The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Grinberg is not connected to me in any way. He is not guilty of anything. By organizing a meeting between theater directors who are all Party members and a celebrated Party lecturer from Moscow, he did not do anything wrong. Even the fact that he put me up in his apartment is being held against him. I left him in a state of utter dejection. He and his wife were looking at me with silent reproach. It is impossible to take, it is worse than a formal accusation. I would have left right away, if I had been able to. I vouch for the fact that Grinberg is an honest Party man and a good comrade and that he has nothing to do with the content of my failed improvised talk. I ask you to make sure that Comrade Grinberg does not suffer any consequences, and that this episode does not prevent him from transferring to Moscow (something he dreams of passionately and impatiently).49

  Boiarsky sent Novitsky’s letter to Molotov, assuring him that he had never told Novitsky anything “in confidence” and expressing the hope that the letter as a whole was “sufficient evidence” of Novitsky’s guilt. Molotov forwarded both letters to Stalin. Boiarsky was later executed as an enemy of the people (partly for being Ezhov’s homosexual partner). So was S. I. Amaglobeli, who believed that no one had a fully transparent soul. The fate of Comrades Vinitsky and Grinberg is unknown. Novitsky survived the purges and died in 1971, at the age of eighty-three.50

  28

  THE SUPREME PENALTY

  The silence ended in prison. New cellmates would begin by asking each other questions about the reason for their arrest and would keep on talking, day after day, as if to make up for lost time (“first cell, first love,” Solzhenitsyn called it). They talked about themselves, others, prisons, and freedom, among many other things, but mostly they talked about what was going on. According to two former cellmates, Konstantin F. Shteppa and Fritz Houtermans, “there was no question that excited the prisoners so much as … ‘Why? What for?’ The question was endlessly argued in the wooden waiting-cells, the ‘dog kennels’ in which prisoners were put before and after interrogation. The words ‘Why? What for?’ were to be found scratched with smuggled bits of broken glass on the inside walls of the ‘black raven’ and the coaches of the prison trains. ‘Why? What for?’”1

  One answer was provided by their interrogators. They had been arrested because they were guilty, and they had no choice but to sign their confessions. The principal means of persuasion were torture (usually sleep deprivation, round-the-clock interrogations, and severe beatings) and, in the case of orthodox Bolsheviks, appeals to sectarian logic and Party discipline. Some orthodox Bolsheviks withstood both torture and persuasion and did not plead guilty at their trial: Anna Muklevich, after six months in prison; Ivan Gronsky, after eleven; Filipp Goloshchekin, after twenty-two. Goloshchekin was arrested on October 15, 1939, as part of the roundup of Ezhov’s close associates. (Ezhov testified that Goloshchekin “disagreed with the Party line” and that, in 1925 in Kazakhstan, they had lived together as homosexual lovers.) During the interrogation, Goloshchekin insisted that the idea of collectivization had been discredited among the Kazakh population because of “hostile agitation by the enemies of the Soviet state,” not deliberate sabotage on his part. On August 12, 1941, he wrote to the “Great Leader and Teacher” that he had been through “140–150 physically and morally excruciating interrogations,” but that he was innocent of all charges, committed to “living and struggling for the victory of the cause of Lenin-Stalin around the world and in our country,” and “fully convinced that Bolshevik truth would prevail.”2

  The former Party secretary of West Siberia and Sergei Mironov’s troika colleague, Robert Eikhe, wrote his letter to Stalin ten days after Goloshchekin: “If I were guilty of even a hundredth of one single crime I am accused of, I would never have dared approach you with this deathbed appeal. But I have not committed any of these crimes and have never harbored any evil thoughts in my heart. I have never uttered even a half-word of untruth to you, and I am telling you the truth now, with both feet in the grave. My case is an example of entrapment, slander, and the violation of the elementary foundations of revolutionary legality.”3 His only crime against the Party and personally against Comrade Stalin, he wrote to Comrade Stalin, was his false confession of counterrevolutionary activity:

  What happened is this. Unable to withstand the torture that Ushakov and Nikolaev inflicted on me, especially the former who skillfully used the fact that my vertebrae, which had not yet healed after the fracture, caused me unbearable pain, I slandered myself and other people….

  I ask and beg you to have my case reconsidered—not because I wish to be spared, but in order to uncover the evil conspiracy that has, like a snake, ensnared many people, partly because of my own cowardice and criminal slander. I have never betrayed you or the Party. I know I am perishing because of the vile, treacherous work of the enemies of the Party and people, who have staged a provocation against me.4

  At his pro forma trial, on February 2, 1940, Eikhe formally retracted his confession: “In all my supposed testimony there is not a single word of my own, except for my name under the transcripts, which I was forced to sign. The people from 1918 were named under duress, as a result of the pressure by the investigator, who started beating me from the moment of my arrest. After that I started writing all that rubbish…. I am awaiting my sentence and the most important thing to me is to tell the court, the Party, and Stalin that I am innocent. I have never participated in any conspiracy. I will die as firm in my faith in the correctness of Party policy as I was over the course of all my work.”5

  He was sentenced to death. When the heads of the NKVD’s Commandants’ (executions) and Records departments, V. M. Blokhin and L. F. Bashtakov, arrived at the Sukhanovo Prison the next day to pick up the inmates slated for execution, they found Eikhe and two interrogators, A. A. Esaulov and B. V. Rodos, in Beria’s office. According to Bashtakov,

  In my presence, Rodos and Esaulov, on Beria’s instructions, brutally beat Eikhe with rubber clubs. When Eikhe collapsed from the beatings, they would continue to beat him while he was on the floor. Then they would lift him up and Beria would ask him the same question: “Do you confess to being a spy?” Eikhe would answer: “No, I do not,” and Rodos and Esaulov would continue the beating. Just while I was there, this monstrous treatment of a man already sentenced to death was repeated at least five times. At one point one of Eikhe’s eyes was gouged out. Finally, when Beria realized that no confession was forthcoming, he ordered him taken away for execution.6

  In early February 1937, when Voronsky was arrested, beatings were not commonly used, and his prison interrogations continued the logic of his purge and expulsion ordeals. Because he had maintained “domestic and literary” relations with the Trotskyites, and because domestic and literary relations were, at bottom, political, he was politically allied with the Trotskyites. And since the Trotskyites were, as it turned out, terrorists, so was he. For more than four months, Voronsky insisted on a distinction between the domestic and the literary on the one hand and the political, on the other. In June, he admitted that “Voronskyism” was the expression of Trotskyism in literature. A short time later, after being presented with several eyewitness accounts of his involvement in terrorism, he confessed his guilt. He was subjected to all-night “assembly-line” interrogations and to confrontations with his literary protégés, Boris Guber, Nikolai Zarudin, and Ivan Kataev, who had all accused him of planning to assassinate Ezhov. Faced with his accusers, he retracted his confession. At his trial, on August 13, he said that he was not guilty of terrorism, but that he could not prove that his accusers were lying. The trial lasted twenty minutes. He was shot several hours later. Guber, Zarudin, and Kataev were shot on the same night.7

  Voronsky’s nemesis, Leopold Averbakh, accepted his interrogators’ logic as soon as he was arrested. Or rather, he had always shared it, but now he applied it to himself, his family, and friends. “I am in prison, not at home,” he wrote in one of his confessions, “and I need paper—not in order to indulge
my old habit of talking to myself by writing at night, but to understand the reason for my arrest.” The reason, he concluded, was the “atmosphere of all-permissiveness and omnipotence” in which he had been living as Yagoda’s brother-in-law. “I am implicated in the Yagoda case because, over the course of several years, I, though not an NKVD employee, lived at NKVD dachas, received NKVD rations, and was often driven around in NKVD cars. The NKVD repaired my apartment and exchanged my old apartment for a new one. The furniture from my apartment was repaired at the NKVD furniture factory.” The swamp—“gentry-estate self-satisfaction”—had somehow swallowed him up even as he was fighting it. In the end, he accepted Voronsky’s characterization of him and his collaborators (“clever, successful, irrepressible, everywhere-at-once young men, self-confident and self-satisfied to the point of self-abandonment”). “I realized that narcissism, arrogance, intolerance of self-criticism, neurotic instability, flippancy, hollow wit, and other traits of mine are features of a certain nonproletarian social type. During my eighteen years in the Party, I could have developed into a true Bolshevik, but, not having first experienced proletarian education and having always occupied positions of power, I had too high an opinion of myself and got used to living, both politically and personally, in an atmosphere of all-permissiveness.”8

  He was sentenced to death by Stalin and Molotov as part of a “special procedure” reserved for NKVD officials, without the formality of a trial. He was shot a few hours later, one day after Voronsky.9

  ■ ■ ■

  Most orthodox Bolsheviks felt guilty by virtue of being Bolsheviks. In the words of Shteppa and Houtermans, “everyone at some time or other had had doubts about the Communist point of view and expressed them. Everyone had made slips and mistakes that could be regarded as crimes from the point of view of the system.” The orthodox Bolsheviks were different from everyone else because their point of view was the point of view of the system. Goloshchekin’s explanation for what had befallen him (“Why?” “How could all of this have happened, beginning with the fact of my arrest and so on?”) was the same as Eikhe’s: the enemies had penetrated the Party’s inner sanctum and staged a vile provocation that, like a snake, had ensnared many people. But Goloshchekin and Eikhe seemed to believe—or argue, against impossible odds—that their innocence was compatible with the Party’s (Stalin’s) infallibility. Most Bolsheviks knew better. They understood that, at some point or other, they had suffered from doubt and made slips and mistakes. They were all guilty of “gentry-estate self-satisfaction,” of allowing the swamp back into the House of Government, of being surrounded by beds, maids, carpets, nephews, and mothers-in-law. “In these matters it takes but one slip,” wrote Averbakh in his confession, “and you find yourself at the mercy of a kind of vicious logic whose vice-like grip it is very difficult to escape. In the way people related to me, I could see a blurring of the line between one’s own pocket and the state and a return of the bourgeois attitude to one’s material well-being.”10

  But most of all, they were guilty of inner doubt and impure thoughts. Three days after his arrest, before the interrogations got under way, Aron Gaister wrote a letter to Ezhov:

  I admit that I am guilty before the Party of having concealed my Trotskyite vacillations in 1923 and of not having reported (or revealed until now) the fact that when I worked in the State Planning Agency, several leading officials (Rozental, Ronin, Gen. Smirnov, Kapitonov, Kaplinsky, Kraval) formed a caucus, which they talked me into joining for a short period of time, and that Rozental, who presided over that caucus, conducted a de facto Rightist-wrecking policy. In addition to this direct provocation, he treacherously submitted to Kuibyshev a proposal concerning the production of sixty million tons of cast iron during the second Five-Year Plan. This caucus, which often convened in the guise of informal dinners, discussed and criticized the Party line concerning industrialization and the policy in the countryside. I admit that, although I attended these gatherings infrequently and soon stopped altogether, I should have reported that fact to the Central Committee and the NKVD promptly or, in any case, after the unmasking of so many double-dealers and scoundrels. I am profoundly guilty of having done so only after my arrest, and not when I should have. I am ready to inform the investigation about all the relevant facts, including my own guilt.11

  The same, he wrote, was true of his work as deputy commissar of agriculture. He had done well in firing several bad employees, but he had been guilty of mistaking “facts of wrecking” for sloppy work and for not reporting those facts to the Central Committee and the NKVD. Secret doubts had led to criminal inaction, which had led to facts of wrecking. Only a full confession could achieve reconciliation. “I urgently ask you, Nikolai Ivanovich, to interrogate me personally, so I can tell you, without embellishment, everything I know about all the individuals involved and about myself.”12

  A week later, he wrote another letter to Ezhov, in which he acknowledged that criminal inaction was indistinguishable from criminal action:

  I readily admit that I am guilty of the fact that, not having overcome my Trotskyite vacillations of 1923, I continued, in subsequent years, to maintain contacts with the Trotskyites known to me from our days as fellow students at the Institute of Red Professors, and that, having transferred to the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, I, de facto, aided, and participated in, counterrevolutionary wrecking activities of the Rightist center in the commissariat.

  I stand ready to provide the investigation with a full confession of all the facts of counterrevolutionary wrecking activity by all the individuals known to me, as well as my own actions.13

  All he had to realize, in the course of his interrogations, was that de facto abetting counterrevolutionary activity was indistinguishable from actually engaging in counterrevolutionary activity. The Bolshevik conception of sin was identical to St. Augustine’s (“a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law”). When it came to crimes against the Party, which stood for the Eternal Law, thoughts were not radically different from words, and words were not radically different from deeds. And when it came to the Party’s Inquisition, sins were not radically different from crimes. After four months of interrogations, he fully admitted his guilt, actual as well as de facto. He was sentenced to death on October 21, 1937, by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, as part of a list of sixty-eight individuals, including twenty-four of his House of Government neighbors. The sentence was formally announced on October 29, at a trial presided over by Vasily Ulrikh. In his last word, Gaister said that his crimes were great and asked the court to allow him to expiate his guilt through honest work. He was shot the next day, on October 30, 1937.14

  Aron Gaister’s arrest photographs (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)

  Osinsky, like Gaister and his former friend, Bukharin, wanted his confession of guilt to be part of the sacrament of penance, with the inquisitor as confessor. The record of his interrogation may or may not have been revised and abridged, but his voice is recognizable, and all of the themes are familiar:

  QUESTION: You, Osinsky, have been unmasked as an enemy of the people. Do you admit your guilt?

  ANSWER: I am surprised to even hear such accusations. Where do such monstrous accusations against me come from? It is simply a misunderstanding. I am an honest person, I fought for Soviet power for many years.

  QUESTION: Our advice to you, Osinsky, is to stop juggling terms like “honest person,” which are inapplicable to you. Tell us without equivocation: do you intend to supply frank testimony about your crimes?

  ANSWER: I would like to talk to you. After all, I am Osinsky. I am known inside and outside the country.

  QUESTION: It is good that you are beginning to understand that.

  ANSWER: I have made many mistakes, but a betrayal of the Party in the literal sense is out of the question. I am an unusual person, and that means a lot. I am an intelligentsia member of the old formation, with all the individualism characteristic of people of that category. I may disagr
ee with much that is being done in our country, but I have nurtured this disagreement within myself. Can my personal views be considered treason? I have never been a Bolshevik in the full sense of the term. I have always wandered from one opposition to another. In recent years, I have had some innermost thoughts that were anti-Party in nature, but that is not quite struggle. I was doing scholarly work, withdrew into myself. I wanted to leave political work.

  QUESTION: Come on, Osinsky, stop posturing! We assure you that Soviet counterintelligence will be able to make you, an enemy of the people, tell us everything about the crimes you have committed. We suggest that you stop this equivocation.

  ANSWER: Good. I will provide truthful testimony about my work against the Party.15

  The rest was a matter of time and blinding bright light. According to one of his cellmates, after one of the interrogations, he walked into the cell, “lay down on his bunk, covered his eyes with a wet handkerchief, lay silently for a while, and suddenly cried out: ‘What are they doing to my eyes? What do they want from my eyes?’”16

  QUESTION: Osinsky, are you a traitor to the Motherland?

  ANSWER: Yes, it is true. I admit my guilt.

  QUESTION: Did you use the trust of the Party and the Soviet government for the purpose of betrayal?

  ANSWER: That is also true. I acted as a member of a political organization that had the goal of taking power in the Soviet Union.

  QUESTION: You acted not as member of a political organization, but as a traitor and agent provocateur.

  ANSWER: Well, that is overdoing it. You must understand that I am a person of certain political views. I carried out the instructions of like-minded people as an envoy of the Rightist Center.

  QUESTION: You, Osinsky, are the envoy of a gang of murderers. Are you not the one who tried to drown the working people of our country in blood? Are you not the one who sold our republics’ and our country’s wealth, lock, stock, and barrel?17