The economic side of “bourgeois nationalism” was thus well shown, and Khodzhayev made it explicit:
I do not know whether the court is aware that the bourgeois nationalists, particularly in Central Asia, had a theory of organizing a self-contained economy, that is to say, of making the economy of the republic develop independently of the other parts of the Soviet Union, of making it possible for the republic to live without need for the rest of the Soviet Union in the event of possibilities arising for active, direct struggle.81
Ikramov gave similar evidence. He had had contacts with Zelensky, Antipov, and A. P. Smirnov, and Bukharin had stayed with him for a few days in 1933. Bukharin, called on, admitted discussing with him the Ryutin Platform, and “a vague allusion to terrorism,” but denied any talk of wrecking.82 At a further meeting, in 1935, the sinister point was raised that both Bukharin’s and Ikramov’s wives had been present, though the seditious conversation had taken place in their absence. Bukharin denied that on this occasion politics had been discussed at all. Here came a sharp exchange with Vyshinsky:
Vyshinsky:
And you, the leader of an underground organization, met a member of your organization, one whom you enlisted, met him two years later, and did not try to verify whether he still adhered to your counter-revolutionary organization, you showed no interest in this, but began to discuss the weather in Uzbekistan. Is this how it was, or not?
Bukharin:
No, this is not how it was. You are putting a question which contains in itself an ironical reply. As it happens, I figured I would meet Ikramov again, but by chance this meeting did not take place because he did not find me in.
Vyshinsky:
You have an extraordinarily good memory for exactly those meetings which did not take place.
Bukharin:
I do not remember the meetings which did not take place, because they are a phantom, but I do remember those which did materialize.
83
Ikramov gave a long account of Antipov’s vital role in organizing Central Asian subversion. Antipov had insisted on terrorism, and personally boasted that “whoever the Rights had decided to kill would never reach Central Asia.”84 And Ikramov, too, implicated the polygamist Rakhimbayev and his Tadzhik group.
TO RUIN THE ECONOMY
The examinations of Rosengolts and Krestinsky on the evening of 4 March were satisfactory to the prosecution. Rosengolts and Krestinsky testified that they, with Rudzutak and Gamarnik, had constituted the main center of the conspiracy after the arrest of Rykov and Bukharin in February 1937. They had then relied almost entirely on the projected Army coup.
Their connections with German espionage, arranged through Trotsky, had dated back to 1922–1923. Krestinsky admitted to the meeting with Trotsky in person which he had denied on 2 March. Trotsky had given full instructions for all types of treason, espionage, sabotage, and terror.
The only slightly awkward moments were when Krestinsky said that he, Rosengolts, and Gamarnik had “discussed the necessity for a terrorist act” against Molotov, but had made no actual preparations for it (Vyshinsky commented sharply that this amounted to the same thing), and when Rykov, again called on briefly to confirm conversations with and about Tukhachevsky, denied them.85
Rykov and Bukharin, too, were incidentally all but exculpated of all the recent activity attributed to them by Krestinsky’s remark that “Trotsky said that we should not confine ourselves to Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, because although they were the recognized leaders of the Rights, they had already been compromised to a great extent and were under surveillance,” so that Rudzutak, whom no one suspected, should be the connection. But this “surveillance,” and the admission that it made Rykov and Bukharin unsuitable conspiratorial colleagues, in effect disposes of the possibility of their guilt—and this from 1933 on, covering the whole period of the Kirov and other alleged murders.
Rosengolts confessed to various embezzlements, including sabotage in the export of iron. This seems to refer to pig-iron exports, which in fact had been under a directive bearing Stalin’s signature, with the deliveries superintended by Yezhov.86
Rakovsky was now questioned. He was the son of a landowner in the Southern Dobrudja, at first part of Bulgaria, but transferred to Romania a few years after his birth. He was prominent as a Bulgarian Socialist at the age of twenty, when he represented the party at the Congress of the Second International. He took a doctorate of medicine at Montpellier, and went back to the Balkans, where he was arrested a number of times for involvement in the Romanian revolutionary movement. In 1916, he was again arrested in Romania, and imprisoned at Jassy, where the Russians freed him in May 1917. He went to Petrograd and in 1919 became a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukraine. Becoming attached to Trotsky’s views, he lost his high posts and from 1924 to 1927 was Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in London and then Ambassador in Paris. He was recalled to Moscow in November 1927 and was expelled from the Central Committee in the same month, for supporting the Left opposition. He defended the opposition viewpoint at the XVth Party Congress. In January 1928, he was expelled from the Party and deported to Astrakhan, and later to Barnaul. It had not been until February 1934, one of the very last, that he had recanted and been readmitted to the Party. He had been implicated in the Pyatakov Trial and was arrested on 27 January 1937.87 Apart from the doctors, he was easily the oldest of those in dock. And even among his veteran fellow accused, his record stood out as long and legendary.
The sixty-five-year-old revolutionary had refused to testify to the NKVD for eight months,88 one of the best records in the trials. He now confessed that he had been a British spy since 1924. His disavowal of Trotskyism in February 1934 had been designed to deceive the Party.89
On his rehabilitation, he had been sent to Japan at the head of a Red Cross delegation, and this was made the occasion for him to incriminate the then Soviet ambassadors in the Far East, Yurenev and Bogomolov. He himself became a Japanese as well as a British spy.
Vyshinsky got in one particular unfair smear. Rakovsky’s father had been a landlord.
Vyshinsky:
Hence I am not mistaken when I say that you were a landlord?
Rakovsky:
You are not mistaken.
Vyshinsky:
Well, now. It was important for me to establish whence you received your income.
Rakovsky:
But it is important for me to say what this income was spent for.
Vyshinsky:
This is a different matter.
90
Everyone among the Old Bolsheviks knew that Rakovsky had spent everything he had on the revolutionary movement—financing the Romanian Socialist Party, which he had founded, and its paper, which he edited, and also subsidizing Russian and other revolutionaries. Now provoked enough to try to draw attention to these facts, he was instantly silenced.
When Rakovsky began to refer to the “opposition,” Vyshinsky interrupted briskly:
In your explanations today you are generally permitting yourself to use quite a number of such expressions, as if you were forgetting that you are being tried here as a member of a counter-revolutionary bandit, espionage, diversionist organization of traitors. I consider it my duty to remind you of this in my interrogation of you and ask you to keep closer to the substance of the treasonable crimes which you have committed, to speak without philosophy and other such things which are entirely out of place here.91