Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Another centre of gravity was the chemical and nitrogen plant in Gorlovka. Major explosions had occurred there on 7 April 1934 and 11 and 14 November 1935.

  The most thorough discussion was reserved for the tense and dramatic situation in the transport system, especially the railways. Turok, the defendant in question, referred to forty serious accidents between the end of 1934 and the end of 1936; a particularly serious incident had taken place on 30 September 1935.20 Major accidents had occurred on the lines to Kazan, the South Urals, Perm, Transbaikal, the Ussuri region and East Siberia. A particularly serious incident had occurred on 27 October 1935, when a military train was derailed at Shumikha Station. Ninety-seven Red Army soldiers lost their lives and another twenty-nine were injured.21

  The frequency of accidents can hardly come as a surprise, given the wear and tear and obsolescence, the excessive strains on the network and rolling stock, and the enormous problems of coordination in such a vast country. The railwaymen had achieved miracles. In 1936 there were 87,000 goods wagon movements every day, an increase of 32.4 per cent over 1935. The majority of accidents were caused by damage to the tracks as a result of wear and tear, poor materials, and the need to fulfil norms not backed up by the finance required for the repair and renewal of the network. Between 1933 and 1938 daily freight movements had increased from 51,200 to 88,000 goods wagons; turnover had more than doubled, from 169.5 billion tonne-km to 369.4 billion tonne-km. The turnaround time for goods wagons had been reduced by over two days, the speed of the freight trains had increased by 9.6 kph. Since 1933, 5,000 kilometres of new single track and 8,000 kilometres of twin track had been laid. Over 5,000 kilometres of old railway lines had been renewed and new signalling systems had been installed in over 5,000 kilometres of track. Six thousand new locomotives, 186,000 freight wagons and over 5,000 passenger carriages had been brought into service. Further modernization involved the introduction of automatic brakes, new signal boxes and repair workshops. But the number of accidents caused by wear and tear remained enormous. Up to November 1936 alone, 640 accidents were recorded as the result of defects in the track – 40 per cent of which were caused by rail breakages.22

  External pressure on those in positions of responsibility to find solutions was intensified still further – from the political leadership and from other branches of the economy – but also pressure from within the rail industry itself. But even at the All-Union Congress for Transport which was held in the Moscow Park for Culture and Rest, Lazar' Kaganovich, the People’s Commissar for Transport, in a speech to 25,000 railway employees lasting two hours, resisted calling for a police ‘solution’ to the transport crisis. ‘We are not calling for purges and repression. No, 99 per cent of railway employees are decent folk who are devoted to their work and who love their country.’23 But the mood changed after the show trial in August 1936. At the end of September, new rules came into force and Kaganovich announced: ‘The struggle to achieve better, accident-free work in the transport system and to maintain a high level of technical competence, is a struggle against the enemies of the socialist fatherland; it is a political struggle.’24 Wreckers now appeared everywhere: predel'shchiki – people who always wanted to lower the limits for the amount of freight trains can carry or ease back on the timetables; they were also denounced as supporters of the ‘theory of marginal utility’. Then there were sabotazhniki – saboteurs, desorganizatory – disorganizers, and avari'shchiki – people who provoked accidents and caused disasters. As early as 1936 an entire layer of management in the railway industry was arrested;25 wreckers were discovered everywhere. Kaganovich: ‘I cannot name a single line, not a single junction without its Trotskyite-Japanese wreckers … And moreover, there is not a single branch of the railway without such wrecking activities.’26

  Figure 8.1 Marshalling yard: illustration from The USSR under Construction

  ‘The railways and junctions that held the entire country together were chronically overstretched and susceptible to accidents. In the show trials the railway system was the most important field of activity for “wreckers” and “saboteurs”.’

  The problems created by the wear and tear of the infrastructure could not be alleviated by intensified discipline or the application of new methods in assembling long-distance freight trains, or indeed by better routing – marshrutizatsia. The rhythm of rail traffic was not identical with the rhythm in which brigades of shock workers worked. However powerful the will to work might be, it could not make up for defects in the materials with which to work. The coordination and management of the flow of passengers and freight could not simply be achieved by commands and decrees. The price of shock industrialization was high and could be said to be built into the system, since it was based less on the routine of labour discipline than on the collective spirit of a shock-troop enterprise. Any disturbance at one point could unbalance other points and might disrupt the equilibrium of the whole. The failure to deliver goods in a timely fashion wrought havoc within the entire system. The failure to stick to timetables could lead to a universal breakdown. What was astonishing was not that there were so many fires, derailments, explosions and accidents, but that the system continued to function for so long despite this disorganization, and despite the impact of the purges. Following the plenum of February– March 1937, 137 senior managers belonging to the People’s Commissariat of Transport and Communications were arrested and condemned. The proportion of highly qualified specialists among the condemned men was unusually high.27 One reason for this was that the economic and planning departments contained a particularly large number of well-qualified specialists who had been trained in pre-revolutionary times and were therefore especially ‘suspect’: former Mensheviks, members of various oppositional groupings or repatriated North China Railway workers. But, despite the purges of 1936 and 1937, the transport system remained surprisingly efficient.28

  No leap of the imagination is called for to identify the weak points of this fragile economic system, held together by commands, willpower, enthusiasm and force. All accidents had a single plausible, almost predictable cause. The points at which the entire system became vulnerable were easily identified. The prosecuting counsel and the author of the trial scripts placed them in the mouths of the enemy and gave them the form of a directive. This directive went: ‘Aim damaging blows at the most sensitive parts’29 or ‘Strike at the most sensitive parts with blows designed to do the most damage.’30 And even bringing about an accident was no more than a means to an end – namely, ‘to create resentment towards the government’31 and ‘to provoke dissatisfaction with Soviet power among the workers’. The transformation of the ‘objective’ causes of accidents into ‘subjectively’ inspired acts of sabotage was the chief function of this theatrical production.

  Human sacrifice, nemesis, chorus

  Wreckers not only acquiesced in the death of other people; they built it into their political calculations. The chief defendant, Piatakov, said under interrogation: ‘We were well aware that, if it became necessary for the implementation of our wrecking plans to resort to diversionary measures, human sacrifice would be inevitable.’ And here is Drobnis: ‘It is even better if there are victims down the pits, since they will undoubtedly cause great bitterness among the colliers, and that is what we need.’ Kniazev too said in his statement: ‘Lifshits gave special instructions for us to prepare and carry out a series of diversions (explosions, train derailments or poisonings) that would involve a number of human victims.’32 One of the chief aims of State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinskii was to present these victims to the court, to give them names and faces, and to use them to excite sympathy and indignation. In his account of the rail disaster at Shumikha, he described the scenes of mutilation down to the very last detail: locomotives and wagons were smashed and twenty-nine Red Army soldiers were killed. All of them were introduced as individuals, with a name and relatives: Kriuchkov, born in 1910, a collective farmer; Zochilin, born in 1913, a collective farmer; Kolesnikov, born in
1912, a collective farmer; Terekhov, born in 1913, Khrapunov, Agapkin … all of them born in 1913 and collective farmers, with the exception of Ivanov, Kolesnikov and Ginkin, who were workers.33 Vyshinskii:

  Comrade Judges! Terrible images have passed before our eyes in this courtroom, but I shall have to remind you of them. I must remind you of the explosion in the Tsentralnaia mine, which resulted in the deaths of ten workers and serious injury to another fourteen. I shall also have to remind you of the railway disaster in Shumikha Station, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine Red Army soldiers and injuries to a further twenty-nine.34

  Since coincidences and accidents were deemed not to exist, there must be people who caused these events and were responsible for them. Since there was no ‘invisible hand’ standing behind everything, there must be ‘visible hands’, planning, influencing, leading or simply bringing about accidents, and, that being the case, they must have a name. What we are looking at is the creation of the desired profile of perpetrators. What are the characteristics of the perpetrators in the Piatakov trial? They must be real, identifiable people with names, backgrounds and specialisms. They occupied responsible, sensitive posts, which were plagued by bottle-necks and where they could cause the greatest possible damage. They worked in managerial positions and had contacts with foreign firms such as Borsig, Dehlmann and Fröhlich. They could travel abroad in connection with their work, and this enabled them to make contact with Trotsky. They occupied control centres and could take decisions or provide cover for fellow conspirators. They must therefore have been placed in major organizations, in key positions. Their past showed that they had never been fully committed to the Bolshevik cause; they belonged to a variety of parties and oppositions. An astonishingly high proportion of them had Jewish names, such as Fridland, Fligeltau, Levin, Reingold, Mandelstam and Lifshits.35 Among them were numerous adventurers with multiple identities, grey areas in their past, forged papers, bewildering biographies. They knew all the tricks, were familiar with the scene in all the capitalist capitals, were proficient in the use of invisible ink and knew how to convey messages concealed in the heels of shoes, etc. The dividing lines between dubious individuals and oppositionists and between oppositionists and criminals who were ready to commit terrorist acts were fuzzy. These ‘perpetrators’ were remote from the masses, and what characterized them was a ‘certain lordly attitude’ – as Norkin said of Piatakov.36 They were ready to act as spies for foreign powers. Strangely enough, although they were thoroughgoing terrorists, they never succeeded in mounting a single action. Nevertheless, Vyshinskii could move directly to his peroration, which concluded with a total criminalization and dehumanization of the accused:

  They are literally a horde of bandits, robbers, document forgers, saboteurs, spies and murderers! This horde of murderers, arsonists and bandits can be compared only to the medieval Camorra, which combined Italian dignitaries, tramps and common bandits in one. That is the moral physiognomy of these morally decadent and depraved characters. They have lost all sense of shame, shame at their own actions and in the eyes of their accomplices.37

  One of the defendants, Radek, appeared not only to confirm this moral degradation, but also to underpin it with the dignity of his own experience, so Vyshinskii argued. Known for his cynical attitude, Radek always looked at himself as it were from outside, conscious of the crack in the steel that can lead to a catastrophe if it is not eliminated, and, as the quintessence of what he had learned from his experience, he offered the view that the ‘Trotskyists’ still at large should lay down their arms. He would like to reach out to them with this statement of his beliefs:

  But the country still contains half-Trotskyists, quarter-Trotskyists, eighth-Trotskyists, people who have helped us without knowing anything about terrorist organization, who sympathize with us and who have helped us from a spirit of liberalism, of rebellion against the Party. To these people we say, if there is a blister in the metal of a steam hammer, it isn’t dangerous; but a blister in the metal of a propeller – this can lead to a catastrophe. We are living in a period of great tension, as in the run-up to a war. We say to all these different elements now facing the court and the moment of truth: whoever has even the smallest crack in his attitude to the Party should realize that he may tomorrow become the perpetrator of acts of sabotage, that he may become a traitor if this crack is not repaired by absolute honesty towards the Party.38

  Where that is not the case, the person in question ‘will be seized and hanged from the nearest lamp-post’. ‘And rightly so, since there can be no cure for traitors other than the gallows.’39

  Vyshinskii’s closing speech for the prosecution is nothing but the tactic of a demagogue who wishes to hand the ‘malefactors’ over to the people. He assumes the role of spokesman for the people that is said to be crying out for retribution for the wrongs done to it. It is a plea to gratify the people’s anger and to proceed to execution.

  I do not merely accuse! I have the feeling, comrade judges, as if the victims of these crimes and these criminals were standing next to me on crutches, mutilated, left half-alive, perhaps without their legs; people like the signalwoman at Chusovskaia Station, Comrade Nagovitsyna, who appealed to me in today’s Pravda and who lost both her legs at the age of twenty in her efforts to prevent the railway accident organized by these people. I am not alone. I feel that the dead and mutilated victims of terrible crimes are standing next to me here and they expect me, as the public prosecutor, to make this charge with all the force at my disposal. I am not alone! Even if the victims have been buried, they are still standing next to me, pointing to the dock, to me in the dock like you defendants; they are pointing with their terrible hands that have mouldered in the graves to which you have consigned them … It is not I alone who accuses you! I accuse you together with our entire nation; I accuse the vilest criminals of all; only one punishment is good enough for them – shooting, death!40

  The people make their appearance like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. The chorus articulates the lamentation, the suffering. It describes the situation that only a thousand eyes could have observed and remembered, and ends up overwhelming the accused with its curse. The chorus is the voice of the hundreds of thousands; it is a chorus of a hundred thousand voices. Something elemental finds its voice in it, a true popular anger, but so finely tuned and modulated that you scarcely doubt that you are witnessing a brilliant piece of staging. In contrast to the chorus of antiquity, Vyshinskii had far more than an amphitheatre at his disposal. The media he could exploit included the newspapers, posters, caricatures, radio broadcasts, mass rallies and the crowds of hundreds of thousands gathered under the floodlights. His appearances resembled a series of waves breaking on the shore, until they reached their apogee and the chorus could cry out: it is finished! It is in terms such as these that the choreography of the week of the trial and the days following it can be summarized. The trial reverberated throughout the country, as can be seen from the reactions of such intelligent contemporaries as Lydia Chukovskaia, who describes Olga Petrovna’s reaction to news of the trial in her story The Deserted House [also known as Sofia Petrovna], which was written during the winter of 1939–40 but not published until thirty years later.

  In January reports appeared in the daily press about a new show trial that was about to take place. The previous trial against Kamenev and Zinoviev had infuriated Olga Petrovna, but since she did not read the papers regularly she had not followed the proceedings day by day. On this occasion, however, Natasha persuaded her to join her in reading all the reports every day, since one simply had to be informed about the fascist spies, terrorists and arrests that were increasingly becoming the focus of discussion.

  Just imagine, these scoundrels wanted to murder our beloved Stalin! These were the same people who had murdered Kirov, as it turned out. They had organized explosions in mine shafts, caused trains to be derailed, and they had associates in almost every factory.41

  The waves began to rise while th
e trial was still in progress. A politically correct idiom was tried out that was not in fact entirely new, but which would continue to influence future generations in its uncompromising harshness. This was the time when the vocabulary used to create an image of the enemy was manufactured: Trotskyist spies, saboteurs, traitors and ‘the lowest of the low’, who would ‘sell their country’. The reader is always up with events, since not only did the press publish excerpts from the speeches of the prosecution, cross-examinations and judgements but, in addition, a diary was put out every day on behalf of the invited spectators.42

  Letters, resolutions and telegrams poured into editorial offices from every corner of the land – from Leningrad, Kiev, Sverdlovsk, Tashkent, Alma Ata and Erevan. ‘The torrent grows every day just as the chain of unprecedented treachery constantly grows. Workers call for a final reckoning with the enemy to pay for the blood shed by the Trotskyists, for the sell-out of the nation, for the terrorist attacks on our leaders, and for undermining our socialist construction.’43 The voice of the people resounded in the resolutions of the 800 workers of the Gorlovka works, reading out a list of the workers who had lost their lives in accidents. ‘We know full well that these murders were committed by Rataichak and Pushchin; by the Trotskyists in conjunction with the Gestapo.’44 The 20,000 workers of the farming combine in Rostov-on-Don called for the saboteurs to be put to death. The 45,000 workers of the Moscow automobile plant, the Hammer and Sickle Works and the Kirov Works in Leningrad all called for the ‘shooting of the Trotskyite bandits who are out of control’. All professions were represented: mine workers, employees of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, members of the Academy of Sciences, prominent actors – such as Maria Blumental-Tamarina, the grande dame of Russian theatre – well-known writers and journalists – Vsevolod Vishnevskii and Mikhail Kol'tsov, who wrote about their observations in Moscow and Madrid – serving marines from Sevastopol, Arctic explorers from Dickson Island, railway workers, tractor drivers, people of all ages. There is a surviving letter, signed by children and headed ‘They murdered our parents’, and ending with a call for vigilance to be increased tenfold.45 A thousand-strong meeting in an engineering factory in Krasnoiarsk called on the NKVD to arrest Sergei Sedov, Trotsky’s son, who had not accompanied his father into exile but had remained in Russia, working as an engineer, on the grounds that he had tried to poison factory workers.46 No one is forgotten in the chorus of the people. Even the Terek Cossacks are given a voice,47 as well as the railwaymen and writers such as Aleksandr Fadeev, Aleksandr Bezymenskii and one Aleksandr Prokofiev, who contributed a poem, ‘You must pay with blood, gentlemen!’48 Reactions abroad can be judged from the reports of correspondents from Madrid – together with the pronouncement that the Trotskyists in Spain will suffer the same fate as those in Moscow49 – from New York, and from Berlin, where any number of quotations from the Völkischer Beobachter were adduced as proof of the rightness of that judgement. The Society of the Friends of the USSR in England explained why the trial was conducted in accordance with the principles of human rights.50 In this way, the chorus was universalized and its judgement and the popular anger echoed around the world.