The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “Don’t you try to provoke me, you bandit. If I weren’t convinced that you were a spy, and, in fact, one of the most dangerous spies we have here, do you think I’d hold you in prison? We don’t keep innocent men in prison.”

  “In that case, Citizen Examiner, I find your present excitement a little difficult to understand. If what you say is correct then nothing of any importance has happened. Two spies have just exchanged experiences, that’s all. You say that I’m just as much a spy as the other fellow. In that case why do you appeal to my feelings of honor and loyalty? You can’t have it both ways.”

  There was quite a lot I intended to say further, but the examiner sprang up. He was purple in the face with rage. He realized that by reproaching me as a Party man he had exposed the whole stupid comedy he had been playing. Picking up a marble paperweight from his desk, he hurled it at me with all his strength. It just skimmed my head. Then he rushed out of the room calling for guards.

  “Take this swine away,” he shrieked. “Take him away before I do him injury.”

  When I got back to the cell and told the story Bogutzky almost danced with delight.

  “Splendid!” he exclaimed. “Good for you, Alexander Semyonovitch. You let him have it that time. Those swindlers always pretend they believe in our guilt, and that one fell right into it. You ought to receive a reward.”

  At the beginning of July an eighty-eight-year-old peasant was put into our cell. Despite his great age, Pavel Andreyevitch Gonsharov was a picture of health and unbroken strength. He was a tall, powerfully built man, and with his long white beard he looked like a patriarch. His face was rosy and still unwrinkled, and his dancing eyes suggested that he had enjoyed life up to the present and intended to go on doing so even in prison if he could. He was extremely good-natured and also extremely credulous.

  He was the first representative I had met of a new type of counterrevolutionary: the religious enemy. He came from Tiraspol and he had been arrested as the head of a community of the sect known as the Old Believers.

  Religion had never been prohibited in the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Government and the Party had used various propagandist and administrative measures to limit its influence. The faithful had to maintain their own churches. If they had too little cash to keep the buildings in order then the local Soviet would declare the church a dilapidated structure and confiscate it. Thus the Cathedral in Kharkov was now a broadcasting station. Prior to the revolution Moscow had been known as the town of forty times forty, or 1,600, churches. By 1936 that great number had shrunk to something over a dozen, and in fact no more were necessary because the number of churchgoers had declined very greatly both in town and in the country, and the decline continued.

  Small religious sects had no churches in which to hold their services and it was forbidden to hold them in private houses. It was also made difficult for small religious communities to register themselves officially. In consequence many sects were driven underground.

  “Formerly we always succeeded in finding somewhere or other for our prayer meetings,” declared Pavel Andreyevitch. “If it was too expensive on our own we used to get together with others, particularly with the Jews. At one time I can remember there were three different religions using the Jewish synagogue. The Jews are cunning, you know. They used to pray twice a day, whereas we prayed together only once a week, but they made us pay just as much as they did.”

  I had always thought that each religion felt its church desecrated if it were used by some other religion, and I said so.

  “That’s all very well when you can afford to be particular,” replied Pavel Andreyevitch, “but after 1930 you had to take what you could get and be glad of it. It became more and more difficult for us to find anywhere to go on our own, but the Jews are clever. They’ve got their people everywhere. We had to be thankful if they let us pray in their place.”

  “What are you in for, Pavel Andreyevitch?”

  “We got too ambitious,” he replied. “When the new Constitution came out my neighbor Anisei Feodorovitch came to me and said: ‘Everything’s all right now, Pavel Andreyevitch. Everyone’s allowed to pray. It says so in the Constitution. We must get ourselves registered, then we can ask the Soviet for a proper place for our prayer meetings.’ That was our mistake.”

  The three elders of the sect went to the village Soviet and asked to be registered. They were told that fifty signatures were necessary so they went away and collected them and then returned with the list. They were promised a reply within two weeks. They got it in two days. All the fifty were arrested as counterrevolutionaries. Pavel Andreyevitch was now charged with being the leader of a secret counterrevolutionary organization.

  “That wasn’t very nice of them,” he complained. “Why did they promise us freedom to worship in the Constitution? It says so quite plainly. And no one is allowed to interfere, it says too. We Old Believers are human beings every bit as much as the orthodox, so why doesn’t it apply to us? And if it doesn’t, why didn’t they say so?”

  Almost all of us in the cell were atheists, but we were quite touched by the fate of the old peasant. It was difficult to understand why the G.P.U. didn’t let these harmless people go their way in peace. They interfered with no one and they represented not the slightest danger to the state. They were all older men and women and their sect would probably die out with them if it were left alone.

  In ordinary life Pavel Andreyevitch was a gardener and he boasted mildly that his apples were the best in the whole of Moldavia. He had a small piece of land along the Dniester, which was the frontier in those parts. He was quite comfortably off because his land was near the town and so he had a ready outlet for his produce. Pomology was more or less a closed book to me; apples grew on trees, and when they were ripe you picked them. Pavel Andreyevitch enlightened my ignorance. It appears that a very great deal has to be done to produce good apples, and he and his wife had to work very hard to look after all their trees. I liked listening to him, and he was extremely interesting when he spoke about the improvement of the strains and so on. Apart from his knowledge in a field of which I was ignorant, it was a pleasure to talk to him. I think he was the first perfectly contented and happy man I had ever met in my life.

  His wife was seventy-six and she was as strong and healthy as he was. Together the two old people did all the work. With their savings they had bought costly burial vestments, handsome coffins and a joint gravestone. Everything was all ready for their ultimate departure. Such preparations might seem grisly, but with Pavel Andreyevitch it didn’t make that impression at all. His only anxiety now was that someone might steal all those lovely things and rob him of the fruit of a life’s work. The Old Believers had a bishop in Kiev. He was also under arrest, and Pavel Andreyevitch was expected to provide evidence that would compromise him. It puzzled the old man.

  “They keep saying things I can’t understand,” he complained. “It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with our prayers. We’ve all admitted that we’ve been praying regularly together in secret, but now they say our bishop is a Rumanian spy and that he gave us messages to take over the Dniester into Rumania by boat. But none of us have any boats. It’s been forbidden for a long time now.”

  One humiliation was not spared him. He had to have his beard cut off. That was a prison regulation, he was told.

  “But I was in prison in Tiraspol,” he protested, “and they let me keep my beard. And that was the G.P.U. just the same as here.”

  It was no good. They were merciless, and off came his lovely white beard, but they left him a mustache. Without his beard he still looked handsome.

  I had been waging a comic battle with the barber. Every two weeks we had to have our heads shaved, but it takes several months to grow a proper head of hair. Now that I was certain that I was soon going to be released, I tried to avoid the shavings. I didn’t want to arrive in Stockholm or London with a bald head. Several times I succeeded on one absurd pretext or other and I was beginnin
g to get quite a lot of hair again, but just before I was transferred they shaved it off after all.

  One day Pavel Andreyevitch’s wife came to the prison with bread and sausage, and the G.P.U. allowed him to have it. In general they behaved with reasonable humanity to the old man. He was called out for interrogation, but he was never beaten or very roughly treated.

  One night he came over to my bed and woke me up cautiously. “Alexander Semyonovitch,” he whispered, “you’re an educated man and perhaps you can help me. I have a secret, and I know you won’t betray me, but perhaps you can tell me what I ought to do. It’s like this: twenty years ago in the first days of the revolution they persecuted our bishop and he had to flee. He came to me and asked me to get him across the Dniester into Rumania, and I did. He wrote to me from Rumania thanking me for helping him. He’s a bishop in Rumania now. Ought Ito tell that to the G.P.U. or not?”

  “You must give me a little while to think it over, Pavel Andreyevitch,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll discuss it with Bogutzky. You can trust him too. Go back to bed and don’t worry about it. What happened twenty years ago really doesn’t matter much now.”

  “But won’t Bogutzky reproach me? He’s a very strict man.”

  “Yes, I know, but he’s a just man and a good man.”

  Pavel Andreyevitch seemed much relieved to have got his terrible secret off his chest.

  The next day we discussed it at length with Bogutzky, who was in favor of telling. Pavel Andreyevitch agreed to do so, happy to get it off his conscience. But oh, how difficult it is to do the right thing! The examiner recorded the confession and then wove a whole story around it: the real chief of the counterrevolutionary organization was the bishop in Rumania. His right-hand man was the bishop of Kiev, now under arrest, and Pavel Andreyevitch, who lived on the frontier, was their go-between.

  It was all very depressing and I don’t know how it ended because I was transferred before Pavel Andreyevitch’s examination was concluded.

  At the end of July I was called out again for interrogation. It was a different examiner, a pale-faced fellow in the early twenties. The atmosphere was quite calm, and not a cross word passed between us. He made no attempt to intimidate me and faithfully recorded all I had to say. He was obviously new to the job and before every signature he ran off to his departmental chief.

  One evening I was taken to see this man, whose name was Kasin if I remember rightly. He was a tall slim man in the uniform of a G.P.U. officer, and his head looked as though it were worked in bronze. He reminded me of an actor in the part of Rhadamès in Verdi’s opera Aida.

  “I don’t wish to intimidate you, or to exercise any undue pressure,” he began. “Make your statement voluntarily, but tell us everything you’ve done against the Soviet Union. There is a great mass of compromising evidence against you, you know.”

  This was quite a new tone, and I talked for about an hour. He listened attentively and made no attempt to interrupt.

  “Well, what do you say to that?” he asked, and he showed me a deposition signed by Houtermanns accusing himself of outrageous crimes. But there was nothing in it to compromise me.

  “Hasn’t he withdrawn his confession yet?” I asked.

  “No, of course he hasn’t.”

  “Citizen Examiner, I have no right to interfere in Houtermanns’ affairs. But I could prove to you that his confession is perfect nonsense. I know his life intimately both here and abroad. He has never done such things in reality, or anything like them.”

  “If that is true why doesn’t he withdraw his confession? And why did he make it in the first place?”

  “Houtermanns is not strong physically, and his nerves are bad. He is a brilliant physicist, but he’s not a fighter. He probably got so tired and exhausted that he had to give way.”

  Kasin rose to end the interview.

  ‘We don’t want to be unjust to you, Weissberg. You write down what you think you must.”

  When I got back to the cell I woke my friends and described my interview with Kasin. They congratulated me, declaring that he would never have spoken to me like that if my release had not already been decided on.

  The young examiner wrote down a number of depositions at my dictation, and then his place was taken by a new examiner every bit as young and inexperienced as he was. I got to know quite a number of this type. The intellectuals had all disappeared from the G.P.U. apparatus, and there were no longer any Jews, though before the Great Purge there had been very many. The newcomers were young Communists from factories and schools, with only a few months’ training to prepare them for their new tasks.

  There were no interrogations for about a week and then there was a sudden relapse into the old methods. One morning I was called out and taken to Kasin’s office. In one corner of the room sat an old man nervously clasping and unclasping his hands. His face was gray and haggard and his eyes were dull. He looked up at me for a moment, muttered something which I could not catch and then lowered his head again. I’ve seen those bony, hairy hands with their long fingers somewhere, I thought, but I couldn’t remember where.

  “Repeat your evidence to Weissberg,” Kasin ordered.

  In a low voice the old man began, and then I realized that it was Obremov. Once he had been a human being with a personality and a will of his own, and a valuable personality too, a professor and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. And now he cowered there utterly broken and spoke like an automaton. He no longer had any teeth and I was unable to understand much of what he mumbled. In addition the sight of him so shocked me that I hardly paid any attention to what he was saying. Not only had I worked under him, but we had been friends. Every evening we had discussed the day’s work together and made plans for the future. We had been so friendly that we had even discussed politics. He was, or had been, a man of the old school, a real character, though obstinate and fond of having his own way. He was vain and ambitious and he thought too much of himself, and lacked courage, both physical and civic. But for all that he had been a man of great intelligence and exceptional education. And now he sat huddled before me, a broken old man. Nothing was left but the shell, and that was broken too. He kept his head down during his statement and avoided my eye.

  “I’m sorry, Citizen Examiner,” I said when Obremov had finished, “but I could hardly understand a word of what he was saying. Would you mind reading it to me?”

  Kasin picked up the deposition and read it out to me. It was a farrago of disconnected nonsense, so impossibly stupid and confused that there was really little to take hold of and remember. I had first met him in Berlin at the end of 1930 or the beginning of 1931 just before I left for the Soviet Union. Houtermanns had introduced us. He had invited me to come and work for his Institute in Kharkov as a technical physicist.

  Obremov’s story was very different. He had been in the pay of the German secret police; Houtermanns too; me too. We had met to discuss the best way to get me unobtrusively into the Soviet Union to reinforce the anti-Soviet work there. And so it went on: fantastic rubbish, all of it. It irritated me to think that Obremov could still maintain such nonsense months after the change, and I couldn’t understand why Kasin, who knew about it better than any of us, was prepared to accept it. But perhaps all Stalin wanted was to stop the flood of mass arrests which threatened to bring the country to ruin. Most of those who were already arrested could go off to the camps and rot there. I decided to try to shake Obremov out of his lethargy.

  “Citizen Examiner, the Berlin conversation Obremov refers to was conducted in German. I remember it exactly. It was an important one for me. May I recall it to him in German?”

  Kasin knew no German, but he gave me permission. I began to talk German to Obremov. I repeated our conversation as far as I could remember it, but in between I introduced appeals to him: “Obremov, withdraw your perfectly idiotic statements. You can do it now safely. There’s been a great change. Their chief has been sacked and they don’t beat up prisoners anymor
e.” And so on, but it was no use. Obremov was finished. He took no notice of what I said and just repeated his stereotyped charges against himself, against Houtermanns and against me.

  Kasin began to record what I said and I disputed every word with him. I didn’t let a phrase pass which I thought was not absolutely accurate. My intention in fighting Kasin tooth and nail was to give Obremov a little courage and perhaps persuade him to show a spark of spirit. Suddenly Kasin realized why I was disputing everything with him and he rose angrily, marched up to me and struck me several times full in the face, making my nose bleed. I still refused to sign unless he wrote down what I said. He continued to punch me and I shouted:

  “I won’t sign a thing, not a word unless it’s absolutely correct. Obremov can say what he likes, but I make my statements myself, and I won’t make them under pressure. If you go on trying to terrorize me I won’t sign anything at all until I’ve seen the Prosecutor himself.”

  “Don’t you dare to talk to me like that,” snarled Kasin. “You fascist hound, you want to stir up revolt even here. That’s anti-Soviet rebellion. I’ll settle with you once and for all this time.”

  He rang and a guard came in.

  “Take this man down to the cellars,” he ordered.

  The guard took me down below and locked me up in a sort of cupboard. Half an hour later he released me and took me back to Kasin. Obremov was no longer in the room and Kasin addressed me in a perfectly amiable tone as though nothing at all had happened.

  “Listen, Weissberg, what do you think you’re up to? You know something about our ways. You can’t do that sort of thing and get away with it.”

  “I absolutely refuse to sign an inaccurate deposition.”

  “No one’s asking you to. Write down whatever you like.”

  He tore up the old deposition, took a fresh sheet of paper and then wrote down every word I said without making the slightest difficulty. I went back to my cell in a daze and told them what had happened.