The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “No one’s going to build their canals in the Far North unless he’s compelled to,” he argued. “The work’s too heavy and the climate’s too bad. They’d have to double wages at least, and that would come too expensive. But we’re cheap.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Lagodin,” I objected. “We’re not cheap in the least; we’re the most expensive form of labor power there is. You’re a Marxist and you ought to know that forced labor existed at one time all over Europe, either as slavery or serfdom. In the end it was replaced by free labor, and the main reason was that the free worker is more productive than the slave and therefore more profitable to whoever employs him. However, I don’t want to stress that point because, after all, slaves weren’t university professors like so many of the men they’re sending to the Far North today. Take our Institute as a case in point. After twenty years of endless trouble and enormous expense the Soviet Government finally developed a working body of really capable physicists. And now what’s happened? Shubnikov, one of the leading low-temperature physicists in the country, is to help dig a canal in the Arctic. So is our first Director, Professor Obremov, also a leading Soviet physicist and an expert on crystallology. Can’t you imagine what expensive navvies men like Shubnikov and Obremov are? And I won’t say anything about myself and the others. And what’s to become of the Institute itself? It won’t be closed down, which might be the best thing in the circumstances. No, it will go on working and costing huge sums of money, but it won’t produce anything.”

  “That’s you people all over,” interrupted Makedon indignantly. “You think you’re irreplaceable. They’ve arrested all the factory directors, all the chief engineers and all the departmental managers, but others come forward to take their places, and tractors and motorcars and steel are still being produced. You can’t tell me! We can get on very well without you.”

  “But, Makedon, a scientific institute isn’t like a factory. If a good engineer is dismissed and replaced by a less efficient man, the quality and quantity of production falls, and a tractor lasts, say, three years instead of five. However, you don’t notice that at once. But when you arrest the eight leading men in a scientific institute then you might as well close it down. You can’t replace them. Imagine a hospital in which all the doctors are arrested and only the nurses and the patients left. The hospital carries on as best it can. Some of the patients will even get better, but no operations will be performed, and a hospital without doctors isn’t a hospital any longer.”

  In May we returned to this theme. A new prisoner came to us from the inner prison and from him I learned that Leipunsky had been arrested. I had fought tooth and nail against the efforts of Ryeznikov to make me denounce Leipunsky, but my resistance had apparently been of no avail. Since then I had often had news of the Institute. The last time had been on January 15th, 1938. I had been called out again to Weissband in the matter of the divorce. According to Soviet law fifty rubles had at that time to be paid for a first divorce, and he wanted to know whether I was prepared to pay it out of my prison account.”

  “I have money in the Kharkov savings bank,” I pointed out. “Over ten thousand rubles. I can give you a check for the fifty rubles, but I won’t touch the money in my prison account. In fact, I should be obliged if you would let me transfer another five hundred rubles to my account here, because I don’t know how much longer I shall have to stay.”

  “Don’t let money troubles worry you, Weissberg,” he replied. “In a month at the latest you’ll be shot.”

  When I was sent back to Kholodnaya Gora I had to wait with a couple of dozen other prisoners to be let in, and among them I recognized Nikolayevsky, who had just been arrested. For a short time he had been Party Secretary in the Institute. I had never liked him. He was one of those who was constantly giving information to the G.P.U. Now apparently they were arresting typical Stalinists like him.

  “Leipunsky has been expelled from the Party,” he told me. “Shubnikov, Gorsky, Obremov, Rosenkevitch, Komarov, and Gussak have all been arrested. Leipunsky is no longer Director but he hasn’t been arrested. Lange is still at large, which is strange because he’s a German.”

  In February I was informed of the arrest of Houtermanns. Martin Ruhemann had practically been deported. The G.P.U. was unwilling to arrest him because he was a British citizen, but they had compelled the Institute to cancel his contract.

  But Houtermanns was a German and a Communist. He had fled from Nazi Germany and gone to England, where, in 1935, Leipunsky had engaged him to work for the Institute. After my arrest the situation of foreigners had become very delicate and Houtermanns was preparing to go. He obtained an exit visa at the beginning of 1938, and left with his wife and two children for Moscow. There he had to settle various formalities. The customs in particular made difficulties and he had to go there day after day, until finally he was invited into the office of the Director, where he found two G.P.U. men waiting for him. He ended up in the inner prison in Kharkov.

  I felt sorry for him. He was not physically strong and I didn’t rate his chances of survival very highly. He was a chain smoker, and at the Institute he was rarely to be seen without a cigarette between his lips. Coffee was another passion, and he drank one cup after another.

  I did my best to send him cigarettes through prisoners who were transferred to the inner prison, but when I met him again in 1948 I discovered that he had received none of them.

  In May, 1938, Leipunsky came to prison at last. He had just returned from a long holiday—in the Crimea, I think—when they arrested him. He was bronzed from the sun and in high spirits, and he kept us all highly amused. He was a modest fellow, but he was soon the leading spirit in the cell and as popular in prison as he had been outside. The whole cell listened with bated breath to his daily lectures on physics.

  In May, when the talk in our cell once again veered round to the labor-power theory of the arrests, I publicly drew up the balance of the G.P.U. achievement in our Institute.

  “Listen,” I said. “Our Institute is one of the most important of its kind in Europe. In fact, there is probably no other institute with so many different and well-equipped laboratories. The Soviet Government has spared no expense. Our leading scientists were partly trained abroad. They were constantly being sent to leading physicists all over the world at Government expense to supplement their knowledge and experience. Our Institute had eight departments, each headed by a capable man. And what’s the situation now? The head of the laboratory for crystallology, Obremov, is under arrest, and so is the head of the low-temperatures laboratory, Shubnikov. The head of the second low-temperatures laboratory, Ruhemann, has been deported. The head of the laboratory for atom-splitting, Leipunsky, is under arrest, and so is the head of the X-ray department, Gorsky, the head of the department for theoretical physics, Landau, and the head of the experimental low-temperatures station, myself. As far as I know, Slutski, the head of the ultra-shortwave department, is the only one still at work.

  “Among those arrested is the founder of the Institute, Professor Obremov—its first Director; Professor Leipunsky, member of the Academy of Science and later Director of the Institute; Professor Lev Davidovitch Landau, the leading theoretical physicist in the Soviet Union. Landau had already been forced out of the Institute by the G.P.U., and he went to Moscow to work with Professor Kapitsa. I supervised the building of our low-temperatures experimental station, but before it could be put into operation I was arrested. My successor was Komarov. He has also been arrested. Who is to carry on?”

  “They’ll find somebody else, all right,” said Makedon obstinately.

  “No, they won’t, Makedon, because the same sort of thing is happening everywhere else—in the Leningrad institutes, for example. You need five years to train an engineer, and even then the Government had a very great deal of trouble before it could get suitable engineers for its new factories. But a capable physicist needs from ten to fifteen years of training. Where scientific work is concerned
all that matters is the peak performance, the record, the new idea. Ninety per cent of the work done in our laboratories might as well not be done at all, because it leads nowhere, but the point is that the other ten per cent, the creative work, could not be done without the ninety per cent routine. Outwardly, of course, work will go on in the institutes. Measurements will continue to be made, but new discoveries won’t. A new discovery is a very rare thing. Our Institute had not yet made any. It had only just reached the end of the preliminary organizational work. It was on the verge of greater performances. But there’s no chance of that now.”

  “And it’s not only in Weissberg’s Institute,” Sborovsky put in. “Do you know they’ve arrested Tupelov, Makedon? Our greatest airplane designer. And Gvacharia too. Who is to carry out the reorganization and rationalization of our foundry industry now?”

  The case of Gvacharia is interesting. I knew him personally, though not intimately. However, I knew a good deal about his work through his assistant Rudolf Anders, the man who had denounced me.

  Gvacharia was a Georgian and the nephew of Ordzhonnikidze. The iron foundry at Makeyevka was built before the revolution, and it was then one of the most important foundries of the Russian metallurgical industry. The second Five-Year Plan provided for an investment of 800 million rubles in the Makeyevka works (which represented a sum of approximately 200 million dollars). The Makeyevka works were to be developed into the second largest in the Soviet Union, which also meant the second largest in Europe. Ordzhonnikidze appointed a new works director, his nephew Gvacharia. In 1934 we had begun to discuss the problem of charging blast furnaces with compressed air. In this connection I went to the Donetz Basin and visited Anders in Makeyevka, and he introduced me to Gvacharia.

  Gvacharia was a manager in the Burnham sense. He was completely taken up with his work, and he was at it day and night, never taking a holiday, and finding little time for ordinary courtesies. Moderate success did not satisfy him; his aim was perfection, but in pursuing it he had quite forgotten that its ultimate aim was to raise the masses of the working people from privation and misery. He had no human relation to his workers at all. He was a fanatical supporter of industrialization for the sake of industrialization.

  His job was to produce steel: good steel and cheap steel. Before he began work the milliard deficit of the Soviet foundry industry was a great burden on the Soviet budget. Gvacharia was the first to succeed without it, and he announced his success in a letter to the Commissar for Heavy Industry in 1935.

  The press resounded with his praise. Not only the specialized press, such as Za Industrialisatziu, but even Pravda regularly sent its correspondents to Makeyevka.

  “He wanted to rationalize the works and pay proper wages,” Anders had told me during my own visit to Makeyevka. “And when he gets an idea into his head there’s no holding him. There isn’t a single part of the works he hasn’t reorganized, from the coking ovens to the accounts department. At first we were short of locomotives. We had ten, and Gvacharia asked for another one. Generally speaking, Ordzhonnikidze refused him nothing: money, machinery, raw materials, anything he wanted. He even freed him from the obligations of the labor laws and let him experiment on his own. But with locomotives he was economical. It was just at the time when Kaganovitch was reorganizing the railways and needed every locomotive. The Central Committee had declared transport to be the hub of the second Five-Year Plan, and so Ordzhonnikidze told his nephew he ought to be ashamed of himself for asking for another locomotive at such a time: he ought rather to give one back again. Gvacharia’s pride was wounded. He called the man in charge of works transport and asked him how much he earned: 400 rubles. ‘Listen,’ said Gvacharia, ‘if you can get by with one locomotive less you’ll get another 200 rubles as bonus, another 300 rubles for a second, and 450 for a third.’ The man swore it was quite impossible; they needed more locomotives, not less. But Gvacharia would brook no refusal. ‘You go away now, and come back and report to me in a week’s time.’ The end of the story was that within a month the man was earning two thousand rubles instead of 400 rubles, and the works was able to hand back four locomotives to the Commissariat for Heavy Industry and save 30,000 rubles.”

  “What was the solution of the mystery?”

  “Quite simple. Half the time the locomotives were standing idle. They weren’t being used to capacity.”

  “But what about the saving of 30,000 rubles? Locomotives don’t cost money when they’re standing idle.”

  “They do if they’re standing idle under steam, and so they were. The men weren’t getting the best out of their locomotives. But now the transport manager did the same with the locomotive drivers and the cranemen as Gvacharia had done with him. He made their wages interdependent, and promised them more. So when the locomotive man arrived and the craneman wasn’t ready, instead of just hanging around patiently he began to kick up a fuss, because he was losing money. And similarly the cranemen bullied the locomotive drivers if they had to wait. Gvacharia introduced payment by results, and what he managed to do in the steel works is nobody’s business. Steel can be made with various supplementary materials, as you know. Some of the best materials were in short supply, but the steel works wanted only these. Gvacharia gave the manager of the steel works a certain number of checks per ton of steel, some red, some yellow. With the red checks he could obtain the more expensive and scarcer materials from the stores, but if he saved red checks and used yellow ones he could earn money. The checks represented certain sums, and the manager was allowed so much per ton of steel. He therefore did his best to use the yellow checks rather than the red ones.

  “Supplies were a sore point with us as in all big undertakings, but Gvacharia brought about a fundamental change in the situation.”

  I knew the supply difficulties from my work at the Institute. There was one fundamental evil: factory and construction directors had more money than was necessary to obtain the commodities they needed. Prices for state capital goods and raw materials were very low compared with prices on the free market, and deliveries of such goods had therefore to be rationed. Otherwise, for instance, each undertaking would have bought timber from the state and sold it to its workers at low prices. Most workers and peasants in the Soviet Union live in small houses, and timber is a much-sought-after material both for building purposes and for heating. But a cubic yard of timber as sold by the state to the consumers cost four times as much as the same amount delivered by the state to the factories for productive purposes. This gap between “hard” and “soft” prices was the running sore of Soviet economy. Every factory, every construction undertaking and every institute did its best to get hold of raw materials. They eagerly grabbed all the scarce materials they could and piled them up in their warehouses. For instance, our Institute had several tons of copper in store, or enough to have lasted us for perhaps ten years. But the stores manager was still afraid he might not have enough.

  The position was the same everywhere. Some undertakings had too much cement and too little timber. With others the situation was reversed. In both cases production was held up. The laws of the Soviet Union forbade factories to exchange materials among themselves, but the law was circumvented and this helped to alleviate the difficulties.

  Now, the stores manager in Makeyevka had enormous supplies piled up. A capital of scores of millions was frozen in this way. He was lucky. He did not have to suffer the tribulations of other stores managers: the powerful influence of Gvacharia opened all doors in Moscow.

  Gvacharia called the chief bookkeeper.

  “How much do stores represent in the balance sheet?”

  “Twenty millions, Comrade Director, and it’s constantly increasing. Unless our debtors pay promptly or the bank lends us money we shall be unable to meet the wage bill next month.”

  “Comrade Bookkeeper, from now on the bookkeeping department will receive an 0.1 per cent premium of the ready cash the works has available. I will issue a special order laying down how th
is premium is to be divided between you and your subordinates. Do your best therefore to get in all outstanding accounts as quickly as possible and to avoid all unnecessary purchases. Report to me whenever the stores manager makes unreasonable demands.”

  Gvacharia then summoned the stores manager and placed him squarely between Scylla and Charybdis. He gave him permission to hold stores to a certain amount, say, ten millions (I can’t, of course, remember now what the real figure was, but I give this one for the sake of illustration). For anything over that amount the stores department would henceforth have to pay interest to the bookkeeping department. On the other hand, the bookkeeping department would have to pay if the stores department did not hold stores up to the maximum. To prevent the stores manager from getting rid of his whole stores as quickly as possible in order to obtain the biggest possible reward, Gvacharia made the stores department conclude agreements with the various works departments. These departments put in their claims for materials for the next quarter one month in advance. Fines were imposed if the stores department failed to provide each of the works departments with the requisite materials. The stores manager was now in a dilemma: if he bought too much material he would need too much money and thus lose his premium to the bookkeeping department; on the other hand, if he bought too little he would have to pay fines for failing to deliver the requisite amounts of materials to the works departments.

  With this principle of payment by results Gvacharia rationalized the whole works. His experience was taken over by the Commissariat for Heavy Industry and soon his principle was in operation in the foundry industry throughout the Union. People like Gvacharia were the real initiators of the Stakhanov movement. What people like Alexander Stakhanov and Maria Demchenko did was not in the least spontaneous, but carefully prepared in advance by the Party and the administration.