The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  Thus Gvacharia was a very valuable man, but he had one black mark in his record. In 1927, at a time when open discussion still took place in the Party, he had voted for Trotsky. Long since he had returned to the fold and become a true Stalinist, but Stalin’s memory was a long one and Gvacharia’s youthful sin was never forgiven. As long as Ordzhonnikidze lived he was left in peace to get on with his work, but the Commissar for Heavy Industry died soon after the Piatakov trial, and a few months later Gvacharia was arrested. The newspapers which had resounded with praise for his great services now denounced him as “an enemy of the people.” It was reported that he had been shot, and it was probably true.

  After that it was the turn of all the directors of the big foundries in the Donetz Basin and the Dniepropetrovsk district. A few months later their successors were arrested too. It was only the third or fourth batch who managed to keep their seats. In this way the direction of the foundry industry came into the hands of young and inexperienced men. They had not even the normal advantages of youth in their favor, for the choosing had been a very negative one. They were the men who had denounced others on innumerable occasions. They had bowed the knee whenever they had come up against higher authority. They were morally and intellectually crippled. The great era of Soviet industrialization was over. The heroic era of the Soviet foundry industry ended with men like Gvacharia, Rogachevsky and Birman. Their successors were little men, and it was not long before the fact began to make itself obvious.

  Day after day fresh prisoners brought the news of further arrests all over the country, but we had already grown indifferent. The governments of the minor republics had almost been liquidated. The process had begun six months earlier with the suicide of the President of the White-Russian Soviet Republic, Cherviakov. A week later almost all the other members of his government were arrested. The same thing took place in the Ukraine, where the government changed several times with G.P.U. assistance. There is little point in mentioning names. Who abroad has heard of Lubchenko, the President of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars? Or of Shatayevitch, the Secretary of the Dniepropetrovsk District Committee? But the names meant something to us. Before the Great Purge the local Party Secretary was the most powerful man in the district; now it was the chief of the G.P.U. And almost all the old district Party Secretaries had been arrested. The fate of Shatayevitch touched us closely, for he was a just and upright man with heart and understanding. The Kharkov District Party Secretary, Demchenko, was also arrested. That left us cold, but his predecessor Postishev was a different type. Although formally subordinate to Kossior, he was in fact the leading figure in the Ukraine. Stalin had instructed him to purge the Party and the Government from nationalistic elements, and after the suicide of Skrypnik, an old Bolshevik and a member of the Central Committee, Postishev had taken over with great energy and resource. At the beginning of 1938 there had been rumors that he had been sent to the Volga, where most of those who were dismissed were first sent. Then it was reported that he had been arrested. He was the only man who had become tremendously popular after only a short stay in the Ukraine, and when the masses marched past the saluting base on May Day and November demonstrations it was always to the powerful figure of Postishev their eyes turned. He was too popular. Stalin is a jealous god who brooks no rival.

  Almost all the leading Generals of the Red Army had gone. Of the five Soviet Marshals, Tukhachevsky had been shot, Blücher and Yegorov arrested. There were rumors even about Budyenny. Only Voroshilov was left in the Politburo. Budyenny’s pictures all disappeared from the walls. It was said that he had been arrested and then released. His pictures appeared again on the walls.

  The liquidation of the leaders of the Red Army had still shocked us deeply. What came after that affected us less. The Red Army was as well-loved among the masses of the people as the G.P.U. was hated. I well remember my own feelings. In February, 1937, after I had already been summoned to the G.P.U. three times, I was walking in a very depressed mood along the Ulitsa Pushkina in Kharkov when I met a column of the Red Army. The men were singing, and the sight of them brought the tears to my eyes. Inwardly I had already finished with the Communist Party, but the Red Army still remained the symbol of the great revolution for me.

  The eight Generals who lost their lives with Tukhachevsky were all well-known throughout the country. Tukhachevsky had the reputation of being a great military technician, and people were convinced that in the next war he would prove himself a great strategist as well. It was he who had mechanized the Red Army and introduced the idea of parachute units. Personally he was said to be a hard man and unapproachable, but people were convinced of his loyalty and devotion, and they knew that he was pushing forward the modernization of the Red Army with great energy.

  The chief of the armed forces in the Ukraine, General Yakir, was much loved. When the revolution broke out in 1917 he had been a weakly Jewish student, but during the civil war he had performed legendary feats of heroism, and afterward at the Military Academy he had won the admiration of the old professional officers who were still in charge of it then by his tireless studies.

  General Kork had been commander of the Moscow garrison. All the troops in the Moscow military district—including those who guarded the Kremlin—had been under his command. Later he had become head of the Military Academy.

  General Feldmann was in charge of the personnel administration of the Red Army. General Uborevitch was in command of the White-Russian military district. General Putna was Soviet military attaché in London. General Primakov was a cavalryman. General Eidemann was head of the Ossoaviakhim, the organization responsible for liaison between the Red Army and the people.

  General Gamarnik, who shot himself in May, 1937, was head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army and Navy, and his duties had brought him into close touch with the G.P.U. It was always easy to recognize him on the platform at the May Day and November celebrations because he was the only one of the high officers of the Red Army with a long beard. In the course of his duties, it was said, he had heard of the plans against Tukhachevsky and the others, and he had preferred to commit suicide rather than have any hand in the affair. But there were also rumors that he had been shot while resisting arrest.

  The Generals were not brought before an open court but were tried by a secret military tribunal of which Voroshilov and Budyenny were said to have been members. Shortly afterward all the Generals were executed. We in prison knew already that the accused at the Moscow show trials were innocent. We knew that the crimes to which they had confessed were just as imaginary as the ones to which we had confessed. But where the Generals were concerned we were doubtful. Was it conceivable that Stalin would recklessly destroy the General Staff of the Red Army without some reason? What was behind it all?

  The official charge that Tukhachevsky and the others were German agents and had betrayed Soviet military dispositions to the Germans and the Japanese we regarded as an insult to the Red Army. For us they were heroes of the revolution and the civil war, and their personal integrity was beyond all question.

  Tukhachevsky and his Generals—apart from Gamarnik—had never been politicians, and they had taken no part whatever in the Party struggles. None of them had ever had any connection with the opposition. They were men to whom the country had entrusted its armed forces, and their activity was confined to strengthening and modernizing those forces.

  Why had Stalin had them shot? I often discussed the problem with Sborovsky and in the end we came to the following conclusion:

  Tukhachevsky and his associates must, like Ordzhonnikidze, have been horrified at the slaughter of the Old Guard of Bolshevism in the series of show trials. But their revulsion was dangerous. They were in command of the armed forces, including in particular the Moscow garrison. They could seize the Kremlin. They could easily give such an order, ostensibly in the interests of Stalin’s safety and that of the Politburo, and later, with one or two reliable officers, they could arrest Stalin.
Had there perhaps been a conspiracy after all? It seemed unlikely to us, but it was conceivable that Tukhachevsky had expressed some such ideas to Kork or to some other high officer with whom he was intimate. Someone might then have betrayed him to Stalin. That would have been enough to deprive the Red Army of its leaders. Or perhaps the whole thing was a provocation by Yezhov, anxious to show Stalin what important conspiracies he was able to unmask? It was difficult to know. In any case, the beheading of the Red Army shook the country far more than the destruction of the former opposition. Even the G.P.U. began to tremble....

  Postishev was the first member (candidate member, to be exact) of the Politburo to go, but others soon followed. Kossior was Stalin’s representative in the Ukraine. He was a colorless personality but one of the most powerful men in the country, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party and member of the All-Russia Politburo. The leading People’s Commissars; the President of the Union, Kalinin; the General Secretary of the Party, Stalin; and the three Party Secretaries of the Moscow and Leningrad districts and of the Ukraine—all were members of the Politburo. All power was concentrated into the hands of ten men, and not one of them had ever shown the slightest sign of any oppositionist tendency, and most of them had fought with Stalin against the opposition. Kossior was one of them. Such men at least were immune from the attacks of the G.P.U., we thought.

  Now, almost all of us were accused of being spies, and many of us were terrorists in addition. The imaginary terrorism of which we were guilty was directed not only against Stalin but against almost all the members of the Politburo. Even at the trial of Zinoviev, Vishinsky had declared on August 22, 1936, that the Trotskyists had lifted their hand against the leaders of our Party, against Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovitch, Ordzhonnikidze, Kossior and Postishev.”

  From this point of view the dismissal and probable arrest of Postishev was odd. A man whom the opposition was charged with having sought to assassinate was now arrested as himself a member of the opposition? That seemed more than strange. But worse was to come.

  In the Kharkov G.P.U. prison and in Kholodnaya Gora there were about fifty students charged with terrorism. Allegedly they had formed an organization to assassinate Kossior. The investigations dragged on interminably. Everyone in the prison knew about it and we constantly met the accused in the brikhalovka because the G.P.U. was no longer able to isolate them effectively.

  They had already confessed in full detail. At a Party conference the light was suddenly to be turned off, and in the ensuing confusion Kossior was to be killed. With painstaking care the examiners had succeeded in the course of a year’s work in getting every statement to fit every other. All the necessary confrontations had been satisfactorily made, and the examination was at an end when in 1938 came news that Kossior himself had been arrested as a Trotskyist.

  Two of these students were in the cell next to ours. Excitedly we tapped through the news. What would happen now? The whole web of lies the G.P.U. had so meticulously constructed had now been torn to shreds. If Kossior was a leading Trotskyist why should his Trotskyist followers conspire to assassinate him? Was there such confusion in the ranks of the counter-revolution that the counterrevolutionaries did not know who was for them and who against?

  The two students came in for general congratulations, and everyone felt sure they would be released. For a few days nothing at all happened. Then the two were called out for examination. They came back in a terrible state. They had been beaten up. We were horrified.

  “What was that for? What do they want now?”

  Both of the students said the same thing. As soon as they had come before the examiner he had greeted them furiously:

  “You lousy Trotskyists. So you thought you could lead us up the garden path with your provocations? And now tell the truth about your real crimes or we’ll break every bone in your body.”

  The two youngsters were in despair. Their examination in the Kossior affair had been concluded and they had both signed the final depositions. The examiner had demanded that they confess to the plot against Kossior and they had duly confessed. What did he want them to confess now? He hadn’t said. Just left them to guess, and in the meantime he had beaten them black and blue.

  A few days later a little light was cast on the matter. Through an N.K.V.D. stool pigeon the students received an intimation of what they were expected to confess to this time. And they both went in and confessed it. Everything they had already said was correct in every detail, but the victim was to have been not Kossior but Kaganovitch. They had mentioned Kossior’s name in order to deceive the G.P.U. and to give the Trotskyist Kossior the glory of being a man whom the opposition sought to destroy.

  The examiner was too tired of the whole business to start all over again, so all the old depositions were used, but wherever the name Kossior occurred it was now replaced by the name Kaganovitch, and every correction had to be signed by the accused. At last everything was in order. The depositions went off to OSO and in due course the students went off to camps.

  The reader should not get the impression that we were at liberty to talk freely in the cells. It is true that because we were already arrested we were not as inhibited as people outside, but even we had to be careful. Certain subjects were never discussed, or if they were discussed then only between personal friends in the greatest secrecy. For instance, it was very rare that anyone openly expressed any doubt about the guilt of the accused in the Moscow show trials, although we were almost all perfectly certain that for reasons of his own Stalin had sent innocent men to their deaths. What made things particularly dangerous for us was that the G.P.U. had its stool pigeons in many of the cells. It was not difficult to find out who they were because, apart from keeping the G.P.U. informed about what went on in the cells, it was their job to assist the more naïve prisoners to draw up their confessions. The need for mass production compelled the G.P.U. to use this method. There wasn’t enough time to wait until a prisoner had realized what was required of him. On the other hand, they couldn’t very well dictate the whole deposition themselves. Generally speaking, these confession fabricators were kept in the inner prison. Most of them were not ordinary stool pigeons at all. When they drew up confessions they often did so with the interests of the prisoner in mind, and their products consisted of much talk and very little fact, but sometimes they included facts which a prisoner could later disprove. In 1939, after the great change, all the prisoners who had not yet been sent to camps withdrew their confessions. If they were able to disprove certain of the details they stood a better chance of securing a reopening of their cases.

  Although there were rarely stool pigeons in the smaller cells of the Kholodnaya Gora, Makedon was always very cautious, and I was the only one he trusted. He would quarrel furiously with me, but he was quite certain I would never betray him.

  “What do you think of Misha?” he asked me one day. “Do you think he’s a spy?”

  Now Misha, who looked after Kushnarenko so touchingly, was a very fine intelligent young fellow. Nevertheless, in the peculiar circumstances of our imprisonment he might have had some understanding with the G.P.U. We had nothing definite to go on, but both Makedon and I had acquired a seventh sense about such matters, and we felt it was just as well to be careful.

  “Why do you talk to him?” asked Makedon when he had discovered my feelings. “If you must talk, talk to Sborovsky or Kushnarenko. With a fellow like Misha you can never be sure. A few unconsidered words and you’re in the soup.”

  Makedon kept a guard on his tongue, but sometimes things were too much for him. He had been a real Stalinist, and a real Stalinist knew perfectly well that the whole official theory was a tissue of lies. In his time Makedon had caused the expulsion of quite a number of Party members, and on innumerable occasions he had voted enthusiastically for “the wiping of these vermin off the face of the earth.” Now he was all the more furious because he, who had always been on the side of the powerf
ul and had never shown any weakness in the struggle against the opposition, was now in prison with the rest of us. While only Gevondi was in the cell with us he would often wake me up at night to talk about it.

  “You know,” he said on one occasion, “when this business is over, all power will be in the hands of one man, and things will become impossible. He won’t be overthrown from within. That idea’s silly. But do you think other countries will stand for it?”

  He had spoken very softly. I told him my opinion. If he heard steps in the corridor he would start up and begin to abuse me for inveigling him into dangerous conversations.

  “There might be a microphone in the cell,” he pointed out. “We oughtn’t even to think such things.”

  On another occasion he declared: “Alexander Semyonovitch, I’m quite sure they’ll never let a fellow like you get away again. You’ll probably be sent to the Far North to rot. But should you by any chance be right and they do let you go, then at least learn your lesson and have nothing more to do with politics. You’re an engineer. Don’t go back to Europe; they’ve got enough engineers there. Go to Persia or to Turkey, and make a lot of money.”

  The stream of new prisoners arrested as the aftermath of the Bukharin trial gradually subsided. In May most of them went off to the camps. I had to go into hospital for a few days and when I returned the cell was occupied only by what seemed to be its irreducible minimum: Makedon and Gevondi. Kushnarenko, Sborovsky, Lagodin and Misha had all gone, and I had had no opportunity of saying good-by to them. I missed Sborovsky in particular. We had often lain side by side at night and talked in whispers. I enjoyed my discussions with him because he was the only one who had any real idea of what life abroad was like. He had thought very deeply about the mistakes of the Russian Revolution, trying to decide those which could have been avoided and that would be avoided if a revolution ever came in Europe. After the experiences of the Great Purge most of us felt, consciously or unconsciously, that up to the death of Lenin the policy of the revolution had been more or less correct. The isolation of the revolution in a peasant country without wide-scale industrialization and without a strong and homogeneous industrial proletariat had then led to the Bonapartist dictatorship of Stalin. We completely approved of Lenin’s theories and we just as completely opposed Stalin’s practices.