“Sit down here and write your confession, Alexander Semyonovitch,” said Polevedsky amiably. “I hope we can settle the whole affair today.”
“But, Citizen Examiner, I haven’t anything to write.”
“Write down your confession. It’s high time you began to see reason, I can tell you.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve already told you a dozen times that there’s nothing to confess.”
“Write down who recruited you.”
“No one recruited me, Citizen Examiner.”
“Are you mad, Alexander Semyonovitch? Do you really think you can beat us?”
“I’m not fighting you, Citizen Examiner. The whole thing’s a riddle to me.”
“You came to this country on behalf of a foreign power. You conspired here against our Government, and you built up a network of enemy agents. No doubt you thought you’d remain undiscovered, but, in fact, we have had you under observation from the first moment you crossed the frontier, and now we’ve had enough. You must capitulate, break with your foreign masters and reveal the names of your collaborators.”
“Not a word of what you say applies to me.”
“Who recruited you?”
“I was never recruited.”
“Who recruited you, I said?”
“No one.”
“Who recruited you?”
This time he almost shrieked the senseless question, and I made no answer.
“In our cellars you’ll learn to talk. We’ve dealt with tougher men than you. In a week you’ll be soft enough, I can tell you.”
“There is nothing I can say.”
“Reveal the organization to us.”
“What organization?”
“The counterrevolutionary sabotage organization you built up in the interests of a foreign power.”
“I didn’t build up any such organization.”
“Who recruited you?”
“No one.”
“Whom did you recruit?”
“No one.”
“I warn you again, we have ways and means of loosening your tongue. You’ll talk in the end all right, but then it will be too late.”
“There’s nothing more I can say. Whatever your ways and means are, they can’t alter the truth. And it’s no use my inventing things.”
“We don’t want you to invent things; it’s the truth we want. In whose service did you come here?”
“The Soviet Government’s, to assist in the work of socialist construction.”
“Save yourself the fine words, and tell me about the counter-revolutionary organization you created here.”
“I never created anything of the sort.”
“Tell me the names of your agents.”
“I have no agents.”
“You’re a dirty agent in the service of a foreign power.”
I made no reply.
“Who recruited you?”
“No one.”
“Whom did you recruit?”
“No one.”
“We’ll break every bone in your body if necessary, but you’ll talk.”
He became more and more vehement. I was so depressed and felt so helpless that at first I failed to notice how much all this shouting was costing him. He was not a sadist who took a delight in bullying a helpless prisoner. I really think it was almost as unpleasant for him as it was for me, but he did his best. The interrogation, if such it can be called, lasted eight hours apart from short interruptions, and at the end of it we were exactly where we started. He put the same questions again and again and I always gave him the same answers. I no longer made any attempt to convince him that I was innocent; I was quite certain by this time that he knew it. He never once made any concrete charge. By seven o’clock I was on the point of exhaustion, and so I think was he. Then he left his room and went off, leaving me in the corridor. This time I no longer wondered what was going to happen to me. Obviously I would be arrested and marched off to a cell.
He was back very quickly.
“Citizen Accused,” he said, “my chief has decided not to arrest you now. You’re to have another forty-eight hours to think it over. Come again on Saturday. Oh! And just one thing: forget all about Spain. We are in charge of security there too, and we don’t want any enemies behind the lines. If you make any attempt to volunteer we’ll arrest you immediately.”
I left the building in a daze. This time my unexpected freedom did not console me. I was quite certain now that I was lost. It was obvious that they were determined to regard me as a foreign spy and to extort a confession from me with all the means at their disposal. Should be strong enough to resist? It wasn’t a question of will, but of nerves and muscles. Hundreds were being arrested every day, and none of them ever came back though occasionally we heard that some of them had made penitent confessions. I had known many of them and I knew that they had honestly done their best to serve the Soviet Union. It hadn’t helped them. Why should it help me?
“Good God, Alex!” exclaimed Marcel when I got back. “What’s happened to you? You’re as white as a sheet.”
I flopped down onto the couch and Lena brought me a glass of water. Marcel sat down on the edge of the couch.
“Tell us about it, Alex,” he begged.
“I can’t, Marcel.”
“It would do you good. Let’s discuss whatever it is together. Two heads are better than one.”
“I mustn’t. I had to sign an undertaking to keep my mouth shut.” “Very well, but don’t get so upset. It will be all right. You haven’t done anything.”
“But you haven’t done anything either, Marcel, but that didn’t stop your getting the sack, and you don’t know why even now.”
A few months before, Marcel had been quite suddenly dismissed from his work at the Coal Chemical Research Institute. As luck would have it, the unexplained dismissal had come just one week after he had been publicly praised at a meeting of all the members of the Institute for his exemplary work. He was, in fact, a first-class man and a brilliant chemist. And yet he had been dismissed without notice and without explanation. The Director of the Institute had said nothing, but Marcel had seen clearly enough how unhappy he had been at the prospect of losing his best chemist. Obviously the dismissal had not come from the Institute. After that Marcel had looked for other work. Wherever he had applied they had been enthusiastic in the beginning, because to find a man of his training and capacities free was a great rarity, but after a day or so the routine letter had arrived saying that, after all, there was no vacancy. In the meantime, of course, his papers and the request for permission to employ him had been sent to the G.P.U. The discovery that there were no vacancies after all was the result.
In the end he had obtained part-time work in our Institute. As he was not on the established staff, his name did not appear on the nominal roll of the Institute’s employees and it was not necessary to ask G.P.U. permission before he could be employed. So there he was, just tolerated, until such time as some informer got the idea of putting the G.P.U. on his trail again.
He was the son of a wealthy industrialist, and with his father’s resources the whole world was open to him, but it had no attraction for him. He was not a Communist, but he had come to the Soviet Union to work because he had believed that a juster system of society was being built up. Despite what had happened he still refused to leave. Either he did not see, or did not want to see, the way things were developing. He believed what he read in the newspapers and he found it quite understandable that as a foreigner he should be treated with suspicion. The country was surrounded by capitalist enemies, war threatened, and it was quite clear that the Soviet authorities had to take defensive measures. Two months before he had handed in his passport and applied for Soviet nationality. Once he had it he was quite convinced he would enjoy complete equality in Soviet society. I had received the news of his step with very mixed feelings, but as a Communist I could hardly advise him against it. I knew perfectly well that by abandoning his national
ity he was abandoning his last shred of protection and that he would get no thanks for his devotion. Honesty, unselfishness and nobility of purpose had become cause for suspicion. If a foreign specialist demanded the utmost for his service, and in foreign exchange at that, and fought for better living conditions, he gained the confidence of the G.P.U. It was the other type which aroused their suspicions: a capable engineer who might have earned big money and enjoyed big privileges but who was prepared to sacrifice it all for an ideal.
Now Marcel sat on the edge of the couch and sought to comfort me, but I was not at all sure that his lot was any more enviable than my own.
“Look, Alex,” he said consolingly, “there must be a change soon. It can’t go on like this forever. You ought to apply for Soviet citizenship too, then all this mistrust would cease.”
“But, Marcel, hundreds of Soviet citizens are being arrested every day. Whenever I have to go to Moscow I am startled all over again at the number of familiar faces missing. During the past three months at least twenty-five per cent of the staff has disappeared.”
“If they’re innocent they’ll come back again all right. They’re needed too badly.”
“They notice they need people too late. In the meantime the work goes on through force of inertia. Perhaps it doesn’t go quite so well, but it goes. And where scientific institutions are concerned it’s years before you begin to notice that things are going badly.”
We went on talking, but my mind was really elsewhere. What could I do to slip out of the trap which was gradually closing? Should I do nothing and just let myself drift to destruction? I was still free. I could appeal to the Party. I could appeal to higher authorities in Moscow. After all, I was innocent, and if the Kharkov G.P.U. once discovered that higher bodies were interested in my fate they might be more cautious. I had already in 1935 been in one awkward situation. When Davidovitch had become Director of our Institute he, too, had denounced me as the leader of an anti-Soviet group. But we had fought back and we had won. Davidovitch had been dismissed and Leipunsky had been brought back from England to take charge of the Institute. But things were different now. The slogan “Revolutionary watchfulness” was official, and show trials had resulted in the arrest of thousands. It was no use cherishing illusions. Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Muralov and all the others had no more been agents of a foreign power than I was, but they had all been destroyed. How much was my innocence worth?
The next morning I decided to speak to Leipunsky. I couldn’t keep the thing secret any longer, no matter what the consequences might be. I did not feel myself morally bound by my signature to an undertaking which had been made under duress. And perhaps my appeal to a wider public—no matter how limited—might help matters.
At midday I went to see Leipunsky at his home. As soon as I met him I felt relieved. Alexander Ilyitch Leipunsky had a subtle charm of manner and a frank and friendly face which captivated everyone who came into contact with him. At that time he was thirty-three. He was of medium height, with fair hair and blue eyes, and his stocky powerful build suggested his proletarian origin. He was one of the most talented of the younger physicists of the Soviet Union, and he occupied a place somewhere between the two generations. The leading physicists of the Soviet Union all came from the old Tsarist intelligentsia, but they had honestly come over to the side of the Soviet Union and most of them worked devotedly and loyally. Nevertheless the Party did not regard them as its own. The Party had decided to create a proletarian intelligentsia to take over the cultural and scientific leadership of the country. Year after year new batches of young men from the industrial working class were sent into the scientific institutes. They had attended so-called Workers’ Faculties and, later, higher schools, and now they were supposed to be ready to become scientists. It was not always the most talented who were chosen in this way. The Party believed that if it went on sending masses of young proletarians to the high schools and scientific institutes a body of real talents would develop sooner or later. But so far it had not. There was no single proletarian physicist who could measure himself even remotely against the scientists of the old school. Leipunsky was still one of the younger generation and he was a physicist of some standing. He was not a real proletarian in the Soviet sense, because his father had been an independent artisan.
Leipunsky had worked for three years in a factory in the provinces and studied at the same time. He had joined the Komsomol and then the Party, and had been sent to the Institute of Physical Sciences in Leningrad under Professor Joffe. In 1929 the Ukrainian Government decided to open a similar Institute in Kharkov. The physicists all came from Leningrad, the old center of Russian science, and a scientist of the old school, Professor Ivan Vassiliyevitch Obremov, was appointed its first Director. The young Communist Leipunsky was appointed at his side as “Red Director.” Gradually the control of the Institute slid into the capable hands of Leipunsky. He was only twenty-six at the time, but everyone accepted his authority as a matter of course. He had an easy and dexterous, almost humorous, way of settling all administrative affairs, and he decentralized as far as he possibly could. He placed confidence in those who worked under him and by so doing he gave them confidence and brought out the best in them. There was nothing in the least bureaucratic about him.
His way of life was extremely modest. In 1931 I went with him to Moscow to obtain permission for the publication of a journal of physics. I had been in the Soviet Union only a few weeks, but he and I already got on excellently. At that time no Communist was allowed to earn more than 280 rubles a month, but prices were high and that was a very small salary. Before we went I noticed the state of Leipunsky’s boots. All my Western ideas of propriety revolted at going to interview a high Government official with broken boots.
“Alexander Ilyitch,” I declared reproachfully, “you can’t possibly go to see the People’s Commissar with those boots. After all, you’re Director of the Institute.”
“So what?” he inquired. “They’re the only ones I’ve got and I can’t afford to buy any more with things the price they are. They’ll do. It never rains in summer.”
Leipunsky was also intellectually between the generations. He was as far removed from the involved intellectualism of the old school as he was from the primitiveness of the new Soviet intelligentsia. He was on the whole a reserved man and he did not talk a great deal, but you had the feeling that he listened very carefully to all you had to say and thought it over. He would make a trenchant observation now and again and after a conversation which had been almost a monologue you came away with the impression that you had taken part in a lively discussion.
He greeted me warmly.
“Nothing wrong, I hope,” he said.
“I’m afraid there is,” I replied. “The apparatus seems to think I’m a foreign spy.”
“Good Lord, what makes you think that, Alex?”
“I’ve very good reason to think it, Alexander Ilyitch. I’m not supposed to say anything about it, of course, but I’m just at my wits’ end and I must have advice.”
And I told him the whole story from beginning to end in all its details. He listened closely and he was obviously worried.
“It’s a bad business,” he said when I had finished. “The fact they’ve spoken openly is a bad sign.”
“But what am I to do, Alexander Ilyitch? I can’t prove my innocence because they haven’t told me what my guilt is supposed to consist of. There is no black spot in my life. They are supposed to know everything, so how can they believe that I have become an enemy of the Soviet Union? A man doesn’t work as devotedly as I have if all the time he is an enemy in his heart. This country has given me everything. I have a position here no young engineer could hope to obtain so quickly in any of the old capitalist countries. So what on earth should make me an enemy of the Soviet Union?”
Leipunsky said nothing, but I could see that he was thinking hard. He had irregular features and when he was deep in thought his left eyebrow went up.
He was looking at the floor, and I could feel that he was trying to find some way out.
“Alexander Ilyitch,” I went on, “if you only knew how they talked to me! I always thought the best and most devoted revolutionaries were in that apparatus, but what I came up against was the Inquisition. They didn’t want to hear what I had to say. They wouldn’t believe me and they never will believe me. It’s their job not to believe what people say. I didn’t have the impression that I was among comrades at all.”
The intolerable tension of the past few days suddenly sought release and tears came into my eyes. I looked at Leipunsky, a younger man than myself, as though he were my sheet anchor.
At that moment there was a knock at the door and Panteleyev, the treasurer of the Institute, came in with one or two papers for signature. My overwrought state caused him to look at me curiously. Leipunsky signed and Panteleyev went off. Then Leipunsky turned to me again.
“Why have you told me all this, Alex?” he asked. “How can I help you?”
“I don’t know, but I just couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.” “Unfortunately, I shall have to report it.”
That gave me rather a shock. I hadn’t thought of the possibility.
“Do you really think you must? No one will ever know.”
“Panteleyev saw you here and he noticed you were very upset.” “Panteleyev isn’t an informer. He’s a very decent fellow, and in any case he’s too simple to draw his own conclusions.”
Leipunsky smiled tolerantly.
“Despite your intelligence, you’re very naive in such matters, Alex. But don’t let’s discuss it. What do you want me to do?”
The Accused Page 8
