Levin’s defense counsel, Braude, then cross-examined:
Braude:
Allow me to ask you, what methods did you employ to secure Levin’s consent to commit these terrorist acts?
Yagoda:
In any case not such as he described here.
Braude:
You yourself went into detail about this at the preliminary investigation. Do you confirm this part of your testimony?
Yagoda:
It is exaggerated, but that doesn’t matter.
165
Vyshinsky now attempted to involve Bukharin in the Gorky murder. Bukharin defended himself effectively. The “evidence,” even at its face value, was simply that Tomsky had once said to him in conversation that the Trotskyites were opposed to Gorky and had some idea of a “hostile act” against him. A hostile act could be anything from a newspaper article up, and in any case such a conversation, as he pointed out, could not possibly prove that he, Bukharin, had murdered the writer.
Kryuchkov, Gorky’s secretary, followed. He had left Peshkov lying in the snow in March or April, without result, and finally managed to leave him out to catch a chill in May; Levin and A. I. Vinogradov had managed to persuade other doctors and nurses to give the patient a fatal dose of laxative. When Gorky, in turn, had been given a cold, Pletnev and Levin had insisted on overdoses of digitalis.
The most tragic of all the figures in the great trials was examined on the morning of 9 March. Professor Dmitry Pletnev, a sixty-six-year-old heart specialist, had long enjoyed a reputation as Russia’s leading doctor, the pride of the profession. Now, for the first time (if we except the petty crook Arnold) a figure from outside the whole machinery of state, the whole political controversy, stood for trial—and confessed. He, above all, represented the silent non-Party masses whose sufferings in the Purge were otherwise hidden from sight.
When Yezhov had decided that a confession from Levin alone would clearly not be impressive enough, he had turned his attention to Gorky’s other main physician. But Pletnev had been before the Revolution a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. There was no question of appealing to him on the basis of Communist morality. But equally, he had avoided politics since the Revolution, and no political blackmail against him was possible.
Yezhov’s solution was nasty even by Yezhov standards. A preliminary decision on the story of medical murders must have been taken soon after he succeeded to Yagoda’s post. An NKVD provocateur, a young woman usually employed to compromise foreigners, was sent as a patient to Pletnev. After a couple of consultations, she accused him of having assaulted her two years previously.166 By December 1936, she was coming to his house, annoying his daughter and housekeeper, and he complained to the police.167
They affected to take up his complaint, but instead went into hers, and claimed to believe it. Pletnev appealed to his medical and personal connections to help him. (He was treating Ordzhonikidze and others.)168 As late as 5 March, the official account tells us, he was still expecting that such help would be forthcoming.169
But the contrary was true. On 8 June, Pravda, by a very rare exception to its policy of not dealing with individual crimes, published under the sensational headline “Professor—Rapist, Sadist” an account in three half-columns. Pletnev had (it told) thrown himself upon the woman patient “B” on 17 July 1934, and bitten her severely on the breast. This had done her a permanent injury which Pletnev, though no expert in breast disorders, had tried to cure. Not succeeding, and being pestered by the woman, he complained to the police, who took the matter up. On 17 January, she had written him a letter, described by Pravda as “a striking human document”:
Be accursed, criminal violator of my body! Be accursed, sadist, practicing your foul perversions on my body! Let shame and disgrace fall on you, let terror and sorrow, weeping and anguish be yours as they have been mine, ever since, criminal professor, you made me the victim of your sexual corruption and criminal perversions. I curse you.
“B”
A short statement was added, signed by Vyshinsky, to the effect that the Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases had the matter in hand—that is, I. I. Shapiro, who was in fact to be Pletnev’s interrogator throughout.170
On the day after the publication of this article, the papers were full of accounts of meetings of a whole series of medical organizations vilifying him—the Moscow Association of Doctor-Therapeutists, the Medical Union, and others. The following day, the equivalent organizations from other parts of the country sent in their protests, from Kiev, Tula, Sverdlovsk, and elsewhere, denouncing the villainous doctor, the disgrace to Soviet medicine. Among the doctors speaking to, and signing, violent resolutions attacking Pletnev, one finds the names of M. Vovsi, B. Kogan, and V. Zelenin, who were (like Drs. Shereshevsky and V. N. Vinogradov) to be tortured by the MGB in 1952–1953 in the later Doctors’ Plot.
Pletnev was sentenced, in a trial which took place on 17 to 18 July 1937, to two years’ imprisonment. The press said that he had confessed. And thus, crushed and dishonored, denounced by his colleagues, found guilty of a disgraceful offense, he found himself in the cells of the Lubyanka, “where a still greater misfortune awaited him.”171
Just before the present trial, Pletnev had the formal confrontation with Vyshinsky, as Prosecutor, in the Lefortovo. When it was finished, Vyshinsky said to him, “I would like you to explain to me how you took to terror… it interests me psychologically.” Pletnev replied that he would confirm all the lies in court, and not spoil the show, but that for now he asked to be returned to his cell, since it disgusted him to talk to Vyshinsky.172
Now, under Vyshinsky’s questioning, he confessed his role in the murders of Kuibyshev and Gorky. He spoke of the “violent threats [made by Yagoda] against me and against my family.”173
He mentioned a connection with Dr. Nikitin, Tolstoy’s favorite physician, who had been one of a number of doctors exiled some years earlier. But he said that he did not believe Nikitin to be politically minded174—an honorable rebuttal of what was presumably a false charge against a distinguished colleague.
Pletnev’s defense lawyer, Kommodov, elicited his splendid medical record. Then Vyshinsky reexamined on that, raising the assault case. Pletnev made an attempt to reject the charge, but he was borne down by Vyshinsky, now in one of his most arrogant and bullying moods:
Vyshinsky:
How many years did you say was your standing as a physician?
Pletnev:
Forty.
Vyshinsky:
You consider your standing as irreproachable?
Pletnev:
Yes, I do.
Vyshinsky:
Irreproachable?
Pletnev:
Yes, I think so.
Vyshinsky:
During these forty years you have never committed any crime in connection with your profession?
Pletnev:
You are aware of one.
Vyshinsky:
I am asking you because you state that your work for forty years was irreproachable.
Pletnev:
Yes, but since I denied that time …
Vyshinsky:
Do you think that the sentence in the case which is well known to you, the case of an outrage which you committed against a woman patient, is a blot on your reputation?