World-historical criminal cases: the rhetoric of the first Moscow show trial
Andrei Vyshinskii (1883–1954) did not permit himself to make any mistakes. He was too well educated, too skilled and too much the professional for that. He had grown up in Odessa in a well-to-do family of Polish origin; he had graduated in law from the University of Kiev in 1913 and joined the Menshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy. Only after the Revolution, in 1920, did he switch to the Bolsheviks. From 1925 to 1928 he was rector of Moscow University; during the First Five-Year Plan he worked in the People’s Commissariat for Education. In 1927 he produced a ‘Course in Criminal Law, from 1935 to1939 he was the director of public prosecutions. Later, and until the end of his life, he occupied important posts in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and in international diplomacy. When he took over the prosecution in the first Moscow show trial in 1936, he had already won his spurs in earlier famous or notorious show trials: against the engineers of Shakhty and Metro-Vickers, the Mensheviks and the Industrial Party.8 Since both the task facing him and the result of this and other trials were fixed from the start, his aim could only be to achieve the greatest possible propagandistic, mass-mobilizing effect. His mission in this instance was to bring to trial a group of former prominent Bolsheviks who had belonged to the united opposition in the years 1925–6 together with a second group, consisting essentially of young members of the German Communist Party who had immigrated to the USSR, and to convict them of terrorist activities.9 The most prominent among them – Zinoviev and Kamenev – had already been accused and condemned in the trial of the Moscow Centre in 1935 for their alleged complicity in the assassination of Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov. Now, however, they were being called to account not merely for their moral or political responsibility but for their immediate, personal involvement in Kirov’s murder and the preparation of assassination attempts on the lives of the Soviet leadership – in particular, Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze. According to the indictment, the two groups had been brought together in Berlin by Trotsky and his son as early as 1932. This meant that Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, sat in the dock as principal defendants in absentia – both at the start of the trial and also in the summing up at the end. Throughout the entire proceedings there were no documents, no proofs of any kind. All Trotsky’s letters and so-called directives were quoted from memory, but were not produced in court. The court adhered to the conviction that the highest form of proof was to be found not in any material evidence but in the confession of the accused, a conviction that was shared by some observers, who simply could not get over their astonishment at the ‘free and natural demeanour of the accused facing the court’. What counted in the trial was not evidence, or even objections and arguments, which were advanced from time to time – especially by Ivan Smirnov, a long-standing associate of Trotsky’s, who refused to confess that he had personally helped to prepare the ground for terrorist actions. From the outset, however, the meaning of the trial lay not in the search for proof, but in telling a fantastic story that would arouse fear and cause confusion. Instead of highlighting inconsistencies in a large number of details and clarifying them in the course of a counter-narrative, the trial aimed to focus on these inconsistencies, these fantastic details which served to transform a dry, purely propagandistic political process into a breathtaking spectacle that would hold the public spellbound and paralyse them with fear. Vyshinskii was a great storyteller and orchestrator of criminal trials. He possessed the boundless imagination of a conspiracy theorist, but he also had the entire machinery of the NKVD at his disposal, together with its specialists in interrogation and torture, who were well able to produce narratives, life stories, events and connections at will. Vyshinskii’s narratives had the great advantage that nothing had to be proved. They connected the small local world with world-historical struggles in the international arena where breathtaking transformations took place: revolutionaries were suddenly unmasked as counter-revolutionaries, unexpected incidents cried out for explanation, and we – the listeners and eye-witnesses of this great revelatory process – rushed from one scene to another at breakneck speed, from a meeting with Trotsky in the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen to a tractor factory in Cheliabinsk beyond the Urals, from a rendezvous in a café in Leipziger Strasse in Berlin to mysterious encounters in the Slav Library in Prague, where a conspirator was alleged to have been given a passport and further instructions. The scenes flew past; the actors all found themselves on train journeys – Mrachkovskii and Evdokimov, two of the accused, met conspiratorially in a special carriage.10 Others arranged to meet in familiar squares in Moscow or in Nürnberger Platz in Berlin. One of the accused – Richard Pikel – even went into hiding for a while as far away as Spitsbergen.11 The journeys and the circumstances are fantastical, even bizarre. Valentin Ol'berg, a defendant from Riga, went on a journey from Berlin to Moscow; as a stateless person, he obtained a passport en route in Prague, then went under cover in Moscow in order to make preparations for an assassination plot against Stalin. After that, he continued his journey on to Stalinabad in order to work there for a time as a history teacher. But that was by no means the end of his travels. He returned to Prague, where, with the assistance of his brother, he established contact with a Gestapo agent, who for 13,000 Czech korunas procured for him a passport of the Republic of Honduras.12 Another defendant – Natan Lurie – worked as a surgeon in Cheliabinsk, where he planned a terrorist attack on Kaganovich and Orzhonikidze, but subsequently tried to assassinate Zhdanov in Leningrad.13 The chief accused, Zinoviev, chose his terrorist associates personally and subjected them to various individual tests in advance; his fellow conspirators had mastered the entire panoply of betrayal, conspiracy and disguise. They wrote letters in invisible ink; they placed a sheet of paper between particular pages of a book; they tapped official sources in order to fund their conspiracies. They wormed their way into the confidence of unsuspecting citizens whom they exploited for their nefarious purposes. Many of the accused were presented as broken figures, ‘decadent types’ and failures. Others, however, had only acted carelessly, irresponsibly; they had gone to the bad, and could be rescued only by the solidarity of the Communist Party or the efforts of caring fellow citizens.
Figure 4.1 Trotsky and Son, Salesmen for the Gestapo (caricature by P. N. Krylov, Kukryniksy [one of the three members of the collective], in Pravda, 26 August 1936)
‘Throughout the entire proceedings there were no documents, no proofs of any kind. All Trotsky’s letters and so-called directives were quoted from memory, but were not produced in court.’
We are introduced to an ensemble of very different individuals and characters who all have one thing in common: their absolute hatred of Soviet power, above all of Stalin, and their goal of overthrowing Soviet power. Vyshinskii leads us into the obscure but fascinating world of conspiracies and subversive circles. Needless to say, he denies that they have anything in common with the conspiratorial tradition of the Russian liberation movement or the terrorist Narodnaia Volia. Compared to such heroes and idealists, the accused of 1936 are nothing but a band of murderers. All the members of this milieu cultivate a secret language – very much like characters in a penny dreadful novel or a detective film. One codeword used by the conspirators was ‘Galia sends greetings’. Or they used certain pages from a volume of A Thousand and One Nights as an agreed sign of recognition. The defendants Goltsman and Sedov used the current issues of the Berliner Tageblatt and Vorwärts to make contact with each other in their meetings near the zoo in Berlin.14 The conspirators agreed to meet in private houses – for instance, in Kamenev’s apartment at 15 Karmanitskii Lane or in Zinoviev’s summerhouse in Il'inskoye. However, none of the assassination attempts was successful. One of the accused, Berman-Iurin, was supposed to aim his Browning at Stalin during the thirteenth plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, since that would ensure worldwide publicity. But in the first place there was a problem wit
h obtaining the necessary entrance ticket and, secondly, the assassin’s view of his victim was obscured because too many people were crowding into one of the boxes.15 Another plot was supposed to be carried out in the Central Committee secretariat by Zinoviev’s secretary Bogdan, but it misfired. Bogdan himself was unable to respond to this accusation because he had committed suicide, a suicide that is said to have in fact been murder.16 Another attempt on Stalin’s life was to have been made in the Academy of Sciences. Acting under orders from the fascist secret police, Natan Lurie lay in wait for Comrade Voroshilov, but this plan too misfired. ‘We saw Voroshilov’s car driving down Frunze Street, but it drove far too fast for us. It is hopeless shooting at a fast-moving vehicle; we decided that there was no point in doing that.’17 Natan Lurie wanted also to shoot at Zhdanov during the Mayday celebrations on Uritskii Square, but Zhdanov marched past out of range.18 If necessary, the accused also expounded their political views at length in a form that might have been found in any leading article or textbook. Kamenev was an example of this. In reply to Vyshinskii’s question whether ‘Kirov’s murder was your work personally’, he was able to answer ‘Yes’ calmly and without any sign of emotion.19 The charges brought against the defendants are so surreal and bizarre that even the prosecutor was moved to ask:
Can it be that this is all an invention? Is it possible that Fritz David and Berman-Iurin simply made up all these fantastic stories? Has all of this simply been invented or is it just the irresponsible chatter of defendants who are doing their utmost to cast blame on others in order to avoid their own ultimate fate? No, it is no invention, no product of the imagination. It is the truth! For this [foreign policy] programme our Soviet people will hang these traitors up on the nearest tree. And that will serve them right.20
According to this scenario, there existed a network of conspirators operating nationwide, indeed worldwide – between Moscow, Copenhagen, Prague and Berlin – who changed their identities and were on the move for no other reason than to carry out terrorist acts, none of which succeeded except for the single act of murdering Kirov. These conspirators could not be identified because they were cleverly disguised, not as counter-revolutionaries but as Party members and Party activists.
The echo of violence: how a latent civil war comes to be articulated in language
Vyshinskii was also the master of other registers. In addition to the world of conspiracies and terrorism, he conjured up trite, sentimental images of the Soviet Union:
Our great country blossoms and blooms in joy. The golden ears of wheat waft in waves over the fields of the countless collective farms. Thousands of new socialist Stakhanovite factories and workshops are bursting with activity. The railways all work together harmoniously for the well-being of our homeland; on their endlessly mirrored steel rails Krivonos trains hasten from one end of the country to the other, devouring Krivonos routes …21
But the basso continuo of his forensic speeches was the dismal sound of an unprecedented threat and danger. The doom-laden tone in which he spoke had its source not in his fear of the activities of a completely isolated, desperate group of conspirators attempting to conceal its true intentions, but in the premonition that the entire Soviet venture would be at risk if the conspirators were not thwarted in time.
The violence of which Vyshinskii spoke really did exist, not simply at the moment of assassination when a leading official of the ruling party – Kirov – was killed. We need only consider the following picture: less than six years had passed since the entire vast country had been shaken by grave disturbances, which the troops of the GPU had quelled only with great difficulty. It was barely five years previously that hundreds of thousands of peasants had been expelled from their villages and forced to move to the far north. In many parts of the country the rule of the Party, which in any case had scarcely existed in the countryside, had collapsed and could be restored only through a kind of reconquista with the aid of special forces operating from bases in the towns. The peasants had risen up at first against the violent confiscation of their crops and then again against being forced to join collective farms. OGPU and NKVD reports record thousands of attacks, acts of revenge and skirmishes both minor and major. Revolts by women occurred daily in many places. Local officials of the Communist Party and the Komsomol were ambushed and killed. Peasants chose to slaughter their own cattle rather than hand them over to the collective farms and state farms. The disturbances on record show us a country in ferment, in uproar, in a peasants’ uprising that was partly open, partly hidden. In January 1930 there were 300 mass uprisings in the whole of the USSR; in February that had increased to 1,048, and by March there were 6,528. In March 1930 there was a climb-down, and local officials were held responsible for the ‘excesses’ of collectivization. At the end of March 1930 there were mass uprisings in the North Caucasus in which regular troops were sent in against the rebellious peasants. For the whole of 1930, 13,755 mass uprisings were recorded. Hundreds of thousands were deported. In 1930, 20,201 villagers were sentenced to death by special commissions. At the same time, millions and millions had fled from the countryside into the towns and to the new building sites. This meant that, with every refugee from the countryside and every peasant migrating to the towns, images of executions, the deportation of entire villages, house searches and firing squads seeped into the towns. ‘The Soviet Union found itself in peacetime, more than ten years after the bloodiest war had come to an end, in a condition that amounted to military devastation.’22 The country faced a situation in which even the hardest of the hard had come to doubt whether it would survive the crisis – striking workers, student unrest, protests of religious believers against the persecution and demolition of the churches.
This extremely tense situation may have eased somewhat in the following years – there was the so-called Victors’ Party Congress in 1934, and people even spoke of the Neo-NEP following the abolition of ration cards and the rationing system and the partial reinstatement of private building sites and collective farm markets. But, even so, scarcely anything really changed to reduce the existing tensions.23 The wave of terror that followed the Kirov murder in December 1934, the trial of the Moscow Centre, the deportations of ‘social strangers’ from capital cities, expressions of opinion such as ‘It would have been better if they had killed Stalin rather than Kirov’ or ‘If Lenin were still here, things would be better’ – all of this points to a nation in a state of emergency rather than one to which normality has been restored.24 Thousands of former members of the opposition – supporters of Trotsky, Zinoviev, the workers’ opposition and others – were arrested after 1934 and banished, as the spearhead of a targeted preventive campaign of repression which aimed to go beyond the mere neutralization of small groups of opponents. International developments contributed to heightened fears of a possible outbreak of hostilities. In Germany the National Socialists had come to power, and there could be no doubt about the intensity of their militant hatred of Bolshevism. Some people thought it pure chance that the remilitarization of Germany coincided with the opening of proceedings against the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Centre on 19 August 1936; others thought the connection was too obvious to be ignored: the internal enemy was evidently in league with the external one.
The rhetoric of the first Moscow show trial echoed the violent excesses that had swept over the nation in recent years. The country was ripe for an outbreak of violence, for a pogrom against all those who in its eyes were to be held responsible for everything it had suffered.25 The need for an enemy was immeasurable, but the ruling party had no use for a spontaneous outbreak of violence after all; such an outbreak might have turned against it and might have destabilized the dictatorship of the Party, the secret police and the army. Vyshinskii – and this is how he had depicted himself in his writings hitherto, and would continue to strike the same note in his future ones – was no more a ‘legal nihilist’ than Stalin; he insisted on the ‘due process of terror [trials]’.26
Moscow, 1937 Page 12