The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  Those who disbelieved the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in equal astonishment how it came about that men confessed to crimes they obviously could never have committed.

  But without exception attention was concentrated on the “show trials,” on the proceedings against the leaders of the former opposition. Both capitalist and working-class observers confined themselves to the criminological aspect. No one went behind the façade. No one realized what was going on deep within Russian society.

  The trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was followed in January, 1937, by the trial of Piatakov and Radek, and, a year later, by the trial of Bukharin. Each of these big trials was preceded by mass arrests and followed by a flood of further arrests. The victims belonged to all political circles of Soviet society. The arrest of members of the former opposition began the process. The followers of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin came first. Then followed those who had once belonged to other political parties: Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Octobrists, Kadets, Armenian Dashnaki, Georgian Nationalists, Trudoviki, Anarchists, Pan-Russian Chauvinists and Ukrainian Nationalists.

  It should not be thought that these men were still members of underground groups when they were arrested, or that they still propagated their former ideas. They had merely been at some time or other—often many years before the revolution—members of these parties, or known to have sympathized with them. Most of them had taken part in the revolution with the Bolsheviks, fought in the civil war side by side with the Bolsheviki and then joined the Communist Party and worked for the building up of socialism. Now they were suddenly destroyed because of the sins of their youth—perhaps because they had once fought against the Tsar as Social Revolutionaries instead of as Bolsheviks; perhaps because as young men they had once distributed Anarchist or Menshevik leaflets. Incidentally, Party membership in those pre-revolutionary days depended more on chance than on deliberate choice. The one would join the Mensheviki because his best friend at the university happened to be a Menshevik. The other would join the Social Revolutionaries because theirs was the only revolutionary organization in his district. The third would join the Bolsheviki because the strike in his factory was organized by them. But one and all, they were moved by a common hatred of Tsarism. They fought side by side for liberty and a better social order. In those days young workers and students were “revolutionary” in the general sense of the term and without any precise idea of the differences between the various political conceptions. They fought side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to prison side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to Siberia side by side with the Bolsheviki. Later on most of them abandoned their former ideas and accepted the leadership of the Bolshevik Party because it fought with greater vigor and determination for the victory of revolutionary socialism. During the civil war they fought on all fronts; in the hunger years they tightened their belts; in the construction period they worked hard for the success of the Five-Year Plans. And now, after almost thirty years, during which they had become middle-aged and old men in the service of the revolution, they had to go to prison again; this time into the prisons of their former allies, the Bolsheviki.

  They tramped up and down their cells and tried to understand. They remembered that some of their old comrades had gone to prison even in 1917 because they had refused to accept the dictatorship. But they had willingly suffered imprisonment, and the doors of their cells had stood wide open for years. All they had been required to do was to abandon their beliefs, and then not only would freedom have been theirs but the highest offices in the state. But they had still refused to support the policy of the ruling party. They had fought for the freedom of the whole people, and when the revolution finally came they refused to sacrifice even a fraction of that freedom to clear the way for working-class power and the socialist reorganization of society. They had sat in the prisons of the revolution as they had sat in the prisons of the Tsar. The highest arbiter for them was not world history, which invariably approves the ruling powers, but their own conscience, and that forbade all compromise.

  These men had nothing in common with the prisoners of 1937, who had capitulated again and again to the ruling group in the Party, who had obediently accepted all the changes in the Party line, who, at the behest of the Party, had condemned their comrades when they had fallen into disgrace—and who now found themselves in prison nevertheless. They had lost their freedom because in those far-off days they had belonged not to the small Bolshevik group but to some other revolutionary group.

  But it was only for a few weeks that such questions troubled them, and then they were joined by many of their old Bolshevik friends. At the beginning of 1937 the Party closed down the Old Bolsheviki’s Club, and that was the signal for mass arrests of old Party members. Whoever had been a Party member for a long time must have uttered a careless word on occasions, a word not dangerous at the time but fatal now. The secret records of the G.P.U. go back a long way, but if anything were overlooked there were no thousands of informers eager to drag it back into the light. But these former heretical utterances were not the real reason for the arrests. The old revolutionaries, whether Menshevik, Social Revolutionary or authentic Bolshevik, had fought for freedom against Tsarism. They had loved freedom then and probably loved it still in their hearts. The new regime of despotism had no use for men who had once fought for freedom. They must be got rid of.

  But this liquidation of the politically conscious sections of Soviet society was only the preliminary to happenings which were so fantastically senseless that it is difficult to describe them—and still more difficult to persuade Western minds to believe them. Hundreds of thousands of old revolutionaries and old members of the Bolshevik Party had been arrested. The very foundations of Soviet life had been shaken. But ordinary people still believed it was exclusively a conflict within the ranks of the ruling party. Then in the second half of 1937 the character of the action changed. The scale of the arrests increased enormously and extended to those who had never been members of any political party. Day and night G.P.U. vans raced through the streets of town and village, taking their victims from their homes, factories, universities, laboratories, workshops, barracks and Government offices. All walks of life were involved, and workmen, peasants, officials and professional men, artists and officers found themselves together in the cells. All branches of the economic system were affected. Officials of heavy industry, agriculture, education and the armed forces were among the arrested. There were fifty republics and autonomous districts in the Soviet Union with their separate governments, and about five hundred People’s Commissars. Very few of these Commissars survived the storm. Not a single one of all the big Soviet undertakings retained its director or its leading engineers. New men took their places, but within a few weeks they too were arrested.

  The arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky and eight leading generals opened the prison gates to the officers corps. The commanders of all Russian military districts, the strategic units of the whole system, changed their commands for prison cells. Their successors joined them a few weeks later before they had even had time to settle down in their new commands. Within the space of a few months some military districts changed their commanders half a dozen times, until before long there were not enough generals left and colonels took over, only to be relieved in their turn by majors. In the end many regiments were commanded by lieutenants.

  The purge in the higher reaches of the Party and the labor unions was complete. At the head of the Communist Party is its Central Committee, which then consisted of seventy-one members and sixty-one deputies. These men had proved their revolutionary loyalty on a score of occasions. They had been picked out of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Party members. Every day of their lives had been carefully examined by the control organs of the Party and by the G.P.U. And yet more than three-quarters of them were arrested as spies. The Politburo of the Party, which consisted of ten members and five deputies, is an even narrower elite. It is the personal s
taff of the dictator, the actual government of the country. And yet at least five of these men fell victim to the G.P.U. The Comintern apparatus was formally extraterritorial, so to speak. According to the Comintern statutes, its Executive Committee was superior to any organ of the Russian Communist Party. Every Communist everywhere was supposed to be under its orders—including the officials of the G.P.U., who were almost all Communists. In reality the G.P.U. didn’t care a fig for the laws of the Comintern and they purged its apparatus ruthlessly. Even old revolutionaries known to the working-class movement all over the world, men like Bela Kun, were arrested as counterrevolutionaries and liquidated as spies.

  Soviet cultural life was temporarily paralyzed and it never fully recovered. The control organs of the Party closely examined every new literary and scientific publication for “Trotskyist contraband.” An unhappy formulation was enough to seal the fate of its author. Many leading Soviet writers joined the masses in the concentration camps. Many of those who were spared stopped writing altogether for fear of suffering the same fate. Still others sought safety in writing only of the past and avoiding even the slightest reference to current affairs. Those who were totally unprincipled “fulfilled their social task,” i.e., they wrote whatever the ruling group required of them. They turned their coats again and again, condemned today what they had held sacred yesterday, only to damn tomorrow what they praised today. The result was a deplorable decline in literary standards, and such books as were published were no longer products of imagination and talent but belletristic comments on the decisions of the latest Party Congress. Ordinary people stopped reading them.

  Scientific work suffered greatly from the G.P.U. excesses. The Terror paralyzed every creative endeavor. During the construction period the Soviet Government had spared neither money nor energy to build up a great network of scientific institutions. The scientist was the favored child of Soviet society. But when the Great Purge came he was not exempt. Many leading scientists were arrested and their colleagues were so intimidated that they stopped their work on the urgent problems of the day and turned to mere routine work in which they could not go wrong.

  The arrest of Piatakov was the signal for the purging of Soviet heavy industry. The arrest of the Vice-Commissar for the Railways, Lifschitz, played the same role for transport. A special department of the G.P.U. attended to railway and other transport workers, and within a short space of time the painstaking reorganizational work of Kaganovitch was undone. Kaganovitch himself, People’s Commissar for Transport, was no more willing to protect his officials and his workers from the G.P.U. than his colleague in the War Department, Marshal Voroshilov, had been to protect his officers.

  The preparations for the trial of Bukharin and other members of the right-wing opposition brought the peasants into the hands of the G.P.U. Peasants were arrested wholesale and the number of prisoners now rose to millions. With peasant fatalism they immediately signed everything the examiners demanded of them, and then went off in packed trains to the concentration camps of the Far North. They made no attempt to quarrel with their fate. They were so used to its being settled for them, for good or evil, by someone else, that they did not even ask why. A very few showed fight. These were the new-type peasants, the kolkhoz stalwarts of the social transformation in the villages. The remainder accepted it all as they would have accepted an earthquake or a flood, or any other “act of God,” and made no attempt to delve for meanings.

  The victims of the purge came from all the peoples of the Union, but the national minorities were singled out for special attention. In all big towns there were small minorities whose main stock lived elsewhere, perhaps even outside the frontiers. The Germans had their independent republic on the Volga, the Armenians theirs in Southern Caucasia, the Uzbeks theirs in Central Asia. The origins of the groups of Letts, Lithuanians, Finns, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Persians and Chinese lay outside the Soviet Union. Groups of these peoples had lived for hundreds of years scattered over Russian territory without ever becoming fully assimilated. When they lived together in agricultural colonies, like the Germans in the Southern Ukraine, they obstinately retained their old national customs and their way of life. Lenin’s nationality policy not only gave the oppressed nationalities political independence in their homogeneous colonies, but it also gave cultural autonomy to the smaller groups scattered over the territory of the bigger nationalities. It gave them their own schools, their own clubs and their own national theaters in which they could hear pieces performed in their own tongue, and it ensured them equality before the law. In the first years of the revolution none other than Stalin was People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and under Lenin’s guidance he implemented this just and far-sighted policy which ended the everlasting nationality squabbles in Russia and won the oppressed peoples for the revolution. And now all these minorities were liquidated by Stalin’s own order. The men were all arrested, the women were banished from European Russia to Asiatic Russia and the children were often carried off to be brought up as Russian orphans in the children’s homes of the G.P.U.

  A small colony of about six hundred Armenians lived in Kharkov. One day in the autumn of 1937 over three hundred of them were arrested. Within six weeks the rest followed. Most of them were illiterate or semiliterate shoeshine boys, cobblers or petty black-marketeers. For a long time they were unable to understand what had brought them into prison. The Letts and the Germans had preceded them, and the Greeks and Bulgarians (who were among the most skillful gardeners in the country) followed them. After that came Poles and Lithuanians, Finns and Estonians, Assyrians and Persians, Uzbeks and Chinese, and many other ethnic groups Europe has never heard of. It almost seemed as though the G.P.U. were determined to ensure the racial purity of Russia’s towns by administrative action.

  All these people had to be spies; the G.P.U. insisted. Germans, Poles and Letts had to have spied for Hitler; Chinese, Koreans and Mongolians for Japan; while Armenians, Assyrians and Persians had to have spied for the British Intelligence Service. The G.P.U. was a stickler for order. The fact that the G.P.U. insisted that the Chinese should have spied for Japan, the archenemy of their own country, was a national injustice about which my Chinese cellmates—they were poor laundrymen—complained bitterly. On the other hand, in the examiner’s office the Armenians entered the service of the British without much protest.

  Millions of ordinary people from town and country were thrown into prison. People who had never bothered their heads about politics; people who were quite prepared to be loyal to any government provided it did not oppress them too harshly. They were the type of people who rarely take part in mass movements and then only at certain psychological peak points of history. In normal times they do their work, bring up their children and dig in their own garden. They were hungry when the rest were hungry and they enjoyed their simple pleasures when the country’s economic situation improved. Now they were completely out of their depth. They had no idea what wave had swept them off their feet or where it was taking them. In the cells they looked at the representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia and their eyes seemed to ask: Where have you led us? What have you done to our country? And there was no answer to their unspoken questions because those they asked were themselves wrestling with those very questions, turning the same problems over and over in their minds and discussing them with each other. ‘What was the political significance of it all? Why did the dictator arrest his own followers? Not only the lukewarm who served him only with their lips, not only the weaklings who were always hoping that the Party policy would grow less extreme, but even his most ruthless and fanatical supporters. Why did the G.P.U. force them all to confess things which not even the G.P.U. men themselves believed in? Where was the lunacy to end?

  The final organization to go through the mincing machine was the G.P.U. itself. The examiners came into their own cells to keep their former victims company. Prisoners would often find themselves in the same cell with the examiner who had been in charge
of their cases. And then all the old questions would be asked again. But the G.P.U. men had no idea what they had done or why they had done it. They had no more idea of the significance of the happenings than their victims. It was only years later, when the whole thing was over, that the more intelligent prisoners gradually pieced together a general picture of the happenings and sought by analyzing innumerable incidents, which taken on their own seemed insignificant, to discover the motives of the dictator in launching the Great Purge.

  I was the companion of these people for three years in the prisons of the G.P.U. in Kharkov, Kiev and Moscow. During that time I was held in a dozen different cells, and innumerable batches of prisoners came and went before my eyes. I remained. I was a careful observer of the unique process going on around me and I made a note of the facts with the intention of one day giving them to the outside world. I talked to hundreds of prisoners, classified them in the general framework of the events and sought an explanation. At no time did I ever lose hope that one day I should be free again. With calm certainty I waited for the change which I knew must come.

  We all waited for that change. We all knew that things could not go on in the same way much longer. At some time or other the disastrous process would have to be curbed unless the country was to go down to ruin. Someone would have to put a stop to the G.P.U. madness. At some time or other the dictator would have to recognize the full extent of the damage which was being done by the purge he had ordered. For two terrible years we waited, and the whole country waited with us. Then the change came.