The Great Terror

12 The Great Trial

fn1

The Senior Veterinary Surgeon of the Moscow Military District is reported in the Butyrka about this time. He was charged with destroying 25,000 horses of the cavalry reserve by issuing poisoned vaccine and was sentenced to death (R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik,

Memoirs

[London, 1965], p. 310).

fn2

Apart from the other two doctors actually on trial, it may be noted that two more were implicated: Dr. A. I. Vinogradov, of the medical service of the OGPU (

Bukharin Trial

, p. 518), proceedings against whom had been “terminated owing to his death” (ibid., p. 35); and the political Khodorovsky, Head of the Kremlin Medical Administration until 1938, who had presumably not yet ripened (and whose death date was later given as 1940) (

XI s“ezd RKP(b) mart—aprel’ 1922 g. Stenograficheskiy otchet

[Moscow, 1961]).

fn3

Levin

: … Gorky loved fire, flames, and we made use of this. A bonfire would be lit up for him. Just when Gorky would feel the fatigue after his work all the chopped branches were gathered together, and a flame kindled. Gorky would stand near this bonfire, it was hot there, and all this had a harmful effect on his health (

Bukharin Trial

, p. 537).

fn4

Professors Shereshevsky and (V. N.) Vinogradov were to survive Levin by many years. In 1952–1953, they themselves were to go through the same process. Vinogradov, who was seventy on 3 November 1952, was arrested a few days later, and proved to have been “an old agent of British Intelligence.” He had, it was announced on 13 January 1953, been one of the murderers of Zhdanov (whose death certificate on 31 August 1948 he had signed). On Stalin’s personal order, he was put in chains. Shereshevsky’s name was not announced as one of those arrested, but in the larger list of those released when the Doctor’s Plot was repudiated by Beria on 4 April 1953, it turned out that he, too, had been implicated and arrested. This later batch of doctor-poisoners, who survived by the happy chance of Stalin dying in the meanwhile, had been treated with particular brutality. It was to them that Stalin’s order “Beat, beat and beat again” was applied by ‘3eneral of State Security M. D. Ryumin, Head of the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases and Assistant Minister of State Security (himself shot in July 1954) (Khrushchev, Secret Speech).

fn5

It is a curious fact that Stalin was later (in his Report to the 1939 XVIIIth Congress) twice to name Rosengolts first among the 1938 conspirators—once in a general list of spies and so on, running “Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengolts, Bukharin,” and then on the 1938 Trial alone, “Rosengolts, Rykov, Bukharin and others.” This seems to reflect some special animus on the part of the dictator, and fits in with the special jab at Rosengolts on the “talisman,” doubtless ordered from above.

fn6

Other members of the Central Committee implicated include Vareikis, Lyubimov, Lobov, Su¬limov, Kabakov, Razumov, Rumyantsev, and Komarov.