Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Of the GUGB [the Soviet secret police run from within the NKVD – Trans.] heads in service on 1 January 1938, one survived, ten were shot between February 1938 and February 1940, and Abram Slutskii, head of the Foreign Department, was poisoned while visiting Frinovskii’s office … Many people forestalled the expected blow of fate by taking their own lives, even in the Moscow administration. Leonid Sakovski, who had been head of the Moscow NKVD since January 1938, was demoted in April 1938 and transferred to the Kuibyshev Region as camp commandant. He, his wife and his sister, also an NKVD employee, were shot in succession during the period April–September 1938. Vasilii Karutskii, Slutsky’s successor in Moscow, took his own life after only three weeks in the post. His successor, Vladimir Tsezarskii, was transferred to a post as camp commandant, after which he was arrested and shot, together with many other leading Chekists, in January 1940. His successor, Aleksandr Shurbenko, remained in office only from September to November 1938. His death sentence was carried out in February 1940.28

  36

  Bukharin Takes his Leave

  On 2 March 1938, after a year’s preparation, the third great Moscow show trial began before the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR. Like the preceding trials, it was held in the October Hall of the House of the Unions. The accused were charged with ‘treason, espionage, sabotage, terrorism, wrecking activities, subverting the military power of the USSR, and provoking a military attack on the USSR’.1 The proceedings concluded on the morning of 13 March with the reading of the verdict. Eighteen of the accused were sentenced to the ‘supreme penalty’ – i.e. to be shot and to the confiscation of their entire personal property; one was sentenced to twenty-five years’ custody, two others to gaol sentences of twenty and fifteen years respectively. It was the show trial of the most prominent people to stand accused. Three of them had once been members of Lenin’s politburo – Bukharin, Rykov and Krestinskii; Christian Rakovskii, a professional revolutionary from a wealthy family, had been a Soviet ambassador. The accused included the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Iagoda, former People’s Commissars – Arkadii Rozengol'ts, Mikhail Chernov, Grigorii Grin'ko, Vladimir Ivanov – and regional Party secretaries, such as Vasili Sharangovich from Belorussia and Faizulla Khodjayev and Akmal Ikramov from Uzbekistan. Others forced to sit in the dock were the secretaries of Iagoda, Kuibyshev and Gorky, and three doctors who were regarded as the USSR’s leading specialists. All the conspiracies that had been ‘uncovered’ hitherto – by Trotskyites, Zinovievites, right deviationists, bourgeois nationalists, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, agents of foreign powers, wreckers – were now bundled together in a conspiracy of conspiracies, a criminal case ‘against the anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’. Nikolai Bukharin was regarded as its leader on Soviet soil. As one of the best-known figures in the Bolshevik Party, he was renowned for his talent as a theorist, and Lenin himself had described him as the ‘darling of the Party. Since appeals for mercy were rejected, the death sentences were carried out on 13 March 1938.2

  The third show trial entered the consciousness of contemporaries and posterity because of the fantastic self-accusations of the principal accused, all of whom were experienced, tried-and-tested revolutionaries. It was shocking and baffling to think that these representatives of the ‘Bolshevik Old Guard’ had not only committed the monstrous crimes of which they stood accused, but that they should have candidly confessed to having done so and to have expressed their sense of guilt. The American ambassador, who had regularly attended the trial, noted, ‘It is horrifying.’ But, at the same time, he felt that ‘it brings back into play all the old critical faculties involved in assessing the credibility of witnesses and sifting the wheat from the chaff – the truth from the false.’3 Arthur Koestler, who had known some of the accused personally, and who had himself gone through the school of Party communism, erected a monument to the accused in his novel Darkness at Noon, which he had started as early as the autumn of 1938. In that novel, his portrait of the figure of Nicholas Rubashov achieved an astonishing lifelikeness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty took up the question of the ‘theory and practice of violence in communism’ in his study Humanism and Terror. For both men, Bukharin’s final plea during the trial was the key point of reference.4

  Figure 36.1 Caricature of the third Moscow show trial by Boris Yefimov; beneath the inscription ‘Fatherland’, it shows, from left to right, Rykov, Sokol'nikov, Bukharin, Radek and Trotsky.

  ‘It was the show trial of the most prominent people to stand accused.’

  But Bukharin’s final plea was not his last word. This can be found rather in the prison writings that he produced in a feverish and yet highly concentrated effort between his arrest on 27 February 1937 and the opening of the trial on 2 March 1938. These writings tell us more about what went on in his mind than the trial records, which in any case have been doctored and censored.5 During the year he spent in the Lubianka, with the show trial and a certain death awaiting him, Bukharin composed four lengthy manuscripts.6

  Bukharin’s final plea

  Bukharin was familiar with the hall in which he was speaking.

  It seems to me that when some of the West European and American intellectuals begin to entertain doubts and vacillations in connection with the trials taking place in the USSR, this is primarily due to the fact that these people do not understand the radical distinction, namely, that in our country the antagonist, the enemy, has at the same time a divided, a dual mind. And I think that this is the first thing to be understood.7

  He wanted his listeners to understand that neither ‘Tibetan powders’, nor hypnotism, nor even ‘l’âme slave’ played any part in his confession of guilt. ‘I must say of myself that in prison, where I was confined for over a year, I worked, studied, and retained my clarity of mind.’ But even though he admitted his guilt in having organized kulak uprisings and a conspiracy for a ‘palace coup’ and confessed that he had merited the most severe punishment, ‘I, as one of the accused, must not admit more than I had admitted and I must not invent facts that have never happened.’ He admitted his ‘defeatist orientation’, while emphasizing that ‘personally I did not hold this position’. He accepted responsibility for the greatest and most heinous ‘crime against the socialist fatherland and the whole international proletariat’, ‘although I personally do not remember having given directions about wrecking activities’.8 He admitted that he had been accurately described as the head of a gang of brigands, ‘but in order to be a gang the members of the gang of brigands must know each other’ … ‘Yet I first learnt the name of Sharangovich from the Indictment, and I first saw him here in Court …’ He wondered about the doctors who were said to have taken part in conspiracies but who did not even know what Mensheviks and Trotskyites are. Bukharin accepted responsibility in general terms but categorically denied his personal complicity in any specific plans to murder Soviet leaders. He was far more conversant with the tangled history of the factional struggles than Chief Prosecutor Vyshinskii and constantly corrected him on points of detail about the history of the Party.

  Why, therefore, had he, Bukharin, for so long denied his complicity, why had he resisted, and how did he finally succeed in overcoming his inner conflict of supporting the general political line, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, sabotaging it by refusing to lend it adequate support?

  For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?’ – an absolutely black vacuum suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepentant. And, on the contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country. And when you ask yourself, ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for?’ �
�� And at such moments, Citizen Judges, everything personal, all the personal accretions, all the vestiges of rancour, pride, and a number of other things, fall away and disappear. And, in addition, when the reverberations of the broad international struggle reach your ear, all this in its entirety does its work, and the result is the complete internal moral victory of the USSR over its kneeling opponents … World history is a world court of justice.

  Bukharin spoke of ‘a peculiar duality of mind’, of a ‘dual psychology’.

  There emerged what in Hegel’s philosophy is called an unhappy consciousness. This unhappy consciousness differed from the ordinary unhappy consciousness only by the fact that it was also a criminal consciousness. The might of the proletarian state found its expression not only in the fact that it smashed the counter-revolutionary gangs, but also in the fact that it undermined its enemies from within, that it disorganized the will of its enemies. Nowhere else is this the case, nor can it be in any capitalist country.9

  Following this line of argument, Bukharin evidently wished to assume a general, objective responsibility for ‘political crimes’, while, on the other hand, he denied any personal involvement and concrete actions – in other words, all the concrete assassination attempts, poisonings and other attempted murders. He maintained this stance right up to the end, and, alongside Nikolai Krestinskii’s open repudiation of his confession at the very beginning of the third show trial, this turned the trial into a drama that sometimes proved too much for its stage managers and, above all, left world opinion and international commentators baffled.

  The show trial: exercises in dialectics

  If we resist the temptation to measure the show trial against the standards relevant to a normal court of law, and think instead of the proceedings as having been planned and conceived from the outset as a drama designed to dehumanize the political opponent and destroy his reputation, to abandon him to a public lynching, then analysis can concentrate on the impact of the staging, the rhetorical tools of incitement and the art of mobilizing hatred, resentment and the readiness to resort to violence. The recipe is simple enough: we need only evoke thoughts of all the evils in the world, all the fears and dangers to which a society is exposed, and direct them at one target. In the third Moscow show trial, the producers had thought everything through in detail, and the man occupying centre stage, Andrei Vyshinskii, did his job expertly, as he had done on previous occasions. Vyshinskii impressed the court once again with his mastery of his brief and his grasp of specialized details of every kind – he seemed to be equally expert on medicines and foreign policy, clinical diagnoses and Machiavelli’s writings or medieval legal practices. He was able to change his tone at will – from that of a man of prudence and moderation to an agitator full of murderous instincts who did not shrink from the use of violent, brutal and foul-mouthed abuse – at the end of his summing up he referred to Bukharin as ‘a hybrid, half fox, half pig’.10

  As had been the case in the earlier trials, what was involved was the transformation of normal, everyday events into extraordinary and spectacular ones, the transformation of accidents into acts of sabotage, and their distortion into planned wrecking activities – in short, the criminalization of reality, the political or criminal codification of conflicts of which a country in the midst of the most extreme crises and clashes had more than enough. It was necessary to expose the guilty parties responsible for accidents and breakdowns, and, wherever there was an event of whatever kind, the malicious intent lying behind it had to be rooted out. For crimes invented in this way it was essential to discover or invent the scapegoat who could be held responsible for it.

  In his stage managing, Vyshinskii had a virtuoso grasp of all the elements involved in mobilizing this scenario of violence. It presented the picture of a country that was full of tensions and grievances and on the point of exploding. It touched on almost all the sore points of everyday life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – but crucially identified them not as ‘shortcomings’ or ‘social ills’ but as the work of hostile elements. Instead of curing such ills, something that could not be done simply or directly, human beings were declared guilty and then liquidated and stigmatized in order to gain time. The subjectivism it expressed was unlimited and the power that lay behind it was total.

  All the evils that came to the surface in the third show trial were matters that ‘were known to every pioneer’. The subjects of Vyshinskii’s revelations were an open secret: chaos in the taxation and savings offices,11 queues in the shops, epidemics and infectious diseases afflicting cattle and horses, chaos in harvesting and delivering the crops,12 and endemic shortages of items in daily use, such as makhorka tobacco, bread and cakes, and sugar.13 Department store fraud was a daily occurrence;14 chaos ruled throughout a planned economy that supplied summer goods in winter and winter goods in summer.15

  The political leadership, unable and unwilling to eliminate the causes of these crises and conflicts, needed scapegoats – and found them in the relevant People’s Commissariats. It was easy to see, therefore, how people might be selected for the roles of the accused. The lists of the accused were drawn up from representatives of more or less every sector of the economy: Grinko (finance), Rozengol'ts (foreign trade), Chernov (agriculture, farming and animal husbandry), Zelenskii (cooperative societies, the distribution of goods in state department stores). There were roles also for accused who had a murky past (involvement with the tsarist Okhrana or the White Army) or simply for non-political experts such as the eminent doctor Professor Levin – people who were made to pay dearly for their naïvety or ‘lack of vigilance’. The crucial link in the chain was the trick of transforming an obvious and ordinary problem into a crime – in other words, the product of an intentional activity. On this interpretation, defects were ‘exploited’; discontent was ‘fanned’ so as to stoke the flames of rebellion and revolt; resentment was encouraged and ‘the national pride of the Ukrainians’ was insulted in order to increase their fury with the Communist Party; a ‘hunger for goods’ was stimulated while the supply of cultivated acreage was intentionally cut back, thus ensuring a shortage of grain and spreading dissatisfaction among the peasantry. Timber was not delivered, thus paralysing work on the construction sites; mulberry plantations were cut down, thus destroying silkworm production, etc., etc. No one was better suited to ensuring the transformation of discontent into rebellion, of indignation and fury about problems of supply into a hatred of ‘those in charge’, than all those who had always had their doubts about the rightness of the Communist Party line or who had tried to act as ‘appeasers’, confining themselves to wanting to take things more slowly or expressing their reservations, all those who had failed to show themselves ‘decisive enough’ in their support for the leadership. These ‘troublemakers’ had in effect been produced by the Communist Party itself, which had brought them into being in their hundreds of thousands during the preceding ten years by the simple device of expelling so many from the Party. Among those particularly suited to the role of scapegoat were all those who had not been entirely in agreement with the Party’s general line in the past, and who had latterly opposed the all-or-nothing collectivization policy – in other words, the ‘right-deviationists’ supposedly led by Bukharin. The final step was to establish the connection between internal dissatisfaction and external threat, between latent revolt internally and the threat of war. Since a connection between internal and external threats was a genuine possibility, it was necessary only to invent actions in order to convert this possibility into a criminal reality. No limits were set to the imagination bent on finding criminal acts; all that was called for were incriminating details, mysterious names and places, dubious characters and theatrical effects.

  The third show trial too relied on all sorts of tricks: a mysterious trip to Merano ‘during the grape-harvest season’, undertaken by Krestinskii, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, for a secret meeting with Trotsky;16 a strange brawl with the police involving Mikhail Chernov, who w
as, after all, the people’s Commissar for Agriculture, during a stay in Berlin;17 the scene in which Hans von Seeckt, commander-in-chief of the German Army, handed over 250,000 gold Marks to Ambassador Krestinskii – to help finance Trotsky;18 Trotsky’s plans to escape to China from Alma-Ata by crossing the Soviet frontier, etc.19 There were also very detailed accounts of scenes in which People’s Commissar Yezhov was to be killed – with the assistance of a flask of foreign origin containing a solution of mercury20 – or the murder of one of Maxim Gorky’s sons by administering the wrong medical treatment.21 The flavour of the show trial is conveyed also by the stilted jargon used by expert witnesses:

  On the basis of the material laid before the court regarding the chemical analyses of the carpet, the curtains, the furnishings and the atmosphere of the study of Comrade N. I. Yezhov, as well as the analysis of his urine and the nature of the symptoms of illness he displayed, it should be held to be absolutely proven that the poisoning of Comrade N. I. Yezhov by administering mercury through the respiratory organs had been arranged and carried out, which represented the most efficacious and dangerous method of inducing chronic mercury poisoning.22

  Whether the accused ‘subjectively’ wished to do something or other or whether their thoughts and actions merely led to crimes ‘objectively’ was a matter of complete indifference. At the beginning of his trial Krestinskii had refused to admit his guilt. ‘I plead not guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, of whose existence I was not aware. Nor have I committed any of the crimes with which I personally am charged, in particular I plead not guilty to the charge of having had connections with the German intelligence service.’23 As the trial proceeded, and Krestinskii was subjected to further ‘persuasion’, he revised his deviation from the script. Bukharin’s confession, too, reads like a confession that is simultaneously a recantation. He assumes responsibility for the ‘sum total of the actions taken’, ‘irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took direct part in, any particular act’.24 This acknowledgement of a global responsibility makes the confession of a concrete act meaningless. Whatever the accused admitted or denied was of no consequence, since the decision about life or death had long since been pre-empted.