The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  But would the peasants be prepared to believe the new promises? They had so often been deceived that they had lost all confidence in the state, which represented an oppressive power in their eyes. Stalin knew that very well, and he also knew that the country could not stand another bad harvest, so orders were given to open the granaries of the Red Army. At the same time Russia bought large quantities of grain on the Baltimore exchange. The whole apparatus of the Party was mobilized to convince the peasants that the changed policy was real, and a new Party organ was created in the village: the political department of the machine-tractor station. Their leaders were given dictatorial powers, and all other Party bodies in the village were subordinated to them. In those critical days the fate of the whole country depended on the work of such men. Kaganovitch was one of them. Tirelessly they worked to imbue the despairing peasants with new hope, and they succeeded. Gradually confidence was restored, the peasants went to work again, and the harvest of 1933 was the best for many years.

  For his work in that critical period Kaganovitch was decorated with the Order of the Red Flag of Labor, but four years later the G.P.U. pretended to believe that the work he had done in those days had really been sabotage. He had deliberately put tractors out of commission by ordering wrong spare parts; at the beginning of collectivization he had instigated the kulaks to poison the cattle; and all the time he had secretly agitated against the Party policy.

  Kaganovitch had “confessed” it all but one thing. He could not bring himself to agree that he had attempted to poison the cattle. He loved animals, and particularly horses. He was willing to admit counter-revolution, but not poisoning a horse. The examiner had struck him in the face, but the strong and powerful Kaganovitch had sprung to his feet in such a rage that the man had grown alarmed and contented himself with the confession of tractor sabotage and counterrevolutionary agitation.

  About the middle of October an enemy of the people of a rather different type came into our cell. He was an Armenian from Persia and he went by the name of Gevondi. His real name was Gevondian, but the Tsarist police at the frontier had apparently been too lazy to write it out in full so Gevondi he had remained.

  Everything about him was bent: his legs, his arms and his nose. His small lively eyes were constantly blinking. In a fit of anger he could use a knife. Apart from that he was a decent enough little fellow and he had the honor of being the first enemy of the people in our cell from the ranks of the national minorities. In September the rumor spread that the G.P.U. had started arresting the Letts. After that it was the Armenians. We found it difficult to believe that the G.P.U. would arrest a man merely on account of his nationality, but the fact remained that all the prisoners brought in on a certain day were Letts, and on another Armenians. In both eats there were hundreds of prisoners in the batch.

  Gevondi was a cobbler, and all the arrested Armenians, with three exceptions, were either cobblers or shoeshine boys. Incidentally, all the shoeshine boys in the Soviet Union were either Armenians or Assyrians. As a side line they operated a minor traffic in gold. Very few Jews are to be met with on Russia’s black markets; the operators are almost always peasants or Orientals. At first we thought the Armenians had been arrested to liquidate the black market. But what about the Letts? They were among the best citizens in the Soviet Union and they had given very many efficient officers to the Red Army. So when our first Armenian arrived we were very curious to know what it was all about.

  “There were six hundred of us in Kharkov, and we all knew each other,” began Gevondi. “We have our own church and our own club. In July they arrested our priest. Now you must know that our priest is everything to us. When we’ve got squabbles we never take them to court; he settles them all, and it works very well like that. He was a very good man. At the beginning of September they came in the night and arrested about three hundred and fifty men. Two weeks later they took the remainder.

  “All of us were taken direct flow the street to the brikhalovka. We saw what happened there, and so we decided not to wait until they broke all our bones, but to give up the gold voluntarily.”

  “What gold?” asked Makedon with interest.

  “They arrested us all once before in 1930. At that time they needed gold to pay for the machines they had bought from the Americans. They wanted to get the gold from us—as though we had ordered the machines. But it’s not so easy to get things out of us. Only the first ones were caught out. The others were warned in time and they hid the gold in various places.”

  Komarovsky interrupted.

  “I don’t understand a thing. Tell us plainly what it’s all about.”

  Although Komarovsky had been a high Party official, this side of Soviet life was a closed book to him—and to me too. The Armenian shoeshine boys belonged to the Soviet underworld and neither of us had ever had any occasion to look into it.

  Gevondi asked nothing better than an audience. He loved to talk, and later on he amused us for many an evening telling Persian and Arabian tales. He would sit there with his legs doubled up under him and his head a little to one side, swaying gently backward and forward as he told us the stories of the caliphs and their lovelies, and we would quite forget our troubles and imagine ourselves in the market place at Baghdad.

  “They arrested two hundred of us in 1930, and put us in quite a small room where we could only stand upright, and we were pressed together like sardines even then. It gradually got hotter and hotter. Some of us stood it for four days. They were the ones who had been unwise enough to hide all their gold in one place. Whoever told where his gold was hidden was released at once. They didn’t get much out of me: only four gold pieces. The rest was safely hidden.” “And what’s happened now?”

  “The G.P.U:’s mad this time. They don’t want our gold.”

  “Well, what do they want, then?”

  “They say we’re all Dashnaki. Believe me, we didn’t know what that was until the priest told us.”

  “Now tell us everything in the right order,” insisted Komarovsky, who had appointed himself a sort of grand inquisitor. “One thing after the other, just as it happened.”

  Gevondi packed away his bundle and sat down on the floor.

  “Well, as I told you, we were all taken to the brikhalovka and there we saw how the people were beaten up. We held a meeting and we decided to give up some of the gold immediately. Everyone who was called out for an examination said at once: ‘Comrade Commissar, you needn’t hit me. I’ll give you what gold I’ve got at once.’ But what happened then was just impossible to understand.”

  “Well, what did happen?”

  “The Commissar and his assistants began to beat us up, shouting: ‘We don’t want your gold. You’re a Dashnak,{12} you dirty dog. Tell us about your organization.’ We cleaned boots and shoes, and did just a little black-marketeering on the side. You can’t live just from cleaning boots. We all got a thorough drubbing and then we were sent back to the brikhalovka, and they said: ‘If you don’t tell us all about your organization tomorrow you’ll get beaten till you’ve had it.’ It was very awkward because none of us—honestly not one of us—knew what a Dashnak was. When we got back to the brikhalovka we asked the Russians what a Dashnak was, but they didn’t know either.

  “For two days we sat in the brikhalovka wondering what a Dashnak was. Then we were saved. Our priest was put in the cell with us. We wept when we saw him. Our priest knew what to say. They had already told him, and now he told us. Dashnak, it seems, fought against the Turk and blew the cursed Grand Vizier to pieces. Then he made counter-revolution against the Soviets. We didn’t believe the bit about counter-revolution, of course. They said that only to insult us. Why should our Dashnak want to be a counterrevolutionary?”

  “What did you do then?”

  “We were all given pencil and paper, and our priest went from one to the other writing his confession for him, just a little bit different for each one.”

  “It seems to me your wonderful priest is a
stool pigeon,” I said. “He’s an agent provocateur, a G.P.U. stool pigeon. And now all you blockheads are in the soup.”

  But this was the wrong approach. Gevondi sprang up at the insult to his priest and would have hurled himself at me if the others hadn’t held him back. As it was he uttered the most bloodcurdling threats.

  “You so-and-so, and so-and-so, I’ll—Our priest a G.P.U. stool pigeon! Just wait till I get at you. He’s a gentleman, a saint. But for him they would have broken all the bones in our bodies and we should have all perished miserably. We should never have known what to write if he hadn’t told us.”

  I was eighteen months in prison with Gevondi, and he soon forgave me. We grew to like each other, particularly as we both hated Makedon, with whom we were forced to share a cell for months. But on one point we never could agree: when I said that one should absolutely refuse to make any false confession he would look at me pityingly as though I were wrong in the head.

  “You’ve picked the right sort of fellows to scrap with,” he would mock. “The G.P.U. can do that sort of thing better than you can.”

  The food in prison got worse and worse. Prisoners who had no money and were therefore unable to buy themselves supplementary food went hungry. The others helped as well as they could. We were allowed to buy food in the prison canteen up to the sum of fifty rubles a month. Fifty rubles was the price of two kilograms of butter or thirteen kilograms of sugar. Reckoned in calories, that was several times the amount given to us as prison food. I received fifty rubles a month from Lena. I wasn’t short of money, but I was afraid she might be arrested or deported and then there would be no one to send me money. I therefore did my best to smuggle out a message. Once a week she came to bring me clean linen. I had to sign for it on a piece of paper. On one occasion when I signed I wrote “five hundred rubles” on paper. As I had to write down the number of items received, I hoped that the censor wouldn’t notice it, particularly as I had written it in the middle of the list. Lena would understand if she got the receipt. The following week five hundred rubles was paid in to my account. About a month after that it was forbidden to send in clean linen and so I lost my only contact with the outside world.

  By this time I had become quite experienced in prison ways and I was able to advise the newcomers. I felt sure I was going to be left in peace for a while: perhaps for a year; perhaps till the next political change. The political change would come within the year, I felt sure, because if they went on as they were going they would soon have arrested everybody. The others expected a change in about three weeks. They hoped for a general amnesty in connection with the special celebrations on November 7, 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the revolution. I was not so optimistic, but during the course of October I became more and more convinced that I should be able to hold out no matter how long the lunacy lasted.

  Against all my expectations I was called out at midnight on October 17th. My heart missed a beat. Was my examination going to start up all over again? By temperament I lose my balance easily when experience upsets the theories I have worked out. I had carefully analyzed my situation and I had come to the conclusion that they would leave me alone now for at least a year.

  Completely confused and weak with anxiety, I followed the warder who had been sent to fetch me. The brikhalovka was more overcrowded than ever. Peasants, factory managers, officers, engineers, Communists, and non-Party men were all huddled in together in a space in which it was difficult even to breathe, particularly as all the windows were closed. The prisoners didn’t like hearing the shrieks. Every few minutes soldiers took a man away for examination and brought another one back again. I was left standing the whole night and the next morning I was taken back. I breathed again. Perhaps there had been a mistake? Perhaps my theoretical analysis was right after all?

  But at midnight the wicket in the cell door was lowered.

  “Letter W....”

  The warders never mentioned names because if they happened to make a mistake in the cell number, the prisoners in it would learn that whoever was mentioned had been arrested. By that time, however, the mass arrests had rendered such precautions illusory. There were so many prisoners in the brikhalovka that prisoners from various cells met each other and exchanged information. In addition, all important items of news were tapped through. However, even in Kholodnaya Gora the warders had to obey their instructions.

  Three of us whose names began with “W” went up to the wicket and whispered our names. I was wanted.

  Once again I stood there the whole night through without being called, and the next day I was not sent back to Kholodnaya Gora. During the day the brikhalovka was half empty and I was able to lie down and sleep. The third night came. The prisoners were discussing various items of news, but I hardly listened. What were they up to with me this time? The next morning the prison vans came and took most of the prisoners away, but I was left behind. At eleven o’clock in the morning—a most unusual time—a soldier took me off for interrogation. The examiner was Weissband, and I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw him.

  “Sit down, Weissberg,” he said, and reached for what was obviously my dossier. I noticed at once that he addressed me with the formal “you” and not the familiar “thou.”

  “Are you finally prepared to confess?”

  “I have nothing to confess.”

  “Listen, Alexander Semyonovitch, there are twenty witnesses against you. Who do you think the judge is going to believe? You or the witnesses?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “I can tell you. He’ll believe the twenty witnesses and the sooner you make up your mind to it the better.”

  “Citizen Examiner, tell me: if twenty people were all to insist that I was a Negro, whereas I know perfectly well that I’m not, should I then admit that I am a Negro?”

  “That sort of clever talk isn’t going to help you; Weissberg. If you don’t confess now you’ll come before the Troika, and by November 15th at the latest you’ll be shot. There’ll be no further postponements.”

  “That’s very sad. Very well, I may be dead by that date, but I still shan’t be guilty.”

  “Now listen, Weissberg, I’m sorry for you. You’re an intelligent, well-educated man, a specialist in your own line. You could be very useful to us.”

  “I have always done my best to be useful to you and if that’s what you want you shouldn’t have dragged me away from my work.”

  The experiences of the previous two months had strengthened my powers of resistance. I no longer had any illusions about the state apparatus, and I had come to the conclusion that socialism could be victorious only after it had been broken. The fight that I was putting up became a political one. My aim was no longer exclusively to regain my freedom. More than that was at stake. I had the feeling that my self-respect in the future would depend on what attitude I took now.

  Weissband could sense the different tone, but strangely he did not react to it with asperity.

  “Very well,” he said. “I don’t want to enter into a long discussion with you, and I called you here today for a different reason. Your wife wants to divorce you.”

  I felt myself go weak. For the time being I had forgotten all about my wife. The last time her name had been mentioned was by Ryeznikov, who had shown me an official document of the Leningrad Court and declared: “Your wife has been sentenced to eight years as a spy and sent to the Arkhangelsk camp. If you confess you can be sent to the same camp.”

  At that time I didn’t believe Ryeznikov, and so I answered rather cockily: “That would be increasing my punishment, Citizen Examiner. We couldn’t stand each other even in freedom.”

  Was Weissband trying to play on my nerves? No, I didn’t think so. This time it was serious.

  Weissband sorted out a letter and handed it to me. It was on my brother’s notepaper. He was a lawyer in Vienna. I studied the heading eagerly: “Dr. Jakob Weissberg, Solicitor, Wipplingerstrasse 25, Vienna I.” It struck me immediately that m
y brother had moved his office in the meantime. Typed on the sheet were the words: “I herewith grant Dr. Jakob Weissberg full power of attorney to take all steps which may be necessary for the dissolution of my marriage.”

  “If you’re in agreement, just sign that,” said Weissband.

  I saw his features as though through a mist.

  “Who brought this letter here?” I asked.

  “Your wife’s mother. Here is a letter from her asking for power of attorney in another matter.”

  It turned out that the cleaners refused to hand over a suit of mine, which I had given to be cleaned and pressed the day before my arrest.

  “Does that mean that my wife is free and outside the country, Citizen Examiner?”

  “Yes. Now do you agree to the dissolution of your marriage?”

  “My wife and I have been separated for a long time. She lived near Moscow and I lived in Kharkov. We were both of us too busy to register the dissolution of the marriage.”

  “Well, if you sign this document now the formalities can be settled.”

  I studied the letter again carefully and I hesitated.

  “Can I write anything else on it besides my signature?”

  “No.”

  “Try to understand my position, Citizen Examiner. It’s true that my wife and I have parted, but we’re good friends. All I want to do is to wish her good luck and a happier marriage. She hasn’t got a great deal of time. She’s over thirty, and she has no children, although she always wanted them.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt you to think that your wife wants to many some other man?”

  “No, it doesn’t. She will probably many a very old friend of mine who loves her very much and has waited for her all this time.” Weissband rose.