Pyatakov had originally been invited to act as the main accuser at the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had consented, and got ready to slander his old comrades. It was, he said, a task which showed how great was the Party’s trust in him, and he accepted it “with all my heart.”
After they saw that Pyatakov was ready to collaborate in any way required, they gave him a more complicated role. In the 1937 trials he joined the defendants, those whom he had meant to blacken. He was arrested, but was at first recalcitrant. Ordzhonikidze in person urged him to accept the role assigned to him in exchange for his life. No one was so well qualified as Pyatakov to destroy Trotsky, his former god and now the Party’s worst enemy, in the eyes of the country and the whole world. He finally agreed to do it as a matter of “the highest expediency,” and began rehearsals with the interrogators.
Alas, he found at the trial that he had been tricked. As scripted in the thriller, he informed the court that while visiting Berlin on business he had secretly met Trotsky in Norway. The Boss had made an exciting story of it: Pyatakov had flown to Oslo in a German plane to establish contact with Trotsky, Trotsky had told him that he had concerted plans for intervention with the Germans (one of the Boss’s favorite themes), etc., etc. Unfortunately, the personnel of the airport at which he was supposed to have landed announced that no foreign planes had touched down at that time.
As might be expected, the Boss also found a star part in the trial for Trotsky’s one-time bard Radek. But, in his usual thrifty way he saw to it that the fullest use was made of Radek before his arrest. When Yezhov had asked permission to arrest Karl Berngardovich the Boss replied by telegram from Sochi on August 19, 1936: “I suggest we take Radek’s arrest off the agenda and let him write a signed article against Trotsky in Izvestia.” That was during Kamenev’s trial, and it enabled Radek to trample on Trotsky and other former acquaintances to his heart’s content. After which the Author and Producer ordered him to take the stage himself.
Bukharin, Radek’s chief at Izvestia, was horrified. He wrote to the Boss that “Radek’s wife came rushing to tell me that he has been arrested. I have none but positive impressions of Radek. Maybe I am wrong but my inner voices tell me that I must write to you. What a strange business!” Radek realized at once that he would have to play the part assigned to him. But he was clever enough to think of a way of saving his life. He took the investigator’s uninspired record of his statements, and instead of signing it said with a laugh, “This is no good. I’ll write it myself.” He then wrote a “confession,” an ingenious tissue of lies, which utterly damned Trotsky. He knew that his literary exercise would be sent to the Boss, and that the Boss would appreciate his servant’s cleverness.
In court Radek scintillated. He exposed himself and his comrades unmercifully. It was largely thanks to his inspired performance that the trial was such a success.
The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who was present at the trial, wrote that “those who faced the court could not possibly be thought of as tormented and desperate beings. In appearance the accused were well-groomed and well-dressed men with relaxed and unconstrained manners. They drank tea, and there were newspapers sticking out of their pockets.… Altogether, it looked more like a debate … conducted in conversational tones by educated people. The impression created was that the accused, the prosecutor, and the judges were all inspired by the same single—I almost said sporting—objective, to explain all that had happened with the maximum precision. If a theatrical producer had been called on to stage such a trial he would probably have needed several rehearsals to achieve that sort of teamwork among the accused.”
It was simply that the play had such a great producer. And he had found such an excellent actor. The producer thought very highly of him. The trial ended with sentences of death for Lenin’s famous comrades-in-arms Pyatakov, Serebryakov, Muralov, etc. Radek got ten years. And Radek “gave the condemned men a guilty smile, as though embarrassed by his luck,” wrote Feuchtwanger.
The Boss, however, after showing his gratitude to Radek for the trial, stuck to his original principle: the whole of the old guard must disappear. He needed neither clever Fouchés, nor geniuses like Talleyrand. He needed only faithful servants. Faithful dogs. Radek too would be killed, in the prison camp to which he was sent.
Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary on November 20, 1936: “[They arrested] Radek and others whom I knew, people I used to talk to, and always trusted.… But what transpired surpassed all my expectations of human baseness. It was all there, terrorism, intervention, the Gestapo, theft, sabotage, subversion.… All out of careerism, greed, and the love of pleasure, the desire to have mistresses, to travel abroad, together with some sort of nebulous prospect of seizing power by a palace revolution. Where was their elementary feeling of patriotism, of love for their motherland? These moral freaks deserved their fate.… Poor Kirov was the key that unlocked the door to this den of thieves. How can we have trusted this gang of scoundrels so blindly? It’s beyond understanding!” And in a later entry she wrote: “My soul is ablaze with anger and hatred. Their execution will not satisfy me. I should like to torture them, break them on the wheel, burn them alive for all the vile things they have done.”
Beyond understanding indeed! Can she really have believed it all? She, who knew these people? Or …? “Top people were terrified,” wrote N. Kotov. “They vied with each other in accusing their former friends. And lied to each other—to friends, to fathers, to mothers, to children, just to demonstrate beyond doubt their loyalty to the mustachioed one. They expected to be arrested from day to day and lied even to themselves, in their diaries, hoping that their lies would be read by the investigators.”
GRATEFUL SPECTATORS
The trials, inevitably, met with incredulity in Europe. Trotsky, in exile abroad, helped to reinforce this skepticism.
The Boss knew that the success of a show depends as much on the spectators as on the actors. He needed authoritative spectators, who would approve of his play, and—more important—say so in writing.
He had faith in himself. All those whom he had previously invited to visit the USSR—H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Emil Ludwig, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland—had left the country as its friends, full of praise for the Boss. Had they really noticed nothing? Or were they overwhelmed by the technique he had devised of nonstop flattery, dazzling receptions, lavish presents, and fulsome speeches? Was that all there was to it?
Romain Rolland’s Journal, published many years after his death, shows that one great friend of the USSR understood everything. And saw everything: “I feel pain and indignation welling up within me. I am trying to suppress the need to speak and write about it.” But why? Because “rabid enemies in France and throughout the world will use my words as a weapon.” Rolland forbade publication of his diaries before 1985. The Communist ideal must not be besmirched. Stalin’s cause was more important than Stalin and his myrmidons. An extension of the false argument from expediency in which the Boss had grounded his monstrous trials.
This time things were more serious. What Stalin needed was some eminent European to confirm that the old Party leaders, to a man, had become a gang of murderers and traitors. After long consultations with Comintern the candidate agreed upon was Lion Feuchtwanger, an antifascist and the author of a number of well-known novels, who had been forced to leave Hitler’s Germany. He was invited to the USSR, where the Boss in person joined in the game of seducing him. “Comrade Stalin has received the German writer L. Feuchtwanger. They conversed for over three hours,” Pravda reported.
HOW IT HAPPENED: KARAVKINA’S REPORTS
The secret archive of VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) includes twelve reports, stamped “not to be divulged,” written by A. Karavkina, who acted as Feuchtwanger’s guide.
I asked a former employee of VOKS to comment on these records. She laughingly told me, “I don’t know anything about Karavkina. But in those days any woman interpreter
who acted as escort to an eminent foreigner naturally had connections with the NKVD, and was sometimes required to be not just a guide but a ‘close friend.’ So nothing would escape her notice, by day or by night.”
From the Karavkina file:
19.12.36. He talked about his visit to Dimitrov [head of the Comintern].… Went specially to talk to him about the Trotskyist trial. Said that Dimitrov was very agitated when talking about this, argued for an hour and a half, but “couldn’t convince him.” Feuchtwanger informed me that people abroad took a very hostile view of this trial, and that nobody would believe that fifteen high-principled revolutionaries, who had so often risked their lives by participating in conspiracies, would all suddenly and of one accord confess and voluntarily do penance.
22.12.36. He informed me that he had finished an article on André Gide for Pravda. The copy typist will be here tomorrow.
27.12. Today was a difficult day, as Fekht Vanger [sic] couldn’t wait to pour out to me his indignation about the article on Gide. It shows, he said, that Gide was right, and that we don’t have freedom of opinion, that people cannot say openly what they think, etc. The editors asked him to rewrite certain passages, especially about the “Stalin cult.” I explained to him the true nature of Soviet people’s attitude to Comrade Stalin, and where it springs from, and told him that it was utterly false to call it a “cult.” He went on fuming for some time, saying that he would change nothing but … finally cooled off, sat down quietly in his study, and made the corrections they’d asked for.
From early this morning Fekht Vanger has been talking interminably about the discomforts of life in the Soviet Union, complaining about service in the hotel, etc. “I should like to see somebody in the USSR print a piece in which I described how uncomfortable your lives here are.” He went on to say that however splendid life in the Soviet Union may be, he still prefers to live in Europe.
But what did our author finally have to say about it in his book Moscow 37? “To explain the Zinoviev and Radek trials by Stalin’s ambition to reign unchallenged and his thirst for vengeance would be simply absurd. When I was there in Moscow, at the trial, when I saw and heard for myself … I felt my doubts dissolving like salt in water.” And this is what Feuchtwanger wrote about the cult of Stalin’s person which he had found so irritating: “It cannot be doubted that the excessive veneration … is sincere. People feel the need to show their gratitude, their boundless admiration.… The nation is grateful to Stalin for bread, meat, education, and the creation of an army which safeguards its well-being.… Add to this that to the people Stalin really is flesh of their flesh.… When I remarked on the tastelessly exaggerated veneration shown to him he shrugged and excused his peasants and workers by saying that they were too busy with other matters to develop good taste.”
The arrests continued without interruption. Black cars scoured the city every night, picking up Party members and their families and friends. There were no more sensational trials for the present. The victims were picked up quietly, quickly supplied the testimony required, and were quickly put up against the wall. Yezhov’s new investigators felt no pious respect for Party members. Moreover, the NKVD had been given a new weapon by the Boss. It was allowed to use torture.
Many works about Gulag, Stalin’s system of labor camps, have described the forms of torture used. They were the brainchild of cruel NKVD officers. They were officially authorized. In this twentieth century of ours, torture was given documentary authority. In the President’s Archives I read the stenographic record of a Central Committee plenum in 1957, adorned with a number of “top-secret” warnings:
Molotov: The use of physical means was decided upon by the whole Politburo. Everybody signed.
[A voice]: There was no such decision.
Molotov: There was such a decision. It was secret, I don’t have a copy.
Khrushchev: Kaganovich said on the eve of the Twentieth Congress that a document exists in which everybody signed his agreement to the beating of a prisoner.… We haven’t found that document, it has been destroyed.
But it proved impossible to destroy everything. Copies of the following telegram, signed by Stalin, were found in the secret safes of many provincial Party Committees: “The Central Committee of the CPSU … wishes to make it clear that the application of physical pressure by the NKVD has been authorized by the Central Committee since 1937.… It is well known that all bourgeois agencies use physical pressure on representatives of the proletariat. The question is why should socialist countries have to be more humane with sworn enemies of the working class?” The angry voice dictating that telegram is easily recognized.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FEAR
He had decided to speed up the process of destroying the Party. That meant speeding up the confession stage. Logic dictated the use of torture. The new generation of Yezhov interrogators quickly mastered the use of the fist and more refined methods. Torture really began before the victims entered the interrogator’s office, immediately after their arrest. It began with “cell torture.” As one witness described it, “There were sixty people in the cell. It was June, and hot outside. We laid our faces on the cracks in the floor, trying to suck in a little fresh air. And took it in turns to crowd around the door, where a slight draft could be felt through the cracks. Old people succumbed almost immediately.” Then came torture by the interrogator: “The first interrogation in the Sukhanov Prison often began with a savage beating, to humiliate the prisoner and break his resistance right from the start. Ordzhonikidze’s wife was whipped to death in that place. In the NKVD torture chambers in Leningrad, prisoners were made to sit on the cement floor and covered with a box with nails sticking inward from all four sides. Army commander P. Dybenko, a giant of a man, was covered with a box of this kind one cubic meter in size.” Depositions of whatever sort were now signed quickly. Women sometimes put up more resistance than men. The wife of Nestor Lakoba, the deceased dictator of Abkhazia, was taken along for questioning every evening, and dragged back to her cell next morning unconscious and covered with blood. But she answered every demand that she should put her name to “evidence” against her late husband with the same short sentence: “I will not defile my husband’s memory.” She held out even when they thrashed her son, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, before her eyes and told her that they would kill him if she did not sign the protocol. She still had not signed when she died in her cell.
Blows and lashes were only the beginning—the entrance to hell. After that the notorious “conveyor belt” was set in motion. Interrogators worked in shifts, while prisoners were kept awake day and night. Kicks, blows, and insults were sustained throughout. The prisoner’s mind would be so fogged by sleeplessness that he was ready to sign absolutely anything—usually a version made up by the interrogator himself.
Orlov, an intelligence officer, told this story: “One evening Boris Berman [an NKVD chief] and I were walking along a corridor. We were pulled up short by heart-rending screams coming from the office of an investigator called Kedrov. We opened the door and saw Nelidov sitting on a chair. (He taught chemistry at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute, and was the nephew of the tsar’s ambassador in France.) Kedrov was beside himself with rage. He tried to explain. Nelidov, he said, had confessed that he wanted to kill Stalin, and now he had suddenly gone back on it. ‘Look!’ Kedrov kept yelling hysterically, ‘Look at this! Here’s what he wrote.’ … Kedrov was behaving as if he was Nelidov’s victim—not the other way round. There was a phosphorescent glow, sparks of madness in his eyes.”
The next stage was that of “consolidation.” The prisoner was fed, given cigarettes, and told that it was now his turn to think what more he could add to his testimony. He was given paper, and told what direction his thoughts should take. His progress was carefully monitored.
If he had to appear in court—most prisoners were condemned in camera—he would be carefully rehearsed first: “Bear in mind,” the investigators would say, “that if you make a mistake in cour
t we shan’t just shoot you, we shall torture you, we shall tear you limb from limb.” They might also suggest that he not be shot at all, that this was just for the press, that all those condemned were in fact spared. During the trial, the investigators sat under the prisoner’s nose. Yet as they were at their cruel work the torturers never stopped talking about the nobler motives for a prisoner to slander himself. It was all for the good of Party and the Motherland. To preserve something of their self-respect, the accused would often join in the game. But, as one victim of Gulag wrote, “Behind all the lofty arguments of an ideological and political character I saw a little imp of fear with a hideous face jigging away.”
By then, the country was no longer ruled by the Party, nor even by Stalin. It was ruled by fear. The Roman historian wrote of the age of Nero that “in the city of fear people ceased to exist—nothing but human flesh and bones was left.” Ready to do whatever he bade them.
It was now the turn of Trotsky’s old friend Alexander Beloborodov, onetime head of the Urals Soviet, who had arranged the execution of the tsar and his family. Terminally ill with cancer of the throat, holding on to his trousers (they had taken his belt from him), the former head of the Red Urals stood before the interrogators and obediently testified against his former friends, the Trotskyists. But he refused to confess to terrorist activities himself. “Stalin to Yezhov. 26 May 37. Isn’t it time to put pressure on this gentleman and force him to tell us about his filthy deeds? Where is he supposed to be—in prison or in a hotel?” They “put pressure” on him. They tortured him. They shot him. Did the former boss of the Red Urals ever remember in those terrible days the cellar in the Ipatiev house, where the tsar’s wounded son crawled on the floor, while they bayoneted the tsar’s daughters?
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