The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953
All these trials aroused, to put it mildly, very grave doubts in the minds of observers abroad. But what was to follow surpassed all previous human experience, not excluding that of the witchcraft trials of the Middle Ages. In a series of world-staggering trials, practically the entire Old Guard of the Russian Revolution publicly confessed to all the crimes in the Soviet calendar, and were duly despatched from this world by a bullet in the back of the neck in the cellars of the Lubianka, or else, in a few instances, hidden away in secret prisons from which they have never since emerged. At the same time, nearly the whole of the General Staff and many minor officers were tried in secret, condemned as traitors and shot, while hundreds of thousands of real or alleged opponents of the regime were executed without trial or exiled to remote regions of the country under conditions amounting for most of them to slow death from starvation and disease.
In 1934 a faint light of hope appeared on the Soviet horizon. The worst period of forced collectivisation was past; the last harvest had mercifully been excellent; the speeches at the party congress of that year appeared to give grounds for the belief that the terrible tension of the previous years would at last be relaxed.
A single shot shattered all these hopes and gave the starting signal for a new wave of ferocious repression worse than anything that had gone before. A certain Leonid Nikolayev, in circumstances never clarified and for reasons never divulged by the authorities (although Nikolayev left a letter stating the reasons for his action), shot down and killed the party boss of the Leningrad district, Sergei Mironovich Kirov.
An examination of this affair does not lie within the scope of this book. [1] Suffice it to say that the ‘realists’ in Russia utilised this assassination as the pretext for a final settling of accounts with all who had ever at any time had even the remotest connection with any opposition inside the party.
The Dewey Commission set up in Mexico to sift the evidence of the first two of the Moscow Trials (1936 and 1937), submitted it to an exhaustive and devastating analysis, see The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty (Secker and Warburg, 1937 and 1938 respectively), and demonstrated with irrefutable logic that in their confessions the accused contradicted themselves and one another, that certain key statements in these confessions were false, and came to the conclusion:
(1) That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no effort was made to ascertain the truth.
(2) While confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
In view of this very thorough investigation by the Dewey Commission, it is not here necessary to recapitulate the abundant evidence proving the bogus nature of the confessions. Our notice of these Moscow Trials will therefore be confined to two aspects: their purpose and the technique employed to obtain confessions.
The purpose of these two trials, and also the one that followed in 1938, was very simple. They destroyed all those within the party who had at any time in the past belonged to an opposition. They not only destroyed them physically, but they also sought to annihilate them morally; to deny their past services in the revolutionary cause, transform them into traitors, and render them for ever anathema to the mass of the Russian people. At the same time they constituted the ostensible motive for a purge, both at home and abroad, of the administrative apparatus and the armed forces, thus removing all who did not belong to the new generation of parvenus typified in the person of AY Vyshinsky, who, during the days of revolution, had been on the other side of the barricade — and as far away on the other side as possible. This process halted only with the fall and trial of Yagoda, chief of the GPU, accompanied by a cleansing of the police apparatus itself, thus silencing — by death or the threat of death — all those who knew too much about the inner mechanics of the purge.
This does not mean to say that all of the purged were innocent of any hostility towards Stalin. Many nursed in secret a passionate desire for a change in the regime. Stalin could not but know how much he was hated, and that was enough for him. This was treachery! Vengeful, almost (one hesitates over the qualification) pathologically suspicious, Stalin smelled treason everywhere; and, once launched, the purge acquired a momentum of its own, independent of its author, impossible to stop till at last it bogged down of itself in the blood and filth churned up in its path.
From a study of the trial records themselves we can obtain a glimpse into their shadowy background.
The chief accused in the 1936 trial had already been in prison for a long time before they appeared in the dock. Yevdokimov was asked by Vyshinsky: ‘Do you admit that the assassination of Comrade Kirov was prepared with your assistance?’ Yevdokimov admits it. Vyshinsky continues: ‘At the trial in Leningrad, on 15-16 January 1935, you emphatically asserted that you had nothing to do with that murder.’ So — he had been in GPU hands since before January 1935. Among others figuring in this trial of 1935 were Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bakayev. They had all been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for ‘moral complicity’ in the killing of Kirov. Now they all figured in this new trial in 1936. Thus they had all been in prison, at the disposal of the investigators, for a long time before they once again faced their judges.
The official report also gives us an indication of the length of interrogation necessary before the accused can be made to confess. V Olberg confessed ‘during examination on 21 February of this year’ (that is, 1936). But there is no date in the report indicating that any of the other accused confessed before July. It is reasonable to assume that had they confessed earlier, the report would have said so. It gives dates ranging from 3 July to 10 August, when ‘detailed evidence’, that is, when the required admissions were made by some of the principal accused (no dates are given for Fritz David and Berman-Yurin, who, like another accused, Olberg, rouse the very strong suspicion of being government agents). Thus we have a period of time from 21 February to 10 August: more than five months between the first confession and the last.
During these five months (at least) the accused were subject to interrogation. Again the trial record itself helps us to understand that these men (apart from Olberg, Fritz David and Berman-Yurin) did not give way easily. We quote from the report (Trial I): ‘After obdurate denials, the accused Zinoviev, convicted by the testimony of a number of other accused, had to admit that ...’ (p 31) (No date is given for Zinoviev’s first break, but from the text it is obviously after many of the others.)
After persistent denials of his participation ... the accused Bakayev, under the weight of evidence brought against him, testified... (p 33)
Comrade Vyshinsky reminds Kamenev that he admitted this only after Reingold had given his evidence; that at the preliminary investigation he did not admit this until he had been implicated by others. (p 57)
Gradually a picture of part of what takes place behind the scenes begins to form. Olberg confesses first, a long time before any of the others; his confession is shown to others, or they are confronted with him in person to hear his accusations; still others ‘confess’, perhaps at first only partially but at last they are completely broken; and finally the most obdurate fall into line ‘under the weight of evidence’.
Now, we already have a slight idea of the nature of the preliminary interrogation from the evidence of Monkhouse in the Metro-Vickers Trial. He admitted that he lost his nerve after only forty-eight hours of questioning. Only forty-eight hours! — but ‘under such conditions it was enough’ — he said in court. For these later victims, however, it was not a question of two days, but of at least five months. Vyshinsky sought to excuse the very long periods of each interrogation session to which the British engineers were subjected, on the grounds that the British government itself was urging that the case be speeded up. The investigation of Nordwall and Monkhouse would normally have taken weeks and they would have been questioned for only two or three hours at a time, he said. But what power on earth was there to prevent the investigators in the case of Zinoviev and Kamenev et alii from continuing each interrogation for more than two or three hours, for as long as the prisoners retained consciousness? And then reviving them, to continue the torture. What power on earth was there to stop them from keeping up this pressure day after day, week after week, and month after month?
The reports of the public trials, particularly the first (1936), are far from being verbatim, and appear to have been edited with some care. Still it is clear that of all the accused, Smirnov, even in court, was more difficult to hold in line than the others. It is not therefore without significance that before his turn comes for cross-examination by Vyshinsky the ‘witness’ Safonova is brought into court. We put ‘witness’ in quotes because ‘her case has been set aside for separate trial’ (Trial I, p 76), although she is manifestly just as much one of the accused as any of those actually in the dock.
After Safonova had affirmed that Smirnov said ‘Stalin must be assassinated, Stalin would be assassinated’, Vyshinsky turns to Smirnov and asks: ‘What were your relations with Safonova?’
Smirnov: ‘Good.’
Vyshinsky: ‘And more.’
Smirnov: We were intimately related.
Vyshinsky: ‘You were husband and wife.’
Smirnov: ‘Yes.’
Was Smirnov’s wife brought into court simply to report alleged conversations, or conversations about conversations, which added nothing to what other accused had already confessed? And why was her case ‘set aside for separate trial'? And why was she never tried in public after all?
Is it altogether unwarranted to suggest that some sort of bargain is here in question? We affirm nothing at this point, but the reader is asked to bear this incident in mind when reading later testimony regarding the methods employed at the preliminary investigations. Let us for the time being content ourselves with quoting the words of the 67-year-old accused Fyedotov in the Industrial Party Trial: ‘If at the present time I none the less beg... for leniency, it is not for myself... but for my family.’
It must also be noted that many others allegedly involved with the accused at this trial were also ‘reserved’. ‘The cases of Gertik, Grinberg, Y Gaven, Karev, Kuzmichev, Konstant, Matorin, Paul Olberg, Radin, Faivilovich, D Schmidt and Esterman, in view of the fact that investigation is still proceeding, have been set aside for separate trial.’ (Trial I, p 39 — my emphasis) What becomes of them? No one knows — or rather no one tells. They do not figure in the next great trial in 1937, or the next in 1938. Who are they, what were they? Just names, outlandish names. But nearly all of them were leading figures in the early Bolshevik movement, and men who had for years worked hand-in-glove with Stalin. The GPU has power, however, to deal with them ‘administratively’ — and it uses this power. Since men can be shot without trial, it rests with the preliminary investigation whether they ever appear at a public trial — or any trial at all. On the other hand, men are ostensibly condemned to death and yet later they reappear in public life. Ramzin, for a well-known example. His case might well be cited to men under interrogation as an example of the fact that the regime is not vindictive, is prepared to rehabilitate those who aid it by making a clean breast of their sins.
Listen to the evidence on Smirnov’s attitude during the preliminary investigations:
At first he denied everything: he denied the existence of a Trotskyite organisation, he denied the existence of a centre, he denied his part in the centre, he denied connection with Trotsky, he denied that he gave any secret instructions, even those which he gave in 1936, and we know that this great conspirator managed to organise the communication of criminal instructions to his adherents even while he was in isolation. He denied everything. The whole of his examination of 20 May consisted of the word: ‘I deny that, again I deny, I deny.'... On 21 July, you, Smirnov, gave somewhat different evidence... When confronted with Mrachkovsky you continued to deny... I want to remind you that at the confrontation with Safonova during the preliminary investigation, which, in the main, reproduced what we saw in this court... he says ‘I do not remember.’ ... But on 13 August he was compelled to admit that this conversation did take place in 1932... (Trial I, pp 158-60, my emphasis)
Note in the above the phrase ‘even while he was in isolation’: the prosecution could not ignore the awkward fact that Smirnov had been in prison from January 1933 until his last trial in 1936.
The 1936 trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev is their third. Twice before, in January and July 1935, they have been tried in connection with the Kirov affair, in conditions of almost complete secrecy. Clearly they were not at that time ripe for a public propaganda trial. At this, their third and last appearance in court, prospective members of the cast of other performances are mentioned. In addition to the list of names of those whose ‘cases are reserved’, others crop up during the court questioning. Since the accused only repeat in court what they have confessed behind the scenes, the mention of these names comes as no shock to the prosecuting authorities.
There is therefore nothing haphazard about all this. The second and third Moscow Trials are already in process of rehearsal before the first is launched. It is not enough for the accused to confess his own guilt: he must have had accomplices. Who were they? We get a hint of this aspect of the matter from the following:
Ter-Vaganyan explains to the court that Smirnov is afraid of telling the court the whole truth because he would then have to name a number of persons who were associated with terrorism. (Trial I, p 109)
Smirnov’s reluctance to go the whole hog is thus explained in part by his desire not to implicate others. Ter-Vaganyan then offers him a way out of the dilemma; he suggests that Smirnov should admit connection with the ‘Gruzian [that is, Georgian — author] deviationists’: ‘In particular, Smirnov does not want to say that beginning with 1928 he maintained systematic connections with Gruzian deviationists.’ Thus aided, Smirnov remembers that in 1929 he ‘met Okudjava’. No danger here, because Okudjava had already been sentenced in secret trial (if ‘trial’ is the right word) and shot, together with seven other prominent Georgian leaders.
While Smirnov is allowed this easy way out, not so for the others of lesser calibre. On 21 August 1936, Comrade Vyshinsky makes the following statement:
At the preceding sessions some of the accused (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Reingold) in their testimony referred to Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov, Radek, Pyatakov, Serebriakov and Sokolnikov as being to a greater or lesser degree involved in the criminal counter-revolutionary activities... (Trial I, p 115)
I consider it necessary to inform the court that yesterday I gave orders to institute an investigation of these statements of the accused in regard to Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Radek and Pyatakov, and that in accordance with the results of this investigation the office of the State Attorney will institute legal proceedings in this matter. In regard to Serebriakov and Sokolnikov, the investigating authorities are already in possession of material convicting these persons of counter-revolutionary crimes...
It goes without saying that the mere mention by the accused of these men is sufficient to condemn them. The prosecutor bears this statement out — an investigation will be instituted, but its findings are already known — for the ‘State Attorney will institute legal proceedings in this matter’. All the men whose names are mentioned know this. One of them, Tomsky, commits suicide rather than be forced to dishonour his name by public ‘repentance’. In the words of an exiled Oppositionist, ‘he throws his corpse in the face of Stalin’. Two are already ‘convicted'; they are due to appear at the following trial, which will serve only to publicise the conviction already decided upon.
The trial of the next batch of victims does not take place until January 1937. Among the accused are such famous figures as Radek, Sokolnikov, Serebriakov and Pyatakov. These men must have been under interrogation at least since the date of Vyshinsky’s statement on 21 August, that is, for five months. The trial report also in this case gives us evidence that the accused here too took some time to condition. Shestov says: ‘I did not surrender on the first day of my detention. For five weeks I denied everything, for five weeks they kept confronting me with one fact after another... (Report of the Court Proceedings in The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre (Moscow, 1937), p 562; hereafter referred to as Trial II) Muralov declares: ‘And I said to myself almost after [sic] eight months, that I must submit...’ (Trial II, p 233) Norkin holds out for two months and then yields. Why? asks Vyshinsky. ‘Because there is a limit to everything’, replies Norkin. The reply is not good enough; it has a double meaning; Vyshinsky is suspicious. Isn’t that precisely what the accused intended to convey? ‘Perhaps pressure was brought to bear on you?’, he asks. Norkin still refuses a direct answer. ‘I was questioned, exposed, there were confrontations.’ Vyshinsky persists: ‘You were confronted with evidence, facts?’ Norkin: ‘There were confrontations.’ (Trial II, p 288) How revealing is Norkin’s refusal to accommodate Vyshinsky.
From this material we are in a position to gain a vague impression of the general circumstances of the accused during the preliminary investigation. Many are (at least as far as the three great Moscow Trials are concerned) proclaimed guilty even before the preliminary investigation is completed. They are all questioned for long periods of time (we shall later show how long each session can last). Those who prove obstinate are confronted with other accused who have yielded, or they are shown their depositions. Finally even the most obdurate are convinced that further resistance is useless.
But these preliminary investigations have a kind of ‘chain-reaction’ effect. It is not only a question of the men who formerly played a leading part in Soviet life, and whose destruction has already been planned. So many others are in addition inevitably involved, their families, their friends, their colleagues, and these in turn are compelled to involve others. So many investigators working on so many suspects, and all of them goaded to fulfil their ‘norm’. The Frankenstein monster thus created begins to run amok. There is no end to the nightmare. Yet eventually there must be an end, if the entire administrative machinery is not to fall apart. So finally the signal for a halt is given. In the third and last great trial Henry Yagoda, the Grand Inquisitor, is himself put in the dock! At the same time large numbers of his investigators are thrown into jail, side by side with the men whom they have put to the question! Finally — the truth is out! — GPU men themselves are tried on the charge of — having extorted false confessions!
On 2 August 1938, Pravda (no 211) reported a three-day trial of GPU men in Yaroslavl. BK Yurchak, former District Prosecutor, together with his assistants, is accused of ‘abusing his position’, using it to ‘sanction unmotivated arrests of citizens’, forcing them to confess that ‘accidental mistakes’ committed during the course of their work were ‘sabotage, wrecking, counter-revolutionary crimes’. Do we read aright? There is no doubt about it. Again on 22 October 1938, Pravda (no 292) reports the trial of GPU man Busorgin, and his assistant, Nikigorovsky, for ‘sanctioning illegal arrests’, holding ‘innocent workers’ for from three to five months. These GPU officials are sent for trial by none other than Vyshinsky, who affects great moral indignation at this state of affairs! What! — innocent men forced to confess to imaginary crimes! Who ever heard of such monstrous proceedings! Away with these ‘enemies of the people’ who have ‘penetrated into the leading district organs’ — that is, into the GPU itself! Vyshinsky did not know that such things were possible! If only he had known about it when he was prosecuting at the Moscow Trials!
Still another trial of scapegoat inquisitors, reported by Pravda (8 February 1939), results in the death sentence for Shlipniev, former deputy-chief of the Thirty-Ninth Militia Department, and in sentences of ten, seven, five and three years’ imprisonment for four others; all accused of ‘manufacturing’ cases and using false witnesses. Similar trials in various parts of the country marked the turn of the tide. These miscreants had been discovered as a result of complaints to the Public Prosecutor! So many crimes, so many victims, so many cries for justice unheard for so many years. And at last the great Leader deigns to hear, Vyshinsky gets his instructions — and a handful of underlings are sacrificed. All is well; justice has been done.
In the last great Moscow Trial Stalin makes a final clearance of his rivals; the remaining famous personalities of the Russian Revolution are removed for ever from the political scene — and from life.
Once again all the defendants are seen to have been in the hands of the interrogators for a long time. We shall cite only the following statement of Bukharin as typical for them all, including, of course, even those who played the role of agents of the prosecution among the accused: ‘I have been in prison for over a year, and I therefore do not know what is going on in the world.’ (Trial III, p 767)
The most illuminating incident during the course of this trial was when the accused Krestinsky tried to retract his confession.
Krestinsky made the usual confession before the trial, but as soon as he got into open court he withdrew it and pleaded not guilty. Vyshinsky asks him if he always tells the truth and he replies with one word — no. Upon this Vyshinsky retorts — to this man accused of treason and on trial for his life — that ‘there is no need to get excited’. One can well appreciate that Krestinsky was in a state of the highest nervous tension. The following exchange then takes place:
Vyshinsky: ‘Consequently, Bessonov is not telling the truth?’
Krestinsky: ‘No.’
Vyshinsky: ‘But you do not always tell the truth. Is that not so?’
Krestinsky: ‘I did not always tell the truth during the investigation.’
Vyshinsky: ‘But at other times you always tell the truth?’
Krestinsky: ‘The truth!’
Vyshinsky: ‘Why this lack of respect for the investigation, why during the investigation did you tell untruths? Explain!’
Krestinsky: (No answer.)
The process of accusation and denial continues. Then once more Vyshinsky asks: ‘But what about your admission?’ Krestinsky replies: ‘During the investigation I gave false evidence.’ [my emphasis] The State Prosecutor tries very hard to bring him back to a confirmation of his confession, but Krestinsky stubbornly persists in his denials. At one point he says that he does not feel well but that he has ‘only to take a pill’ and he will be able to continue. Further questioning takes place.
Vyshinsky: ‘You remember that I directly asked you whether you had any declarations or complaints to make against the investigator. Was that not so?’
Krestinsky: ‘It was.’
Vyshinsky: ‘Did you answer me?’
Krestinsky: ‘Yes.’
Vyshinsky: ‘Did I ask whether you had any complaints, or not?’
Krestinsky: ‘Yes, and I answered that I had no complaints.’
Vyshinsky: ‘If you were asked whether you had any complaints, you should have answered that you had.’
Krestinsky: ‘I had, in the sense that I did not speak voluntarily.’ (Trial III, pp 47-66 — my emphasis)
The afternoon and evening session of 2 March concluded with Krestinsky still denying his guilt. But at the evening session of the next day Krestinsky yields and says: ‘I fully confirm the testimony I gave in the preliminary investigation.’ (Trial III, p 157)
What happened to make Krestinsky give way again?
As indicated in the Foreword to this book, most of the defendants in the three great Moscow Trials had long records of devoted service to the Russian revolutionary movement. The charges against them were so incompatible with all that was known of their past, and the notion of them as men whom the threat of torture and death could not turn from the path of what they held to be their duty as revolutionaries was so generally accepted, that many observers explained their confessions by their devotion to ‘the Cause’. Krestinsky’s attitude helps us to estimate the validity of this theory.
Krestinsky first of all makes a complete confession during the preliminary investigation; then he retracts it in court; then he retracts his retraction. His denial of guilt in court is quite categorical. Four times the president of the court asks him if he pleads guilty; four times he gives him the opportunity to fall into line with all the other accused, but he remains firm:
I plead not guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, of whose existence I was not aware. Nor have I committed any of the crimes with which I personally am charged, in particular I plead not guilty to the charge of having had connections with the German intelligence service... I have never been a Trotskyite. I have never belonged to the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites and have not committed a single crime. (Trial III, p 36)
He alone of all the accused had the courage to make this point-blank denial of the charges made against him. What caused him to lose courage again? His final plea gives us the answer.
He begins his plea by evoking his revolutionary past:
I am one of those who have the longest records of active participation in political life. I began my revolutionary career as an 18-year-old youth, in 1901... The first stage in my revolutionary activities, 1901-06, was connected with the first revolution of 1905. I worked in practically every town of the North-Western Territory, was several times arrested... was deported... I removed to St Petersburg, where I established connections with Lenin, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya [Lenin’s wife — author] and Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin. At that time I worked on the Zvezda (Izvestia), and on Pravda.
And so on, up to 1921, when he says that he linked up with Trotsky in the ‘illegal Trotskyite work which he was then commencing’.
Having emphasised his complete loyalty to Lenin and Stalin he refers the beginning of his downfall to his agreement with Trotsky’s views in 1921; [2] views which were then freely expressed, published by the party press, but which he now calls ‘illegal’. However, in course of time this inner-party battle of ideas assumed ‘a purely conspiratorial’ character, eventually involving ‘terrorism, wrecking and diversion’. Then comes the key to his strange behaviour in pleading not guilty at the outset of the trial. ‘I consider it necessary’, he says, ‘to stress the fact that I had absolutely no knowledge of the terrorists’ acts enumerated in the second section of the indictment, and that I learnt about them only when I was handed a copy of the indictment.’ (Trial III, p 734) He continues:
The fact is that in the days just preceding the trial I was under the painful impression caused by the gruesome facts that I had learnt from the indictment, and especially from its second section... It seemed to me easier to die than to give the world the idea that I was even a remote accessory to the murder of Gorky, about which I actually knew nothing. (Trial III, p 736 — author’s emphasis)
Thus Krestinsky did not know the full charges against him until a few days before the opening of the trial (this gives a further insight into the preliminary staging), although he had been nine months in prison. At the end of the trial, in excuse for pleading not guilty, he said that it was the shock of learning that he was charged with being an accessory to the murder (so-called) of Maxim Gorky that made him deny everything he had previously admitted.
It seemed to him ‘easier to die’ than admit this charge. But this excuse is obviously not in accord with the words he used when pleading not guilty: for he did not then once mention the name of Gorky; instead he made a point of denying ‘in particular’ the charge of being a German agent. Had his retraction really been due to a feeling of revulsion on learning that he was to be implicated in the death of Gorky, he would have denied ‘in particular’ this charge and not a quite different one. So in reality it was the charge of treason to socialism and of counter-revolutionary activity that he found so hard to admit. Although Krestinsky says that he admitted ‘at the first interrogation’ his ‘connections with the German Military Intelligence Service’, it took a further four months before he could be made to accept the prosecution’s interpretation of these ‘connections’. The reason why he made this initial deposition with relative ease is clear: it meant no more than that he was Ambassador in Berlin when the 1922 Rapallo Treaty was signed between Germany and Russia. Secret military clauses of this treaty provided for exchange of information and cooperation between the two countries in building up their armed forces.
Since 1923 [Krestinsky testified during the trial] the agreement with Seeckt was carried out mainly in Moscow, and sometimes in Berlin. But, of course, as I was the person who concluded this agreement, inasmuch as I carried it out at times, and inasmuch as I was a member of the organisation on behalf of which this agreement was concluded [that is, a member of the government! — author], I naturally bear full political responsibility also for those acts which were committed in Moscow. This agreement did not remain unchanged: in 1926 the Reichswehr raised the question of repudiating this agreement. (Trial III, p 263)
Note here that he speaks of bearing full ‘political responsibility’, not ‘criminal responsibility'; also that he refers to ‘the Reichswehr’ not the ‘military intelligence service’. The change in 1926 probably is a reference to the new Treaty of Berlin of 24 April 1926.
The whole rickety structure of lies and half-truths which compose the confessions has a certain foundation in fact, but as we can see from Krestinsky’s ‘connections’ with German intelligence, any actual historical event mentioned in the course of the trial is given a completely false interpretation, and is sometimes so camouflaged that it cannot be recognised for what it really was except by the leading participants in the trial. Seen in retrospect, the policy of aiding Germany to rebuild her war potential was wrong. Up to 1933 the main enemy had been France, with England a step behind; but after Hitler took power it became clear to Stalin, although not immediately, that the main danger was Germany. Krestinsky accepts ‘political responsibility’ for supporting and carrying out this earlier policy, but he cannot be charged with treason on this account, so official ‘connections’ must be transformed into espionage. After four months of conditioning to acceptance of this, Krestinsky agrees. Will he stand up in court and say exactly what these ‘connections’ were — that they belonged to the secret agreement with Germany whereby she evaded the provisions of the Versailles Treaty? Will he tell the workers of the world that Russia helped to build up the military strength of Germany — now Nazi Germany? No, that he cannot do. He is persuaded to accept the false version, and take the blame on his own shoulders. And then there comes another five months’ waiting for the trial. And at the last moment comes an addition to the charges by implicating him in Gorky’s death. To this man, who up to that moment has tried to retain the illusion that he remains a political figure, with a past worthy of some respect, and that he is not to be treated as a common criminal, this additional charge inserted at the penultimate moment comes as a tremendous shock. It reveals his opponents as even more unscrupulous than he had imagined them to be. This single breach of faith brings back the doubts overcome by four months of ‘conditioning’. That Gorky’s quite natural death was thus dragged into the affair is not in itself important — for who can take this seriously? — but all this repellent penny-dreadful nonsense about poisoning causes him to review his confession. For the first time he admits to himself that he may have been motivated by the desire to save his life. The courage that it took four months to break down momentarily returns to him. No, ‘easier to die’ than admit to it. And, of course, it was not complicity in Gorky’s death that he found easier to die for than admit: for, let us once again repeat, he did not even mention this when he pleaded not guilty at the opening of the trial.
But his new-found courage lasted a short time only. Hear his last words:
I beg you to bear in mind that I did not take a direct part in the most acute forms of struggle — terrorism, diversion and wrecking — and did not specifically know about these actions. I beg you to remember my former really revolutionary work, to believe me when I say that during these nine months I have undergone a radical change, and, by sparing my life, to give me the opportunity to expiate my crimes in any way, even if only partially. (Trial III, p 736 — author’s emphasis)
It could hardly be put more plainly. Krestinsky is pleading for his life. In the final analysis it is the instinct to survive that motivates his submission, however much he may have rationalised. During the night following his categorical retraction of his entire confession, his inquisitors have once again placed the alternative brutally before him.
This basic aspect of the matter is important, because if one accepts the Darkness at Noon explanation of the confessions, according to which these revolutionaries sacrifice themselves in the larger interests of the Party and the Cause, then the confessions of others who had no such motives would remain a mystery. But already, long before the trial of the Bolshevik ‘Old Guard’, we had confessions whose essence was similar, given by persons with no allegiance to the Communist Party. And since these trials we have had Protestant and Catholic leaders and British and American employees of business firms all making confessions. Therefore for all of them there must be some common factor compelling their submission.
Just as it is clear that the ‘Russian soul’ has nothing to do with the matter, so it is clear that the ‘Marxist soul’ offers no solution to the problem.
It is not, of course, suggested by this that the Darkness at Noon theory in no way contributes towards understanding of the confessions. On the contrary, it raises an extremely important aspect of the technique employed: the ‘psychological approach’. During the preliminary investigation it is the task of the examiners to aid the accused to rationalise his motives for submission. According to the psychological make-up of the person concerned, the arguments employed will be more or less subtle, will combine physical with moral pressure in differing proportions. Something of this can be deduced from the case of a man like Bukharin, who would never admit to himself that he was motivated by the fear of death and whose resistance would only be strengthened by the bald threat of it. He gives the following reasons for his confession:
I shall now speak of myself, of the reasons for my repentance. Of course, it must be admitted that incriminating evidence plays a very important part. For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?’ — an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented. And, on the contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the party and the country. And when you ask yourself: ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for! Isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, in an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life...’ And at once the same reply arises. And at such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all the personal incrustation, all the rancour, pride, and a number of other things, fall away, disappear. And, in addition, when the reverberations of the broad international struggle reach your ear, all this in its entirety does its work, and the result is the complete internal moral victory of the USSR over its kneeling opponents... (Trial III, p 777)
In considering this statement we may leave aside the reference to ‘incriminating evidence’, since there was none apart from the confessions themselves; he almost seems to be saying; let us have done with the formalities and get to the real issue. Bukharin here is seeking to explain the apparently inexplicable in terms that may leave something of his past reputation unsullied. Here it is not the propaganda needs of the immediate moment that concern him so much as the verdict of History. He had lived for a Cause and now he wanted to persuade posterity that he was dying for a Cause — or what remained of it: ‘everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union’. Again the spectre of the ultimate and irrevocable — Death. The choice had been put before him: die in the dark alone or perform one last service, and perhaps not the last, perhaps there is a chance of rehabilitation; in any case there will be an opportunity, within certain limits, of defending yourself, of explaining why you are doing what you are doing. And he did defend himself, so well that he at times made Vyshinsky look like a not particularly gifted pupil.
He categorically denied that he was ‘connected with foreign intelligence services’, categorically denied complicity in the assassinations real or alleged, and categorically denied participating in the alleged conspiracy to murder Lenin. But still he accepted the role of a counter-revolutionary, because he had been convinced when he threw in his lot with Stalin years before that that was the only thing to do to save the country and the revolution; and because in spite of all vacillations and doubtings he ultimately returned to this conviction — since what else was there with all possible alternative leadership destroyed? — and because, finally, the ‘reverberations of the broad international struggle’ had reached his ear through his inquisitors — after a year without any knowledge of what was going on in the world. Be sure that his informants had coloured the picture to suit their aims. War threatened and the masses must be rallied to the only leadership there was; the leadership of which he had been a part, all whose crimes he shared, and whose positive achievements he could not deny without stripping himself of everything — the self within, the part that History would respect, not the outer man that the politically uninitiated would revile a short time and then forget. Yes, he convinced himself of this. But it took him and the investigators three months to do it; and did the fear of death play absolutely no part in his final yielding? Not just death itself, the physical end, but the uselessness of it, the senselessness of it. ‘Only a miracle’, he said, could avert it; clearly the thought of this miracle was ever present in his mind. For three months he could tell himself with truth that he would rather die than do this thing; and the mere threat of death would only have stiffened his resistance. But he was offered life, one chance in a million perhaps, but a chance.
War is coming, comrade, and all will be needed. Only a full confession will show whether you are truly devoted, whether it is possible to trust you. ‘Everything personal, all the personal incrustation, all the rancour, pride, and a number of other things’ must be cast aside... Yes, his inquisitors would help him to rationalise...
Against Bukharin’s case set that of Friedman. Ignace Reiss, the secret Soviet agent abroad who broke with Stalin and was shortly afterwards assassinated in Switzerland, tells the story of this man:
A case better known than the others is that of the aged Friedman, an old Chekist whom Stalin, for some reason, was bent on including in the Zinoviev trial... But old Friedman remained adamant. The story is that his last words were: ‘You can shoot old Friedman only once, but no one can make a whore out of him.’
Thus men of fundamentally differing mental and physical calibre, although their devotion to the Party and the Cause be equally profound, will choose opposite paths. In general it may be said that the more purely intellectual the character of the accused, the less difficult it is to persuade him to confess. But for the investigators each accused required for a trial is a separate problem, demanding individual treatment. However, while the ‘psychological approach’ is an essential element of the technique, this understanding must not be permitted to obscure the fact that this moulding of the individual psychology is only possible in certain conditions. Without these essential conditions the confessional trial is not possible; it is therefore their sum total of all the circumstances that makes confessions possible, and not one element of them alone.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the propaganda value of these displays. However fantastically remote from reality they may appear to most of us in the West, they are yet effective, even if only temporarily, for the peasant masses for whose benefit they are primarily staged. No study of ‘mass persuasion’ can ignore them, for in this process they have undoubtedly been of immense value. Even in the West there are those — otherwise normally intelligent persons — who shake their heads and knowingly remark that ‘there is no smoke without fire’.
There is another angle worth considering. Even for those in the country concerned who do not wholly credit the ‘evidence’ of these trials, there is still a considerable satisfaction to be obtained from the fall of those who once sat in the seats of the mighty. The worker on the bottom rung of the Soviet social ladder derives some compensation from the fact that those at the top are even less secure than he, that they can be plunged overnight to depths beneath even him. [3] The more culturally immature a people, the more effective is the appeal to the basest instincts, to envy, unreasoning spite and personal malice; and the stage managers of these political demonstrations know how to play on all the stops. For the time being at any rate, millions of politically uneducated workers and peasants are persuaded that these ‘agents of the enemy’ are the sole cause of all their misfortunes. Attention is temporarily diverted from the evils of the system itself to individuals. If there are grave shortages of food, clothing, houses; if the promises of an easier and happier life do not materialise — it is all the fault of these saboteurs, these enemies of the people. Glass in butter, potatoes allowed to rot, grain not sown, jerry-built dwellings, mining disasters and train wrecks, wages not paid out at the right time, high prices and shoddy goods — it is all due to sabotage, behind which lurks the foreign enemy awaiting the appropriate moment to strike.
So one must work still harder, tighten one’s belt in order to ensure the defence of the Fatherland.
If those responsible for the trials had not found them effective in this respect, they would not have exported them abroad.
In the trials that have taken place of recent years outside Russia the same essential propaganda purpose is evident. The Russian government finds it expedient to maintain the ‘interventionist atmosphere’ of the early years of the Russian Revolution, however much world conditions may have altered. This constitutes one of the strongest psychological props of the regime. And those who frame Soviet policy — are they not also infected by the interventionist phobia? We have already briefly noted that the confessions of the accused always tally with the diplomatic manoeuvres of the Russian government; let us now examine this side of the question in more detail.
In the Industrial Party Trial of 1930 and the Menshevik Trial of 1931 the accused were chiefly in league with French imperialism; after 1935, when the Popular Front was in full swing, the accused forgot all about France and confessed themselves agents of the Gestapo, Japanese and, to lesser extent, British imperialism. England for long played a more or less secondary role in Soviet diplomatic considerations, and the USA no role at all; but today the accused in the satellite countries are all primarily agents of US or British imperialism. In the Moscow Trials the arch instigator of intervention was Trotsky, who had allegedly been an agent of German imperialism since 1921, and of British imperialism since 1926 — but nothing was said about France, which had loomed so prominent in previous trials. In the trials in satellite countries, Tito has taken the place of Trotsky; it is in agreement and collusion with Tito, arch-agent of imperialism, that the accused admit to having conspired. In 1936-38 Japan and Poland are also involved with Germany in interventionist plots, just as today France, Belgium and even Sweden stand behind the USA and Great Britain in the organisation of espionage against the People’s democracies and their protector, the Soviet Union.
The fact that all countries maintain intelligence services is not disputed. What strikes one as peculiar, however, is that in their confessions the defendants never admit to being in the pay of countries that are considered ‘friendly’ to Russia at the given time. This is most strikingly brought out by the single fact that never at any time has anyone confessed to being an agent in the pay of Italy. Italy had never been regarded as a serious threat to Russian security and relations between the two countries, in spite of Fascism in Italy, have never been strained. (In September 1933 the two countries signed a pact of non-aggression.)
Thus no one confesses to being a spy for Germany and Japan when England and France are regarded as the main enemies; and this in spite of the fact that at later trials the majority of the leading men in governmental, administrative and army circles are alleged to have all been in the pay of Germany and Japan long before these earlier trials took place. Conversely, no one confesses to having been a spy of England and France when the Comintern, on instructions from the Kremlin, is pursuing the policy of a United Front against the Axis Powers. Nor does the fact that hundreds are executed for allegedly seeking an agreement with Germany and Japan prevent the Soviet government from concluding an agreement with these countries scarcely a year after the last batch of ‘German and Japanese agents’ have been executed. (The later excuse that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was entered upon merely to gain time is demonstrably pure humbug.)
While, therefore, what the accused have to say about external aid is dictated by diplomatic considerations of the moment, their selection is sometimes determined by the requirements of the domestic situation. Thus we have batches of industrial technicians and specialists, Mensheviks (or, rather, former Mensheviks), foreign and native technicians, and finally high-ranking members of the Communist Party itself together with GPU men.
In Russia the process of suppressing opposition went on over a number of years, gradually widening its scope to embrace more and more social categories. In the satellites this destructive process, clearing the ground for the construction of the totalitarian states, is being telescoped into a much shorter period, for the driving force behind this is Soviet Russia. So in quick succession we have seen the Catholic and Protestant churches, foreign specialists, the Agrarian opposition parties, the Social Democrats, and Communist Party members themselves, all involved in confessional trials in the comparatively short space of six years.
An early and little remembered attempt to export the technique of the Moscow Trial to Europe took place in Spain in 1938. This is of particular interest because it was a dress rehearsal, as it were, of the later, successful export of these trials to Eastern Europe. It furnishes additional strong evidence in support of the view that these trials are not concerned with bringing criminals to justice, but are organised in order to provide scapegoats and a platform for propaganda and to give a legal covering for the physical suppression of opponents. Moreover, by noting the circumstances that prevented this Spanish trial from blossoming into a confession trial proper, we shall assist our understanding of those trials that were successful.
Russia’s policy in Spain during the Civil War was in essence no different from that pursued in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. She hoped to see emerge from the fires of war a government that would be her puppet; she was not content that gratitude for military aid against Franco should forge a bond of friendship between her and Spain; she wanted to make sure that her own satraps should be in control of any government resulting from a victory of the Loyalist forces. To ensure that it was felt necessary, even before the Civil War had ended, to destroy the parties and personalities within the Spanish workers’ movement that were hostile to the Communist Party. As hopelessly unrealistic as this aim of dominating Spain through the Russian-controlled Communist Party may seem, the Barcelona trial in 1938, and the circumstances surrounding it, so strongly resemble postwar experience in Eastern Europe that there can be no doubt that such an ambition existed, and was not so unlikely of realisation as it may seem.
As early as December 1936, Pravda (17 December 1936) exposed this aim by stating that ‘so far as Catalonia is concerned the cleaning up of the Trotskyist and Anarcho-Syndicalist elements has already begun and it will be carried out with the same degree of energy as in the USSR’. The ‘Trotskyist’ elements referred to were the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers Party of Marxist Unity), commonly known by its initials, POUM. Its main strength was in Catalonia, the most industrialised part of Spain, and during the first months of the Civil War it had achieved a large following, representing the most serious challenge to the Communist Party. The POUM, whose leaders were mostly ex-members of the Spanish Communist Party, although in some respects the weakest party opposing the Stalinists, was at the same time the greatest potential danger to their plans. Unlike the Socialists and Republicans, it had no illusions about Russian policy, and it refused to soften its criticism of this policy. Soviet military aid increased the influence of the Spanish Communists, who had been a negligible handful at the outset of the Civil War. Seeking an alliance with the Socialists and Republicans, it toned down its social demands in order to create the impression of moderation. Manoeuvring on the basis of the popular desire for unity in the interests of the common struggle against Franco, the Communists in Catalonia succeeded in uniting with the Socialists to form the Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña (PSUC). In spite of the numerical superiority of the Socialists in this new party, it was soon apparent that the Communists were in full control. This particular manoeuvre is now familiar to us from similar experiences in Eastern Europe.
The next step was to gain control of the armed police by placing Communists in all key positions. At the same time a propaganda campaign against the anarchists and the POUMists — and particularly against the latter — was waged, and the POUM was eventually forced out of the Barcelona Generalidad. In June 1937, six months after the Pravda directive had been given, the leaders of the POUM were arrested as ‘agents of General Franco’. Nin, however, was not among those officially arrested. He, like many others, had been seized by secret agents acting on Russian instructions, taken to a private prison, and murdered. His body was picked up in a Madrid gutter some time afterwards.
The leaders of POUM were not brought to trial until sixteen months after their arrest. But in spite of this long delay they had not been broken and did not make any confessions. A very lively interest in their fate had been aroused in the working-class movement abroad, and a widespread campaign was being waged on their behalf. The exigencies of the Civil War made the Spanish authorities susceptible to pressure of this nature, and, although Prieto had been manoeuvred and strong-armed out of office, the Stalinists were still not completely master of the situation. The POUM leaders’ place of detention was known; they could not in the circumstances be kept incommunicado. In an ‘unofficial’ secret Spanish prison men could be interrogated: as was the case with the Belgian ex-Communist Kopp, questioned twenty-seven times for a total of one hundred and thirty-five hours in an unsuccessful effort to make him ‘confess’. But these prisoners, held officially by a government containing men still hesitant to go as far as the Communists urged, although conscious of their dependence upon Russian support, could not be subjected to such methods. Nor, even if they had been so treated, is it likely that they would all have been broken, since they could not be isolated from the outside world and were well aware of the efforts being made outside on their behalf.
The considerable volume of protests aroused by the arrest of these men and the charges brought against them made the authorities reluctant to bring the case to court. Anxious as they were to please their Russian ‘advisers’, the manufactured ‘evidence’ purporting to show that the accused were Franco agents was a little too much even for them, and this main charge in the indictment was dropped. But heavy prison sentences were none the less passed on the defendants — for seeking to overthrow the existing Loyalist government by force. The moderate Socialists and Republicans who lent themselves to this Communist manoeuvre apparently saw no inconsistency in thus allying themselves with the exponents par excellence of the armed coup d'état. Nor did they have the slightest inkling of the fact that, should the Communists’ policy prove successful, they themselves would have eventually been in the dock, charged with attempting to overthrow the regime by armed force!
This attempt to export the Moscow Trial failed because the Communists were not in full command, could not make unrestrained use of every possible moral and physical pressure. Their opponents had been neither morally nor physically disarmed. World public opinion was still a power to which even the Communists at that time felt it expedient to make some concessions. Yet the Communists made the utmost possible use of the trial for propaganda purposes. Pravda — which translated means ‘Truth’ — even reported that the accused had confessed! In their reports they studiously ignored the findings of the court rejecting the charge of espionage; they continued to propagate this charge as though it had been proved; and to this day they have not ceased propagating it.
Unfortunately, as postwar events in Eastern Europe have demonstrated, the Socialist and Liberal movements never studied Russian methods in Spain. Had they done so they would have been better equipped to fight for survival.
1. See the author’s Assassins at Large, Wingate, 1951. [On the MIA at http://www.marxists.org/archive/dewar/assassins/index.htm — MIA.]
2. At the Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) Trotsky’s views on the role of the trade unions were supported by, among others, Bukharin, Krestinsky, Serebriakov, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov — all tried and convicted in the Moscow Trials (see Isaac Deutscher’s Soviet Trade Unions (Chatham House, 1950), p 42 and following).
3. ‘In a Serbian village we were discussing the Moscow Trials. Shortly before, the Yugoslav War Minister had resigned in somewhat dubious circumstances. A peasant said to me: ‘Russia must be a grand country. There the big people get punished when they do wrong, because the people rule.’ (H Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1945), p263)