The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “Under the chairmanship of the Trotskyist fascist Maddalena, the terrorist group met in Weissberg’s apartment. The political report was made by the Trotskyist fascist Maddalena. He declared that because the Party had been victorious on the economic front, other methods of struggle were now necessary. The leaders of the Party and the state, and, above all, Comrade Stalin, must be got rid of. The whole group was in agreement with this. It was then decided to take practical measures for the terrorist act. It was agreed that Weissberg should organize it, and he chose three reliable comrades for the purpose. He declared that thanks to his special relations with the Red Army he could easily obtain the necessary weapons. Then he went into another room with the three men he had chosen and gave them secret instructions. I was not informed of what followed....”

  Tornuyev put the rubbish down and looked at me.

  “Do you confirm the statements of Lessing or do you desire a confrontation?” he asked.

  “I do not confirm her statements and I can’t see the slightest point in a confrontation.”

  “Why do you refuse to confirm her statement?”

  “Because it’s completely false for one thing, and then for another I should be doing you personally a very ill service if I did.”

  “Me?” he exclaimed in astonishment. “What have I got to do with it? Why should it be an ill service to me?”

  “Do you know who Maddalena was, Citizen Captain?”

  “He was one of you sons of bitches sent into our country to betray us.”

  “Citizen Captain, Comrade Maddalena was one of the best comrades in the German Party. He was a Communist member of the Reichstag. After Hitler came to power he went to Moscow to work for the Comintern. He was also, I think, Vice-Chairman of the Red International of Labor Unions. When it was decided to send experienced men to reinforce the German Communist Party in its underground work Comrade Maddalena was chosen to go. Now he was very well-known in Germany and he knew what a risk he was taking, but he went. Unfortunately, he was recognized and arrested in Hamburg. The workers of all countries began to demonstrate on his behalf. For months the Soviet press was reporting his case under banner headlines: ‘Save Thälmann, Ossietzky and Maddalena!’ Unfortunately, all the agitation was unsuccessful and Comrade Maddalena was beheaded. Now what do you think would happen if I signed this ridiculous statement and it came to the notice of Moscow by any chance? Just think of it: the Party and the Comintern honor Maddalena as a martyr of the German revolution, and the N.K.V.D. in Kharkov denounces him as a Trotskyist fascist. You see what I mean, Captain Tornuyev?”{11}

  Tornuyev had risen in his seat. For the first time in our acquaintance it was obvious that phlegmatic as he was he was deeply shaken.

  “Weissberg,” he admitted, “perhaps in this case Lessing is lying. She may have said it with counterrevolutionary intent, to cause confusion. But that doesn’t make any difference to your situation. Even if she’s lying in this particular instance, there are a score of other witnesses against you, and it’s high time you realized it. You must confess something or other.”

  “But I keep on telling you, Citizen Captain, if I had anything to confess I should have confessed it long ago.”

  “Now that won’t do, Weissberg. You can’t really believe we lock up innocent people and keep them in jail for seven months. Who’s going to believe that? Now do be reasonable. Why do twenty people come forward and all say you’re a counterrevolutionary? There must be something in it and you’ve got to admit something or other. Don’t go on running your head up against a brick wall. And remember that your folly can have very disagreeable consequences. The extraordinary Troika has been in operation now for about a month. Have you heard about it?”

  “I have, but I don’t know exactly what it means.”

  “Well, if you confess you’ll be brought here before the military tribunal and perhaps you’ll get three years, but if you go on fighting against us, we shall have no alternative but to hand your case over to the Troika. And the Troika can do only one of two things: sentence you to death or acquit you. And you don’t think it would acquit you, do you? Just think of it: twenty hostile witnesses and five confrontations! That’s certain death.”

  “Are the proceedings before the Troika conducted in my absence?”

  “Naturally. The Troika is an administrative court. There is no appeal against its decision, though the Supreme Soviet can grant a pardon. But an appeal for pardon can be forwarded only if a condemned man admits his guilt in it and asks for clemency. So if you are sentenced to death you will have to confess if you want to remain alive so it’s better to confess straight away.”

  “But I have nothing to confess.”

  “Is that your final word?”

  “Yes, just as it was my first word: I am innocent.”

  “Very well, if you insist on being obstinate there’s absolutely nothing I can do for you.”

  He had me taken away and that was the last I ever saw of him. My case was then shelved, to be reopened in Kiev twenty months later.

  CHAPTER 10—Witches’ Sabbath

  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1937 THE DAM BROKE AND A FLOOD OF REPRESSION burst over the country. Soviet prosecutors approved arrest warrants in bundles, often without bothering even to read the names on them. And that took place daily, even hourly. Freed from all considerations of reason, morality or the national interest, the G.P.U. concocted conspiracies, each more fantastic than the last. They invented illegal organizations. They prepared the overthrow of the Soviet regime in countless depositions and then, according to some system known only to themselves, they apportioned the leading roles in the armed insurrections they had allegedly nipped in the bud. By this time the arrested men hardly made any attempt to defend themselves or plead their innocence. They already knew better, and the psychological madness had seized on them too. Not only did they willingly confess what was expected of them but they embellished their confessions with fantastic details. The fact that the heroes of the revolution and the civil war were all in prison like themselves soothed their consciences and inspired their fantasy. “The worse it sounds the better it will be,” was their slogan. Once the thing had gone so far perhaps it was the best solution to invent incredible crimes and drag the best men in the Army, the economic system, the sciences, politics and industry into the general catastrophe and thus force the policy of the dictator and his secret police to the point of utter absurdity.

  Prisoners no longer feared death when they confessed to having planned an attempt on the life of the dictator. There were too many of them. They no longer felt ashamed of confessing they were Hitler’s spies. After all, Hitler had millions of spies in the Soviet Union—at least in the cellars of the G.P.U. During the day the best brains in the country wrestled with the problems of catching up with capitalist countries, but after dark they made deep-laid plans to creep back and blow up their laboratories. It was only the G.P.U:’s watchfulness which prevented them.

  The G.P.U. had an easy job but the laws of competition began to operate. Each G.P.U. examiner jealously observed the progress of his rival and sought to outdo him. Each department of the G.P.U. competed with all the others, and the G.P.U. in the provinces competed with the G.P.U. in Moscow. It was a question not merely of the number of arrests but also of the “quality” of the arrested men. The worse the criminals the better for the G.P.U. Examiners who wanted to advance their careers—or even merely to hold their ground—had to invent conspiracies and keep on inventing them. In this way they fabricated plots for dynamiting factories, burning down granaries, wrecking trains and poisoning whole battalions of the Red Army. Soon even that was not enough. They wanted more than mere plans. They wanted counterrevolutionary facts. But the accused could provide them only with words, intentions, conspiracies, and not with real insurrections. They could provide only terrorist attempts which had been planned, not any which had been carried out. They could talk vaguely about secret stores of arms, but they could not provide any real arms which cou
ld serve as exhibits at trials.

  The reason for this awkward shortage lay irrevocably rooted in reality. There were plenty of people who hated the dictator, but there wasn’t a single illegal organization anywhere in the country. There were no insurrections, no secret stores of arms, and no attempts on the lives of Stalin and his leading henchmen. And the members of the Politburo were not prepared to let themselves be shot at merely to provide the G.P.U. with authentic material.

  As it was impossible for the G.P.U. to reveal counterrevolutionary actions, it had to content itself with counterrevolutionary intentions, but it unmasked these on a fantastic scale. Every village had two or three separate terrorist groups all thirsting for the blood of the dictator. In every industrial concern there were desperate diversionists all planning to blow up the power station. Up and down the country railwaymen were only waiting for an opportunity to wreck troop trains. And scientists were in the van in the general nihilistic frenzy, particularly the bacteriologists, who were always working out new ways of poisoning the population or the troops. The surviving partisans from the days of the civil war met again in the woods with their arms. The politicians made preparations to cede Russian territory to Russia’s deadliest enemies. The national minorities made preparations to wrench their territories away from the Soviet Union and unite them to the fascist fatherlands—even when the latter, as was the case with the Volga Germans, was thousands of miles away. That was the Soviet Union toward the end of 1937 as reflected in the minds of G.P.U. men.

  But not all the arrested men panicked. Some of the finest brains in the country—and the stoutest hearts—were now in the prison. They were the men in their fifties, the men who had carried the revolution through the civil war to victory. And now with bitterness and anxiety they watched the destruction of all they had labored for. They did not share the optimism of the younger men, who were convinced that the vast purge which thrashed its way across the country was the work of the G.P.U. apparatus and not the will of the Leader. And they did not share the illusion of many that the process of destruction would finally destroy the whole apparatus of destruction and that the purge would liquidate itself. It was against these men that the G.P.U. terror was chiefly directed. They collapsed under physical torture and many of them died, but they did not “confess.”

  In October there was such a man in the brikhalovka. He was of herculean build. He had fought under Laso in the Far East against the Japs, and against the White Guardist generals, Kolchak and Ungern-Sternberg. Now he was expected to admit that all the time he had been a Japanese spy, and that he had betrayed his comrades to the enemy. They were unable to break him and his cold contempt drove them frantic. After a week of torture he was brought back to the brikhalovka unconscious. The doctor examined him and ordered his removal to hospital. A fellow prisoner told us later of his end. The doctor and other patients in the hospital asked him what they had done to him. At first he kept silent, and it was only when he knew that he was going to die that he spoke, and then he insisted that he had fallen down the stairs.

  During this period the old isolation had broken down and we were well informed of what was going on outside. Every day hundreds of new prisoners were brought in. They came from the land of silence, where no one dared to open his mouth, but in the cells it was different. The danger of arrest was past. It was a fact, and now they almost all talked: they talked to each other and they talked to us old hands. They had been fearing and expecting their arrest often for many months, and now it had happened. The tension was released and they became voluble. After the strain of fearing and waiting it was a relief to talk at last.

  They told us what would formerly have been unbelievable stories. Party secretaries were quite seriously questioning members as to how many enemies of the people they had denounced. And it was not enough for a man to reply that he hadn’t met any to denounce. “Do you mean to say there are no enemies of the people in your circle,” he would be asked, “or do you think Stalin’s slogan ‘Revolutionary watchfulness’ doesn’t apply to you? If you want to stay a member of the Party see that you denounce its enemies.” If a man refused to denounce the innocent he was expelled, and that was merely the first stage to his own arrest. Usually the G.P.U. arrived for him the day after his expulsion.

  When the new prisoners had got their own troubles off their chests the great guessing game would start afresh: What did it all mean? Every new theory was soon refuted by subsequent happenings. Only one thing was quite obvious: whatever the secret political aim of the dictator might be, the technique of the G.P.U. was bringing about its contrary. Apparently an insane idea had become allied with an insane but horribly logical technique for its execution, and in consequence the very basis of human community seemed well on the way to destruction. We did not know the impelling idea, but we did know the technique. It was the brutal stupidity of what was known as “recruitment.”

  The Shah of Persia, delighted with the new game of chess, invited its inventor to express a wish and promised that it would be fulfilled even if it cost him half his kingdom. The inventor seemed to be a modest man: “Put one grain of wheat on the first square of the board,” he said, “then two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on, and I shall be more than recompensed.” At first the Shah was quite indignant at such modesty and he ordered his servants to supply the wheat. Before long it became clear that the palace would not be big enough to hold it. Then he called in his wise men to calculate just how much wheat was required. And after a while they appeared with the result of their cogitations: the harvests of the whole country for a thousand years would not be sufficient. Stalin must have felt something like the Shah when after three years of his purge he realized what had happened. Then, and only then, did he call a halt. But it was already too late. To release the innocent in masses would have been dangerous. To leave them to rot in the prison camps of the Far North and elsewhere sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution.

  The technique was the same in each case. Every new prisoner brought in was asked the same two fatal questions: “Who recruited you?” and “Whom did you recruit?” Within a very short time after his arrest the half a dozen innocents he had been forced to denounce would join him in the cells. And then the mechanism would start up again on a wider scale; each of these new prisoners denounced another half a dozen. And so on, and so on, and so on. After six months the successors of the first counter-revolution had swollen into an army of thousands, even allowing for the fact that many of the denunciations overlapped. In this way the purge mechanism became self-operating, and each wave of arrests was followed by a still bigger one.

  When in my report a prisoner uses the term “recruited” then the reader must not suppose that any real recruitment is indicated. If someone says: “Lebedev has ‘recruited’ Kondratchenko,” it merely means that although both Lebedev and Kondratchenko are loyal Soviet citizens, Lebedev has broken down under torture and “confessed”: “I was a counterrevolutionary and I recruited Kondratchenko for my counterrevolutionary organization.” If Lebedev came first then in our jargon Lebedev was the “recruiter” and Kondratchenko the “recruited.”

  In prison we could follow this process only in one direction, forward, and never, or only very rarely, back to the source. We could see the branches and watch them putting out twigs, but we could never see the trunk. All the prisoners had themselves been “recruited,” but who had started it all was lost in the mystery of first things. Somewhere there were the imaginary founders of our various organizations, and we always referred to these legendary forefathers as “the arch-recruiters.”

  The mass arrests began in the late summer of 1937, but the arch-recruiters had already passed through the cells in 1936, and grass was growing on their graves. At first we had supposed that all our organizations were descended from the leaders of the opposition, the men who were physically exterminated in the big show trials, but later on a careful analysis of the stories of hundreds of my fellow unfortunates reve
aled that this was not so. Up to the spring of 1937, the G.P.U. arrested not only those who were directly or indirectly connected in some way with the great trials, but also everyone whose name was in its dossiers as in some way suspect or compromised from former days. These men also played the role of arch-recruiters and they became the forefathers of several generations of arrested. However, even they had to be “recruited” and they had to choose someone or other from among the big leaders of the opposition.

  One question interested me and that was whether the G.P.U. arrested everyone who was denounced. It certainly did in the beginning, but later on some attempt was made to guide the “recruitment.” By the spring of 1938 a very large section of the population was registered in the dossiers of the G.P.U. as “compromised” or “suspect” in some way or other. At that period it must have been easy to reckon by simple multiplication when the whole Russian people would finally be “recruited.”

  It was at this point that the G.P.U. began to become anxious, but it was not easy to call a halt. It was impossible not to arrest a man who had just been denounced as an agent of Hitler and a terrorist. The examiners knew, of course, that the whole thing was a grotesque invention, but they were unable to admit their knowledge, even to each other. A G.P.U. man who expressed the slightest doubt about the farce would himself have been arrested. The members of the G.P.U. knew that better than anyone, and so they strenuously “believed” in the guilt of their prisoners. However, they did begin to curb the “recruitment,” but in this they often met with the resistance of the accused. In the summer of 1938 there was a widespread feeling among the prisoners that the more people they dragged into it the better it would be for them and the sooner the wretched farce would be played out, so that whereas in the beginning prisoners denounced others with a bad conscience, they now began to denounce all and sundry, and in particular they took a great pleasure in denouncing all those they believed to be orthodox Stalinists. The examiners were often non-plused. The prisoners insisted on their own lists of accomplices and indignantly rejected the tentative attempts of the examiner to delete this or that name.