The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  After Polevedsky had taken down these formal details he proceeded to record my biography once again. By now I knew it all by heart. When that was finished the first interrogation was over. Polevedsky rang for the guard.

  “Citizen Examiner, may I have books and newspapers?”

  “Write a formal request and I will submit it to my chief.”

  “I have neither pencil nor paper.”

  “You will receive them in prison.”

  On the way back my guard and I passed the spot where I had always waited after these interviews when I was still free. I remembered the giant officer who had passed me, and how I had wondered whether I should ever be in his position. That already seemed a long time ago. And yet it was only six weeks! With what anxiety I had waited for this first interrogation! And now I was just as wise as I had been before. When would they speak plainly at last? What had they arrested me for?

  When I finally went to bed my mind turned back to faraway things: the youth movement; the games of handball we used to play on the Ramberg; the Grundlsee and the Alps. I found myself longing for Western Europe again, for a life with both comfort and liberty and without political complications. At one time I had found such a life empty and unsatisfying. Seen in retrospect, it looked very much like a paradise lost. Pictures of landscapes I had not seen for years, and the faces of bygone friends surged up in my mind in a kaleidoscope over which I had no control. At last I went off to sleep.

  The next day was like all the others, except that I was more restless than ever. I found it difficult to carry out my daily program. In the afternoon the wicket opened.

  “Your name?”

  I whispered my name in the approved fashion.

  “Here are pencil and paper to make your application.”

  It was a very small piece of paper, and I wrote my request for books and newspapers on it, pointing out that I was in solitary confinement and had absolutely no means of occupying my time. The warder came back a little later and took away the pencil and my application.

  That evening I was called out again for interrogation.

  “Accused, do you plead guilty to having carried on counterrevolutionary work?”

  “May I know just what it is I am supposed to have done?”

  “If you don’t want to plead guilty just say so and don’t waste my time.”

  “Very well, I plead not guilty.”

  He wrote down my plea.

  “What do you know about Edek Herrmann?”

  If I had been asked to name a hundred people who I thought might in some way or other figure in my interrogation I should certainly never even have thought of Edek Herrmann. He was a Polish Communist whose acquaintance I had made quite casually at Vienna University as a fellow student. He was a fine-looking fellow, the typical revolutionary student from books about the Narodniki. Apart from that general impression I really didn’t know anything about him. I had met him once again quite casually in Kharkov. I explained the circumstances.

  “Through whom did you get to know Edek Herrmann?”

  “Through Karol Lang, I think.”

  I could tell him that only because I had a very good memory. I had met hundreds of people in the socialist youth movement. It is usually very difficult to remember years later when, where and how you got acquainted with someone, but in this case it all came back to me very clearly. After a fascist students’ demonstration I had met Karol on the steps of the university with Edek Herrmann, and Karol had introduced us.

  “Who is Karol Lang?” Polevedsky asked. “And when did you last see him?”

  I had been closely associated with Karol Lang. At the time I first met him he was nineteen. He had come from the Polish Party, and as a high-school student he had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for revolutionary activity. His father, a well-to-do lawyer, had managed to secure his release on very heavy bail. Karol had taken advantage of his remand to escape abroad. He was the prototype of a Marxist-Leninist and his strong character and great determination made a deep impression on us. We were all socialists, it was true, but we still had only very vague ideas about the development of the historical process. Karol subordinated his whole life to the laws of the Party and the exigencies of the revolutionary movement. Every phenomenon, even in the remotest spheres of science and art, he analyzed with the equipment of revolutionary Marxism. At the same time his thought was not rigid and pedantic, but vigorous and alive. We all knew that his whole personality was behind his theories, and that won him our respect and even our liking, although his way of life was very foreign to us. It was under his influence that I joined the Communist Party.

  “In Berlin in 1932,” I replied.

  “Do you know what has happened to him since?”

  “He went back to Poland for illegal work. One day he was sitting in a café with a well-known member of the Central Committee when he noticed a police spy who knew the man well. He could see the spy but the other man had his back to him. They were sitting near the window and Karol smashed it to let the member of the Central Committee escape. Karol was arrested.”

  “Have you heard anything of him since?”

  “He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. At first the police didn’t discover his identity because he had someone else’s papers, but after he had been in prison for two years they found out and then he was sentenced to a further three years. While he was in prison in Stanislavov he contracted an eye disease—I think it was T.B.—which nearly blinded him. Friends of his in Vienna wrote to me not so very long ago asking me to approach the Comintern to get him put on the exchange list so that he could come to the Soviet Union.”

  “Who asked you to do that?”

  “Lolek, one of Karol’s friends.”

  “Did you actually do anything in the matter?”

  “No, I couldn’t. First of all I had no connections with the Polish Party and second, owing to the arrest of my wife, any intervention on my part wouldn’t have helped him.”

  “What were your relations to Anna Yevseyevna Byelina and Yelizavyeta Markovna Frumkina?”

  These two women had been secretaries to Pudalov, Chairman of the Technical Commission of the Commissariat for Heavy Industry, and one of the backers of our low-temperature research station. Pudalov was one of the leading engineers in the Soviet Union and I think he was chief engineer of the Putilov Works in Petersburg even before the revolution. Ordzhonnikidze brought him into the People’s Commissariat, and all important projects were first presented to Pudalov for his opinion: the rebuilding of the Moscow motorcar factory “Stalin,” which cost a billion rubles, the introduction of a new process for the production of synthetic ammonia, measures to prevent industrial accidents, or the introduction of a new type of tractor. He was a man of the old school, solid, cautious and calculating. He had no personal ambitions and he was interested in nothing but the problems of industrialization. He was an approachable man, and he represented the shortest cut to the ear of Ordzhonnikidze. He was not a member of the Party and he was not interested in politics. In view of his great services to Soviet industrialization he was made a member of the Party by the Central Committee without having to go through the normal period as a candidate member. I last saw him in the autumn of 1936, i.e., after the trial of Zinoviev and his associates and in the early days of the Great Purge. Piatakov had already been arrested. I had been shocked at the change in Pudalov’s appearance. His face was ashen and he looked a very sick man. A few months later—I think it was actually during Piatakov’s trial—he was missing. He went to his office in the morning and did not return in the evening. They searched for him for two weeks and finally they found him hanged in a remote attic in the Commissariat building.

  Anna Yevseyevna Byelina was his private secretary. I first met her in his office in 1934 or 1935. She was a plump blonde of middle height with beautiful brown eyes and a pleasant manner. I flirted with her, I must confess, and she showed her appreciation of the compliment by giving my affairs priorit
y. Both she and her friend Yelizavyeta Markovna Frumkina, who was Pudalov’s translator, helped me considerably, making out statements and copying documents. I constantly had business in Moscow in connection with the building of our research station, and as I had no office there I was very grateful to them for their assistance.

  When my wife was arrested in the spring of 1936 I approached various highly placed persons on her behalf. My wife was very well liked and most of them gave me written declarations in her favor. Six months later, after the trial of Zinoviev, that would have been (Alt of the question; even the highest placed and most powerful had begun to fear for their own safety. These statements had to be copied and sent to the Prosecutor General, to the Military Prosecutor of the Leningrad district, to the G.P.U., and so on, and in Soviet law they all had to be authenticated before they were admissible as evidence. Any Soviet office could authenticate documents, but they were already refusing to do so for “enemies of the people.” It was in this situation that Anna Yevseyevna Byelina and her friend Yelizavyeta Markovna Frumkina came to my assistance. They both knew and liked my wife, and they authenticated the documents for me.

  I told the examiner as much of this as I thought necessary and he noted it down.

  “Did you ever hold anti-Soviet conversations with either of these women?”

  “Of course not. I’m not an enemy of the Soviet Union and therefore I don’t hold anti-Soviet conversations.”

  “Answer my questions with yes or no, and don’t indulge in argument.

  “What do you know about Gustav Wegerer, alias Schiller?”

  Gustav Wegerer had been a leading Austrian Communist. A worker himself, he had a turbulent career in the newly founded Communist Party after the war. In 1928 he was expelled from the Party as a right oppositionist, and he turned to technical and scientific studies. In a cellar of the Mining Academy at Leoben he found a laboratory in which he could work. By 1930, he claimed, he had found the exact conditions under which carbon can be crystallized. He had found a method for making synthetic diamonds.

  The I. G. Farben interests offered him $200,000 for his discovery and gave him a cash advance. But Wegerer was unable to repeat in the I. G. Farben research laboratories the experiment which he had twice done successfully, in Leoben and in Vienna. Finally, he offered his discovery to the Moscow Institute for Geology and Mineralogy. The idea had definite value for Soviet national defense, and the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry was generous in its support of the project. Wegerer and two colleagues, also expelled as oppositionists from the Party, were invited to Moscow and given a magnificently equipped laboratory. His research continued for a year. Then he carried out his fantastic experiment, and a week later left Russia to have a surgical operation in Austria.

  He stayed abroad for almost a year. In the meantime a scientific commission studied his work and found that what he had produced was not diamonds. It was corundum crystals, which have almost the same hardness as diamonds. The Institute was convinced that Wegerer was an impostor.

  To everyone’s surprise, he came back to Russia at the end of December, 1933. He was looking for his young wife, who had not written him from Moscow for some six months. Wegerer traveled from Vienna to Moscow by way of Kharkov. Here he visited me. I had business in Moscow at the same time, so we went on together. During the seventeen-hour trip he told me the whole fantastic story of his alleged discovery. But on his arrival in Moscow, he found equally extraordinary experiences waiting for him, and I was their unwilling witness.

  He could not get a hotel room so he stayed with me. This was why I became involved in his story. He was looking for Elli, his wife, and she had disappeared without a trace. He told me the story of their marriage. In Moscow, the beautiful, nineteen-year-old girl had had a love affair with the well-known Russian movie director, Kaufmann, and had had a child. In spite of this, Wegerer had taken back both the girl and her child.

  Two days after he reached Moscow, Wegerer learned the details of her disappearance. She had been drawn back to her affair with Kaufmann, but then had suffered a profound nervous breakdown. On a July day in 1933, she told her lover that she had killed her child that morning. Then she laughed. Kaufmann thought it was a joke. The child usually spent the hot summer days in the garden of friends who lived in the suburbs. Kaufmann rode there on his motorcycle to get the child, and discovered the incredible fact that Elli actually had hanged her child that morning in the woods. A laundress had been walking by the tree a few minutes later and had cut the body down. It was still alive. She took it to the police station, where Kaufmann found it. He hurried back to the house. But Elli was no longer there. On the table was a letter in which she begged forgiveness. She wrote him that he would never see her again. She had left the house in a summer dress, without any papers, without any money. Since then, she had never been seen again. Kaufmann reported it, and for two months the G.P.U. tried to find the girl who had vanished. The search was in vain.

  It was a deeply troubled Wegerer who told me this story. But even more exciting events lay ahead of him in the next few days. A commission from his Institute summoned him. It included a secret police official. It demanded an explanation of his alleged discovery, and it accused him of deliberate fraud.

  Two members of the commission, Professor Pertschík and Professor Petrovsky, asked me to help them. Since I had never been close to Wegerer and since the technical problem was not in my special field, I declined. But Professor Petrovsky, who was an old man and had been a Party member since the time of the 19.35 revolution, appealed to me as a Communist. This involved, he said, an important national interest. I should help to clear up all the complications of the case. My knowledge of the foreign world would be helpful. I gave in and agreed.

  For two long weeks, we struggled over the intricate facts. But we were not completely successful. The grounds for suspicion of Wegerer were very grave. A bill had been found from a firm in Vienna from which Wegerer had bought some diamonds a few years earlier. The G.P.U. produced letters from his vanished wife which accused him of having defrauded the Soviet Union. But it was not possible to establish beyond doubt whether he had once successfully completed an experiment which he then could not repeat, or whether he had deliberately organized a fraud.

  Nevertheless, I did succeed in throwing a little light into the dark mystery of his wife’s disappearance. I came to know Kaufmann, who made a very strong impression on me. Among the things which Elli had left behind her at his house I found a calendar in which she had kept a very fragmentary and primitive kind of diary. Four pages had been torn out of this little book. They covered the days between February 24 and 28, 1933. I then looked in her passport. These were precisely the days of her trip back to Moscow from Austria, where she had taken her sick husband for his operation. The control stamps showed that she had broken her trip in Poland and had apparently stayed in Warsaw for these four days. Later it was learned that she had become acquainted with an Italian diplomat on this trip. Further inquiries developed the fact that she had decided to travel with him to Capri. There was also found a telegram which she had sent to Capri. But I could never discover whether she had actually left the country, with the help of this Italian diplomat and unknown to the G.P.U., or had taken her own life after trying to kill her child.

  Polevedsky forced me to tell him this long and complicated story in all its details. I quickly noticed that he had no intention of connecting it in any suspicious way with the charges against me. He was simply interested personally in an absorbing story. He took hardly any notes on what I told him.

  The telling of the story filled two long evenings. Polevedsky listened intently and hardly ever interrupted me. In the course of these two evenings the mood between us changed. His aggressiveness disappeared. The story put him in such a good humor that he even allowed me to have a newspaper in my cell, though he had it taken away again the next day.

  I had been almost a month in prison, and I was none the wiser. However, my nerves
were very much calmer and I had no desire to force the pace. I still thought that sooner or later Polevedsky would close the investigation as inconclusive and release me or have me deported. I had quite made up my mind that I should soon be out of the Soviet Union and all my plans were based on that supposition.

  A few days later I was summoned to see Captain Azak. He welcomed me rather ironically.

  “So you’ve become our guest, Alexander Semyonovitch! How do you like it here?”

  “I could think of better places.”

  “Well, why don’t you choose one, Alexander Semyonovitch?”

  I made no answer.

  “You could, you know. It’s still not too late.”

  “I just can’t grasp what it is you want with me.”

  “I want you to see the situation as it is and tell us the truth. Realize you’re on the losing side and act accordingly. The sooner you do that the better it will be for you, because in the meantime your situation has grown very much worse. Now we have not only the reports of our own agents, but the statements of people who assisted you in your counterrevolutionary activity. They’ve been wiser than you; they’ve already capitulated, confessed their crimes and denounced the crimes of others, including yours. We can show you their signed statements and, if that isn’t enough, confront you with them. But I warn you, Alexander Semyonovitch, the longer you resist the worse it will be for you.”

  “There’s nothing for me to say, except that I shall welcome seeing both the statements and the people.”

  “You be a sensible fellow and use the few days left to you to think the matter over carefully. Is there anything you want?”