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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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THE ACCUSED
BY
ALEXANDER WEISSBERG
TRANSLATED BY
EDWARD FITZGERALD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
PREFACE 4
1 4
2 5
3 6
4 8
5 9
CHAPTER 1—The “Great Purge” 13
CHAPTER 2—Trapped 24
CHAPTER 3—The Inner Prison of the Kharkov G.P.U. 84
CHAPTER 4—The Confrontations Begin 113
CHAPTER 5—Every Inch of the Way 128
CHAPTER 6—The Provocateur 154
CHAPTER 7—The “Conveyer” 193
CHAPTER 8—The “Confession” 220
CHAPTER 9—Kholodnaga Gora 228
CHAPTER 10—Witches’ Sabbath 263
CHAPTER 11—Enemies of the People 276
CHAPTER 12—The Anteroom of Hell 317
CHAPTER 13—G.P.U. Men in the Cells 333
CHAPTER 14—The Great Change 350
CHAPTER 15—Kiev 358
CHAPTER 16—A Real Spy 379
CHAPTER 17—Moscow 394
CHAPTER 18—The Bridge of Brest-Litovsk 412
CHAPTER 19—“The Memory Hole” 421
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 430
PREFACE
1
THIS BOOK is in several respects unique in the voluminous literature on contemporary Russia. Its author, a scientist of Austrian origin, and a member of the Communist Party, was arrested during the Great Purge of 1937. He was charged with having recruited a gang of Nazi terrorists to assassinate Stalin and Voroshilov during a hunting trip in the Caucasus, and to blow up the main industrial plants of the Ukrainian capital in the event of war. He confessed to all these remarkable crimes, and lived to tell the tale.
It is a tale which brings closer to the reader than any published before the inner mechanism of the most extraordinary terror regime in human history. It describes from firsthand experience how, in the so-called “political isolators” or “inner prisons” of Soviet Russia, men are prepared by special methods to confess in public to imaginary crimes. The part allocated to the author was that of an accomplice of Nikolas Bukharin, former member of the Politburo, former President of the Communist International. He was to testify that, as a member of the “Bukharinite Block,” he had been instructed to kill Stalin, blow up the Kharkov plants, and so forth. He proved unfit for the part, and the producers dropped him quietly out of the cast.
This in itself is not very extraordinary. In show business, as in other spheres, many are called but few are chosen. The production of a political melodrama, staged in a courtroom in Moscow, Prague or Budapest, needs many months of painstaking preparation, just as a musical show or a motion picture does, only more so. For in this particular kind of show business the script must, up to a point, fit the real character and history of the actors. This greatly narrows the choice of possible participants. Thus a person fit to play the part indicated above must have, inter alia, the following qualifications: (a) He must have known Bukharin personally. (b) He must have had some contacts with Germans and Germany. As no Soviet citizen is allowed to have contact with foreigners or to travel abroad except on a Government mission, this is a decisive limiting factor. (c) He must have occupied a position of some influence, otherwise the confession would pass the borderline between the wildly improbable and the completely absurd. (d) Finally, the producers must be sure that, once he stands behind the footlights, the actor will stick to his text and not sabotage the show. It was on this last point that Weissberg proved to be an unfit candidate.
Even under these limiting conditions scores of possible candidates could be found for each part. To pick them, recondition them, transform their personalities, break them down and build them up for the selected part, was one of the functions of the O.G.P.U. Thus, let me repeat, the nature of the confession which Weissberg signed is extraordinary only in Western eyes. For the O.G.P.U. it was all a matter of routine, as it is for a talent scout to put a possible candidate for a part through a screen test. They found out fairly soon that from their point of view this candidate was hopeless. The no-ad procedure would then have been either to shoot him without trial by administrative decision, or to let him finish his days in one of the Arctic labor camps. That he survived was due to a chain of exceptional circumstances. But even that is less startling if one considers that, according to the rules of probability, where tens of thousands of cases are concerned, the improbable chain is bound to occur sooner or later.
2
I HAVE known Alex Weissberg since 1930; our life-stories intersect at various decisive points. He was born in 1901 in Kraków, which then belonged to Austria. His father was a prosperous Jewish merchant. A few years after his birth the family moved to Vienna and Weissberg retained his Austrian citizenship. This fact became important later on. He studied mathematical physics and engineering in Vienna, where he was graduated in 1926. He joined the socialist youth movement at the age of seventeen, and later the Austrian Social Democratic Party. In 1927 he left the Socialists and joined the Communist Party.
After his graduation he held various jobs, among them that of an assistant lecturer at the Berlin Polytechnic under Professor Westphal. Later he entered the service of the Argentine Government as a technical expert. The Argentine was a heavy buyer of German machine tools, and Weissberg traveled in the Saar and Ruhr to supervise the quality of the material, thus gaining a wide experience in plant management.
In 1931 he received a call from the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute (UFTI) in Kharkov, and moved to the Soviet Union for good. We met in Berlin, a few weeks before his departure for Russia, through a mutual friend, E. I had known her from early childhood and we had always remained close friends. She told me that she was engaged to many Alex, and that he was a very remarkable character.
My first impression of Alex was that of a prosperous and jovial businessman with a round face, rounded gestures, a great gusto for telling funny stories and a curious liking for sweets—there were little trays with chocolates around, which he kept gobbling up absent-mindedly by handfuls. I failed to see what E. found so remarkable about this character until the other guests were gone and we became involved in an argument on some of the finer points of Marxist theory. Then Alex’ eyes became narrow and piercing, every trace of humor left him and he made dialectical mincemeat of me. He had a lucid, trenchant and relentless way of arguing, and, not content with knocking his opponent down, he continued to hammer away at him. After a while he became jolly and jovial again.
I was at that time already a Communist by conviction and just about to take the decisive step of joining
the Party. We met a number of times in Berlin; then Alex left, and later E. joined him in Kharkov, where they married. We corresponded occasionally; one year later I lost my job, owing to my Party activities, and decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union. My first and last port of call in that country was Kharkov, where I stayed in the Weissbergs’ flat. It was a small but by Russian standards luxurious flat in the vicinity of the Institutes.
The Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute is one of the largest and best-equipped experimental laboratories in Europe. During my stay with Alex and his wife, I met most of the scientists who appear as dramatis personae in this book. Among them were Leipunsky, in charge of the Department for Nuclear Fission, and Landau, the infant prodigy of Russian physics—both of whom are today probably playing a leading part in perfecting the Russian atom bomb. Incidentally, I remember a long discussion with Landau, who argued with great conviction that the works of all the philosophers from the beginning of time up to and excluding Marx are not worth the paper on which they are printed. We also sometimes played poker with Professor Shubnikov, a dear old donnish scientist who was later on to testify that Alex had tried to recruit him for the Gestapo—which offer he only refused because he had already been in the service of a German espionage organization since 1924. Our neighbors and most intimate friends were Martin and Barbara Ruhemann—of whom the latter, when I asked her to help Alex, affirmed that she had always known him to be a counterrevolutionary saboteur. Every member of that happy band of scientists who used to come in after dinner to play cards or drink tea stood up after Alex’ arrest and denounced him. They were neither cowards nor inferior human beings; they had to comply with orders or share the fate of the man whom they denounced. Even so, nearly all of them, including Landau, Leipunsky and Shubnikov, were arrested at a later stage of the purge and signed the usual fantastic confessions. About half of them were released and returned to their work at the end of the purge in 1939.
I left Russia in the autumn of 1933. During the three following years Alex worked hard and successfully. He founded and edited with others the Soviet Journal of Physics. In 1933 he was put in charge of the construction of a large experimental plant of which, after its completion, he was to become director.
Then came the assassination of Kirov, the first show trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev, the beginnings of the Terror. In April, 1936, Alex’ wife was arrested. They had separated in 1934 but had remained on friendly terms. The charges against her were that in her work as an artist she had surreptitiously inserted swastikas into her work, and that in addition she had hidden under her bed two pistols with the intent of killing Stalin. After that it was only a question of time before Alex was arrested too. He perhaps still had a chance, as an Austrian citizen, to secure an exit permit. Instead he went to Moscow and Leningrad to obtain testimonies from influential people to help his wife. In 1937 this would have been lunacy; in 1936 it was merely reckless. After eighteen months of detention, and a near-successful attempt at suicide, she was actually released, thanks to the extraordinary exertions of the Austrian Consul. But six months before she was freed and expelled from Russia, in March, 1937, Alex himself was arrested. That is where his book starts.
It ends three years later when Alex, together with a batch of other German and Austrian Communists, Socialists and anti-Nazi refugees, was handed over by the G.P.U. to the Gestapo. This act of unfathomable baseness was one of the consequences, and at the same time the ignominious symbol, of the Stalin-Hitler pact. How he survived the further ordeals of Gestapo treatment and the part which he later played in the Polish underground movement would, and I hope will, fill the pages of a further book.
3
DURING his three years in Soviet detention, Weissberg went through all the various phases of prison regime: solitary confinement, political isolator, punishment cell, mass detention cell—and even the “luxury” cell in the Butyrka where prisoners were served ham and eggs for breakfast to fatten them up before delivery to the Gestapo so that they would give a favorable impression of the amenities of the Soviet penitentiary regime.
The dramatic climax of his personal story is reached in Chapters 7 and 8, “The ‘Conveyer’” and “The ‘Confession.’” After seven days and seven nights of continuous interrogation by three alternating examining magistrates, interrupted only twice a day for a few minutes, he broke down and signed his confession. Twenty-four hours later he withdrew it. He was again put on the “conveyer”—the technical name under which the method of nonstop interrogation with deprivation of sleep is known—and after four days and nights signed another confession. He withdrew it and was put on the “conveyer” a third time; but this time only for twenty-four hours. After that his torturers realized that they were faced with a kind of human jack-in-the-box, whose springs they could strain but not break. They gave him up as a hopeless case and from then on they left him more or less alone.
Stronger men than Weissberg—old revolutionaries, partisan commanders, men who had risked their lives a dozen times—had capitulated under the same type of ordeal. The fact that Weissberg was able to hold out is due to a rare concurrence of circumstances. Some of these were external. His Austrian passport assured him a minimum of special consideration. The intervention of leading physicists like Einstein and Joliot-Curie on his behalf was an additional factor. Finally, the Soviet-Nazi mutual extradition agreement got him out of the country, which otherwise he would never have been allowed to leave.
But these external circumstances alone would not have saved him. What enabled him to hold out where others broke down was a specific mixture of just those character traits which survival in such a situation requires. A great physical and mental resilience—that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental. An extraordinary presence of mind—witness the story of the lost blueprint in the chapter “The Provocateur.” A certain thick-skinnedness and good-natured insensitivity, coupled with an almost entirely extroverted disposition—notice the absence of any contemplative passage, of any trace of religious or mystic experience which are otherwise almost inevitably present in solitary confinement. An irrepressible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising situations; that “it can’t happen to me” attitude which is the most reliable source of courage; and an inexhaustible sense of humor. Finally, that relentless manner of persisting in an argument and continuing it for hours, days or weeks, which I mentioned before. It drove his inquisitors nuts, as it sometimes had his friends. His marathon dialogues with the examining magistrates are dotted with gruesomely funny scenes in which an exasperated G.P.U. officer exclaims: “Alexander Semyonovitch, why do you keep torturing us?” There are moments when one almost pities the poor brute caught in his victim’s dialectical traps.
Practically all of my Central European friends have had experiences of varying severity in prisons and concentration camps. I don’t know a single one who, after three years in the hands of the G.P.U. and five years hunted by the Gestapo, has emerged physically and mentally so unscathed and pleased with this best of all possible worlds as Alexander Weissberg. He looked like a prosperous businessman when I first met him twenty years ago, before the roof collapsed over our heads; and he still looks like a prosperous businessman, with rounded gestures, a fondness for Viennese coffeehouse stories, munching pralines or his favorite Turkish Delight.
4
This is a rambling, sprawling, spouting whale of a book. The organization of the material is, from the craftsman’s point of view, atrocious. The narrative is interrupted by lengthy excursions into the past or future; at the most dramatic moment the author goes off on a dissertation on the Bukharinist opposition’s attitude to the Soviet rationing system. And yet the reader will find that in spite of these rambling digressions, or perhaps because of them, the book will grow on him steadily, entrance him more and more, and slowly carry him off his feet like a great muddy stream, until he finally realizes that he has become an eyewitness to a
great saga of our time. For the Great Purge, with its round ten million victims, was more than an episode in a dictatorial regime. It was a catastrophe like the Black Death, a witches’ sabbath of human reason and the first full-sized example of the hitherto inconceivable ravages which modern despotism is capable of inflicting on the bodies and souls of its subjects.
And yet this is not a book of horrors. It is—and this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it—not even depressing to read. Partly this is due to the author’s courage and unquenchable optimism, which gradually infect the reader; partly to the cavalcade of colorful characters who march through the cells, each with a more fantastic story than the other, all described with a mastery rare in a first book. Some of these—like the Provocateur Rozhansky or the Anarchist Eisenberg—are unforgettable portraits which could find an honorable place in the great works of literature. Taken together, they add up to something out of The Arabian Nights. All of them seem to accept their fate with truly Russian resignation; nobody seems to care particularly what is going to happen to him; they curse, quarrel and argue in this exotic inferno which, through the author’s jovial eyes, seems at times quite a cozy place to live in. It is an astounding contrast to the high-pitched tone customary in books on prisons and concentration camps.
Even the defects of the book seem to turn into assets in the total picture. The repetitiveness of the dialogues with the examining magistrates is at first annoying; but after a while the reader is caught in the spirit of this game of psychological attrition and is steeped in the peculiar atmosphere in which confessions are extracted. The rambling flashbacks and diversions contribute to the scope and width of the panorama, to its typically Russian climate. Looseness of structure is an essential part of the Russian literary tradition; one wonders how much of its impact a masterpiece like The Brothers Karamazov would retain if it had been pruned and trimmed by an ambitious editor. The maxim that all really good cooks work in untidy kitchens seems to be equally applicable to the great masters of epic art.
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