The Great Terror

5

THE PROBLEM OF CONFESSION

He lies like an eyewitness.

Russian Saying

When, at 1:45 P.M. on 19 August 1936, Mrachkovsky started to confess in public to a series of appalling crimes, it marked the beginning of a series of events which shook and astonished the entire world. Mrachkovsky was a former worker and an Old Bolshevik, a member of the Party since 1905. He had actually been born in prison, where, in 1888, his mother was serving a sentence for revolutionary activity. His father, a worker like himself, was a revolutionary too, and became a Bolshevik when that party was organized. Even his grandfather, also a worker, had belonged to one of the first Marxist groupings, the Southern Russian Workers’ Union.

Mrachkovsky himself had come to prominence by leading a rising in the Urals. He had fought in Siberia in the Civil War, and had been wounded several times. He had later been one of the boldest of Trotsky’s followers, and had been the first to be arrested when, in 1927, he organized the Trotskyites’ short-lived underground printing press.

He was, in fact, a real epitome of revolutionary boldness, born and bred to resistance. He now stood up and complaisantly confessed to active membership in a plot to murder the Soviet leadership. Over the next few days, half a dozen other Old Bolsheviks followed suit, including leaders known the world over. Lastly, they made final pleas, condemning themselves for “contemptible treachery” (Kamenev), speaking of themselves as “the dregs of the land” (Pikel), “not only murderers but fascist murderers” (Holtzman). Several expressly said that their crimes were too foul to let them ask for clemency; Mrachkovsky described himself as “a traitor who should be shot.”

Twice in the next two years the same scene was to be repeated, always to the bafflement of commentators, friendly or hostile. The impression of unanimous surrender was not, indeed, entirely a correct one. Two of the 1936 accused (Smirnov and Holtzman) hedged considerably in their admissions, but this was hardly noticed among the self-abasement of so many others, including the two major figures, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

And similarly, the minor hitches and qualifications of later trials passed barely noticed. Krestinsky withdrew his confession on the first day of the 1938 Trial, and only reaffirmed it after a night in the hands of the investigators. Bukharin refused to confess to some of the major charges, such as that of having planned to kill Lenin. Radek, admitting that he was a treacherous liar, took occasion to point out that the case rested entirely on his evidence.

But such points were on the whole lost in the picture as it appeared in gross: everyone had confessed; the Old Bolsheviks had publicly avowed disgraceful plans and actions. The whole business almost passed belief. Were the confessions true? How had they been obtained? What did it all signify? We are told that the confessions were as little believed in Russia as abroad, “or even less,” but that the average Soviet citizen who had not been in jail found them as puzzling as foreigners did.¹

It was curiously argued, not only by Vyshinsky, but also in the West, that the accused confessed owing to the weight of evidence against them, that they had “no choice.” Apart from the fact that there was no evidence against them except their confessions and those of others, this does not accord with common experience. People, especially on capital charges, plead not guilty even if there is a great deal of evidence against them. In the past, Communists had frequently denied facts. But in any case, it was not only confession which was so strange, but also repentance—the acceptance of the prosecution’s view that the acts confessed to were appalling crimes. If Zinoviev and Kamenev had really concluded that the way out of Russia’s difficulties was the assassination of Stalin, this would be to say that experienced politicians had made a definite political decision suited, as they thought, to the circumstances. It would not be a decision they felt guilty about. Their natural line of reasoning—as with the terrorists of the People’s Will—would have been, if the facts were admitted, to defend their plans and actions. The complete acceptance of the opinion of their accusers was the real and crowning implausibility of the whole affair.

THE PARTY MIND

The problem of these confessions is really a double one. We have to consider the technical means, the physical and psychological pressures by which false public confessions could be secured. And this is a question that applies to non-Party as well as to Party victims.

But in the surrender and self-abasement of at least some of the revolutionaries, a further element enters. Their surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party made in terms they knew to be “objectively” false. And this attitude is a key to Stalin’s victory going far beyond the trials themselves, largely accounting as it does for the extraordinary and disastrous failure of the successive Party elements who objected to his rule to take any effective action to block him.

In Soviet circumstances, where all factions had long been united in imposing the principle of the one-party State and the practice of crushing all alternative and independent political enterprise by police methods, the responsibility for saving the country and the people from Stalin rested squarely on his leading opponents within the Party.

They had abdicated that responsibility. The Party mystique led them to submission to the Party leadership, however packed the Congresses and Committees which produced it. They could see no political possibilities outside the Party. Even when they had been expelled, they thought of nothing but a return at any price.

The leading oppositionists—with the exception of Trotsky himself—had made a basic tactical error. Their constant avowals of political sin, their admissions that Stalin was, after all, right, were based on the idea that it was correct to “crawl in the dust,” suffer any humiliation, to remain in or return to the Party. In this way, they thought, when Stalin’s policies came to grief, they themselves would be there, available as the alternative leadership which the Party must then seek.

In the first place, the policy was too abjectly cunning. The constant avowals and humiliations ate into the morale of rank-and-file oppositionists, and wore away their reputations, perhaps irretrievably. But the basic miscalculation was on an even more crucial point. The members of an alternative government have at least got to be alive. It is certainly true that some of the oppositionists—Kamenev, for instance--did not underestimate Stalin’s desire to crush them at all costs. But they did not believe that it would be politically possible for him to face the Party with the execution of its veteran leaders. They underestimated not his ruthlessness, but his determination, cunning, and unscrupulousness. When he had finished, there was no such thing as a living ex-member of the Politburo, with the single exception of Grigori Petrovsky, working on sufferance as a museum administrator.

Their view of history made it hard for them to conceive that the proletarian Party could simply be converted by intrigue or any other method into an apparatus of personal dictatorship. And if they did not understand the unappeasable drive to power in Stalin’s mentality or the fact that with the simplicity of genius he was prepared to undertake actions contrary to the “laws of history” and to do what had never been done before, they also did not understand his methods. That a modern, a Marxist, State could be subverted by intrigue and maneuvers in the political organs, this they had at least begun to grasp. It did not occur to them that their opponent could use the methods of a common criminal, could procure assassination, and could frame others for his own crime. A rank-and-file oppositionist commented (of Rykov), “To spend twenty years with Stalin in an illegal Party, to be with him during the decisive days of the Revolution, to sit at the same table in the Politburo for ten years after the Revolution and still fail to know Stalin is really the end.”²

There were two great preconditions for the Purge. First, the personal drives and abilities of its prime mover, Stalin; and second, the context, the political context, in which he operated. We have traced the changes which had come over the Party after the Civil War and the trauma of Kronstadt. Since then, the final silencing of debate and the extravagantly bitter test of the “Second Civil War,” against the peasantry, had put it on the anvil. Under these new strokes, an ever greater premium was put on ruthlessness and will, but at the same time the idea of the Party itself as an object of devotion and of its membership as an elite brotherhood had strengthened yet further.

For his opponents as well as his supporters, Stalin’s leadership was thus the authentic—or at least the only—representative of the “Party.” While Lenin had always been prepared to split a party if he had felt the majority to be wrong, the oppositionists were now hamstrung by an abstract loyalty. Just as most of the German generals were later to be reduced to impotence by their oath of loyalty to a man who would not himself have thought twice about breaking his word, so the Rightists were brought to ruin by a similar intellectual and moral muddle.

In 1935, Bukharin, who had just been denouncing Stalin’s “insane ambition,” was asked why, in that case, the oppositionists had surrendered to him, and he replied, “with considerable emotion”: “You don’t understand, it is not like that at all. It is not him we trust but the man in whom the Party has reposed its confidence. It just so happened that he has become a sort of symbol of the Party….”³

Bukharin’s faith in the Party, as the incarnation of history, was seen again in 1936, a year before his own arrest, when he remarked to the Menshevik Nicolaevsky:

It is difficult for us to live. And you, for example could not accustom yourself to it. Even for some of us, with our experience during these decades, it is often impossible. But one is saved by a faith that development is always going forward. It is like a stream that is running to the shore. If one leans out of the stream, one is ejected completely. (Here Bukharin made a scissor-like gesture with his two fingers.) The stream goes through the most difficult places. But it still goes forward in the direction in which it must. And the people grow, become stronger in it, and they build a new society.⁴

This view is admittedly an act of faith, of pure theoretical anticipation. Stalin held in effect that his personal rule was essential on precisely the same grounds. The moral distinction between the two attitudes is not a very clear one. The whole general ethic had been expressed most plainly by Trotsky in 1924:

None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right…. We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. The English have a saying, ‘My country, right or wrong’; whether it is in the right or in the wrong, it is my country. We have much better historical justification in saying, whether it is right or wrong in certain individual cases, it is my party…. And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.⁵

And this, as we shall see, is absolutely cardinal in explaining not so much Stalin’s rise to power, as the almost total failure to oppose him after his aims and methods had declared themselves.

A very revealing account of the attitude of an old oppositionist to the already Stalinized Party—more revealing than official statements, since it was made in the heat of the moment in private—had been given in a series of remarks made by Pyatakov in 1928 to a former Menshevik friend, N. V. Volsky. Pyatakov had just “capitulated”⁶ and, meeting the Menshevik in Paris, provoked him by a suggestion that he lacked courage. Volsky replied warmly that Pyatakov’s capitulation a couple of months after his expulsion from the Party in 1927, and repudiation of the views that he had held right up until then, showed a real lack of moral courage.

Pyatakov, in an excited and emotional manner, replied with a long harangue. Lenin, he said, had become a tired and sick man towards the end of his life:

The real Lenin was the man who had had the courage to make a proletarian revolution first, and then to set about creating the objective conditions theoretically necessary as a preliminary to such a revolution. What was the October Revolution, what indeed is the Communist Party, but a miracle? No Menshevik could ever understand what it meant to be a member of such a Party.⁷

Pyatakov’s “miracle” was a reasonable description from the Marxist point of view of what the Party, as he thought, was attempting to do. For it was contrary to the natural “Laws of Society” as propounded by Marx: instead of socialism arising as the result of the conquest of political power by a Party representing a large proletarian majority in a country already thoroughly industrialized, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was (in theory) attempting to create by mere will power and organization the industry and the proletariat which should in principle have preceded it. Instead of economics determining politics, politics was determining economics.

‘According to Lenin’, Pyatakov added, ‘the Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion by itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a Party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things which no other collective of men could achieve…. A real Communist … that is, a man who was raised in the Party and had absorbed its spirit deeply enough becomes himself in a way a miracle man’.⁸

From this attitude, significant conclusions followed:

Tor such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, “the Party”, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the Party—that is the test of a true Bolshevik’.

There could be no life for him (Pyatakov continued) outside the ranks of the Party, and he would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it. In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.⁹

This idea of all morality and all truth being comprehended in the Party is extraordinarily illuminating when we come to consider the humiliations Pyatakov and others were to accept in the Party’s name. For this evaporation of objective standards, though it did not affect all members of the old Party, was widespread. Many had by the end of the 1920s become quite disillusioned with the idea that the workers, let alone the peasants, could play any part in a country like Russia. By 1930, a foreign Communist noted among his students in Leningrad that they thought it entirely natural for the masses to be mere instruments under both Fascism and Communism—the moral distinction being simply one of the respective leaders’ intentions.¹⁰ One Trotskyite remarked that there was much to be said for Stalin: “No doubt Trotsky would have done it with more go and with less brutality, and we, who are more cultured than Stalin’s men, would have been at the top. But one should be able to rise above these ambitions…¹¹

Even those who did not go to Pyatakov’s self-immolating lengths no longer felt capable of the intellectual and moral effort of making a break and starting afresh:

They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.¹²

Even the brave Budu Mdivani is quoted as saying, “I belong to the opposition, that is clear. But if there is going to be a final break … I prefer to return to the Party I helped create. I no longer have the strength to begin creating a new party.”¹³ As a psychological hurdle, the fresh start was too high. The oppositionists fell back into submission, surrender.

This loyalty to “the Party” has an element of unreality about it. The original Party of 1917 had been decimated by the expulsion of thousands of oppositionists. By the end of 1930, only Stalin, of the original leadership, remained in the Politburo. His nominees, from the ranks of the new men, controlled the elements of power. The Party itself, diluted by the great influxes of the 1920s, had changed in the style of its membership and now contained a rank and file who had regularly, so far at least, acted as reliable voting fodder for the secretaries imposed by Stalin’s Secretariat.

On the face of it, the opposition could well have argued that Stalin’s control of, and claim to represent, the Party was based on no higher sanction than success in packing the Party Congresses, that in fact he had no real claim to be regarded as the genuine succession. But the oppositionists themselves had used similar methods in their day, and had never criticized them until a more skilled operator turned the weapon against them.

In 1923, Stalin was already able to attack such arguments from his opponents by pointing out that appeals for democracy came oddly from people like Byeloborodov and Rosengolts, who had ruled Rostov and the Donets Basin, respectively, in the most authoritarian fashion.¹⁴ Even more to the point, in 1924 Shlyapnikov ironically remarked that Trotsky and his followers had all supported the action taken against the Workers’ Opposition at the Xth Party Congress in 1921, so that their claims to stand for Party democracy were hypocritical.¹⁵ Kamenev denounced Party democracy in this struggle with Trotsky in revealing terms:

For if they say today, let ud have democracy in the Party, tomorrow they will say, let us have democracy in the trade unions; the day after tomorrow, workers who do not belong to the Party may well say: give us democracy too … and surely then the myriads of peasants could not be prevented from asking for democracy.¹⁶

A year later he was asserting, “We object to the Secretariat, uniting policy and organization in itself, being placed above the political organism.” It was too late. And the Stalinists were able to comment tellingly, as when Mikoyan said, “While Zinoviev is in the majority he is for iron discipline…. When he is in the minority … he is against it.”¹⁷

When Stalin proceeded to the further step of arresting those responsible for the Trotskyite underground printing press, headed by Mrachkovsky, in 1927, he was again able to refute opposition objections, remarking: “They say that such things are unknown of the Party. This is not true. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers’ Truth group? Does not everyone know that Comrades Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves supported the arrest of the members of these groups?”¹⁸ Mere truth is a common casualty in all types of political systems, but in nontotalitarian parties this never becomes an overt and overriding principle, remaining sporadic and occasional, and discrediting its authors when exposed. Among the Communists, it was consciously and systematically accepted.

It was ironically enough Trotsky who had publicly denied the existence of Lenin’s Testament. When Stalin attacked Kamenev in 1926 for having sent a telegram of congratulations to the Grand Duke Michael at the time of the February 1917 Revolution, Kamenev pointed out that Lenin had personally signed a denial of this. Stalin retorted quite matter-of-factly that Lenin had, in the interests of the Party, knowingly stated a falsehood.¹⁹ At the XIVth Congress in 1925, Krupskaya appealed, as a member of the defeated faction, to objective truth. Bukharin retorted: “N. K. Krupskaya says truth is that which corresponds to reality, each can read and listen, and answer for himself. But what about the Party? Disappeared, as in the magic picture!”²⁰

Also going back to the earliest days of the Party was the tradition that the best method of winning political argument was to smear the opponent by every conceivable means. Lenin once said to Angelica Balabanoff, “Everything that is done in the proletarian cause is honest.” The great Italian Socialist leader Serrati, though sympathetic to the Communists, had tried to prevent their splitting his movement to suit their strategies, and had been attacked in terms to which Balabanoff, at that time Secretary of the Comintern, had objected. After Serrati’s death, it was Zinoviev who explained the Leninist tactics to her: “We have fought and slandered him because of his great merits. It would not have been possible to alienate the masses [from him] without resorting to these means.”²¹ It was natural, then, that the oppositionists should be required to cast filth on their own motives and ideas.

At the XVth Party Congress in December 1927, Kamenev argued that the denunciation of their own views then required of the opposition would be meaningless. He explained the dilemma. They now had no choice but either to constitute a second party, which would be ruinous for the Revolution and “lead to political degeneration,” or to make “a complete and thorough surrender to the Party.” He and Zinoviev had decided on the latter, taking the view that “nothing could be done outside of and despite the Party.” They would obey, but he pleaded that they should not be obliged to denounce views that they had obviously held just a few weeks earlier. None, he said, had previously made such a demand. (Though, in fact, Zinoviev had made exactly the same demand of Trotsky in 1924!)

Stalin did not accept Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s recantation. They were trapped. They could hardly go back on what they had already said. Finally, they accepted the terms of the victor, denouncing their own views on 18 December as “wrong and anti-Leninist.” Bukharin told them they were lucky to have made their minds up in time, as this was “the last moment available to them.”

Again denounced, expelled from the Party, and sent into exile in 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted in 1933 on similar but yet more abject self-abasement. Zinoviev wrote to the Central Committee:

I ask you to believe that I am speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you to restore me to the ranks of the Party and to give me an opportunity of working for the common cause. I give my word as a revolutionary that I will be the most devoted member of the Party, and will do all I possibly can at least to some extent to atone for my guilt before the Party and its Central Committee.²²

And soon afterward, he was allowed to publish an article in Pravda condemning the opposition and praising Stalin’s victories.²³

In crawling as he did,fn1 Zinoviev was acting logically from the point of view of Party ethics. He believed that any humiliation could be undergone for the purpose of remaining in the Party, where he might, in the future, play a useful role. But such logic was in any case to prove inapplicable. And meanwhile, the long process of deception and apology was corrupting the oppositionists. As a close observer commented:

It must be admitted that from the point of view of political morals, the conduct of the majority of the oppositionists was by no means of high quality. To be sure, the conditions prevailing in the Party are intolerable. To be loyal, to do every single thing that is demanded of us is almost impossible: to do so would mean to become an informer, to run to the Central Control Commission with reports on every utterance of opposition picked up more or less accidentally, and on every oppositionist document one comes across. A party which expects such things from its members cannot be expected to be regarded as a free association of persons of like views, united for a common purpose. We are all obliged to lie: it is impossible to manage otherwise. Nevertheless, there are limits which should not be exceeded even in lying. Unfortunately, the oppositionists, and particularly their leaders, often went beyond these limits.

… To plead for pardon has become a common phenomenon, on the supposition that the party in power being “my party,” the rules which applied in the Tsarist days are no longer valid. One hears this argument everywhere. At the same time, it is considered quite proper to consistently deceive “my party,” since the party does not fight its intellectual opponents by trying to convince them, but by the use of force. This has given rise to a special type of morality, which allows one to accept any condition, to sign any undertakings, with the premeditated intention not to observe them.²⁴

This attitude had a very demoralizing effect. The border between treachery and compromise became very vague. At the same time, Stalinists could point out that it was impossible to believe the opposition precisely because of their idea that telling lies was permissible.

Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled for the third time in 1934, on suspicion of politically inspiring Nikolayev in the murder of Kirov. And in January 1935, as we have seen, they had once again declared their political guilt, this time accepting it in a form which was already a partial plea of guilty before the criminal law.

Their successive surrenders had never been voluntary, in the sense that they would have preferred to avoid them. But they had accepted them, under pressure, as unavoidable moves in the political and moral conditions of the one-party system to which they adhered. They had abandoned in turn each of their objections—to falsification, to undemocratic procedures, to insincere retractions, to arrest. They had chosen to do so in order to remain in the Party, or to gain readmission after they had been expelled. The Rightist Slepkov is reported by a Soviet writer as being brought back from a political isolator and supplying the names of over 150 accomplices, on the grounds, “We must disarm! We must go on our knees to the party.”²⁵

A thoughtful Soviet analysis which appeared recently notes that Ryutin (and later Raskolnikov) flatly denied the legitimacy of the Stalin regime, but that most of the victims of the trials were “paralyzed” by feeling themselves to be “within the system personified by Stalin.” Even in his “last letter” (see here), Bukharin merely says that he has not opposed the Party line for eight years, and has no quarrel with Stalin.²⁶ In the case of the prominent Communists accused at the great show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, there is no doubt that the rational, or rationalized, component in their motives included this idea of service to the Party. This theme has been most strikingly and persuasively developed in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and is often taken as the explanation of the public confessions—though Koestler himself makes no such claim and, on the contrary, remarks:

Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins. The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats—and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.²⁷

Koestler’s last point—that the oppositionists felt they had lost the right to judge Stalin—is confirmed in various reports. A non-Communist prisoner notes how “nearly every supporter of the regime, before falling a victim to it, has in his time been involved by it in actions which have conflicted with his political conscience.”²⁸ And he agrees with Koestler on the main issue:

It is true that the interrogation methods, particularly when applied for months or years, are capable of breaking the strongest will. But the decisive factor is something else. It is that the majority of convinced Communists must at all costs preserve their faith in the Soviet Union. To renounce it would be beyond their powers. For great moral strength is required in certain circumstances to renounce one’s long-standing, deep-rooted convictions, even when these turn out to be untenable.²⁹

Koestler’s account is in fact extremely well founded on the facts. For instance, when he describes an attempt to break Rubashov’s morale by dragging a badly tortured prisoner past his cell to execution, he can base this firmly on the evidence.³⁰ Briefly summarized, Rubashov’s surrender is based on a feeling that his own past actions have deprived him of the right to judge Stalin’s, coupled with a feeling of loyalty to the Party and its conception of history; and it is largely a conscious process—the pressure of the interrogation, toothache, and so on merely intensifying his reflection leading up to the decision. In fact, he is shown in court as resisting the temptation not to confess. They key thought in his confession is formulated thus:

‘I know’, Rubashov went on, ‘that my aberration, if carried into effect would have been a mortal danger to the Revolution. Every opposition at the critical turning-points of history, carries in itself the germ of a split in the Party, and hence the germ of civil war. Humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy, when the masses are not mature, is suicide for the Revolution. And yet my oppositional attitude was based on a craving for just these methods—in appearance so desirable, actually so deadly. On a demand for a liberal reform of the dictatorship, for a broader democracy, for the abolition of the Terror, and a loosening of the rigid organization of the Party. I admit that these demands, in the present situation, are objectively harmful and therefore counter-revolutionary in character…³¹

We have here, though in more extreme form, that extravagant identification with Party which is to be found in Bukharin’s private utterances before his arrest and in Pyatakov’s 1928 outburst. Bukharin was to say publicly in his last plea,

For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while I was in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?’—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented…. And when you ask yourself, ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for?’ Isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life.³²

Koestler does not, as we have noted, put forward his account as a general theory of the motivation of confessions. He is simply giving an account of one presumable mechanism: and it is clear from much that has been written since that what he describes, or something like it, was genuinely involved in certain cases.

These considerations did not apply to all Party members. Ryutin and his associates were clearly prepared to remove Stalin. And similarly with the confessions. Ivan Smirnov was only induced to make his partial and derisory confession on the grounds that without it he would be shot in secret and his name dragged in the mud by those who had already decided to confess, and by the promise to spare his former wife and his family,³³ while his presence would to some extent check the smears of the Prosecutor. Even so, he is said to have gone to his death remarking that he and the other defendants had behaved despicably.³⁴

And what greater contrast could there be between Pyatakov’s words and those reported of Ter-Vaganyan:

But in order to sign the testimony which is demanded of me, I must be sure first that it is really needed in the interests of the Party and the Revolution….

… You suggest that I do not think and rely blindly on the Central Committee, because the Central Committee sees everything more clearly than I. But the trouble is that by my very nature I am unable to stop thinking. And when I do think, I come to the inescapable conclusion that the assertions that the oldest Bolsheviks have turned into a gang of murderers will bring incalculable harm not only to our country and the Party, but to the cause of Socialism all over the world….

… If now the new program of the Central Committee deems it necessary to discredit Bolshevism and its founders, then I don’t agree with that program and I no longer consider myself bound by Party discipline. And besides, I am already expelled from the Party, and for that reason alone I am not obliged to submit to Party discipline.³⁵

When he was finally persuaded that there was no point in resisting while Zinoviev and Kamenev, greatly senior figures, were going to smear the Party anyhow, and he was advised by the interrogator Boris Berman, with whom he had become friendly, that he might just as well save his own life this way, he gave in. Berman remarked that in this way he hoped, after years had passed, to see Ter-Vaganyan rehabilitated and given an important post. Ter-Vaganyan is said to have replied,

I have not the slightest desire to be in a high post. If my party, for which I lived, and for which I was ready to die any minute, forced me to sign this, then I don’t want to be in the Party. Today I envy the most ignorant non-Party man.³⁶

And yet Ter-Vaganyan was one of those who gave in. We can be sure that similar views, even more strongly held, determined the attitudes of men who could not be broken. Kuklin is reported in prison as saying that “all was lost” as far as the Party and the Revolution were concerned, and a new start would be necessary.³⁷

The argument that Party-style thinking, the idea of Party discipline, is the main explanation for the public confessions has one obvious objection. This logic, if it existed, was as formally true at the moment of arrest as it was later. We have seen how Safonova took it to be her Party duty to confess and to try to persuade Smirnov to confess. Similarly with other recent Soviet accounts. For example, one such tells, as illustrative, of another old Party member: “The interrogator asked him whether he considered himself a Bolshevik and, receiving an affirmative answer, continued: ‘Well, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.’ To this the former member of the Supreme Court replied: ‘If the party demands it, I confess.’”³⁸ Yet in most cases the accused resisted for a longer or shorter period. Why was the idea of Party discipline convincing to Muralov in December 1936, when for eight months previously he had found it unconvincing? Why did Bukharin resist for three months?

Bukharin, indeed, gave an answer at his trial: cut off and exposed, removed from the Party, with nothing to live for, he started a reexamination of his thoughts, a reevaluation which led him to surrender. If it comes to that, Boguslavsky went through the whole process in eight days, during which “owing to my arrest, I recovered my balance and I was able to bring my still largely, if not utterly, criminal ideas in order”³⁹—which, though expressed suitably to the trial, amounts to the same thing.

Thus it is not the case that good Communists automatically obeyed when told “The Party needs your evidence”; they did so after a varying length of imprisonment and interrogation. Even Bukharin himself (who is supposed to have been the main follower of this line) did not after all produce a confession wholly in accord with the prosecution’s wishes, but chose to speak in such a way that anyone of any sense could see that the charges were false. And we have already noted that when Kaganovich, one of the keenest supporters of the Purge, himself fell from power, he omitted to suggest that the Party’s image would be best served by bringing him to trial and blackening him as a spy, terrorist, and saboteur and shooting him amid public execration. On the contrary, he rang up Khrushchev and begged him “not to allow them to deal with me as they dealt with people under Stalin”⁴⁰—a grave dereliction from the point of view of service to the Party. Clearly, without denying that in many cases the idea of being useful to the Party was a component of the intellectual and psychological conditions of surrender, we can at least say that it took effect in combination with a good many other pressures.

It is obvious enough that the oppositionists did not expect just fair treatment and political persuasion. Tomsky’s suicide the day he heard of the charges against him is enough to show that, and his was not the only one. The political argument about service to the Party can, in fact, be seen as a component in some cases (but not all) of a larger system of physical, intellectual, and moral pressures. In a case like Kamenev’s, where the argument about the Party’s interests was combined with exhausting interrogation, heat, lack of food, threats to his family, and promises of his life, we can hardly expect to decide which played the most important part.

For having gone into the habits of mind of the oppositionists who confessed, there are two major qualifications to add. First, as we have seen, not all the Communists held the ideas of Party unity and of self-abasement in the way that Zinoviev and Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov did; and from them it was often impossible to obtain public confessions. We are told that Syrtsov (interrogated by the dreadful Vlodzimirsky) “signed nothing” and that the same was true of Uglanov, Preobrazhensky, Shlyapnikov, Smilga, and others.⁴¹ And, second, public confessions were produced from non-Communists: the doctors in the 1938 Trial, most of the Polish underground leaders in 1945, the Bulgarian Protestant pastors in 1949. The motivations just described were of primary importance in the whole great cycle of party submission to Stalin, but in the trials themselves they were neither necessary nor sufficient causes of the particular surrender involved in public confession. In a number of the most important cases, they predisposed the leading accused to giving in to the pressures put on them, and they provided the rationale of the confessions made. But it was by the merely technical action of the NKVD interrogation system that these and other predisposing factors were brought to the full fruition of the scenes in the October Hall.

TORTURE

When it came to explaining how the confessions had been obtained, the first thought of hostile critics was torture. Indeed, Khrushchev was to remark in 1956,

How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, depriving him of his judgment, taking away his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired.⁴²

The interrogation of the accused in the 1938 Trial was started with a laconic memo from NKVD Deputy People’s Commissar Frinovsky: “I authorize transfer to the Lefortovo. Beating permitted.”⁴³ And it is clear that Krestinsky, for example, was severely tortured.⁴⁴

Physical torture had, of course, been in use since the early days of the regime. There are many reports of police brutality in the early 1930s: in Rostov, prisoners were hit in the stomach with a sandbag; this was sometimes fatal. A doctor would certify that a prisoner who had died of it had suffered from a malign tumor.⁴⁵ Another interrogation method was the stoika. It consisted of standing a prisoner against a wall on tiptoe and making him hold that position for several hours. A day or two of this was said to be enough to break almost anyone.⁴⁶

Other “improvised” torture methods included the “swallow,” which involved tying the hands and feet behind the back and hoisting the victim into the air.⁴⁷ One prisoner describes having her fingers slammed in a door.⁴⁸ Beating up was usual. Interrogators sometimes had to hand over prisoners to special heavily built thugs known to the prisoners as “boxers,” who would carry this out.⁴⁹ Nor was this done only with peasants and socially hostile elements: a colonel, later restored to the Party, reports being badly beaten up by the NKVD in 1935.⁵⁰ There are many accounts of women being beaten.⁵¹ In general, the provincial interrogators were the more brutal. A Red Army Choir accordionist had both legs broken at Khabarovsk;⁵² toenails were torn out at Baku; genitals beaten at Ashkhabad .⁵³

All this was, in a sense, “unofficial.” In most prisons, physical torture remained so. Needles, pincers, and so on are sporadically reported, and more specialized implements seem to have been in use at the Lefortovo.⁵⁴ But on the whole, some appearance of spontaneity was maintained. Feet and fingers were stamped on. Broken-off chair legs were the usual weapon for beatings, which were sometimes distinguished from “torture.” But as one very experienced prisoner says, this distinction was rather absurd when a man came back after such a beating with broken ribs, urinating blood for a week, or with a permanently injured spine and unable to walk.⁵⁵

Physical torture, though not uncommon, had been contrary to regulations until 1937. Then it suddenly became the usual method of interrogation, at least in the bulk of cases at the lower level. The time of the Zinoviev Trial saw the first official, though secret, permission to use “any method” put out on 29 July 1936.⁵⁶ Early in the following year, an authorization from the “Central Committee’

is, Stalin—was given to the NKVD. It was only on 20 January 1939 that a coded telegram formally confirming the system was circulated to the secretaries of Provincial Committees and Republican Central Committees of the Party, and the heads of NKVD organizations:

The Party Central Committee explains that application of methods of physical pressure in NKVD practice is permissible from 1937 on, in accordance with permission of the Party Central Committee…. It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services use methods of physical influence against the representatives of the socialist proletariat and that they use them in their most scandalous forms. The question arises as to why the socialist intelligence service should be more humanitarian against the mad agents of the bourgeoisie, against the deadly enemies of the working class and of the collective farm workers. The Party Central Committee considers that physical pressure should still be used obligatorily, as an exception applicable to known and obstinate enemies of the people, as a method both justifiable and appropriate.⁵⁷

This instruction has all the signs of being written by Stalin himself. He was, in fact, a great believer in “physical methods.” Khrushchev tells of his orders to “beat, beat and beat again” the accused in the 1952 Doctors’ Plot. A recent Soviet article quotes from the archives a written note of his to Yezhov, when the old Bolshevik Beloborodov was giving unsatisfactory testimony: “Can’t this gentleman be made to tell of his dirty deeds? Where is he—in a prison or a hotel?”⁵⁸

A Soviet general describes his fate under this system:

I accidentally found out that my fiend of an interrogator’s name was Stolbunsky. I don’t know where he is now. If he is still alive I hope he will read these lines and feel my contempt for him, not only now but when I was in his hands. But I think he knew this well enough. Apart from him, two brawny torturers took part in the interrogation. Even now my ears ring with the sound of Stolbunsky’s evil voice hissing “You’ll sign, you’ll sign!” as I was carried out, weak and covered in blood. I withstood the torture during the second bout of interrogation, but when the third started, how I longed to be able to die!⁵⁹

He adds that every one of his cell mates had confessed to imaginary crimes: “Some had done this after physical coercion and others after having been terrified by accounts of the tortures used.” Another report, by an Old Bolshevik, says that only 4 of the 400-odd cell mates he met in prison had failed to confess; and the critic Ivanov-Razumnik similarly writes that in his years in jail in Moscow and Leningrad only 12 of his 1,000-odd cell mates had held out.⁶⁰ In most cases, the threat of further torture was enough to prevent retraction.

Various forms of humiliation were often especially effective on men weakened by torture. An army officer who withstood beating finally broke when the interrogator pushed his head into a spittoon brimful of spittle. Another gave way when an interrogator urinated on his head—an interrogation practice which according to reports became traditional.⁶¹

Moreover, when it came to those tried in open court, “the defendants were warned that the tortures would be continued after the trial if they did not give the necessary testimony.”⁶² The presence of their interrogators, who sat in front of them in court, would reinforce this.⁶³

And, of course, confessions obtained by torture were useful in bringing pressure to bear on other victims. When Bukharin’s first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was interrogated, her brother Mikhail was among the members of the family who were tortured to give evidence against the others and her. A recent Soviet article gives a horrifying account of his withdrawing his evidence, and then, after further interrogation, confirming it again. The article quotes another former prisoner, a woman who, asking “How could a brother give evidence against a sister?” answered that a Comintern worker in her cell came back from interrogation one day, complaining bitterly that a close comrade had incriminated her; the examiners had shown her the testimony in his own handwriting. Soon afterward, she returned from a further session. This time she cried, “How could I? How could I? Today I had a confrontation with him and I saw not a man, but live raw meat.”⁶⁴

Yet in spite of Khrushchev’s comment, torture is not a complete explanation when it comes to the public confessions of the oppositionists. We should record its extent, and its overwhelmingly powerful effects throughout the period. But critics were right in saying that torture alone could probably not have produced the public self-humiliation of a whole series of Stalin’s enemies, when returned to health and given a platform.

We shall see, in fact, that some accused withdrew in closed court confessions obtained by torture. Others “insisted even in the preliminary investigation or in court that their statements charging violations of socialist legality be entered in the examination record.”⁶⁵

THE “CONVEYOR”

When there was time, the basic NKVD method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the “conveyor”—continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? No absolutely precise answer could be given.

But at any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was “as painful as any torture.”⁶⁶ In fact, we are told, though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough. One week is reported as enough to break almost anybody.⁶⁷ A description by a Soviet woman writer who experienced it speaks of seven days without sleep or food, the seventh standing up—ending in physical collapse. This was followed by a five-day interrogation of a milder type, in which she was allowed three hours’ rest in her cell, though sleep was still forbidden.⁶⁸

The conveyor and torture were not, of course, mutually exclusive. Recent Soviet accounts describe the actions of V. Boyarsky, still alive and in a post in a scientific commission. In the late 1930s, he served as interrogator in Northern Ossetia, where he “falsified accusations against 103 people, of whom 51 were shot and the remainder sent to camps, where most of them died.” On one occasion, he interrogated a woman schoolteacher, Fatimat Agnayeva, for eight days—and then had her hung by her hair to a bracket on the wall, where she died.⁶⁹

There is nothing new about the conveyor method. It was used on witches in Scotland. The philosopher Campanella, who withstood all other tortures during his interrogation in the sixteenth century, succumbed to lack of sleep. Hallucinations occur. Flies buzz about. Smoke seems to rise before the prisoner’s eyes, and so on.

Beck and Godin report a case in which interrogation lasted without any break for eleven days, during the last four of which the prisoner had to stand. Towards the end of even lesser periods, prisoners collapsed about every twenty minutes and had to be brought round with cold water or slaps.⁷⁰ Sitting on a stool for fourteen hours is, according to one victim, more painful than standing against a wall, where you can at least shift your weight from one foot to the other. The groin swells, and violent pains set in.

In Weissberg’s account of his interrogation, he mentions that on one occasion he was questioned for eighteen hours, and then left locked in the washroom, where the floor was under water.⁷¹ He was, however, able to lie down on a foot-rack. After fourteen hours, he was called out for a brief interrogation and sent back to find that the rack had been removed, so that he had to stand in an inch or so of water for forty hours, until the next interrogation. Later, he was beaten up, under the new practice, but was then returned to the conveyor. A “technical improvement” had been made in that the seat had been taken out of the chair, and it was extremely painful, even briefly.⁷²

There are very few accounts of successful resistance to the conveyor. One is of a fifty-five-year-old anarchist, Eisenberg, who on being called a counter-revolutionary refused to answer any more questions. Beating up had no effect on him, and he survived a conveyor lasting for thirty-one days—an extraordinary record. Examination by a doctor showed that though he was physically very sound, there was something abnormal about his imperviousness to pain. He is supposed to have been sent to a lunatic asylum.⁷³ Weissberg himself held out for seven days, helped by a brief interruption, but finally confessed. After a day’s rest, he withdrew the confession. Interrogation started again. This time he gave way on the fourth day, having already told the examiners that every confession he made he would withdraw when he recovered. The third conveyor session ended on the fifth day without his signing a fresh confession, though by now the interrogators had two “documents.”

And here we have the defect of the “conveyor.” Although it was almost always successful, and usually in two to three days, it has no essential advantage over torture proper (with which it was often combined), since the confessions it produced could be withdrawn.

THE LONG INTERROGATION

The interrogation system which broke down many prisoners to the extent of maintaining their confessions at public trial was conceived on rather different lines. It aimed at a more gradual, but more complete, destruction of the will to resist. With intellectuals and politicians, the process often lasted a long time—some (with interruptions) up to two and a half years. The average is thought to have been about four or five months.⁷⁴

Throughout the period the prisoner was kept with inadequate sleep, in cells either too hot or (most usually) too cold, on insufficient though attractively prepared food. The Spanish Communist general El Campesino speaks of three and a half ounces of black bread and some soup “served beautifully and tastily” twice a day,⁷⁵ with results such as scurvy, which must be taken as planned. Physical exhaustion produces increased liability to psychological disorders, a well-established phenomenon noted in the Second World War in, for example, boats’ crews who had drifted for a long time; even persons whose stability was such that they were not likely to break down under the most difficult situations frequently then succumbed.

Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused—often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect. There was a continual emphasis on the absolute powerlessness of the victim. The interrogators—or so it usually seemed—could go on indefinitely. Thus the struggle seemed a losing one. The continual repetition of a series of questions is also invariably reported to disorient both semantically and as regards the recollection or interpretation of facts. And there was a total lack of privacy.

A Pole, Z. Stypulkowski, who experienced the whole process in 1945 describes it:

… Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and by sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above freezing point make him tremble all the time. During the night I had only one blanket.

… After two or three weeks, I was in a semi-conscious state. After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton—his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state he is often convinced he is guilty.⁷⁶

He estimated that most of his fellow accused had reached this condition between the fortieth and seventieth interrogations. International considerations made it necessary to bring the Polish underground leaders to trial before Stypulkowski (alone among the accused) was ready to confess. We have also had the evidence of men who made a full confession: Artur London⁷⁷ and, more revealingly, Evzen Loebl, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Czechoslovak Slansky Trial in 1952.

Loebl mentions other prisoners being beaten, having their genitals crushed, being put into ice-cold water, and having their heads wrapped in wet cold cloth, which, when it dried, shrank and caused “unbearable pain.” But (unlike London) he was not tortured himself and confirms that torture was inadequate for the preparation of the victim of a set-piece trial, when “the whole of the person had to be ‘broken.’ “He describes having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes, upon which he had to jump to attention and report, “Detainee No. 1473 reports: strength one detainee, everything in order.” He was, that is, “awakened thirty or forty times a night.” If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture. He says that the worst pain came in his legs when he lay down. He was taken six or seven times to what he was led to believe would be his execution; he did not mind it at the time, but the reaction afterwards affected him badly. Like others in various Eastern European trials, he is convinced that he was given drugs. But if so, this was a late refinement and does not appear in reports of prewar interrogations in Russia. (Loebl notes, incidentally, that the doctor’s brutality was even greater than that of the interrogators.) He finally reached the stage where it did not occur to him to repudiate his confession. Having confessed, he was allowed books, adequate food, and rest, but he had (as he puts it) been deprived of his ego: “I was quite a normal person—only I was no longer a person.”⁷⁸

A manual for NKVD workers was written on orders from Yezhov by three of the most notorious inquisitors—Vlodzimirsky, Ushakov, and Shvartsman—and approved by Beria after Yezhov’s fall. It contained no overt call for torture; but a few quotations from it, given recently in the Soviet press, are worth recording:

… investigations at the NKVD are carried out according to the Code of Criminal Procedure. But the grounds for initiating a criminal case are somewhat broader.

… the accused must not be allowed to get the better of you…. During the investigation the accused must be kept strictly in line.

… Failure to confirm the evidence [already obtained] is indicative of poor work by the interrogators.⁷⁹

There is no doubt that not only nonpolitical defendants, but even strong political opponents can be broken by the “Yezhov method.” In this connection the statements of the Bulgarian Protestant pastors in their February 1949 Trial are the most relevant, since no one could possibly argue that loyalty to Party or creed induced them. In their confessions, they all remarked that they now saw Communist rule of their country “in a new light.” In their final pleas, Pastor Naumov thanked the police for their “kindness and consideration” and said, “I have sinned against my people and against the whole world. This is my resurrection”; Pastor Diapkov was in tears as he admitted his guilt and said, “Do not make of me a useless martyr by giving me the death sentence. Help me to become a useful citizen and a hero of the Fatherland Front”; Pastor Bezlov, who had earlier stated that he had read 12,000 pages of Marxist literature while in prison and that this had entirely changed his outlook, declared, “I have now an intellectual appreciation of what the new life means and I want to play my part in it.”fn2

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 26 October 1953, Dr. Mayo drew attention to the parallel between the similar treatment of the American prisoners of war in Korea to obtain confessions of “germ warfare” and the work of Pavlov in establishing conditioned reflexes in dogs. Soviet psychologists and physiologists always treated Pavlov as the basis of their work, and his method of associating stimuli to provide an automatic response accords with the reduction of prisoners to the point at which they associate survival with the single response of accepting what their captors tell them. In a human being, this involves considerable degradation. An animal’s response—at least to situations which it recognizes (the only ones it can cope with)—is in principle unconditional and without discrimination. Man’s higher status consists precisely in his ability to distinguish and discriminate. To put it another way, among men it is only the psychotic who gives an unconditional reaction to a stimulus.

But a man, even in this state, is not an animal. He needs at least the appearance of rational motives. In the case of Communists, as we have seen, this was ready to hand in their Party principles: a survivor of the 1949 purges in Hungary describes how Laszlo Rajk, after severe torture, regarded service to the Party as a “Golden Bridge” back to his self-respect.⁸⁰ There were other pressures.

HOSTAGES

There is no doubt that threats to the family—the use, that is, of hostages for good behavior—was one of the most powerful of all Stalin’s safeguards. It seems a general rule that with confessions by prominent figures, members of the family were in the power of the NKVD. Bukharin, Rykov, and Zinoviev all had children of whom they were very fond, whereas at least some of those tried in private, such as Karakhan, did not. Several of the accused in their final pleas referred to their children—for example, Kamenev and Rosengolts.

Engineers under arrest as early as 1930 had been threatened with reprisals against their wives and children.⁸¹ And the decree of 7 April 1935, which extended full adult penalties down to children of twelve, was a terrible threat to those oppositionists with children. If Stalin could openly and publicly declare such an atrocity, they could be sure that he would not hesitate to apply the death penalty secretly to their own children in cases where he thought it would bring him advantage. According to Orlov, it became regular practice, on Yezhov’s orders, for interrogators to have a copy of the decree on their desks.⁸² We are also told that fear of reprisals was made more dramatic and emotionally effective by the display on the interrogator’s desk of private belongings of members of the family.⁸³ Even if accepted and allowed for on the conscious level, this must have been a continual argument in the unconscious in favor of surrender.

The use of relatives as hostages, and their imprisonment or execution in other cases, was a new development in Russian history. In Tsarist times, revolutionaries never had this problem. Here again, Stalin recognized no limits. Moreover, it was not merely a matter of threats to relatives’ lives: “They tortured husbands in front of wives and vice versa.” Again, Roy Medvedev tells us that Kossior stood up under torture, and was only broken when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought to the interrogation room and raped in front of him.⁸⁴

On the other side of the coin, it was suggested, even at the time, that there was something about the confessions which was specifically Russian. The Dostoievsky-style habit of self-abasement was much spoken of. Bukharin denied that the ame slave had any bearing on the confessions. He was himself a more intellectual and in a sense more Westernized character than many of the leaders. But in any case, these adumbrations of national psychology are very vague and in themselves unconvincing. It is not surprising that at the time people faced with the extraordinary phenomenon of the confessions should have sought out extraordinary explanations. Nevertheless, like any other, the Russian culture has its own characteristics, affecting the attitudes of all those brought up in it. We can hardly quite exclude some effect of a tradition of self-immolation (even though the Russian tradition also contains famous examples of most outright defiance or authority, as with Archpriest Avvakum, who spat in the face of the Tsar).

Another powerful motive was that of self-preservation. This is a paradox which confused observers in the West, and still confuses some. By the full and sometimes abject confession of capital crimes, it appeared that the defendants were actively seeking the death sentence, which, they themselves sometimes said, they fully deserved. The reality was different. The absolutely certain way for a defendant to get himself shot was to refuse to plead guilty. He would then not go before an open court at all, but either perish under the rigors of the preliminary investigation, or be shot, like Rudzutak, after a twenty-minute closed trial. The logic of Stalin’s courts was different from what is customary elsewhere. The only chance of avoiding death was to admit to everything, and to put the worst possible construction on all one’s activities. It is true that even this seldom saved a man’s life. But it did sometimes, for a while—as in the cases of Radek, Sokolnikov, and Rakovsky. At the August 1936 Trial, moreover, the defendants had actually been promised their lives and had reasonable expectation that the promise would be fulfilled. The same promise was evidently made to Pyatakov and others in the second trial. It must have lost a good deal of its efficacy; yet, even then, it represented the only possible hope. Besides, on the face of it, the Pyatakov situation was different. While Zinoviev and Kamenev had continued in effect to oppose the Stalin leadership, and had long since been excluded from decent Party society, Pyatakov had been of the greatest service to the dictator and had been admitted by him to his latest Central Committee. He was, in addition, under the apparently powerful protection of Ordzhonikidze. And a little hope goes a long way. Promises that confessions in court would save their lives continued to be made to various groups of accused—for example, the generals in the Tukhachevsky Case.⁸⁵

As to Communist motives proper, the Party and the old opposition had already been smeared beyond relief. Even for a man like Sokolnikov, it may have appeared that no action he could take could affect the issue one way or the other, and that the only consideration left was to attempt to save his family. So much more admirable, then, is the sense of truth and personal courage shown by men like Ryutin, who even under the pressure of such arguments seem to have “died in silence.” For when everything is said of the pressures for confession, it is remarkable how many did not give way or—if they did—were not trusted to maintain their confessions in court. Nonconfessors were a special breed. Koestler analyses his friend Alexander Weissberg:

What enabled him to hold out where others broke down was a special mixture of just those character traits which survival in such a situation requires. A great physical and mental resilience—that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental. An extraordinary presence of mind…. A certain thick-skinnedness and good-natured insensitivity, coupled with an almost entirely extroverted disposition--notice the absence in Dr. Weissberg’s book of any contemplative passage, of any trace of religious or mystic experience which is otherwise almost inevitably present in solitary confinement. An irresponsible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising situations; that ‘it can’t happen to me’ attitude, which is the most reliable source of courage; and an inexhaustible sense of humour. Finally, that relentless manner of persisting in an argument and continuing it for hours, days or weeks, which I mentioned before. It drove his inquisitors nuts, as it sometimes had his friends.⁸⁶

Similar attitudes can be seen in other known nonconfessors—for example, the Spaniard El Campesino. We can trace the tough temperaments elsewhere. In Pervouralsk, in 1938, the chief construction engineer at the Novo-Trubi Plant, who had been in prison for thirteen months, “little more than a skeleton in rags” and with patches of blood and bruises all over him, was interrogated by the local NKVD chief, Parshin. He was accused of having put wooden roofs over furnaces, which might well have caught fire. He continued to explain that though the roofs should have been made of iron, a Government order signed by Ordzhonikidze had ordered wood because of the iron shortage. To several similar questions, he answered in the same way.⁸⁷ Similar accounts are given all through the literature, though they are always treated as most exceptional; as we have noted, only about one in a hundred failed to confess.⁸⁸

It is significant that many oppositionists who had repudiated the Bukharin view of Party discipline in the early 1930s did not come to trial. Stalin must have wanted Ryutin in the dock, but he did not get him. The same no doubt applies to Uglanov, Syrtsov, A. P. Smimov, and the others who tried to organize resistance while the Right leaders were counseling patience. The absence in their make-ups of the Party fetishism noted in Bukharin, Zinoviev, and most of the other public confessors must be a factor. It is fairly clear that neither the pressures nor the arguments were enough to break many or, in other cases, to keep them broken. (Just as a number of prominent accused were not brought to trial with Slansky in Prague because they “would not behave in court,” of fifty or sixty leading functionaries available, only fourteen were used.)⁸⁹

According to most reports, there were several hundred candidates for the Moscow Trials, but only about seventy actually came into court. Of those named for complicity in the Zinoviev Trial, sixteen appeared at the time, three committed suicide, and seven were tried later. Forty-three others were never brought to trial and so never made public confessions. (They included men as prominent as Uglanov, Shlyapnikov, and Smilga. At least twenty-two of them must have been dropped at a fairly late stage. For the dossiers quoted from the preliminary investigation are numbered intermittently from 1 to 38.)

In the Pyatakov Trial, where dossiers ran from 1 to 36, there are nineteen missing. The leading figures have the low numbers: Pyatakov, 1; Radek, 5; Sokolnikov, 8; Drobnis, 13. Serebryakov and Muralov do not happen to be quoted; but even inserting their names, there are clearly missing volumes, and the presumption is that they existed and covered figures at this political level not brought to trial. This presumably includes those shot in secret a couple of weeks earlier, among them Ryutin and Smilga.

THE IDEA OF CONFESSION

The question naturally arises, not only why the accused made the confessions, but also why the prosecution wanted them. In the public trials, indeed, as Radek pointed out in the dock, there was no other evidence. A case in which there was no evidence against the accused, who denied the charges, would clearly be rather a weak one by any standards.

In fact, confession is the logical thing to go for when the accused are not guilty and there is no genuine evidence. For in these circumstances, it is difficult to make people appear guilty unless they themselves admit it. And it is easier to stage-manage a trial of this sort if one can be sure that no awkward defendant is going to speak up at unpredictable intervals.

In general, moreover, in the public trials of Zinoviev and the others, the confession method can be easily accounted for. Stalin wanted not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically. It would have been difficult simply to announce the secret execution of Zinoviev. It would have been equally difficult to try him publicly, without any evidence, on charges which he could vigorously and effectively deny.

Even if confessions seem highly implausible, they may have some effect on skeptics, on the principles that there is no smoke without fire and that mud sticks. Even if the confession is disbelieved, a defendant who humbly confesses and admits that his opponents were right is to some extent discredited politically—certainly more than if, publicly, he had put up a stout fight. Even if the confession is disbelieved, it is striking demonstration of the power of the State over its opponents. It is more in accordance with totalitarian ideologies that a defendant should confess, even under duress: it is better discipline and a good example to all ranks. (Those who would not confess properly in court were sometimes provided with posthumous confessions, to keep up the standards, as with the Bulgarian Kostov in 1949.)

These are rational considerations. But it is also clear that the principle of confession in all cases, even from ordinary victims tried in secret, was insisted on. In fact, the major effort of the whole vast police organization throughout the country went into obtaining such confessions. When we read, in cases of no particular importance, and ones never to be made public, of the use of the “conveyor” system tying down team after team of police investigators for days on end, the impression one gets is not simply of vicious cruelty, but of insane preoccupation with a pointless formality. The accused could perfectly well, it seems, have been shot or sentenced without this frightful rigamarole.

But the extraordinary, contorted legalism of the whole operation remained to the end. It would have been possible simply to have deported thousands or millions of people on suspicion. Yet perhaps 100,000 examiners and other officials spent months interrogating and guarding prisoners who did not, during that time, even provide the State with any labor.⁹⁰ One explanation advanced in the prisons was that, apart from a hypocritical wish to preserve the façade, the absence of confessions would have made it much more difficult to find fresh inculpations.

It is also clear that the confession system, involving one single type of evidence, was easier to stereotype down the whole line of investigators than were more substantial methods of faking. When evidence of actual objects was involved, there was often trouble. In the Ukraine, a group of Socialist Revolutionaries confessed to having a secret arms cache, at the instance of an inexperienced interrogator. The first “conspirator” confessed to having put it in charge of another man. The second man, under torture, said that he had passed the weapons on to another member. They went through eleven hands until, after a discussion in his cell, the last consignee was urged to think of someone who had died whom he knew well. He could only remember his former geography master, a completely nonpolitical character who had just died, but maintained that the examiner would never believe him to have been a conspirator. He was finally persuaded that all the examiner wanted was to get rid of the arms somehow, so he made the confession as suggested, and the examiner was so delighted that he gave him a good meal and some tobacco.⁹¹

We may also feel that with the establishment of the confession principle in the public trials, its abandonment with lesser accused might have been taken in NKVD usage as an implied criticism of the trials. The principle had become established that a confession was the best result obtainable. Those who could obtain it were to be considered successful operatives, and a poor NKVD operative had a short life expectancy. Beyond all this, one forms the impression of a determination to break the idea of the truth, to impose on everyone the acceptance of official falsehood. In fact, over and above the rational motives for the extraction of confession, one seems to sense an almost metaphysical preference for it.

As early as 1918, Dzerzhinsky had remarked, of enemies of the Soviet Government, “When confronted with evidence, criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal’s own confession?”⁹² Vyshinsky was the great theorist of confession. He regarded a confession, however obtained, as “in itself grounds for a conviction,” and recommended prosecutors and investigators to make a practice of getting the defendant’s testimony in his own handwriting, as looking more voluntary. He added, “I personally prefer a half confession in the defendant’s own handwriting to a full confession in the investigator’s writing,” thereby, as a recent Soviet legal commentator remarks, “creating the appearance of the ‘voluntary nature’ of this testimony.”⁹³ (One prisoner reports that after several days of bullying and beating to make him sign a confession which he had not read, with the interrogator showing especial rage at his obstinacy, he found himself unable to speak or use his hand, whereupon the interrogator put a pen in his fingers and signed it thus.)⁹⁴

Vyshinsky’s remark is interesting, as showing some awareness on the part of Stalin’s entourage of the basic incredibility likely to attach to confessions. But as to their general desirability, we can note that Vyshinsky was not a man likely to intrude his own prejudices in a matter in which Stalin was deeply concerned. We can take it that basically the idea must have been Stalin’s own. It involved endless thousands of men and women in days and months of mental and physical torment.