Let us now introduce M. P. Yakubovich. He had begun his revolutionary activity so early that he had not even finished the gymnasium. In March, 1917, he was already Chairman of the Smolensk Soviet. Impelled by the strength of his convictions, which continued to lead him on, he became a strong and successful orator. At the Congress of the Western Front, he impetuously called those journalists who were demanding that the war continue enemies of the people. And this was in April, 1917. He was nearly hauled from the rostrum, and he apologized, but thereafter in his speech he maneuvered so adroitly and so won over his listeners that at the end he called them enemies of the people again, and this time to stormy applause. He was elected to the delegation sent to the Petrograd Soviet, and hardly had he arrived there than—with the informality of those days—he was named to the Military Commission of the Petrograd Soviet. There he exerted a strong influence on the appointment of army commissars,34 and in the end he became an army commissar on the Southwestern Front and personally arrested Denikin in Vinnitsa (after the Kornilov revolt), and regretted very much indeed (during the trial as well) that he had not shot him on the spot.
Clear-eyed, always sincere, and always completely absorbed in his own ideas—whether they were right or wrong—he was counted as—and was—one of the younger members of the Menshevik Party. This did not prevent him, however, from presenting his own projects to the Menshevik leadership with boldness and passion, such as, in the spring of 1917, proposing the formation of a Social Democratic government, or, in 1919, recommending that the Mensheviks enter the Comintern. (Dan and the others invariably rejected all his plans and their variations, and quite condescendingly, for that matter.) In July, 1917, he was very pained by the action of the socialist Petrograd Soviet in approving the Provisional Government’s calling up army units for use against other socialists, considering it a fatal error even though the other socialists were using armed force. Hardly had the October coup taken place than Yakubovich proposed to his party that it should support the Bolsheviks wholeheartedly and work to improve the state structure they were creating. In the upshot, he was finally ostracized by Martov, and by 1920 he had left the ranks of the Mensheviks once and for all, convinced that he could not get them to follow the Bolsheviks’ path.
I have gone into all this detail to make it quite clear that throughout the Revolution Yakubovich had been not a Menshevik but a Bolshevik, and one who was entirely sincere and disinterested. In 1920 he was still one of the Smolensk foodsupply commissars, and the only one of them who was not a Bolshevik. He was even honored by the People’s Commissariat of Food Supply as the best. (He claims that he got along without reprisals against the peasantry, but I do not know whether or not this is true. At his trial he did, however, recall that he had organized “antispeculation” detachments.) In the twenties he had edited the Torgovaya Gazeta (The Trade Gazette) and had occupied other important posts. He had been arrested in 1930 when just such Mensheviks as he, “who had wormed their way in,” were to be rounded up in accordance with the GPU plans.
He had immediately been called in for questioning by Krylenko, who, earlier and always, as the reader already knows, was organizing the chaos of the preliminary inquiry into efficient interrogation. It turned out that they knew one another very well, for in the years between the first trials Krylenko had gone to that very Smolensk Province to improve food-requisition work. And here is what Krylenko now said:
“Mikhail Petrovich, I am going to talk to you frankly: I consider you a Communist! [His words encouraged Yakubovich and raised his spirits greatly.] I have no doubt of your innocence. But it is our Party duty, yours and mine, to carry out this trial. [Krylenko had gotten his orders from Stalin, and Yakubovich was all atremble for the sake of the cause, like a zealous horse rushing into the horse collar.] I beg you to help me in every possible way, and to assist the interrogation. And in case of unforeseen difficulties during the trial, at the most difficult moments, I will ask the chairman of the court to give you the floor.”
!!!!
And Yakubovich promised. Conscious of his duty, he promised. Indeed, the Soviet government had never before given him such a responsible assignment.
And thus there was not the slightest need even to touch Yakubovich during the interrogation. But that was too subtle for the GPU. Like everyone else, Yakubovich was handed over to the butcher-interrogators, and they gave him the full treatment—the freezing punishment cell, the hot box, beating his genitals. They tortured him so intensively that Yakubovich and his fellow defendant Abram Ginzburg opened their veins in desperation. After they had received medical attention, they were no longer tortured and beaten. Instead, the only thing to which they were subjected was two weeks of sleeplessness. (Yakubovich says: “Just to be allowed to sleep! Neither conscience nor honor matters any longer.”) And then they were confronted with others who had already given in and who urged them to “confess” . . . to utter nonsense. And the interrogator himself, Aleksei Alekseyevich Nasedkin, said: “I know, I know, none of this actually happened! But they insist on it!”
On one occasion when Yakubovich had been summoned to interrogation, he found there a prisoner who had been tortured. The interrogator smiled ironically: “Moisei Isayevich Teitelbaum begs you to take him into your anti-Soviet organization. You can speak as freely as you please. I am going out for a while.” He went out. Teitelbaum really did beg: “Comrade Yakubovich! I beg you, please take me into your Union Bureau of Mensheviks! They are accusing me of taking ‘bribes from foreign firms’ and threatening me with execution. But I would rather die a counterrevolutionary than a common criminal!” (It was likelier that they had promised him that as a counterrevolutionary he wouldn’t be shot! And he wasn’t wrong either: they gave him a juvenile prison term, a “fiver.”) The GPU was so short on Mensheviks they had to recruit defendants from volunteers! (And, after all, Teitelbaum was being groomed for an important role—communication with the Mensheviks abroad and with the Second International! But they honorably kept the deal they had made with him—a “fiver.”) And with the interrogator’s approval Yakubovich accepted Teitelbaum as a member of the Union Bureau.
Several days before the trial began, the first organizing session of the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks convened in the office of the senior interrogator, Dmitri Matveyevich Dmitriyev—so as to coordinate things, and so that each should understand his own role better. (That’s how the Central Committee of the Promparty convened too! That’s where the defendants “could have met”—to answer Krylenko’s earlier leading question.) But such a mountain of falsehood had been piled up that it was too much to absorb in one session and the participants got things mixed up, couldn’t master it in one rehearsal, and were called together a second time.
What did Yakubovich feel as he went into the trial? Should he not, in revenge for all the tortures to which he had been subjected, for all the falsehood shoved into his breast, create a sensational scandal and startle the world? But still:
1. To do so would be to stab the Soviet government in the back! It would be to negate his entire purpose in life, everything he had lived for, the whole path he had taken to extricate himself from mistaken Menshevism and become a right-minded Bolshevik.
2. After a scandal like that they wouldn’t just allow him to die; they wouldn’t just shoot him; they would torture him again, but this time out of vengeance, and drive him insane. But his body had already been exhausted by tortures. Where could he find the moral strength to endure new ones? Where could he unearth the required heroism?
(I wrote down his arguments as his heated words rang out—this being a most extraordinary chance to get, so to speak, a “posthumous” explanation from a participant in such a trial. And I find that it is altogether as though Bukharin or Rykov were explaining the reasons for their own mysterious submissiveness at their trials. Theirs were the same sincerity and honesty, the same devotion to the Party, the same human weakness, the same lack of the moral strength needed to fight back, because they had
no individual position.)
And at the trial Yakubovich not only repeated obediently all the gray mass of lies which constituted the upper limit of Stalin’s imagination—and the imagination of his apprentices and his tormented defendants. But he also played out his inspired role, as he had promised Krylenko.
The so-called Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks—in essence the entire top level of their Central Committee—formally dissociated themselves from the defendants in a statement published in Vorwärts. They declared there that the trial was a shameful travesty, built on the testimony of provocateurs and unfortunate defendants forced into it by terror; that the overwhelming majority of the defendants had left the Party more than ten years earlier and had never returned; and that absurdly large sums of money were referred to at the trial, representing more than the party had ever disposed of.
And Krylenko, having read the article, asked Shvernik to permit the defendants to reply—the same kind of pulling-all-strings-at-once he had resorted to at the trial of the Promparty. They all spoke up, and they all defended the methods of the GPU against the Menshevik Central Committee.
But what does Yakubovich remember today about his “reply” and his last speech? He recalls that he not only spoke as befitted his promise to Krylenko, but that instead of simply getting to his feet, he was seized and lifted up—like a chip on a wave—by a surge of anger and oratory. Anger against whom? After having learned what torture meant, and attempting suicide and coming close to death more than once, he was at this point in a real, honest-to-God rage. But not at the prosecutor or the GPU! Oh, no! At the Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks!!! Now there’s a psychological switch for you! There they sat, unscrupulous and smug, in security and comfort—for even the poverty of émigré life was, of course, comfort in comparison with the Lubyanka. And how could they refuse to pity those who were on trial, their torture and suffering? How could they so impudently dissociate themselves from them and deliver these unfortunates over to their fate? (The reply Yakubovich delivered was powerful, and the people who had cooked up the trial were delighted.)
Even when he was describing this in 1967, Yakubovich shook with rage at the Foreign Delegation, at their betrayal, their repudiation, their treason to the socialist Revolution—exactly as he had reproached them in 1917.
I did not have the stenographic record of the trial at the time. Later I found it and was astonished. Yakubovich’s memory—so precise in every little detail, every date, every name—had in this instance betrayed him. He had, after all, said at the trial that the Foreign Delegation, on orders from the Second International, had instructed them to carry out wrecking activities. He no longer remembered this. The foreign Mensheviks’ statement was neither unscrupulous nor smug. They had indeed pitied the unfortunate victims of the trial but did point out that they had not been Mensheviks for a long time—which was quite true. What was it, then, that made Yakubovich so unalterably and sincerely angry? And exactly how could the Foreign Delegation not have consigned the defendants to their fate?
We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.
Krylenko said in his summation for the prosecution that Yakubovich was a fanatic advocate of counterrevolutionary ideas and demanded therefore that he be shot.
And Yakubovich that day felt a tear of gratitude roll down his cheek, and he feels it still to this day, after having dragged his way through many camps and detention prisons. Even today he is grateful to Krylenko for not humiliating him, for not insulting him, for not ridiculing him as a defendant, and for calling him correctly a fanatic advocate (even of an idea contrary to his real one) and for demanding simple, noble execution for him, that would put an end to all his sufferings! In his final statement, Yakubovich agreed with Krylenko himself: “The crimes to which I have confessed [he endowed with great significance his success in hitting on the expression ‘to which I have confessed’—anyone who understood would realize that he meant ‘not those which I committed’] deserve the highest measure of punishment—and I do not ask any forgiveness! I do not ask that my life be spared!” (Beside him on the defendants’ bench, Groman got excited! “You are insane! You have to consider your comrades. You don’t have the right!”)
Now wasn’t he a find for the prosecutor?
And can one still say the trials of 1936 to 1938 are unexplained?
Was it not through this trial that Stalin came to understand and believe that he could readily round up all his loud-mouth enemies and get them organized for just such a performance as this?
* * *
And may my compassionate reader now have mercy on me! Until now my pen sped on untrembling, my heart didn’t skip a beat, and we slipped along unconcerned, because for these fifteen years we have been firmly protected either by legal revolutionality or else by revolutionary legality. But from now on things will be painful: as the reader will recollect, as we have had explained to us dozens of times, beginning with Khrushchev, “from approximately 1934, violations of Leninist norms of legality began.” And how are we to enter this abyss of illegality now? How are we to drag our way along yet another bitter stretch of the road?
However, these trials which follow were, because of the fame of the defendants, a cynosure for the whole world. They did not escape the attention of the public. They were written about. They were interpreted and they will be interpreted again and again. It is for us merely to touch lightly on their riddle.
Let us make one qualification, though not a big one; the published stenographic records did not coincide completely with what was said at the trials. One writer who received an entrance pass—they were given out only to selected individuals—took running notes and subsequently discovered these differences. All the correspondents also noted the snag with Krestinsky, which made a recess necessary in order to get him back on the track of his assigned testimony. (Here is how I picture it. Before the trial a chart was set up for emergencies: in the first column was the name of the defendant; in the second, the method to be used during the recess if he should depart from his text during the open trial; in the third column, the name of the Chekist responsible for applying the indicated method. So if Krestinsky departed from his text, then who would come on the run and what that person would do had already been arranged.)
But the inaccuracies of the stenographic record do not change or lighten the picture. Dumfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic productions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed.
This was unprecedented in remembered history. It was particularly astonishing in contrast with the recent Leipzig trial of Dimitrov. Dimitrov had answered the Nazi judges like a roaring lion, and, immediately afterward, his comrades in Moscow, members of that same unyielding cohort which had made the whole world tremble—and the greatest of them at that, those who had been called the “Leninist guard”—came before the judges drenched in their own urine.
And even though much appears to have been clarified since then—with particular success by Arthur Koestler—the riddle continues to circulate as durably as ever.
People have speculated about a Tibetan potion that deprives a man of his will, and about the use of hypnosis. Such explanations must by no means be rejected: if the NKVD possessed such methods, clearly there were no moral rules to prevent resorting to them. Why not weaken or muddle the will? And it is a known fact that in the twenties some leading hypnotists gave up their careers and entered the service of the GPU. It is also reliably known that in the thirties a school for hypnotists existed in the NKVD. Kamenev’s wife was allowed to visit her husband
before his trial and found him not himself, his reactions retarded. (And she managed to communicate this to others before she herself was arrested.)
But why was neither Palchinsky nor Khrennikov broken by the Tibetan potion or hypnosis?
The fact is that an explanation on a higher, psychological plane is called for.
One misunderstanding in particular results from the image of these men as old revolutionaries who had not trembled in Tsarist dungeons—seasoned, tried and true, hardened, etc., fighters. But there is a plain and simple mistake here. These defendants were not those old revolutionaries. They had acquired that glory by inheritance from and association with the Narodniks, the SR’s, and the Anarchists. They were the ones, the bomb throwers and the conspirators, who had known hard-labor imprisonment and real prison terms—but even they had never in their lives experienced a genuinely merciless interrogation (because such a thing did not exist at all in Tsarist Russia). And these others, the Bolshevik defendants at the treason trials, had never known either interrogation or real prison terms. The Bolsheviks had never been sentenced to special “dungeons,” any Sakhalin, any special hard labor in Yakutsk. It is well known that Dzerzhinsky had the hardest time of them all, that he had spent all his life in prisons. But, according to our yardstick, he had served just a normal “tenner,” just a simple “ten-ruble bill,” like any ordinary collective farmer in our time. True, included in that tenner were three years in the hard-labor central prison, but that is nothing special either.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 46
