“I have asked for books.”
“You shall have them. Do you read Russian?”
“Of course, but I should like one or two of my own books.”
“Your examiner will attend to that, and now I hope you’ll use the chance you still have like an intelligent man.”
He pressed a button and I was taken away.
I hadn’t felt so good for a long time: I was to get books! Polevedsky no longer spoke to me as though I were an enemy. I became more and more convinced that I should be freed before long. No doubt they had to carry the examination through to an end, but as I was not a counterrevolutionary, finally they would have to release me. But why had they arrested me at all? They still hadn’t told me what concrete charges there were against me. They hadn’t even indicated any suspicious circumstances. It was all very peculiar. However, it was up to them to make the charges. In the meantime I looked forward to the prospect of getting books again.
Two days later I was called to the examiner’s office to receive my books. There were six of them, and Lena had been asked to pick them out from among my other books. I can only remember two of them now; one was Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and the other was a Russian book for young people about inventions. This latter book was an excellent example of its kind; indeed, the Soviet didactic works were usually very well done, and the countries of Western Europe might well have taken them as an example, at least where natural science was concerned. During the many months that followed I must have read and reread Stendhal at least a dozen times. Soon I knew it by heart. But still I read it—there was nothing else to read.
In the two weeks that followed, Polevedsky’s tone gradually became sharper again, but my general treatment remained humane. Solitary confinement had lost its terrors; I had learned to master it. The six books I had been given, the two or three newspapers I was allowed and the interrogations themselves were enough to occupy my mind. At the beginning of April I was put into a different and much smaller cell on the floor below. It was on the other side of the corridor and it had only one window, which gave on to a small inner yard. Unfortunately, it was next to the lavatory and I was much irritated by swarms of flies. I lodged a formal complaint, mentioning the flies in particular. When I look back now, I have to laugh. Those were idyllic days. I was even allowed to lie down on the bed during the day, though I was not allowed to go to sleep. I had got hold of a small piece of wood which I used as a sort of stylus to scratch calculations on the wall. The position of my recumbent body prevented the warder from noticing anything if he looked in. I occupied myself with such problems as why the prime numbers don’t stop, and other such theoretical matters. Despite the prohibition I slept a good deal during the day and none of the warders bothered me. Normally I don’t sleep easily and I don’t need a great deal of sleep: five or six hours a night is quite enough for me, but very often I didn’t get them because I can sleep only in very favorable circumstances. But I learned the art of sleeping in that little cell, and I slept more there than I have ever slept before or since.
There were two trees in the courtyard. One of them was obviously dead but scores of birds had made their nests in it while for some reason the leafy tree was neglected. The courtyard was narrow. When the first morning sun touched the top of the dead tree and the yard was still in the shade, one bird would start up and a host of others would join in. The noise they made with their chattering was incredible and it woke me at once. This time my window looked toward the south, and when I woke up I saw the first rays of the sun lighting up the top of the tree and that consoled me to some extent for the coming day.
Suddenly the receipt of parcels was forbidden and a new arrangement was introduced by which a prisoner could have fifty rubles paid in to his account every month, and with this sum he was allowed to buy from the prison canteen, or lavochka. Every fortnight—later on it was once a month—a warder would come round and take orders for the canteen. I used to order sweets. The warder was quite indignant at my frivolity.
“You’d do much better to spend your money on bread and bacon,” he assured me.
But I wasn’t hungry. Lena had fed me well, and I needed the sweets because I was unable to smoke. A few months later when food grew short I appreciated his point of view.
It was at this time that I learned of Marcel’s arrest. I can’t remember now whether I heard it direct from the examiner or through some error on the part of the prison administration. Such “errors” happened from time to time, but they were quite deliberate and there was always some reason for them, but I didn’t know this until much later. When the wave of mass arrests filled the prisons our isolation was broken down to some extent, and on a number of occasions I met people who were able to give me news of my friends. But these cases were real accidents.
My examination was broken off for a week. After that Polevedsky questioned me for several evenings about my relations with various Soviet officials in Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov, and about my life before I came to the Soviet Union. Apparently they had studied my correspondence in the meantime and were anxious to clear up one or two points. I had not yet seen through their methods. I still thought they were anxious to establish the truth, whatever it might be. And in this Polevedsky era that was true to some extent, though not entirely. The G.P.U. were not fools enough to suppose that a man who really had been doing conspiratorial work would obligingly leave traces of it in his letters. All they were after was something which could be made to look suspicious. When a man gave way under the intolerable pressure—it was only months later that I learned just how intolerable it could be—he had to invent his guilt. The guilt edifice was a fantasy, but its bricks were real things and real happenings made to look suspicious. There was no real guilt, but the G.P.U. wanted guilty men. In general they provided no details of the desired confession and left them to the imagination of the accused. The constant interrogations, in so far as they dealt with real happenings in the life of the accused, were intended solely to produce the bricks for the subsequent guilt edifice. Sometimes the G.P.U. would draw attention to the bricks and sometimes the accused would produce them himself. The G.P.U. probably thought the edifice would look more convincing if the accused built it himself. In so far as the accused offered no conscious resistance—and very few did—the G.P.U. was right. A prisoner who capitulated could erect a fantastic guilt edifice which was much more convincing than anything the G.P.U. could have produced because he used real experiences and respected the laws of logic and chronology.
In addition, it saved a lot of time. Each prisoner had to erect only one guilt edifice, but the examiner would have had to erect scores during the course of a year. Real people and real happenings took their fantastic places in these stories of guilt. The G.P.U. could never have invented anything so logical and with the same prima-facie credibility. If the examiners had had to do the job themselves they would have made mistakes which might subsequently have been exposed. The G.P.U. did in fact make mistakes, even in connection with the show trials: for instance, the “Hotel Bristol” blunder. Trotsky was alleged to have met Golzmann in this hotel in Copenhagen in 1932, and to have given him instructions for attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. Unfortunately for the G.P.U., the Hotel Bristol had been pulled down in 1917 and never rebuilt. The source of the blunder was obvious. Golzmann had had no intention of tricking the G.P.U. He had been told to confess that he had met the arch-traitor Trotsky in Copenhagen and received instructions from him. Under the usual pressure Golzmann had agreed. As he had never met Trotsky for such a purpose he had to invent when, where and under what circumstances.
Now if the G.P.U. had done the job themselves their inadequate knowledge of the life of the accused might have caused them to bungle it; place, time or circumstances might be wrong, and at some future date the accused might be able to put forward an unimpeachable alibi. It was therefore much better to let the accused do it himself. The big Moscow show trials were matters of the utmost importance to the
dictator, and a tremendous apparatus was mobilized and a vast amount of work was done in order to make quite certain that every falsehood could stand careful examination. Nevertheless three mistakes were made which shattered the whole edifice of lies.
How was it that the accused Golzmann, in his fictitious story of how he had met Trotsky to receive instructions, had chosen a hotel which had been pulled down twenty years earlier and never rebuilt? Golzmann had broken down completely under the torture, and was prepared to say anything required of him. He had certainly had no intention of discrediting the trial. He had only one object: to end the torture of the examination. He was told to name the time and the place of his meeting with Trotsky, who was known to have been in Copenhagen for a few weeks. Copenhagen was therefore obviously the town. But why did he choose the Hotel Bristol? Perhaps because twenty years before he had stayed in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol and it was the only hotel he knew there. But now one of those strange chances that often upset the lie, but can never upset the truth, entered into the game. Hotels can usually be relied upon to carry on business in the same old spot even twenty years later, though perhaps the management may have changed. But it so happened that this particular hotel was pulled down in 1917.
If such slips occurred in big trials under the control of the G.P.U. leaders, the Prosecutor General and the Politburo, and in full view of world public opinion, how many more would have occurred in the guilt edifices erected by the eight to ten million minor accused! In Holzmann’s case the usually highly efficient technique of the G.P.U. failed by a million-to-one chance, but in millions of other cases the G.P.U. technique did obviate gross errors in logic and chronology in the confessions of the accused.
My examination was interrupted again for a while. When it was resumed they began to bring forward concrete charges for the first time. One afternoon I was called up for interrogation.
“Accused Weissberg,” began the examiner solemnly, “here is proof of your guilt. Up to the present you have been lying shamelessly. Now is your last chance to confess before I prove you guilty by documents. If you do you may reasonably expect to be pardoned.”
“But I have nothing to confess.”
“So you’re going to wait till you’re cornered? Very well. Do you know a certain Rudolf Anders?”
“Yes, very well.”
“What exactly were your relations with this diversionary agent?”
Rudolf Anders a diversionary agent! I was speechless. His real name was Ervin Kohn, and he had worked in the German Party as an economist. In 1929, I think it was, he went to the Soviet Union, where he worked first of all in the World Trade Institute. Ordzhonnikidze then took him into the Commissariat for Heavy Industry, and when a clean sweep was made of the old management of the Makeyevka foundry works he was placed in charge of construction work under the new director, Ordzhonnikidize’s nephew Gvacharia. Forty thousand workers were engaged on the reconstruction of the works, and when it was complete Makeyevka was to be the second biggest foundry complex in Europe.
I once visited him there. He took me on a tour of inspection through the works at night. We stood near the blast furnaces and waited for the metal to be run off. The glowing stream of ore lit up the faces of the two men standing beside me. Anders was a tall, slim fellow with a lean face and rather Jewish features. He looked a typical denizen of the Vienna and Prague cafés. The other man was a giant with a round Tartar skull and powerful shoulders, dressed in blue overalls. He and his son had recently been awarded the Order of Lenin and received in the Kremlin by Stalin together with other Stakhanovite workers of the metallurgical industry. This man spoke Yiddish to his son. He was a Jew from the Kiev district. How the revolution refashions people, I remember having thought.
We went on and Anders explained the lay-out of the works to me.
It had been built on various levels. I inquired about the traffic in the works and about the flow of the materials. Then we went near by to a site where new construction was in progress. Some of the work, and a series of large gasometers, was already completed. Anders spoke of it all with great pride. He was the manager-Communist type. He was interested in construction for the sake of construction. He had no relation at all to the men and women who slaved and half-starved here in the hope of a better future. The ultimate aim of the building up of socialism—to give bread, liberty and the joy of life to the great masses of the people everywhere—was a matter of the far distant future for him. He just wanted to build, to build well and to build economically. He wanted to show the Party and the Soviet Government what he could do. It was no question of material reward; a man of his capacity could have done very much better for himself in the capitalist world. But he was ambitious; he wanted to be connected with something really big and lasting, something that would owe something to him. Gvacharia, one of the finest industrial organizers in the Soviet Union and the creator of the Stakhanovist movement, valued Anders highly.
However, at the beginning of 1936 the two fell out, and Anders was transferred to a new job: the reconstruction of the Zaporozhye steel works. He still worked with the same energy and devotion, but by that time foreign Communists were gradually coming under suspicion. Despite his loyalty, Anders felt they would never overlook the fact that he was a foreigner. He had become a second-class citizen in the fatherland of the workers and peasants, and he suffered deeply in consequence.
In the summer of 1936 his car collided with a works locomotive and he was seriously injured. He was away for about a year, and in the meantime intrigues began against him, and he was denounced as a Trotskyist. Usually such charges were a preliminary to arrest or at least to expulsion from the Party. The new Director cut down his sick pay and he fell on hard times, particularly as he had not long been married and had a small child.
Whatever judgment might be passed on an ambitious technician of his sort, one thing was beyond all question: he and his type were of immeasurable value to the Soviet Union. And now my examiner was suggesting that all the time the man had really been engaged in destruction rather than construction. For anyone who knew Anders the charge was ridiculous.
“I don’t believe he was a diversionary agent. Anders was devoted to his work. It almost cost him his life.”
“That was all camouflage. In reality Anders was the head of a very dangerous sabotage group in the metallurgical industry. He engineered a catastrophe in the Zaporozhye steel works which did a tremendous amount of damage and cost many lives. He has confessed.”
“Confessed! But how is that possible? Before he met with his accident there was no catastrophe in Zaporozhye, and after it he lay in bed helpless.”
“A man can direct a sabotage group from his bed.”
I didn’t believe a word of it but there was nothing I could say. I had a right to defend myself but I had no right to take up the cudgels on behalf of Anders and to cast doubt on what the G.P.U. said. That would have been counterrevolutionary agitation per se. And Anders probably had “confessed.”
My examiner thumbed through his documents for a while. Then he looked up and said deliberately:
“The Trotskyist diversionary agent Anders is now in prison in Dniepropetrovsk. He has capitulated and confessed his crimes. At the same time he has made highly interesting statements about you and your political attitude and about your sabotage work in the Soviet Union. I am going to Dniepropetrovsk to question him personally, and then God help you.”
“I have never done more than discuss technical and economic questions with Anders. He was a highly experienced man, and I was a newcomer without experience. His advice was of great assistance to me. All we spoke about was how the work could be improved, and so on. If you call that ‘counter-revolution’ then, of course, we were counterrevolutionaries.”
“How dare you talk to me like that, you Trotskyist bandit, you. I’ll give you three days in the punishment cell; perhaps then you’ll learn manners.”
“I had no intention of insulting you, Citizen Examiner. I was mer
ely defending my honor and reputation against unfounded charges.”
But the Citizen Examiner was not to be mollified, and he became more and more vehement and abusive.
“Go and—your grandmother, you fascist dog,” he bawled. “How much longer do you think you can go on playing this game with us? Confess at once. Who recruited you?”
I made no reply.
“Do you think you can lead us by the nose much longer? We’ve got you where we want you, I tell you. Who sent you here?”
I still remained silent and he sprang up and almost danced with rage.
“Who did your dirty work for you here?” he demanded. “What instructions did the Trotskyist agent Platschek bring you from abroad?”
So Platschek was a Trotskyist agent, tool I still said nothing. There was nothing to say. He calmed down after a while and went on:
“Accused Weissberg, if you continue to refuse to answer questions you will be guilty of an anti-Soviet action right here in the office of the examiner. You would have to pay for that dearly. We have very effective ways and means of dealing with people who sabotage our inquiries.”
“Citizen Examiner, I have not the slightest intention of sabotaging your inquiries; on the contrary, I want to facilitate them. But you aren’t putting any definite questions to me to which I could give you definite replies.”
“I have asked you what counterrevolutionary instructions were given to you by the agents of international Trotskyism. Did Platschek bring you the program of their new espionage organization, the Fourth International?”
“As far as I know Platschek has nothing whatever to do with the Fourth International.”
“How much longer are you going to say that black’s white? How much longer are you going to lie to us in this shameless fashion? Do you want to deny the obvious facts recognized by everyone? Platschek insolently supported the Fourth International in the Institute. Do you dare deny that? We have four witnesses.”
The Accused Page 16