They left me alone for hours. After a while I wanted to go to the lavatory, so I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I tried again. Still no answer. My need was becoming urgent and I began to hammer. Still no warder came, but a woman’s voice sounded from the next room and we got talking. Much to my surprise, when I mentioned my name she began to sob.
“You’re the cause of my misfortune,” she exclaimed.
Her name was Jerusalem if I remember rightly, and she had come to the Soviet Union from Germany. I had never seen her in my life but she had been acquainted with Houtermanns. However, as she now told me, the G.P.U. had appointed her one of my accomplices. Under pressure she had confessed that I had recruited her for my counterrevolutionary organization and given her orders for espionage and sabotage. Her idea of cause and effect seemed out of joint to me, but there was very little point in discussing it. In the room on the other side there was a man who joined in the discussion. He turned out to be another of my fellow conspirators. He, too, had been under my orders. I had never even heard of him.
I was anxious to know who else was supposed to have been in my organization, and they mentioned Professor Obremov, the first Director of the Institute, Fritz Houtermanns, and two other people whose names were unknown to me. We turned to our present situation. Did they intend to release us now? The other two were skeptical. They had neither of them withdrawn their confessions and so we were all still compromised.
In the meantime my need grew more and more urgent, and I asked them to knock on their doors, which gave on to the corridor. They did so vigorously, but still nothing happened. I was beginning to suffer agonies and in the end I could stand it no longer and so I used one of the empty drawers of the desk.
It grew late. If they let us go now the trolleys would no longer be running. I would have to walk a long way to the Institute and I had no money. I didn’t even know Lena’s new address. It was very unlikely that Ruhemann was still there. Leipunsky’s wife would probably get a fright if I went to her and be unwilling to offer me shelter. I needn’t have worried.
In the early morning they came for me. I was taken to another room and very carefully searched. Then I had to give them all my particulars, including the particulars of my parents and grandparents. Then they were unable to find my case. They searched for it everywhere for over two hours, but it was nowhere to be found.
“All right,” one of them said finally. “We’ll have to send it on.” “Send it on?” I asked. “Where?”
They made no answer, and from this minor detail I came to the conclusion that I was not to be released after all. I was not even disappointed. I realized that I was a little afraid of sudden freedom.
In the end I went off under G.P.U. escort. A car took us to a lonely railway station and there we took a train. We were alone in the compartment. It was dark and I was unable to estimate the direction we were traveling by the stars. Our journey lasted for about twelve hours, and as Moscow was seventeen hours’ journey by fast train I guessed that the large town into which we had now rolled was Kiev.
A car was waiting and it drove off rapidly and took me to a prison. The cell into which I was put had proper beds and bed linen. The occupants woke up when I was brought in.
“You’ll excuse me, comrades,” I said, “but I’ve only a very foggy notion as to where I am. Where are we?”
“The inner G.P.U. prison of Kiev.”
CHAPTER 15—Kiev
THE MASS CELLS OF THE KHOLODNAYA GORA WERE DIRTY, AND prisoners lay pressed close together on the bare floors. The air was fetid from their breath and their bodily exhalations and flatulence’s. Very few of them ever had the chance of a change of linen, and their underclothing and shirts were filthy.
However, social life in the mass cells was interesting and the general regime in the Kholodnaya Cora was not severe. Constant comings and goings between the brikhalovka and Kholodnaya Gora broke down the attempts at isolation, and at the same time a steady flow of new prisoners kept us in touch with the outside world. Some of the bigger mass cells held between two and three hundred prisoners each, and each cell was a real world of its own, and a very interesting world, for among the prisoners were real personalities. Scientific and literary lectures were delivered and there were long and interesting discussions.
By comparison the inner prisons were living graves. That was the case in Kharkov and it was the same in Kiev. The cells were clean and there was no overcrowding. Each prisoner had his own bed and his own bed linen, and his personal linen was washed once a month. But the regime was oppressive. For one thing, there was never a loud word. Even the warders spoke in subdued tones and the prisoners answered them in the same way, and when they spoke to each other they had to whisper. Every few minutes the spy-hole in the cell door flicked open. Prisoners had to be kept under constant observation.
From eleven o’clock at night until six o’clock in the morning a prisoner had to be in his bed. During the day he was allowed to sit down, but not to lean against anything. There was nothing whatever to do: no pencil, no paper, no chess, no checkers, no dominoes, no books and no lectures.
There were not more than a few hundred prisoners in the inner prison in Kharkov, while the Kholodnaya Gora held something like twelve thousand. It was the same in Kiev. All the inner prisons were run along the same strict lines in order to ensure the greatest possible degree of isolation.
During the first night of my stay in Kiev I changed my cell twice, and finally I came to rest in a cell with six beds, three of which were already occupied. I introduced myself to my new cellmates. The most interesting prisoner was Bogutzky, a Red Army general, a famous hero of the civil war and the leader of the Kiev insurrection. His wife and son had fallen into the hands of the Whites. The woman was so beaten that she became a cripple for life and the boy’s eyes were put out. They also caught Bogutzky himself, but they had no time to attend to him as they would have liked because the Reds were close on their heels, so they put him against a wall and left him for dead. But although he was wounded in sixteen places he still lived and recovered to take a command in the Red Army. He was wounded again in battle and lost his right arm. The sight of his crippled wife and his blinded son was a never-ending source of suffering, particularly as he was no longer of an age when he could expect more children. In 1936 a famous Russian ophthalmologist wrote a paper on the transfer of corneas in order to enable the blind to see again. I remembered the discussion this paper aroused in scientific circles. As far as I can remember experiments had thus far been conducted only on animals. Bogutzky, who was, of course, greatly interested in such matters, volunteered to sacrifice one of his eyes for his son, but nothing ever came of it because he was arrested soon afterward and charged with terrorism. On the instructions of a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist organization he was to have assassinated his chief, Voroshilov, by shooting him with a revolver. In addition he was a spy in the pay of a foreign power and he had organized diversionary activity. In particular he had planned a coup with his brother officers against the Kremlin, in order to seize the Government.
The part of the indictment on which the Prosecutor laid chief stress was the plan against the life of Voroshilov. Bogutzky refused to confess. He was confronted with his best friend, who had already confessed and implicated him, but Bogutzky was not to be intimidated.
“When the Whites tortured you you held out like a man, but now you give way when you’re only beaten. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I fought against the Whites,” his friend replied, “but I don’t want to fight against the Soviet power.”
Bogutzky held out for a long time. He was a proud and impulsive man, but now he was well over sixty, and his nerves, which had been through the revolution and the civil war, were unable to hold out forever against this new kind of burden. The examiner soon discovered the old man’s weak point: his pride and his dignity, and then everything was done to break both. He was subjected to the worst possible humiliations. The Na
zi swastika was pinned to his breast and he was mocked in chorus. On another occasion the examiner took a spittoon and emptied its foul contents over the gray head of the former hero of Kiev.
His friend Vudzhik told me in whispers that on returning from that examination the old man had broken down and wept. For hours he had muttered:
“And my son lost his sight for that. My wife was crippled for that. I lost my right arm for that.”
The next day Bogutzky had asked to see the examiner. He had been given pen and paper and then he had written a long and fantastic confession admitting everything with which he was charged, and much more besides. At the same time he abused Voroshilov violently, declaring him to be a foul coward and a mean crawler. Of course, this part of his confession was not included in the deposition.
The turning point with the “resignation” of Yezhov had been noted in Kiev, but not so clearly as in the Kholodnaya Gora, although it is true that in Kiev I was held only in the inner prison and I did not know what was going on in the bigger prisons. Only very few of the prisoners in the inner prison in Kiev had withdrawn their confessions as a result of the new situation. Bogutzky also made no attempt to do so, but he showed his contempt for the examiner at every opportunity. Bogutzky was a proletarian Hampden. He could not knuckle under for long, and he couldn’t keep quiet. In the land of the totalitarian lie such a temperament was dangerous.
We tried to persuade him to withdraw his confession but he refused.
“Every man jack of them knows who I am,” he declared. “Why should I bother to withdraw all that nonsense? They know perfectly well that none of it’s true.”
“But they’re in an awkward position themselves, Comrade Bogutzky. They’re only doing what they’re instructed to do.”
“They ought to throw themselves into the Dnieper rather than lay their dirty hands on me and my comrades.”
In the end they sent his case before the Military Tribunal, instead of to OSO. Before his trial he was called before the Prosecutor to clear up one or two doubtful points. The Prosecutor was a young fellow and perhaps not very experienced. He looked at the one-armed terrorist in some surprise and asked:
“But why did your comrades choose you to carry out the assassination? I take it you were right-handed and therefore you can’t shoot so well with your left?”
“Listen, young man,” said Bogutzky grimly, “my comrades didn’t choose me and there was no such organization, and why the examiner picked me out for the job I don’t know either. You must ask him.”
“But I don’t understand you. Here are all the details of the organization as provided and signed by you.”
“You’d have signed all that and more besides if they’d treated you as they treated me, Comrade Prosecutor.”
The Prosecutor broke off the discussion, gave Bogutzky pen and paper and told him to write out the whole story.
Bogutzky was the only one of us all, to my knowledge, who exposed the vile comedy in which we had all been forced to play the parts assigned to us, and in his statement he dealt openly with a subject which we all knew to be taboo: the secret of the show trials.
“The fault is Stalin’s,” he said to me one day at exercise. “The hangmen who carry out the executions change. Yagoda, Yezhov and now Beria, but Stalin remains.”
“I know that perfectly well,” I replied, “but can you explain why the accused in the show trials publicly confessed to things they had never done and in many cases couldn’t possibly have done?”
“Yes, I can. Men like Muralov were tortured fiendishly for months before they finally gave way. Cowards like Radek invented all the appropriate crimes after the first clout and when they were promised their lives.”
“But not one of them could really have any confidence in such a promise once they had confessed and publicly confirmed their confessions.”
“Oh, yes they could! I was in a cell together with People’s Commissar Leplesky, the head of the Ukrainian G.P.U., and I learned a thing or two from him, my boy.”
“Wasn’t he Military Vice-Prosecutor for Moscow?”
“No, that was his brother, but he was arrested too.”
We were, of course, not supposed to talk to each other at exercise, but there was one warder with a broad, good-natured peasant face who deliberately looked the other way. He would even occasionally address a friendly unofficial word to us. At the end of August he disappeared.
Bogutzky came back to the subject at the next convenient opportunity.
“Leplesky knew what he was talking about,” he said. “What’s happened to us here is a flea-bite compared with what those poor devils in Moscow went through before they finally gave way.”
“But they could have denounced it all in open court. Foreign journalists and diplomats were present, and the eyes of the whole world were on them.”
“Of course they couldn’t have been touched in court, but afterward in the cellars of the G.P.U. it would have been different. They knew that, and they’d already gone through as much as they could stand. Take the case of Krestinsky. He withdrew his confession in court at the Bukharin trial. And what happened? A world scandal? Nothing of the sort. Ulbrich, the Presiding Judge, just ignored him for the rest of the day. During the night the G.P.U. dealt with him, and the following day he was back in court as meek as a lamb, declaring that his withdrawal had been a counterrevolutionary maneuver intended to discredit the examination methods. What more do you want?”{15}
The mystery of the show trials exercised my mind constantly, and we came back to the point again and again.
“Leplesky told me that the sixteen accused in the first trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their friends, were all personally promised their lives by Stalin if they would confess and go through with it in open court. To lull them into a sense of security the law against terrorism was amended a week before they came up for trial.”
That was quite true. After the assassination of Kirov, a special law against terrorism had been passed making the death sentence obligatory in all cases and abolishing all provisions for an appeal or a commutation of the death sentence. Before the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial this law was amended to allow reprieves.
“All right, Comrade Bogutzky, assuming that the first sixteen accused were tricked like that, what about those who came up for trial six months later: Piatakov, Muralov and the others? They knew that the others had been shot, and they at least couldn’t have had any confidence in promises.”
“I was starosta in a cell with eight Red Army officers and sixteen G.P.U. men. One of the G.P.U. men, who came from Moscow, told me that although Pravda announced the execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others the day after their conviction, which was on August 24 1936, they were not really executed until five days later, and there was a very good reason for that. The accused in the second show trial, apart from Piatakov and Radek, were almost all arrested by then. They were shown the announcement of the sixteen executions in Pravda and then they were shown the men who had allegedly been executed. They were all in the best of health and glad to be alive. They declared that they all had to abandon their names and take numbers, and then they were to go to an isolator and never to let anyone know their real names under pain of death. They had been promised the use of a large reference library where they could do scientific work. Stalin had insisted that the whole country should be united under a single leadership, his own, and they had been compelled to give way. Five days after that the sixteen men of the Zinoviev-Kamenev group were taken out and secretly executed. The others knew nothing about that, and when Piatakov and Radek were arrested it was easy for the G.P.U. to persuade them that the death sentences were not meant seriously.”
Of course, it might have happened just like that, but I wasn’t altogether convinced. Many of the men were of the highest physical and moral courage, heroes of the underground before the revolution, heroes of the revolution itself and heroes of the bloody civil war which followed it. They had never hesitated to risk death. Why sho
uld they suddenly attach so much importance to life? It was the Old Guard of Lenin that Stalin had exterminated. Surely among them there would have been one or two who preferred death to dishonor? I put this point to Bogutzky.
“Alex, my friend, you no longer have a wife here and you have no children,” he said bitterly. “Most of those men would have accepted death willingly, but not further torture. Many of them had wives and children, all in the G.P.U. cellars. Many of those men would have been prepared to suffer torture themselves, but not to see their wives tortured. I would have confessed anything at all and done it publicly: a pact with the Devil himself, never mind Hitler, sooner than see them lay a hand on my wife.”
“Yes, I see that, but I don’t see how Stalin could have risked a revelation in open court.”
“Was the risk so very great? They were kept apart. Each man could speak only for himself. Krestinsky could withdraw his own confession, but he couldn’t withdraw Bukharin’s or Yagoda’s. They had no chance of getting together and agreeing to act in concert. They saw each other for the first time since their arrest when they were brought into court. And there’s another thing. About seventy people were brought to public trial all together, but there were several hundred candidates for the role. Those who wouldn’t agree were tortured to death. And then there’s something I find difficult to believe myself, but the G.P.U. men insisted that it was true. If it is it explains a lot.”
The Accused Page 56