The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “Tell me,” he asked, “is there a chemical works on the river—perhaps twenty or twenty-five miles above the place where you pipe off fi your water?”

  “As a matter of fact there is, but what’s that got to do with it?” “There must be phenol in the waste the chemical works discharges into the river.”

  “We thought of that, of course, but throughout the summer our water was all right and yet the chemical works was discharging its waste all the time.”

  “Yes, but flowing water is cleansing and the phenol amalgamations normally decompose in it. However, the speed of reaction depends on the temperature. In summer when the temperature is high the reaction is rapid and so the distance between the chemical works and your pipe point is enough, but in winter when temperatures are low it isn’t, and so you get phenol still present in the water you pump into your system.”

  “What can we do about that?”

  “Aren’t your chemical works under an obligation to cleanse their wastes before they discharge them?”

  “It would take years to get that through here.”

  “In that case you must build a water-cleansing station. The latest method is with charcoal filters. I can explain the process to your engineers if you’d like.”

  At two o’clock in the morning, London rang me up. Was I a friend of Taussig? Could I persuade him to stay in the Soviet Union and build the cleansing station?

  “But the man is only on holiday. He’s got his job in Vienna and I suppose he’s expected to go back to it. He’s under contract, I’ve no doubt.”

  “Have a chat with him, Comrade Weissberg, will you? Try to persuade him to stay. Tell him it’s important for our country.”

  “I don’t see why that should impress him much. He’s not one of us. You’d have just as much influence on him as I would, probably more. He’s no more than a chance acquaintance of mine.”

  “I’ll ring him up right away.”

  “Don’t be silly. You couldn’t do anything worse than drag him out of bed at this time of the night. He’s not Russian. He won’t understand your funny little ways. Wait till the morning.”

  Early the next morning, London invaded Taussig’s room, practically kidnaped him and took him off in a car to Kharkov. Taussig was to survey conditions on the spot and estimate all the requirements. He did so and presented his results to London, who clung to him like a limpet and begged him to draft the technical plans. Taussig, who was interested in the project, wired to Vienna asking for an extension of leave. When he had completed the technical plans, the working drawings had to be made, and he stayed on to do that. And finally the work itself had to be directed. This time Taussig canceled his contract and stayed on to assist in the building up of socialism. It was his job to see that the workers of the Donetz Basin got proper supplies of good drinking water, and he did it. He was decorated for his services and the press even published a laudatory article about his work.

  In Kharkov Taussig met Shura, who was a draftsman employed by the trust. Before long they were a pair, and a very handsome pair too. Shura was strong and healthy, with a beautiful body and an untamable temperament. My wife and I were always glad to see the two of them. Shura came from Pensa, where, according to tradition, the real Russians come from. She was a platinum blonde, a real one, with green eyes and a fair complexion, Mongolian cheekbones and a broad smooth forehead; altogether a very attractive young woman.

  When he had finished building the cleansing station Taussig proposed to come and work with me in the Institute, but I advised him to go abroad again for a year to study low temperatures, and then to come back, by which time our experimental station would be completed and he could then take charge of the engineering office. Taussig went and in the meantime Shura waited only for him to come back. He remained abroad rather more than a year and when the time came for him to return, the atmosphere in the Soviet Union had changed. Kirov had been assassinated and mistrust and fear were rising everywhere. We were not exempt from the general deterioration, and Davidovitch was already Director of the Institute. He was very unwilling to employ any more foreigners and he made me write to Taussig calling the whole project off.

  Shura was desperate. She was a Komsomolka, but although she was really unpolitical, she had grown up with the Soviet Union. At the same time she longed for the man she loved with all the passionate ardor that Russian women of her type are capable of. The Soviet state proved the stronger.

  In those days she could easily have obtained an Austrian passport. Adi Taussig sent her all the documents required to register their marriage with the Austrian Consulate. Once she did that she would be an Austrian citizen, but then she would have had to leave the country, perhaps never to return.

  Adi Taussig urged her but she refused. She wanted to remain in Russia. To change her nationality seemed ‘desertion to the ranks of the enemy.

  She chose another course. She applied for a Soviet passport for traveling abroad. She wanted to go to Vienna and live there with Adi for a year and then make her final decision. She was well-known as a champion athlete, and through the Dynamo Club she was acquainted with most of the leading G.P.U. officials, and they proved willing to help her. Nevertheless, it took fifteen months for her application to work its way through all the necessary stages. In August, 1936, she would at last have received the passport and been able to go to Vienna, but in the meantime came the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial and a special decree of the Government forbidding all journeys abroad which were not in the direct interests of the state.

  Shura wrote almost daily to her Adi. She could not get him out of her mind, and had no desire to do so, but the conflict, which now seemed soluble only by a definite break in one direction or the other, oppressed her. She couldn’t forget Adi, and at the same time she was unwilling to leave the Soviet Union. In the six months that followed the nervous strain of the conflict told on her. I saw a good deal of her and tried to help her.

  “Shurotchka, you really must make up your mind one way or the other,” I urged. “This thing is making you ill. Choose one or the other: Adi or the Soviet Union. Either go to the Austrian Consulate, register your marriage, take out an Austrian passport and go to Adi, or break with him completely and stop writing to him. Then you must look round for another man. You’re twenty-seven now. You can’t leave things as they are. It isn’t fair to Adi, quite apart from the constant misery you’re suffering.”

  In February, 1937, she was a particularly frequent visitor and we became very friendly. But I told her nothing about my interrogations by the G.P.U., although they were depressing me and I would have liked to confide in someone. But she seemed to sense that something was wrong, and one day she asked me suddenly:

  “Tell me, Alex: have they arrested you?”

  “Whatever do you mean, Shura? Once they arrest you, they don’t let you go again.”

  “Sometimes they do,” she said, and added significantly: “For a while.”

  I knew that through her club she was in touch with high G.P.U. officials. Perhaps they had let fall a hint that I was no longer altogether safe.

  “Shura was almost certainly in the service of the G.P.U.,” declared Bogutzky.

  But I wouldn’t have it. The idea made me indignant.

  “What could they have found out about me through a person like Shura? I wasn’t a counterrevolutionary, and I wasn’t brewing any plots. Aid if they had wanted to find out something about my political views they would have had to send me someone with whom I could have political discussions, certainly not Shura.”

  Shura, like Sima, was the Komsomolka type. They exist only in the Soviet Union. Young Communists abroad are totally different. The building up of socialism was not a revolutionary task for people like Sima and Shura; it was just a question of ordinary patriotism. Like Sima, Shura believed without doubting in all officially propounded doctrines, and she had not the slightest connection with the revolutionary idea which inspires foreign Communists. But for her Soviet patriotism she was
prepared to make any sacrifice, including the surrender of her lover.

  But Bogutzky still insisted that she was a G.P.U. agent; otherwise, he said, she would have taken the Austrian passport and gone abroad to her husband.

  In those four empty, monotonous months we all learned so much about the details of each other’s private affairs that we might have grown up together, and we told our stories day after day to while the endless hours away. As far as possible we chose private and unpolitical affairs, but we were not very successful in this: in one way or the other the State bobbed up in all of them. There is no private life in the Soviet Union.

  But then, at the beginning of June, something extraordinary happened. A prisoner was put into our cell who was one of the last persons one would have expected to meet there: a real spy.

  CHAPTER 16—A Real Spy

  HIS NAME WAS GRIGORY GRIGORIEVITCH VURSTA AND HE WAS DRESSED like a young kolkhoz peasant. We began to question him as usual.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Abroad.”

  There was nothing surprising in that; I had come from abroad too.

  “How long have you been in the Soviet Union?”

  “Two days.”

  That was different. It was a sensation. Two days! We had almost forgotten there was such a thing as an outside world.

  “You’ve been here only two days and you’re already in prison,” said Bogutzky. “How did that happen?”

  “I wanted to enter Russian service and I came over the frontier illegally. I was on my way to the nearest G.P.U. post, but I was arrested before I could get there.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Poland.”

  “Are you a Pole?”

  “No, I’m Russian really. I come from Ruthenia, but nominally I’m a Czech citizen.”

  His language was a mixture of Czech, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. He was twenty-seven years old. At first he was obviously very upset, but later he calmed down.

  He had been in a military flying school in Prague, where he had been recruited by the Gestapo for espionage against Czechoslovakia. Later on he had been working for the German secret service in Poland. But in his heart he had always been a Russian patriot, and when Germany began an anti-Russian policy he had decided to break away from the Germans and offer his services to the Russians.

  We were deeply shocked. A man in our cell who had actually entered into the service of the Gestapo! An abyss opened up between us. No-one wanted to talk to him, and he sat silently on his bed.

  At night when he was asleep Bogutzky came over to me.

  “Do you believe the fellow, Alexander Semyonovitch?”

  “I don’t knew what to think.”

  “There’s something fishy about him. I expect he’s a German spy.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, if he really wanted to enter our service he had no need to cross the frontier. He could easily have got into touch with our people in Prague or Warsaw.”

  Two days later, when the fellow returned from interrogation, there was no longer any need for him to stick to his first story. He had been compelled to admit everything to the G.P.U. and now he was franker with us.

  “I came with another man,” he said. “We were sent to find out one or two things and then return. We crossed the frontier near Baranovichi. We passed a kolkhoz and although we were dressed like peasants they must have been made suspicious by something or other and they warned the G.P.U. When a motorcar appeared in the distance, we tried to get away but the G.P.U. men, fired. The other chap was hit and I put up my hands. When he was interrogated he told everything.”

  I talked to him for a long time. He understood no German at all, and it soon became clear to me that whatever he was he could hardly have had much to do with the Gestapo. He was just a Polish agent, though he was still not prepared to admit. He probably had strict instructions not to give away his employers.

  We weren’t sure what attitude we ought to adopt toward him. According to the G.P.U. there were twelve thousand spies in prison in Kiev alone. And they had certainly all confessed, but not one of us believed their confessions and not one of them supposed for one moment that anyone would take his confession seriously. There were only decent ordinary Soviet citizens in prison with us. None of them would even have dreamt of entering the services of a foreign power.

  But here was a genuine spy, an agent of the class enemy, a man who really threatened our common cause—and in the same cell with us! What were we to do about it? Refuse to have anything to do with him? That was Bogutzky’s suggestion, but it was very difficult to carry out in a small cell. For one thing, we were all thirsting for information. The man came from abroad and must know something about the political situation. We had been almost three months without news of any kind from outside. The boycott broke down.

  When he was taken out for examination again we discussed the situation. He was a Pole and an agent of the Polish secret service, we declared. That allayed our animosity toward him. We could not possibly have stood a Gestapo man for a cell companion. We decided not to ignore him, but to maintain correct though cool relations with him.

  He made it easy for us. He behaved himself well. He was clean, disciplined and helpful. Now that our consciences were free we discussed the outside world eagerly with him. Germany had been given the Sudeten districts by agreement with France and Great Britain. Later it had seized Prague, but Great Britain had given Poland a guarantee of assistance, so that any attempt to seize the Polish Corridor would mean European war. The other countries were rearming rapidly.

  The loss of Austria and Czechoslovakia was a heavy blow for me. There was no longer anywhere for me to go to in Central Europe if the G.P.U. did finally decide to release me. My thoughts turned to Finland and Sweden as possible havens.

  Something which happened about a couple of weeks later caused us to have more sympathy with Vursta. He had been called out at midnight to an examination and when he returned the next day his back showed the marks of a severe flogging.

  “Your people are mad,” he said. “I’ve already told them the truth, but now they want me to confess to the most fantastic things. In Kiev there is a Party Secretary who was once in Prague attached to a diplomatic delegation. I happen to have been in Prague at that time, but I never saw the man or even knew of his existence. And now the examiner wants me to denounce the man as our agent in Kiev and to say that I was sent over the frontier to get in touch with him. I refused. Then they stripped me and flogged me, two at a time.”

  “Did you do it in the end?”

  “No, I didn’t. Naturally, your Party Secretary’s nothing to me, but it’s a dirty trick. I’ve never seen the man. He may be a very decent fellow for all I know. Why should I ruin him?”

  To us his flogging was a sign that despite the changed situation there was still the possibility of a relapse into the bad old ways. But our spy was tough. He could stand a good deal of flogging and he still refused to give way. They flogged him again, and he still held out. The day after that he was taken to the departmental chief, who forbade any further maltreatment.

  Gradually the first excitement over our real spy subsided and he was accepted as a member, though a second-class member, of our community. We returned to our private storytelling. One evening I was talking about my work at the experimental station. At first Bogutzky had not been present because he had gone to see the doctor, but I was still talking when he returned. He listened for a while and then he interrupted me.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” he said, and he seemed strangely on edge.

  That night our spy was taken out for examination again. Bogutzky asked the others what I had been talking about. When he heard he was furious.

  “Alexander Semyonovitch, are you quite mad?” he demanded. “How can you talk about such things in front of an anti-Soviet spy?” I was startled.

  “But I didn’t say anything of any use to a spy,” I protested.
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  “At the very least an enemy airman could find out the position of the Institute from your description.”

  “An enemy airman could find out more easily by looking it up in the Kharkov telephone directory,” I replied dryly.

  “But he wouldn’t know what was being done at the Institute.”

  “And I didn’t say anything about it, either. Quite apart from that, the fellow will never be in a position to pass anything on he may have heard.”

  “You can’t be so certain of that. Such people are often exchanged with our own men who are caught abroad.”

  Bogutzky wouldn’t be pacified, and the others took his side. I broke off the discussion.

  A few days later I was called out for examination. Someone must have reported the incident. Perhaps it was the warder. We had raised our voices. In Kiev the warders wore boots with felt soles and often crept up to the cell doors and listened.

  It was the same examiner. Two months before he had made no particular impression on me. He had sat there cool and disinterested. Now he was really angry. He began to bellow the moment I entered his room.

  “You miserable son of a bitch. You betray state secrets to a dirty spy. You’re supposed to be a Patty man. Have you lost all sense of duty and honor? Haven’t you got a scrap of decency left in your miserable carcass? You’ll pay for this, I can tell you.”

  Even while he was bellowing the absurdity of the scene struck me. He was appealing to my honor as a Communist and a loyal supporter of the Soviet Government. I had plenty of time to think over what to say, because he went on in the same strain for some time.

  “Citizen Examiner,” I began as soon as he had calmed down sufficiently to let me get a word in. “As you know, I am charged with espionage. Would you mind telling me whether you really believe me to be a spy or not?”