A Soviet poet wrote as long ago as 1963, in lzvestiya,
There—row on row, according to years,
Kolyma, Magadan,
Vorkuta and Narym
Marched in invisible columns.
The region of eternal frost
Wrote men off into eternity,
Moved them from the category of “living”
To that of “dead” (little difference between them)—
Behind that barbed wire
White and grizzled—
With that Special Article of the law code
Clipped to their case files.
Who and what for and by whose will—
Figure it out, History.205
12
THE GREAT TRIAL
Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste.
Pascal
Preparations for the greatest trial of all were in less expert hands than those which had produced the Zinoviev and Pyatakov shows. The NKVD veterans had gone. Agranov had by now followed Yagoda and his staff, being “in 1937 expelled from the Party for systematic breaches of socialist legality,”1 or so a later Soviet footnote has it, as if asking us to believe that such practices were frowned on by the Party leadership of that year. He died, presumed shot, in 1938.2 His wife was also shot.3
Instead of Molchanov and Mironov, Agranov and Gay, Yezhov’s team for the 1938 Trial consisted basically of the experienced Zakovsky, promoted from Leningrad; Mikhail Frinovsky, who under Yagoda had been Commander of the NKVD’s Frontier Troops; I. I. Shapiro, Head of Yezhov’s Secretariat and of the new Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases; and to some extent Slut-sky of the Foreign Department.4 They were all themselves to perish, but meanwhile they had after all contrived a show not grossly inferior to its two predecessors. The plot was more complicated, and more horrifying, and there were faults of detail which attracted the censure of the stricter critics. But on the whole, it was a fair success.
It might be thought (as we have said) that no public trial was now necessary. The opposition and the semi-independent voices among Stalin’s own supporters had been crushed. The third trial was in this sense little more than a victory parade. It brought together publicly every type of opposition, terror, sabotage, treachery, and espionage, and turned them into branches of one single great conspiracy. For the 1936 Trial, Molchanov had prepared for Stalin “a special diagram … a system of many colored lines on the diagram indicated when and through whom Trotsky had communicated with the leaders of the conspiracy in the U.S.S.R.”5 Such a diagram showing all the links in the Bukharin Case would be one of great complexity. The trial, which opened in the October Hall on 2 March 1938, had, indeed, taken over a year to prepare, but it was a production of far greater scope than the others.
For all the threads were now pulled together. The Rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, were linked to Trotsky; to the earlier Zinovievite and Trotskyite plotters; to Trotskyites, hitherto considered ex-Trotskyites, who had not yet been tried; to the usual dozens of terrorist action groups; to the espionage organizations of several powers. They had set up at least two “reserve” centers; they had been involved in Yenukidze’s plots; and they were closely concerned with that of Tukhachevsky. They had formed organizational connections with underground nationalist conspirators in half a dozen of the non-Russian Soviet Republics. Their own “Rightist” grouping had involved dozens of men thought to be loyal Stalinists, in high positions in the State. And, as a final touch, they had throughout had as a major accomplice Yagoda, with all his leading subordinates.
As Vladimir Voinovich comments of the shorthand report of the Trial in The Ivankiad:
Don’t regard it as a document, for it is not a document; don’t think about methods of investigation, about why Krestinsky first offered one story, then another. Regard it as a work of art. And you will agree that you’ve never read anything like it in all of world literature. What well-defined characters! What a grandiose plot, and how cohesive and integrated everything was. It’s just too bad that the characters were living people, otherwise you might be able to stand reading it.6
“In the dingy winter daylight and under the stale glare of the electric lamps,”7 a wide variety of prisoners sat in the dock. In the first trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to a lesser extent Smirnov and Evdokimov, were the only well-known figures. The second, with Pyatakov, Radek, and Sokolnikov, was less impressive still. And in each case, the supporting cast consisted mainly of third-rate alleged terrorists and only slightly more interesting engineers.
This time, three members of Lenin’s Politburo stood in the dock—Bukharin, Rykov, and Krestinsky. With them were the legendary Rakovsky, leader of the Balkan and Ukrainian revolutionary movements, and the sinister figure of Yagoda, the Secret Police personified, looking right and left with a certain rat-like vitality. A group of the most senior officials of the Stalinist state who had for many years served it uncritically formed the bulk of the accused: Rosengolts, Ivanov, Chernov, and Grinko—all People’s Commissars until the previous year; Zelensky, Head of the Cooperatives; and Sharangovich, First Secretary in Byelorussia. For the first time, two Asians, the Uzbek leaders Khodzhayev and Ikramov, denounced the previous year for bourgeois nationalism, took their places beside the European accused. These main political accused were supplemented by five minor figures: Bessonov, who had worked in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin; Zubarev, an official of the Agriculture Commissariat; and the former secretaries of Yagoda, of Kuibyshev, and of Maxim Gorky. Last, by a fearful innovation, there were three men far from public life, the doctors Pletnev, Levin, and Kazakov—the first two highly distinguished in their field and the oldest men in dock (sixty-six and sixty-eight, respectively).
The indictment was a comprehensive one—of espionage, wrecking, undermining Soviet military power, provoking a military attack on the USSR, plotting the dismemberment of the USSR, and overthrowing the social system in favor of a return to capitalism. For these purposes, the accused had assembled this vast conspiracy of Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and “bourgeois nationalists” from the whole Soviet periphery. They had been in close cooperation with the military plotters. A number of them had been spies of Germany, Britain, Japan, and Poland since the early 1920s. Several of them had been Tsarist agents in the revolutionary movement. Wrecking had been committed in industry, agriculture, trade, and finance.
On the terror side, they had been responsible for the assassination of Kirov, which Yagoda had facilitated through Zaporozhets. But in addition, they had caused the deaths of Kuibyshev and of Maxim Gorky, hitherto regarded as natural (and of the former OGPU chief, Menzhinsky, and of Gorky’s son Peshkov into the bargain). This had been done by medical murder. Yagoda was also charged with an attempt to poison Yezhov. And a variety of the more usual fruitless plans to assassinate Stalin and other leaders were also alleged.
A brand-new charge, against Bukharin alone of those in dock, was of having plotted to seize power in 1918 and to murder Lenin and Stalin at the same time.
We are now told that when, “thirteen months later,” Frinovsky was himself interrogated, he recounted how he had “prepared” witnesses in this trial, and then brought them before Yezhov, who warned them not to change their stories in the public trial; if at any point before then they retracted, they were returned to interrogation. (But this 1939 confession by Frinovsky was not thought to necessitate any revising of the 1938 verdict.)8 We also learn that rehearsals were held, and a recent Soviet document tells us how “Yezhov more than once talked with Rykov, Bukharin, Bulanov, and assured each of them that they would not be shot.” To Bukharin, he said, “Conduct yourself well in the trial—I will promise you they will not shoot you.”9