The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

N.I. grew thin and aged, and his red goatee turned gray. (It was my job to serve as barber; otherwise N.I. would have grown a huge beard over the course of six months).25

  On December 15, Pravda published an article accusing the former Rightists of working hand in hand with “Trotskyite-Zinovievite spies, murderers, and saboteurs, as well as Gestapo agents.” Bukharin wrote a formal letter of complaint to the Politburo and a personal one to Stalin. “What am I to do? I am hiding in my room, can’t see anyone, never go out. My family is desperate. I am desperate, too, for I am powerless against the slander that is suffocating me. I was counting on the fact that you had the extra advantage of knowing me well. I thought you knew me better than the others and that, despite the correctness of the general mood of distrust, that circumstance would have been an important component in your overall assessment.” Stalin sent a memo to Pravda’s editor in chief, Lev Mekhlis: “The case of the former Rightists (Rykov, Bukharin) has been postponed until the next Plenum of the Central Committee. Consequently, attacks against Bukharin (and Rykov) must be stopped until the matter has been resolved. It does not take great intelligence to understand such a basic truth.”26

  Meanwhile, Ezhov, on Stalin’s instructions, was working on the resolution. Former oppositionists and their associates were being arrested or brought back from the camps and forced to incriminate Rykov and Bukharin (as well as themselves and others). According to M. N. Riutin’s letter to Stalin, “at each interrogation, they threaten me, yell at me, as if I were an animal, insult me, and don’t even allow me to submit a reasoned refusal to testify.” According to L. A. Shatskin’s letter to Stalin, false testimony was being demanded “in the interests of the Party.” Those who wrote to complain wrote to Stalin, who stood for the interests of the Party. Stalin—in the interests of the Party (sub specie historiae)—supervised the operation, edited the confessions, and suggested new names and general directions.27

  After three months of interrogations by Boris Berman (the brother of the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, and the brother-in-law of the Middle Volga collectivizer and currently deputy head of the Moscow Province NKVD, Boris Bak), Radek began to incriminate Bukharin. On January 13, 1937, they confronted each other at a hearing attended by Stalin, Voroshilov, Ezhov, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze. Radek accused Bukharin of involvement in terrorist activity. Bukharin asked him why he was lying. Radek said that he would explain. Several minutes later, he did. “I would like to say that no one physically coerced me into testifying. No one threatened me with anything before I began testifying. Comrade Berman told me: ‘I am not telling you that you will be shot if you refuse, and I am not telling you that you will not be shot if you provide the testimony we consider correct.’ Besides, I am old enough not to believe any promises made when you are in prison.”

  He was not out to save his skin, he claimed, because he had given up on it long ago. The hardest part was testifying against Bukharin, “as comrades will confirm.” “At first I did not consider the overall political significance of this whole thing at the trial and so on, but then I said to myself: any attempt to deny this thing at the trial will only serve to reinforce it, so it is necessary to put an end to all this, primarily because there is a war going on. And then I said to myself that personal friendship should not be allowed to prevent me from revealing the fact that, in addition to the Zinovievite-Trotskyite organization, there is an organization of Rightists.” Radek’s statements combined the needed confessions with an explanation of why they were needed. Some seemed preliminary and needed to be reformulated. In the typed minutes of the confrontation, Stalin crossed out the self-reflexive introduction up to the colon and substituted “will only serve to reinforce the terrorist organizations” for “will only serve to reinforce it.”28

  Three days later Bukharin wrote to “dear Koba,” asking whether it might be possible that some nameless group within the Party “understands its Party duty in such a way that I need to be destroyed a priori.” He was willing to die for the Party, but not as the Party’s enemy. “I can’t think of a more monstrously tragic situation than my own. It is a profound tragedy, and I am crumbling from exhaustion. Comrade Ezhov says, in all innocence: Radek also protested at first, and then … and so on. But I am not Radek: I know I am innocent. And nothing and no one will ever force me to say ‘yes’ if the truth is actually ‘no.’”

  But what if a yes was required by the Party? Could he still say no? “If I am to be removed from the Central Committee, a political motive will have to be given. In any Party cell, I will have to admit my guilt in a way that I refused to do in front of you. That is impossible. The consequence is expulsion from the Party, which means death.” The only way out was to convince the Party, or at least Koba, that the whole thing was a deliberate campaign by the “Trotskyite protobeasts.” “When Radek was shedding tears and lying about me, I looked into his clouded, depraved eyes and saw all that Dostoyevskian perversion and depth of human vileness that has left me half dead, wounded by his slander.”29

  He never mailed that letter to Koba. Instead, he wrote one to Comrade Stalin, with copies to the other participants in the confrontation. It made the same points in a less confessional mode and ended with the words: “I am for the Party, for the USSR, and for our victory, whatever they may say about me on the basis of slander spread by wicked and cunning people. This is not a newspaper article ending, but my profoundest conviction and the very core of my existence.”30

  At the trial of the “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite center,” which opened on January 23 (one week after Bukharin mailed his letter), Radek said that it had taken him two and a half months to understand what was required of him. “In case someone has raised the question of whether we were tortured during the investigation, I must state that it was not the investigators who tortured me, but I who tortured my investigators.”31 The passage about Bukharin had been revised in accordance with Stalin’s suggestions:

  I knew that Bukharin’s situation was as hopeless as my own, because our guilt—if not de jure, then de facto—was the same. But he and I are close friends, and intellectual friendships are closer than other kinds of friendship. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of shock as I was, and I was convinced that he would provide honest testimony to the Soviet state. For that reason, I did not want to have him brought in handcuffs to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. I wanted him to do what I wanted our other associates to do: to disarm himself. This explains why it was only at the very end, when the trial was upon us, that I realized that I could not appear in court, having concealed the existence of another terrorist organization.32

  He could now do publicly what he had rehearsed in his confrontation with Bukharin: incriminate himself and others and explain his reasons for doing so. The prosecution’s entire case, he said in his last word, was based on his testimony and the testimony of his co-defendant, Piatakov (“all the other testimony by all the accused rests on our testimony”). He did not have to admit his guilt, but he did, anyway: “I admitted my guilt and testified exhaustively about it not from a simple need to repent—repentance may be an inner realization that does not have to be shared or demonstrated—and not from a general love of truth—the truth in my case is very bitter and, as I said before, I would rather be shot three times over than admit it. I must admit my guilt because of how I understand the general benefit that would be produced by that truth.”33

  That benefit was the realization by all those whose hearts were not wholly devoted to the Party that, on the eve of the last war, even the slightest doubt meant siding with the beast. Active terrorists could easily be handled by the police (“on that score we, based on our own fate, have not the slightest doubt”). The real danger came from the “half-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, and one-eighth-Trotskyites,” who might, through pride, carelessness, or “liberalism,” encourage the active terrorists. “We find ourselves in a period of utmost tension, on the brink of war. Speaking before the court and facing our hour of judgment, we
say to those people: if there is the slightest crack in your relationship with the Party, be forewarned that tomorrow you may become a saboteur and a traitor, unless you carefully repair that crack by means of full sincerity before the Party.”34

  Lion Feuchtwanger, who was present at the trial, wrote that he would not “easily forget” Radek’s performance:

  How he sat there in his brown suit, his ugly fleshless face framed by a chestnut-colored old-fashioned beard; how he looked over to the public, a great many of whom he knew, or at the other prisoners, often smiling, very composed, often studiedly ironical; how he laid his arm with a light and easy gesture round the shoulders of this or that prisoner as he came in; how, when he spoke, he would pose a little, laugh a little at the other prisoners, show his superiority; arrogant, skeptical, adroit, literary. Somewhat brusquely, he pushed Piatakov away from the microphone and himself took up his position there; often he smote the barrier with his newspaper, or took up his glass of tea, threw a piece of lemon in, stirred it up, and, whilst he uttered the most atrocious things, drank it in little sips. Nevertheless, he was quite free from pose whilst he spoke his concluding words, in which he admitted why he had confessed, and, despite his apparent imperturbability and the finished perfection of his wording, this admission gave the impression of being the self-revelation of a man in great distress, and it was very affecting. But most startling of all, and difficult to explain, was the gesture with which Radek left the court after the conclusion of the proceedings. It was towards four o’clock in the morning, and everyone—judges, accused, and public—was exhausted. Of the seventeen prisoners, thirteen, amongst whom were close friends of Radek, had been condemned to death, while he himself and three others had been sentenced only to imprisonment. The judge had read the verdict, and all of us had listened to it standing up—prisoners and public motionless, in deep silence. Immediately after the reading the judges retired and soldiers appeared, and first of all approached the four who had not been condemned to death. One of them laid his hand on Radek’s shoulder, evidently with an order to follow him. And Radek followed him. He turned round, raised a hand in greeting, shrugged his shoulders very slightly, nodded to the others, his friends who were condemned to death, and smiled. Yes, he smiled.35

  Radek offered himself—along with Bukharin, among other friends—as a scapegoat, a metaphor of unopposed temptation, the embodiment of forbidden thought. He may not have murdered anybody, or even conspired with any murderers, but in Bolshevism, as in Christianity or any other ideology of undivided devotion, it was the thought that counted. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The interchangeability of acts and thoughts was the main theme of Radek’s exchange with the state prosecutor, A. Ia. Vyshinsky. The fact of having had sinful thoughts was proof of the reality of criminal actions, whether they occurred or not. All criminal actions were emanations of sinful thoughts—and, therefore, premeditated:

  Karl Radek

  VYSHINSKY: Were you for the defeat or victory of the USSR?

  RADEK: All my actions during those years testify to the fact that I was helping to bring about its defeat.

  VYSHINSKY: Were they conscious actions on your part?

  RADEK: I have never committed an unconscious act in my life, except for sleeping (laughter). 36

  Bukharin, who had discovered the world without God by reading The Adolescent, was not the only one to think of Dostoevsky. The following morning, Pravda published an article by the head of its arts and literature section, I. Lezhnev (Isai Altshuler), titled “Smerdiakovs”: “Sitting in the dock are the monstrous offspring of fascism, traitors to the motherland, wreckers, spies, and saboteurs—the most evil and perfidious enemies of the people. They appeared before the court in all their loathsome nakedness, and we saw a new edition of Smerdiakov, a disgusting image become flesh and blood. The Smerdiakovs of our day provoke combined feelings of indignation and revulsion. They are not just the ideologues of the restoration of capitalism, they are the moral incarnation of the fascist bourgeoisie, the product of its senile dementia, mad ravings, and creeping putrefaction.”37

  The image of nakedness was borrowed from Radek’s article about the previous show trial. As Vyshinsky said in the courtroom: “Radek thought that he was writing about Kamenev and Zinoviev. But he made a slight miscalculation! This trial will correct this mistake of his: he was writing about himself!” What the nakedness revealed was that Radek, like the traitors he had helped expose, was the incarnation of a disgusting image that was the incarnation of Ivan Karamazov’s thoughts. He was not what he appeared to be because he was a metaphor, a thought become flesh and blood, Mephistopheles who had betrayed himself even as he was trying to betray others. As Vyshinsky said at the trial, “he puffed away on his pipe everywhere, blowing smoke in the faces of not only his interlocutors.” And as Lezhnev wrote in his Pravda article,

  How this Jesuit, this puny, sanctimonious hypocrite with his theatrically affected Onegin persona must have been cackling to himself as he let loose his verbal fireworks and bravely fenced on the newspaper stage with his cardboard sword!

  This foul, prostituted creature, spat upon and soiled by the dregs of imperialist kitchens, reeking of the stench of the diplomatic backstage—this male courtesan actually had the gall to lecture Soviet journalists and writers about high morals and class loyalty. How many millions of false words this creature has uttered, how often he has inveighed against venal bourgeois journalists! How many false praises this vilest of vile traitors has sung as he offered up his loose, streetwalker’s lips for a kiss! Before the ink on his articles had a chance to dry, he would scurry over to diplomatic receptions at foreign embassies, where he had his second, real job as a lackey to his imperialist masters, and would whisper in their ears about the best way to ruin the very socialist democracy he had been praising an hour earlier.

  But if, shocked by all this, you were to stop and ask yourself if such duplicity and such depth of moral depravity were indeed possible, Dostoevsky would answer you in the words of Smerdiakov:

  “Pretending, sir, is not very difficult for an experienced person.”38

  Was Radek pretending during his trial? According to Lion Feuchtwanger, many of his friends in the West thought so:

  And to me also, as long as I was in Western Europe, the indictment of the Zinoviev trial seemed utterly incredible. The hysterical confessions of the accused seemed to have been extorted by some mysterious means, and the whole proceedings appeared like a play staged with consummate, strange, and frightful artistry.

  But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Piatakov, Radek, and his friends, and heard what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my senses, and my doubts melted away as naturally as salt dissolves in water. If that was lying or prearranged, then I don’t know what truth is.39

  Two days after Radek’s verdict was announced, A. K. Voronsky, the foremost theorist of the Bolshevik as an underground man, was arrested in his House of Government apartment.40

  ■ ■ ■

  On February 18, People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze committed suicide (the official announcement described the cause of death as “heart failure”). On February 20, Bukharin wrote to the Politburo announcing a hunger strike until all the accusations were lifted. “I swear to you one more time on the last breath of Ilich, who died in my arms, on my ardent love for Sergo, on everything that I hold sacred, that all this terrorism, wrecking, and alliances with Trotskyites, etc., is, in my case, vile, unprecedented slander.” On the same day, he sent a letter to “dear Koba,” asking him not to be angry and apologizing for having disagreed with him in the past:

  As I have written before, I am guilty before you for the past. But I have expiated my guilt many times over. I truly love you now, belatedly, but deeply. I know that you are suspicious and that you a
re often wise in being suspicious. I also know that events have demonstrated that the level of suspicion must be increased considerably. But what about me? I am, after all, a flesh-and-blood person, entombed alive and spat on from all sides.

  Above all, I wish you health. You do not age. You have iron self-control. You are a born general, destined to play the role of the victorious leader of our armies. Those will be even greater times. I wish you, dear Koba, quick and decisive victories. Hegel says somewhere that philistines judge great men based on trivialities. But even their passions are the instruments of what he calls the “World Spirit.” Napoleon was the “World Spirit” on horseback. Let people see world events that are even more interesting.

  Accept my greetings, my handshake, my “forgive me.” In my heart I am with you all, with the Party, with my dear comrades. In my mind, I am at the graveside of Sergo, who was a marvelous, true human being.41

  Bukharin’s last hope was to reconcile the laws of history with the “flesh-and-blood person” by addressing the World Spirit as “dear Koba.” According to Larina, he sat “trapped” in his room, refusing to bathe and avoiding being seen by his father. “His birds—two African lovebirds—lay dead in their cage. The ivy he planted had wilted; the stuffed birds and pictures on the walls were covered with dust.” As he was writing his two letters, or perhaps soon after he finished writing them, three men walked into the apartment and ordered the family to move out of the Kremlin. At just that moment, according to Larina, the telephone rang. It was Stalin, who lived nearby.

  “What’s going on over there, Nikolai?” asked Koba.

  “Some people are telling me to move out of the Kremlin. I don’t care about staying in the Kremlin, I am only asking for some place where I could fit my library.”

  “Tell them to go to the devil,” said Stalin and hung up.

  The three man were standing near the phone, heard Stalin’s words, and ran off “to the devil.”42