The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “I don’t know what you could do.”

  “Have you made any plans? Do you want to stay with us?”

  “No, after what’s happened I couldn’t go on working here. I want to go, but I don’t want to flee. I want to go abroad after formally communicating with the Party and the Comintern—to Spain perhaps. But I’m afraid it’s out of the question. I shall probably be arrested tomorrow.”

  “But in the meantime I shall have to report the matter.”

  For a moment or two we both remained silent and I thought the matter over.

  “Very well,” I said finally, “if you must, you must, but wait till tomorrow. When I get back I’ll write a letter to the G.P.U. and tell them I just couldn’t keep my own counsel any longer and that I came to you and told you everything.”

  “That would be the best thing to do, I think.”

  He got up and went over to the window. Then he turned back to me.

  “Listen, Alex, I’ll see if there is anything I can do in the matter. I’ll speak about it to Maso. He’s a decent fellow.”

  Maso was head of the G.P.U. in Kharkov. In other words, with the progressive transfer of control from the Party to the G.P.U. he was the most powerful man in the area. Polevedsky was his subordinate and probably shook in his shoes at the thought of him. Maso alone was the final arbiter of my fate. Leipunsky was a member of the Kharkov Party Committee and the Director of one of the most important scientific institutes in the country. He was also a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Science and stood in high repute as one of the few leading scientists who were also members of the Party. In addition there was his own extraordinarily engaging personality, which made it possible for him to get things done which would have been impossible for anyone else. I began to hope again.

  “When will you speak to Maso?”

  “It depends on when he can find time to see me. I’ll get in touch with him today. But there’s one thing, Alex: I shan’t be able to tell you whatever it is he says to me.”

  “Supposing they arrest me tomorrow?”

  Leipunsky put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It will be difficult, Alex, but then you’ll have to show you’re a good Communist even in prison. Sometimes you have to stand up to the enemy and sometimes to your own people.”

  We shook hands and I felt an inclination to embrace him, but I contented myself with an extra-firm pressure of the hand.

  The discussion with Leipunsky had given me new courage. I went home and wrote the letter to Polevedsky at once. Then I ordered the car and drove to the building site, where I found everyone in great excitement. The arrival of an Inspection Commission from the Commissariat for Heavy Industry had been announced for the following day. Although I had handed over to Komarov I was primarily responsible for the plans, the building operations and the assembling, and when I told him that I could not be present he was in despair. I decided to ring up Polevedsky and ask him to postpone my next interview. I asked Komarov to leave the room while I made a telephone call. He looked at me in astonishment for a moment, but then left wordlessly. He had already noticed that something was wrong, and as an experienced Soviet citizen he had no doubt come to his own conclusions.

  I got in touch with Polevedsky at once.

  “Citizen Polevedsky,” I began, “an Inspection Commission is coming to our research station tomorrow and it would create disagreeable notice if I were not there. Do you think that in the circumstances you could postpone my appointment?”

  “Hang on a moment,” he replied. After a moment or two he was back again. “Very well, come on Monday at ten o’clock in the morning. Yes, it’s important that no one should notice our relations.”

  I put down the receiver with a sigh of relief. Until Monday—three more full days! But I was a trifle disturbed by his remark about the importance of secrecy. I was in no mood for working and I went straight home. Lena was pleased to see me so obviously in a better mood. I hoped again, and I was once again able to concentrate. Marcel came home and we had lunch together.

  “What’s happened, Alex?” he asked. “Is everything in order again? I know how quickly you react to either good or bad things. Come on: out with it.”

  “There are some grounds for hope, I think. I’ll tell you all about it this evening. But you must really keep your own counsel if I do.”

  That observation was unnecessary. It would have been difficult to find a more discreet person than Marcel.

  I made myself comfortable with a book and I succeeded in driving the whole affair out of my mind. I fell asleep and when I woke up it was evening. I immediately remembered my talk with Leipunsky. All my hopes were now based on his intervention with Maso. Perhaps it would take place tomorrow, in which case Polevedsky would have received new instructions by the time I saw him again on Monday.

  I went over to Houtermanns. Martin Ruhemann was with him and they were listening to the radio. For a week I had only glanced at the papers. The long-expected trial of Piatakov, Radek, Muralov and the others had begun, but I was unable to read the reports; they made me feel physically ill, but now I had to listen to the radio.

  We heard the confessions of the accused and looked at each other. Only a year ago Houtermanns, Ruhemann and I had discussed things openly, but the time for that had already passed. No one dared speak freely any longer even among friends, but we knew that we were all thinking the same thing. No one dared say it out loud. I no longer believed a word of it all. During the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates I had hesitated. They were accused of having organized a terrorist plot against Stalin and the leaders of the Party. That accusation was not altogether fantastic. Stalin had destroyed the last vestiges of democracy both in the Party and in the state. He had carried out a policy in the rural areas which had cost the lives of millions of peasants during the famine years 1932 and 1933. He had subjected the Party and the whole country to a ruthless G.P.U. terror. He had imposed a leadership cult of obsequiousness and subservience which made decent people feel sick. It was therefore not at all impossible that groups might have planned to free the country from his dictatorship. It was impossible for me to decide whether the Zinoviev, Kamenev group had actually had so much courage, though I doubted it. Their general attitude and their repeated capitulations did not suggest such firmness of character. At the same time it was very strange that their first victim should have been not Stalin but a second-rate figure like Kirov, whose assassination represented no threat to the regime but rather a timely warning. They must have known that it would inevitably be followed by ruthless repression which would paralyze their work. Why had they killed Kirov when Stalin was their game? Further, Kirov had been assassinated on December 1, 1934, and it was almost two years before Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates were put on trial; and before that other groups had been accused in connection with the murder. For instance, at the beginning of 1935, one hundred and seventeen White Guardists had been executed for having allegedly organized the murder. The whole thing didn’t hang together at all. Still, I had hesitated. I was not certain one way or the other.

  That they confessed did not make us suspicious at first, but that they made no effort to explain their real motives was less understandable. After all, they were all old revolutionaries who had fought against Tsarism. It would therefore have been logical if they had used the trial to proclaim the objects of their struggle to the Party and to the working class of the whole world. As it was they obediently did whatever the prosecution wanted, admitted the charges against them, expressed penitence and made themselves contemptible in the eyes of the masses. It was all very suspicious, but it was what came later that opened my eyes: the arrest of the whole Old Guard of the revolution without a single exception, the physical destruction of all those who had worked together with Lenin. The subsequent trials opened up an abyss.

  The accused in Kemerovo had declared that Piatakov, Vice-Commissar for Heavy Industry and the real organizer of Soviet industrialization, had instructed t
hem to neglect the ventilation plant in the Kemerovo mines so that the miners should be asphyxiated and resentment against the Soviet Government aroused. I knew Piatakov. He was my indirect chief. After the collapse of the old opposition in 1927, in which he had played a role, he had been appointed to the Supreme Economic Council and had become Ordzhonnikidze’s deputy. He was a man of iron will and boundless energy and in the space of ten years he had organized the whole industrialization of the country. There was not an important works or factory in the country which he did not know personally, and not an important order was given which he had not first confirmed. I had always regarded this supercentralization as a bad thing, but if any man were able to control such a vast organization efficiently it was Piatakov. He never seemed to stop working, and at three o’clock in the morning he could still be found hard at it in his office. He drew up the plans for the development of Soviet industry, he administered the investment funds and he studied the new technical methods of German and U.S. industry. He supervised the execution of the production plans and he imported up-to-date machinery from Europe and America. You felt that all the superhuman energy of this man went completely into his work and that the creative satisfaction he experienced in its development compensated him fully for the exclusion from political life which his former membership of the opposition had cost him. The actual People’s Commissar, Gregori Konstantinovitch Ordzhonnikidze, occupied himself with the personnel; Piatakov occupied himself with the things. Ordzhonnikidze was loved, much as a good but stern father is loved. He often had vehement clashes with his engineers, his directors and even with workers, but everyone knew that beneath his gruff ways there was a warm heart. Piatakov, on the other hand, was feared and respected. He was the brain of the whole vast organization. And this was the man who was charged by the accused in the Kemerovo trial with having sent an engineer to a small mine in Central Siberia to sabotage the ventilation plant!

  Did Vishinsky really think that any reasonably intelligent human being could possibly believe such rubbish? Was that sort of thing calculated to bring down a government? Could anyone believe that a man of Piatakov’s caliber could be guilty of such fantastic stupidity? Piatakov was arrested in August, 1936, and at first his absence was explained by saying that he had gone on a tour of inspection in the Urals. The intriguers began to cock their ears. I was present at a conference of scientific workers under the chairmanship of Ordzhonnikidze. The director of a scientific institute somewhere, who had apparently already heard of Piatakov’s fall, attacked him violently, whereupon old Ordzhonnikidze arose and interrupted the speaker coldly:

  “It is very easy to attack a man who is not there to defend himself. Wait until Yuri Leonidovitch returns.”

  At that time Piatakov, already held incommunicado, had probably signed his fantastic confessions. But Ordzhonnikidze still rose to defend him publicly. The friend and fellow countryman of Stalin, the only man in the country who could still speak frankly and openly to him, was also the only one who would have dared to do that. A few months later, shortly after the trial of Piatakov, Ordzhonnikidze died—of heart failure, it was said. He certainly died at a very convenient moment for the dictator because it was generally believed that he was determined to take steps to curb the reckless savagery of the G.P.U. It was impossible to treat him as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Piatakov had been treated. He had always been a member of the dominant fraction in the Party and he had never been even remotely associated with the opposition. Later on a rumor gained currency that he had not died a natural death. However, in the atmosphere which prevailed in the Soviet Union in 1937 it was not possible to check up on such rumors. Ordzhonnikidze certainly suffered from heart trouble, and it may well have been that the excitements of the last few months before his death were too much for him.

  My mind went over all that as I sat in Houtermanns’ flat and listened to the radio. Vishinsky was delivering his closing speech. Muralov had confessed among other things that through Shestov he had recruited an adventurer named Arnold in Siberia to kill Molotov. This Arnold was a chauffeur, and he had decided to drive Molotov’s car over a precipice at a dangerous spot in the road. As his record showed, this Arnold was a common criminal. But now apparently he was willing to sacrifice his life and plunge over a precipice with Molotov in order to assist the cause of the opposition to victory. Vishinsky had better make up his mind what he proposes to make of this fellow Arnold, I thought—either a common criminal or a hero. And the fellow was supposed to have done it all at Muralov’s instructions. But Muralov could easily have gone to see Molotov in his office in Moscow and shot him down there and then. It would have been no more dangerous than entrusting his safety to the discretion of a common criminal. And the leader of this alleged conspiracy, Piatakov, often met Stalin in the course of his duties. There were no such strict security regulations in the Kremlin then, and Piatakov carried a revolver in his pocket quite legally. Thus if the conspirators had determined to put the dictator out of the way they could easily have found better and less dangerous opportunities for doing so than recruiting a chauffeur in far-off Siberia who was to await Molotov’s visit and then drive him over a precipice.

  “I’ve got a headache,” I said to Houtermanns, “do you mind if I switch off the radio?”

  They all agreed, and I am sure they were all very glad when I did.

  “What strikes one most forcibly about these conspirators is not so much their infamy as their stupidity,” observed Fritz Houtermanns. “This business with Arnold is enough to make your hair stand on end.”

  Ruhemann also joined in the discussion, and we talked in a guarded fashion for a while. We all spoke as though we were perfectly convinced of the truth of the indictment, but then in perhaps a casual observation we remarked upon the senselessness with which the conspirators had gone to work. It sounded as though we were anxious to point out that Piatakov, Muralov, and Radek were not only scoundrels but also fools. But anyone with a finer ear would have known that we were talking obliquely. The growing terror instituted by the G.P.U. in recent years had forced such a secret language on us. We had good cause to fear G.P.U. spies everywhere. People became afraid to talk openly even to their friends. People were horrified at the thought of straying too far away from the official line. The gulf between public opinion, which was being suppressed into social subconsciousness, and reality grew wider and wider. The dictatorship of the lie dominated the press, the school, the radio, the film, the factories, and the meetings of the Party. It had dominated even before the period of the big trials, but at least at that time no one had dreamed of asking people to believe such improbable and fantastic stories. The gulf between what one could believe and what one was supposed to believe widened enormously. The contradiction opened up in this way by the terrorism of the G.P.U. poisoned the relations between men. Men denounced their friends for fear of being denounced by them. A man no longer trusted his own brother, and he no longer spoke openly to his own wife. The small circle of foreigners in our Institute was a little better off—at least there were no informers among us. The G.P.U. had put pressure on our servants to get them to make copies of letters and documents. But we were not counterrevolutionaries and therefore there were no treasonable correspondence or documents for them to copy. When we talked to each other the servants were not present. In addition, we never spoke Russian to each other, and our servant girls understood nothing but Russian. Thus we could have expressed our real opinions without fear of being betrayed, but we were literally afraid of our own words. In this period any expression of opinion would be equivalent to adopting a political position in irreconcilable contradiction to the prevailing line of the Party and the dictator. To remain in the country and to know that one was on the other side of the borderline of legality was an intolerable situation for men who were not conspirators but scientists. On the other hand it was also difficult to hear and see everything going on around us and never to be able to relieve our feelings with an open word to a friend. It was th
is situation which forced us to adopt a sort of secret language. But even that was no solution in the long run because the G.P.U. began to decipher it, to work out its real meaning, and to accuse us of treasonable utterances. In fact, the G.P.U. men found it particularly easy to decipher our secret language because in their own hearts they thought just as we did.

  We talked for a long time. The general feeling was very depressed.

  I tried to make the best of a bad job.

  “It’s a good thing the trial is over at last,” I said. “Perhaps this is now the crest of the wave. Afterward we may all be able to breathe a little more freely.”

  “It doesn’t look much like it, Alex,” said Barbara Ruhemann.

  It had got late, and I went home.

  In the two days I grew very much calmer. I did my best not to think about my plight, and to relax both physically and mentally. On Saturday some friends came to visit us, and in the evening I went to the theater. On Sunday we went for a drive in the country. In the evening there was a concert in the club. Our Komsomol members sang folk songs and revolutionary songs. I was in a strange dilemma. The memory of the revolution still moved me deeply, and I still believed at that time that the only way to the socialist transformation of the world was through revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand, what was now taking place in the land of the proletarian dictatorship deeply depressed me, though I regarded it as a temporary aberration, a sort of paroxysm of the social organism, which would soon cease. The land, the factories, the mines, the banks and the railways were no longer in private hands. That for me was the fundamental fact of the situation. Sooner or later the whole superstructure of society must adapt itself to that economic basis. Once the new socialist economic system had begun to operate freely, once essential goods became readily available, once the people had not merely the existence minimum but a fair share of all the good things of life, freedom would once again return. Oppression would lose its point; there would be no excuse for the continued existence of an oppressive secret police. All we had to do was to wait and be of good heart. And with that feeling I went to bed.