The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  Rashkov had no idea why he had been arrested, except that he had once been a Menshevik.

  “I can quite understand that they still distrust us,” he said, “that they want to isolate us, if you like. But why this farce? If they think we’re a danger they should just banish us by administrative sentence to Siberia as the Tsar used to. Why do they first want us to confess to crimes we have never committed?”

  “So they want you to do that too?”

  “Yes. First of all it was merely counterrevolutionary organization, and agitation, but now it’s sabotage. They say I smuggled Trotskyist ideas into my books and lectures. I pointed out that all my books had been carefully censored before publication, and the examiner just said: ‘Don’t try to hide behind the censor. He was your accomplice. He was arrested long ago.’ Almost a third of the professors at the university have been arrested. They are all charged with the same thing. Many of the books were published years ago and highly praised in the Party press. But now, it appears, it was all Trotskyist propaganda.”

  Rashkov was an old man and his health was not good. However, he held himself surprisingly well. He was called out for interrogation again and again. To make his sufferings worse he had bladder trouble and every ten minutes or so he had to go to the lavatory. This apparently made the examiner furious because he had to interrupt the interrogation and go with Rashkov, but at least it gave Rashkov a respite during the deliberately long periods of interrogation.

  A few days after Rashkov’s arrival I was taken out for my first interrogation since I had been in the Kholodnaya Gora. Interrogations did not take place in the prison itself but in the G.P.U. headquarters, and I was escorted there in the prison van. I was not taken direct to the examiner’s office but put in a cell in the basement. As we were passing through the corridors I had the impression that all the cells were full. Prisoners in the Kholodnaya Gora going for interrogation were usually taken away in the evening between seven and eight o’clock, though sometimes it was later. They were then placed in these basement cellars until their turn came for interrogation. Usually that was in the same night, but sometimes they were kept waiting for two or three days in the cells. The prison van went back to the Kholodnaya Gora at about six in the morning. Prisoners whose interrogation had not been concluded in the night were kept below. It sometimes happened that a prisoner would be kept there for as long as a month without being allowed to “go home.” For most prisoners this was a very real aggravation of their sufferings.

  In the summer of 1937 the G.P.U. apparently still wished to keep me isolated from the other prisoners. A great deal of time and energy was spent on my case, which they seemed to regard as important, and whenever I was brought in for interrogation I was always locked up in a cell on my own. A few months later this became impossible because all the cells were crowded and prisoners often had to spend the night standing up, pressed closed together, so that the cells were like vertical sardine tins. ‘When the warder opened a cell to push in a new prisoner, it was often difficult to close the door because the packed mass of prisoners had expanded a little. These waiting cells in the inner G.P.U. prison were known as the “brikhalovka,” which, roughly translated, means something like “the talking shop,” because prisoners from all the cells at Kholodnaya Gora met each other there. The brikhalovka was the most important chink—or rather breach—in the G.P.U. wall of isolation. It was the brikhalovka which turned the isolated groups in a hundred different cells into a homogeneous prison collective. Those who came back were immediately surrounded by their fellow prisoners and pumped for news.

  I was kept overnight in my cell and at about midday the following day I was taken up to Ryeznikov, who received me standing.

  “I have just received information about you from Lugansk,” he declared. “It makes my blood run cold. You certainly aren’t what we thought you were—a minor accomplice. Oh, no, you’re a master hand at counter-revolution. Here, read that.”

  I read the sheets of paper he handed to me, and then I said calmly: “Citizen Examiner, do you really mean that you take all this seriously, or are you making fun of me?”

  “Accused,” he said solemnly, “I warn you against keeping up your old game. It is deadly serious. Previously we failed to recognize the connections or we should never have tolerated your attitude. Thanks to the confession of Vlakh and his associates we have now revealed the whole network of counterrevolutionary organization you created in the Ukraine. All your accomplices are now under arrest. Vlakh is in prison in Lugansk, Stupin in Kiev, Lessing is here and the rest are either in Dniepropetrovsk or Kharkov. All of them have confessed, and all of them have implicated you. There are twenty witnesses who accuse you of terrorism, espionage and diversionary activity. Formerly we had only clues and our suspicions; now we have all the threads in our hands. ‘What little remains you will now give us.

  “Citizen Ryeznikov, if this goes on much longer I shall go off my head. All this is nothing but fantasy.”

  Vlakh was a worker from Vienna, whom I had first met in Kharkov in 1931, when he was secretary of the German Club, where I had often spoken. In the first period of my stay in the Soviet Union he had helped me considerably by his knowledge of Russian and Russian conditions. He was fundamentally a decent fellow and a staunch Communist. He devoted himself to the Club as another man might have done to the well-being of his family. He worked as a molder in the Kharkov locomotive works, and all his spare time was given to the Club; but despite his obvious devotion and unselfishness, he was often the object of malicious intrigues. I had always been one of his most steadfast supporters. In the summer of 1933, Vlakh was sent to the Kuznetsk Basin by the Party, where he worked for about a year, and then he returned to Kharkov. In 1935 he moved again and went to Lugansk. Since then I had lost sight of him.

  He had been arrested at the beginning of 1937 and he hadn’t forgotten me, poor fellow, for now he testified:

  “Weissberg was the head of our organization. In 1934 he delivered a speech on the situation and declared that we must now work in three directions to accelerate the overthrow of the Soviet power. War was approaching and on its outbreak we must blow up all the power stations in Kharkov. Foreign-born workers known to be absolutely reliable and devoted to our organization were to be found in the big Kharkov factories. He also stressed the importance of espionage work. Our chief task, he said, was to get rid of the Party and the Soviet Government. Stalin and Voroshilov must be assassinated. Weissberg chose reliable comrades from among us and instructed them to prepare the terrorist attempt....After a speech by Comrade Maddalena about the Dimitrov trial, we met in Weissberg’s rooms, and he informed us that the time for action had come. He chose two reliable comrades and promised to provide them with arms, which he said he could obtain thanks to his good relations with the Red Army. The two comrades were to go to the Caucasus to a place to be revealed to them later. Stalin and Voroshilov were spending their summer holidays there. Weissberg said that the two comrades must kill them so as to make their deaths appear like a hunting accident....”

  I was simply unable to take this farrago of nonsense seriously. It had no relation whatever to truth, and I could hardly believe that it could prove dangerous to me. I was soon to learn better.

  Ryeznikov pretended to take Vlakh’s statements quite seriously.

  “If it were Vlakh alone,” he said, “we might suppose he had some reason for slandering you, but no, Lessing says the same thing, and so does Joffe. And Mehrenbach has said the same thing quite independently in another town altogether. There are over a score of witnesses against you. And yet you expect us to believe you when you say it’s all nonsense?”

  “Citizen Examiner, frankly I don’t know what to say about it beyond the fact that it’s all fantastic. It has no relation to me or my doings at all. I know Vlakh quite well, of course; he’s a simple honest fellow, and I can’t believe he has ever done anything against the Soviet Union.”

  Ryeznikov rose from his chair again. He gl
ared at me like a maniac and his face was red with anger. Slowly and threateningly he came toward me. I had stood up too and I fell back before him. In the corner of the room he stopped before me and said slowly:

  “Do you dare to accuse the organs of the Soviet power of having extorted false confessions? Vlakh himself confesses to his crimes and yet you have the insolence to dispute them! Why should he confess things which aren’t true?”

  I realized that I had gone too far. It was impossible for me to tell the plain truth and say such statements must have been extorted under extreme pressure. That would probably have been more than my life was worth. In future I must be careful to deny only my own alleged part in these fantastic doings; I must not attempt to defend the others.

  “Citizen Examiner,” I said, “I don’t know in what dark conspiracy Vlakh has got himself mixed. What I meant was that I should never have believed him capable of it. But one thing I can say with certainty: I have had nothing whatever to do with it. This is the first I have heard about it.”

  “No,” he replied, “this time you won’t succeed in wriggling out of it. We know the crimes you have committed and now you know that we know. We no longer need your confession to bring you to trial, but we do need your information to allow us to draw in the entire network of your organization. You must tell us who recruited you and whom you recruited. Now first of all, who gave you instructions to organize an attempt on the lives of the leaders of the Party and the Soviet Government?”

  “I never received any such instructions.”

  “Give us all the details of the treasonable organization you built up on Soviet territory.”

  “I never built up any such organization.”

  ‘What now followed was a new tactic. He went on shrieking the same questions. At first I gave him simply the same answers, but in the end I stopped answering. I thought he would soon get tired of it, but he had a powerful voice and a tremendous command of foul abuse and bad language. It went on for about four hours before he had had enough.

  “I’ve no more time for you now,” he said. I heaved a sigh of relief, but he added: “Comrade Weissband here will continue with the interrogation.”

  My heart sank. However, Weissband was the least aggressive of Ryeznikov’s assistants. He started off his interrogation by advising me in a fatherly fashion to be a good fellow and confess: it would save a lot of trouble. When he saw that his words had no effect, he gave it up. He asked a casual question from time to time, which I answered, and in the meantime he read the paper or busied himself with his dossiers. Then he asked me if I intended to blow up the Kharkov tractor works as well, but his voice was so casual he might have been asking me where I intended to spend my next holidays.

  The ‘interrogation” dragged on and night fell. I was very tired. Surely they’ll stop soon and send me “home,” I thought. But I was wrong. At ten o’clock Weissband handed me over to the other assistant, Shalit. He was a young man in the early twenties, of middle height and so slim that, with his fair hair, he looked boyish. During the course of my long remand period I had made the acquaintance of many examiners, but there was not one who inspired me with such loathing as Shalit. Trained as a Marxist, I had always sought to analyze a process objectively and find out the real motives of the actors. I knew that these examiners were only small cogs in the gigantic mechanism of the dictatorship. I knew that they were driven and that they had to drive others or be broken themselves. This recognition usually reduced the vehemence of my personal reactions. All my hatred I tried to concentrate on the central motor of this horrible mechanism, on the despot himself and his immediate assistants like Yezhov, the head of the G.P.U. When I look back I feel very little resentment against my examiners. Some of them, Azak and Tomuyev, for instance, I even find quite likable. But Shalit is an exception.

  He was a very minor official and a ruthless and conscienceless careerist. His rank was probably something like that of a sergeant, but he was ambitious. The steps on which he proposed to rise were the bodies and souls of the prisoners entrusted to his charge. Unlike many of the examiners, he really took his job seriously. He read the newspapers carefully and he knew just what counterrevolutionary conspiracies were needed at any given moment, particularly after a speech by Stalin or Yezhov. I don’t know whether he was really stupid enough to believe the charges he made against his prisoners, but he pursued them with uncanny logic and persistence. Even Ryeznikov was sometimes human and would interrupt his interrogation with a joke, but Shalit never. Ryeznikov sometimes showed sympathy for a prisoner; Shalit never. He hated the prisoners because they resisted him and were not prepared to admit at once what he wanted them to admit. Every “favorable” deposition he extorted was to him like a fresh scalp to an Indian brave. Off he would hurry with it to the head of the department. He was capable of bawling exactly the same question for six hours on end without the slightest variation and without showing any signs of fatigue. On one occasion he shouted at me every two minutes for hours on end the following verbose demand:

  “Tell me about the counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist, fascist, terrorist, diversionist and espionage organization which you built up on the territory of the Soviet Union.”

  I varied my answers in the hope of making him change the form of his question even in the slightest degree, for the monotony of it was driving me mad, but I didn’t succeed. He repeated exactly the same thing in exactly the same loud voice and with exactly the same gestures hundreds—no, I really believe thousands—of times. I tried everything I knew, including traps and tricks. On one occasion I announced solemnly:

  “Citizen Examiner, I have already answered that question, in my deposition at the beginning of June.”

  He hesitated, and fell into the trap.

  “Who drew up the deposition?”

  “Lieutenant Ryeznikov.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that I did not build up any such counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist, fascist, terrorist, diversionist and espionage organization on the territory of the Soviet Union.”

  That provocation was dangerous, but he was driving me mad. I thought it would send him off into a fit of rage, but instead he just continued churning out the same question all over again. And he had a loud and rasping voice. Sometimes I wondered why they used men for such mechanical work and not a phonograph. I thought I was indulging in a frivolous thought to cheer me up, but later and in all seriousness I heard of cases where phonographs actually were used for the purpose.

  I often asked myself whether Shalit was utterly stupid. Couldn’t he think of anything different to say? Was it lack of inventiveness which prevented him from trying to trip up a prisoner, make him admit something by a trick or try to refute his argument? Did he feel no shame at repeating the same thing over and over again? Gradually I came to the conclusion that he wasn’t stupid. I believe he realized perfectly well that the charges he made were inventions and that he was unwilling to become involved in discussions in which he would probably get the worst of it. All he could do was to try to exhaust his prisoners physically, and he used this technique with more determination and iron logic than any other examiner I have ever met. From the G.P.U. point of view he was right.

  One day in the lavatory I found a dirty piece of newspaper which probably one of the warders had most improperly left behind. I cleaned it as well as I could. The news it contained was sensational. It reported the arrest and condemnation of Marshal Tukhachevsky and eight leading Red Army generals. At the previous trials the accused had all been leaders of the various oppositions. Tukhachevsky and his generals were unpolitical experts engaged on their own special job, though they were all, of course, members of the Party and of its Central Committee.

  After the departure of Trotsky and the death of Frunze, Tukhachevsky had begun to reorganize the Red Army. Officially he was Vice-Commissar for War, but the Commissar for War, Voroshilov, was little more than a cipher. Tukhachevsky reformed the system of training and abolished all
vestiges of Prussianism. Under his leadership Red soldiers learned to wage war instead of merely to exercise on a parade ground, though they learned that as well. The young peasants who went into the Army were given the technical training necessary to enable them to use modern weapons of war. The Russian people loved their new Army. During the hunger years the peasants flocked into its ranks, where they were well fed, well clothed, properly housed and well equipped. The popularity of Tukhachevsky with Communist and non-Communist alike was greater than that of any other Soviet leader. As long as Tukhachevsky was at the head of the Soviet General Staff people felt that their safety was in capable hands and they bore the heavy burden of armaments willingly.

  It was impossible for me to know how the country was taking it all, but I was able to notice the reaction among the examiners. A few days later Ryeznikov called me out for an interrogation. He was obviously confused. His usual calm confidence had deserted him. In those days the G.P.U. men talked to each other in undertones. Did they already feel tremors in their own edifice? A few days later I was under interrogation by Shalit. He began by observing:

  “We know it all now: your organization wasn’t Bukharinist or Trotskyist as we thought at first. It was something much more dangerous. You must now describe exactly who was involved in it, and it would be a good thing if you gave the names of one or two leading officers of the German Reichswehr as well.”

  I did not know then that Tukhachevsky was accused of having conspired with the leaders of the Reichswehr. None of us knew that until considerably later, about the autumn of 1937. Subsequently I realized how ambitious Shalit’s plans had been. Immediately after the Tukhachevsky affair he wanted to expose a semi-military conspiracy headed by German Reichswehr leaders. That would have brought him honor and profit indeed—if he could have pulled it off. But Shalit was only a little fellow, and his immediate superior, Ryeznikov, refused—in all probability wisely—to have anything to do with it. In any case, Ryeznikov had plans of his own: I was to be one of the chief witnesses in the coming trial of Bukharin, a role for which I was, on the face of it, far better suited. To have secured a foreign witness against Bukharin would have been a triumph. Although they would never have admitted it, all the Soviet authorities, the G.P.U., the Prosecutor General’s Department and the Military Tribunal, all respected world public opinion. Stalin, Yezhov and Vishinsky followed the foreign press closely, and they knew perfectly well the skepticism with which the so-called confessions had been received abroad. The Prosecutor General and the G.P.U., therefore, did their best to make their charges sound reasonably probable.