The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  Larichev joined in: "This caste must be destroyed! . . . There is not and there cannot be loyalty among engineers!"30 And Och- kin too: The intelligentsia "is some kind of mush. As the state accuser has said, it has no backbone, and this constitutes un- conditional spinelessness. . . . How immeasurably superior is the sensitivity of the proletariat."

  [Ibid., p. 509. For some reason, the main thing about the proletariat is always, believe it or not, sensitivity. Always via the nostrils.]

  So now just why should such diligent collaborators be shot?

  And that was the way the history of our intelligentsia has been written for decades—from the anathema of 1920 (the reader will remember: "not the brains of the nation, but shit," and "the ally of the black generals," and "the hired agent of imperialism") right up to the anathema of 1930.

  So should anyone be surprised that the word "intelligentsia" got established here in Russia as a term of abuse.

  That is how the public trials were manufactured. Stalin's searching mind had once and for all attained its ideal. (Those blunderheads Hitler and Goebbels would come to envy it and rush into their shameful failure with the burning of the Reichstag. )

  The standard had been set, and now it could be retained perennially and performed over again every season—according to the wishes of the Chief Producer. And in fact the Chief wanted another within three months. The rehearsal time was very short, but that was all right. Come and see the show! Only in our theater! A premiere.

  M. The Case of the All-Union Bureau of the Mensheviks— March 1-9, 1931

  The case was heard by a Special Assize of the Supreme Court, the presiding judge in this case, for some reason, being N. M. Shvernik. Otherwise everyone was in his proper place—Antonov- Saratovsky, Krylenko, and his assistant Roginsky. The pro- ducers were sure of themselves. For after all, the subject wasn't technical but was Party material, ordinary stuff. So they brought fourteen defendants onto the stage.

  And it all went off not just smoothly but brilliantly.

  I was twelve at the time. For three years I had been attentively reading everything about politics on the enormous pages of Izvestiya. I read the stenographic records of these two trials line by line. In the Promparty case, I had already felt, in my boyish heart, superfluity, falsehood, fabrication, but at least there were spectacular stage sets—universal intervention, the paralysis of all industry, the distribution of ministerial portfolios! In the trial of the Mensheviks, all the same stage sets were brought out, but they were more pallid. And the actors spoke their lines with- out enthusiasm. And the whole performance was a yawning bore, an inept, tired repetition. (Could it be that Stalin felt this, too, through his rhinoceros hide? How else can one explain his call- ing off the case of the Working Peasants Party after it had already been prepared, or why there were no more trials for several years?)

  It would be boring to base our interpretations once again on the stenographic record. In any case, I have fresher evidence from one of the principal defendants in this case—Mikhail Petrovich Yakubovich. At the present moment, his petition for rehabilitation, exposing all the dirty work which went on, has filtered through to samizdat, our savior, and people are reading it just as it happened.

  [He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his insolation, he has been granted a personal pension for his revolutionary activity! What monstrosities exist in our country.]

  His story offers material proof and ex- planation of the whole chain of Moscow trials of the thirties.

  How was the nonexistent "Union Bureau" created? The GPU had been given an assignment: they had been told to prove that the Mensheviks had adroitly wormed their way into—and seized —many important government jobs for counterrevolutionary purposes. The genuine situation did not jibe with this plan. There were no real Mensheviks in important posts. But then there were no real Mensheviks on trial either. (True, they say V. K. Ikov actually was a member of the quiet, do-nothing illegal Moscow Bureau of the Mensheviks—but they didn't know that at the trial. He was processed in the second echelon and received a mere eight.) The GPU had its own design: two from the Supreme Council of the Economy, two from the People's Commissariat of Trade, two from the State Bank, one from the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, one from the State Planning Com- mission. (What a boring and unoriginal plan! Back in 1920, they had ordered, in the matter of the "Tactical Center," that it include two from the Union of Rebirth, two from the Council of Public Figures, two from this and that, etc.) Therefore they picked the individuals who suited them on the basis of their positions. And whether they were Mensheviks or not depended on whether one believed rumors. Some who got caught this way were not Mensheviks at all, but directives had been given to consider them Mensheviks. The genuine political views of those accused did not interest the GPU in the least. Not all the de- fendants even knew each other. And they raked in Menshevik witnesses, too, wherever they could find them.

  [One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers' group in the War Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Min- ister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr long-termers of Gulag. I do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from 1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in .Spassk Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.]

  (All the wit- nesses, without exception, were later given prison terms too.) Ramzin testified prolifically and obligingly at this trial also. But the GPU pinned its hopes on the principal defendant, Vladimir Gustavovich Groman (with the idea that he would help work up this case and be amnestied in return), and on the provocateur Petunin. (I am basing all this on Yakubovich's report.)

  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 success- ful orator. At the Congress of the Western Front, he impetuously called those journalists who were demanding that the war con- tinue enemies of the people. And this was in April, 1917. He was nearly hauled from the rostrum, and he apologized, but there- after 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 com- missars, [He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff, who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.] 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 Men- shevik 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 approv- ing the Provisional Government's calling up army units for use against other socialists, considering it a fatal error even tho
ugh the other socialists were using armed force. Hardly had the Octo- ber 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 Men- shevik but a Bolshevik, and one who was entirely sincere and disinterested. In 1920 he was still one of the Smolensk food- supply 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 Krylen- ko, 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 con- sider 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 un- foreseen 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 Alekseye- vich 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 Teitel- baum 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 counter- revolutionary 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 inter- rogator's approval Yakubovich accepted Teitelbaum as a mem- ber 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 Prom- party 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 sub- jected, 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 Bol- shevik.

  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 submis- siveness at their trials. Theirs were the same sincerity and honesty, the same devotion to the Party, the same human weak- ness, 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 es- sence the entire top level of their Central Committee—formally dissociated themselves from the defendants in a statement pub- lished 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 over- whelming 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 impude
ntly 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 con- signed 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 argu- ments 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 in- sulting him, for not ridiculing him as a defendant, and for call- ing 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 sig- nificance 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, Gro- man got excited! "You are insane! You have to consider your comrades. You don't have the right!")