With that, the morning session dragged to a close.
When the court reassembled at 6:00 P.M., Ulrikh announced to a tense court that the examination of Krestinsky would now take place. Vyshinsky interposed to say that he first wanted to put a few questions to Rakovsky.
He asked the old Bulgarian about the letter to Trotsky abandoning Trotskyism, which Krestinsky had referred to in the previous day’s session. Rakovsky recalled it, and said it had been intended as a deception, and that Krestinsky had never broken with Trotskyism.
Vyshinsky then produced the letter, whose existence he would not acknowledge the previous day, and went on to argue that the letter itself, which spoke of the defeat of the opposition and the need to work in the Party, should be interpreted as a call to underhand subversion—a possible argument, indeed, but one scarcely compatible with an out-and-out deceptive surrender.
Finally he turned to Krestinsky. Did he accept this formulation?
Krestinsky, who was “looking more than ever like a small bedraggled sparrow,”45 accepted it.
Vyshinsky asked if this meant that Krestinsky would now cease to deceive the court. The answer was a full confirmation of the evidence given at the preliminary inquiry. He admitted his guilt. On the first day, Krestinsky had occasionally been roused by Vyshinsky’s taunts, but on the whole his tone is said to have been natural; it had now become flat and desperate.46
Vyshinsky pressed the point:
I have one question to ask Krestinsky: What, then, is the meaning of the statement you made yesterday, which cannot be regarded otherwise than as a piece of Trotskyite provocation in court?
Krestinsky:
Yesterday, under the influence of momentary keen feeling of false shame, evoked by the atmosphere of the dock and the painful impression created by the public reading of the indictment, which was aggravated by my poor health, I could not bring myself to tell the truth, I could not bring myself to say that I was guilty. And instead of saying ‘Yes, I am guilty,’ I almost mechanically answered ‘No, I am not guilty.’
Vyshinsky:
Mechanically?
Krestinsky:
In the face of world public opinion, I had not the strength to admit the truth that I had been conducting a Trotskyite struggle all along. I request the court to register my statement that I fully and completely admit that I am guilty of all the gravest charges brought against me personally, and that I admit my complete responsibility for the treason and treachery I have committed.
47
And now, despite Ulrikh’s earlier announcement that the examination of Krestinsky was due, Vyshinsky at once dropped him and turned to the examination of Rykov. All this has very much the air of the prosecution playing safe, and not willing to risk a further retraction at this stage.
Stalin received regular reports on the case and gave advice. The latest Soviet account says that after he was informed of Krestinsky’s retraction, he said, “You worked badly with that filth,” and ordered a stop to be put to Krestinsky’s talk. On the night of 2 March, “special measures” were taken. The interrogators dislocated his left shoulder, so that outwardly there was nothing to be seen. Bessonov is named has having told this version to the German engineer Hans Metzger in a prisoners’ transfer train in l939.48 According to another variant, Krestinsky was also faced for hours with a battery of particularly bright lights, which damaged his already injured eyes, but only consented to confess on condition that the letter he had written to Trotsky should be put in the records.49
And if Krestinsky had hoped to rouse the other defendants to defy the court, he had had to recognize defeat. Indeed, he may never have hoped or intended his retraction to go beyond the first day, making what demonstration he felt to be in his power.
An alternative account leaked through NKVD circles was that Krestinsky’s retraction and reaffirmation were a put-up job. Stalin was wishing to show that the defendants did not all confess like automata and thought that this single and temporary lapse would add a touch of verisimilitude.50
The arguments against this notion are very powerful. Krestinsky’s phrasing during the first day sounds, on the face of it, genuine, and some of the points he makes seem to be both valid and extremely embarrassing to the prosecution. Vyshinsky’s attitude is sinister in a way which appears more compatible with a genuine threat to Krestinsky than the appeal to his reason and conscience, which would be supposed to have produced the change in his evidence on the second day.
There is another and most suggestive piece of evidence from the trial itself. At the beginning, Vyshinsky announced the order in which he proposed to question the twenty-one prisoners. This was evidently a predetermined list, since it is repeated in the order in which they made their final pleas, except for one transposition among the minor characters. But the actual order of questioning was different. The first day went according to schedule—Bessonov, Grinko, Chernov. But on the second, Krestinsky should have had his examination-in-chief immediately after Ivanov. Instead, as we saw, the agricultural official Zubarev took the stand on the morning of 3 March, and in the afternoon Krestinsky was called upon not for a full examination, but only for a brief recantation. This, too, was preceded by the short and unscheduled interrogation of Rakovsky, undermining Krestinsky’s point about the letter disavowing Trotskyism.
On the evening of 3 March, this was all that Krestinsky’s examination amounted to. His full examination was postponed until the following afternoon, when the examinations of Rosengolts and Rakovsky were rescheduled, the former to precede and the latter to follow Krestinsky’s. Rosengolts, as Krestinsky’s alleged closest Trotskyite collaborator, established both Krestinsky’s connections with Trotsky and the joint plotting activity of himself, Krestinsky, and the Tukhachevsky group in the days after the Pyatakov Trial and Bukharin’s arrest. Krestinsky confirmed and elaborated all this, and Rakovsky rubbed it in afterward. All this seems to show an emergency procedure.
Nor is it difficult to see that the circumstances of his original interrogation were such as to make retraction possible. Krestinsky had been arrested at the end of May 1937. He confessed “after the lapse of a week … at the end of the first interrogation.”51 This was by torture in its most intensive form, and he was not, therefore, broken in the long-drawn-out fashion described on here. It was just at that time that Bukharin was making his first confession, and it may be that it was momentarily intended to produce the next big trial at very short notice—and about as soon after the Pyatakov Trial as that had been after Zinoviev’ s .
If so, this perhaps came to nothing when Bukharin started to retract some of his confession (see here), and the whole business of interrogating him had to begin over again. Meanwhile, with the spread of the Purge right through the Party, other useful additions to the case kept emerging, and it was nine months later that the trial took place.
However that may be, it is certainly the case that the NKVD seems to have had in its hands a leading prisoner who had not been brought into the right state for a trial by the most tried and successful procedure. Torture and the conveyor could produce confessions, but, as we have seen, the victim, once rested, recovered to the degree that he could retract them. He was not reduced to the degree of submission obtained by the longer method. Yet Krestinsky had confessed, and was being cooperative. There was no overt resistance to break.
Krestinsky’s withdrawal of his confession was not unprecedented. During the Shakhty Trial, one of the accused (Skorutto) had refused to confess, been kept out of the court for a day on the grounds of illness, and then come back and confessed, only to withdraw the confession again, and the following day to reaffirm it. Again, in the Metro-Vic Trial, MacDonald withdrew, then reaffirmed, his original confession. It has never been thought that these withdrawals added anything to the credibility of the confession when finally produced.