehood of the charges and something of the ways in which the whole thing was prepared. At the time, to the world, and to the Party itself, it appeared differently—as a terrible public event. The allegations were examined in detail. They were found convincing by various British lawyers, Western journalists, and so forth, and were thought incredible by others. As so often, this appears to be a case in which alleged facts were accepted or rejected in accordance with preconceived opinion. Most people felt either that it was incredible that old revolutionaries should commit such actions, or that it was incredible that a Socialist State should make false accusations. But neither position is really tenable. It was by no means absolutely inconceivable that the opposition might have planned the assassination of the political leadership. There are various reasons for thinking it was out of character and contrary to their previous views, but that is a much weaker argument.

Some Western commentators, applying “commonsensical” criteria to the situation, argued that the oppositionists should logically have seen that the removal of Stalin was the only way of securing their own lives and a tolerable future, from their point of view, for the Party and the State. So it was, yet history gives many examples of inadequate common sense.

But in any case, it seems perfectly clear that the opposition, up to the actual execution of the Zinoviev–Kamenev group, never expected that Stalin would really kill off the old leadership. The whole of their maneuvers up to that point had been designed to keep themselves alive and, if possible, in the Party, until such time as Stalin’s failures and excesses would swing Party feeling back in their favor and give them another chance. After the first executions, no oppositionists of any standing were in a position to attempt assassination whether they thought it suitable or not. The only people with any chance of getting rid of the General Secretary were those close to him.

It seems certain that Stalin himself was really afraid of assassination. He must have known that the leading oppositionists could scarcely organize such plots, so closely did he have them watched. But at a lower level in the Party, there were thousands and thousands of potential enemies. Individual assassination was indeed contrary to established Marxist principles. In fact, Zinoviev had been supposed to be banking on this idea. Reingold remarked: “Zinoviev told me … ‘When under examination the main thing is persistently to deny any connection with the organization. If accused of terroristic activities, you must emphatically deny it and argue that terror is incompatible with the views of Bolsheviks-Marxists.’ “Nikolayev, the assassin of Kirov, had been a dupe; but, himself a Communist, he had shot down a Party leader with a quite clear idea of what he was doing. That others should refrain on Marxist principle from individual terror was not a certain hope. Desperation had already, for example, driven the Bulgarian Communist Party to the bomb outrage in Sofia Cathedral in 1925.fn7

Again, the selective assassination of NKVD defectors and of other political enemies in the West was soon to become routine. And Stalin himself—an Old Communist too!—had organized the killing of Kirov. In the circumstances, we may agree with the idea that after all assassinations by Zinoviev and Kamenev were possible, that Reingold could have been telling the truth when he deposed: “In 1932, Zinoviev, at Kamenev’s apartment, in the presence of a number of members of the united Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre argued in favor of resorting to terror as follows: although terror is incompatible with Marxism, at the present moment these considerations must be abandoned…”¹⁶⁷

Moreover, some of the ideas placed in the mouths of Zinoviev and Kamenev were plausible. It was quite reasonable to suppose that if Stalin had been assassinated, as a result of the leadership struggle that would ensue, “negotiations would be opened with us.” As Kamenev said, “Even with Stalin we, by our policy of double-dealing, had obtained, after all, forgiveness of our mistakes by the Party and had been taken back into its ranks.”¹⁶⁸ And it was also plausible that they had anticipated the rehabilitation of Trotsky as a later result.

But to support either view of the case, there was very little genuine reference to the facts. Yet at this level, the only one worth a sensible examination, the outward semblance of an established plot could easily be shown to rest on absurdities and contradictions. For its composition, as in later cases, bears many marks of crudity. It seems that these are not attributable to Molchanov and Yagoda, but to Stalin himself, who personally insisted, for example, on the inclusion of Smirnov.

In spite of the inconsistencies and incredibilities, Pravda, on 4 September 1937, was able to give prominence to a statement by “the English jurist Pritt” from the London News Chronicle on the complete propriety and authenticity of the trial. And this was one case among many.

But Zinoviev and Kamenev had been in exile or prison for most of the period of the active plot. Mrachkovsky had been in exile in Kazakhstan. Smimov had been in a prison cell since 1 January 1933. Vyshinsky had spoken of ways in which “even those not at liberty” had been able to take part in the plot. But no evidence had been produced of their methods of liaison. It might have been thought that even observers like Pritt would have found it odd that a conspiracy directed from outside the country should, when one of its members was actually in prison in a distant area, have continued to pass instructions through him, rather than use alternative channels--of which, the evidence implied, they had a profusion.

A further striking point is the proportion between the number of assassinations planned and those carried out. Two separate plans to kill Stalin at the meeting of the Communist International had been made, another to shoot Voroshilov, a third to assassinate Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze, and many others simply decided on in principle.

No reference was made during the trial to some of the previous trials in connection with the Kirov assassination. The action of NKVD officers in Leningrad was not referred to. The allegation about the Latvian Consul was not mentioned.

No documentary evidence (except Olberg’s Honduran passport and Tukalevski’s visiting card) was produced. The failure of the prosecution to produce documents should have struck observers as particularly odd. For in the arrest of underground Bolsheviks, the Tsarist police repeatedly discovered documents—without which, indeed, it is difficult to see how an underground could operate. When the February 1917 Revolution opened up the police archives, hundreds of secret Party documents were found in them, including letters written by Lenin himself. And the underground Bolsheviks of that time were at least as skilled in conspiracy as the men Stalin now arrested; indeed (as Orlov points out), “They were the same men.”

Again, prominent conspirators and witness were simply missing. Sokolnikov was clearly a relevant and important witness. But he was not called. Nor were Bukharin, or Tomsky, or Rykov—or any of the newly implicated. Among the Zinovievites who were not called but who had appeared at previous trials were Gertik, one of the main links with the “Leningrad Center,” which had allegedly assassinated Kirov,¹⁶⁹ and Karev, who was supposed to have been personally instructed by Zinoviev and by Bakayev to prepare the Kirov murder with others of the Leningrad assassination group,¹⁷⁰ with which Faivilovich was also a contact man.¹⁷¹ (Kuklin, actually named as a full member of the “Center,” seems to have died in the interim.)¹⁷²

But meanwhile, questions of evidence, of logic, were not decisive. The prestige of the “Socialist State” was high. There was little choice between accepting the trial at its face value and branding Stalin as a vulgar murderer, and his regime as a tyranny founded on falsehood. The truth could be deduced, but it could not be proved. Few cared to hear it, given the more evident menace of Fascism.

In the Soviet Union itself, things were different. Few, perhaps, credited the confessions. But fewer still could even hint their doubts.

A week after the execution of Zinoviev and his fellow defendants, Stalin ordered Yagoda to select and shoot 5,000 of the oppositionists then in camps.¹⁷³ At this time, the last privileges were withdrawn from political prisoners in camps. In March 1937, some rights were temporarily restored. But a few months later, another mass execution was ordered. The brick factory at Vorkuta became notorious as the center of the operation.¹⁷⁴ The victims included Trotsky’s son Sergei Sedov. In March 1938, the Armenian So!crates Gevorkian and twenty other former Leftists were executed near their camp. From then until the end of 1938, groups of forty or so were executed there once or twice a week. Children under twelve alone were spared.¹⁷⁵

There are reports of a last hunger strike by the oppositionists before they were separated, resulting in many deaths and, eventually, the disappearance of all concerned.¹⁷⁶ Roy Medvedev tells us that of several thousand Old Bolsheviks who returned to Moscow after rehabilitation in 1956 and 1957, he was “only able to find two former Trotskyists and one former Zinovievist.”¹⁷⁷