The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  On December 8, 1938, the organizer of Stalin’s Great Purge, Nikolai Ivanovitch Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Home Affairs and head of the G.P.U., was removed from his post. A few months later he disappeared from the Central Committee and then he was arrested. We were never able to discover whether he was shot or not. At the same time a unique trial took place in the Moldavian Republic, in the south-west corner of the vast Soviet Union. The leader of the local G.P.U. and four of his examiners were charged before a military court with having arrested innocent people and forced them to make false confessions under torture. The accused pleaded guilty. But they did not defend themselves by saying that they had only carried out orders; instead, they confessed that they had acted under the instructions of a counterrevolutionary organization. They were found guilty, sentenced to death and shot. These men had done no more than every G.P.U. man had been doing with impunity for two years from Arkhangelsk to Odessa and from Vladivostok to the Polish frontier. The indictment and execution of these minor G.P.U. officials was Stalin’s signal for the change. The Great Purge was over.

  On February 20, 1939, I was transferred to Kiev, and at the beginning of September to Moscow. By this time I reckoned with my speedy release, but I had seen so much during the previous three uncanny years that I feared that I should not be allowed to leave the country.

  An improbable and unique historical conjunction of events came to my assistance. In the hope of turning German aggression against the Western powers Stalin signed the notorious pact with Ribbentrop. From that date, August 23, 1939, a period of carefully stressed friendship began between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and to celebrate it the Russians handed over all German nationals they were holding imprisoned, including even the Communists and the Jews. The prisoners were brought from all parts of the Soviet Union, from the Arctic Circle, from Yakutsk, from the Amur district and from the desert of Karaganda, to a central reception prison in Moscow, the Butyrka, where they were well fed for a few weeks and then sent off to Nazi Germany in batches of about fifty. At the bridge over the Bug at Brest-Litovsk G.P.U. men handed them over to Gestapo men.

  I crossed the Bug in this way on January 5, 1940. For three months I was held by the Gestapo in various prisons in Byela Podlaska, Warsaw and Lublin, and then I was released in the Kraków ghetto. When the extermination of the Jews began in the spring of 1942 I went underground. In March, 1943, the Gestapo caught me and put me into the concentration camp of Kavencin. With the help of friends in the Polish underground movement I succeeded in escaping, and I remained in hiding in Warsaw, where I took part in two insurrections against the Germans. My wife, my father, my two brothers and almost all my friends were slaughtered by the S.S. On January 17, 1945, Russian troops occupied the suburb of Warsaw where I was in hiding and I could again walk the streets freely. Eighteen months later I left Poland and arrived in the Swedish port of Malmö, setting foot on free soil for the first time for a decade.

  Since I emerged from behind the Iron Curtain I have been bombarded with all sorts of questions. My Anglo-Saxon friends, practical men by temperament and upbringing, are chiefly interested in what actually happened to me, but my socialist friends from Central Europe are more exigent: they want a social theory to explain what happened.

  “Was the development in Russia inevitable?” they want to know. “Must every social revolution which resorts to a working-class dictatorship end in the despotism of a single man or of a small oligarchy over the masses of the people?”

  But both groups ask the same questions concerning the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge:

  “Why in heaven’s name did the accused confess to crimes they had never committed?”

  “Why didn’t they take advantage of the publicity at the trials to expose the whole tissue of lies in the presence of foreign diplomats and journalists?”

  “Why did Stalin arrest his own followers as well?”

  I am not in a position to satisfy fully the very proper desires of all my friends. By analyzing innumerable individual fates and reconstructing innumerable happenings which preceded the events of the years 1937 to 1939 I have developed my own theory, but I cannot claim that it is the only conceivable one.

  The circumstances are much too complicated for that. Some of the happenings had a variety of causes, and that confuses the general picture. Some of them were quite senseless. They were the excesses of a machine which had got out of control, and as such they defy rational explanation.

  What I can and will do is to set down the facts as carefully and accurately as my memory will allow, and as conscientiously as the gravity of the happenings demands. I will not allow any feeling of bitterness at the injustice I suffered to guide my pen. Later events shall not influence what I write. Current tendencies shall not cloud my vision. I will set down the facts just as they were.

  I know that I shall be fiercely assailed by those who have made it their business to defend the system of totalitarian lies. I know that like all others who have come forward in the past I shall be ruthlessly slandered. I cannot prevent that and there is no legal means of proving that what I say is true. The G.P.U. dismisses its victims without papers or documentary records. But history gives one weapon to truth which it denies to the lie. Lies have many versions, truth only one. Several hundred people left the Soviet Union when I did. Some of them will have lost their lives, or be in prison again, but others will probably have survived and be in freedom. I have no idea where they are now, but one day they too will come forward. What they say will agree with what I say, and that material agreement will confirm the truth of what I have said here.{3}

  Where the facts I set down refer to things I experienced personally I have to rely entirely on my memory. Before my arrest I had a very good memory indeed, but owing to my subsequent experiences there is no doubt that it has suffered to some extent. Further, the events I describe now he from ten to fifteen years in the past, and in part they have been overlaid by my subsequent experiences. In consequence some of my memories of those earlier days have paled, and some of the connections are no longer so obvious. Sometimes a figure comes back to me and I am unable to remember exactly where it came from and when it first entered my life. Many names and dates have also been forgotten. However, the main experiences have remained very clearly in my mind because, with minor differences, they were repeated again and again.

  Sometimes I have been obliged to change not only names but also accompanying circumstances in order to shield people who are still within reach of the G.P.U., though I am well aware of how unreliable such precautions are. World public opinion is one of the sore points of the regime, and in this respect the G.P.U., whose arm is long, spares no efforts. For this reason I have even felt myself obliged to leave out some things altogether. But although I may have altered names and places in some instances, the essentials have remained. After all, it is of no consequence that a man I call Lebedev was really Lebedinsky, that he came from Stalingrad and not from Sverdlovsk, and that he was really only thirty and not forty.

  A very great deal of space is devoted to my talks with the examiners and with my fellow prisoners. In most cases I have used the direct form of speech. It may be objected that it is impossible to reconstruct a conversation accurately after the passage of ten years. But the same is true of a conversation that took place only ten days before. Thus the form of direct speech I have chosen is a matter of convenience only and I make no claim that it conveys absolute verbal accuracy.

  As far as the statements of my fellow prisoners reproduced here are concerned, I was naturally not always in a position to check their accuracy. However, the atmosphere of a prison quickly teaches a man to judge the character and credibility of a fellow prisoner. Most of the experiences were typical and they were materially confirmed by constant repetition.

  When all these reservations have been made I can claim with confidence that the future will confirm the objectivity of my report and the accuracy of my interpretation of what happened. />
  But one way or the other, I propose to describe what happened just as it happened, without exaggeration and without minimization.

  CHAPTER 2—Trapped

  IT WAS SUNDAY, JANUARY 24, 1937, AND I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO A rest after a tiring journey, when the telephone bell rang. The voice was unknown to me.

  “Repeat nothing I say,” it declared abruptly. “This is the N.K.V.D. Come to us at eleven o’clock. Ask below for Room Number 222. A pass will be ready for you.”

  My hand trembled as I put down the receiver. Since the trouble in the Institute, and particularly since my wife’s arrest, I had sensed the noose drawing tighter. I had never previously had any direct contact with the G.P.U.—at least not in connection with my own affairs. Now I was to cross the unseen borderline. The strain and uncertainty of the past few months had begun to play on my nerves, and when I set off my mind was in a whirl and I was deeply disturbed.

  The Kharkov G.P.U. headquarters was only about five minutes’ walk away. It was big and solidly built, with three façades facing on to the street. Inside it was, by Russian standards, very well furnished and equipped. The People’s Commissariat of the Interior, or N.K.V.D., always had the best buildings in all Russian towns, while important economic and cultural organizations were often pitifully housed.

  I went in and a guard directed me to the office where passes were made out. As the unknown voice had assured me, my pass was ready and it was handed to me as soon as I mentioned my name. Back I went with it to the guard, who examined it suspiciously and then let me pass. Room No. 222 was on the second floor.

  It was a longish, sparsely furnished room. By the window were a desk and a number of chairs. Seated at the desk with his back to the window was a man in civilian clothes. Abruptly he invited me to sit down. While he was looking for a dossier, I examined him closely. He was dark and of medium height. In conversation he gave me the impression of being a subordinate official, a man who liked to have everything just so. He doesn’t look a sadist, I thought, but he’s certainly not one of those tough old revolutionaries who joined the Cheka for idealist motives. He’s an ordinary careerist. I had often met people holding responsible positions in Soviet factories who came from the G.P.U. You could tell them from their attitude. They felt they were more important than ordinary Party members. They felt themselves the masters of the country, and they let you know it. I knew the type well. Men with the faces of peasants and big hands. Men who were sent out whenever there was ruthless work to be done. They seldom spared themselves and they never spared others, and they ordered their former comrades around in a tone no factory manager elsewhere would dare to adopt. They enjoyed many privileges and materially their lives were in blatant contrast to the impoverishment around them, but this they thought quite in order.

  The man who sat opposite me was different. He was a sort of clerk, and everything he did revealed his subaltern nature. I was to get to know him well. His name was Polevedsky and for two months after my arrest he was my special examiner. When I look back now I realize that he was one of the better sort, but when I first made his acquaintance I thought he was a real hellhound.

  “So you’re back?” he began.

  “Yes. The day before yesterday.”

  “What did you do in Moscow?”

  “I went to the Commissariat for Heavy Industry on Institute business.”

  “And what did you do in Leningrad?”

  “I ordered electro-motors and cable.”

  “Is that all you did there?”

  “No. I also settled one or two private affairs.”

  “That’s all very vague. You’ll have to give us more definite and more detailed information.”

  “Well, I went to the Military Prosecutor and to the N.K.V.D. on behalf of my former wife.”

  “Your wife was arrested as an enemy of the people and yet you intervened on her behalf? So you support an enemy of the people, eh?”

  “I’m certain she’s quite innocent.”

  “So now you’re saying we arrest innocent people.”

  “No, but in this particular case there must be a mistake, and I want to help the N.K.V.D. to clear it up.”

  “We don’t need your help. We’ll find out the truth all right. However, you’re not here to discuss your wife’s affairs but your own. Let me have an account of your past life.”

  I had given this “account of my life” to the proper authorities on innumerable occasions already: when I first went to the Institute, when I joined the union, when I applied for my transfer to the Russian Communist Party, and so on and so on. The account was in the confidential dossiers of all these organizations and, naturally, at the disposal of the G.P.U. A copy was probably in the dossier on the desk between us. I made no comment, however. As a foreigner it was just as well for me not to show any inside knowledge, so I obediently reeled off a short account of my professional and political life. Perhaps Polevedsky hoped to discover discrepancies, though it was unlikely. Soviet citizens have a very lively respect for the omniscience of the G.P.U., and they therefore make no attempt to give false information; they even include the slightest detail they think might interest the authorities. Once having given an account of their lives, they never subsequently give a different one. The G.P.U. agents in the Institute would know me well enough to realize that I was unlikely to contradict myself.

  I therefore couldn’t think why Polevedsky wanted the whole business all over again, but, equally, I couldn’t think what the G.P.U. wanted with me at all. It took me three years to learn the G.P.U. technique in preparing for an arrest. When I look back now I realize the aim of the G.P.U. in summoning me and the sense of their interrogations.

  Polevedsky scribbled away for about half an hour. Then he asked one or two unimportant questions about my life abroad. And finally he asked the question which I realized years later was the only one that mattered.

  “Have you any friends or acquaintances against whom the Soviet power has had to take repressive measures?”

  “Well, yes, there’s my former wife. But I’ve already told you about that.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I don’t really know quite what you mean by friends.”

  “People you know well and are in touch with.”

  “Through my work I come into touch with many people in responsible positions. As you know, quite a lot of such people have been arrested lately.”

  “Give me the names of those you know.”

  “Piatakov, Bukharin, Ratazhak, Pushin, Norkin and quite a number of others. But you don’t want me to mention the names of all the people I’ve ever had to visit officially, do you? I hadn’t the faintest idea of any counterrevolutionary activity they might have been engaged in. They were simply my superiors.”

  “Give the names of those you had personal relations with.” “None of my friends has been arrested.”

  “That’s impossible. You must give a few names at least. We know that you’ve had personal relations with enemies of the people.”

  “I did casually know one or two foreigners, and former foreigners who’ve since been arrested.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Hans Strahler, Carola Neher, Lucy Lehman, and perhaps Erwin Anders rather better than the others.”

  It was Anders who was to prove dangerous to me. The G.P.U. subsequently used every means of pressure at the disposal of an uncontrolled and uncontrollable secret police organization to make him denounce me as a counterrevolutionary and provide the pretext they wanted for my arrest.

  Polevedsky wrote down the names and asked one or two questions about when and where they were arrested and why, and how I came to know them and what I knew about them, and so on. He wrote down my answers and then handed me the statement to sign.

  After putting it away carefully he got up.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  We went out into the corridor and he locked the door.

  “Wait here until I come back,” he ordered.
“I am going to see my chief.”

  G.P.U. men typists and various civilians, perhaps secret agents, or Soviet officials went to and fro. Now and again a guard passed with a prisoner being taken for examination. The faces of these men were white and drawn and their clothes were crumpled. Their dragging steps spoke of exhaustion and harassing interrogations, and their dull eyes looked out hopelessly. But I was too greatly disturbed on my own account to pay much attention to their misfortunes. Would Polevedsky’s chief sign the warrant for my arrest? Polevedsky was gone a long time. Perhaps the formalities were complicated. No one could be arrested without the approval of the Public Prosecutor, and the formalities had to be complied with. Perhaps they were preparing the warrant issued by the G.P.U. and countersigned by the Public Prosecutor? In that case I should be handed over to a guard, placed in a cell and deprived of collar and tie, braces, pocket knife and shoelaces. And in a few weeks’ time I should look just like the others.

  One of them was brought along now. At the top of the stairs they stopped and the guard clapped his hands and listened. I had seen them do that before without result, but this time an answering clap came from below, whereupon the guard ordered:

  “Face to the wall.”

  The prisoner turned to the wall and the two of them waited. A moment or so later another guard came up the stairs with his prisoner, a giant of a man in the uniform of a Red Army officer. It was impossible to tell his rank because all indications had been removed from his uniform. His tread was still firm, his face was still tanned from the sun and his hair had not been shaved off. Obviously he hadn’t been there long.

  When he and his guard had passed the other two continued their way down the stairs.

  Prisoners were apparently not allowed to see each other. But was I still free? I could walk down the stairs to the door, but the guard would never let me leave without Polevedsky’s signature. I still held the so-called propusk in my hand and I looked at it closely. I could sign it myself. After all, hundreds of people went, in and out every hour. The guard was a peasant. It was unlikely that he knew the signatures of all the many officials who had the right to sign such pro-parks. He would probably let me through with the rest. But perhaps a stamp was necessary as well as a signature? In any case, I could try. What had I to lose?