The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  When he was sixteen Ruhemann had gone to Germany with his parents. His wife Barbara was a Prussian, and the sort of stuff fanatics are made of. She was vehement in all her reactions, and her opinions were always formed and her decisions taken for some internal reasons which she never thought it necessary to check against her experience. She was a courageous woman and she devoted herself wholeheartedly to any cause she thought right, but she was just unable to judge objectively. During the conflict with Davidovitch at the Institute she stuck to me through thick and thin, but at the same time she was perfectly convinced that we were the real Stalinists, and not Davidovitch and his friends. For her they represented the obscurantist and backward “apparatus” which perverted the good intentions of the leader. I could never make her see that this apparatus she so despised had been deliberately created by Stalin, and that when Davidovitch tried to suppress the last vestiges of intellectual liberty and individual freedom in our Institute he was only carrying out the general Party line.

  From the time she embraced the cause of socialism as a young woman Barbara had believed fervently in Stalin. She was quite convinced that all evil in the Soviet Union—and she realized that there was quite a lot—was due to the wicked apparatus and not to Stalin’s deliberate policy. She used the word “apparatus” as though it had some life of its own and were a thing apart. It was difficult to understand how she managed to believe that in a country so politically centralized as the Soviet Union it was possible for an apparatus to carry out a policy independent of and opposed to the will of an all-powerful dictator.

  Now I needed Ruhemann’s assistance again, but for myself this time. I needed it to help me get away if I was going to be allowed to get away, and to help me get free if I were arrested after all. As a British subject Ruhemann had much more freedom of movement than the rest of us had. At the same time his position in the Institute itself was very strong. He was to be in charge of the new low-temperature research station, an entire scientific and technical combination with experimental stations, laboratories, workshops and so on. It was a cross between a scientific institute and a production center. In size it was bigger than any other scientific institute in the country. The Commissariat for Heavy Industry hoped that it would greatly assist in the development of the nitrogen industry and of other branches of the Soviet chemical industry. Without Ruhemann the scientific work could not begin at all.

  Fortunately, we were on very friendly terms. When I first met him he was an English liberal, and it was through me that he became a socialist. When he first came to the Soviet Union in 1932 the country was experiencing the worst year since the end of the civil war. At first he and his wife were always on the point of leaving. All they could see was chaos, poverty and hunger. In addition the promises made to them had not been kept, though this was due to sheer inability and not to malice. Barbara Ruhemann, who was expecting a baby at the time, was particularly indignant. She was used to order, and she found the slovenliness and indiscipline of the Slays almost more than she could stand. When I tried to persuade her to be a little more patient and to show a little understanding of the country’s difficulties she flared up at me.

  “I can very well understand that they are unable to do what we asked, but then why didn’t they say so at once? Why did they promise things they knew they couldn’t perform? They ought to have sufficient civic courage to say ‘no,’ but once they’ve said ‘yes’ then they should keep their word.”

  Conditions got steadily worse, and the famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. Throughout 1932 the relationship between the Institute and the Ruhemanns was constantly strained. I did my best to mediate, to take the edge off the bitterness, and to retain Ruhemann’s services. I had a high opinion of his capacities and I sought to make them realize the historical significance of something that looked just chaotic to them. In the end I succeeded.

  I don’t want to suggest for one moment that it was my influence alone which won them. Ruhemann was carried away by the force of the great work itself. He came from a well-to-do family and everything had gone easily for him from the beginning. When I first met him he was an assistant at the Stuttgart Institute of Physics. In due course he would have become an established lecturer and after that a professor, as his father had been before him. He would no doubt have written a number of valuable papers, and his work would more or less have satisfied him. He was personally a contented man without great ambitions, and the restlessness of the revolutionary was unknown to him. He had never thought much about the significance of social revolutions, but once in the Soviet Union he grasped what was really at stake and was swept up in a new and larger movement than he had ever known before. His horizon enlarged and he began to understand that we were all architects working on the plans for a new world, and that the history of our century would depend on our success or failure. It was a tremendous experience for him, and after that the idea of a return to his old comfortable jog-trot was out of the question.

  Martin Ruhemann lived in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1938. They were critical years. When he arrived the country was being shaken to its foundations by the enforced collectivization and the accompanying famine. By the time he left the agricultural crisis was over, but a far more serious crisis had taken its place: the Great Purge. In those six years, Ruhemann had ample opportunity to see the Soviet Union from all sides and in every aspect: on the one hand the self-sacrifice of the younger Soviet generation and their single-minded dedication to a great idea; and on the other poverty, hunger, oppression, injustice and the domination of the lie. When he finally left the country the he had won the day. Ideas of equality and fraternity had lost their force. A parasitic layer of bureaucrats oppressed and exploited the people, and a shameless leader cult compelled everyone to join in singing obsequious hymns of praise to a personal dictator. But all this did not shake Ruhemann’s conviction that the ideas of the Russian Revolution would finally be successful.

  He was in many respects a simple soul, sometimes almost naive. When, after my arrest, the G.P.U. brought up my case before the assembled members and employees of the Institute something quite unprecedented occurred. The representative of the G.P.U. got up and announced that Alexander Semyonovitch Weissberg had been found guilty of organizing attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders, of counterrevolutionary sabotage and of espionage for a foreign power. After that, in accordance with Soviet ritual in such matters, all the leading members of the Party and the union, and all my former colleagues solemnly arose one after the other and damned the enemy of the people who had once been their comrade. No one would have dared to cast any doubt on what the G.P.U. representative said—that would have been counter-revolution. In their hearts, of course, they all knew that it was untrue, but none of them had sufficient courage to say so and very few had courage enough even to keep their mouths shut. Then came Martin Ruhemann’s turn.

  “Personally I can’t believe that Weissberg was a counterrevolutionary,” he declared. “You all know me and I think you trust me. When I first came here the Soviet cause was not particularly dear to me, and if there was one man more than any other who won me over to it was Weissberg. He did his utmost to show me what was going on here and to make me understand its historical significance. Why should he have done that if he had been a counterrevolutionary all the time? He didn’t try to win me for the counter-revolution but for the cause of socialism.”

  The G.P.U. boiled with fury, and I noticed the echo during my interrogations.

  “You’ve got some fine friends,” the examiner said to me ironically one day. “That fellow thinks he can get away with it because he’s got a British passport. But he needn’t feel so safe; we’ve arrested Englishmen before now.”

  When the meeting was over the leading members of the Party cell pounced on poor Ruhemann and began to bully him. It went on for two days and in the end he was persuaded to publish a feeble declaration in our wall-newspaper in which he mildly criticized his attitude at the meeting. Without t
hat declaration it would have been impossible for him to continue his work at the Institute.

  The G.P.U. never forgave him. During the following year, as I heard, they extorted various compromising statements from prisoners about him. Sometimes he was an agent of the Intelligence Service and at others of the Gestapo; he was a saboteur, and so on. All these statements were collected in the dossiers of the G.P.U. in Kharkov, but they were never used. He was neither arrested nor deported, but when his contract came to an end the G.P.U. instructed the Institute not to extend it, so Ruhemann left the Soviet Union in the spring of 1938 and went to England, where, despite everything, he joined the Communist Party.

  Eleven years after these events I came to England and was delighted at the idea of seeing Ruhemann again. While I was in prison in Kharkov news from outside had come through to me from time to time, chiefly through newly arrested men, and I had learned how loyally he had stood by me. In London I met Arthur Koestler and when I told him I was looking forward to seeing Ruhemann he was furious.

  “What, you want to get into touch with Martin Ruhemann! You’re mad. He’s an out-and-out Stalinist.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “Is it? Very well, I’ll tell you something. When we hadn’t heard anything of you for two years, a few of us tried to do something about it. Albert Einstein wrote a letter on your behalf to Stalin, and so did Perrin, Joliot-Curie, and one or two others. We wanted Ruhemann’s signature because he had been more or less a witness to what had happened in 1937, so I went to see them. I noticed Barbara’s face harden at once when I told them what I had come for. ‘We’ll do nothing of the sort,’ she said. ‘Alex Weissberg was a counterrevolutionary.’ I was flabbergasted. ‘Perhaps I don’t know what you mean by a counterrevolutionary, Barbara,’ I said, ‘but do you think it’s decent to let Alex rot in a G.P.U. prison without making any attempt to help him?’ But she answered abruptly: ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with the business.’ I turned to Ruhemann: ‘What about you, Martin?’ He seemed a bit uncertain of himself, but he agreed with her: ‘Look, Arthur,’ he said, ‘perhaps I wouldn’t put it quite so sharply as Barbara has done, but in the matter itself I don’t think I can do anything.’ So much for Ruhemann. You can imagine how I reacted, Alex. I got up at once and slammed the door behind me.”

  It made me very depressed but I was still quite determined to see Ruhemann. I could quite imagine that Barbara, with her hysteria and her vehemence, had unduly influenced him. He was a gentle sort and by nature no fighter. I discovered he was working as a physicist at a big oil refinery in Manchester, and I decided to go and see him unannounced. One February evening in 1948 I knocked at his door. A woman opened it. It was not Barbara. I asked for Ruhemann and she told me that her husband was in. At that moment Martin himself came to the door and stared at me as though I were a ghost.

  “Alex,” he stuttered. “Alex. It’s you!”

  “Yes,” I answered cheerfully. “It’s me. Have I changed so much?” “No,” he said, “you look just the same as ever.”

  He led me through a room in which a very young baby was in a cot, to his study.

  We sat down and began to talk, but before I could tell him my story he suddenly looked hard at me and put a question which astonished me.

  “Alex,” he said, “tell me honestly—you can now—did you ever have an affair with Barbara?”

  “Good God, no,” I replied in astonishment. “Whatever makes you ask? Barbara and I were very good friends, but that was all.”

  “If that’s true, Alex, and I’m sure it is, the whole business is very strange.”

  “What whole business?” I asked.

  “You remember the night when you were arrested, practically in our flat. Afterward Barbara went into hysterics and she was ill for weeks, and even after that she was strange from time to time, and silent. One day she came home and I noticed that something had happened; somehow she was changed. She said nothing at the time, and I didn’t press her. A week later she suddenly said: Wow I realize that Alex really was a counterrevolutionary.’”

  Martin’s words recalled half-forgotten things to my mind. I remembered a talk with my examiner a few months after my arrest. He drew my attention to a statement made by Barbara Ruhemann which might in certain circumstances have been used against me.

  “She made that statement without any pressure from us,” he said. “If she said that then it must be true.”

  I can’t remember now just what it was Barbara had said, but Martin’s words helped me to understand the mental process which had led Barbara to her subsequent attitude toward me. Barbara came from East Prussia and her weakness was a certain mystical worship of power as such. Many German women of her type fell victim to Hitler’s demagogy. In her case it was Stalin. Apparently the G.P.U. got in touch with her some months after my arrest; perhaps they even showed her forged proofs of my guilt. In any case, the idea that I, who had lived in such close touch with her, should really have been a counterrevolutionary conspiring against the life of her beloved leader must have made a deep impression on her.

  I told Martin my story. He was deeply shaken but he found it difficult to draw any political conclusions from it. I could sense his mental distress.

  “Alex,” he said finally, “do you remember what you said to me the night when the G.P.U. was waiting for you down below and we said good-by?”

  “No, I can’t say I do.”

  “‘Despite everything, Martin, never forget that this country is the fatherland of the freed workers and peasants.’”

  “Martin, I don’t know now whether I was altogether honest when I said that then. And I don’t know whether at that time I had already realized clearly and definitely what had happened to the revolution. But since then eleven years have passed. Eleven years of tremendous happenings in which the monstrous lie has lost its mask. If you are still fighting under the old flag then you are fighting for the oppression of the people and not for its freedom. Do you really believe that the accused in the big trials, the entire Old Guard of Bolshevism, were a band of spies and counterrevolutionaries?”

  “I did at the time,” he replied. “It was a terrible struggle which tore the country in two. They had to be ruthless if they wanted to win through.”

  “Martin, those men were as innocent as you and I are. If you don’t believe I was a German spy how can you believe that old revolutionaries like Piatakov, Muralov and Bukharin were?”

  “Alex, I find the whole problem extraordinarily difficult. What am I to do? I can’t bring myself to believe that all my conscious political life, the whole movement into which you brought me, was an error. There are two camps in the world today, the Soviet Union and the United States. Am I to side with the American imperialists?”

  I did my best to make him see the real situation, but in vain. He had invested too much moral capital in the Communist movement to abandon it now. We went our ways amiably enough, but we were both depressed.

  I have described Ruhemann at greater length than I originally intended to do because I know him to be an honest and upright man serving the cause of an evil thing in the belief that he is serving the cause of human progress. There are many like him among those Englishmen who still sympathize with the cause of Communism.

  But to return to 1937. I decided to take as many people into my confidence as I considered necessary, and I felt no moral qualms about it, though I feared that any indiscretion might perhaps provoke the G.P.U. to arrest me prematurely. I therefore limited the circle of those who knew to Leipunsky, Marcel, and Martin Ruhemann, and, through Ruhemann, my brother-in-law, who, I hoped, would intervene on my behalf if they really did arrest me.

  Martin Ruhemann received my confidences quite calmly, almost as though he had seen it all coming, but Barbara was deeply shaken. From that moment on she went out of her way to stress her friendship for me. She was quite convinced that the whole thing was a vengeful intrigue on the part of Davidovitch or one of his supporters, and s
he urged me to stay on and fight the thing out, reminding me of the many difficulties we had surmounted in 1935 by fighting tooth and nail.

  “Barbara,” I said dejectedly, “you’re wrong, I’m afraid. It’s not a personal intrigue at all. They just don’t want people like me here anymore “

  “But, Alex, how can you talk like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, giving up everything just because a few blackguards have denounced you to the G.P.U.”

  “No, Barbara, it’s not just a few blackguards. There’s more to it than that. It’s part of a whole wave of unrest and distrust. I can’t pretend to understand the political sense of it all. I had hoped that once the difficult years were past things would settle down and we should be able to work in peace again. But I was wrong. I puzzle over the whole affair day and night, wondering just why it has come about this way and whether it was inevitable. This business with the G.P.U. isn’t the result of some casual malicious denunciation. For me it’s a warning. The time has come to get out. There’s nothing more I can do here.”