“I cannot swear to every word, because the talk took place over two years ago,” I said, “but the second talk Komarov mentions is much more recent and took place after the trial of Zinoviev, that is to say, hardly six months ago, and I remember that very well.” “Let us have that conversation word for word then, Accused.”
“I said: ‘It is hardly credible how low these Trotskyists have fallen. Formerly they, too, were Marxists and opposed individual terrorism, and now they themselves organize attempts on the lives of Party leaders.’ Thus my words were a condemnation of the terrorists and not a criticism of the trial.”
“Witness Komarov, do you confirm your signed statement?”
“I do,” said Komarov miserably.
“I don’t understand how you can say such things, Petya,” I said reproachfully. “You know they aren’t true.”
He turned his eyes away and looked out of the window.
“Accused Weissberg, attempts to influence witnesses will not help you. We have a great deal of material concerning your counterrevolutionary agitation.”
“Tell the truth, Petya. Try to remember exactly what I said. After all, it’s not so very long ago.”
I did my best to reconstruct all the details of our discussion and the circumstances under which it had taken place. My own words I repeated literally. What he had answered I left open. Although our discussion had certainly had no open counterrevolutionary character, there were nevertheless one or two formulations that a Party man like Komarov should not have used. I tried my utmost to move him, but either he could not or would not go back on what he now said.
“Weissberg said what is written down in the deposition,” he insisted dully. “The sense of his words was quite clear.”
“That will do,” said Polevedsky. “Please sign this deposition, Citizen Komarov.”
“You are signing your own judgment, Petya,” I said. “You’re walking with open eyes into your own misfortune.”
“Silence, Accused Weissberg. The confrontation is at an end.” Komarov and I signed and I was taken away.
Two months later Komarov was arrested. The examiners had an easy task with him. He had already admitted that he had conducted counterrevolutionary discussions with an enemy of the people and not reported them to the G.P.U. That was quite enough, but the charges finally made against him were not confined to this incident.
Back in my cell, I thought the thing over. Komarov was an intelligent man. He was of proletarian extraction but he looked more like a student of the Narodniki days. He was not without political experience and yet when the test came he failed miserably. That he had kept at a distance from me after my arrest and even denounced me at meetings of the Party cell and of the Institute employees was quite in order and I bore him no grudge for that. Komarov had only done what everyone had to do. Had he not done so he would have been arrested at once. But what had made him sign a statement distorting my words and making them appear hostile to the Party? In doing so he had certainly obliged the G.P.U. but at the same time he had compromised himself. If what he said were true then it was his duty to report me at once to the G.P.U., and this he had failed to do. No, the man was not a secret agent of the G.P.U. He really had been a sincere friend. So what had happened to him in the meantime? Perhaps the G.P.U. had summoned him to a secret interrogation and told him, “We need material against Weissberg. You can give it and go home; refuse and you stay here.” If Komarov had signed under those circumstances he had purchased only a very temporary freedom. He had put the noose round his own neck.
What sort of material had they still got up their sleeve? And how much was the material they had produced so far really worth? The confrontation with Gerf had produced nothing. Gerf had really behaved very decently. He had always been so cautious, so bureaucratic, so hundred-per-cent Stalinist that it surprised me. My chauffeur Grisha had invented a cock-and-bull story about a secret airfield, but it would be difficult to twist the fact that two women had walked into a field to pick wild flowers and been turned back for some reason or other by a sentry into anything treasonable before any normal court. But would the court be normal?
No, Komarov was the only one who had really given them anything. But how much had he really given them after all? I was supposed to have said that Trotskyists were Marxists and therefore not terrorists. But in the mouth of a foreigner could that really be construed as counterrevolutionary agitation? According to the Constitution of the Soviet Union there was freedom of opinion, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. The fact that I was—or had been—a member of the Party was juridically irrelevant. At the public trial of a foreigner they would have to show some regard for the basic principles of international jurisprudence. It would be quite impossible to convict him of treason merely because his views on Trotskyists were unorthodox. Such a foreigner could be expelled from the Party and deported from the Soviet Union, but he could not be indicted for high treason on evidence like that.
In addition I had never even said what Komarov now insisted that I had said. The words I had actually used were irreproachable in Russian Party practice, though, of course, they contained a sense that did not appear on the surface. Komarov knew that perfectly well when I spoke them. He knew that they were a vent to give relief to my feelings by exchanging a guarded word or two with a friendly soul who understood perfectly well what I meant and agreed with me.
It was the way friends were talking to each other everywhere—even husbands to their wives, and fathers and mothers to their children. It was a sort of secret language which had grown up as a matter of necessity. No matter what the press and the radio said, the Russian people did not believe that the entire surviving Old Guard of Bolshevism, the heroes of the revolution and the civil war, were in reality a band of venal criminals, saboteurs and foreign spies. They wanted to express their feelings somehow and to someone, but because an open word would have cost them their freedom and perhaps their lives they used guarded phrases which nevertheless expressed their real feelings because their hearers understood.
If the G.P.U. were now, through Komarov and through the pressure of the examination, to succeed in making me admit my real meaning then it would prove to be very little different from what Komarov now insisted that I had actually said.
If it had been a question of a normal judicial examination followed by a trial before a court which showed even the slightest respect for the laws of the land and the constitutional rights of freedom of opinion and freedom of speech, then it would have been the best thing for me to say openly:
“Now although I did not in fact say what Komarov insists that I said, I certainly meant it. And what is more, I am quite certain that the overwhelming majority of the Russian people do not believe a word of what you print in your newspapers. For us the Trotskyists, Bukharinists, Zinovievists and all the rest of them are just opposition elements in the general flow of the working-class movement. For us they are not, and never were, groups doing the dirty work of German fascism and Japanese imperialism. For me Muralov is a hero of the revolution and the civil war, and not an agent of the Gestapo. For me Piatakov is the great organizer of Soviet industrialization and not a cowardly murderer sabotaging the ventilating apparatus of the Kemerovo mines to choke a few unfortunate miners. For me Trotsky is the leader of the insurrection in Petro-grad and the creator of the Red Army, and not a traitor in league with Rudolf Hess to play the Ukraine into German hands and the Amur district into Japanese hands. These people may have had divergent ideas, but everyone knows that they were revolutionaries. After all, it is impossible that in a revolutionary party numbering millions of people all over the world all members should think alike over everything. The uniform policy, the joint opinion, must be worked out in lively discussions between the various opposing groups. If you demand that such agreement should exist from the very beginning then that is to turn the Party into either a military organization or a despotic oligarchy. In that case the creative forces of revolutionary democracy wil
l be hamstrung and a negative process of selection will operate in which the worst elements, the yes-men, the flatterers, the crawlers and the brutal and unscrupulous careerists, will get to the top in the economic system and in the general life of the country. In this way a stratum of privileged parasites living on the backs of the workers will be created.”
That is the way a revolutionary would have spoken. But would the G.P.U. ever allow a man like that to come before an open court? Never! Such a man would have shown his real mettle even during the preliminary interrogations. But should he have succeeded in hiding it until he found himself in open court, then that would mean that he had first obediently signed all the examination depositions and thereby hopelessly discredited himself. The judge could then dispose of his testimony merely by comparing it with all the statements he had signed while awaiting trial. On the other hand, a hero who defied the G.P.U. during the preliminary examination would be disposed of by a secret death sentence and his sacrifice would have no demonstrative significance whatever.
Tsarism had given revolutionaries an opportunity of turning the court into a demonstration and denouncing oppression, but Stalin’s dictatorship sealed off every avenue of approach to the masses.
And then, I thought, I am not a fighter for liberty in the Soviet Union. I no longer believe that the Stalinist dictatorship can be changed from within.
“Organizations do not dissolve themselves when they no longer have any historical raison d’être; they have to be destroyed.”
A twenty-year-old revolutionary, Kolya R—, had said that to me some years before in a discussion on the Red Square under the frowning towers of the Kremlin. At that time I still believed in the possibility that the dictatorship would gradually disappear and that freedom would return. Young Kolya had been wiser.
No, that was not the way for me. My own attitude was already clear. My thoughts were not on trial. There was no need for me to answer for them. It was my words and my actions that were in question, and they had never gone beyond the limits of Soviet legality.
If the G.P.U. had some means of supersensory perception which allowed it to read men’s minds, then no one would be safe from arrest. And the G.P.U. men themselves would be among the first to find themselves in jail, for no one knew better than they did what was going on in the country.
I was quite determined to fight as long as I was able over every letter in the depositions if need be. I would deny nothing that I had really said. But what I had thought was nothing to do with the examiner. The dictator forced us to speak in riddles. If he forced his people—who loved truth and freedom no less than the peoples of other countries did—to be hypocrites then he could hardly expect us to betray our real opinions in the prisons of his G.P.U.
I had said nothing which could be used as the basis for a charge of treason and I had done nothing that any judge could convict me for. The charges they brought against me were absurd; they would collapse of their own accord. I must hold out to the end and then they would have to release me.
My conclusions comforted and calmed me. During the next few days there were no interrogations, and I occupied myself with my books and with statistical calculations. I was almost content.
Then I was called out again for an interrogation. Polevedsky questioned me about the conflict at the Institute. It appeared that I was now charged with having organized the scientific personnel into a counterrevolutionary group to sabotage the work of the Institute and thus the defense of the Soviet Union. That was a very serious matter—nothing less than high treason. Polevedsky was determined to get an admission out of me. Usually he was formal and almost correct, but now he began to storm and rave, and to abuse me in unprintable terms. It upset me, of course, but it did not intimidate me. I refused to admit anything.
Then he adopted a new tactic. He would call me out in the night, examine me for an hour and then send me back to my cell. He would just give me time enough to undress and get back into bed, and then he would call me out again. This would happen perhaps half a dozen times or more in the course of a night. However, as he was not relieved himself this proceeding tired him out almost as much as it did me. Finally he drew up a deposition which abounded in falsehoods and deliberate distortions. I began to read it. It was written by hand in Russian. Now although I spoke Russian well it was not my mother tongue, and the reading took some time, particularly as he kept interrupting me and urging me to sign. He was anxious not to give me time enough to think out just what his distortions would mean for me.
“You have no right to try to force me to sign before I have had a chance to read it carefully,” I protested.
“You fascist dog,” he bellowed. “You son of a bitch. You whoremonger. You’re still trying to tell me what my rights are and what they aren’t.”
“Citizen Examiner, I formally request you to tell me who is ultimately responsible for the examination.”
“What’s that got to do with you, you swine?”
“When I was still at liberty and my wife was arrested I was informed that accused persons had the right to appeal to the Prosecutor for protection.”
“That’s right, but the Prosecutor’s got something better to do than protect a counterrevolutionary like you.”
“I am not a counterrevolutionary and you can’t prove that I am. I request you formally, Citizen Examiner, to tell me how I can get in touch with the Prosecutor.”
“What do you want to get into touch with the Prosecutor for?”
“To make a formal protest against the fact that you are not recording my statements accurately, but in a distorted fashion, and that you are using illegal pressure to force me to sign.”
“You can write to the Prosecutor, but all letters to him will go through my hands.”
“I have neither paper nor pen.”
“You can write to the Prosecutor tomorrow. Now we’re still engaged in the interrogation.”
This was the third night of his high-pressure badgering. He was determined to make me sign a record that was false in a hundred and one details. I hadn’t slept for two nights and I was physically exhausted. Apparently he slept during the day, for he seemed fresh enough. My warder must have received instructions not to let me sleep during the day or even lie down on the bed. Every five minutes he looked through the spy-hole, and if he thought I was on the point of nodding off he would make me stand up. Every two hours my interrogation would be interrupted for ten minutes. By ten o’clock in the morning I was utterly exhausted, and I gave way. There were, after all, no very serious distortions in it; just a whole series of minor inaccuracies intended to make things look suspicious.
“Citizen Examiner,” I said finally, “I will sign on condition that you give me pen and paper and forward a letter to the Prosecutor.”
“You have no right to attach any conditions to your signature, but in any case, you have a right to send a letter to the Prosecutor.”
Thereupon I signed and he handed me pen and paper to write my letter. I addressed it to the Prosecutor of the Kharkov Military District and I protested against methods which brought me to physical exhaustion in order to force me to sign distorted records. At the same time I asked for an interview at which I could set out my case in detail.
Polevedsky took the letter and then sent me back to my cell. No more interrogations took place until the last week in April.
When they began again Polevedsky received me in a strangely chastened mood. Every trace of his former aggressiveness had disappeared. He asked me questions about various people and various things and he recorded what I said without the slightest attempt at distortion. Of course I assumed that this agreeable change was due to the intervention of the Prosecutor as a result of my letter. In any case, our relations became almost agreeable. One day he informed me that he would soon conclude the examination.
“Citizen Polevedsky,” I asked, “what do you think will happen to me?”
“That depends on the Prosecutor,” he replied. “Perhaps you’ll
be deported.”
“In any case I’m finished.”
“How so?” he inquired. “You’re an engineer by profession; you can get work anywhere.”
“Citizen Polevedsky, you forget that I am also a member of the Party. When I go home now I shall have been expelled from the Party and deported from the Soviet Union. I shall be cold-shouldered by all my old friends and comrades. My life has always been bound up with the revolutionary movement. What am I to do outside it? The Party will never take me back once I have been branded as an anti-Soviet element. That’s what I mean when I say I’m finished whether you release me or not.”
“You’re being pessimistic, Alexander Semyonovitch,” he said.
“Things aren’t as black as all that. The revolution won’t be victorious from one day to the next; there will be fighting, and you can take your part in it and show that you really are a revolutionary.”
Looking back now, I realize that at this point Polevedsky had really made up his mind to bring the examination to an end and recommend my release. But circumstances arose that were independent of his will or mine. The result was that I spent another three years in prison.
The next few interrogations were quite unimportant. When I was trying to assist my wife after her arrest I had learned that in Soviet law the preliminary examination of a prisoner must be concluded within two months of his arrest, and that special permission must be obtained from the Prosecutor if this limit is to be overstepped. In my case the end of the two-month period fell exactly on May Day, and May Day was very near now. I was optimistic. Polevedsky’s tone was no longer that of a G.P.U. man toward a prisoner he was anxious to prove guilty. I began to believe that I was about to be released, and I even started worrying about what I was going to do when once I got abroad.
The Accused Page 19