Moscow, 1937
Page 13
Double-dealers
The ‘double-dealer’ who found himself in the limelight in the show trial of 1936 was someone who had outwardly abandoned his oppositional stance in order to be readmitted to the Party, but in fact remained faithful to his old, oppositional views.27 To be a double-dealer was another expression for hypocrisy, deceit. When the Party leadership steered its course towards industrialization and collectivization at the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, many supporters of the former ‘left opposition’ made their peace with the Party because they thought it was coming round to an acceptance of their programme. Prominent leftists endorsed Stalin’s leadership, thereby giving it a new legitimation as opposed to Bukharin’s ‘right-opportunist deviation’, which had rejected the frontal attack on the peasantry. Regardless of whether they stood on the ‘left’ or the ‘right’, whether they inclined towards Trotsky or Bukharin – double-dealing became a stigma to be pinned on everyone who preserved a vestige of independence from Stalin’s leadership and who had not given up having independent thoughts of their own. There were more than enough people of this sort, even in and around the Party, given that the country had almost two decades of unrest and self-assertion behind it. Revolutionary times are times of ‘wild thought’ and ‘pigheadedness’, and to that extent there were more than enough individuals, even around the Russian Communist Party, who had kept their head. Being a double-dealer, then, was a strange amalgam of conformism and pigheadedness, an everyday opportunism. In other words, it was not an unusual attitude restricted to a political sect but a state of mind, a way of life, both in the Party and its immediate penumbra and, doubtless, more widely. It thrived wherever ordinary people living their lives in the real world found themselves confronted by a power hostile to that reality and blind to it as well. In an age of radical change such double-dealing was not an eccentric, marginal response but a mainstream attitude which resorted to stubbornness and compromise as a form of self-defence.
In contrast to the moralistic and moralizing use of the term ‘double-dealer’, this broader interpretation opens our eyes to the hopelessness of Bolshevik attempts to do away with such an attitude by pillorying it. Thus, in practice, ‘double-dealing’ meant joining a collective farm under coercion while continuing to act like a private farmer. A Party member was a double-dealer when he followed a general line while remaining persuaded of its flawed nature; he was a double-dealer when he acquiesced in arguments put forward in public meetings in the workplace – in an institute or a factory – while continuing to deride them as childish in private. A ruling party which aimed to challenge such double-dealing and even hoped to eradicate it was doomed. The double-dealer was in fact endemic, a mass phenomenon, and, if he was attacked directly in the show trials, it suggests that we are speaking not of attempts to eliminate a minority or sectarian oppositional group but of a tactic for disciplining ordinary members of society – indeed, society itself – especially those acting in and around the Party. People in their hundreds of thousands had been subjected to the painful process of criticism and self-criticism in the campaigns to check Party documents in the years 1934 and 1935.28 In deploying the term ‘double-dealing’, Vyshinskii was speaking not just about the crimes of a small group – ‘crawling on its belly into the Party in order to gain its trust and especially Stalin’s trust’,29 but about a social state of affairs, a social attitude, a widespread state of mind.
The birth of the show trial from the spirit of lynch-law
The semblance of due process in the trial of August 1936 and in subsequent trials can easily mislead us about the historical roots of show trials. Needless to say, there is a court, a presiding judge, a prosecutor, defence counsel (in the trial in question the defendants all renounced their right to defence counsel), a public process, a court record, etc. But since the court, indictment, defence and public are not independent from one another, but are instead all limbs of the same unified ensemble, we are really looking at a pseudo-court, one not concerned with discovering the truth and pronouncing on the law. This is hinted at in the origins of the show trial. Show trials existed from the first days of revolutionary power and were based on a ‘nihilistic understanding of law’, according to which a trial was ‘more like a method for continuing the Civil War by other means’.30 Such trials demonstrated the power of the proletariat, a power that found expression not in its adherence to specific rules and procedures but in its class instincts, in a resolute partisanship that draws a distinction between whether a crime has been committed by ‘social strangers’ and so-called former people or by proletarians and workers. This has implications for the evaluation of an offence and the appropriate punishment. Punishing is much less important than demonstrating the social background to an offence, the background of the perpetrator, and the intention to deter or improve is inseparable from the demonstration. Whereas members of the exploiting classes could be accused of unrelenting hard-heartedness, the courts relied on improvement and re-education in the case of ‘people of one’s own kind’. An admission of wrongdoing and the readiness to make ‘a courageous, open confession of the error of one’s ways’ were the preconditions for the return to cooperation on equal terms and complete rehabilitation. What was looked for was an ‘honest admission of guilt’, the product of enlightenment, admonition, the helpful criticism of colleagues and comrades, and self-criticism, in which the accused proclaimed that they grasped the implications of their responsibility and guilt. These procedures and practices were the order of the day in the Bolshevik Party itself, and in a sense they became the norm in a public sphere increasingly dominated by the Party. The readiness to accept criticism and admonition from those around one, to ‘submit’ to public scrutiny and criticism, created a communicative space in which it became normal to have one’s own behaviour constantly viewed through the eyes of others and commented on by them. This was the panoptic primal scene that represented the foundation of all discipline and self-discipline.31
In August 1936 the show trial already had a track record, in particular with the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the trials of the Industrial Party in 1930 and the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks in 1931 (the trial of the ‘Toiling Peasants’ Party did not in the end take place).32 In the Shakhty trial the task was ‘to expose, denounce and condemn the mentality of a social group’, namely the group of old specialists, engineers and technicians – in that trial the defence could even put in a plea for acquittal. The trial of the Industrial Party was directed against the technical intelligentsia, intellectuals and foreigners. It ended with death sentences which, however, were commuted to prison terms. In the trial of the Union Bureau ten-year prison sentences were handed down – in all these trials the accused had confessed that they had had time to reflect, and after admitting their guilt they asked for permission to put their expertise and their energies to work in the service of the Soviet state.33 By 1931, then, all the pieces of the show trial were already in place: the moral and political formulation of the task, the fabrication of the points of the indictment as well as the confessions, and the practice of making use of confessions. What was new in the first show trial of 1936 was something else: it was the first case against members of the revolutionary leadership, and the aim was to secure not an admission of a generalized moral and political guilt but a confession of direct, personal involvement in particular crimes. Furthermore, it was the first time that the death penalty was called for against the state’s own people – and that it was then carried out. This meant breaking new ground in three major respects. It was a genuine caesura.
The ideal enemy
It was not the existence of new facts that had led to the trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and others. It was already known that there had been contacts in 1932 between supporters of Trotsky in Russia – such as Ivan Smirnov – and Trotsky himself. Nor was there any new information about the Kirov assassination. The decision to launch the trial was a response to what Vyshinskii imputed to the opposition in his opening speech for the prose
cution: their wish to deal ‘a hammer blow’ so as to sow ‘confusion in the Party and the nation’.34 Vyshinskii drew a vivid picture of the outbreak of violence:
In sinister illegality Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev issued their infamous call: Eliminate, murder! The illegal machine started up, the knives were sharpened, revolvers were loaded, bombs were made, false documents were written and fabricated, secret connections were established with the German secret police, sentries were posted, shooting practice was stepped up, and it all ended up with actual shooting and murdering. That is the heart of the matter! The counterrevolutionaries do not merely dream of terror; they do not merely hatch out plans for a terrorist conspiracy or a terrorist assassination, they do not merely arm themselves for this infamous crime – they actually carry it out, they shoot and murder!35
Kamenev confessed: he used ‘every means in his power – open political discussion, attempts to enter factories and works, illegal appeals, illegal presses, deceiving the Party, the street and the organizing of street demonstrations, conspiracy and finally, terror.’36
The accused, who had once been known all over the world, and who may well have enjoyed a certain popularity in the early days of Soviet power, had long since lost their shine, had tarnished their reputations in various oppositional groupings and had lost credibility even among their supporters. They had failed and were long since condemned and broken. In the course of the trial they would provide ample proof that they could survive only as double-dealers, not as a political opposition but as a criminal organization that could achieve its aims only with outside help, above all from Trotsky, the mastermind, who in turn could look for support only to fascism. From then on, anyone who had belonged to any oppositional movement was labelled a ‘Trotskyist’, a universal name for absolute evil in the Stalinist cosmos, quite independently of actual political positions adopted. (It was in this sense comparable to ‘kulak’ or ‘bourgeois’, etc.) The people produced during the trial were very colourful, with adventurous biographies and stations on life’s way; in every case they were unpatriotic and lacking in both character and scruples. Their names sounded foreign or Jewish. They calmly gave an account – just consider the fact that we are speaking here of Jews such as Kamenev, Zinoviev and many other accused – of their contacts with the Gestapo, with Himmler’s personal aide ‘Franz Weitz’, and how they had prepared for the assassination with their Brownings. Their world was not the world of Stakhanovite workers and tractor drivers whom Vyshinskii evokes in the trial.37 During the trial itself they spoke in textbook sentences, their last service for the creation of a socialist homeland. In his final speech Reingold says: ‘Politically we have already been shot’. ‘The circle is complete! The political masquerade is at an end; the farce of opposition, debates and platforms is over! Opposition has now been replaced by conspiracy against the state, debate and platforms have now been replaced by bullets and bombs.’38 Not even the most humiliating self-abasement could save them. As Christian Rakovskii, himself a former member of the opposition and soon to be a victim of a further show trial, noted in a commentary on the trial, ‘If, like the Catholic Church, which induces atheists on their deathbed to return to the bosom of the church, the Party leadership coerces the oppositionists to acknowledge their alleged errors or to renounce their Leninist views, then the oppositionist who changes his opinions overnight deserves no more than contempt.’39 In the course of the trial the names of further oppositionists had come up; the net of enemies and traitors had widened in every direction. More and more guilty people turned up in the chaos and opaqueness of the situation. It sometimes appeared as if continuity could be ensured only by further threats and dangers. The enemy’s certainty gave a direction to the despair and the diffuse hatred of all the things that had been done to human beings. The more fantastic the imminent danger, the more people stuck together. Vyshinskii could cry out triumphantly: ‘And aren’t the massive waves that are sweeping over our nation at the moment a clear proof of our unity!’40 The process leading to the radical dehumanization of the excluded had been launched. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in the factories and streamed onto the squares to demand the deaths of the accused. The true success of the show trial as a ‘ritual of liquidation’41 could be seen only now, in the vocal demands of the hundreds of thousands who had turned into an ‘enraged mob’ and who had marched onto Red Square for a ‘plebiscite for the right to kill’.42
5
‘Tired of the Effort of Observing and Understanding’: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Moscow 1937
What picture could an attentive, interested European intellectual form of Moscow in 1937? To reconstruct this we need to familiarize ourselves with the standpoint and attitudes of such an intellectual. Such a perspective will enlighten us not just about what he saw but also about the fact that he saw certain things while failing to notice others. We are concerned here, then, more with the factors that conditioned the experience and judgement of contemporary witnesses of what was happening in Moscow in 1937 than with reproaching them for their ignorance of what later generations can see simply by virtue of the fact that they were born later, and so can be said to know more about that history than those who were directly entangled in it.1
Scarcely any traveller to the Soviet Union in the 1930s was as fully aware as Lion Feuchtwanger of just what he was letting himself in for. His greatest anxiety was how to resist being taken in by a grand illusion and colluding in a piece of theatre whose direction lay in the hands of others. Six months before his own visit, André Gide had been to the Soviet Union, where – flanked by the members of the Politburo in the mausoleum – he had given the funeral oration for Maxim Gorky, who had died shortly before. On his return to France he had published his reminiscences, for which he had been violently attacked by the pro-Soviet left.2 Feuchtwanger had been on friendly terms with some of the spokesmen of the German Soviet Republic [of 1918–19], men such as Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller and Kurt Eisner. He was thus well aware that he might be accused of having been co-opted by the communists – but he at least had no qualms about coming into contact with them. As a writer who enjoyed worldwide fame with books like Erfolg [Success], Jud Süß [Jew Suess] and Die Geschwister Oppermann [The Oppermanns], his fame may even have exceeded Thomas Mann’s. He could not take a step or publish a text without having his every word carefully weighed. In the Soviet Union too his report was read attentively. ‘The book made an unpleasant impression on M.A.’, noted Elena Bulgakova on 6 December 1937, referring to her husband, Mikhail Bulgakov.3
Feuchtwanger was regarded as the representative of the writers and intellectuals who had been driven out of Germany. He was fully aware of the temptations of fame and vanity and how they could blind people in his position and reduce their sensitivity. He had been overwhelmed by the enthusiastic reception he had received on his arrival at Moscow’s Belorusskii Station on 6 December 1937. But in a letter he wrote right away to Arnold Zweig, he said, ‘My reception in Moscow was such a triumph that it is difficult not to get a swollen head.’4 He imposed a regime of self-restraint upon himself and confined himself to listening, observing, and learning.
So I arrived at the Soviet frontier, sympathetic, curious, and doubting. The honours with which I was received in Moscow served to increase my insecurity. Good friends of mine, and, moreover, quite intelligent individuals, had had their judgement clouded by the effusiveness of the German Fascists, and I wondered whether for me, too, the appearance of men and things was not being distorted by personal vanity. Then, again, I told myself, I should certainly only be allowed to see the successes, and it would be difficult for me, ignorant of the language as I was, to penetrate the surface and see beyond any veil which it might be necessary to arrange for my benefit.5
Feuchtwanger insisted that, ‘As a writer, … I am driven from within to give unrestricted expression to what I feel, think, see and experience, regardless of individuals, class, party or ideology. And so, despite my personal leanings, I was mistr
ustful of Moscow.’6 Discounting the pressure exerted by worldwide public opinion, Feuchtwanger was a sceptical, reflective writer. ‘Exhausted by my efforts to see and understand clearly’, he had decided at first ‘to remain silent until my experiences had crystallised’.7 By the end of his visit he had arrived at a mixed view, though on balance ‘I had, however, found more light than shadow’.8
The Feuchtwanger who met Stalin on 8 January 1937 for a conversation that lasted three hours was no ideologist but a versatile and experienced observer, a sceptic from a thoroughgoing bourgeois background.
A key scene in European intellectual history: Feuchtwanger’s meeting with Stalin
Stalin received Lion Feuchtwanger in the Kremlin between 3.15 and 9 p.m. on 8 January 1937. The photograph published on the front page of Pravda the following day shows the two men together in front of a panelled wall. With them are Boris Tal, who acted as interpreter, and Mironov, a man in charge of foreign relations. The men pictured seem to be aware of the historical importance of their meeting. They look towards the photographer with a fixed, somewhat tense gaze.9 Feuchtwanger has given a detailed account of the meeting. It reads like the text accompanying the image:
When I saw Stalin the proceedings against the first Trotsky group, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were over; the accused had been condemned and shot, and an action against the second Trotsky group, Pyatakov, Radek, Bukharin and Rykov, was pending. But no one had more than a vague idea of the nature of the accusations against them, and it was not yet known whether, when, and against which of them proceedings would be taken. It was during this interval, then, between the two trials that I saw Stalin.10