Rakovsky finished by explaining that his surrender after eight months had been due to getting information, during the summer of 1937, about the Japanese attack on China and the extent of Nazi and Italian intervention in Spain.92 This “had a stunning effect on me. Rancour and ambition fell from me.” He decided that his “duty was to help in this struggle with the aggressor, that I would go and expose myself fully and entirely, and I told the investigator that on the following day I would begin to give complete, exhaustive testimony.”
This sounds, in the context of interrogation and exhaustion, a credible exposition of the “Rubashov” motive—more so, indeed, than the reluctant and partial confession of Bukharin, on whom “Rubashov” was founded.
Rakovsky’s evidence, adjourned over the night, had lasted until the morning of 5 March. The court then took Zelensky, a much less interesting figure. He had, however, a past in the highest Party ranks, as a former (1923–1925) Secretary of the Central Committee and Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, who had been removed for inadequate hostility to Zinoviev and Kamenev. He had merely been transferred to be Secretary of the Party’s Central Asian Bureau from 1924 to 1931, and had never lost his place on the Central Committee. In his Asian capacity, he had already been implicated as an agent of Trotsky by Ikramov and Khodzhayev. But his main role now was to explain how he had given rise to popular discontent; in the position he had held from 1931 to 1937, as Chairman of the Consumer Cooperatives—that is, virtually the entire official distribution network—he had had unexampled opportunities for doing this.
Starting with an account of his work as a Tsarist police agent in the Party from 1911, he admitted complicity in Kamenev’s actions in 1924, and recruitment by A. P. Smimov into the Rightist “organization” in 1928–1929. After Smirnov’s exposure (that is, in 1933), his contact became Antipov, under whose instructions the whole shop system was badly disrupted:
Zelensky:
… The Rights engineered interruptions in the supply of commodities of everyday use to the trading organizations. Thus, for instance, interruptions of this kind were engineered in the Kursk Region in the first quarter of 1936, in the sugar supply. Many shops were out of sugar for two or three weeks. Similar interruptions were engineered in the Leningrad Region in the
makhorka
supply; there were similar interruptions in the summer of 1936 in the bread trade in a number of rural districts of the Byelorussian S.S.R. situated near the frontier.
To give you some idea of the character of these interruptions, I will point out the following: out of 30,000 shops inspected by the
cooperative
trade sections of the Soviets and by trade inspectors, there was no salt in 3,700 shops in the first quarter of 1936. Out of 42,000 shops, 2,000 shops had no sugar on sale. In the third quarter of 1936, 1,600 shops out of 36,000 had no
makhorka
, so that these were not isolated cases, but rather widespread.
93
And again:
Vyshinsky:
Was there a case in 1936 when Moscow was left without eggs through your fault, through the fault not of you personally, but of one of the active participators in this conspiratorial bloc?
Zelensky:
There was.
Vyshinsky:
Do you remember when this made itself most acutely felt?
Zelensky:
I cannot recall the month just now, but I can mention the following fact. In 1936 fifty carloads of eggs were allowed to spoil, from wrecking motives.
94
He had also dislocated the accounts system:
Zelensky:
It seems to me that the question of overcharging, short measure and short weight should be clear to everybody; it is very obvious. It consists in the following: when a man comes into a shop to make a purchase, he is overcharged, given short measure and short weight, that is, he is named a price higher than the one at which goods should be sold, or is given shorter weight than he is entitled to, or is sold goods not of the proper quality.
Vyshinsky:
Why is this done?
Zelensky:
To arouse discontent among the population…. Prices are fixed by the trading organizations or by the salesmen in the shops very often at their own discretion, that is, without control. And so it is almost impossible to detect a man who overcharges the consumer. This matter assumed a serious and widespread character. To give some idea of the extent of this wrecking work, I may mention that of 135,000 shops that were inspected by the co-operative inspectorate, cases of overcharging and defrauding purchasers were established in 13,000 shops. The actual number was considerably larger.
Another important form of wrecking, also designed to arouse the discontent of the population, was the freezing of trade by dispatching goods to the wrong districts or at the wrong times. For example, there were cases when summer goods were sent in winter and vice versa, when winter goods arrived in the shops in summer.
Vyshinsky:
That is, the public was offered felt boots in summer and summer shoes in winter?
Zelensky:
Yes.
All this was partly due to his staff:
Zelensky:
… I had instructions, and I pursued the aim of contaminating the apparatus with alien, hostile, anti-Soviet and insurrectionary elements. How contaminated the apparatus of the Centrosoyuz was may be judged from the fact that when I was in charge of it about 15 percent of the staff of the Centrosoyuz consisted of former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, Trotskyites, etc. In certain regions the number of alien elements, former members of other parties, Kolchak officers, and so on, as, for example, in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Irkutsk and West Siberia, was considerably higher.
96
He then got into a curious altercation with Vyshinsky:
Vyshinsky:
… But how did matters stand with butter?
Zelensky:
We don’t sell butter in the rural districts.
Vyshinsky:
I am not asking you what you sell. You were above all selling the main thing—your country. I am speaking about what measures were taken by your organization to disrupt trade and deprive the population of prime necessities. Apart from sugar and salt, do you know anything concerning butter?
Zelensky:
I told you that the co-operatives do not sell butter in the rural districts….
Vyshinsky:
I am asking you: have you any knowledge of criminal operations with regard to supplying the population with butter, particularly cheap grades of butter, or not? Operations which were effected on the orders of your ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’; are they known to you or not?
Zelensky:
Yes, they are.
Vyshinsky:
In what did they consist?
Zelensky:
They consisted in the following: in making butter, all the produce purchasing organizations used the international standards fixing quality of butter.
Vyshinsky:
That is not the point.
Zelensky:
That is the point.
Vyshinsky:
No.
Zelensky:
What do you mean? This was done….
The President:
Accused Zelensky, no cross-talk, and keep to the point….
Vyshinsky:
And was the butter which was issued for sale always of good quality, or did you try to spoil its quality too?
Zelensky: