Theoretical physics, the queen of the natural sciences, can look back on a brilliant history of half a millennium, but it claims no more for its discoveries than the validity of statistical laws. How much more modest therefore the materialist conception of history should be, particularly as the century which has passed since the days of Marx has done very little to confirm its theories!
Soviet society under the domination of Stalin is a system in arrested development. The elements which make up the system have almost entirely lost their freedom of movement. The will of the dictator determines the movement of the system as a whole—though against a tremendous volume of passive resistance. Every conception of history and every policy which fails to take this fundamental fact into account will in all probability break down.
But these particular theoretical considerations are advanced by some of my critics only. Others are quite prepared to allow a phenomenon like the Great Purge to be explained by the psychological motives impelling a despot, but they find my particular explanation unsatisfactory.
Admittedly, there is an element of conjecture in my theory. How could it be otherwise? Stalin conceals his real motives even from those closest to him. However, the time at which the Great Purge began, the groups which were first arrested and the nature of the confessions which were extorted from them offer many openings for a careful analysis.
Before we can approach the real truth we must first of all dispose of the obviously false explanations.
The necessity for obtaining labor power for the great works being carried out in the Arctic cannot explain the arrest of the leading groups in the Soviet administration, but that is how the Great Purge began. The leading scientists and engineers throughout the country were not arrested, the leaders of the Red Army were not removed, and the governing bodies of all the federal republics of the Union were not decimated merely in order to obtain navvies for Siberia. That would be a too costly method of obtaining labor power. No, this motive played only a secondary role. When hundreds of thousands had already been arrested large-scale work was planned in order to occupy them. The plans went further than they were originally intended to go and called for the employment of millions. The mass arrests then followed.
The attempt to explain the Great Purge as a defensive measure on the part of the revolution against its enemies in a critical period is no more successful. The very point at which it began spoils this explanation. The arrests did not begin in 1932 or 1933 at a time when the enforced collectivization and the great famine were shaking the country to its foundations and when a political upheaval seemed to many to offer the only way out, but in 1936 at a time when Stalin’s victory in the countryside was already long established. At that time no one even thought of the possibility of his overthrow. Never were the revolution in general and Stalin’s domination in particular more securely founded.
An analysis of the groups which were arrested shows one thing very clearly: the enemies of the socialist revolution were not involved. It was not even exclusively a question of the supporters of the former opposition in the Party. It concerned everyone who was unable to forget the days of freedom. And one thing must be kept firmly in mind: together with the Leninist era, the days Of Tsarist absolutism appeared to Russian lovers of liberty as a fata morgana of freedom compared with the despotism of Stalin.
The Great Purge was aimed against lovers of freedom, and this was clearly demonstrated by the make-up of the groups which were arrested in its first period. The traditional enemies of the Russian Revolution, the monarchists and White Guardists, were not involved. These supporters of a different form of despotism were spared. I did not meet a single monarchist in prison during the Great Purge. And even among the national minorities it was not the reactionary, orthodox groups which were liquidated, but the progressive and democratic groups—for instance, the Armenian Dashnaki.
It might be objected that there were no monarchists left in the Soviet Union in 1937. But there were no Dashnaki either. The arrested Armenians were illiterate shoeshine boys and up to their arrest they had not even heard of the name. And that is the decisive point, because it was precisely these extortions of the G.P.U. which betrayed the secret intentions of the dictator. The Russian prisoners were compelled to acknowledge their allegiance to the Social Revolutionaries, the Anarchists, the Menshevists and other progressive groups. The G.P.U. was not interested in branding them as supporters of Tsarist absolutism.
The Great Purge was directed against the few real friends of liberty and against the many who—Stalin and his G.P.U. feared—might become friends of liberty.
That is the ultimate conclusion from the experiences of three years in G.P.U. prisons and from an analysis of innumerable cases.
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thank you so much for reading our book, we hope you really enjoyed it.
As you probably know, many people look at the reviews before they decide to purchase a book.
If you liked the book, could you please take a minute to leave a review with your feedback?
60 seconds is all I’m asking for, and it would mean the world to us.
Thank you so much,
Pickle Partners Publishing
{1} In The God That Failed (New York, 1949), which mentions Weissberg’s story, I mistakenly stated that Professor Langevin was among the signers.
{2} An organization which will be referred to throughout by its best-known initials, G.P.U.—except where the reference is an official one.
{3} These lines were written over two years ago, and in the meantime my supposition has been justified.
{4} This chapter had already been printed when I came across an unexpected explanation for the incident. In The God That Failed, Arthur Koestler mentions a man named Edgar who put him in touch with the N Apparatus. I knew, of course, that the Comintern, the G.P.U. and the Department IV of the Red Army Intelligence Service maintained secret organizations abroad, but I did not know that one of them was known as the N Apparatus.
“Edgar” was a revolutionary worker from Hamburg, and I had met him in Berlin. His real name was Fritz Burde. He was a decent fellow and a good comrade. I met him in August, 1936, in Moscow when he had a high position in the Red Army Intelligence Service, and I asked him to help my wife. He rang up Krylenko, who was then Commissar for Justice, and Krylenko got in touch with the G.P.U. As my subsequent examinations showed, the Moscow G.P.U. informed their Kharkov colleagues of the incident, and this may have been the reason for my first interrogations.
For a long time the G.P.U. and the War Commissariat had been fighting for control of this important secret organization abroad, and at that time the G.P.U. won when it denounced the military apparatus as riddled with Trotskyists. Once Tukhachevsky was arrested, the G.P.U. had a free hand. They recalled almost all the military secret agents from abroad and arrested them. Fritz Burde was in charge of the secret service of the Red Army in Scandinavia and when he was recalled with the others he told friends that he was going to his death, but that he had no alternative.
In May, 1937, my examiner, a man named Ryeznikov, suddenly demanded that I should give him incriminating material against “Edgar,” whose name had not previously been mentioned at all. It occurs to me now that on my return from Moscow in 1937, after I had spoken to “Edgar,” they probably called me for examination in order, among other things perhaps, to find out about my relations to “Edgar” and to obtain incriminating material against the members of the N Apparatus. Small wonder, therefore, that Azak and Polevedsky were astonished when I denied all knowledge of any N Apparatus.
{5} Djura was the fiancée of my friend Adi Taussig, an Austrian engineer. He had returned to Austria and he was anxious that she should follow him as his wife.
{6} The figures were known in leading Party circles in Moscow, but during the crisis they were not published. I was given them by one of the leaders of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Until the autumn of 1932 official reports all spoke of “brilliant
victories on the agrarian front.” It was only eighteen months later, at the Seventeenth Party Congress in February, 1934, that Stalin partly revealed the cattle losses, and mentioned the following figures:
(in millions)
Horses—34 (1929)—16 (1933)
Sheep and Goats—147 (1929)—50 (1933)
Pigs—20 (1929)—12 (1933)
Even these figures were doctored, but they still show that in a short period almost sixty per cent of the country’s horses and two-thirds of its sheep and goats were slaughtered.
Stalin naturally makes no mention of the human casualties of his policy. The first-aid organization kept a record of the deaths, as it was in duty bound to do. The figures began to leak out, and in the summer of 1932 the head of this organization in the Ukraine was arrested and it was forbidden to continue to register the figures.
{7} Later I was to meet men who had confessed much more trivial things than espionage and been convicted and sentenced.
{8} Down with the Jews! Save Russia!
{9} Western Ukraine represents the Ukrainian districts in old Poland beyond the San and the Bug and the so-called Curzon Line. Both the Ukrainian nationalists and the Communists worked for its separation from Poland.
{10} This did not, of course, apply when prisoners were arrested in groups—for instance, the peasants of a collective, or the Armenians of Kharkov.
{11} Years later, after my return to Europe, I discovered that, in fact, Maddalena was sentenced in June, 1937, not to death but to life imprisonment.
{12} “Dashnak” was the name of an Armenian National-Revolutionary Party which fought against the Turks for Armenian independence.
{13} Snabshenez: an official entrusted with the obtaining of supplies.
{14} I have been unable to find any report in the Pravda of January, 1939, concerning this trial in Tiraspol. Perhaps the date given was not accurate, or perhaps only the local newspapers carried the reports. In any case, the facts themselves were confirmed from many sources, and finally also by our examiners.
{15} Twelve years later Bogutzky’s assumption was confirmed in a striking fashion. I was in Paris as a witness at the Rousset libel trial which attracted worldwide attention in 1951, and there I met another witness whom I already knew from the Butyrka. It was Hans Metzger, a German road-building expert, who had worked in the Soviet Union. In 1936 he had been arrested in the usual way and sentenced to ten years’ forced labor. He was sent to the notorious Solovki Island W serve his term. After the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact he, too, was deported and handed over to the Gestapo, and we were together in Lublin prison. We naturally discussed our experiences, and, among other things, he told me:
“We left Solovki on November 15, 1939. On the boat to Kem and later in the train to Orel I was together with Bessonov. There were also thirteen Volga Germans and two Chinese students in our carriage. I asked Bessonov why he had not taken advantage of the international publicity at his trial to withdraw his absurd confessions, and he shrugged his shoulders and answered:
“‘Thanks, I didn’t want to go through what Krestinsky went through. He withdrew his confession in court, and that night he was fiendishly tortured for three hours. They put out his left shoulder and he suffered terrible agonies, but outwardly there was nothing to be seen. The next day he confessed again: “
Bessonov and Rakovsky were the only two accused in the Bukharin trial who were not sentenced to death and executed. They both received long terms of imprisonment.
Metzger was an unpolitical civil engineer and a highly conscientious man. He will hardly have understood the full significance of this story and I am quite certain it happened just as he told it.
{16} A Russian substitute for tobacco.
{17} The last Ukrainian Premier of whose arrest I had heard was Lubchenko. Those who came after him were unknown to me even by name. I had never heard of Marchak, and I don’t know whether he was actually Premier or perhaps Vice-President, or even whether I have got his name correct.
{18}The eleventh month in the French revolutionary calendar extending from July 19th to August 18th. It was on the Ninth Thermidor (July 27th, 1794) that Robespierre was overthrown by Barras.
{19} As early as 1934, after the famine had been overcome, he decided to liquidate the leaders of the opposition. He subsequently decided to liquidate the rest after the experiences of 1936.
The Accused Page 67