The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953
Hardly had the Prague trial ceased to occupy the front pages of the world press than the Soviet news agency, Tass, announced the ‘unmasking’ of yet another ‘plot’, this time in the USSR itself. The details made public on 13 January, though scanty, once more gave evidence of the inspirational source of all these incredible affairs. It was as though the Soviet government itself was determined to leave no room for doubt that it held the copyright in these scripts. At the same time the Tass announcement confirmed that the anti-Semitism of the Prague trial was not a mere local variation on the general theme but, on the contrary, had been featured at the direct instigation of Moscow.
Tass reported the ‘arrest of a terrorist group of physicians, uncovered by the state security organs of the USSR’. Among those arrested were GI Mayorov, and the professors MS Vovsi, VN Vinogradov, [1] MB Kogan, BB Kogan, PI Yegorov, YG Etinger, AI Feldman and AM Grinshtein. Most of the members of this terrorist group were allegedly in the pay of the American intelligence service and received their instructions through the medium of Joint, described as ‘an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organisation'; others were long-standing agents of the British intelligence service. Their aim had been ‘first of all to undermine the health of Soviet leading military cadres, to disable them, and to weaken the defence of the country. They tried to disable Marshal AM Vasilevsky, Marshal LA Govorov, Marshal IS Koniev, Army General SM Shtemenko, Admiral GI Levchenko and others.’ They had failed in this purpose, but had succeeded in murdering AA Zhdanov and AS Shcherbakov, ‘outstanding leaders of the Soviet state...’.
This announcement naturally gave rise to speculations as to whether a purge comparable in its fury to those of the 1930s might not be getting under way. Was this so-called Doctors’ Plot symptomatic of a deep-going struggle among the Soviet leaders? And would the circle of those involved be later expanded to include prominent figures of the regime?
Pravda of 13 January stated that the fact that this ‘group of cheap monsters recruited among “scientists” was able to go about unpunished shows that some of our Soviet authorities and their heads have forgotten about vigilance’, and there was also direct reference to ‘shortcomings’ in the state security services. In some quarters this was taken to indicate an attack on LP Beria, who had become head of the NKVD in 1938, after the removal of NI Yezhov. However, the simultaneous prominence given in the Soviet press to the public appearance of Beria with Stalin and other leaders would seem to have been designed to scotch any such rumours and to emphasise the unity of the top leadership. It must also be remembered that Beria relinquished his post in the NKVD in 1946. Sometime in 1945 the organisation had again been split into two departments, the MVD (Ministry of Internal Security) and the MGB (Ministry of State Security). Thus, although Beria may have continued to exercise a behind-the-scenes control over these organisations, the persons officially responsible are SN Kruglov and VS Abakumov, heads of the MVD and the MGB respectively. (To date, there has been no official confirmation of the rumour that Abakumov has been shot.) Further expansion of the circle of those involved in the Doctors’ Plot would therefore be more likely to include one of these two men rather than Beria.
The existence of rivalry for the succession to Stalin’s throne cannot, of course, be discounted entirely; but there is no immediate evidence that the story of the Doctors’ Plot is an element of such a rivalry, while there is considerable evidence that it has been motivated by quite other considerations.
The idea of involving Kremlin doctors in a plot against the regime derives, of course, from the Moscow Trial of 1938, which, in the final analysis, was an expression of fundamentally opposed political viewpoints; but today the entire political circumstances are quite different from those prevailing in 1938. The trial of the ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists’ gave the death-blow to the last of the ‘Old Guard’ around which, given certain conditions, a political opposition might have crystallised. At the same time it eliminated all those who had prepared and carried through the previous purges and trials. Then the great and dreaded Yagoda, thanks to whose vigilance the enemies of the people had been unmasked, was himself unmasked by the even more vigilant Yezhov. In due course Yezhov was also unmasked and executed. Beria’s appointment as head of the NKVD marked the end of an epoch, the final stabilisation and consolidation of the new bureaucracy around Stalin. It was henceforth in the common interest of all members of this bureaucratic caste to stand together, to display a united front to the Soviet people and the world. The ground for fundamental political divisions among them no longer existed; if any divergences arose they were tactical and not strategic.
The problem confronting the Soviet bureaucracy today is not therefore the former one of a divided leadership, part of which, however much it might ostensibly have reconciled itself to the Stalin course, still looked back for its inspiration to the revolutionary past. No, the problem confronting it is: how to justify the sacrifices required of the common people for war preparedness; how to channel the discontent of the great mass of the non-privileged workers and peasants away from the bureaucracy; how to combat the more blatant abuse of party and state office for personal ends — a disease endemic to the very system; how to stimulate ‘criticism from below’ and yet to hold it within the limits inevitably imposed by a regime essentially authoritarian; and how to hold on to, strengthen and consolidate its vast empire.
In the common interest of the bureaucratic caste the leadership must be prepared from time to time to sacrifice individual members of that caste, but only an internal crisis of major proportions and long duration could call forth a political opposition necessitating a purge comparable in scope to that of the 1930s.
Subsequent Soviet comment on, and developments with regard to, the Doctors’ Plot have all tended to confirm the view that its ‘discovery’ was inspired by considerations already revealed at the Nineteenth Congress of the party in October 1952. Then Malenkov spoke of ‘such ugly features as bureaucracy and degeneration, and even corruption in some sections of the party apparatus...'; of ‘a spirit of negligence [that] has penetrated our party organisation'; and demanded that a ‘decisive stop’ be put to ‘violations of party and state discipline’, and that it be made ‘possible for all honest-minded Soviet citizens to come forward boldly and fearlessly and criticise shortcomings in the work of our organisations and institutions’ (G Malenkov, Report to the Nineteenth Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B) (Moscow, 1952), pp 114, 116, 121, 131). Although Malenkov — moved by the need to face the facts and yet to proclaim the unceasing vigilance of the party — blew alternately hot and cold on this theme, it is clear from his speech that the Soviet leaders are deeply concerned at the existing state of affairs in the country. The greater part of the pre- and post-congress discussion was concentrated on the subject of mismanagement, nepotism, corruption and so forth. It is evident that the national leadership has decided that the entire state apparatus needs an extremely severe shaking up. The seriousness of the situation must be brought home to everyone by some striking object lesson. What better method than the time-honoured one of a confession trial? There can be little doubt that the Doctors’ Plot has been devised precisely for this purpose of administering a therapeutic shock to the party activists and the entire administrative apparatus.
After the first news of the ‘discovery’ had been published and briefly commented on, the Soviet press was silent on the matter for four days. Then on 18 January [2] came a Pravda editorial, which referred to the ‘fight for the fulfilment of the tasks laid down in Stalin’s work of genius Economic Problems of the USSR'; called for the strictest discipline, high political vigilance, an irreconcilable attitude towards shortcomings; and quoted the new party statutes obliging all members to ‘keep party and state secrets’ (author’s emphasis). ‘A carefree, smug and complacent mood’, it said, ‘has penetrated the party ranks'; vigilance had been blunted and such ‘unpleasant facts as capitalist encirclement and plots have begun to be forgotten’ (author’s emphasis):
They are losing sight of the fact that the imperialists, especially the American developing preparations for a new war, attempt to send into our country and other countries of the socialist camp twice and three times more agents, spies, diversionists, than into the rear of any bourgeois country.
It is surely unnecessary to look further for an explanation of the motives behind the ‘discovery’ of the Doctors’ Plot.
These nine doctors will confess in court, not to any real crimes that they may have on their consciences, but to crimes concocted by their inquisitors to conform to a determined pattern of propaganda, for the purpose of educating the party and the people. That men can be tortured, degraded, ruined, crushed out of existence like flies, simply in order to provide an object lesson, to tighten up the administrative machine, and to bring home the ‘unpleasant fact of capitalist encirclement’ — this is horrible even to think of. Yet it has been done, as we have seen, over and over again in the Soviet world — systematically, cynically, with cold-blooded calculation.
Nor will the forthcoming Moscow trial (public or private) be the first occasion on which eminent Kremlin doctors have been obliged to ‘point a moral and adorn a tale’. In the light of present events in the Soviet Union it is worthwhile to glance back at that aspect of the 1938 Moscow Trial that concerned the three Kremlin doctors, Levin, Kazakov and Pletnev, accused and found guilty of the murder of the former GPU chief, Menzhinsky; the Politbureau member, Kuibyshev; the world-famous author, Maxim Gorky, and his son, Maxim Peshkov. The last named was a confirmed alcoholic who, after a particularly heavy bout of drinking, lay out in the snow, caught pneumonia, and died. The others were all chronic invalids liable to die at any moment (only one-third of Gorky’s lungs were functioning at the time of his death). Yet the doctors, all of them in the top ranks of their profession (Levin had even treated Lenin) all confessed to having murdered them by ‘wrecking methods of treatment’, on Yagoda’s orders.
The confessions of the Kremlin doctors were required in order to make out a case against Yagoda, who could not be charged with the many real crimes he had committed without accusing his accusers. [3] Thus it was necessary to charge him with purely imaginary crimes.
The testimony of the doctors as to why they had done Yagoda’s bidding is particularly instructive. Dr Kazakov said:
I was dazzled by the power of the representative of the OGPU [changed to NKVD in 1934 — author]; he seemed to me to be an omnipotent person, in whose hands a tremendous amount of power was concentrated. And if this man said I must do this, then I did it. Psychologically, I explain it by a sort of cowardice — not for my own life, that I say in all sincerity. What frightened me was his threat to destroy my family. (Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, p 546)
The force of this admission is not diminished by the fact that Yagoda denied ever having met Kazakov. For the force of it lies in the fact that Kazakov’s fear of Yagoda was accepted by the court as perfectly natural. Pletnev, questioned on the same point by Vyshinsky, replied that: ‘After all, he was the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs.’ Levin also pleaded that Yagoda had threatened to ruin him and his family if he disobeyed his orders. All the doctors obviously thought that everyone would appreciate the situation. And everyone did appreciate it.
Thus both in 1938 and now, with the Doctors’ Plot, the alleged victims are men who have been dangerously ill for a long time. In both instances the physicians’ treatment is said to have undermined their patients’ health and so caused their deaths. But whereas in 1938 the doctors played a minor role, now they are apparently to be given leading parts. Then they received instructions from the head of the GPU and had no direct connection with any foreign intelligence service, while now they are in the pay of the US and the British. In 1938 the doctors committed their imaginary crimes through fear of Yagoda. The fear no one thought imaginary, since it corresponded to Soviet reality. Today, however, the doctors — nine of them, all highly paid and highly privileged — allegedly sold themselves for dollars and pounds, a charge that is absurd on the face of it. Will the Soviet authorities not try to make their case in this respect appear less feeble? And if so, will they not fall back again on the 1938 script? Should they do so, it is clear that either Kruglov or Abakumov is indicated for Yagoda’s role, rewritten to accord with present requirements and circumstances. If it is true that Abakumov has already been executed, then he would be the ideal person for the purpose, since there would be no question of his making even the limited denials made by Yagoda. Either Kruglov or Abakumov could be expended without calling in question the stability of the national leadership. The inclusion of a security chief would also demonstrate that the government was really trying to square the circle in order to realise Malenkov’s demand that the ‘honest-minded Soviet citizen’ should be able to come forward and criticise without fear of the consequences.
In 1938 the foreign intelligence services involved with the ‘plotters’ were the German and the Japanese, with the British lying well back in third place. It was not easy to make this connection seem in any way plausible, and no attempt was made to show the doctors as directly connected. Even their indirect connection through Yagoda appeared obviously ridiculous after Yagoda had said: ‘I am not jesting when I say that if I had been a spy dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services...’ (Ibid, p 786) But today the doctors have somehow to be shown as agents of the US and British intelligence services. This is to be established through the ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalist’ Mikhoels and a certain Moscow physician, Shimeliovich, who were allegedly the liaison agents between the doctors and the Jewish charitable organisation Joint. Mikhoels (he is said to be a brother of the accused Professor Vovsi) is dead, having been mysteriously murdered in Minsk in 1947. Whether Shimeliovich is alive or dead is not known. In addition to these two it is almost certain that the former US Ambassador, Mr Kerman — recalled last October at the request of the Soviet government — will be dragged into the affair. The Soviet inquisitors’ means of connecting the doctors with the British intelligence service is even more tenuous. Possibly the ubiquitous Konni Zilliacus will again come in useful. It may also be established that the accused had at some time or other had contact with members of the medical profession in the West.
Another point of interest requires to be noted. In the 1938 trial there was a Professor VN Vinogradov among the panel of medical experts called upon by the prosecution to bear witness against their accused colleagues. And among the doctors under arrest today there is also a Professor VN Vinogradov. This may be merely a coincidence: there may really be two Professors Vinogradov, with the same initials, and both members of the Kremlin Medical Service. But perhaps it is the same old story once again — the accusers of one trial becoming the accused of the next. There was also in 1938 a Dr AI Vinogradov, allegedly implicated in the murders but not brought to trial. His subsequent fate was never disclosed. Whatever bearing these facts may prove to have on the present case, it seems clear that the Doctors’ Plot will somehow be made to stem back to 1938 and before. The fantastic ramifications and nightmare logic of these affairs are such that nothing is impossible.
How were these doctors selected for their confessional roles? In the first place, of course, because they had had the so-called victims under their care. But it does not follow that Zhdanov and the others were not also given treatment by other physicians, who have not been arrested, who, on the contrary, will testify against their accused colleagues. This is what happened in 1938 — and here another nauseating aspect of this business has to be noted.
The accused Dr Kazakov testified in 1938 that ‘... most of the physicians in the Medical Service were my scientific opponents. I thought that a time might come perhaps when I would be able to work freely, that Yagoda would perhaps be able to curb them.’ (Ibid, p 602)
Vyshinsky’s violent reaction to this ‘slander’, as he called it, showed that he was touched on the raw. A fleeting glimpse of another sombre corner of Soviet reality had been unwittingly afforded. The moral degeneration in the upper circles of Soviet society had reached such a point that even controversy on matter of science was made the subject of appeal to the ‘thought police’, and the methods of the informer, the police spy and the provocateur resorted to in order to win the day against an opponent. On each side there were those who sought to show that their opponents held views hostile to the regime, were class enemies, deviationists, etc, etc. They did this knowing full well that it could, and did, lead to not merely dismissal of the defeated, but to their degradation, utter ruin, imprisonment, even death by shooting. Is the situation today any better than it was then? The answer to that has already been given. For shortly after the announcement of the Doctors’ Plot the Order of Lenin was awarded to a woman doctor, Lidya Fedoseyevna Timashuk, for ‘her assistance in the matter of exposing the doctor-assassins’. Something moves upwards from the murky depths, a monstrous, obscenely repellent shape...
There is still to be considered another problem raised by the Doctors’ Plot. Since the basic elements of all these judicial frame-ups have necessarily to be derived from events that actually did take place, is it not possible that the poisoning of professional or political rivals was in fact resorted to? Clearly the possibility cannot be excluded. The judicial frame-ups themselves prove that the Soviet rulers are not deterred by any moral scruples from the blackest iniquities. It is therefore quite possible that ‘incorrect treatment’ has been used to get rid of awkward persons who could not conveniently be disposed of by direct police methods. The number of persons coming in such a category would inevitably be very small, however; a man like Gorky, too world-famous to be arrested, might conceivably have been dealt with in this manner. Yet in the 1938 trial there was no solid evidence that Gorky or any of the other alleged victims had really been murdered; on the contrary, the doctors’ confessions, when they went into details, were calculated to disprove the charges rather than substantiate them. In the absence of any positive evidence other than confessions, extracted by the means described in the minutest detail in this book, and confronted with the contradictions and absurdities of those confessions, the only conclusion any reasonable person can come to is that the charges were false in the past and are false today. The suspicion that the particular crime of political murder has been committed in the Soviet Union must, however, remain strong; but precisely who the victims were will never be known, the real instigator never be brought to trial (we do not, of course, refer to those murders carried out under the guise of juridical proceedings). Confessions extorted by psychological and physical tortures do not constitute evidence of guilt — they constitute only evidence of the lack of evidence. And if one suspects that behind these charges of murder there does in fact lie, at a remote distance, some trace of the truth — the confessions have nothing to do with this truth.
Zhdanov, a sufferer from angina pectoris, died suddenly, as sufferers from this infliction often do. The Bulgarian Communist leader Dimitrov, his constitution seriously weakened long before he went to Moscow for treatment, also died. Marshal Choi Balsan, Premier of the Soviet Mongolian Republic, likewise went the way of all flesh. All of these men were under the care of Kremlin doctors now charged with murder. And how many others...? The scope of the trial involving these men may thus be widened indiscriminately at the discretion of the government. It may even be that the failure of the French Communist leader Thorez to recover in Russia from his illness will be attributed to the Doctors’ Plot, and thus linked with the disgrace of the Communist leaders Marty and Tillon in France. There is no fantasy beyond the imaginative powers of the Moscow show trial producers.
It would be a mistake to minimise the propaganda effect of these trials, however nonsensical they may seem to reasonable people. Even in the West, relatively politically mature, there are still many who are fooled by them. But with each successive trial the truth marches forward to conquer new ground. It is to the politically backward areas of the globe, however, that this propaganda is mainly directed. The Kremlin has noted the steady deterioration of the position of the Communist parties in the West, and while it has by no means written these parties off, it is, on the international field, concerned principally with consolidating its position in its Eastern European empire, and in China. The crude, highly coloured propaganda of ‘plots’ is well calculated to be effective in these areas. The anti-Semitism of the Prague trial and the Doctors’ Plot, while it loses supporters here, will win them there. It has not failed to find approval in the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, or among the rabidly anti-Israel elements of the Middle East.
In the Soviet Union itself the Doctors’ Plot serves the purpose we have indicated. There its effect is calculated to terrorise party and state officials as much as to convince the masses of the reality of ‘capitalist encirclement’. And that such a method must be resorted to in the ‘land of socialism’, thirty-five years after the Revolution promising an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity to the people of Russia, is in itself a sufficient commentary on the true state of affairs in that unhappy country.
29 January 1953
No sooner is the last line written than news comes of fresh charges and arrests. The former deputy Minister of the Non-Ferrous Metal Industry, SM Petrov, has been ‘guilty of impermissible carelessness and gullibility in losing a series of important secret documents’. The ‘traitor SI Orlov, taking advantage of the carelessness of the workers in an institution’, stole a secret document, ‘which he intended to transmit to a foreign intelligence service’. A certain IG Khanovich wrote books, which were published, containing top secret information. GL Zaslavsky, an official in the Ministry of Geology, showed secret material to outsiders. The heads of four Ukrainian Ministries are attacked... important documents have been poorly guarded. The campaign around the party statute obliging all members to ‘keep party and state secrets’ is launched on a nation-wide scale. All except the very top leaders are quaking in their shoes... wondering fearfully... will they, too, be made to confess that they are espionage agents of the US and British intelligence services?
And in the West the dark foreboding grows. Does all this herald a fresh thrust of aggression on the part of the Soviet Union?
1 February 1953.
1. On 27 February 1952, Pravda published the following item: ‘For outstanding services in the field of practical medicine and development of Soviet medical science, Professor VN Vinogradov, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, has on the occasion of his seventieth birthday been awarded the Order of Lenin.’
2. On the same day the arrest was announced of I Korshun, a consultant in the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, implicated in the ‘disappearance of an important document’. Also reported was the ‘unmasking’ of B Suleimenov, a ‘bourgeois nationalist’ member of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakhstan Republic, who had ‘deceitfully wormed his way into the ranks of the party’.
3. ‘I directed vast construction jobs — the canals’, he pleaded in mitigation; and when he wanted a simile to describe his membership of the ‘Right-Trotskyist underworld’ the one that he thought of was — ‘chained to this underworld as a convict to his wheelbarrow’ (Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, p 785).