Krestinsky:
The letter I am referring to is in the possession of the Court investigator, because it was taken from me during the search, and I request this letter to be attached to the records.
Vyshinsky:
The records contain a letter dated 11 July 1927, taken from you during the search.
Krestinsky:
But there is another letter of 27 November….
Vyshinsky:
There is no such letter.
Krestinsky:
That cannot be.…
21
This was to be significant.
Pressed continually in a long exchange, Krestinsky gave his motives for earlier confessions:
Krestinsky:
At the preliminary investigation, before I was questioned by you, I had given false testimony.
Vyshinsky:
… And then you stuck to it.
Krestinsky:
… And then I stuck to it, because from personal experience I had arrived at the conviction that before the trial, if there was to be one, I would not succeed in refuting my testimony.
22
Vyshinsky now called on Rosengolts, who confirmed Krestinsky’s Trotskyism. Krestinsky, who had not been feeling well, slumped. Vyshinsky told him to listen. He replied that when he had taken a pill, he would be all right, but asked not to be questioned for a few minutes.
Rosengolts, then Grinko, gave evidence of Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky, recovering, continued to deny it:
Vyshinsky:
Here are three men on good terms with you who say what is not true?
Krestinsky:
Yes.
After several more denials, Vyshinsky again asked him directly, “When we interrogated you at the preliminary investigation, what did you say on this score?”
Krestinsky:
In giving testimony I did not refute any of my previous testimony, which I deliberately confirmed.
Vyshinsky:
You deliberately confirmed it. You were misleading the Prosecutor. Is that so, or not?
Krestinsky:
No.
Vyshinsky:
Why did you have to mislead me?
Krestinsky:
I simply considered that if I were to say what I am saying today—that it was not in accordance with the facts—my declaration would not reach the leaders of the Party and the Government.
23
This clear statement of the position was greeted with a “shocked hush” from the audience.24
Questioning further about the preliminary examination, Vyshinsky asked, “If you were asked whether you had complaints, you should have answered that you had.” And Krestinsky replied, “I had in the sense that I did not speak voluntarily.”25
Vyshinsky then abandoned this line of questioning and turned to his official prey, Bessonov, who developed his connections with Trotsky at length, adding that Trotsky had hinted at the physical extermination of Maxim Gorky. The session ended with a further exchange with, and denial from, Krestinsky.
After a two-hour adjournment, the evening started off with the evidence of Grinko, former People’s Commissar for Finance. He had been a Borotbist, and in the early 1920s had been dismissed from his post as Ukrainian Commissar for Education for excessive haste in carrying out Ukrainianization. In this capacity, he now implicated Lyubchenko and other lesser Ukrainians, such as Porayko, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, as members of the “national-fascist” organization. In his Moscow role, he brought in a number of other leading figures, such as Antipov, Rudzutak, Yakovlev, and Vareikis, as Rightist plotters. He described how Yakir and Gamarnik had instructed the Head of the Department of Savings Banks to “prepare a terrorist act” against Yezhov, and how other conspirators had arranged for an official of the Northern Sea Route to do the same against Stalin. His own main activity had been financial sabotage, which he had defined at the preliminary examination:
The main object of undermining work in the People’s Commissariat of Finance was the following: to weaken the Soviet rouble, to weaken the financial power of the U.S.S.R., to dislocate the economy and thus rouse among the population discontent with the financial policy of the Soviet power, discontent over taxes, discontent with bad savings bank service, delays in paying wages, etc., which were to result in wide, organized discontent with the Soviet power and were to help the conspirators to recruit adherents and to develop insurrectionary activities.26
This sort of theme—the blaming of all the errors and malpractices of the Soviet economy on sabotage by the accused—was to run through the trial. For all spheres of life, there was someone in the dock to answer for popular discontents. And the evidence tells us a huge amount about Soviet conditions.
Grinko, similarly, had been involved with Zelensky and others in trade hold-ups:
Grinko:
… Bolotin in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Trade, carried on undermining activities, created a shortage of goods, goods difficulties in the country…. Zelensky, on the instructions of the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, sent huge quantities of goods to the districts where there was a poor harvest and small quantities of goods to the districts where there were good harvests, and this caused goods to remain on the shelves in some districts and a shortage of goods in others.
27
But once again, Vyshinsky diverged to attack Krestinsky. Again he was rebuffed by a firm, “I deny that I talked with Fascists for Trotskyite purposes.”
At this, Rykov was called on. He, too, confirmed Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky once more asserted flatly that he knew nothing of any illegal activities, and the intervention of Ulrikh could get no more out of him.
But Rykov, too, proved unsatisfactory, though in a different way. In the period before his arrest, he had taken to heavy drinking, and reduced himself to a bad condition which the long strain of his imprisonment had, in its different way, done nothing to help. During cross-examination, he sometimes seemed to have gone to pieces, punctuating his answers with inane giggles.28 But he rallied. At first he was vague:
Grinko:
From Rykov I learnt that Yagoda belonged to this organization, but I had no direct connections with Yagoda.
Vyshinsky:
(to the court): Permit me to question Rykov. Accused Rykov, did you tell Grinko about this?
Rykov:
I do not remember exactly, but I cannot exclude such a fact.
Vyshinsky:
Hence, you told him about Yagoda’s membership?
Rykov:
Yes.
Now, wrecking was raised:
Vyshinsky:
Accused Rykov, do you corroborate this conversation with Grinko about wrecking?
Rykov:
I don’t accept that. I deny it, not because I want to minimize my guilt. I have done much worse things than this.
30
But then he got into his stride on the line which both he and (much more forcefully and consistently) Bukharin were to take throughout. That is, they admitted forming an illegal organization, confessed to giving it a terrorist “orientation,” accepted full responsibility in the abstract for all the acts allegedly committed, but denied personal knowledge of or connection with any particular crime. They were thus able to point out that they were freely confessing to capital crimes, so that their denials of the particular acts could not be interpreted as attempts to evade the penalty.
The last to be examined on 2 March was Chernov. Ex-Menshevik and ex-theological student (like Bessonov—and Mikoyan and Stalin), he had been in charge of grain collection in the Ukraine in 1929 and 1930, and had more recently been serving as All-Union People’s Commissar for Agriculture. He had been a ruthless executer of Stalin’s will in the collectivization campaign, but apparently not a convinced one. He is reported as having said, during the 1930 slaughter of their livestock by the peasantry, that at least “for the first time in their sordid history, the Russian peasants have eaten their fill of meat.”31 He had started to confess on the day of his arrest.32