The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  One thing I did decide at once: whatever happened I would not appeal to the German representatives in the Soviet Union. It was possible that before releasing me the Russians would propose that I should accept Soviet citizenship in order that I should never be able to get out. They were quite capable of doing that if they thought it suited me, despite the fantastic anti-Soviet enormities with which I was charged. That would put me in a fix. If I refused it would mean that I really was an anti-Soviet element, and then they wouldn’t release me at all. But I longed to get out of the country. How could there be any freedom in the Soviet Union after the Great Purge? No one would want to speak to me. No one would want to be friendly with me. And then I knew my own temperament. No matter how hard I tried, sooner or later I’d open my mouth and then I’d find myself in prison again. No, it was quite impossible; to stay here would mean to be a prisoner for life, even if on ticket of leave for a while. And I longed so much for real, unlimited freedom, for countries living under real political democracy. Would they really let me leave the country? Having witnessed all I had witnessed, I hardly dared to hope.

  The warder came and took me to the washroom. It was just round the corner from the cell. It proved to be a large room with many taps and showers and I was left there with soap and as much hot water as I liked. I soaped my whole body and scrubbed away like a washerwoman, and then I let glorious hot water pour over me. When I had dried myself down thoroughly I was given clean prison linen and taken back to my cell. I went to bed and put my coat over the bedclothes, and a feeling of well-being such as I had not experienced for a very long time stole over me. I could already see myself properly dressed and sitting in the Café National on the corner of the Tverskaya drinking real coffee and eating cakes. And then I should walk down to the Red Square, visit the Lenin’s mausoleum, and feast my eyes on that wonderful little gem of medieval Eastern architecture, the Cathedral of St. Basil. I would go to Leningrad too, and in my mind I saw the Neva quays and the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, the golden tower of the Peter-Paul Fortress, the Admiralty building and the Tartar Church—the whole beauty of a beautiful town. And then at some time or other I would go abroad and be free, really free, subordinate to no one, no political party, no secret police and no totalitarian state. I should no longer have to fight for my few rights, no longer have to lie; I could think what I liked and say what I thought. Wonderful, wonderful dreams!

  The warder disturbed them. He came in with a bowl of cabbage soup. The portion was about half the size of our Kharkov portions, but it was much better and had some fat in it and even traces of meat. It was excellent by comparison, but the trouble was that it made me really hungry. We had such a bowl of soup twice a day in the Butyrka together with something over a pound of bread, which was less than in Kholodnaya Gora, but of much better quality.

  The Butyrka certainly was a model prison. In Kharkov prisoners were not allowed to have paper, not even toilet paper; they had to use water. In Butyrka the warder who led me to the lavatory solemnly handed me one single piece of paper. After using it I had to give it back to him and it was his responsibility to see that it was destroyed. This rule was designed to prevent prisoners’ using their toilet paper for any purpose other than the recognized one. For the writing of official requests, each prisoner was allowed one sheet of paper a week. There were regular visits from the block commandant or from the governor himself and prisoners were allowed to express reasonable wishes. On his first visit to me the governor pointed to a dull patch on the linoleum.

  “You must polish that a bit better, Citizen.”

  “I will,” I promised, and I did. I made it a point of honor. I obtained wax, a brush and two cloths from the warder and went to work with energy. When I had finished it shone like a mirror. I was very proud of my cell, and I liked it so much there that when my stay neared its end I surprised myself thinking the secret thought that really it wouldn’t be at all bad if they left me there altogether and I didn’t have to worry about freedom any more. Prisoners, particularly long-term prisoners, fear change, any change, even a change for the better.

  And then there was the prison library. A few days after my arrival the librarian came into my cell and handed me a piece of ruled paper.

  ‘Write the names of five books you would like on that,” he said. “Can’t I see the library list?” I asked. “I don’t know what books you’ve got.”

  “We’ve got everything,” he replied proudly.

  “What about foreign literature?”

  “Yes, we’ve got that too, but you can only have translations. If you want the originals you have to get special permission from your examiner.”

  I wrote down the names of five books and hoped for the best. The next day I received every one of them. The following week I did the same thing—with the same result. Then I began to ask for more out-of-the-way books, often books which struck me as very unlikely to be in a Russian prison library: Swedish mystics, German historians, books on the early history of despotism in Asia Minor, books on the deciphering of hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing, books on the theory of heredity and the latest biological theories. I got them all. The prison library of the Butyrka was really remarkable, and later a Russian prisoner explained the reason. Before the revolution the Butyrka had also been used for political prisoners, and the big liberal publishing houses began presenting free copies of every book they published to the central prisons of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

  With such a vast world of the intellect at my disposal I began to live again. I read for hours every day until my eyes grew tired. I read all the books which had banked up in my mind during the past twenty years “to be read at some time.” Up to my seventeenth year I read a great deal, but then I joined the socialist movement and after that political activity and my career took up so much time that I was never able to read as much as I wanted to. In the socialist youth movement we tended to discuss books rather than to read them. But now fate made me a present of both time and opportunity. Never before had I read with such concentration—and I never have since. I didn’t choose the books “one ought to have read,” and I didn’t read in order to collect material for a discussion. I entered enthusiastically into the world of the great Russian writers, with their ideas, their characters and their atmosphere; I buried myself in the early history of our culture; I followed the struggles of man against the forces of nature and vicariously enjoyed his victories. The story of the great discoveries of man restored my courage and gave me new hope in the future. I found cause for confidence when I measured man’s progress with the rule of centuries. But I was still afraid of what might happen the next day.

  My feelings in this autumn of 1939 were strangely confused. I feared any kind of change and awaited the next interrogation with anxiety. I knew that I had to go through the final door before I could go out into freedom. At the same time I felt that nothing could go wrong now. The dangers were past; my persistence had been successful. And yet I was happy at each postponement of the final decision. I was happy when they left me alone in my cell. I no longer needed the company of my fellow men—I had books. Every Wednesday the prison librarian brought me his treasures. Books in several volumes counted as one book, so where possible I gave them preference in order not to run short of reading material. My only trouble was that I didn’t get enough to eat. I had fallen away almost to a skeleton, but I was still healthy.

  I took no exercise. I was too tired and I had no shoes to walk in—at least that was the excuse I gave. The Butyrka had too many cells and too few courtyards. In order that all the prisoners should be able to exercise many of them had to be taken out in the night. I had no desire to be wakened at two in the morning, so I refused exercise altogether. However, this did not stop them from waking me night after night to hear my refusal. I complained to the governor.

  “I am responsible for the health of the prisoners,” he declared, “and exercise is necessary. You must take part in it.”

  “Look at my shoes,�
� I replied. “They’re unwearable, and it’s already too cold to walk barefooted outside.”

  He went away and returned about an hour later with a pair of the bast boots usually worn by Russian peasants. After that I had to exercise. We walked round and round at the same pace in small circles. My circle was drawn on the ground with white chalk. We were not allowed to raise our heads, but from time to time I broke the rule and looked around. It was a small round yard. On one side there was a semi-circular fortress wall with embrasures for cannon. It was in this prison that the famous peasant rebel Pugatchev was held and executed. The old building had been added to from time to time and modernized.

  I was always hungry and after a month I wrote a letter to the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs pointing out that I had been in prison on remand for almost three years, and asking permission to have money transferred from my savings account to my prison account so that I might use the lavochka to supplement my prison rations. I received no reply.

  I became weaker and weaker. Even to read was an exertion. For days I just lay on the bed and dreamed.

  It was in this period that something came back to me that made me very happy. The mystery of the missing blueprints had never left me completely in peace, and again and again my mind would return anxiously to the problem of what had happened to them.

  One evening I was lying on the bed. I had been there for hours, motionless. Suddenly I sprang up in great excitement. A scene which had been buried deep in my subconsciousness for so long now came to the surface with every detail clearly visible.

  The drawings had arrived in Vienna several weeks late and my holidays were practically at an end, when the Soviet Trade Delegation in Vienna informed me that a parcel had arrived for me from Moscow. I went to the offices—9, Wallnerstrasse—and a secretary handed me the parcel in the outer office and asked for a receipt, which I gave her.

  So far that was nothing new; I could remember that distinctly, but what I had forgotten was that on my way out I thought over the matter and then went back.

  “Comrade,” I said to the girl, “these drawings have really come too late to be of any use to me now. I think you had better send them back to Moscow.”

  Whereupon she took the parcel and gave me back the receipt.

  I was beside myself with delight. For three years the mystery had disturbed and upset me. I knocked at once to call the warder, and when he came I asked for paper. I had to wait for three days before I obtained it. Then I wrote an account of everything to the examiner, whom I had not yet met, and asked for an interview. I received no reply.

  Toward the end of October another prisoner was put into my cell with me. He had been Party Secretary in one of the Moscow districts, and he insisted that he had been arrested for quoting Lenin too frequently, which seemed absurd to me. Later on when we got better acquainted he began to talk.

  “You don’t understand such things,” he declared. “You see, you’ve been occupied with scientific matters and you’ve not had much to do with ideological affairs. In addition you were arrested eighteen months before me. Things hadn’t progressed so far then. Believe me, you can’t quote the old things out of Lenin without risking arrest nowadays. I met a comrade from Tula in prison. He had been arrested because he had kept a file of Pravda dating from before 1923 and shown certain articles to his friends. I’m accused of espionage. That’s nonsense, of course. I read too much Lenin and didn’t keep my mouth shut; that was my mistake.”

  There was probably something in what he said. While I was in prison the whole history of the Soviet Union was rewritten under the personal direction of Stalin. The result was a gigantic falsification of the truth down to the smallest details. According to evidence at the show trials, Trotsky had been a foreign spy since 1923, and Zinoviev and Kamenev had been anti-Soviet since 1917. All the former members of the opposition who had been liquidated had entered the ranks of the Party at an early age as agents of the enemy bent on betraying the revolution. This was the new conception of history as established in 1938.

  This rewriting of history naturally came up against considerable difficulties, because for one thing traces of the truth were present in the archives all over the country. They all had to be wiped out. The editorial board of Pravda in 1918 had naturally not known that Stalin would subsequently require a totally different history of the revolution than they were experiencing at the moment. Even Stalin himself had not known it then, and, in any case, he had been only a very modest People’s Commissar for Nationality Problems and not the all-powerful dictator of Russia. He was not then in a position to forge and falsify, but in 1938 he was and he did.

  During the period of the revolution and the subsequent civil war the country had resounded with the praises of the man who was then Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, Lev Davidovitch Trotsky. The men tried, found guilty and executed as spies, Piatakov, Muralov, Bukharin, Zinoviev and so on, were then the closest friends and collaborators of Lenin, the leader of the revolution, men of the highest revolutionary integrity. The newspapers and the books of the day were full of their names and their deeds. In 1938 Stalin was faced with the task of wiping all that out.

  Stalin had to make not only Lenin and Pravda illegal, but also his own past. For instance, an article written by him appeared in Pravda on November 6, 1918, giving the main credit for the victory of the insurrection in Petro-grad to the Chairman of the Petro-grad Soviet and leader of the Revolutionary War Committee. But the comrade in question was none other than Lev Davidovitch Trotsky. Six years later Stalin wrote that Trotsky had played no particular role in the revolution and had really been a very unimportant person—at that time Trotsky had not yet been graduated to the role of leader of the counter-revolution. But another seven years after that affairs had ripened, and Stalin announced that Trotsky had always been a fascist agent in the ranks of the Party. Any reference to the newspapers and the literature of the revolutionary period was now dangerous.

  One thing, of course, even the all-powerful Stalin couldn’t do, and that was to suppress Lenin’s works. His whole regime is based on the assumption of continuity and succession, and he claims to be realizing the ideas of the great November Revolution. But Trotsky declared that Stalin’s successful struggle for power in the Party was the Russian equivalent of the French Thermidor,{18} and that under a pseudo-cloak of the old ideology the structure of the Soviet state had fundamentally changed. A silent counter-revolution had brought a new privileged class to power, the bureaucracy. Stalin fought against this dangerous accusation tooth and nail, and he was determined to be regarded as the legitimate heir of the November Revolution. For this reason it was impossible for him to suppress Lenin’s works, but at least he could falsify them, and he did. The old files of Pravda could not very well be pulped, despite the fact that they contained articles and reports of speeches by Stalin himself utterly exposing his present claims, but at least Party members could be taught not to refer to them. The re-education of the Party was gradual, particularly as it was impossible to say openly what was wanted. “Trotsky was a fascist agent since 1923,” said Stalin, and those in charge of the machinery for producing public opinion took it as their guiding principle and falsified the history of the revolution in that sense. They realized what they had to do without being told directly. As it was in the G.P.U. organization so it was everywhere else. Every G.P.U. man knew perfectly well that his prisoners were innocent of the charges against them, and yet he had to go on pretending that they were guilty. And in the same way every historian, librarian, journalist and Party propagandist knew very well that he was one small cog in a vast machine for falsification. But neither the G.P.U. men nor the falsifiers of history admitted even among themselves what they were doing, and the vast conspiracy of unacknowledged forgery extended from the center of repression and lies, Stalin himself, to the lowest subordinate.

  However, it is easier to control a highly efficient repressive organization like the G.P.U. in this way than a political pa
rty, and the result was that again and again Party members, particularly young and enthusiastic Party members, inadvertently broke through the web of conspiracy. Their further education was then entrusted to the G.P.U.

  My fellow prisoner, former Party Secretary Vassily Kusnetzov, was twenty-six years old. He had imprudently occupied himself with the history of the Party. His subsequent arrest had been a great shock to him. However, although he was naïve he was not a fool, and the constant interrogations to which he had been subjected had made him realize what his crime had been: not only had he read Lenin but he had quoted from what he had read.

  He did not talk a great deal and I was grateful to him for that. For years I had conscientiously questioned every new prisoner I had met in order to build up a general picture of what had happened. Now I believed I already had a very good idea of what Stalin had been after when he launched the Great Purge, and of how the gigantic process had slid out of control. Now I was no longer particularly interested in individual fates—they could bring me no further contribution to the whole. I preferred to be alone with my books. It was only in the evenings that we sometimes talked.

  I found that he knew even less of the situation outside than I did. He had not even heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I had abandoned my first assumption that war had broken out because nothing had happened to confirm it. But a week later a third prisoner was put in with us, the Bashkir I discussed earlier, and then, three days later, the Soviet diplomat from Chungking.

  I was delighted to hear that Nazi Germany was embroiled with the Western powers. German fascism had pressed down on Europe like a monolithic block. Now that block would be shattered and freedom would return and I should be able to go home. I assumed that my socialist friends had streamed into the armies of the Western European powers to fight against Hitler, and after a short rest in which to recuperate I proposed to join them.