The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  He drew nearer to me and lowered his voice.

  “He says they organized mock trials beforehand, except that the accused didn’t know that they were mock trials. Everything was exactly the same as on the real trial days, except that the court was crowded with G.P.U. men, some of them got up as foreign journalists and diplomats and so on. In this way they were able to test the reliability of the accused. The proceedings were opened. The accused were asked whether they admitted the charges against them. Those who thought they were in open court and denounced the whole thing as a farce were subsequently tortured and shot. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but there you are. Perhaps it isn’t, because they have ways and means of making anyone as soft as clay in the potter’s hand.”

  “Did you ask Leplesky about it?”

  “Yes, but he would neither admit nor deny it.”

  “Tell me, Bogutzky, what about Tukhachevsky? Do you think he was innocent too? Of course, I know that he and the others weren’t working for the Germans and the Japanese, but couldn’t he have been planning a military coup d’état with the others when he saw the state things were getting into?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Alexander Semyonovitch. When could he have been doing that? He was arrested in June, 1937, but for six months before that he was finished. He was cut off from everyone and dogged at every turn by the G.P.U. No one would even talk to him. How could he have organized coup d’états in those circumstances?”

  “I don’t understand that. Up to May he was Vice-Commissar for War and practically supreme commander of the Red Army.”

  “You don’t know Stalin. He plays with his victims as a cat plays with a mouse until the moment comes. A year before, Putna had been mentioned in the Zinoviev trial as a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist. Five months later at the Piatakov trial Radek mentioned the name of Tukhachevsky. Do you think he would have dared to do that if Yezhov hadn’t told him to? From that moment on Tukhachevsky was finished and everyone knew it. He continued in command of the Red Army for another six months, but every officer feared to be in the same room with him alone.”

  “Why did Gamarnik shoot himself?”

  “Because he was a man and not a dirty tripe-hound like Voroshilov or Budyenny. He was told he was to be a member of the Troika, together with Voroshilov and Budyenny, which was to try Tukhachevsky and the others. Yezhov showed him documentary proofs of Tukhachevsky’s guilt, but Gamarnik was head of the Political Administration of the Red Army. He had worked in close contact with the G.P.U. for years, and he knew a little about them and the way they worked, and he knew Yezhov very well. Naturally, he realized immediately that the proof was forged. He went to Stalin at once and in that talk he realized that the forger was Stalin himself and not Yezhov. He wanted no part in it so he went home and blew his brains out.”

  “But tell me one thing, Bogutzky. If Tukhachevsky was not preparing any coup against Stalin why did Stalin wipe out the General Staff of the Red Army?”

  “Because Stalin’s afraid of his own shadow. Tukhachevsky was tremendously popular. He wasn’t organizing any coup, but he could have done it, and that was enough for Stalin.”

  While I was in prison I had no opportunity of checking anything Bogutzky said. No one else had courage enough to discuss such matters. It was dangerous even to show any interest in them. But later on, during the Second World War, there was a rumor that the fall of Tukhachevsky and the destruction of the Red Army leadership had been brought about as the result of a provocation deliberately organized by Hitler. I was told about it in 1948 by the Polish author Herling-Grudzinski, who had been in prison in Leningrad together with various Red Army generals during the war, and later on I read the accounts of Churchill, Bend, Krivitzky and Walter Hagen, a former member of the German secret service.

  On the basis of the material now available there is no doubt that the compromising material against Tukhachevsky was manufactured at the orders of the German Gestapo leaders Heydrich and Behrens in the cellars of the Gestapo Headquarters in the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin, but the leaders of the Gestapo were merely cat’s-paws of Stalin.

  It was a much more dangerous thing for Stalin to liquidate the leaders of the Red Army than it was for him to liquidate the leaders of the former opposition, men who had already been broken and discredited by a series of public humiliations. It would also have been much more difficult to persuade men like Tukhachevsky and the others to make false confessions. He therefore chose a roundabout fashion and initiated the type of intrigue in which he is a master.

  Through an agent of the G.P.U. in Berlin who had ostensibly gone over to the Gestapo he suggested a plan to the German Gestapo leaders by which they could wipe out the leadership of the Red Army. With Hitler’s permission Heydrich set to work to forge the documents which were to provoke the Russians into wiping out their own generals. Correspondence between Tukhachevsky and the leaders of the Reichswehr was forged. At one time very good relations existed between the two armies, and this, no doubt, facilitated the forgeries. When they were completed they contained full proof of Tukhachevsky’s alleged treachery. At first an attempt was made to play this material into the hands of the Russians via Czechoslovakia, but in the end it was sold direct to the head of the G.P.U. of the Berlin Soviet Embassy. A few months previously the G.P.U. had found ways and means of letting Bend know that secret negotiations were allegedly taking place between Tukhachevsky and the German Reichswehr. Unfortunately, Bend did not see through the game and he therefore thought it his duty to warn Stalin against Tukhachevsky. The letter of warning was a gift for Stalin in the subsequent proceedings against Tukhachevsky. Churchill also failed to see through the provocation, and Heydrich was quite convinced that it was he and he alone who deserved credit for the wiping out of the General Staff of the Red Army. The S.S. General Behrens was a wiser man: “We were the tools of Stalin in the affair,” he declared to Heydrich.

  If Stalin had not been the wire-puller in the whole affair from the beginning such a clumsy provocation could never have succeeded. He would have ordered a real inquiry, and then it would have been child’s play for Tukhachevsky and the others to prove their innocence.

  In April the fate of Yezhov came up for discussion. By that time his pictures had finally disappeared from the walls.

  “He’s in prison himself now,” said Bogutzky.

  “Do you really think so?” I asked.

  “Alexander Semyonovitch, you obviously don’t know our little ways in the Party even now. When a member of the Politburo ‘resigns’ his position just before a Party Congress, every Russian knows which way the wind is blowing. ‘He won’t be at the Party Congress,’ they say to themselves. ‘He’s in an isolator already.’”

  There was a railway official named Kovalsky in our cell. He was a cross-grained old man and he used to irritate us by constantly bemoaning his fate, though I must admit that he certainly had had bad luck. Eight years before he had managed to get out of the Soviet Union. He had been in charge of freight trains crossing the frontier into Poland. Owing to the difference in gauge, all goods had to be unloaded from Russian trains and reloaded into Polish trains for the next stage of their journey. For this purpose Russian trains would be driven a short distance into Polish territory. Kovalsky had taken advantage of this to flee. He had a brother who was a Polish lawyer in Zdolbunovo, a little town about an hour’s journey from the frontier. So far so good, but after that Kovalsky’s story became rather less clear and convincing. He had got involved with a Polish politician and had been arrested as a Soviet spy. The Polish court had sentenced him to eight years’ imprisonment, and when he had served his time he had been put over the Soviet frontier illegally by the Polish police. He had given himself up and been transferred to the inner prison of Kiev, where he now awaited his fate, charged with illegally crossing the frontier as a Polish spy.

  He was certainly not a Polish spy, but whether he had been a fugitive or a Soviet agent when he went into Poland it was impossible
to discover. If you asked him questions to clear up doubtful points in his tale he would become disagreeable and abrupt. He was not a good companion and he depressed the general spirit in the cell.

  The third of my companions was Vassily Petrovitch Vudzhik, who had been Chief of the Ukrainian Customs Administration. For the G.P.U. he was now a Bukharinist and a Polish spy. He was a tall, slim man with pleasant features, and even in prison he retained a certain elegance of appearance. I spent about two months in almost complete isolation with these three men, and in that period I was called out twice for interrogation. The examiner acted as though there had been no change in the situation at all, and he continued to urge me to “confess.”

  “I have nothing whatever to confess,” I replied.

  “You won’t get away with that,” he declared. “You must confess something.”

  I made no attempt to discuss the matter seriously. I regarded his attitude as an anachronism and a waste of his time and mine.

  On the second occasion I was called out in connection with the evidence of a fellow prisoner named Gussak, a young engineer who had been employed at our research station. A year previously he had “confessed” that he belonged to my organization, and that I had recruited him.

  “Do you confirm the statement of the Accused Gussak?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Have you any comment to make?”

  “Yes, that I’m not a counterrevolutionary, and that I did not recruit Gussak for any counterrevolutionary organization.”

  “What is your opinion of Gussak?”

  “Well, I never liked him, but that doesn’t mean he’s a counterrevolutionary. In fact, to tell the truth I always suspected him of being one of your spies.”

  “So your relations to Gussak were unfriendly?”

  “Well, not friendly, shall we say.”

  “Very good, we’ll put that down.”

  That seemed quite harmless, and I signed a statement to the effect that my relations with Gussak had not been particularly friendly. The examiner seemed very pleased, and I realized that they probably intended to release Gussak and wanted something to place him in a favorable light and cleanse him of his fictitious sins.

  After that they left me alone for weeks on end, and I felt convinced that the critical period for me was over, and that they would now either release me or just deport me. But what were they waiting for?

  I had wasted away to a shadow of my former self, and I was always hungry. We received our bread ration at six o’clock in the morning. I marked four lines on my piece to give me five small portions to be eaten at fixed times throughout the day. I am afraid it usually all went in the morning. It is very difficult to master the pangs of hunger when you know you still have bread. Once the bread is gone then at least there’s no further struggle, just an ache.

  By the evening I was always weak with hunger and I often got into trouble for leaning against the wall. But I was so weak I couldn’t sit upright till eleven o’clock. The warder was not unfriendly, but he was absolutely insistent that the rules should be obeyed to the letter. Every few minutes he would open the hatch and point without a word at me.

  Another source of trouble was the position in which we had to sleep. In Kharkov I had slept for two years in my clothes, and in winter even in my overcoat, and no one had bothered. But in Kiev they attached importance to hygiene. A prisoner had to undress before he got into bed. Further, he had to keep his arms outside the covering, so that his hands could be seen, because a prisoner had once plaited a length of string under the covering and hanged himself with it. I found it extremely difficult to sleep like this. In my weakened condition my arms and shoulders felt the cold intensely. I did my best to persuade the warder to turn a blind eye, but it was impossible. Finally I just covered myself up and went to sleep without bothering about the rule.

  However, the warder was very experienced. He didn’t get angry with me or begin to bawl, but every five minutes he would open the hatch and wake me up. The opening of the hatch woke up the others as well, and under the combined pressure I had to give way. For three nights after that I couldn’t sleep at all, but then I found a way out of the difficulty; I slit two holes in the blanket and put my hands through so that the warder could see them while at the same time my shoulders remained covered. He was a reasonable man, and this satisfied him.

  Boredom was an oppressive thing in Kiev. There was nothing to do for seventeen hours. My stay in the Kholodnaya Gora had spoiled me for such a life, and I found the monotony of the prison regime in Kiev very difficult to bear.

  After the middle of May a new prisoner was brought in to us. His name was Ivan Dimitritch Yaroshenko, and we soon became friends. He was a man of medium height and considerable determination. His dark blue suit was in very good condition and of smart cut, and his general bearing was markedly confident. He would sit quietly on his bed or stand bolt upright as though to attention. I think he held himself deliberately upright in order to make the most of his height and appear as impressive as possible.

  He had led an adventurous life and at the time of his arrest he had been president of a trust in Kiev. He came of proletarian stock and his father was still a docker in Vladivostok. During the First World War he had been a sailor in the Tsarist, Navy and at the age of twenty he had thrown in his lot with the revolution. He left his ship and joined the Red Guards and later fought in the civil war with a group of partisans. The Far East was the last stronghold of the White generals, who were able to maintain themselves there with the support of the Japanese, who were in occupation, and for years an underground revolutionary struggle was waged there under the leadership of a famous partisan named Laso whose daring exploits had made his name known throughout the whole country. Yaroshenko joined Laso and took part in sabotage and attacks behind the enemy’s lines. In the end Laso was captured by the Japanese and put to death in an abominable fashion. Yaroshenko fought on with the remaining partisans until finally the whole Far Eastern area of the Soviet Union was cleared of both Japanese and Whites. He was quite willing to talk about his experiences, and his tales helped to while away the leaden time.

  “Once I was told to blow up a certain important railway tunnel,” he said. “I sent observers out to report on the lie of the land and they came back with bad news. The tunnel was very closely guarded, and a direct attack would have been too costly and perhaps unsuccessful. I had about a hundred and fifty men in small groups concealed in a neighboring forest. I decided not to risk a frontal attack so I dispersed my men and prepared to do the thing on my own. Our experts prepared two cases of explosives with fuses, and disguised as a peasant I drove off in a small farm cart to the first railway station outside the tunnel. I was supposed to be taking cheese to market. It was forbidden for civilians to be in trains going through that tunnel, but I managed to persuade the guard of a freight train to take me in exchange for half a pound of mahorka.{16} I got into the last truck with my two cases and off we went. In the middle of the tunnel I set the fuses going and pushed the two cases out onto the track. The train rumbled on. As soon as we were out of the tunnel and safely away from the guards I sprang off the train and fled. I heard the dull rumble of the explosion while I was still in flight. The tunnel was out of action for a very long time.

  “The whole thing had quite an amusing sequel. Years later when I was Chairman of the Khabarovsk Soviet a railwayman came to me with a complaint. I immediately recognized him as the guard of the goods train. He was threatened with eviction from his home. I listened to his story. ‘Comrade,’ I said, ‘you shall have another place and a better one, but first you must tell me where we met before.’ He looked at me in astonishment. But, Comrade Chairman, I’ve never seen you before.’ ‘You have, you know,’ I replied. ‘Think hard. Your house depends on it.’ And then suddenly he recognized me. His eyes blazed and I think that but for my position he would have sprung at my throat. ‘You were the cause of what they did to me,’ he declared in great excitement. ‘You
blew the tunnel up and left me to face the trouble afterward. The Japanese arrested and tortured me and I was in prison for three months.’ I calmed him down and gave him good living accommodations. He had certainly earned it.”

  During the civil war Yaroshenko often went over the Manchurian frontier to organize grain supplies for the Red Army, and he won over the Chonchusen—Manchurian robber bands—for the revolutionary cause. What he told us about conditions in Manchuria in those days was simply fantastic, and if only half of it was true they must have been wild, disorderly and lawless times.

  ‘When the civil war came to an end Yaroshenko had the usual career of a Communist who had done good service. At the end of 1937 he was arrested. His past services now made him a Japanese spy in the eyes of the G.P.U. In addition he was alleged to have conspired with his old partisan comrades to rise against the Soviet power. He was one of the few who refused to confess and held out to the end.

  “Why are they arresting all the former partisans?” I asked Bogutzky.

  “The G.P.U. thinks they might be dangerous. They still keep in touch with each other and they glorify the old times. That in itself is cause for misgiving. You see, people who have once taken to the woods and risked their lives for freedom might easily get the idea of doing it again.”

  Yaroshenko brought new life and energy into our cell. He made us do physical exercises every morning. I refused, saying I was too weak from lack of food and had to husband my strength.

  “You shall share with me, Alexander Semyonovitch,” he said with determination, and when lavochka day came round he bought the full quota permitted and shared it exactly with me. At first I was unwilling to accept anything more than bread, but he became very angry and declared that I was insulting his comradeship, so I gave way. From then on he fed me. He had a number of less pleasant characteristics: he was ambitious, excessively proud and very sensitive. Above all, he could not bear to be corrected before others. To be proved wrong was a humiliation. When on one occasion I corrected something he had said he was furious. He lost his temper completely and there was a very disagreeable scene. After that my material dependence on him depressed me and I refused to touch the food he had put out for me.