by Les Weil
To the western mind, unacquainted with the system and the rules, the confessions in the Trials appeared as one of the great enigmas of our time. Why had the Old Bolsheviks, heroes and leaders of the revolution, who had so often braved death that they called themselves `dead men on furlough', confessed to these absurd and hair-raising lies? If one discounted those who were merely trying to save their necks, like Radek; and those who were mentally broken like Zinoviev; or trying to shield their families like Kameniev, who was said to be particularly devoted to his son--then there still remained a hard core of men like Bukharin, Piatakov, Mrachkovsky, Smirnov, and at least a score of others with a revolutionary past of thirty, forty years behind them, the veterans of Czarist prisons and Siberian exile, whose total and gleeful self-abasement remained inexplicable. It was this `hard core' that Rubashov was meant to represent.
The solution that emerged in the novel became known as the 'Rubashov theory of the confessions', and was the object of a long public controversy. I have taken no part in this controversy. In this autobiography, fifteen years after the novel was written, a few comments regarding the question of its historical authenticity may be justified.
The three flash-back episodes in the novel--Richard, Little Loewy and Arlova--are stylised versions of factual events. The technical side of the G.P.U.'s method of interrogation, such as depriving the accused of sleep by the `conveyor' system, of making him stand upright for one or several days, the use of the glare-lamp, the threat of execution without trial in case he refuses to co-operate, the alternation between `hard' and `soft' treatment, have been confirmed in detail by subsequent reports. As for the central problem: the reasoning by which one type of accused--the `hard core' type-is induced by logic to confess to the absurd, I must try the reader's patience by two long quotations. The first is a key-passage from the novel; the second a factual account of the interrogation of one of the chief accused in the First Moscow Trial, which has subsequently come to light.
The quotation from the novel is taken from the concluding part of Rubashov's interrogation by Gletkin. Rubashov protests that, though he has opposed the policies of the Leader, he has acted neither with counterrevolutionary intent nor as the agent of a foreign power, but in good faith, according to his conscience. To this, Gletkin answers by a quotation from Rubashov's own writings: `For us the question of subjective good faith is without interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That was our law . . .' In the verbal duel which ensues, Gletkin continues to base his arguments on Rubashov's own writings and speeches; and Rubashov is helpless against them. Gletkin quotes from Rubashov's diary: `It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the head of the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. ...' When Rubashov is at last physically and mentally worn out, Gletkin rams the final argument down his throat:
`Your faction, Citizen Rubashov, is beaten and destroyed. You wanted to split the Party, although you must have known that a split in the Party meant civil war. You know of the dissatisfaction amongst the peasantry, which has not yet learnt to understand the sense of the sacrifices imposed on it. In a war which may be only a few months away, such currents can lead to a catastrophe. Hence the imperious necessity for the Party to be united. It must be as if cast from one mould--filled with blind discipline and absolute trust. You and your friends, Citizen Rubashov, have made a rent in the Party. If your repentance is real, then you must help us to heal the rent. I have told you, it is the last service the Party will ask of you.
`Your task is simple. You have set it yourself: to gild the Right, to blacken the Wrong. The policy of the opposition is wrong. Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language which the masses understand. If you begin to talk of your complicated motives, you will only create confusion amongst them. Your task, Citizen Rubashov, is to avoid awakening sympathy and pity. Sympathy and pity for the opposition are a danger to the country.
`Comrade Rubashov, I hope that you have understood the task which the Party has set you.'
It was the first time that Gletkin called Rubashov `Comrade'. Rubashov raised his head quickly. He felt a hot wave rising in him, against which he was helpless. His chin shook slightly while he was putting on his pince-nez.
`I understand.'
`Observe,' Gletkin went on, `that the Party holds out to you no prospect of reward. Some of the accused have been made amenable by physical pressure. Others by the promise to save their heads--or the heads of their relatives who have fallen into our hands as hostages. To you, Comrade Rubashov, we propose no bargain and we promise nothing.'
`I understand,' Rubashov repeated.
Gletkin glanced at the dossier.
`There is a passage in your journal which impressed me,' he went on. `You wrote: "I have thought and acted as I had to. If I was right, I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I shall pay".'
He looked up from the dossier and looked Rubashov fully in the face:
`You were wrong, and you will pay, Comrade Rubashov. The Party promises only one thing; after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published. Then the world will learn what was in the background of this Punch-and-Judy show--as you called it--which we had to act before them according to history's text-book. ...'
The material of the secret archives, to which Gletkin consolingly refers, has not yet been published. But some of it has leaked out, as it was inevitable in the long run. I shall quote here only one line of evidence: General Krivitsky's account of the method by which Mrachkovsky, one of the accused at the first show trial, was induced to confess.
General Walter Krivitsky was the head of Soviet Military Intelligence (fourth Bureau of the Red Army) for Western Europe till he broke with the regime in 1937. It was the first case of desertion of a top-ranking official in the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence network. On two occasions the G.P.U. tried to assassinate him in France; on the third, in the United States, they succeeded. His death was made to appear as suicide. General Krivitsky was found shot through the head, apparently by his own hand, in a room in a small Washington hotel where he had never stayed before. He had repeatedly warned his family and friends never to believe, if he were to be found dead, that he had committed suicide. There is an old G.P.U. saying: `Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a natural death.'
I have never met General Krivitsky; those of my friends who knew him admired his courage and integrity. His book I was Stalin's Agent was published in December 1939--at a time when I had finished Darkness at Noon except for the last, post-interrogation part, `The Grammatical Fiction'. I actually read Krivitsky's book only several years later, for when I had finished Darkness at Noon I became allergic, for a long time, to the whole subject. As Krivitsky's book is out of print and may not be reprinted for years to come, I am obliged to quote the relevant passages.
First, this short summing up of the problem in a chapter of his book called Why did they Confess?:
How were the confessions obtained? ... A bewildered world watched the builders of the Soviet Government flagellate themselves for crimes which they never could have comnutted, and which have been proved to be fantastic lies. Ever since, the riddle of the confessions has puzzled the Western world. But the confessions never presented a riddle to those of us who had been on the inside of the Stalin machine.
Although several factors contributed to bringing the men to the point of making these confessions, they made them at the last in the sincere conviction that this was their sole remaining service to the Party and the revolution. They sacrificed honour as well as life to defend the hated regime of Stalin, because it contained the last faint gleam of hope for that better world to which they had consecrated themselves in early youth....
>
Krivitsky proceeds to point out, that this explanation applies only to a certain type of accused, whom I have called `the hard core'; and then gives
the following account of the way Mrachkovsky was persuaded to confess:
Mrachkovsky had been a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1905. He was the son of a revolutionist exiled to Siberia by the Czar. He himself had been arrested many times by the Czarist police. During the civil war, after the Soviet Revolution, Mrachkovsky organised in the Urals a volunteer corps which performed wonderful feats in defeating the counter-revolutionary armies of Admiral Kolchak. He acquired the reputation of an almost legendary hero in the period of Lenin and Trotsky.
By June 1935, all the preparations for the first show trial had been completed. The confessions of fourteen prisoners had been secured. The leading characters, Zinoviev and Kamenev, had been cast for their roles and had rehearsed their lines. But there were two men in this batch of marked victims who had failed to come across with their confessions. One of these was Mrachkovsky. The other was his colleague Ivan N. Smirnov, a founder of the Bolshevik Party, leader of the Fifth Army during the civil war.
Stalin did not want to proceed to the trial without these two men. They had been grilled for months, they had been subjected to all the physical third degree practices of the Ogpu, but still refused to sign confessions. The chief of the Ogpu suddenly called upon my comrade, Sloutski, to take over the interrogation of Mrachkovsky, and to 'break down' this man--for whom Sloutski had, as it chanced, a profound respect. Both of us wept when Sloutski told me of his experience as an inquisitor.
`I began the examination cleanly shaven,' he said. `When I had finished it, I had grown a beard.
`When he was first led into my office, I saw that he limped heavily from the effects of a leg wound he had received in the civil war. I offered him a chair. He sat down. I opened the examination with the words: "You see, Comrade Mrachkovsky, I have received orders to question you!" '
Mrachkovsky replied: `I have nothing to say! In general I do not want to enter into any conversation with you. Your kind are much worse than any gendarmes of the Czar. Suppose you tell me what right you have to question me. Where were you in the revolution? Somehow I do not recall ever hearing of you in the days of the revolutionary war.'
Mrachkovsky caught sight of the two orders of the Red Banner which Sloutski was wearing, and continued:
`I never saw your type at the front. As for those decorations, you must have stolen them!' Mrachkovsky rose, and with one swift motion removed his shirt and exposed the scars of the wounds he had received in battles for the Soviet regime.
`Here are my decorations!' he exclaimed.
Sloutski continued his silence. He had tea brought in, and offered the prisoner a glass and some cigarettes. Mrachkovsky seized the glass and the ashtray which was put before him, threw them on the floor, and shouted:
`So you want to bribe me? You can tell Stalin that I loathe him. He is a traitor. They took me to Molotov (the Soviet Premier) who also wanted to bribe me. I spat in his face.'
Sloutski finally spoke up:
`No, Comrade Mrachkovsky, I did not steal the Orders of the Red Banner. I received them in the Red Army, on the Tashkent front, where I fought under your command. I never considered you a reptile and do not regard you as one even now. But you have opposed and fought against the Party? Of course you have. Well the Party has now commanded me to question you. And as for those wounds, look at this.' And Sloutski bared part of his body, exhibiting his own war scars....
Then he said: `I was connected with the revolutionary tribunal after the civil war. Later the Party switched me to the Ogpu administration. I am now only doing my assignment, carrying out orders. If the Party orders me to die, I shall go to mydeath.' (Sloutski did exactly that when, eighteen months later, it was announced that he had committed suicide.)
`No, you have degenerated into a police hound, into a regular Okhrana agent,' broke in Mrachkovsky. Then he stopped, hesitated, and continued: `And yet, apparently, all the soul has not yet gone out of you.'
For the first time Sloutski felt that some spark of understanding had been generated between him and Mrachkovsky. He began to talk about the internal and international situations of the Soviet Government, of the perils from within and without, of the enemies within the Party undermining the Soviet power, of the need to save the Party at all costs as the only saviour of the revolution.
`I told him,' Sloutski reported to me, `that I was personally convinced that he, Mrachkovsky, was not a counter-revolutionist. I took from my desk the confessions of his imprisoned comrades, and showed them to him as evidence of how low they had fallen in their opposition to the Soviet system.
`For three full days and nights we talked and argued. During all this time Mrachkovsky did not sleep a wink. Altogether I snatched about three to four hours of sleep during this whole period of my wrestling with him.'
There followed days and nights of argument which brought Mrachkovsky to the realisation that nobody else but Stalin could guide the Bolshevik Party. Mrachkovsky was a firm believer in the one-party system of government, and he had to admit that there was no Bolshevik group strong enough to reform the Party machine from within, or to overthrow Stalin's leadership. True, there was deep discontent in the country, but to deal with it outside the Bolshevik ranks would mean the end of the proletarian dictatorship to which Mrachkovsky was loyal.
Both the prosecuting examiner and his prisoner agreed that all Bolsheviks must submit their will and their ideas to the will and ideas of the Party. They agreed that one had to remain within the party even unto death, or dishonour, or death with dishonour, if it became necessary for the sake of consolidating the Soviet power. It was for the Party to show the confessors consideration for their acts of self-sacrifice if it chose.
`I brought him to the point where he began to weep,' Sloutski reported to me. `I wept with him when we arrived at the conclusion that all was lost, that there was nothing left in the way of hope or faith, that the only thing to do was to make a desperate effort to forestall a futile struggle on the part of the discontented masses. For this the Government must have public "confessions" by the opposition leaders.'
Mrachkovsky asked that he be allowed to have an audience with Ivan Smirnov, his intimate colleague. Sloutski had Smirnov brought from his cell, and the meeting of the two men took place in his office. Let Sloutski describe it:
`It was a painfully disturbing scene. The two heroes of the revolution fell on each other's necks. They cried. Mrachkovsky said to Smirnov: "Ivan Nikitich, let us give them what they want. It has to be done".
`By the end of the fourth day he signed the whole confession made by him at the public trial.
`I went home. For a whole week I was unfit for any work. I was unfit to live.'
When I read this account, years after Darkness at Noon was written, I had a sickening feeling of deja vu. The resemblance in atmosphere and content to the first interrogation of Rubashov by Ivanov in the novel was indeed striking. The similarity between Ivanov's and Sloutsky's line of argument was easy to explain: both the novel and the real event were determined by the same framework of ideas and circumstances. But there were similarities of detail and nuance which went beyond that. In both cases the interrogation opens with accuser and accused indulging in sentimental reminiscences of the civil war; in both cases the accuser has served under the accused's command; as a result of the civil war, one in each pair of antagonists has a game leg; in both cases the interrogator is in turn liquidated himself. As I read on, I had the impression of meeting the Doppelgaenger, the spectral doubles of Rubashov and Ivanov--a ghostly, ectoplastic regurgitation by reality of the characters and events of my imagination.
Krivitsky had never read Darkness at Noon; he was dead by the time it appeared in print. His book and mine were written at about the same time. According to his editor, Isaac Don Levine, he worked on it in 1938, and his preface is dated October 1939.