Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  Shakespeare’s prescient view of Stalin’s great rival was supplemented by Feuchtwanger’s own rule that in any case all those who had been Bolsheviks were by nature and history plotters. Courageous, brave, and adventurous, they were born to create change by dramatic means. But when the defendants changed their minds and all simultaneously decided that Trotsky was wrong, then they strained every sinew to confess, to assist the authorities and thereby render one final service to the Revolution.

  And Feuchtwanger had a final psychological ace in the hole. He was one of the relatively few outsiders who had managed to obtain an audience with Stalin, and he rested his final judgment on his assessment of the personality of the Soviet leader. “It at once becomes as clear as daylight,” he concluded, “that this modest, impersonal man cannot have committed the colossal indiscretion of producing, with the assistance of countless performers, so coarse a comedy, merely for the purpose of holding a sort of festival of revenge.” It was unimaginable. Why would anyone, let alone a modest, impersonal sort of man, do it?44 Trotsky, it seemed, could be a conspirator by virtue of his revolutionary past, but Stalin couldn’t.

  The Truth

  Whether Stalin himself “did it” will be discussed later, but the fact is that it was indeed done. Today only a few eccentric Stalinist diehards can be found to argue that the confessions were in any way true. Davies, Feuchtwanger, Collard, and the many, many more who accepted the show trials at something like face value—who thought that there had indeed been a gigantic conspiracy to destroy Stalin and his Soviet Union—are now seen as dupes, fools, or fellow travelers.

  At the time, however, arguments raged within socialist and labor movements throughout the world. In America, Trotsky sympathizers even felt the need to set up a parallel tribunal, presided over by the famous philosopher John Dewey, to investigate the charges made against their hero and his supposed secret supporters. It was during the course of this inquiry that evidence was first heard that no planes had flown into Oslo airport at the time that Pyatakov was supposed to have landed there from Berlin, and a letter from Leon Sedov from the autumn of 1931 was cited in which he was supposed to have written, “Do you know whom I saw on Unter den Linden? The redhead. I looked him squarely in the eye, but he turned his face away as though he didn’t recognize me. What a miserable fellow!”

  This account was substantiated when, after 1990, Soviet secret police files were opened up. Among the reports was one from Agent B-187, variously code-named Max, Mack, Kant, and Tulip, who had infiltrated Sedov’s immediate circle in the summer of 1934. Known to Sedov as Etienne (Sedov’s secret-police code name was Sonny), Max had become an intimate of Sedov’s wife, among others. Max reported to his bosses in Moscow that he understood from conversations with Sedov that Pyatakov had never met Trotsky after the latter’s exile. He had therefore not been to Oslo.45 Furthermore, Sedov had also told him that he had seen Pyatakov briefly in Unter den Linden on May 1, 1931. “Pyatakov had recognized him,” reported Max, “but turned away and did not want to speak to him. Pyatakov then went off with someone else, apparently Shestov.”46

  If Pyatakov didn’t meet Sedov and didn’t meet Trotsky, then the entire conceit collapses. There was no moment of decision, no explanation to Pyatakov of the need to betray his country, no revelation of dealings with Nazi Germany, no conversations, nothing. And if that wasn’t true, then the notes in shoes, the sabotage, the assassination plots, these too must all be seen as part of an extraordinarily elaborate and lethal fantasy.

  A fantasy with the faintest glimmer of truth. That there were secret discussions between people who wanted Stalin’s defeat cannot be denied—such meetings, after all, could not have been held in the open. According to American historian J. Arch Getty, the evidence shows that by 1932 Trotsky was indeed “actively trying to forge a new coalition in which former oppositionists from both Left and Right would participate.” In one letter, Trotsky acknowledged that under the circumstances, “One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence.”47 There were probably illicit gatherings and the smuggling of prohibited literature. But there is an immense gap between agitating against a dictator and a conspiracy on the scale claimed at the show trials.

  How then do we explain the weird complexity of the confessions and the sangfroid of the accused? Feuchtwanger described them as “well-groomed, well-dressed men of a careless, natural bearing. They drank tea, had newspapers in their pockets and often looked toward the public. The whole thing was less like a criminal trial than a debate carried on in a conversational tone by educated men.” Why didn’t those old Bolsheviks, standing in front of the world, take the opportunity to indict the process itself? Surely, by January 1937, having seen Zinoviev and Kamenev sentenced to death, they couldn’t have been hoping for clemency?

  As we shall see, the famous Moscow Trials, of which Pyatakov’s was the middle one of three, were actually the end of a process, not the beginning. Before senior party leaders were put on trial, others less exalted had been through the same ordeal. In the early spring of 1931, there had been a trial of alleged leaders of the Menshevik Party in Moscow—the so-called Union Bureau. As an exiled official of the party, Rafael Abramovich Rein, told a Berlin rally in March of that year, the defendants had confessed to all kinds of impossible meetings and contacts. For example, contacts had been cited that he knew—given that many of them were supposed to have involved him—had simply never happened.

  Then Rein asked rhetorically, “How is it that experienced and honor-able people can make such ridiculous confessions and admissions?”

  The answer lies in the methods used by the GPU [secret police] in such trials. The accused are subjected to continuous interrogation for up to 24 and 48 hours, during which time the investigators change, while the accused is made to wait for hours or even days, often in a corridor without food or rest. Prisoners are kept in strict isolation, frequently in windowless rooms, in which they lose all sense of time. They are given no information, they can send no messages, and are given no newspapers or books, nor pencils and paper. They are continually threatened with shooting, and put up against the wall. And if they continue to resist, they are put into a system of stone cubicles, alternately hot and cold, without the most elementary sanitation, which has a murderous effect not just on the health of the defendant, but also on his sanity. [Cries of indignation.] The accused is presented with the false testimony of his friends and comrades, threats are made against his family, provocateurs are placed in the room, and he is given false information about the well-being of his family, about the death of small children . . . And all this continues until the accused, finally, gives in. And then a cynical process of bargaining begins between the accused and the investigator as to what “admissions” he should make. This ends with the defendant simply signing and then obediently repeating in court everything that has been dictated or suggested to him by Soviet justice.48

  Defectors from the Soviet security apparatus, such as Alexander Orlov, detailed how prisoners were subjected to intense physical and psychological abuse, including—crucially—promises that confessions would lead to safety for the victim’s family, promises which were often not kept. Unsurprisingly, such testimony was often regarded as suspect in the West, as propaganda confected by “anti-Soviet” forces. But many years later, long after Stalin’s death and Pyatakov’s rehabilitation, the old dictator’s right-hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, was interviewed by the writer Felix Chuyev. Yes, he agreed, those who had been accused of crimes were often worked over during interrogation.49

  After all the threats, the beatings, the use of prisoners’ families as bargaining chips, there was also that weird loyalty to the party and the Revolution that forms the psychological core of Arthur Koestler’s famous novel Darkness at Noon. It is possible, at the end, that some of the confessors may have come to believe that in toeing one last party line, they were somehow doing the right thing.

  Why the Lie Was Believed

  M
ore important than the question of how the confessions were elicited is the issue of how Soviet society could accept such outlandish propositions. And how could men as intelligent as Ambassador Davies, a good portion of the diplomatic corps, a job lot of foreign correspondents, many independent intellectuals, and courageous labor leaders the world over not see through the dark farce of the proceedings in Moscow?

  Clearly, Russians had private doubts about the veracity of the confessions. From 1935 to 1939, Lyubov Shaporina, wife of the composer Yuri Shaporin, kept a diary, which is now in a library in Saint Petersburg. Her entry for January 30, 1937, the day Pyatakov was sentenced, reads:

  Each People’s Commissariat has in its leadership a traitor and a spy . . . They are all party members who have made it through all the purges . . . For the last fifteen years, there’s been a continual process of decay, treachery and betrayal going on, and all of it in full sight of the Chekists [secret police]. And what about the things that are not being said at the trial? Think how much more terrible they must be. And worst of all is the very openness of the defendants. Even Lafontaine’s lambs tried to justify themselves before the wolf, but our wolves and foxes—people like Radek, Shestov, Zinoviev, old hands at this business—lay their heads down on the block like lambs, say “mea culpa” and tell everything; they might as well be at confession. Feuchtwanger [whose impressions of the trial must have been covered in the Soviet press] wondered why everyone is so forthcoming—how naive can you get! What’s hypnosis for, anyway?50

  Obviously worried lest her writings were discovered, Shaporina employed a tone that was a mixture of irony and contempt. She seems to be beyond belief or disbelief. But Shaporina was a member of the intelligentsia, an elite that had been an earlier target of the Stalinists. Many of her compatriots were more credulous.

  In early 1937, Russia was just emerging from extraordinary and appalling social upheavals. An essentially agricultural nation badly damaged by war and civil war had been transformed from a peasant economy into a heavily industrialized and urban society. The peasants had been reorganized into collective farms or else had left the land to find work in new plants and mines. Central control had at first been weak: there had been substantial movements of population, dislocating and destroying ancient communities and creating entirely new ones. Millions had starved; millions had moved; millions had joined the Communist Party, mostly for practical rather than ideological reasons. At certain points during the Great Experiment, packs of feral children were to be found living wild in the cities and towns.

  Hardly surprisingly, all kinds of strange things had happened. People had acquired positions of expertise or leadership despite their lack of qualifications for either. Raw engineers had been turned out from new institutes and immediately assumed complete responsibility for machinery they barely understood. Managers whose knowledge of running large enterprises was rudimentary were appointed nonetheless. And enormous discussions raged among senior Bolsheviks about whether and when to apply the brakes on the runaway train. But many of the difficulties encountered during what came to be known as the Soviet miracle—the human cost and the terrible errors committed along the way—had never been discussed overtly or even acknowledged. And somehow, from quite early on, the alteration of disastrous policies or the placing of blame for the hardships suffered by the Soviet people became entwined with a series of trials in which scapegoat figures were arraigned for deliberately creating the problems that society faced. One by one, starting in 1928, these trials first created and then elaborated on the idea that everything was the fault not of the Communist Party, nor of “scientific socialism,” but of plotters. In other words, evil was not a consequence of something endemic in the system but of external, conscious decisions by ruthless enemies.

  To understand this better, it’s worth looking at what some have called the warm-up trials, which began by seeking explanations for a series of catastrophic accidents in fledgling Soviet industry. In the year that Trotsky was exiled, 1928, more than fifty Russian and foreign engineers were accused of blowing up mines in the Donbas region, close to the town of Shakhty. Eleven were given the death sentence, which was carried out on five of them. Two years after the Shakhty Trial came what was known as the Industrial Party Trial. During these proceedings, the prosecution alleged the existence of a clandestine Industrial Party two thousand strong, which, in collaboration with anti-Communist Russians based in Paris and with the assistance of French intelligence, planned to overthrow communism. Five were sentenced to death, but their sentences were later commuted.

  Within three months, as we have seen, the Union Bureau of the Menshevik Party was on trial, accused of attempting to sabotage the Soviet Union’s economic program and of planning an armed revolt. All of the accused “confessed,” receiving long terms of imprisonment. In April 1933, in the Metropolitan Vickers Trial, six British electrical engineers were accused, alongside a large number of Russians, of “wrecking” and sabotage. Two of the British engineers confessed.

  So, by the time of the murder of Kirov in December 1934, there was a long history of trials and confessions, of elaborate plots and complex conspiracies, all adding up to the idea that there was a constantly shifting but ever-present group in Soviet society determined to wreck progress by any means necessary. It was after the Kirov assassination, however, that this process became identified with leaders and former leaders of the Communist Party itself, and that old Bolsheviks found themselves in the dock.

  First, Nikolayev—the assassin of Kirov—asserted at his trial, just before New Year 1935, that Trotsky may have contributed five thousand rubles to the plotters. Two weeks later, at the Moscow Center Trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others were given prison sentences for having organized counterrevolutionary activities, and thus having incited the assassins of Kirov. By the end of July of the same year, Kamenev and thirty-seven others had been tried for plotting against Stalin. Two were shot and Kamenev received yet another long prison sentence. By August 1936, a doubtless exhausted Kamenev was back in the dock for the first of the great show trials, this time with his longtime ideological soulmate Zinoviev and a number of others, in what the authorities called the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center or, more colloquially, the Main Center. This time every single one of the defendants, including Kamenev, was shot—not before, however, implicating Pyatakov and others yet to be tried in their testimonies. One trial led to another.

  And each added a new element. Pyatakov’s trial partly focused on alleged complicity with fascist governments. Later in 1937, the secret trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky and some of his fellow officers suggested the possibility of a military coup d’état. Finally, the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-one, including Nikolai Bukharin, once known as the darling of the party, established a supposed connection between anyone who had belonged to the right opposition to Stalin and those on the Trotskyite left.

  As one bestselling apologia for Stalinism, printed in the United States during the Second World War, had it, there had been three layers of Trotskyism uncovered. They had been separate, so that “if one of the layers was exposed, the others would carry on.”51 The taxonomy was something like this: layer one was the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center, headed by Zinoviev and responsible for directing terrorism and assassination. Layer two, the Trotskyite Parallel Center, led by Pyatakov, was charged with sabotage. And finally, the most important and secret layer was the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, with Bukharin as its organizing genius. “The entire apparatus,” said the author of The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, “consisted of not more than a few thousand members and twenty or thirty leaders.”

  And the separation of the layers helped explain why it was that the devious Pyatakov, despite his very full confession, failed to reveal the others, and why the Soviet authorities, as a consequence, had been able to cut into one layer at a time without messily slicing through the whole infernal conspiracy.

  This possibility had been alluded to by at least one foreign obser
ver in the period after Pyatakov’s trial. Dennis Nowell Pritt KC, Labour MP for the constituency of Hammersmith, had noted that the statements from the dock in the Zinoviev Trial had, remarkably, failed to mention the extraordinary campaign of sabotage uncovered in court just five months later. In his preface to Dudley Collard’s book, Pritt—who had been in Moscow for the Zinoviev Trial—acknowledged that the very testimony he had heard there might well be part of the conspiracy itself. Was it not possible, he asked his British readers, that “the real motive for the apparent complete abjectness of the confessions of some of the accused . . . was to lead the authorities to the belief that they had got to the bottom of the conspiracy, in order that the second or parallel center might escape detection?”52 Thus was a possible question mark over the veracity of these proceedings turned instead into a confirmation of the next trial.

  Similar thoughts must have impressed themselves on the minds of millions of ordinary Russians. Had Zinoviev not, after all, endorsed the reality behind the Shakhty Trial? Had Pyatakov not given his assent and backing to the prosecution of the Industrial Party? Had Bukharin not stayed in his Politburo seat during the arraignment of both? And if the Mensheviks had been guilty of such strange and complex plots—as everyone agreed they were—then why should not Pyatakov be guilty too?

  As early as December 1930, the leading Communist V. V. Kuibyshev could address a plenum of the Central Committee with this dire warning of the dangers and treacheries ahead:

  The enemy has been dislodged, but the enemy has not given up. He has become hardened. He will resist and oppose us fiercely. Sabotage within the country, the resistance of the kulaks who are in the process of being liquidated—all of this expresses a bitter class struggle. The threats of an intervention—this is the other side of the same coin . . . We demand of a leader of the party and of a leader of the Soviet state a relentless struggle against all attempts at concealing ideologically class-alien tasks from us.53