The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  The G.P.U. carried out repressive measures against certain groups without admitting it openly. Such measures had no justification in the laws of the land, nor were they documented in any of the administrative decrees. But the struggle against the small nations which began in 1937 and led to the liquidation of the minorities in Russian towns was quite open. For instance, I met Red Army officers in prison who told me that they had received instructions from the Commissariat of War to draw up lists of all Polish, German, Latvian and other non-Russians serving in their units. The listed men were then discharged from the Army and arrested. So the regime admitted the suppression of the minorities.

  I was far from satisfied and I continued to question the Ukrainian closely.

  “There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,” I pointed out. “The Stalin Constitution promulgated last year formally grants each nation the right to secede from the Soviet Union if it so desires. So how can anyone be indicted for merely wanting to exercise a constitutional right?”

  The Ukrainian shrugged his shoulders.

  “What are they doing with all of us?” he inquired in his turn. “Is that constitutional perhaps? None of us have committed any crime and yet we’re all in prison.”

  “Yes, that’s quite true, but at least what they charge us with are really crimes. The only thing is that we haven’t committed them. But according to you the national minorities are being charged with having wanted to exercise a documented constitutional right, which isn’t a crime at all.”

  “But all that about rights in the Constitution isn’t meant to be taken seriously. We’re also supposed to have freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, aren’t we?”

  The Ukrainian was an intelligent and thoughtful man, and we were both aware that our discussion had slid onto dangerous ground, but I persisted.

  “Good, that’s all true. But if someone got up in the market place in Kharkov and delivered a speech he wouldn’t be charged with having exercised a constitutional right. He’d be forced to confess that he was an agent of the Gestapo, and espionage isn’t a constitutional right. Whereas you say that the national minorities are being accused of wanting to secede, which is their constitutional right.”

  “Stop holding counterrevolutionary discussions,” snarled Makedon. “Of course a republic has the right to secede, but no one has the right to agitate for it. That’s all.”

  “But how can a republic know whether it wants to secede or not unless people are allowed to discuss the question?”

  The only answer from Makedon was a curse.

  February came, but there were still no new prisoners, and none of us were called out. We seemed to be completely cut off and the monotony became depressing. In the evenings I would tell stories or the Ukrainian would sing, and as Makedon was fond of both songs and stories, at least we had peace.

  The Ukrainians have a great fund of folk songs, and new ones are constantly springing up in the villages. They are almost always sad and very melodious and beautiful, and their text is rarely banal. Our Ukrainian sang them beautifully and we were very grateful. The warders must have often heard him but they never interfered. I even had the impression that sometimes they stood outside the cell door and listened.

  In the middle of March the monotony ended. One evening there was the sound of many footsteps in the corridor. The cell door was opened and fourteen prisoners came in. They had occupied a cell in the inner prison and they had been transferred to us to make room for a new batch. They brought us two important items of news: Hitler had marched into Austria, and Bukharin had at last been brought to trial.

  Their starosta was a young man of twenty-eight called Misha. He really was a Zionist, though he looked more like a Russian student of the old school than a Jew. The dissolution of the Zionist movement had made no difference to his sympathies and he was now charged with being the leader of a counterrevolutionary Zionist organization and a spy for the British Intelligence Service. As Great Britain had declared in favor of a national home for the Jews, all Zionists were ipso facto British spies for the G.P.U. In this respect the G.P.U. was in line with Comintern policy, which regarded Zionism as a pro-British imperialist movement.

  The most interesting personality in the new batch was Vladimir Ivanovitch Kushnarenko, whose life story was as unusual as the story of his examination.

  As an eighteen-year-old he had smuggled revolutionary leaflets into the barracks during the 1905 revolution and been caught. He was sentenced to lifelong banishment to Siberia. At first he had maintained himself there as a photographer and teacher. He was a passionate hunter and fisherman, and by the great rivers of Siberia he had met the nomadic Yakut tribe. He attached himself to one of them and wandered through the taiga, going farther north than any European had ever gone before. Kushnarenko fell in love with the northern landscape and with a beautiful Mongolian girl. He married her and was solemnly accepted as a member of the tribe. The marriage was a happy one and his wife bore him four sons.

  The founder of the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail Feodorovitch, came to the throne in 1613. The ruling house of Russia proudly traced its origin back to this first Romanov, though in reality it was a falsification and the modern Romanovs were really descended from the German house of Holstein-Gottorp. To celebrate the three hundredth anniversary Tsar Nicholas proclaimed a general amnesty and the Siberian exiles were allowed to return. Kushnarenko was one of them, but he found himself unable to leave the taiga. It had cast its spell on him as it had done on so many others, and he stayed on.

  The First World War broke out but the Yakut tribes were not mobilized. Kushnarenko lived on with them, cut off from the world, and continued his wanderings through the endless steppes of the taiga and the primeval forests of Yakut.

  Then came the 1917 revolution. This time the appeal was too strong. Generations of Russian fighters for freedom had lived only for its coming.

  Kushnarenko took leave of the Mongols he had learned to love so well, and with his wife and four sons he returned to European Russia.

  He joined the Bolsheviki at once and fought for a time in a group of Red partisans. Later he became a regimental commander. He fought well on most of the civil war fronts and after the final defeat of Kolchak he was decorated.

  In 1922, when the civil war was over, Kushnarenko left the Army, and the Party put him in charge of a big factory in Kharkov. In this role he was successful too, and his workers loved him as a man who treated them with humanity and nevertheless always succeeded in fulfilling the production plans. He was also decorated for his success in this work. In the meantime his four sons had grown up and were now all officers in the Red Air Force with a reputation as good soldiers and intrepid airmen.

  But there was one black mark in the political biography of Vladimir Ivanovitch Kushnarenko, and in the late summer of 1937 the G.P.U. arrested him in his factory in the presence of his workmen. The leaflets he had distributed among the soldiers of the Tsar in 1905 had been printed by the Social Revolutionaries and not by the Bolsheviki.

  “Alexander Semyonovitch,” he said, “believe me, I was never a member of the Social Revolutionary Party. I was a young student at the time. Revolution was in the air. The workers of Petersburg had already elected Soviets. We youngsters in the provinces wanted to do something too. A friend of mine got hold of some revolutionary leaflets and he and I took them to the local barracks. We sidled up to a window and threw them in. The sentry spotted us and opened fire. My friend got away but they caught me. That was all there was to it. We had no idea there were right and wrong revolutionaries, that you had to be a Bolshevik and not a Social Revolutionary. We weren’t anything.”

  His story depressed me profoundly.

  “But surely, Vladimir Ivanovitch, it wouldn’t have mattered even if you had been a Social Revolutionary?”

  “Well, at least I shouldn’t have any right to complain.”

  “I can’t see that. Why do you want to deny your past? Did you fight for freedo
m in 1905 or for oppression, for the people or for the Tsar? Have we all got so far that we agree with the G.P.O.? For them a fellow who had no time for freedom or revolution in 1905 and preferred to stay at home is now a good citizen, while a Social Revolutionary who risked his life and liberty in the struggle against Tsarism is now a counterrevolutionary. Be sensible, Comrade Kushnarenko. If we lose our own grasp of what’s right and what’s wrong this insanity will never end.”

  “Of course, you’re right, Alexander Semyonovitch, but frankly I’m too exhausted to fight any longer. If they were to send me back to Siberia now as a foot-loose deportee I should be happy. I should never have left there.”

  Kushnarenko was a tall man, but already a little bowed, although only fifty. The expression on his face was frank and unusually engaging, and normally he radiated a great inner serenity, but at the moment he was depressed. He was quite resigned to his fate. He shared it with millions. But the particular circumstances of his case worried him.

  He was charged under Paragraph 2, Article 54, of the Ukrainian Criminal Law. Paragraph 2 dealt with armed insurrection, but it was chiefly used in practice against talk calculated to lead to armed insurrection.

  Now Kushnarenko’s group was in the hands of a young and inexperienced examiner who had taken over from a colleague who had himself been arrested. In his zeal this new examiner seemed to have forgotten that everything was taking place in the realm of fantasy, and he took the charges seriously. Paragraph 54 of Article 2 dealt with armed insurrection, and for armed insurrection you need arms, so where were they? The original figure in the whole affair was an old Social Revolutionary named Semyonov, who had broken down under torture and confessed, mentioning the names of one or two other people. Having no other way out, Semyonov had invented a secret arms cache which he said was in charge of his assistant Lebedev.

  Lebedev was then arrested, and questioned about the arms. He too was in a tight corner. Counterrevolutionary talk was easy. It could be invented and confessed to ad lib. But arms were a different kettle of fish altogether. A secret arms cache had to be revealed and the arms produced as exhibits. The examiners were therefore usually very careful not to provoke any confessions referring to concrete things, but in his zeal Kushnarenko’s examiner had got himself into a real mess, and none of his colleagues or superiors dared explain matters to him. They all lived in the realm of fantasy, but they knew it, though they continued to insist that the Emperor was wearing the most wonderful clothes. But this poor fool didn’t know it, and no one dared say to him: “Look, don’t make an ass of yourself. It’s all poppycock. If you drive things too far you’ll get into such a hole you won’t be able to get out again.” It was only when he had gone too far to draw back that the innocent realized what a mess he had got himself into.

  Of course Lebedev had never had any weapons. He couldn’t even say he had buried them somewhere, because then he would have to say where. At first he denied all knowledge of any weapons, but under torture he too gave way and extricated himself as Semyonov had done; he passed them on to Smimov, another member of the supposed organization. When Smirnov was arrested the game began all over again. Smirnov handed them over to Lysenko. And so it went on. By the time Kushnarenko got them they had been through eleven hands. Kushnarenko had received them from a certain Curevitch, a leading official of a trust which supplied Kushnarenko’s factory with raw materials.

  Kushnarenko confessed to being a member of a counterrevolutionary organization, but he manfully refused to drag anyone else into it. For weeks he was beaten up, but even when he was on the verge of breakdown he could not bring himself to denounce any of his friends. Every day he was called out at midnight and questioned about the non-existent arms for hours on end. He was unable to admit having received the weapons from Gurevitch, because then he would either have to produce them, which was impossible, or name someone else to whom he had allegedly given them. Exhausted and despairing, he was returned every morning to our cell.

  Young Misha the Zionist loved the older man like a father. He did everything he could for him, looked after his things, darned his socks, rolled his cigarettes and did his best to console him with a sympathy and understanding which was deeply moving. But nothing could lighten Kushnarenko’s despair.

  “What sort of fellow is this Gurevitch?” I asked.

  “What does that matter?”

  “Well, if he’s a nasty type you can get out of it by handing those wretched arms back to him.”

  “But, Alexander Semyonovitch, Gurevitch is a very good friend of mine and a very decent fellow. They must have broken him completely to make him denounce me.”

  “That’s very awkward. What do we do now?”

  Thinking it over in the night I had an idea, and when Kushnarenko came back the next morning I asked him:

  “When is Gurevitch supposed to have sent you these weapons, Vladimir Ivanovitch?”

  “He says they were sent to my factory in August, 1936, from Moscow in cases with false consignment papers as spare parts.”

  “Splendid. Now tell me, my dear fellow, have you any friend who has since died?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “Well, think hard,” I urged him. “There must be some friend or acquaintance who has died since then; someone whom you knew fairly well.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “That’s simple enough. We’ll just hand over the arms to the care of the deceased.”

  Kushnarenko thought hard, and after a while he said:

  “Well, of course, there’s Alexander Ilyitch Petrovsky. He died last year in Soumy. But he doesn’t come into question.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “He was an old man, over seventy. He was my geography master. He never had anything to do with politics in his life. You couldn’t make an insurrectionary out of him. They just wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Don’t be silly, Vladimir Ivanovitch. The examiner would accept Mickie Mouse himself by this time if only you’d give him a chance to close this wretched case. It must be worrying him almost as much as it’s worrying you.”

  But Kushnarenko still hesitated. The idea of turning the poor old professor into an insurrectionary seemed too absurd.

  “If I admit that I received the arms they’ll put it on record and I shan’t be able to withdraw any more. They won’t accept Petrovsky and they’ll demand some one of my friends.”

  “I’ve had more experience in this sort of thing than you have, Kushnarenko. Believe me, all your examiner wants is some excuse to close the case. Another living accused wouldn’t close it. A dead man would.”

  Misha supported me and we did our best to persuade Kushnarenko. He tortured himself for another three days, and every night he was away for examination. Finally Misha became firm.

  “Vladimir Ivanovitch, when they call you out again tonight give them Petrovsky. If you come back here and tell us you haven’t, not one of us will speak to you any more. We’ve had enough of it, and enough’s enough.”

  Kushnarenko gave up his resistance and promised to do as we said.

  At midnight he was taken away as usual, but within a couple of hours he was back again, smiling all over his face and loaded with cigarettes and tobacco. He woke us all up.

  “Alexander Semyonovitch, how right you were! The examiner was so delighted he almost embraced me when I told him that I had handed the weapons over to Petrovsky and that Petrovsky was now dead. In ten minutes it was all over. I was given a good meal and all this tobacco.”

  We were overjoyed and embraced Kushnarenko. We all liked him and the successful conclusion of this wretched arms business was a great weight off our minds.

  There were a number of very agreeable personalities among the new batch of prisoners. Sborovsky was one of them. His reputation had preceded him. He commanded an army of forty millions. They were not soldiers, but bees. He was a famous apiarist. At one time he had been president of a trust, but some deviation from the Party line was
discovered in something or other he had written, with the result that in 1929 he and his friend Kaplan were both expelled from the Party. Sborovsky made no appeal against his expulsion, but left Kharkov and settled down in the country to keep bees.

  He was still in charge of beekeeping developments in the Kharkov district under the Commissariat for Agriculture. He was fond of his job and very thankful that it did not often take him into town. He disliked urban life and, above all, he hated Party discussions and the whole network of lies they involved. At the same time he was not unpolitical. He was an old revolutionary and one of the few who knew anything about the working-class movement in Western Europe. He was hoping for a German revolution, which, he believed, would avoid the mistakes of the Russian revolutionaries, overthrow Russian despotism, if necessary by force of arms, and place Stalin before an international court. I was much taken with his ideas, and it was only in 1946 that their utopian character became clear to me.

  “Kaplan was arrested first,” he said. “He’s dead now, but before he died they got him to denounce me, and here I am. Even in 1929 I could see what was coming and I was glad to be out of it—as I thought. I cut myself off from everybody and I hoped they would forget me, but they’ve got long memories.”

  At that time there was a great coming and going in the Kholodnaya Gora and remand periods became shorter. New prisoners were constantly coming in, but before long they would be off again to the camps. I avoided making any further friends: they always went off and I stayed on alone. Parting with friends is always difficult; it was doubly so in prison.

  The new wave of arrests depressed Kushnarenko and me and gave Makedon malicious pleasure. Some of the others hoped that the very magnitude of the thing would destroy the fiction that they were all “enemies of the people” and bring about their release. In every cell prisoners wrangled and wrestled over the possible sense of the happenings. Some thought that it was because labor was needed in the Far North and couldn’t be obtained in the ordinary way. I was very much against the idea, but one of the prisoners, a man named Lagodin, favored it.