Pletnev:
The sentence, yes….
Vyshinsky:
Is that sentence a blot on your reputation or not?
Pletnev:
It is.
Vyshinsky:
So there were moments of disgrace during these forty years?
Pletnev:
Yes.
Vyshinsky:
Did you not plead guilty to anything?
Pletnev:
I cannot say that I did not plead guilty to anything.
Vyshinsky:
So you did plead guilty to something?
Pletnev:
Yes.
Vyshinsky:
Is this a blot on your reputation?
Pletnev:
Yes.
175
Kazakov, the remaining doctor, confirmed his part in Menzhinsky’s death. But at the end of his evidence, he defended his method and asserted that “lysates” could after all not have harmed Menzhinsky:
Vyshinsky:
For what purpose did you introduce these lysates? To kill Menzhinsky?
Kazakov:
(No reply.)
Vyshinsky:
Did you introduce the lysates for this end? Were you certain that they would assist your crimes?
Kazakov:
You see, lysates have a dual effect.
Vyshinsky:
You dare to assert that these lysates were harmless for Menzhinsky?
Kazakov:
Yes. These three lysates were harmless.
Vyshinsky:
And could you have fooled Yagoda?
Kazakov:
(No reply.)
Vyshinsky:
In view of the impossibility of getting a direct answer to this clear question, I request the court to adjourn the session and to make it possible for the Commission of Experts to answer the questions I have put to Kazakov.
176
After a half-hour adjournment, the Commission of Experts supported Vyshinsky’s view of the matter:
Such a combination of methods of treatment could not but lead to the exhaustion of the heart muscles of the patient V. R. Menzhinsky, and thereby to the acceleration of his death.
Moscow,
Expert Witnesses:
9 March 1938
Professor D. A. Burmin, Scientist of Merit
Professor N. A. Shereshevsky, Scientist of Merit
Professor V. N. Vinogradov
Professor D. M. Rossisky
V. D. Zipalov, Doctor of Medicine
Vyshinsky then read out admissions made by Kazakov at the preliminary investigation. Under these pressures, Kazakov finally confirmed his guilt in the matter. Vyshinsky was then finally able to say:
Inasmuch as we have a definite finding from the Commission of Experts, and Kazakov has repudiated his statement about the neutrality of these lysates, I think that the question can be considered closed.177
The last accused, Maximov-Dikovsky, was then examined. He admitted having been placed in Kuibyshev’s secretariat by Yenukidze, and explained how he had helped the medical killers to dispose of Kuibyshev.
Vyshinsky then produced a medical “witness,” Dr. Belostotsky, who had been present during Gorky’s last illness and now testified against Pletnev and Levin. The final report of the Expert Commission, confirming all the medical accusations and the attempt on Yezhov’s health, was then presented.
It will be seen that the evidence in the case of these medical murders is confused and incomplete. We can be sure that those on trial were innocent of all the charges of treason, conspiracy, espionage, and sabotage. We can be virtually certain, on the other hand, that Yagoda’s responsibility for the murder of Kirov was correctly established—with the minor amendment that his instructions were received not from Yenukidze but from Stalin. But with the murky tale of the deaths of Menzhinsky, Peshkov, Kuibyshev, and Gorky, we are on different ground.
There are two problems: Were they murdered? And, if so, were they murdered by the doctors, or by one or any of them?
The first point to establish is that reliance on the binding force of the Hippocratic Oath will not take us far. Either the five doctors (Levin, Pletnev, Kazakov, A. I. Vinogradov, and Khodorovsky) were guilty as charged or the five doctors on the Expert Commission, and the witness Dr. Belostotsky, were, in their capacity as doctors, accomplices in judicial murder.
A similar pattern was to be repeated in 1952–1953. In the later Doctors’ Plot, either the doctors, or some of them, procured the murder of Zhdanov (and in this atmosphere the fact of their rehabilitation by a political group not wishing the matter to go further by no means disproves this possibility) or Dr. Timashuk—their denouncer—was actively willing to have her colleagues submitted to torture and death, and the new Commission of Medical Experts who certified that the doctors were guilty—and were afterward censured for having doing so—were accomplices in an action which would ordinarily have led to the liquidation of their colleagues. In neither case can the doctors be blamed, as can the true instigators. On the contrary, the degradation of a humane profession under political terror makes the story even more revolting.
Drs. A. I. Vinogradov and Khodorovsky, dead in unknown circumstances in the hands of the Secret Police; Drs. Levin and Kazakov, shot to death in the cellars of the Lubyanka; and Professor Pletnev, killed later, did not commit all or any of the crimes they were charged with. They may all seem to us to have been, in a way, martyrs—the unknown, confused, and pathetic martyrdom suffered by ordinary people caught up more or less accidentally in maneuvers of power by leaders to whom human life and standards of truth counted for nothing.
A number of other doctors were implicated in one way or another, though not publicly, in the Gorky affair (and were known in imprisonment as “Gorkyists”). For example, Professor G. M. Danishevsky, chairman of the Scientific Council of the People’s Commissariat of Health,178 and a Dr. Loevenstein179 were reported in the Pechora and Yertsevo camps, respectively.
The argument that no post-Kirov murders in fact took place is a simple one. Stalin needed a few more assassinations to lay at the door of the oppositionists, and could only produce them by representing natural deaths as murders. This is a perfectly sound point as far as it goes. But it is an entirely negative one, and does not enable us to pronounce one way or the other, meaning no more than “if the deaths were natural, Stalin might have produced an identical story.”
The (equally general) argument on the other side is equally strong: that Kuibyshev and Gorky were obstacles to Stalin, and we all know what Stalin did to obstacles. Nor is it in the least out of character to suppose that he and Yagoda would have been prepared to use the method of murder, if available.
We must turn, rather, to the details. In the first place, there is Yagoda’s evidence of the morning of 8 March, when he pleaded guilty to the murders of Kuibyshev and Gorky, and not guilty to those of Peshkov and Menzhinsky.
On the whole, Yagoda’s initial evidence seems to have been true, or as true as was possible in the circumstances, on most other matters. His account of the Kirov murder seems quite authentic, except on the point of who instructed him to carry it out, and even that is hinted at in his remarks that “it was not quite like that,” when describing the relevant meetings; for this can best be taken as implying that someone’s name has been left out or wrongly reported. Again, he pleaded not guilty to the charge of espionage, and there is no doubt that this was the truth. So when we come to his anomalous pleas on the four medical murders, there is at least some ground for paying attention to what he is saying.