The Great Terror

12

THE GREAT TRIAL

Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste.

Pascal

Preparations for the greatest trial of all were in less expert hands than those which had produced the Zinoviev and Pyatakov shows. The NKVD veterans had gone. Agranov had by now followed Yagoda and his staff, being “in 1937 expelled from the Party for systematic breaches of socialist legality,”¹ or so a later Soviet footnote has it, as if asking us to believe that such practices were frowned on by the Party leadership of that year. He died, presumed shot, in 1938.² His wife was also shot.³

Instead of Molchanov and Mironov, Agranov and Gay, Yezhov’s team for the 1938 Trial consisted basically of the experienced Zakovsky, promoted from Leningrad; Mikhail Frinovsky, who under Yagoda had been Commander of the NKVD’s Frontier Troops; I. I. Shapiro, Head of Yezhov’s Secretariat and of the new Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases; and to some extent Slut-sky of the Foreign Department.⁴ They were all themselves to perish, but meanwhile they had after all contrived a show not grossly inferior to its two predecessors. The plot was more complicated, and more horrifying, and there were faults of detail which attracted the censure of the stricter critics. But on the whole, it was a fair success.

It might be thought (as we have said) that no public trial was now necessary. The opposition and the semi-independent voices among Stalin’s own supporters had been crushed. The third trial was in this sense little more than a victory parade. It brought together publicly every type of opposition, terror, sabotage, treachery, and espionage, and turned them into branches of one single great conspiracy. For the 1936 Trial, Molchanov had prepared for Stalin “a special diagram … a system of many colored lines on the diagram indicated when and through whom Trotsky had communicated with the leaders of the conspiracy in the U.S.S.R.”⁵ Such a diagram showing all the links in the Bukharin Case would be one of great complexity. The trial, which opened in the October Hall on 2 March 1938, had, indeed, taken over a year to prepare, but it was a production of far greater scope than the others.

For all the threads were now pulled together. The Rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, were linked to Trotsky; to the earlier Zinovievite and Trotskyite plotters; to Trotskyites, hitherto considered ex-Trotskyites, who had not yet been tried; to the usual dozens of terrorist action groups; to the espionage organizations of several powers. They had set up at least two “reserve” centers; they had been involved in Yenukidze’s plots; and they were closely concerned with that of Tukhachevsky. They had formed organizational connections with underground nationalist conspirators in half a dozen of the non-Russian Soviet Republics. Their own “Rightist” grouping had involved dozens of men thought to be loyal Stalinists, in high positions in the State. And, as a final touch, they had throughout had as a major accomplice Yagoda, with all his leading subordinates.

As Vladimir Voinovich comments of the shorthand report of the Trial in The Ivankiad:

Don’t regard it as a document, for it is not a document; don’t think about methods of investigation, about why Krestinsky first offered one story, then another. Regard it as a work of art. And you will agree that you’ve never read anything like it in all of world literature. What well-defined characters! What a grandiose plot, and how cohesive and integrated everything was. It’s just too bad that the characters were living people, otherwise you might be able to stand reading it.⁶

“In the dingy winter daylight and under the stale glare of the electric lamps,”⁷ a wide variety of prisoners sat in the dock. In the first trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to a lesser extent Smirnov and Evdokimov, were the only well-known figures. The second, with Pyatakov, Radek, and Sokolnikov, was less impressive still. And in each case, the supporting cast consisted mainly of third-rate alleged terrorists and only slightly more interesting engineers.

This time, three members of Lenin’s Politburo stood in the dock—Bukharin, Rykov, and Krestinsky. With them were the legendary Rakovsky, leader of the Balkan and Ukrainian revolutionary movements, and the sinister figure of Yagoda, the Secret Police personified, looking right and left with a certain rat-like vitality. A group of the most senior officials of the Stalinist state who had for many years served it uncritically formed the bulk of the accused: Rosengolts, Ivanov, Chernov, and Grinko—all People’s Commissars until the previous year; Zelensky, Head of the Cooperatives; and Sharangovich, First Secretary in Byelorussia. For the first time, two Asians, the Uzbek leaders Khodzhayev and Ikramov, denounced the previous year for bourgeois nationalism, took their places beside the European accused. These main political accused were supplemented by five minor figures: Bessonov, who had worked in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin; Zubarev, an official of the Agriculture Commissariat; and the former secretaries of Yagoda, of Kuibyshev, and of Maxim Gorky. Last, by a fearful innovation, there were three men far from public life, the doctors Pletnev, Levin, and Kazakov—the first two highly distinguished in their field and the oldest men in dock (sixty-six and sixty-eight, respectively).

The indictment was a comprehensive one—of espionage, wrecking, undermining Soviet military power, provoking a military attack on the USSR, plotting the dismemberment of the USSR, and overthrowing the social system in favor of a return to capitalism. For these purposes, the accused had assembled this vast conspiracy of Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and “bourgeois nationalists” from the whole Soviet periphery. They had been in close cooperation with the military plotters. A number of them had been spies of Germany, Britain, Japan, and Poland since the early 1920s. Several of them had been Tsarist agents in the revolutionary movement. Wrecking had been committed in industry, agriculture, trade, and finance.

On the terror side, they had been responsible for the assassination of Kirov, which Yagoda had facilitated through Zaporozhets. But in addition, they had caused the deaths of Kuibyshev and of Maxim Gorky, hitherto regarded as natural (and of the former OGPU chief, Menzhinsky, and of Gorky’s son Peshkov into the bargain). This had been done by medical murder. Yagoda was also charged with an attempt to poison Yezhov. And a variety of the more usual fruitless plans to assassinate Stalin and other leaders were also alleged.

A brand-new charge, against Bukharin alone of those in dock, was of having plotted to seize power in 1918 and to murder Lenin and Stalin at the same time.

We are now told that when, “thirteen months later,” Frinovsky was himself interrogated, he recounted how he had “prepared” witnesses in this trial, and then brought them before Yezhov, who warned them not to change their stories in the public trial; if at any point before then they retracted, they were returned to interrogation. (But this 1939 confession by Frinovsky was not thought to necessitate any revising of the 1938 verdict.)⁸ We also learn that rehearsals were held, and a recent Soviet document tells us how “Yezhov more than once talked with Rykov, Bukharin, Bulanov, and assured each of them that they would not be shot.” To Bukharin, he said, “Conduct yourself well in the trial—I will promise you they will not shoot you.”⁹

Once again Ulrikh presided, assisted by Matulevich and a new junior figure, Yevlev. And once again, Vyshinsky conducted the prosecution. Only the three doctors had defense counsel, and they were represented by two of the same lawyers who had done their bit for the prosecution in the same roles in the Pyatakov Trial.

A CONFESSION WITHDRAWN

The first sensation of the trial came almost at once, when the accused were asked their pleas. These were all the usual “guilty,” until Krestinsky was reached.

Krestinsky, “a pale, seedy, dim little figure, his steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his beaky nose,”¹⁰ replied firmly to Ulrikh:

I plead not guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, of whose existence I was not aware. Nor have I committed any of the crimes with which I personally am charged, in particular I plead not guilty to the charge of having had connections with the German intelligence service.

The President:

Do you corroborate the confession you made at the preliminary investigation?

Krestinsky:

Yes, at the preliminary investigation I confessed, but I have never been a Trotskyite.

The President:

I repeat the question, do you plead guilty?

Krestinsky:

Before my arrest I was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (bolsheviks) and I remain one now.

The President:

Do you plead guilty to the charge of participating in espionage activities and of participating in terrorist activities?

Krestinsky:

I have never been a Trotskyite. I have never belonged to the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites and have not committed a single crime.

¹¹

After the pleas, the court recessed for twenty minutes. It has been suggested that this was to give time to put a little pressure on Krestinsky. Probably; but the recess was only five minutes longer than that at the previous trials.

The court proceeded with the examination of Bessonov, who from his post as Counselor in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin was the alleged contact man with Trotsky and Sedov. Bessonov, a grim, gray-faced man with the air of an automaton,¹² had been arrested on 28 February 1937, the day after Bukharin and Rykov. He had denied the main charges until 30 December 1937, when a combination of torture and the conveyor finally broke him.¹³ But meanwhile, he had been tried on 13 August before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court (“composed of almost the same people as in the present Trial”),¹⁴ which neither acquitted nor condemned him, but sent the case for further examination.

This can hardly mean other than that it had been decided to save him for a major trial: as a minor diplomat, and ex-Socialist Revolutionary, he was bound to be purged in any case. He must have appeared a suitable courier. The case is comparable with that of the Komsomols of 1935, saved for the Zinoviev Trial.

When Bessonov now confessed that he had indeed been involved in Trotskyite plots with Krestinsky, Vyshinsky referred to Krestinsky’s refusal to admit this. Bessonov smiled. Vyshinsky asked, “Why are you smiling?” Bessonov replied, “The reason why I am standing here is that Nikolai Nikolayevich Krestinsky named me as the liaison man with Trotsky. Besides him and Pyatakov nobody knew about this.”¹⁵ Something of the mechanics of confessions implicating others, and of the whole tangled net of moral responsibility, comes through. In his final plea, Bessonov was to remark that it was not until Krestinsky implicated him in October 1937 that his resistance to interrogation started to become hopeless.¹⁶

In general, after Bessonov had made a few points about connections with Sedov and Pyatakov, his examination was largely turned into an excuse for baiting Krestinsky. The latter admitted he had met Bessonov in the West, but denied any Trotskyite links:

Vyshinsky:

And about Trotskyite affairs?

Krestinsky:

We did not talk about them. I was not a Trotskyite.

Vyshinsky:

You never talked about them.

Krestinsky:

Never.

Vyshinsky:

That means that Bessonov is not telling the truth, and that you are telling the truth. Do you always tell the truth.

Krestinsky:

No.

Vyshinsky:

Not always. Accused Krestinsky, you and I will have to examine serious matters and there is no need to get excited. Consequently, Bessonov is not telling the truth?

Krestinsky:

No.

Vyshinsky:

But you too do not always tell the truth. Is that not so?

Krestinsky:

I did not always tell the truth during the investigation.

Vyshinsky:

But at other times you always tell the truth?

Krestinsky:

The truth.

Vyshinsky:

Why this lack of respect for the investigation, why during the investigation did you tell untruths? Explain.

Krestinsky:

(No reply.)

¹⁷

A few minutes later, Bessonov spoke of Krestinsky’s formulations. Vyshinsky interrupted in an unpleasant tone, “Briefly, because I think that Krestinsky will himself talk about these purposes later.” And, after Bessonov had made his point, Vyshinsky turned to Krestinsky and asked, “Accused Krestinsky, do you recall such diplomatic conversations with Bessonov?” Krestinsky answered firmly, “No, we never had such conversations.”¹⁸

Two minutes later, it was:

Vyshinsky:

You do not remember the details, but Bessonov does.

Krestinsky:

There was not a word said about the Trotskyite stand.

¹⁹

Finally, the question of Krestinsky’s confession was faced directly:

Vyshinsky:

But what about your admission?

Krestinsky:

During the investigation I gave false testimony several times.

Vyshinsky:

You said, ‘I did not formally belong to the Trotskyite centre.’ Is that true or not?

Krestinsky:

I did not belong to it at all.

Vyshinsky:

You say that formally you did not belong. What is true and what is not true here? Perhaps it is all true, or it is all untrue, or only half of it is true? What percentage, how many grams of it are true?

Krestinsky:

I did not belong to the Trotskyite centre because I was not a Trotskyite.

Vyshinsky:

You were not a Trotskyite?

Krestinsky:

No.

²⁰

Krestinsky went on to point out that he had abandoned Trotsky in 1927:

Krestinsky:

I date my rupture with Trotsky and Trotskyism from 27 November 1927, when, through Serebryakov, who had returned from America and was in Moscow, I sent Trotsky a sharp letter containing sharp criticism….

Vyshinsky:

That letter is not in the records. We have another letter—your letter to Trotsky.

Krestinsky:

The letter I am referring to is in the possession of the Court investigator, because it was taken from me during the search, and I request this letter to be attached to the records.

Vyshinsky:

The records contain a letter dated 11 July 1927, taken from you during the search.

Krestinsky:

But there is another letter of 27 November….

Vyshinsky:

There is no such letter.

Krestinsky:

That cannot be.…

²¹

This was to be significant.

Pressed continually in a long exchange, Krestinsky gave his motives for earlier confessions:

Krestinsky:

At the preliminary investigation, before I was questioned by you, I had given false testimony.

Vyshinsky:

… And then you stuck to it.

Krestinsky:

… And then I stuck to it, because from personal experience I had arrived at the conviction that before the trial, if there was to be one, I would not succeed in refuting my testimony.

²²

Vyshinsky now called on Rosengolts, who confirmed Krestinsky’s Trotskyism. Krestinsky, who had not been feeling well, slumped. Vyshinsky told him to listen. He replied that when he had taken a pill, he would be all right, but asked not to be questioned for a few minutes.

Rosengolts, then Grinko, gave evidence of Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky, recovering, continued to deny it:

Vyshinsky:

Here are three men on good terms with you who say what is not true?

Krestinsky:

Yes.

After several more denials, Vyshinsky again asked him directly, “When we interrogated you at the preliminary investigation, what did you say on this score?”

Krestinsky:

In giving testimony I did not refute any of my previous testimony, which I deliberately confirmed.

Vyshinsky:

You deliberately confirmed it. You were misleading the Prosecutor. Is that so, or not?

Krestinsky:

No.

Vyshinsky:

Why did you have to mislead me?

Krestinsky:

I simply considered that if I were to say what I am saying today—that it was not in accordance with the facts—my declaration would not reach the leaders of the Party and the Government.

²³

This clear statement of the position was greeted with a “shocked hush” from the audience.²⁴

Questioning further about the preliminary examination, Vyshinsky asked, “If you were asked whether you had complaints, you should have answered that you had.” And Krestinsky replied, “I had in the sense that I did not speak voluntarily.”²⁵

Vyshinsky then abandoned this line of questioning and turned to his official prey, Bessonov, who developed his connections with Trotsky at length, adding that Trotsky had hinted at the physical extermination of Maxim Gorky. The session ended with a further exchange with, and denial from, Krestinsky.

After a two-hour adjournment, the evening started off with the evidence of Grinko, former People’s Commissar for Finance. He had been a Borotbist, and in the early 1920s had been dismissed from his post as Ukrainian Commissar for Education for excessive haste in carrying out Ukrainianization. In this capacity, he now implicated Lyubchenko and other lesser Ukrainians, such as Porayko, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, as members of the “national-fascist” organization. In his Moscow role, he brought in a number of other leading figures, such as Antipov, Rudzutak, Yakovlev, and Vareikis, as Rightist plotters. He described how Yakir and Gamarnik had instructed the Head of the Department of Savings Banks to “prepare a terrorist act” against Yezhov, and how other conspirators had arranged for an official of the Northern Sea Route to do the same against Stalin. His own main activity had been financial sabotage, which he had defined at the preliminary examination:

The main object of undermining work in the People’s Commissariat of Finance was the following: to weaken the Soviet rouble, to weaken the financial power of the U.S.S.R., to dislocate the economy and thus rouse among the population discontent with the financial policy of the Soviet power, discontent over taxes, discontent with bad savings bank service, delays in paying wages, etc., which were to result in wide, organized discontent with the Soviet power and were to help the conspirators to recruit adherents and to develop insurrectionary activities.²⁶

This sort of theme—the blaming of all the errors and malpractices of the Soviet economy on sabotage by the accused—was to run through the trial. For all spheres of life, there was someone in the dock to answer for popular discontents. And the evidence tells us a huge amount about Soviet conditions.

Grinko, similarly, had been involved with Zelensky and others in trade hold-ups:

Grinko:

… Bolotin in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Trade, carried on undermining activities, created a shortage of goods, goods difficulties in the country…. Zelensky, on the instructions of the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, sent huge quantities of goods to the districts where there was a poor harvest and small quantities of goods to the districts where there were good harvests, and this caused goods to remain on the shelves in some districts and a shortage of goods in others.

²⁷

But once again, Vyshinsky diverged to attack Krestinsky. Again he was rebuffed by a firm, “I deny that I talked with Fascists for Trotskyite purposes.”

At this, Rykov was called on. He, too, confirmed Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky once more asserted flatly that he knew nothing of any illegal activities, and the intervention of Ulrikh could get no more out of him.

But Rykov, too, proved unsatisfactory, though in a different way. In the period before his arrest, he had taken to heavy drinking, and reduced himself to a bad condition which the long strain of his imprisonment had, in its different way, done nothing to help. During cross-examination, he sometimes seemed to have gone to pieces, punctuating his answers with inane giggles.²⁸ But he rallied. At first he was vague:

Grinko:

From Rykov I learnt that Yagoda belonged to this organization, but I had no direct connections with Yagoda.

Vyshinsky:

(to the court): Permit me to question Rykov. Accused Rykov, did you tell Grinko about this?

Rykov:

I do not remember exactly, but I cannot exclude such a fact.

Vyshinsky:

Hence, you told him about Yagoda’s membership?

Rykov:

Yes.

Now, wrecking was raised:

Vyshinsky:

Accused Rykov, do you corroborate this conversation with Grinko about wrecking?

Rykov:

I don’t accept that. I deny it, not because I want to minimize my guilt. I have done much worse things than this.

³⁰

But then he got into his stride on the line which both he and (much more forcefully and consistently) Bukharin were to take throughout. That is, they admitted forming an illegal organization, confessed to giving it a terrorist “orientation,” accepted full responsibility in the abstract for all the acts allegedly committed, but denied personal knowledge of or connection with any particular crime. They were thus able to point out that they were freely confessing to capital crimes, so that their denials of the particular acts could not be interpreted as attempts to evade the penalty.

The last to be examined on 2 March was Chernov. Ex-Menshevik and ex-theological student (like Bessonov—and Mikoyan and Stalin), he had been in charge of grain collection in the Ukraine in 1929 and 1930, and had more recently been serving as All-Union People’s Commissar for Agriculture. He had been a ruthless executer of Stalin’s will in the collectivization campaign, but apparently not a convinced one. He is reported as having said, during the 1930 slaughter of their livestock by the peasantry, that at least “for the first time in their sordid history, the Russian peasants have eaten their fill of meat.”³¹ He had started to confess on the day of his arrest.³²

He now confessed to qualms about collectivization, and admitted sharing them, at the time, with a wide range of Ukrainian officials, including Zatonsky. But his main role in the dock was to take the blame for agricultural failures. He had only been removed from his post on 30 October 1937,³³ and could reasonably be blamed for much.

For example, there had been a good deal of livestock mortality. Back in September 1937, a spread of infective anemia among Soviet horses had been countered by the arrest of the Head of the Veterinary Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, Nedachin, the Head of the Veterinary Services of the Red Army,fn1 Nikolsky, and a leading veterinary official in the Agricultural Commissariat, Chernyak, whose forthcoming trial was announced.³⁴ They had never again been heard of, but Chernov was now able to accept the blame for similar epidemics, spread through the agency of a different set of veterinarians:

Chernov:

… I performed the following acts of diversion. In order to cause heavy cattle mortality in Eastern Siberia, I instructed Ginsburg, Chief of the Veterinary Department, who belonged to the organization of the Rights, and through him the Chief of the Veterinary Supply Department, who also belonged to the organization of the Rights, not to supply anti-anthrax serum to Eastern Siberia, knowing that Eastern Siberia was particularly liable to anthrax. The serum was not supplied to Eastern Siberia. The preparations for this were made in 1935, and when there was an outbreak of anthrax there in 1936 it turned out that no serum was available, with the result that I cannot say how many exactly, but at any rate over 25,000 horses perished.

Secondly, I instructed Ginsburg and Boyarshinov, Chief of the Bacteriological Department, to artificially infect pigs with erysipelas in the Leningrad Region and with plague in the Voronezh Region and the Azov-Black Sea Territory….

It is difficult to estimate the results, but at any rate it may be taken for granted that several tens of thousands of pigs perished owing to this diversive act.

³⁵

And a variety of other agricultural sabotage schemes, such as wrong types of crop rotation, the provision of bad seed, and so on, contributed to “lowering the harvest yield.”

In Chernov’s Ukrainian period, he had also undertaken to incense the middle peasants and Ukrainian national feeling generally by attributing the policies he had pursued to orders from Moscow. He had contacted Mensheviks abroad, and become a German spy. Rykov was his main connection in the Rightist center. Recalled, the ex-Premier again admitted the plot, but denied approving the actions. “All that he says is essentially and fundamentally true, but as to the part in which he said that I was in favour of distortions [of the agricultural policy], it seems to me he is wrong.”³⁶ On the overthrow of the Soviet power, Rykov added, “I do not remember having such a conversation with Chernov, but of course the possibility of such a conversation is not precluded.”³⁷ Finally, he denied various meetings with Chernov for wrecking purposes, and when Chernov said that to have neglected to give such instructions would have marked him as a very poor Rightist leader, he answered sardonically, “Perhaps I should have done as he says. It was a mistake on my part.”³⁸ At which Ulrikh abruptly closed the day’s session.

The next day, 3 March, started with the ex-medical student Ivanov, former People’s Commissar for the Timber Industry. He had, of course, sabotaged that industry, on instructions from Rosengolts. Referring to the timber dumping which was a notorious aspect of Soviet trade policy in the early 1930s, he said:

The most valuable timber was sold at reduced prices. This involved a loss to the Soviet State of several million roubles in foreign currency. Bukharin explained this measure as being an advance to the British bourgeoisie in return for the support it had promised. Otherwise, he said, we would not be taken seriously, and we would forfeit confidence.³⁹

In the internal administration of lumbering, his main aim, curiously enough, had been the disruption of culture:

Attention was chiefly devoted to hindering the technical re-equipment of lumbering, preventing the fulfillment of the plans of capital construction, especially in the cellulose and paper industry, in this way placing the country on a short paper ration and aiming a blow at the cultural revolution, interrupting the supply of exercise books and thus rousing discontent among the masses.⁴⁰

He confessed also to having been involved in the “Left Communist” movement against Lenin, and to various attempts to organize insurrectionary bands (partly on British orders) and terrorist groups. In this connection, Bukharin was now questioned. He said he had ordered the formation of illegal organizations, but not insurrectionary bands. He had (though at a later date than that given by Ivanov) propounded an “insurrectionary orientation”—the Ryutin Platform. He had given no actual instructions for insurrectionary preparations, but he accepted the responsibility, in that a “practical worker” like Ivanov would doubtless go on to action on such a basis.⁴¹

When Vyshinsky said to him, “Hence, Ivanov’s statements about connections with the British Intelligence Service … ,” he interrupted, “I was totally uninformed about the Intelligence Service.”⁴²

The next questioning should, according to schedule, have been that of Krestinsky. But instead, a minor agricultural specialist from Chernov’s Commissariat, Zubarev, appeared. He gave a good deal of evidence about disrupting the food supply.

Vyshinsky:

Tell us the nature of your wrecking activities.

Zubarev:

… Causing confusion in seed cultivation, lowering the quality of the seeds, employing bad quality materials, bad sifting, careless storing, and the result of all this was not only a reduction in yield, but also a hostile mood of the peasantry, dissatisfaction with these so-called selected seeds…. My criminal activities consisted first of all in wrongly planning the sowing of vegetables…. Exactly the same kind of work was carried on in respect to retarding the development of fruit-tree nurseries.

In respect to State farms, the main wrecking activities were that up to the last moment no proper rotation of crops was established, and in a number of State farms there was no rotation of crops at all. All this naturally reduced the yields. A large number of State farms which possessed large herds of cattle were left without fodder owing to the wrong crop rotation, and as a result we had the dying-off of cattle and slow development of the livestock farming….

⁴³

And so on and so on. As well as with the Rights, he established connections with Muralov from the 1937 Trial. He had also organized a terrorist group in the Agriculture Commissariat, choosing Molotov as the prospective victim. He had carried out agricultural spying for Germany.

Zubarev’s main contribution, however, was his recruitment as a Tsarist agent in 1908 and later. For Vyshinsky now produced a surprise witness. This was a police inspector of pre-Revolutionary days, Vasilyev, who had allegedly recruited Zubarev. The production of this aged Tsarist gendarme was treated by the court and “public” as a sort of comic turn. Even Vyshinsky was comparatively amiable to him, baiting him only with that puny malice which was the closest he could evidently get to good humor.⁴⁴

With that, the morning session dragged to a close.

When the court reassembled at 6:00 P.M., Ulrikh announced to a tense court that the examination of Krestinsky would now take place. Vyshinsky interposed to say that he first wanted to put a few questions to Rakovsky.

He asked the old Bulgarian about the letter to Trotsky abandoning Trotskyism, which Krestinsky had referred to in the previous day’s session. Rakovsky recalled it, and said it had been intended as a deception, and that Krestinsky had never broken with Trotskyism.

Vyshinsky then produced the letter, whose existence he would not acknowledge the previous day, and went on to argue that the letter itself, which spoke of the defeat of the opposition and the need to work in the Party, should be interpreted as a call to underhand subversion—a possible argument, indeed, but one scarcely compatible with an out-and-out deceptive surrender.

Finally he turned to Krestinsky. Did he accept this formulation?

Krestinsky, who was “looking more than ever like a small bedraggled sparrow,”⁴⁵ accepted it.

Vyshinsky asked if this meant that Krestinsky would now cease to deceive the court. The answer was a full confirmation of the evidence given at the preliminary inquiry. He admitted his guilt. On the first day, Krestinsky had occasionally been roused by Vyshinsky’s taunts, but on the whole his tone is said to have been natural; it had now become flat and desperate.⁴⁶

Vyshinsky pressed the point:

I have one question to ask Krestinsky: What, then, is the meaning of the statement you made yesterday, which cannot be regarded otherwise than as a piece of Trotskyite provocation in court?

Krestinsky:

Yesterday, under the influence of momentary keen feeling of false shame, evoked by the atmosphere of the dock and the painful impression created by the public reading of the indictment, which was aggravated by my poor health, I could not bring myself to tell the truth, I could not bring myself to say that I was guilty. And instead of saying ‘Yes, I am guilty,’ I almost mechanically answered ‘No, I am not guilty.’

Vyshinsky:

Mechanically?

Krestinsky:

In the face of world public opinion, I had not the strength to admit the truth that I had been conducting a Trotskyite struggle all along. I request the court to register my statement that I fully and completely admit that I am guilty of all the gravest charges brought against me personally, and that I admit my complete responsibility for the treason and treachery I have committed.

⁴⁷

And now, despite Ulrikh’s earlier announcement that the examination of Krestinsky was due, Vyshinsky at once dropped him and turned to the examination of Rykov. All this has very much the air of the prosecution playing safe, and not willing to risk a further retraction at this stage.

Stalin received regular reports on the case and gave advice. The latest Soviet account says that after he was informed of Krestinsky’s retraction, he said, “You worked badly with that filth,” and ordered a stop to be put to Krestinsky’s talk. On the night of 2 March, “special measures” were taken. The interrogators dislocated his left shoulder, so that outwardly there was nothing to be seen. Bessonov is named has having told this version to the German engineer Hans Metzger in a prisoners’ transfer train in l939.⁴⁸ According to another variant, Krestinsky was also faced for hours with a battery of particularly bright lights, which damaged his already injured eyes, but only consented to confess on condition that the letter he had written to Trotsky should be put in the records.⁴⁹

And if Krestinsky had hoped to rouse the other defendants to defy the court, he had had to recognize defeat. Indeed, he may never have hoped or intended his retraction to go beyond the first day, making what demonstration he felt to be in his power.

An alternative account leaked through NKVD circles was that Krestinsky’s retraction and reaffirmation were a put-up job. Stalin was wishing to show that the defendants did not all confess like automata and thought that this single and temporary lapse would add a touch of verisimilitude.⁵⁰

The arguments against this notion are very powerful. Krestinsky’s phrasing during the first day sounds, on the face of it, genuine, and some of the points he makes seem to be both valid and extremely embarrassing to the prosecution. Vyshinsky’s attitude is sinister in a way which appears more compatible with a genuine threat to Krestinsky than the appeal to his reason and conscience, which would be supposed to have produced the change in his evidence on the second day.

There is another and most suggestive piece of evidence from the trial itself. At the beginning, Vyshinsky announced the order in which he proposed to question the twenty-one prisoners. This was evidently a predetermined list, since it is repeated in the order in which they made their final pleas, except for one transposition among the minor characters. But the actual order of questioning was different. The first day went according to schedule—Bessonov, Grinko, Chernov. But on the second, Krestinsky should have had his examination-in-chief immediately after Ivanov. Instead, as we saw, the agricultural official Zubarev took the stand on the morning of 3 March, and in the afternoon Krestinsky was called upon not for a full examination, but only for a brief recantation. This, too, was preceded by the short and unscheduled interrogation of Rakovsky, undermining Krestinsky’s point about the letter disavowing Trotskyism.

On the evening of 3 March, this was all that Krestinsky’s examination amounted to. His full examination was postponed until the following afternoon, when the examinations of Rosengolts and Rakovsky were rescheduled, the former to precede and the latter to follow Krestinsky’s. Rosengolts, as Krestinsky’s alleged closest Trotskyite collaborator, established both Krestinsky’s connections with Trotsky and the joint plotting activity of himself, Krestinsky, and the Tukhachevsky group in the days after the Pyatakov Trial and Bukharin’s arrest. Krestinsky confirmed and elaborated all this, and Rakovsky rubbed it in afterward. All this seems to show an emergency procedure.

Nor is it difficult to see that the circumstances of his original interrogation were such as to make retraction possible. Krestinsky had been arrested at the end of May 1937. He confessed “after the lapse of a week … at the end of the first interrogation.”⁵¹ This was by torture in its most intensive form, and he was not, therefore, broken in the long-drawn-out fashion described on here. It was just at that time that Bukharin was making his first confession, and it may be that it was momentarily intended to produce the next big trial at very short notice—and about as soon after the Pyatakov Trial as that had been after Zinoviev’ s .

If so, this perhaps came to nothing when Bukharin started to retract some of his confession (see here), and the whole business of interrogating him had to begin over again. Meanwhile, with the spread of the Purge right through the Party, other useful additions to the case kept emerging, and it was nine months later that the trial took place.

However that may be, it is certainly the case that the NKVD seems to have had in its hands a leading prisoner who had not been brought into the right state for a trial by the most tried and successful procedure. Torture and the conveyor could produce confessions, but, as we have seen, the victim, once rested, recovered to the degree that he could retract them. He was not reduced to the degree of submission obtained by the longer method. Yet Krestinsky had confessed, and was being cooperative. There was no overt resistance to break.

Krestinsky’s withdrawal of his confession was not unprecedented. During the Shakhty Trial, one of the accused (Skorutto) had refused to confess, been kept out of the court for a day on the grounds of illness, and then come back and confessed, only to withdraw the confession again, and the following day to reaffirm it. Again, in the Metro-Vic Trial, MacDonald withdrew, then reaffirmed, his original confession. It has never been thought that these withdrawals added anything to the credibility of the confession when finally produced.

Thus the argument that Stalin had planned the whole Krestinsky episode is a weak one. What seems more probable is that some such story was put round within the outer circles of the NKVD to account for the lapse. Another theory is that Krestinsky was replaced in the dock by a double or an actor. Observers present felt that it was someone different who appeared in the later phase of the trial. That Krestinsky did not appear to be “the same Krestinsky” after hours of NKVD attention seems natural enough. And recent long accounts in the Soviet press do not make the suggestion, speaking, in fact, of his reaffirming his confession after being “suitably worked over.”⁵²

In any case, Krestinsky’s withdrawal, so dramatic and so cogent in its cornments, barely affected the reception given to the trial by the foreign public. Stalin had won again.

AN EX-PREMIER

Rykov’s examination-in-chief came almost as an anticlimax. It started off mildly, soon coming to the alleged complicity of Yagoda in Rightist activity back in 1929. And now Yagoda, in turn, was questioned and gave one of those half-hearted affirmatives which any objective observer might have interpreted as a negative: “The fact is true, but not as Rykov puts it.”

Rykov, who is said to have been “tortured quite brutally,”⁵³ still managed to inject a tone of irony into some of his remarks.⁵⁴ He went on to describe the supposed Rightist underground which arose after 1930. He then came to the Ryutin Platform—which, he said, he, Tomsky, Bukharin, Vasily Shmidt, and Uglanov had been responsible for. Ryutin had merely fronted for them, and Yagoda’s protection had saved the main culprits. The Platform

recognized (as far as I remember, and I do remember, for I had a share in editing it) methods of violence in changing the leadership of the Party and of the country—terrorism and uprisings. It was formulated so broadly as to constitute an instruction that measures of violence should be applied in whatever forms might prove to be at our disposa1.⁵⁵

The Rightists were, he added, a large organization: “it was not a question of a hundred or so people, but of numerous cadres,” so that it was understandable that “the name Ivanov has no place in my memory.”⁵⁶ A palpable irony about a People’s Commissar and full member of the Central Committee.

When it came to kulak insurrections, Bukharin too was called on, and both Rykov and Bukharin admitted vaguely a connection with one in Siberia. Its location was put to Bukharin, who could not remember if the one given was right. He, too, mentioned the Ryutin Platform: “I have been questioned so many times about the Ryutin Platform….”

Rykov now admitted to forming a terrorist organization headed by his former secretary, Ekaterina Artemenko, which he had instructed “to watch for passing Government automobiles,” without result. He and Bukharin (again questioned) admitted forming another terrorist group, headed by a former Socialist Revolutionary, to assassinate Stalin and Kaganovich, but again without result. But both men were unsatisfactory as to details. Rykov said, “The Centre did not adopt a decision in such-and-such a year to kill such-and-such a member of the Political Bureau or the Government. The Centre took means that would enable such a decision to be put into effect if one were adopted …” at which point he was understandably interrupted by Vyshinsky. Bukharin, asked on whose initiative Semyonov, the Socialist Revolutionary, had acted, said, “I do not remember. Perhaps it was mine. At all events, I do not deny it.”

Rykov involved the Rightists with the supposed plan of 1935 to seize power, with Yenukidze, Yagoda, Peterson, and others, which had also (he said) implicated Tukhachevsky and other generals. “We did not,” he added, “succeed in making a real attempt….” He went on to the connections with fascism, Menshevism, bourgeois nationalism, and other groupings. But as to detail, he again said he could only suspect, not know, what Grinko represented; and when Grinko was now called on, Rykov said, “I do not remember,” when asked if his evidence was correct.

There followed a further three-way exchange between Vyshinsky, Rykov, and Bukharin on the dismemberment of the USSR and defeatism. Bukharin said that he did not take a defeatist line, “but am responsible for this affair.” Rykov broke down and admitted the whole defeatist position on his own behalf and that of all the Rightists, but withdrew a suggestion he had made at the preliminary inquiry, that Bukharin was the man mainly responsible. At this, Vyshinsky openly expressed his annoyance.

After further confession to treasonable actions in Byelorussia, Rykov again rejected the charge of organizing livestock wrecking. He again denied knowledge of Ivanov’s connections with the British. But he also, backed by Krestinsky and Rosengolts, confirmed the participation of Tukhachevsky in the bloc.

Rykov’s testimony was not coherent, and took no perfectly clear line, but he had still contrived to make a number of substantial denials.

Next day, Sharangovich, the Byelorussian First Secretary, was first to be called. After the shifts and evasions of the previous evening, he made an excellent impression on observers sympathetic to the regime, with his frank and total admission of all charges. He had been a Polish spy since 1921, and had become a prominent member of the Byelorussian “national-fascist” organization, whose other members included Goloded, Chervyakov, and most of the Party leaders in the Republic. Rykov and Bukharin were directly involved in their crimes, which had included the formation of three terrorist groups: two of them had been intended to attack Voroshilov during the 1936 maneuvers.⁵⁷

Sabotage, on a large scale, had been designed to cause discontent as well as disruption. He, too, had spread disease among animals:

I must also say that in 1932 we took measures to spread plague among pigs, which resulted in a high pig mortality; this was done by inoculating pigs against plague in a wrecking fashion.⁵⁸

… Further, as regards rural economy, I should like to say something about our diversionist activities in horse-breeding. In 1936 we caused a wide outbreak of anaemia in Byelorussia. This was done intentionally, because in Byelorussia horses are extremely important for defence purposes. We endeavoured to undermine this powerful base in case it should be needed in connection with war….

As far as I can now recall, about 30,000 horses perished owing to this measure.⁵⁹

More essentially, he took the blame for the early excesses of collectivization. These had been put through for anti-Party reasons:

At that period there were still about 100,000 individual peasants in Byelorussia. We gave it out that an individual peasant who failed to join the collective farm was an enemy of the Soviet power. This was done for provocative purposes; in accordance with our provocative stand, we applied to the individual peasants who resisted collectivization such taxation measures which caused discontent and an insurrectionary spirit among the individual peasants.⁶⁰

But fortunately Moscow had known better:

… Later the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. took measures to correct what we had done, and the situation changed. The spirit among the individual peasants, among those whom we had provoked, took a distinct turn for the better.

This interpretation of the events of 1929 and 1930 is a striking one, and shows a continual preoccupation with the peasantry on Stalin’s part.

In industry, too, the “national fascists” had operated on a large scale:

As to power development, here attention was mainly concentrated on the Byelorussian Regional Power Station, which feeds the industries of Vitebsk, Orsha and Moghilev. Fuel was supplied irregularly. Construction work was interfered with. Specifically, I can mention the Krichevsk Cement Works, the Orsha Flax Mills, the Moghilev Pipe Foundry….⁶¹

ASIAN NATIONALISTS

The Uzbek leader Khodzhayev followed Sharangovich. It will be convenient to take his case together with that of his colleague Ikramov, though the latter gave evidence the following day.

Hitherto “bourgeois nationalism” had been represented by Sharangovich and, to a lesser extent, Grinko. In the persons of the two Uzbeks, it was put forward in a more forthright form. They were not mobile apparatchiks like the two just named. Their entire careers had been spent in Central Asia, where they had successfully fronted for the imposition of Moscow rule on long recalcitrant populations.

They represented, as others represented in their different spheres, a much larger set of Party and State officials—implicating the First Secretary and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in neighboring Tadzhikistan, for example, as well as their own Republic’s deviationists.

Khodzhayev seems to have really resented in some degree the centralizing and denationalizing tendencies of Stalinism, but Ikramov had not. In fact, they had led two opposed factions in the Uzbek Party, and they now attributed their alleged unity in struggling against the regime to pressure from the Rightist central group. Ikramov testified, “Under the pressure of Bukharin and the direct guidance of Antipov, the two nationalist organizations co-ordinated their work.”⁶²

Khodzhayev was by far the most prominent and effective Uzbek to have taken the Communist side right from the time of the Revolution, in the struggle against the old Emir of Bokhara. He had been a member of the Uzbek Central Committee Bureau since the first Congress of the Uzbek Party in 1925, and had long served as Chairman of the local Council of People’s Commissars.

But he had not even been elected a delegate to the VIIth Congress of the Uzbek Communist Party, ending on 17 June 1937. On 27 June, his removal from the Chairmanship of the Uzbek Council of People’s Commissars and expulsion from the Uzbek Central Executive Committee were announced, together with an attack on his counter-revolutionary nationalist positions.⁶³ He was clearly under arrest by this time. His brother, also prominent in the local Party, committed suicide.⁶⁴

On 8 September, Khodzhayev and seven others, including four members of the Bureau of the local Central Committee, were denounced as enemies of the people, and Ikramov, the First Secretary of the Republic, and the current local Bureau, censured for insufficient vigilance.⁶⁵ Two days later, Pravda violently attacked Ikramov for defending a “Trotskyite” Secretary of the Uzbekistan Central Committee.⁶⁶ Ikramov was at this time in Moscow and, still not under arrest, had been “confronted” with Bukharin, Khodzhayev, Antipov, and others. He denied their testimony against him, in spite of four “conversations” with Yezhov.

A letter to the Uzbek Central Committee signed by Stalin and Molotov now drew its attention to the evidence against “Comrade Ikramov,” as apparently proving “not merely political blunders, but also connections with the Trotskyite—Rightist group.” The letter also “proposes that the Uzbek Central Committee consider the question of Comrade Ikramov and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of its opinion.”⁶⁷ On 12 September, it was announced that Ikramov had been “unmasked” and expelled from the Party, and his case handed over to the investigating authorities.⁶⁸ He had been arrested “on Stalin’s personal instructions.”⁶⁹

The Uzbek press now attacked him for weakness towards bourgeois nationalism, and specifically for supporting Khodzhayev.⁷⁰ It was presumably in support of Khodzhayev that Ikramov had protested in 1937 against the Purge, and thus incurred Stalin’s displeasure.⁷¹ (As an otherwise loyal Stalinist, Ikramov was the first defendant in the public trials to be rehabilitated.)

When his arrest was announced to the Party membership in Tashkent, the news was greeted “with warm applause.”⁷² He was confronted in jail with Bukharin,⁷³ who again implicated him, but he only confessed on the “sixth or seventh day” of the interrogation .⁷⁴

Similar events, with similar timing, were sweeping Soviet Asia, as we saw in Chapter 8. In Kirghizia, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars was purged on 12 September,⁷⁵ and a call put out for ruthless measures against the local Central Committee.⁷⁶ In Tadzhikistan, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Rakhimbayev (arrested on 9 September 1937 at a Youth Day meeting at the Park of Rest and Culture); the President, Shotemor; Ashurov and Frolov, Secretaries of the Central Committee; and a number of others were denounced as nationalists or spies on 10 to 12 September. Rakhimbayev was accused in addition of keeping a harem of three wives.⁷⁷ (After the trial, Pravda again denounced these local leaders and “other swine.”)⁷⁸

Under the cold lights of the October Hall, Khodzhayev now confessed that he had been anti-Soviet since 1920. He and Ikramov had been in contact with the Rights, through Antipov, and had been instructed to work with the British for the secession of Uzbekistan as “a British protectorate.” They had done a good deal of industrial sabotage on much the same lines as Sharangovich’s. “Errors” of planning had been intentional:

The ramp for the delivery of coal was planned for a capacity of 75,000 kW., whereas the power house was built for 48,000 kW., and the planned capacity of the station is 70,000 kW. You see, therefore, that the elements of wrecking were present in the very planning of the station.⁷⁹

Their agricultural policy had been disastrous, and this was also intentional, as it caused hostility to Moscow:

Khodzhayev:

… This would have meant causing enormous discontent among the people, because we put it to them in this way: ‘this is the Moscow plan, we are merely the servants of Moscow, we are carrying out Moscow’s instructions. Don’t you like it? Then complain to Moscow.’ This is the task we set ourselves.

Vyshinsky:

A provocative task?

Khodzhayev:

A provocative task, set deliberately, and pursued for a number of years.

What did it lead to? It actually led to the destruction of the rotation of crops system, it led to diminution in the number of cattle, it led to a diminution in silk cultivation, because even here we pursued our wrecking activities, and in the long run it led to a diminution even of the cotton yield. And that is why for years Uzbekistan failed to fulfill its cotton plans…. If a peasant had ten hectares of land he had to sow eight or nine hectares with cotton. You will understand that if only one hectare is left for all the rest, the farm goes to ruin.

⁸⁰

But there was a more important economic aim—to develop an independent economy in Uzbekistan. This (in contradiction to the admissions made above) led to their planning the economy

in such a way as to have less cotton, because it was an industrial crop which most of all bound Uzbekistan with the Union; secondly, we planned to develop agriculture in Uzbekistan so as to have more grain farming not only on the non-irrigated lands, but also on the irrigated lands, in order to be independent of Russian grain, and lastly, we planned the development of industry, road building, etc., in such a way as to be more economically independent than ever of Soviet Russia, of the Soviet Union, at the end of the First Five-Year Plan.

The economic side of “bourgeois nationalism” was thus well shown, and Khodzhayev made it explicit:

I do not know whether the court is aware that the bourgeois nationalists, particularly in Central Asia, had a theory of organizing a self-contained economy, that is to say, of making the economy of the republic develop independently of the other parts of the Soviet Union, of making it possible for the republic to live without need for the rest of the Soviet Union in the event of possibilities arising for active, direct struggle.⁸¹

Ikramov gave similar evidence. He had had contacts with Zelensky, Antipov, and A. P. Smirnov, and Bukharin had stayed with him for a few days in 1933. Bukharin, called on, admitted discussing with him the Ryutin Platform, and “a vague allusion to terrorism,” but denied any talk of wrecking.⁸² At a further meeting, in 1935, the sinister point was raised that both Bukharin’s and Ikramov’s wives had been present, though the seditious conversation had taken place in their absence. Bukharin denied that on this occasion politics had been discussed at all. Here came a sharp exchange with Vyshinsky:

Vyshinsky:

And you, the leader of an underground organization, met a member of your organization, one whom you enlisted, met him two years later, and did not try to verify whether he still adhered to your counter-revolutionary organization, you showed no interest in this, but began to discuss the weather in Uzbekistan. Is this how it was, or not?

Bukharin:

No, this is not how it was. You are putting a question which contains in itself an ironical reply. As it happens, I figured I would meet Ikramov again, but by chance this meeting did not take place because he did not find me in.

Vyshinsky:

You have an extraordinarily good memory for exactly those meetings which did not take place.

Bukharin:

I do not remember the meetings which did not take place, because they are a phantom, but I do remember those which did materialize.

⁸³

Ikramov gave a long account of Antipov’s vital role in organizing Central Asian subversion. Antipov had insisted on terrorism, and personally boasted that “whoever the Rights had decided to kill would never reach Central Asia.”⁸⁴ And Ikramov, too, implicated the polygamist Rakhimbayev and his Tadzhik group.

TO RUIN THE ECONOMY

The examinations of Rosengolts and Krestinsky on the evening of 4 March were satisfactory to the prosecution. Rosengolts and Krestinsky testified that they, with Rudzutak and Gamarnik, had constituted the main center of the conspiracy after the arrest of Rykov and Bukharin in February 1937. They had then relied almost entirely on the projected Army coup.

Their connections with German espionage, arranged through Trotsky, had dated back to 1922–1923. Krestinsky admitted to the meeting with Trotsky in person which he had denied on 2 March. Trotsky had given full instructions for all types of treason, espionage, sabotage, and terror.

The only slightly awkward moments were when Krestinsky said that he, Rosengolts, and Gamarnik had “discussed the necessity for a terrorist act” against Molotov, but had made no actual preparations for it (Vyshinsky commented sharply that this amounted to the same thing), and when Rykov, again called on briefly to confirm conversations with and about Tukhachevsky, denied them.⁸⁵

Rykov and Bukharin, too, were incidentally all but exculpated of all the recent activity attributed to them by Krestinsky’s remark that “Trotsky said that we should not confine ourselves to Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, because although they were the recognized leaders of the Rights, they had already been compromised to a great extent and were under surveillance,” so that Rudzutak, whom no one suspected, should be the connection. But this “surveillance,” and the admission that it made Rykov and Bukharin unsuitable conspiratorial colleagues, in effect disposes of the possibility of their guilt—and this from 1933 on, covering the whole period of the Kirov and other alleged murders.

Rosengolts confessed to various embezzlements, including sabotage in the export of iron. This seems to refer to pig-iron exports, which in fact had been under a directive bearing Stalin’s signature, with the deliveries superintended by Yezhov.⁸⁶

Rakovsky was now questioned. He was the son of a landowner in the Southern Dobrudja, at first part of Bulgaria, but transferred to Romania a few years after his birth. He was prominent as a Bulgarian Socialist at the age of twenty, when he represented the party at the Congress of the Second International. He took a doctorate of medicine at Montpellier, and went back to the Balkans, where he was arrested a number of times for involvement in the Romanian revolutionary movement. In 1916, he was again arrested in Romania, and imprisoned at Jassy, where the Russians freed him in May 1917. He went to Petrograd and in 1919 became a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukraine. Becoming attached to Trotsky’s views, he lost his high posts and from 1924 to 1927 was Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in London and then Ambassador in Paris. He was recalled to Moscow in November 1927 and was expelled from the Central Committee in the same month, for supporting the Left opposition. He defended the opposition viewpoint at the XVth Party Congress. In January 1928, he was expelled from the Party and deported to Astrakhan, and later to Barnaul. It had not been until February 1934, one of the very last, that he had recanted and been readmitted to the Party. He had been implicated in the Pyatakov Trial and was arrested on 27 January 1937.⁸⁷ Apart from the doctors, he was easily the oldest of those in dock. And even among his veteran fellow accused, his record stood out as long and legendary.

The sixty-five-year-old revolutionary had refused to testify to the NKVD for eight months,⁸⁸ one of the best records in the trials. He now confessed that he had been a British spy since 1924. His disavowal of Trotskyism in February 1934 had been designed to deceive the Party.⁸⁹

On his rehabilitation, he had been sent to Japan at the head of a Red Cross delegation, and this was made the occasion for him to incriminate the then Soviet ambassadors in the Far East, Yurenev and Bogomolov. He himself became a Japanese as well as a British spy.

Vyshinsky got in one particular unfair smear. Rakovsky’s father had been a landlord.

Vyshinsky:

Hence I am not mistaken when I say that you were a landlord?

Rakovsky:

You are not mistaken.

Vyshinsky:

Well, now. It was important for me to establish whence you received your income.

Rakovsky:

But it is important for me to say what this income was spent for.

Vyshinsky:

This is a different matter.

⁹⁰

Everyone among the Old Bolsheviks knew that Rakovsky had spent everything he had on the revolutionary movement—financing the Romanian Socialist Party, which he had founded, and its paper, which he edited, and also subsidizing Russian and other revolutionaries. Now provoked enough to try to draw attention to these facts, he was instantly silenced.

When Rakovsky began to refer to the “opposition,” Vyshinsky interrupted briskly:

In your explanations today you are generally permitting yourself to use quite a number of such expressions, as if you were forgetting that you are being tried here as a member of a counter-revolutionary bandit, espionage, diversionist organization of traitors. I consider it my duty to remind you of this in my interrogation of you and ask you to keep closer to the substance of the treasonable crimes which you have committed, to speak without philosophy and other such things which are entirely out of place here.⁹¹

Rakovsky finished by explaining that his surrender after eight months had been due to getting information, during the summer of 1937, about the Japanese attack on China and the extent of Nazi and Italian intervention in Spain.⁹² This “had a stunning effect on me. Rancour and ambition fell from me.” He decided that his “duty was to help in this struggle with the aggressor, that I would go and expose myself fully and entirely, and I told the investigator that on the following day I would begin to give complete, exhaustive testimony.”

This sounds, in the context of interrogation and exhaustion, a credible exposition of the “Rubashov” motive—more so, indeed, than the reluctant and partial confession of Bukharin, on whom “Rubashov” was founded.

Rakovsky’s evidence, adjourned over the night, had lasted until the morning of 5 March. The court then took Zelensky, a much less interesting figure. He had, however, a past in the highest Party ranks, as a former (1923–1925) Secretary of the Central Committee and Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, who had been removed for inadequate hostility to Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had merely been transferred to be Secretary of the Party’s Central Asian Bureau from 1924 to 1931, and had never lost his place on the Central Committee. In his Asian capacity, he had already been implicated as an agent of Trotsky by Ikramov and Khodzhayev. But his main role now was to explain how he had given rise to popular discontent; in the position he had held from 1931 to 1937, as Chairman of the Consumer Cooperatives—that is, virtually the entire official distribution network—he had had unexampled opportunities for doing this.

Starting with an account of his work as a Tsarist police agent in the Party from 1911, he admitted complicity in Kamenev’s actions in 1924, and recruitment by A. P. Smimov into the Rightist “organization” in 1928–1929. After Smirnov’s exposure (that is, in 1933), his contact became Antipov, under whose instructions the whole shop system was badly disrupted:

Zelensky:

… The Rights engineered interruptions in the supply of commodities of everyday use to the trading organizations. Thus, for instance, interruptions of this kind were engineered in the Kursk Region in the first quarter of 1936, in the sugar supply. Many shops were out of sugar for two or three weeks. Similar interruptions were engineered in the Leningrad Region in the

makhorka

supply; there were similar interruptions in the summer of 1936 in the bread trade in a number of rural districts of the Byelorussian S.S.R. situated near the frontier.

To give you some idea of the character of these interruptions, I will point out the following: out of 30,000 shops inspected by the

cooperative

trade sections of the Soviets and by trade inspectors, there was no salt in 3,700 shops in the first quarter of 1936. Out of 42,000 shops, 2,000 shops had no sugar on sale. In the third quarter of 1936, 1,600 shops out of 36,000 had no

makhorka

, so that these were not isolated cases, but rather widespread.

⁹³

And again:

Vyshinsky:

Was there a case in 1936 when Moscow was left without eggs through your fault, through the fault not of you personally, but of one of the active participators in this conspiratorial bloc?

Zelensky:

There was.

Vyshinsky:

Do you remember when this made itself most acutely felt?

Zelensky:

I cannot recall the month just now, but I can mention the following fact. In 1936 fifty carloads of eggs were allowed to spoil, from wrecking motives.

⁹⁴

He had also dislocated the accounts system:

Zelensky:

It seems to me that the question of overcharging, short measure and short weight should be clear to everybody; it is very obvious. It consists in the following: when a man comes into a shop to make a purchase, he is overcharged, given short measure and short weight, that is, he is named a price higher than the one at which goods should be sold, or is given shorter weight than he is entitled to, or is sold goods not of the proper quality.

Vyshinsky:

Why is this done?

Zelensky:

To arouse discontent among the population…. Prices are fixed by the trading organizations or by the salesmen in the shops very often at their own discretion, that is, without control. And so it is almost impossible to detect a man who overcharges the consumer. This matter assumed a serious and widespread character. To give some idea of the extent of this wrecking work, I may mention that of 135,000 shops that were inspected by the co-operative inspectorate, cases of overcharging and defrauding purchasers were established in 13,000 shops. The actual number was considerably larger.

Another important form of wrecking, also designed to arouse the discontent of the population, was the freezing of trade by dispatching goods to the wrong districts or at the wrong times. For example, there were cases when summer goods were sent in winter and vice versa, when winter goods arrived in the shops in summer.

Vyshinsky:

That is, the public was offered felt boots in summer and summer shoes in winter?

Zelensky:

Yes.

All this was partly due to his staff:

Zelensky:

… I had instructions, and I pursued the aim of contaminating the apparatus with alien, hostile, anti-Soviet and insurrectionary elements. How contaminated the apparatus of the Centrosoyuz was may be judged from the fact that when I was in charge of it about 15 percent of the staff of the Centrosoyuz consisted of former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, Trotskyites, etc. In certain regions the number of alien elements, former members of other parties, Kolchak officers, and so on, as, for example, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Irkutsk and West Siberia, was considerably higher.

⁹⁶

He then got into a curious altercation with Vyshinsky:

Vyshinsky:

… But how did matters stand with butter?

Zelensky:

We don’t sell butter in the rural districts.

Vyshinsky:

I am not asking you what you sell. You were above all selling the main thing—your country. I am speaking about what measures were taken by your organization to disrupt trade and deprive the population of prime necessities. Apart from sugar and salt, do you know anything concerning butter?

Zelensky:

I told you that the co-operatives do not sell butter in the rural districts….

Vyshinsky:

I am asking you: have you any knowledge of criminal operations with regard to supplying the population with butter, particularly cheap grades of butter, or not? Operations which were effected on the orders of your ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’; are they known to you or not?

Zelensky:

Yes, they are.

Vyshinsky:

In what did they consist?

Zelensky:

They consisted in the following: in making butter, all the produce purchasing organizations used the international standards fixing quality of butter.

Vyshinsky:

That is not the point.

Zelensky:

That is the point.

Vyshinsky:

No.

Zelensky:

What do you mean? This was done….

The President:

Accused Zelensky, no cross-talk, and keep to the point….

Vyshinsky:

And was the butter which was issued for sale always of good quality, or did you try to spoil its quality too?

Zelensky:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Were there cases when members of your organization connected with the butter business threw glass into the butter?

Zelensky:

There were cases when glass was thrown into the butter.

Vyshinsky:

Were there cases when your accomplices, fellow participants in the criminal plot against the Soviet power and the Soviet people, threw nails into the butter?

Zelensky:

There were.

Vyshinsky:

For what purpose? to make it ‘tastier’?

Zelensky:

That is clear.

Vyshinsky:

Well, that is organized wrecking and diversive activities. Do you admit that you are guilty of this?

Zelensky:

I do….

In addition to his vaguely unsatisfactory and undignified style of reply, Zelensky balked at a major question:

Vyshinsky:

Did you take part in the wrecking, diversive, terrorist and espionage work of this bloc?

Zelensky:

I did take part in wrecking and diversive work.

Vyshinsky:

About espionage work you so far say nothing?

Zelensky:

(No reply.)

Vyshinsky:

Do you answer for all the criminal activities of the bloc?

Zelensky:

I do.

—this last a weak ploy by Vyshinsky.

Zelensky did, however, admit contact with A. V. Alexander, the British Labour and Cooperative leader, with whom he had discussed the possibilities of a Rightist Government in Russia.

Ikramov’s examination, which we have already covered, came next. When he had finished, first Bessonov was again questioned. He gave evidence of connections with Socialist Revolutionary émigrés, with Trotsky, and with the Nazis.

BUKHARIN IN DOCK

And now, at last, the main subject of the trial was brought to questioning. Vyshinsky started his duel with Bukharin.

After his arrest, Bukharin had been confronted with Radek, who, however, had qualified his evidence against him, saying that Bukharin had objected to the degree of Trotsky’s commitment to the Germans,⁹⁸ and refusing to confirm some of the more vicious charges.⁹⁹ In The Great Terror, I wrote that Bukharin had not been tortured. This was based on general report, though also on a definite statement by Mikoyan after Stalin’s death.¹⁰⁰ From recent Soviet articles, it does not appear to be true. Perhaps Frinovsky’s order “beating permitted,” with which the investigation of the case “started,”¹⁰¹ was not applied in its full vigor. But we are now told that, though Bukharin held out for three months, threats to his wife and infant son, combined with “methods of physical influence,” wore him down, and he now wrote to Stalin, “Dear friend, if it is necessary for the Party, I will go to trial as you wish.”¹⁰² At interrogations on 1 and 28 June 1937, he confessed that the Ryutin Platform expressed his own views and that many others shared them, including Rykov and Tomsky, but also Uglanov, Rudzutak, Antipov, Lomov, Unshklikht, and others.¹⁰³ It is reported that he now agreed, in a long talk with Yezhov and Voroshilov—as “representatives of the Politburo”—to confess to all the charges, including that of having planned to assassinate Lenin.

But when, two days later, his confession, amended and corrected by Stalin personally, had been given to him to sign, he was so shocked that he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators. He finally agreed once more to testify, but refused to say that he had planned Lenin’s death.¹⁰⁴ One of the charges brought against him in court, that of espionage, was not raised at all during his interrogation. It was doubtless felt that he was unlikely to agree to it, so it now was sprung on him for the first time at the trial.¹⁰⁵

He had evidently decided on his tactics after considering the earlier cases. His confession, like Rykov’s, avoided admitting direct complicity in any of the worst overt acts, but accepted general responsibility. Anything less would have doubtless led to his omission from the trial and the execution of his wife. As it was, Vyshinsky threatened to stop his evidence.

Before Vyshinsky could speak, Bukharin asked the court to allow him to present his case “freely” and to dwell on the ideological stand of the “bloc.” Vyshinsky at once asked for the request to be denied, as limiting the legal rights of the prosecution. Bukharin then said that he confirmed his evidence at the preliminary inquiry. He then made his carefully phrased acceptance of guilt:

I plead guilty to being one of the outstanding leaders of this ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’. Consequently, I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took a direct part in, any particular act.¹⁰⁶

He had, he admitted, planned the forcible overthrow of the Soviet power, and “with the help of a war which prognostically was in prospect,” relied on the help of foreign States to which territorial concessions would be made.

Vyshinsky:

And also by means of weakening the defensive power?

Bukharin:

You see, this question was not discussed, at least not in my presence.

As to wrecking, “the orientation on wrecking was adopted.” But again, when a concrete question was put:

Vyshinsky:

As you see from the trial, the circumstances were concrete enough. Did you and Khodzhayev discuss the fact that too little wrecking was being done, and being done badly?

Bukharin:

About accelerating wrecking there was no talk.

¹⁰⁷

Bukharin then admitted that the bloc stood for the assassination of the leadership. Vyshinsky immediately asked whether the Kirov murder had been committed on the instructions of the bloc.

Bukharin:

I do not know.

Vyshinsky:

I ask you, was this assassination committed with the knowledge and on the instructions of the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’?

Bukharin:

And I repeat that I do not know, Citizen Prosecutor.

Vyshinsky:

You did not know about this specifically in relation to the assassination of S. M. Kirov?

Bukharin:

Not specifically, but …

Vyshinsky:

Permit me to question the accused Rykov.

The President:

You may.

Vyshinsky:

Accused Rykov, what do you know about the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov?

Rykov:

I know nothing about the participation of the Rights or the Right part of the bloc in the assassination of Kirov.

Vyshinsky:

In general, were you aware of the preparations for terrorist acts, for the assassination of members of the Party and the Government?

Rykov:

As one of the leaders of the Right part of this bloc, I took part in the organization of a number of terrorist groups and in preparations for terrorist acts. As I have said in my testimony, I do not know of a single decision of the Right centre, through which I was related with the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, about the actual commission of assassinations….

Vyshinsky:

About the actual commission. So. Do you know that one of the aims of the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ was to organize and commit terrorist acts against leaders of the Party and Government?

Rykov:

I said more than that, I said that I personally organized terrorist groups. But you are asking me whether I knew of such aims through some third person.

Vyshinsky:

I am asking whether the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ had any relation to the assassination of Comrade Kirov.

Rykov:

I have no information regarding the relation of the Rights or the Right part of the bloc to this assassination, and therefore I am convinced to this day that the assassination of Kirov was carried out by the Trotskyites without the knowledge of the Rights. Of course, I might not have known about it.

¹⁰⁸

Vyshinsky, baffled, then called on Yagoda, who said that both Rykov and Bukharin were lying: Rykov had been present, with Yenukidze, at the meeting which had discussed the question. However, Yagoda now started to drop peculiar hints on his own:

Vyshinsky:

After this, did you personally take any measures to effect the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov?

Yagoda:

I personally?

Vyshinsky:

Yes, as a member of the bloc.

Yagoda:

I gave instructions….

Vyshinsky:

To whom?

Yagoda:

To Zaporozhets in Leningrad. That is not quite how it was….

Vyshinsky:

And then you gave instructions not to place obstacles in the way of the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov?

Yagoda:

Yes, I did…. It was not like that.

Vyshinsky:

In a somewhat different form?

Yagoda:

It was not like that, but it is not important.

¹⁰⁹

Vyshinsky hastily dropped the matter and started to question Bukharin about the allegation that he had intended to kill Lenin. Bukharin admitted that there had been a plan in 1918 to arrest Lenin, but when Vyshinsky asserted that this must mean to kill him, he pointed out that Dzerzhinsky had actually been arrested by Socialist Revolutionaries at the time, and not killed. Conceding that Stalin and Sverdlov, too, were to have been arrested, he added that “under no circumstances” were the three to have been killed. Vyshinsky postponed the question until witnesses were called.

Bukharin was then allowed to start to speak at length. Ulrikh told him to stick to his “criminal anti-Soviet activities,” but after ten or fifteen minutes he was still expounding a theory of the way Rightism inevitably led to the restoration of capitalism. Ulrikh interrupted to say he must not make his defense plea now.

Bukharin countered: “This is not my defense, it is my self-accusation. I have not said a single word in my defense…”¹¹⁰ Nor, strictly speaking, had he. And he now went on to admit that his program would have meant “a lapse into bourgeois-democratic freedom,” which (Vyshinsky pointed out, and he accepted) meant in effect “outright rabid fascism”!

Vyshinsky turned to espionage:

Vyshinsky:

Then why was it so easy for you to join a bloc which was engaged in espionage work?

Bukharin:

Concerning espionage work I know absolutely nothing.

Vyshinsky:

What do you mean, you don’t know?

Bukharin:

Just that.

Vyshinsky:

And what was the bloc engaged in?

Bukharin:

Two people testified here about espionage, Sharangovich and Ivanov, that is to say two

agents provocateurs.¹¹¹

Here Bukharin was cleverly turning the trial’s tactics against its originators. Ivanov had, on his own evidence, been a Tsarist agent provocateur in the revolutionary movement—for a Bolshevik audience, no lower form of life, no more untrustworthy character, could exist. His evidence was automatically worthless. But at the same time, Bukharin was surely suggesting that he was still following the same trade, under different orders.

Vyshinsky now scored a point by turning to Rykov, who again admitted knowing that espionage was being conducted by the Byelorussian “national fascists,” and that “in my opinion, Bukharin also knew.” Bukharin simply retorted that he had not known. His connections with the Austrian police, which Vyshinsky raised, “consisted of my imprisonment in an Austrian fortress.”

Vyshinsky:

Accused Sharangovich, you were a Polish spy, although you have been in prison?

Sharangovich:

Yes, although I have been in prison.

Bukharin:

I have been in a Swedish prison, twice in a Russian prison, and in a German prison.

¹¹²

Bukharin went on to elaborate the negotiations for and the structure of the alleged “bloc,” from his conversation with Kamenev in 1928 on, with special attention to the Ryutin Platform. Again Ulrikh intervened, “So far you are still beating about the bush, you are saying nothing about your crimes.”

Bukharin spoke of the planned coup of 1935 by Yenukidze and Peterson—of which nothing had ever come. And, continuing his evidence at the next session, on the morning of 7 March, he developed this theme to include the Tukhachevsky group. (Vyshinsky here objected to his use of the term “palace coup.”) He admitted also sending insurrectionary organizers to the provinces, but denied all knowledge of their connection with White Guard and German fascist circles. Again there was a long tussle as Vyshinsky tried to get him to admit and Rykov to confirm that he knew of this. But this time, Rykov rallied and supported Bukharin’s point.

Rykov went on to deny knowing that Karakhan was a spy. And on the whole issue of negotiation with Germany, Bukharin admitted that Trotsky had spoken of ceding the Ukraine, but that he himself “did not consider Trotsky’s instructions as binding on me.” On Karakhan’s alleged negotiations:

Vyshinsky:

Did you endorse these negotiations?

Bukharin:

Or disavow? I did not disavow them; consequently I endorsed them.

Vyshinsky:

I ask you, did you endorse them, or not?

Bukharin:

I repeat, Citizen Prosecutor: since I did not disavow them, I consequently endorsed them.

Vyshinsky:

Consequently you endorsed them?

Bukharin:

If I did not disavow them, consequently I endorsed them.

Vyshinsky:

That’s what I am asking you: that is to say, you endorsed them?

Bukharin:

So then ‘consequently’ is the same as ‘that is to say’.

Vyshinsky:

What do you mean, ‘that is to say’?

Bukharin:

That is to say, I endorsed them.

Vyshinsky:

But you say that you learnt of this

post factum

.

Bukharin:

Yes, the one does not contradict the other in the slightest.

¹¹³

Vyshinsky again started to hammer at the espionage theme, raising with Rykov the matter of the Byelorussians. And now, for half an hour, came one of the most striking exchanges in the whole of the public trials:

Vyshinsky:

Isn’t this an espionage connection?

Rykov:

No.

Vyshinsky:

What kind of connection is it?

Rykov:

There was an espionage connection there, too.

Vyshinsky:

But was there an espionage connection maintained by a part of your organization with the Poles on your instructions?

Rykov:

Of course.

Vyshinsky:

Espionage?

Rykov:

Of course.

Vyshinsky:

Bukharin included?

Rykov:

Of course.

Vyshinsky:

Were you and Bukharin connected.

Rykov:

Absolutely.

Vyshinsky:

So you were spies?

Rykov:

(No reply.)

Vyshinsky:

And the organizers of espionage?

Rykov:

I am in no way better than a spy.

Vyshinsky:

You organized espionage, so you were spies.

Rykov:

It may be said, yes.

Vyshinsky:

It may be said, spies. I am asking, did you organize connections with the Polish intelligence service and the respective spy circles? Do you plead guilty to espionage?

Rykov:

If it is a question of organization, then in this case, of course, I plead guilty.

Vyshinsky:

Accused Bukharin, do you plead guilty to espionage?

Bukharin:

I do not.

Vyshinsky:

After what Rykov says, after what Sharangovich says?

Bukharin:

I do not plead guilty.

Vyshinsky:

When the organization of the Rights was set up in Byelorussia, you were at the head of it; do you admit that?

Bukharin:

I have told you.

Vyshinsky:

I am asking you, do you admit it or not?

Bukharin:

I took no interest in Byelorussian affairs.

Vyshinsky:

Did you take an interest in espionage affairs?

Bukharin:

No.

Vyshinsky:

And who did take an interest?

Bukharin:

I received no information with regard to activities of this kind.

Vyshinsky:

Accused Rykov, was Bukharin receiving any information with regard to activities of this kind?

Rykov:

I never spoke to him about it.

¹¹⁴

After going over the ground again, Vyshinsky only got Rykov back to his old line:

Rykov:

I mean to say that we did not personally direct this development; however, it is not a question of direct leadership but of general leadership. We absolutely and definitely bear responsibility for this.

Vyshinsky:

There is no point in making a pious face, accused Bukharin. Better admit what exists. And what exists is the following: you had a group of accomplices, fellow-conspirators in Byelorussia, headed by Goloded, Chervyakov and Sharangovich. Is that right, Sharangovich?

Sharangovich:

It is.

Vyshinsky:

And on Bukharin’s and Rykov’s instructions, and under their leadership, you established connections with the Polish intelligence service and with the Polish General Staff? Is that right, Sharangovich?

Sharangovich:

Absolutely right.

Vyshinsky:

Under your leadership also with regard to the espionage connections. Is that right, Sharangovich?

Sharangovich:

Absolutely right.

Vyshinsky:

Consequently, who was the organizer of the espionage in which you engaged?

Sharangovich:

Rykov, Bukharin.

Vyshinsky:

Hence, they were spies.

Sharangovich:

Quite right.

Vyshinsky:

Just as….

Sharangovich:

As I myself.

Vyshinsky:

Be seated.

(To Rykov): Accused Rykov, did Goloded tell you in 1932 that all more or less important appointments of people to responsible posts in Byelorussia were first co-ordinated with the Polish intelligence service?

Rykov:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Did Bukharin know of this?

Rykov:

I cannot say.

Vyshinsky:

You do not know. You do not want to betray your pal?

Rykov:

What I mean to say is that in those cases when I know that he is not telling the truth, I am exposing him, but in those cases when I do not know, I cannot and shall not do it.

Vyshinsky:

I am asking you with regard to the fact that the Poles were giving their consent to the various appointments to official posts in Byelorussia. Was this known to your leading centre?

Rykov:

I knew of it. As for Bukharin, I never spoke to him about it. I also knew that Chervyakov and Goloded maintained connections, not only with me, but with Bukharin and Tomsky as well. Whether they spoke of this to Bukharin I cannot say, because I was not present at those conversations.

Vyshinsky:

Do you think that it would have been natural for Goloded to speak to Bukharin about this question? Or did they have to keep it a secret from Bukharin?

Rykov:

I think that, naturally, he spoke to Bukharin, but what they talked about I do not know.

Vyshinsky:

I shall ask you now by way of making a supposition: do you suppose that Bukharin knew of this?

Rykov:

This circumstance…. I prefer to speak only of what I knew; and as to what I do not know—my position in the court room is not such as to allow me to advance suppositions.

¹¹⁵

On his conversations with Bukharin, Rykov went on to say: “I do not recall any conversations dealing especially with this espionage work. I do not exclude the possibility that there were such conversations, but I do not remember.”¹¹⁶

After a long exchange with Rykov about the meaning of some of his preliminary evidence, which Rykov pointed out was meant not as fact but as supposition, Vyshinsky turned to Bukharin, who immediately remarked, “I was not asked a single word about this during the preliminary investigation, and you, Citizen Prosecutor, did not question me for three months, not a single word.”¹¹⁷

At this Vyshinsky lost his temper and shouted that Bukharin was not going to instruct him about how to conduct an investigation. He then turned on Rykov again, but got no further.

He concluded weakly: “Permit me to consider it established that Rykov and Bukharin knew the substance of the treasonable connection which included espionage. Is that correct, Rykov?”

Rykov:

That is, espionage followed.

Bukharin:

So it appears that I knew something from which something followed.

¹¹⁸

Ulrikh turned the accused back to the theme of the proposed coup d’état. Following that, Bukharin denied having told Khodzhayev about an agreement with Germany, and after further argument about this Vyshinsky again lost his composure, and Bukharin was able to remark, “There is nothing for you to gesticulate about.” Ulrikh called him to order, and Vyshinsky launched on a harangue: “I will be compelled to cut the interrogation short because you are apparently following definite tactics and do not want to tell the truth, hiding behind a flood of words, pettifogging, making digressions into the sphere of politics, of philosophy, theory and so forth….”

Bukharin replied calmly, “I am answering your questions,” and went on to deny having told Khodzhayev about connections with British spies. Vyshinsky had remarked, during his burst of rage, that “according to all the material of the investigation you are obviously a spy of an intelligence service.” Bukharin now took him up on this point:

Bukharin:

During the year I spent in prison I was not once asked about it.

Vyshinsky:

We are asking you here in an open proletarian court, we are asking you here in this court before the whole world.

Bukharin:

But you did not ask me this before.

Vyshinsky:

I am asking you again, on the basis of the testimony which was here given against you: do you choose to admit before the Soviet Court by what intelligence service you were enlisted—the British, German or Japanese?

Bukharin:

None.

Vyshinsky:

I have no more questions to put to Bukharin.

¹¹⁹

The court adjourned on that note. The Prosecutor had been defeated.

When the session resumed, Bukharin listed his contacts with émigré Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, and the concessions to be made to Germany. He again went out of his way to deny espionage, and say that the military conspirators had spoken to Tomsky of “opening the front” in case of war, but he had disapproved:

Vyshinsky:

And did you talk to Karakhan about opening the front?

Bukharin:

Karakhan said that the Germans were demanding a military alliance with Germany.

Vyshinsky:

And are the gates closed to an ally?

Bukharin:

Karakhan gave me an answer to this question.

Vyshinsky:

That the gates are closed to an ally?

Bukharin:

No.

Vyshinsky:

That means to open the gates?

Bukharin:

Pardon me, there was no alliance yet.

Vyshinsky:

But there were expectations, plans?

Bukharin:

Well, just now the Soviet Union has an alliance with France, but that does not mean that it opens the Soviet frontiers.

¹²⁰

Vyshinsky now went on to the crime with which Bukharin alone of those on trial was charged—the plan to assassinate Lenin in 1918. The prosecution produced three prominent Left Communists of that period, Yakovleva, Mantsev, and Ossinsky—the last (originally Prince Obolensky) still a candidate member of the Central Committee elected in 1934.

At the time, Varvara Yakovleva, a candidate member of the small 1917 Central Committee, had been the more prominent, and with Bukharin, Pyatakov, and V. M. Smirnov had resigned when the decision to accept the Peace of Brest-Litovsk had been taken.

She now fully confirmed Vyshinsky’s story. Bukharin had no difficulty in showing that the alleged illegal activities of early 1918 were not illegal at all, and that in fact the Leftists, with the Trotskyites then roughly aligned with them, held a majority and hoped to enforce their views through ordinary Party channels. After this majority had been lost, he admitted, conversations had taken place with a view to arresting Lenin and forming a new government. (Bukharin had indeed thought of arresting Lenin for twenty-four hours with a view to making it easier to change the Government, and had given the whole story as long ago as 1924.)¹²¹

There had also been conversations with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had dropped out of the Soviet Government on the peace issue. What Bukharin denied was that there had been any sort of plan to kill Lenin or complicity with the Socialist Revolutionaries. He went on to point out that many who had been Left Communists at the time—including Kuibyshev and Menzhinsky—were not for that reason now regarded as enemies. He was ruled out of order. A series of points—including the fact that he had been wounded by a bomb thrown by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries at a time when he was now charged with conspiring with them—were similarly ruled on.

Mantsev’s evidence followed the same lines, and Ossinsky gave a rather more restricted account, omitting certain points against Bukharin. Bukharin denied the evidence about the assassination plan, and twice hinted strongly at the reason for the witnesses’ attitude:

Vyshinsky:

Consequently, you assert that Mantsev’s testimony in this part and the testimony of witness Yakovleva are false?

Bukharin:

Yes, I do.

Vyshinsky:

How do you explain the fact that they are not telling the truth?

Bukharin:

You had better ask them about it.

¹²²

And later on:

Vyshinsky:

You must somehow explain the fact that three of your former accomplices are speaking against you.

Bukharin:

You see, I have neither sufficient material nor the psychological requisites to clear up this question.

Vyshinsky:

You cannot explain.

Bukharin:

Not that I cannot, I simply refuse to explain.

¹²³

Getting no further with this, Vyshinsky called two new witnesses—the old Socialist Revolutionaries Boris Kamkov and Vladimir Karelin. They were in “neat blue suits,” their faces “grey and corpse-like.”¹²⁴ They had been in prison for years. An even more important Socialist Revolutionary, Maria Spiridonova, was implicated with her comrades.¹²⁵ She had been arrested on 8 February 1937, with twelve other former Left Socialist Revolutionaries, in Ufa, where they were living in exile. They were first accused of terrorist plots against the Bashkir Communist leadership. But then the whole of that leadership was itself arrested, and charges of plotting against Stalin and Voroshilov were substituted. On 25 December 1937 they were sentenced on these and other charges by the Military Collegium to various terms of imprisonment—in Spiridonova’s case, twenty-five years—the charges now including setting up a “center” to unite all opposition parties, preparing peasant uprisings, and so on. After a hunger strike, she was held in isolation, finally in Ore1.¹²⁶ But she seems to have refused to cooperate in the present trial.

Kamkov had apparently been released during the 1920s, but was back in prison no later than 1933.¹²⁷ Kamkov now said that he understood from others that Bukharin had been informed of Socialist Revolutionary intentions, but he could not himself testify to this directly. He denied that there was any “joint decision” by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Left Communists. Vyshinsky again became flustered at the firm attitude of the old revolutionist, and when Bukharin tried to ask a question, he burst out with “I request the accused Bukharin not to interfere in my interrogation. I am restraining myself enough, and I request my opponent to restrain himself….”¹²⁸ Kamkov again denied the point. Vyshinsky abandoned the witness without putting the point about Lenin’s assassination.

Karelin was more amenable, and confirmed the plan to kill Lenin. He also brought in an entirely separate action—the genuine attempted assassination of Lenin on 30 August 1918 by the freelance Right Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan. This, he said, had been insisted on by Bukharin, and his insistence transmitted through the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Ossinsky, called on to confirm this, said he had heard some vague gossip about Kaplan’s shot being inspired by the anti-Government stand of the Lefts, but “I can say nothing of Bukharin personally” in such a connection.

Bukharin denied the whole thing:

Vyshinsky:

Ossinsky spoke on the subject.

Bukharin:

Ossinsky said that he could say nothing about me.

¹²⁹

Vyshinsky then tackled Bukharin directly, in an attempt to make him concede that the atmosphere in the Party had been so heated in 1918 that assassination would have been rational. Bukharin denied this, and again denied the evidence:

Vyshinsky:

But why do both former ‘Left’ Communists and ‘Left’ Socialist-Revolutionaries say so—everybody?

Bukharin:

No, not everybody: of two ‘Left’ Socialist-Revolutionaries, only one said it.

¹³⁰

With a final “categorical denial,” Bukharin’s examination was over.

In the indictment, the cases of Yakovleva, Mantsev, Ossinsky, Kamkov, and Karelin are among those mentioned as being the subject of separate proceedings. The death dates of both Kamkov¹³¹ and Karelin¹³² are now given as 1938. We can presume that they were in fact executed for their alleged part in the plan to assassinate Lenin, and similarly with Ossinsky, sentenced in secret by the Military Collegium and shot on 1 September 1938.¹³³ Yakovleva, whose evidence had been the most satisfactory, survived until 1941.¹³⁴

THE DOCTOR-POISONERS

On the morning of 8 March, the most horrible and obscure of all the crimes alleged against the bloc were reached. Over the next two days, the system of alleged “medical murders” carried out directly under Yagoda’s orders was the main subject of examination.

The plan to charge the opposition with these medical murders seems to have been adopted soon after Yezhov took over the NKVD. Of the doctors concerned, as we shall see, Pletnev was already embroiled in the NKVD’s plans by December 1936. Pletnev’s hope “as late as 5 March” (1937)¹³⁵ that the medical world would protect him presumably refers to the date of his arrest. Kryuchkov, Gorky’s secretary, also involved, was denounced (with other writers associated with Yagoda) on 17 May, but his date of arrest is now given as 5 October, with the arrest dates of others directly involved in the poison plots as Dr. Levin, 2 December; Maximov-Dikovsky (Kuibyshev’s secretary), 11 December; and Dr. Kazakov, 16 December—which may indicate that a final decision to go ahead with these charges was not made until a fairly late stage.¹³⁶

There were four of these alleged murders. First, in May 1934, Menzhinsky, Yagoda’s predecessor as Head of the OGPU, had been killed by his favorite doctor, Kazakov, under instructions from Levin. Then, in the same month, Gorky’s son Maxim Peshkov had been killed by Levin and Pletnev. Next came Kuibyshev, killed by Levin and Pletnev; and finally Gorky himself, killed by Levin and Pletnev.

The sixty-eight-year-old Dr. Levin gave the first evidence. “He, together with Yagoda, was the organiser”¹³⁷ of the medical killings. He had served in the Kremlin since 1920 “on the staff of the medical services of the NKVD.”¹³⁸ Levin had worked for Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, and Yagoda, which can certainly be taken as showing him not merely in the medical confidence of the OGPU–NKVD; as he said himself, he enjoyed “a definite recognition and confidence in me on the part of the head of” the OGPU.¹³⁹ He also “had a feeling that I would perish with Yagoda.”¹⁴⁰ In fact, he may be regarded as to some degree another of Yagoda’s NKVD circle, all of whom were to go to the execution cellars.fn2

Levin remarks, too, that he has “told the truth from the first day I entered prison.”¹⁴¹ If that is taken at its face value, it is so different from the attitudes of other non-Party accused that it indicates a high state of discipline vis-à-vis the NKVD.

Bukharin, in a brief cross-questioning of Dr. Levin, asked if he had not been a counter-revolutionary saboteur in 1918 after the Bolshevik seizure of power, as if this were a generally known fact.¹⁴² This question seems quite irrelevant—and indeed, if anything, damaging to the accused in general—but if we seek a special implication, it must be that Levin had been especially susceptible to NKVD blackmail and threats about his past.

Levin gave model evidence on the layout of the alleged crimes. As developed in his and the other testimony, it amounted (1) to getting Kazakov, Menzhinsky’s pet quack, to kill him by an overdose of his patent method, so that Yagoda could inherit the leadership of the OGPU; (2) to killing Peshkov by having Gorky’s secretary, Kryuchkov, get him drunk and leave him passed out on a garden bench in the cold (though it was May), and loosing Levin, Vinogradov, and Pletnev on him when he caught a chill; and (3) to arranging bonfires to affect Gorky’s weak lungs,fn3 and then taking him to see his granddaughters when they had colds, which he caught, thus also falling into the hands of Levin and Pletnev. Kuibyshev (4) had simply been given bad treatment for his heart, but had finally died for lack of medical attention, which, in the circumstances, it might have been thought, he was lucky to avoid.

Levin explained how Yagoda had recruited him in a highly plausible way, which brought a sigh even from the trained audience:

Levin:

He said: ‘Have in mind that you cannot help obeying me, you cannot get away from me. Once I place confidence in you with regard to this thing, once confidence is placed in you with regard to this matter, you must appreciate it and you must carry this out. You cannot tell anybody about it. Nobody will believe you. They will believe not you, but me. Have no doubts about this but go ahead and do it. You think it over, how you could do it, whose services you could enlist for this. I will call you in a few days.’ He reiterated that my refusal to carry this out would spell ruin for me and my family. I figured that I had no other way out, that I had to submit to him. Again, if you look at it retrospectively, if you look back at 1932 from today, when you consider how all-powerful Yagoda appeared to me, a non-Party person, then, of course, it was very difficult to evade his threats, his orders.

¹⁴³

Kazakov was called to corroborate Levin’s story about Menzhinsky. Unlike Levin and Pletnev, Kazakov was not a doctor of reputation, though evidently honest in his eccentricities. He employed (as Bulanov was to remark) “very intricate drugs that were not only unknown to medicine, but not very well known to Kazakov himself.”

Menzhinsky had sworn by Kazakov’s “lysates” method. In Dr. Levin’s evidence, there is a sardonic description of “much talk of a miraculous medicine” produced by a Professor Schwartzman, who had earlier made a good impression on Menzhinsky, ending in disappointment: “Then there was another sensation, there was a lot of publicity about Ignaty Nikolaievich Kazakov and he (Menzhinsky) turned to Kazakov…. He was one of the small group of important people at that time who were under the impression that they were being helped by him a great deal.”¹⁴⁴ There had even been a special meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars to discuss Kazakov’s method—one of several examples of the leadership’s tendency to swallow ideas rejected by specialists of the science in question.

Kazakov confirmed Levin’s evidence, and said he had been taken to see Yagoda personally, submitting out of fear on hearing the remark “If you make any attempt to disobey me, I shall find quick means of exterminating you.”¹⁴⁵

Yagoda was now called. He looked very different from his old self. His hair seemed whiter, and his former jauntiness had gone.¹⁴⁶ But he still showed a certain bitter energy. His evidence was extraordinary, and must be significant—even though he was to withdraw it later in the day.

Vyshinsky:

Accused Yagoda, did you instruct Levin to tell Kazakov that he would be asked to come and have a talk with you?

Yagoda:

The first time I saw this man was here.

Vyshinsky:

So you gave no such instructions to Levin?

Yagoda:

I gave instructions to Levin to talk it over …

Vyshinsky:

With whom?

Yagoda:

With Kazakov, but I did not receive him personally.

Vyshinsky:

I am not asking you whether you received him or not; I am asking you whether you instructed Levin to talk it over with Kazakov.

Yagoda:

I gave no instructions to talk to Kazakov.

Vyshinsky:

You just said here that you gave Levin such instructions.

Yagoda:

I gave Levin instructions to bring about the death of Alexei Maximovich Gorky and Kuibyshev, and that’s all.

Vyshinsky:

And how about Menzhinsky?

Yagoda:

I did not bring about the death of either Menzhinsky or Max Peshkov.

¹⁴⁷

Vyshinsky called Kryuchkov, who confirmed his role in killing Peshkov on Yagoda’s orders. He then turned on Yagoda again and read from his evidence at the preliminary examination confessing to the Menzhinsky and Peshkov murders:

Vyshinsky:

… Did you depose this, accused Yagoda?

Yagoda:

I said that I did, but it is not true.

Vyshinsky:

Why did you make this deposition if it is not true?

Yagoda:

I don’t know why.

Vyshinsky:

Be seated.

‘I summoned Kazakov and confirmed my orders…. He did his work. Menzhinsky died.’

Did you despose this, accused Yagoda?

Yagoda:

I did.

Vyshinsky:

Hence, you met Kazakov?

Yagoda:

No.

Vyshinsky:

Why did you make a false deposition?

Yagoda:

Permit me not to answer this question.

Vyshinsky:

So you deny that you organized the murder of Menzhinsky?

Yagoda:

I do.

Vyshinsky:

Did you admit it in this deposition?

Yagoda:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

When the Prosecutor of the Union interrogated you, what did you answer to this question about your part in the murder of Menzhinsky?

Yagoda:

I confirmed it also then.

Vyshinsky:

You confirmed it. Why did you confirm it?

Yagoda:

Permit me not to answer this question.

Vyshinsky:

Then answer my last question: Did you file any protest or complain with regard to the preliminary investigation?

Yagoda:

None.

Vyshinsky:

Are you filing any now?

Yagoda:

No.

¹⁴⁸

Taking up the Peshkov murder, Vyshinsky went on:

Vyshinsky:

So everything that Kryuchkov says …

Yagoda:

It is all lies.

Vyshinsky:

You gave him no such instructions regarding Maxim Peshkov?

Yagoda:

I have stated, Citizen Prosecutor, that with regard to Maxim Peshkov I gave no instructions. I see no sense in his murder.

Vyshinsky:

So Levin is lying?

Yagoda:

He is lying.

Vyshinsky:

Kazakov is lying?

Yagoda:

Yes, lying.

Vyshinsky:

Kryuchkov?

Yagoda:

Is lying.

Vyshinsky:

You gave Kryuchkov no instructions regarding the death of Maxim Peshkov? At the preliminary investigation you …

Yagoda:

I lied.

Vyshinsky:

And now?

Yagoda:

I am telling the truth.

Vyshinsky:

Why did you lie at the preliminary investigation?

Yagoda:

I told you. Permit me not to reply to this question.

¹⁴⁹

This last was spoken “with such concentrated venom and fury,” an American observer notes that the whole audience gasped with “dismay and terror.”When Ulrikh intervened, Yagoda turned on him and said (in a phrase not included in the official report): “You can drive me, but not too far. I’ll say what I want to say … but … do not drive me too far.”¹⁵⁰ Again everyone was shaken. If Stalin was present in the hidden room above the Tribunal, where during this trial a trick of the light at one point made him clearly visible,¹⁵¹ even he might for a moment have wondered whether his whole plan was not about to be wrecked.

Yagoda, more than any of the others, had reason to resent the trial. He, more than anyone, had performed irreplaceable services for Stalin. His arrest had so affected him that he could not sleep or eat, and Yezhov had feared for his sanity. Slutsky, the insinuating Head of the NKVD Foreign Department, had been sent to talk to him. Yagoda complained about the ruin of the police organization he had built up over fifteen years, and one day remarked that God must after all exist: from Stalin he deserved only gratitude, but from God the fate which had actually overtaken him.¹⁵²

But his present demonic outburst was left in the air. Vyshinsky turned back to Levin. Levin now developed the Kuibyshev and Gorky murders, and Yagoda confirmed them. Towards the end of the morning, when Levin was going into the detail of Gorky’s death, Yagoda suddenly said, “May I put a question to Levin?” Though such cross-examination by defendants had been usual practice in the previous days of the trial, Ulrikh hastily replied, “After Levin finished his testimony.” Yagoda, making it clear that his question was immediately relevant, insisted. “This concerns Maxim Gorky’s death!”

Ulrikh, evidently fearing the worst, cut him off, “When the accused Levin finishes, then by all means.” He shortly ordered a thirty-minute adjournment. After this Vyshinsky said, “… I think the accused Yagoda wanted to put questions to the accused Levin.”

The President:

Accused Yagoda, you may put questions.

Yagoda:

I ask Levin to answer in what year the Kremlin Medical Commission attached him, Levin, to me as my doctor, and to whom else he was attached.

¹⁵³

When this question had been answered, with no reference whatever to Gorky’s death or to any of the other crimes, Yagoda said he had no more questions. It will be seen that what he wanted to say before the adjournment cannot have been the same as what he actually asked after.

Levin was then questioned by his “defending lawyer,” Braude. Two points were made. First, Levin said of the “directing organization” behind the murders, “I knew nothing about it. I learnt about it only at the trial itself.” He then reiterated what was evidently, in one way or another, a powerful motive for obeying those capable of carrying out such measures: “What frightened me most was his threat to destroy my family. And my family is a good, working, Soviet family.”¹⁵⁴

The court had earlier announced an Expert Commission of five doctors. The morning session of 8 March concluded with the following exchange:

The President:

Have the expert witnesses any questions to ask the accused Levin?

Shereshevsky and Vinogradov:fn4

The expert witnesses have no questions to ask; everything is quite clear.

¹⁵⁵

The evening session of 8 March saw the evidence-in-chief of Bulanov (Yagoda’s personal assistant) and of Yagoda himself. Bulanov, a veteran NKVD officer—he had been in charge of the expulsion of Trotsky from the country in January 1929—testified to the special version of the planned coup involving Yenukidze, Yagoda, and the seizure of the Kremlin, and developed its links with the Tukhachevsky group and with Karakhan’s German negotiations. He went on to say that Yagoda had protected Uglanov and Ivan Smirnov in their interrogations and had ordered no search to be made when Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested. He implicated all the old NKVD chiefs in the plot, and described how Yagoda had ordered Zaporozhets to “facilitate” Kirov’s assassination, and how Zaporozhets had released Nikolayev on his first attempt and later killed Borisov. It must have seemed curious that Yagoda, arranging through Zaporozhets to let Nikolayev in to kill Kirov, had not thought to do something similar in Moscow by the agency of Pauker and Volovich, in charge of Stalin’s personal security, and both now implicated as plotters.

A new crime was now developed—Yagoda’s attempt to kill Yezhov after the latter had taken over the NKVD in September 1936. Bulanov and another officer, Savolainen (whose case was sent for separate trial), had sprayed a mercury solution six or seven times in Yezhov’s office, and on the rugs and curtains, together with some other, unidentified poison.

Bulanov went on to describe a special poison laboratory that Yagoda had had fixed up under his personal supervision. Yagoda was, Bulanov said, “exceptionally” interested in poisons. This laboratory is believed to have really existed (Yagoda had been a pharmacist by profession before the Revolution). Given the characters and the motivations, this is one crime which appeared to be possibly genuine: Yezhov’s health, it was alleged, was “considerably impaired.”¹⁵⁶ But a recent Soviet account quotes Yezhov at his own interrogation a year later as saying with a smile that obviously people could not get into his office so easily, and that he had made the whole thing up “to look better in Stalin’s eyes.”¹⁵⁷

On the medical poisonings, Bulanov remarked, plausibly enough, “As far as I know, Yagoda drew Levin into, enlisted him in the affair, and in cases of poisoning generally, by taking advantage of some compromising material he had against him.”¹⁵⁸

Bulanov asserted that Kazakov had indeed visited Yagoda, in spite of the latter’s denials. Kazakov again confirmed this. Vyshinsky then put it once more to Yagoda:

Vyshinsky:

After this testimony, which establishes your part in the poisoning, do you continue to deny it?

Yagoda:

No, I confirm my part in it.

And then:

Vyshinsky:

Accused Bulanov, and was the killing of Maxim Peshkov also Yagoda’s work?

Bulanov:

Of course.

Vyshinsky:

Accused Yagoda, what do you say to that?

Yagoda: I

admit my part in the illness of Peshkov. I request the court to hear this whole question

in camera.¹⁵⁹

Yagoda is described as having looked cornered and desperate during the earlier session, but he now appeared crushed, and gave his evidence in a toneless voice.

Vyshinsky next tried to implicate Rykov in Gorky’s murder, on the grounds that Yenukidze had once allegedly said to him that an end should be put to Gorky’s political activity. Rykov answered that doubtless Yenukidze meant murder by this, but that he himself had not so understood it at the time. He then put a question to Bulanov, who had spoken about “Rykov’s archives” being looked after by Yagoda: What were the contents? Bulanov said that he did not know, but Rykov had clearly established that there was an alleged mass of documentary evidence which no one had produced in court.

Yagoda’s own evidence-in-chief followed. A recent Soviet account has it that Yezhov promised Yagoda his life if he incriminated Bukharin,¹⁶⁰ but if so Yagoda’s confidence in Yezhov’s word cannot have been high. His voice was now utterly weary and so faint that it could barely be heard. He stumbled through a written statement, “reading it as though for the first time.”¹⁶¹ He confirmed his long connection with the Rightist plotters from 1928 on. In the early days, he had supplied Rykov and Bukharin with tendentious material from the NKVD secret files, for use in their anti-Party struggle. It was due to his activities in the NKVD that the Rights, and the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” had not been uncovered and liquidated until 1937–1938. He had appointed conspirators to all the leading posts in the Secret Police—Molchanov (on Tomsky’s express instructions), Prokofiev, Mironov, Shanin, Pauker, Gay, and others. He had joined in Yenukidze’s plot to seize the Kremlin, and it was on Yenukidze’s orders that he had arranged for Zaporozhets’s collaboration in the Kirov assassination.

But when cross-examination started, he still showed a remnant of resistance. Bulanov’s evidence about trying to kill Yezhov, he said, had been wrong in detail, and correct only in “essence.”

Vyshinsky then taxed him with espionage. Yagoda replied, “No, I do not admit being guilty of this activity.” He admitted shielding spies in the NKVD:

Vyshinsky:

I consider that since you shielded this espionage activity, you helped them, assisted them.

Yagoda:

No, I do not admit being guilty of that. Had I been a spy, I assure you that dozens of states would have been compelled to disband their intelligence services.

¹⁶²

This sensible remark did not deter the Soviet leaders from the practice of nominating the heads of their Secret Police as imperialist employees.

Rykov again raised the question of his “archives.” Yagoda said, “I had no archives of Rykov’s.” Bulanov then reaffirmed his evidence about these, and when Yagoda challenged him to mention any of their contents, he said he could not. Yagoda finally commented contemptuously, but tellingly, “In any case, had the archives really existed, in comparison with the other crimes, the Rykov archives are a trifle.”

Later he refused to admit that he had protected Mensheviks:

Vyshinsky:

But in any case you shielded this, even very insignificant role of the Mensheviks?

Yagoda:

I shall not be able to give you an answer to this question.

Vyshinsky:

Allow me to quote to Yagoda his testimony in Vol. II,

here

: ‘Question: You are shown a document from the materials of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, containing a report on the Menshevik center abroad and on its active work in the U.S.S.R.’ Do you recall this fact?

Yagoda:

Yes, I know, only I shall not be able to give you an answer to this here.

¹⁶³

When it came to the medical numbers, he was still not entirely satisfactory. First he admitted his “part in causing Max’s [Peshkov’s] sickness,” but when Vyshinsky pressed him to plead “guilty to causing, as you express it, Peshkov’s sickness,” he simply answered that he would give all his explanations in camera. Vyshinsky asked twice more, with the same result. Finally:

Vyshinsky:

Do you plead guilty or do you not?

Yagoda:

Permit me not to answer this question

¹⁶⁴

The only distinction between what Yagoda had admitted and Vyshinsky’s formulation was that the former spoke simply of “his part in causing” and the latter of “guilt for” Peshkov’s death. Yagoda seems to have been implying either that he had caused the fatal illness in an unintentional way or, more likely, that he did not accept the major guilt. Whether either version is true is another matter.

Yagoda went on to admit to killing Menzhinsky and to reluctantly becoming involved in the murder of Gorky, at Yenukidze’s insistence. When Vyshinsky went through his crimes at the end of the day, asking in turn whether Yagoda was guilty in the cases of Kirov, Kuibyshev, Menzhinsky, and Gorky, he did not refer to Peshkov—a minor victory for the accused.

Levin’s defense counsel, Braude, then cross-examined:

Braude:

Allow me to ask you, what methods did you employ to secure Levin’s consent to commit these terrorist acts?

Yagoda:

In any case not such as he described here.

Braude:

You yourself went into detail about this at the preliminary investigation. Do you confirm this part of your testimony?

Yagoda:

It is exaggerated, but that doesn’t matter.

¹⁶⁵

Vyshinsky now attempted to involve Bukharin in the Gorky murder. Bukharin defended himself effectively. The “evidence,” even at its face value, was simply that Tomsky had once said to him in conversation that the Trotskyites were opposed to Gorky and had some idea of a “hostile act” against him. A hostile act could be anything from a newspaper article up, and in any case such a conversation, as he pointed out, could not possibly prove that he, Bukharin, had murdered the writer.

Kryuchkov, Gorky’s secretary, followed. He had left Peshkov lying in the snow in March or April, without result, and finally managed to leave him out to catch a chill in May; Levin and A. I. Vinogradov had managed to persuade other doctors and nurses to give the patient a fatal dose of laxative. When Gorky, in turn, had been given a cold, Pletnev and Levin had insisted on overdoses of digitalis.

The most tragic of all the figures in the great trials was examined on the morning of 9 March. Professor Dmitry Pletnev, a sixty-six-year-old heart specialist, had long enjoyed a reputation as Russia’s leading doctor, the pride of the profession. Now, for the first time (if we except the petty crook Arnold) a figure from outside the whole machinery of state, the whole political controversy, stood for trial—and confessed. He, above all, represented the silent non-Party masses whose sufferings in the Purge were otherwise hidden from sight.

When Yezhov had decided that a confession from Levin alone would clearly not be impressive enough, he had turned his attention to Gorky’s other main physician. But Pletnev had been before the Revolution a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. There was no question of appealing to him on the basis of Communist morality. But equally, he had avoided politics since the Revolution, and no political blackmail against him was possible.

Yezhov’s solution was nasty even by Yezhov standards. A preliminary decision on the story of medical murders must have been taken soon after he succeeded to Yagoda’s post. An NKVD provocateur, a young woman usually employed to compromise foreigners, was sent as a patient to Pletnev. After a couple of consultations, she accused him of having assaulted her two years previously.¹⁶⁶ By December 1936, she was coming to his house, annoying his daughter and housekeeper, and he complained to the police.¹⁶⁷

They affected to take up his complaint, but instead went into hers, and claimed to believe it. Pletnev appealed to his medical and personal connections to help him. (He was treating Ordzhonikidze and others.)¹⁶⁸ As late as 5 March, the official account tells us, he was still expecting that such help would be forthcoming.¹⁶⁹

But the contrary was true. On 8 June, Pravda, by a very rare exception to its policy of not dealing with individual crimes, published under the sensational headline “Professor—Rapist, Sadist” an account in three half-columns. Pletnev had (it told) thrown himself upon the woman patient “B” on 17 July 1934, and bitten her severely on the breast. This had done her a permanent injury which Pletnev, though no expert in breast disorders, had tried to cure. Not succeeding, and being pestered by the woman, he complained to the police, who took the matter up. On 17 January, she had written him a letter, described by Pravda as “a striking human document”:

Be accursed, criminal violator of my body! Be accursed, sadist, practicing your foul perversions on my body! Let shame and disgrace fall on you, let terror and sorrow, weeping and anguish be yours as they have been mine, ever since, criminal professor, you made me the victim of your sexual corruption and criminal perversions. I curse you.

“B”

A short statement was added, signed by Vyshinsky, to the effect that the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases had the matter in hand—that is, I. I. Shapiro, who was in fact to be Pletnev’s interrogator throughout.¹⁷⁰

On the day after the publication of this article, the papers were full of accounts of meetings of a whole series of medical organizations vilifying him—the Moscow Association of Doctor-Therapeutists, the Medical Union, and others. The following day, the equivalent organizations from other parts of the country sent in their protests, from Kiev, Tula, Sverdlovsk, and elsewhere, denouncing the villainous doctor, the disgrace to Soviet medicine. Among the doctors speaking to, and signing, violent resolutions attacking Pletnev, one finds the names of M. Vovsi, B. Kogan, and V. Zelenin, who were (like Drs. Shereshevsky and V. N. Vinogradov) to be tortured by the MGB in 1952–1953 in the later Doctors’ Plot.

Pletnev was sentenced, in a trial which took place on 17 to 18 July 1937, to two years’ imprisonment. The press said that he had confessed. And thus, crushed and dishonored, denounced by his colleagues, found guilty of a disgraceful offense, he found himself in the cells of the Lubyanka, “where a still greater misfortune awaited him.”¹⁷¹

Just before the present trial, Pletnev had the formal confrontation with Vyshinsky, as Prosecutor, in the Lefortovo. When it was finished, Vyshinsky said to him, “I would like you to explain to me how you took to terror… it interests me psychologically.” Pletnev replied that he would confirm all the lies in court, and not spoil the show, but that for now he asked to be returned to his cell, since it disgusted him to talk to Vyshinsky.¹⁷²

Now, under Vyshinsky’s questioning, he confessed his role in the murders of Kuibyshev and Gorky. He spoke of the “violent threats [made by Yagoda] against me and against my family.”¹⁷³

He mentioned a connection with Dr. Nikitin, Tolstoy’s favorite physician, who had been one of a number of doctors exiled some years earlier. But he said that he did not believe Nikitin to be politically minded¹⁷⁴—an honorable rebuttal of what was presumably a false charge against a distinguished colleague.

Pletnev’s defense lawyer, Kommodov, elicited his splendid medical record. Then Vyshinsky reexamined on that, raising the assault case. Pletnev made an attempt to reject the charge, but he was borne down by Vyshinsky, now in one of his most arrogant and bullying moods:

Vyshinsky:

How many years did you say was your standing as a physician?

Pletnev:

Forty.

Vyshinsky:

You consider your standing as irreproachable?

Pletnev:

Yes, I do.

Vyshinsky:

Irreproachable?

Pletnev:

Yes, I think so.

Vyshinsky:

During these forty years you have never committed any crime in connection with your profession?

Pletnev:

You are aware of one.

Vyshinsky:

I am asking you because you state that your work for forty years was irreproachable.

Pletnev:

Yes, but since I denied that time …

Vyshinsky:

Do you think that the sentence in the case which is well known to you, the case of an outrage which you committed against a woman patient, is a blot on your reputation?

Pletnev:

The sentence, yes….

Vyshinsky:

Is that sentence a blot on your reputation or not?

Pletnev:

It is.

Vyshinsky:

So there were moments of disgrace during these forty years?

Pletnev:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Did you not plead guilty to anything?

Pletnev:

I cannot say that I did not plead guilty to anything.

Vyshinsky:

So you did plead guilty to something?

Pletnev:

Yes.

Vyshinsky:

Is this a blot on your reputation?

Pletnev:

Yes.

¹⁷⁵

Kazakov, the remaining doctor, confirmed his part in Menzhinsky’s death. But at the end of his evidence, he defended his method and asserted that “lysates” could after all not have harmed Menzhinsky:

Vyshinsky:

For what purpose did you introduce these lysates? To kill Menzhinsky?

Kazakov:

(No reply.)

Vyshinsky:

Did you introduce the lysates for this end? Were you certain that they would assist your crimes?

Kazakov:

You see, lysates have a dual effect.

Vyshinsky:

You dare to assert that these lysates were harmless for Menzhinsky?

Kazakov:

Yes. These three lysates were harmless.

Vyshinsky:

And could you have fooled Yagoda?

Kazakov:

(No reply.)

Vyshinsky:

In view of the impossibility of getting a direct answer to this clear question, I request the court to adjourn the session and to make it possible for the Commission of Experts to answer the questions I have put to Kazakov.

¹⁷⁶

After a half-hour adjournment, the Commission of Experts supported Vyshinsky’s view of the matter:

Such a combination of methods of treatment could not but lead to the exhaustion of the heart muscles of the patient V. R. Menzhinsky, and thereby to the acceleration of his death.

Moscow,

Expert Witnesses:

9 March 1938

Professor D. A. Burmin, Scientist of Merit

Professor N. A. Shereshevsky, Scientist of Merit

Professor V. N. Vinogradov

Professor D. M. Rossisky

V. D. Zipalov, Doctor of Medicine

Vyshinsky then read out admissions made by Kazakov at the preliminary investigation. Under these pressures, Kazakov finally confirmed his guilt in the matter. Vyshinsky was then finally able to say:

Inasmuch as we have a definite finding from the Commission of Experts, and Kazakov has repudiated his statement about the neutrality of these lysates, I think that the question can be considered closed.¹⁷⁷

The last accused, Maximov-Dikovsky, was then examined. He admitted having been placed in Kuibyshev’s secretariat by Yenukidze, and explained how he had helped the medical killers to dispose of Kuibyshev.

Vyshinsky then produced a medical “witness,” Dr. Belostotsky, who had been present during Gorky’s last illness and now testified against Pletnev and Levin. The final report of the Expert Commission, confirming all the medical accusations and the attempt on Yezhov’s health, was then presented.

It will be seen that the evidence in the case of these medical murders is confused and incomplete. We can be sure that those on trial were innocent of all the charges of treason, conspiracy, espionage, and sabotage. We can be virtually certain, on the other hand, that Yagoda’s responsibility for the murder of Kirov was correctly established—with the minor amendment that his instructions were received not from Yenukidze but from Stalin. But with the murky tale of the deaths of Menzhinsky, Peshkov, Kuibyshev, and Gorky, we are on different ground.

There are two problems: Were they murdered? And, if so, were they murdered by the doctors, or by one or any of them?

The first point to establish is that reliance on the binding force of the Hippocratic Oath will not take us far. Either the five doctors (Levin, Pletnev, Kazakov, A. I. Vinogradov, and Khodorovsky) were guilty as charged or the five doctors on the Expert Commission, and the witness Dr. Belostotsky, were, in their capacity as doctors, accomplices in judicial murder.

A similar pattern was to be repeated in 1952–1953. In the later Doctors’ Plot, either the doctors, or some of them, procured the murder of Zhdanov (and in this atmosphere the fact of their rehabilitation by a political group not wishing the matter to go further by no means disproves this possibility) or Dr. Timashuk—their denouncer—was actively willing to have her colleagues submitted to torture and death, and the new Commission of Medical Experts who certified that the doctors were guilty—and were afterward censured for having doing so—were accomplices in an action which would ordinarily have led to the liquidation of their colleagues. In neither case can the doctors be blamed, as can the true instigators. On the contrary, the degradation of a humane profession under political terror makes the story even more revolting.

Drs. A. I. Vinogradov and Khodorovsky, dead in unknown circumstances in the hands of the Secret Police; Drs. Levin and Kazakov, shot to death in the cellars of the Lubyanka; and Professor Pletnev, killed later, did not commit all or any of the crimes they were charged with. They may all seem to us to have been, in a way, martyrs—the unknown, confused, and pathetic martyrdom suffered by ordinary people caught up more or less accidentally in maneuvers of power by leaders to whom human life and standards of truth counted for nothing.

A number of other doctors were implicated in one way or another, though not publicly, in the Gorky affair (and were known in imprisonment as “Gorkyists”). For example, Professor G. M. Danishevsky, chairman of the Scientific Council of the People’s Commissariat of Health,¹⁷⁸ and a Dr. Loevenstein¹⁷⁹ were reported in the Pechora and Yertsevo camps, respectively.

The argument that no post-Kirov murders in fact took place is a simple one. Stalin needed a few more assassinations to lay at the door of the oppositionists, and could only produce them by representing natural deaths as murders. This is a perfectly sound point as far as it goes. But it is an entirely negative one, and does not enable us to pronounce one way or the other, meaning no more than “if the deaths were natural, Stalin might have produced an identical story.”

The (equally general) argument on the other side is equally strong: that Kuibyshev and Gorky were obstacles to Stalin, and we all know what Stalin did to obstacles. Nor is it in the least out of character to suppose that he and Yagoda would have been prepared to use the method of murder, if available.

We must turn, rather, to the details. In the first place, there is Yagoda’s evidence of the morning of 8 March, when he pleaded guilty to the murders of Kuibyshev and Gorky, and not guilty to those of Peshkov and Menzhinsky.

On the whole, Yagoda’s initial evidence seems to have been true, or as true as was possible in the circumstances, on most other matters. His account of the Kirov murder seems quite authentic, except on the point of who instructed him to carry it out, and even that is hinted at in his remarks that “it was not quite like that,” when describing the relevant meetings; for this can best be taken as implying that someone’s name has been left out or wrongly reported. Again, he pleaded not guilty to the charge of espionage, and there is no doubt that this was the truth. So when we come to his anomalous pleas on the four medical murders, there is at least some ground for paying attention to what he is saying.

On the Menzhinsky case, we have the added detail of Kazakov’s last-minute retraction of the whole essence of his evidence. This seems decisive. Menzhinsky was almost certainly not murdered by his doctors. (He may, of course, have been killed in some other fashion.)

On Peshkov, on the face of it the whole idea of his murder seems almost pointless. Yagoda justly remarked, “I see no sense in his murder.” That Peshkova was Yagoda’s mistress really adds little to his motive. He did not propose to marry her; he was married already and made no attempt to murder or divorce his wife over the following three years. Moreover, the murder method (reflected in the death of the loyal old sheep in Animal Farm) is a trifle unconvincing.

With Kuibyshev and Gorky, though—that is, precisely the two killings Yagoda freely admitted to—we have cases in which Stalin had definite and pressing political motives for murder.

This does not prove that he killed them. In Kuibyshev’s case, all we can say is that he is now named as one of Stalin’s three main opponents of the purge in the Politburo, and that Stalin procured the death of both the others (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze) by devious, though differing, means—the latter by a faked heart attack. So Kuibyshev’s “heart attack” is not by any means to be accepted simply at face value. Moreover, his survival through 1935 might have constituted a severe obstacle to Stalin’s plans, and he died at precisely the time Stalin was turning against the other main opponents of the killing of Zinoviev and Kamenev.

But as against that, we have no positive evidence of murder. We can, indeed, exculpate the doctors. If Kuibyshev was murdered, it was not done by them. On Kuibyshev’s death, documents now published in the Soviet Union show that he did indeed suffer from heart trouble and that, “feeling very poorly,” he asked to be excused from a session of Gosplan, on which the writer comments, “It is probable that this was a regular heart attack.”¹⁸⁰ (But it has recently been speculated in a Soviet periodical that Stalin may indeed have killed Kuibyshev.)¹⁸¹

Gorky’s death is the most interesting and important. For here we have a case where the survival of a sick man for a few months might have gravely hampered Stalin’s plans for the August 1936 Trial, whose postponement until after the holidays could perhaps have led to resistance in the Politburo and Central Committee. But how could Gorky be silenced, apart from the international scandal of arrest? As Vyshinsky put it, though with different intent, in his concluding speech: “How in our country, in the conditions that exist in the Soviet State, could it be made impossible for Gorky to display political activity except by taking his life?”¹⁸²

But again, it is clear that the doctors, or at any rate those tried, were innocent. Even such credulous observers as Walter Duranty strongly doubted their guilt.

A possible alternative is perhaps that Gorky was indeed murdered, but not by Pletnev and Levin, now long since rehabilitated.

As I write, in 1989, opinion is still current in Moscow that Stalin procured Gorky’s death. Such talk goes back a long way; for example, a “Gorkyist” doctor in one of the Vorkuta camps, wrongly identified as Pletnev, told a confidante in the early 1950s that Gorky had been given poisoned sweetmeats, which also killed one of his attendants.¹⁸³ As evidence, this does not amount to much. However, there is one piece of more cogent testimony. In the summer of 1963, an old American acquaintance of Gorky visited his eighty-six-year-old widow, Ekaterina Peshkova, in Moscow. Of her son’s death, she said quite calmly that she had no doubt that it was natural. When the visitor remarked that people now said that Gorky’s, too, had been natural, she became very agitated and exclaimed: “It’s not quite so, but don’t ask me to tell you about it! I won’t be able to sleep a wink for three days and nights if I tell you.”¹⁸⁴

Mme. Peshkova’s evident conviction that Peshkov’s death was natural and Gorky’s not fits in with Yagoda’s testimony in court. As with his evidence on the Kirov Case, we seem to be driven to the ironic conclusion that, alone among the accused, the story told by the ex-Police Chief was essentially true! And if this is so, his confession to the Kuibyshev murder, alone among the other three, is best explicable as indicating that Kuibyshev, too, was really murdered. But this is a matter of deduction rather than evidence: we cannot at present at all exclude the possibility that the timely death of these men Stalin wanted out of the way was, after all, natural. Nor does it seem very probable that more will be forthcoming even when the Soviet archives are opened up. For it is rather unlikely that plans for this style of killing are committed to paper.

And there we must leave this murky and horrible episode.

When the doctors and their organizers and accomplices had been dealt with, the Expert Commission, as we have said, made its report, confirming their guilt, and for full measure establishing the damage to Yezhov’s health, evidenced in his urine. Apart from a short session in camera at which Yagoda (it was announced) “fully admitted organizing the murder of Comrade M. A. Peshkov,” the hearing was concluded. But before adjournment, Vyshinsky recalled Rosengolts for one petty smear.

He described the good-luck token found in Rosengolts’s pocket (see here), and asked the court’s permission to read it. In a sneering tone, amid titters from the audience, he read out eight verses of the Psalms—“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered …”—and then asked Rosengolts, “How did this get into your pocket?”

Rosengolts:

My wife put it in my pocket one day before I went to work. She said it was for good luck.

Vyshinsky continued on a humorous note, “And you carried this ‘good luck’ in your hip pocket for several months?”

Rosengolts:

I did not even pay attention …

Vyshinsky:

Nevertheless, you saw what your wife was doing?

Rosengolts:

I was in a hurry.

Vyshinsky:

But you were told that this was a family talisman for good luck?

¹⁸⁵

At this, he winked at the crowd, which roared with laughter,¹⁸⁶ and the hearings were at an end.

THE LAST ACT

The court reassembled on 11 March for the final speeches and pleas. Vyshinsky’s speech for the prosecution lasted all morning. He started with a violent harangue:

It is not for the first time that the Supreme Court of our country is examining a case involving the gravest crimes directed against the well-being of our country, against our Socialist fatherland, the fatherland of the working people of the whole world. But I will hardly be mistaken if I say that this is the first time that our court has had to examine a case like this, to examine a case of such crimes and such foul deeds as those that have passed at this trial before your eyes, before the eyes of the whole world, a case of such criminals as those you now see in the prisoners’ dock.

With every day and hour that passed, as the court investigation on the present case proceeded, it brought to light even more of the horror of the chain of shameful, unparalleled, monstrous crimes committed by the accused, the entire abominable chain of heinous deeds before which the base deeds of the most inveterate, vile, unbridled and despicable criminals fade and grow dim.¹⁸⁷

He then came to the whole crux, from the point of view of Stalinist logic:

… The historical significance of this trial consists before all in the fact that at this trial it has been shown, proved and established with exceptional scrupulousness and exactitude that the Rights, Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, and so on and so forth, are nothing other than a gang of murderers, spies, diversionists and wreckers, without any principles or ideals….

The Trotskyites and Bukharinites, that is to say, the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ , the leading lights of which are now in the prisoners’ dock, is not a political party, a political tendency, but a band of felonious criminals, and not simply felonious criminals, but of criminals who have sold themselves to enemy intelligence services, criminals whom even ordinary felons treat as the basest, the lowest, the most contemptible, the most depraved of the depraved.¹⁸⁸

Interrupting his argument with remarks about “a foul-smelling heap of human garbage,”¹⁸⁹ he traced the continuity of counter-revolution back to the Shakhty and “Industrial Party” Trials.

Attacking the entire past careers of Bukharin and the others, he rehearsed their current crimes. Of Zelensky, for example, he said:

I shall refer here to the most abominable practice of mixing glass and nails with foodstuffs, butter in particular, which hit at the most vital interests, the health and lives of our population. Glass and nails in butter! This is so monstrous a crime that, in my opinion, all other crimes of the kind pale before it.

He went on to explain:

In our country, rich in resources of all kinds, there could not have been and cannot be a situation in which a shortage of any product should exist….

It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible for it.¹⁹⁰

A method of explaining economic failure which any Government might envy.

He attacked the line taken by Bukharin—“the damnable cross of a fox and a swine”—and Rykov:

The former wanted to prove here that, actually speaking, he did not favour the defeat of the U.S.S.R., that he did not favour espionage, nor wrecking, nor diversive activities, because in general he was not supposed to have any connection with these practical matters, for he was the ‘theoretician’, a man who occupied himself with the problematics of universal questions.¹⁹¹

He was particularly incensed with the refusal of Bukharin and Rykov to accept responsibility for the Kirov murder:

Why did people who had organized espionage, who had organized insurrectionary movements and terrorist acts, and who, on their own admission, had received instructions from Trotsky on terrorism, suddenly, in 1934, stand aloof from the assassination of one of the greatest comrades-in-arms of Stalin, one of the most prominent leaders of the Party and the Government? …

Bukharin and Rykov have admitted that the assassination of leaders of the Party and the Government, of members of the Political Bureau, was part of their plans…. Why should we assume that, having entered into negotiations with Semyonov for the organization of the assassination of members of the Political Bureau, Bukharin deletes from this list of persons who are to be slain one of the most influential members of the Political Bureau who had distinguished himself by his irreconcilable fight against the Trotskyites, Zinovievites and Bukharinites? Where is the logic in such behaviour? There is no logic in it….

Finally Rykov admitted that in 1934 he instructed Artemenko to keep a watch on the automobiles of members of the Government. For what purpose? For terrorist purposes. Rykov was organizing the assassination of members of our Government, of members of the Political Bureau. Why should Rykov make an exception in the case of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, who nevertheless was assassinated on the decision of this accursed bloc? He made no such exception!¹⁹²

In the medical murders, too, Vyshinsky pointed out that Bukharin admitted everything but actual knowledge or responsibility. Dismissing “an opinion current among criminologists that in order to establish complicity it is necessary to establish common agreement and an intent on the part of each of the criminals, of the accomplices, for each of the crimes,”¹⁹³ he demanded the death penalty for all except Rakovsky and Bessonov.

He concluded that the others

must be shot like dirty dogs! Our people are demanding one thing: crush the accursed reptile! Time will pass. The graves of the hateful traitors will grow over with weeds and thistles…. Over the road cleared of the last scum and filth of the past, we, our people, with our beloved leader and teacher, the great Stalin, at our head will march as before onwards and onwards, towards Communism!¹⁹⁴

In the evening, the doctors’ defense lawyers made their pleas, putting the blame on Yagoda.

Then came the last pleas of the accused. Bessonov remarked that he had loyally returned to Moscow from abroad even when under suspicion. Most of the others simply accused themselves, Bukharin, and Rykov. Ivanov put in the remark, a sinister foreshadowing of future cases:

The reason, I think, why Bukharin has not told the whole truth here is because throughout the whole period of the revolution he has fought the revolution and to this day has remained its enemy, and because he wants to preserve those remnants of the hostile forces which are still lurking in their dens.¹⁹⁵

Krestinsky went into his splendid record in the Party, starting as an eighteenyear-old boy in 1901, his leadership in Bolshevik underground organizations, his many arrests, his work as Lenin’s “organizational assistant.” He made the telling point, “I consider it necessary to stress the fact that I had absolutely no knowledge of the terrorist acts enumerated in the second section of the indictment, and that I learnt about them only when I was handed a copy of the indictment,”¹⁹⁶ and went on to explain his retraction as due in part to the fact that “it seemed to me easier to die than to give the world the idea that I was even a remote accessory to the murder of Gorky, about which I actually knew nothing.”¹⁹⁷

Rykov, trembling and livid, made a sound defense. He admitted his general guilt, and then added:

… But the State Prosecutor has charged me with something in which I had no direct part, and which I cannot admit. He has charged me with adopting a decision, or with giving directions for the murder of Kirov, Kuibyshev, Menzhinsky, Gorky and Peshkov….

The evidence brought against me in this connection has been set forth here in detail; it is based upon the statements of Yagoda, who refers to Yenukidze. Nothing more incriminating was brought against me at the trial….

The assassination of Kirov has formed the subject of two trials. Both the direct perpetrators and the organizers and leaders of this assassination have appeared in court. I do not recall that my name was mentioned then.¹⁹⁸

He went on to rub in one extremely telling point. When it came to the alleged attempt on Lenin of twenty years previously, the prosecution had produced eyewitnesses, there were confrontations, and in fact direct evidence.

Why then, on the question of my participation in the assassination of five most important political figures, should a decision be taken on the basis of indirect evidence?

This, it seems to me, would be incorrect. At any rate, I deny any charge of my participation in these five assassinations.¹⁹⁹

Until his arrest, he had believed that Gorky had died a natural death. It was only at the trial itself that he had “first learnt of such members of our counter-revolutionary organization as Ivanov.”²⁰⁰

He concluded with a formal plea of guilty—“This responsibility of mine of course transcends all the discrepancies which still remain regarding certain facts and certain details”—and called on any surviving Rightists to “disarm.”²⁰¹

Rakovsky said:

I confess to all my crimes. What would it matter for the substance of the case if I should attempt to establish here before you the fact that I learned of many of the crimes, and of the most appalling crimes of the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ here in court, and that it was here that I first met some of the participants?²⁰²

He went on to denounce Trotsky and Trotskyism, and to point out that his evidence had been entirely satisfactory to the prosecution.

Rosengoltsfn5 rehearsed his revolutionary past, starting when, as a child of ten, he had hidden illegal literature. He made a reference to his children, and then ended by unexpectedly beginning to sing a well-known song about the USSR: “… I don’t know any other country where we can breathe so freely.” The NKVD men in the audience are reported jumping to their feet in case their intervention was needed. But Rosengolts then broke down and resumed his seat.²⁰³

Yagoda, too, “in low fear-ridden tones,”²⁰⁴ dwelt on his underground work for the Party, from the age of fourteen, and of such later services as “vast construction jobs—the canals” (that is, the forced-labor projects). He continued to oppose Vyshinsky on one point:

I am not a spy and have not been one. I think that in the definition of a spy or espionage we will not differ. But a fact is a fact. I had no direct connections with abroad, there are no instances of my directly handing over any information. I am not jesting when I say that if I had been a spy dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services—there would have been no need for them to maintain such a mass of spies as have now been caught in the Soviet Union.²⁰⁵

The doctors and secretaries pleaded Yagoda’s threats to them. Levin lapsed by referring to his great esteem for Gorky, and had to be called to order for “blasphemy.” Pletnev mentioned his medical work, adding that the NKVD had given him facilities to write a monograph; he had known nothing of the “bloc.” Bulanov criticized his fellow accused:

I think, perhaps I am mistaken, that some of them showed signs of wanting to deceive the Party even now, although each of them invariably began by saying that he fully and entirely shares responsibility, pleads guilty and is answerable. But this was a matter of form, general declarations. In a number of cases they tried to deny their guilt by pleading ignorance of some point.²⁰⁶

Bukharin’s speech, even more than Rykov’s, was a brilliant development of the line he had taken throughout. He admitted leadership of the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” and accepted political responsibility for all the crimes. For instance:

I admit that I am responsible both politically and legally for the defeatist orientation, for it did dominate in the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, although I affirm that personally I did not hold this position….

I further consider myself responsible both politically and legally for wrecking activities, although I personally do not remember having given directions about wrecking activities. I did not talk about this. I once spoke positively on this subject to Grinko. Even in my testimony I mentioned that I had once told Radek that I considered this method of struggle as not very expedient. Yet Citizen the State Prosecutor makes me out to be a leader of the wrecking activities.²⁰⁷

As Bukharin destroyed the prosecution case against him, “Vyshinsky, powerless to intervene, sat uneasily in his place, looking embarrassed and yawning ostentatiously.”²⁰⁸

While accepting group responsibility, Bukharin went on to deny that the group, as apart from the central “bloc” of politicians, existed:

Citizen the Prosecutor explained in the speech for the prosecution that the members of a gang of brigands might commit robberies in different places, but that they would nevertheless be responsible for each other. That is true, but in order to be a gang the members of the gang of brigands must know each other and be in more or less close contact with each other. Yet I first learnt the name of Sharangovich from the indictment, and I first saw him here in court. It was here that I first learnt about the existence of Maximov, I have never been acquainted with Pletnev, I have never been acquainted with Kazakov, I have never spoken about counter-revolutionary matters with Rosengolts, I have never spoken about it to Zelensky, I have never in my life spoken to Bulanov, and so on. Incidentally, even the Prosecutor did not ask me a single question about these people…. Consequently, the accused in this dock are not a group.²⁰⁹

The bloc had supposedly been formed in 1928, long before Hitler came to power: “How then can it be asserted that the bloc was organized on the instructions of fascist intelligence services?”

On espionage he took the same line: “Citizen the Prosecutor asserts that I was one of the major organizers of espionage, on a par with Rykov. What are the proofs? The testimony of Sharangovich, of whose existence I had not even heard until I read the indictment.”²¹⁰ The prosecution had proved that he had met Khodzhayev and discussed politics, and taken this as proof of espionage contact. There was no logic here.

He went on similarly to “categorically deny my complicity in the assassination of Kirov, Menzhinsky, Kuibyshev, Gorky and Maxim Peshkov,”²¹¹ and in the 1918 case with Lenin:

As to the plan of physical extermination, I categorically deny it, and here the logic to which Citizen the State Prosecutor referred, namely, that forcible arrest implied physical extermination, will not help in the least. The Constituent Assembly was arrested, but nobody suffered physically. We arrested the faction of the ‘Left’ Socialist-Revolutionaries, yet not a single man of them suffered physically. The ‘Left’ Socialist-Revolutionaries arrested Dzerzhinsky, yet he did not suffer physically.²¹²

He then remarked tellingly, “The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence.”²¹³

Vyshinsky flushed at the words.

Thus Bukharin refuted the charges in detail. But he admitted them in general. He had been a counter-revolutionary conspirator in “this stinking underground life.” He had “degenerated” into an enemy of Socialism. He attacked Western commentators who had suggested that the confessions were not voluntary, and rejected the sympathy to be expected from Western Socialists. He was guilty of treason, the organization of kulak uprisings, the preparation of (unspecified) terrorist acts. He hoped that his execution would be “the last severe lesson” to those who had wavered in their support of the USSR and its leadership.²¹⁴

At 9:25 P.M. on 12 March the court retired. It returned and pronounced verdict at 4:00 A.M. on 13 March. All the accused were found guilty on all charges. All were sentenced to death except for Pletnev, who got twenty-five years; Rakovsky, twenty years; and Bessonov, fifteen years. Pletnev was resentenced, this time to death, on 8 September 1941, and was shot on 11 September 1941, as were Rakovsky and Bessonov. Bessonov’s liquidation is reported to have occurred in Orel prison, where Spiridonova was also executed at this time; and perhaps it was there that this final winding up of the Bukharin Trial took place.²¹⁵

An Old Bolshevik remarked that apart from the use of relatives as hostages, he saw the 1938 confessions as based on total lack of political hope. In addition, in spite of everything, Stalin had continued his promise not to execute the Bukharinites. They knew he had gone back on his word in most other cases, but “a little hope goes a long way in such circumstances.”

Bukharin, nevertheless, must have known that his own attitude in court, fulfilling the minimum requirements only, would cost him his life. He had said in court that he was “almost certain” he would be dead after the trial. He and Rykov, unlike Zinoviev and Kamenev, were ready for death. They are said to have died firmly defying their captors.²¹⁶

In 1965, Bukharin’s “last letter” was published in the West.²¹⁷ This was at a time when there was talk of an official rehabilitation of Bukharin and Rykov. And, in fact, they had at least been exculpated of spying and terrorism, though only at a fairly obscure conference of historians.²¹⁸ And Ikramov, Krestinsky, Zelensky, Khodzhayev, and Grinko had actually been rehabilitated, making nonsense of the charges against the rest. However, full rehabilitation of the two principals did not come for another twenty-three years.

The “last letter” appeals to future leaders of the Party and denounces the NKVD and its use of the “pathological suspiciousness” of Stalin. This “hellish machine” can transform any Party member into a “terrorist” or “spy.” He was not guilty, would cheerfully have died for Lenin, loved Kirov, and had done nothing against Stalin. He had had no connection with Ryutin’s or Uglanov’s illegal struggle.

Bukharin’s wife, Anna Larina, was arrested soon after the trial. She is reported spending six months in a small cell permanently ankle-deep in cold water, but survived to serve eighteen years in labor camp and exile. Their small son was brought up by Anna’s sister and for twenty years knew nothing of his parenthood.²¹⁹ It was Anna Larina who, in the final days before Bukharin’s arrest, had learned his “letter” by heart; it was finally published in Moscow in 1988.

Bukharin’s crippled first wife, Nadezhda, had written to Stalin several times asserting his innocence, and turned in her Party card after his arrest. She was arrested in April 1938, and her surgical corset taken from her so that she was in continual pain. However, she refused to confess. She was interrogated at intervals until March 1940, when she was shot. Her brothers, brother-in-law, and other relatives were also arrested and were shot, died in prison, or disappeared in camps.²²⁰

Bukharin’s daughter by his second marriage, Svetlana, had been left at liberty when he was arrested. At the end of the year, she was encouraged to write, and sketch, for an article in Pionerskaya pravda, which appeared on 28 December 1937. She later interpreted this as being a method of showing her father that the family was not being persecuted, but that if he gave further trouble, this unspoken bargain might be changed. She and her mother in fact were not arrested until later. She herself was convicted without an indictment: “is adequately convicted in being Bukharin’s daughter.”²²¹

Ikramov’s wife and his four brothers were shot, and his elder son was arrested (Ikramov himself was informed of all this while in jail). His younger son, Kamil, ten years old at the time of the trial, was only arrested in 1943.²²²

Yagoda’s wife is reported in camp, though she was eventually shot, while two sisters and his mother seem to have died in camps as wel1.²²³ Ivanov’s wife is reported in camp,²²⁴ and the wives of Rakovsky and Ossinsky in the Butyrka.²²⁵ Rykov’s wife was also in the Butyrka, in 1937, anxious and ignorant of her husband’s fate.²²⁶ She did not survive, and their daughter was sentenced to eight years in camp “to be used only for general labor,”²²⁷ and in the event served twenty years. During 1938 at least, Bukharin’s father and Rosengolts’s wife are said not even to have been arrested²²⁸ As for the family of Tomsky, who had sensibly predeceased the other “conspirators”: his two elder sons were arrested and shot; his wife and youngest son were imprisoned.²²⁹

During the whole period of the trial, from the announcement on 28 February 1938 that it would take place until the actual executions, the papers had, of course, been full of the demands of workers’ meetings that no pity be shown to the “foul band of murderers and spies.” Leaders and articles rubbed it in. A Conference on Physiological Problems at the Academy of Sciences passed a resolution of thanks to the NKVD. The folk “poet” Dzhambul produced his usual verse contribution to Pravda, “Annihilate.” The verdict of the court was received with many expressions of public joy.

Life, which had cast the Bukharin reactionaries aside, was represented mainly by the heroes of the Soviet Arctic expedition who had been landed at the pole some months earlier and were now in the news. There was celebration first of their rescue from the ice floe and then, on 16 March, of their arrival back in Leningrad on the icebreakers Yermak and Murmanets. Papanin and his gallant comrades were, as before, given the full treatment day after day, with receptions, decorations, public meetings, and a vast press spread.

A further sign of the rejection by the forward-looking Soviet people of all the dark forces of the past was shown in the elections to Union Republic Supreme Soviets. As Stalin was to remark so tellingly in his Report to the XVIIIth Congress in 1939,²³⁰ the executions of Tukhachevsky and Yakir were followed by the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, giving the Soviet power 98.6 percent of all taking part in the voting. At the beginning of 1938, “Rosengolts, Rykov, Bukharin and others” had been sentenced, and after this, elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics gave the Soviet power 99.4 percent of all taking part in the voting.

As for the effects of the trial, once again neither the ineptitudes of the plot nor the partial denials of the accused made any difference. The extravagances included those long since established. Once more, a vast network of assassins was discovered. At least eight groups were working on the destruction of Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Yezhov. And, this time, they were shown not simply to be under the protection of high officials in the Party and the Army, but actually to have been nourished and sponsored by the NKVD itself. Seldom can terrorists have had such advantages as those supposedly enjoyed by the plotters. Apart from half a dozen members of the Government, including the Head of the Secret Police itself, they actually had on their side the NKVD officers Pauker and Volovich, responsible for guarding their prospective victims. But the results had been negligible. Assassinations had indeed been carried out, but only by doctors. By adding these in, the total successes of all the groups of assassins exposed at the three trials consisted of Kirov killed; Molotov perhaps slightly shaken in a car accident; Kuibyshev, Gorky, and Menzhinsky “poisoned” by their doctors; and Gorky’s son given a chill and then doctored to death. It is an unimpressive result, and the conclusion—that the best way to assassinate anyone was to wait until he got ill—was not very encouraging to anyone desiring speedy action. A minor curiosity, again unnoticed by enthusiasts, is that the indictment cites against the accused diversionary acts in the Far Eastern Territory, and in particular certain specified train wrecks, on the instructions of Japanese intelligence, and the verdict finds them guilty of this, but no attempt at all is made to prove it in the evidence! The reason for this anomaly is not clear, though it might conceivably be that the relevant witness balked at the last moment.

Another oddity of the trial was again the implication of a whole series of important figures who were, however, not produced. As Grinko had remarked, the “bloc” included “a number of other people who are not now in the dock.”²³¹ Major roles in the conspiracy, as important as those played by any of those appearing in court, were alleged to have been played by Yenukidze, Rudzutak,²³² and Antipov,²³³ while A. P. Smirnov, Karakhan, Uglanov, V. Shmidt, and Yakovlev²³⁴ had roles notably more important than the second level of those appearing in the dock.fn6 Yenukidze and Karakhan had indeed been shot without public trial. But why? And as to the others, why did they not appear? Such questions were scarcely asked.

On an even more essential point, Bukharin’s calculation that his tactics would adequately expose the falsity of the charges against him seems to have been too subtle. It was, of course, plain that he denied all overt acts of terrorism and espionage. But who was affected by this? Serious independent observers in any case did not credit the charges, and would not have done so even if he had confessed to all of them—any more than they did in the case of Zinoviev. But to the greater political audience for whom the trials were enacted, the impression received was simply that “Bukharin had confessed.” For those who even noted that the confession had only been partial, the fact that he had admitted to organizing a terrorist conspiracy outweighed his rejection of actual terrorist acts. Indeed, this last even gave a certain color to Vyshinsky’s thesis that Bukharin, though driven to admit the essentials, was trying to wriggle out of particular crimes.

Stalin had once again won the battle of wits. For he understood, as the intellectual Bukharin did not, that political effects did not depend on simple logic, just as, in the 1920s, his opponents had “won” the arguments at Congresses in the debating-point sense, without affecting his practical victory.

All the accused except Yagoda were rehabilitated in 1988.