On the Menzhinsky case, we have the added detail of Kazakov’s last-minute retraction of the whole essence of his evidence. This seems decisive. Menzhinsky was almost certainly not murdered by his doctors. (He may, of course, have been killed in some other fashion.)
On Peshkov, on the face of it the whole idea of his murder seems almost pointless. Yagoda justly remarked, “I see no sense in his murder.” That Peshkova was Yagoda’s mistress really adds little to his motive. He did not propose to marry her; he was married already and made no attempt to murder or divorce his wife over the following three years. Moreover, the murder method (reflected in the death of the loyal old sheep in Animal Farm) is a trifle unconvincing.
With Kuibyshev and Gorky, though—that is, precisely the two killings Yagoda freely admitted to—we have cases in which Stalin had definite and pressing political motives for murder.
This does not prove that he killed them. In Kuibyshev’s case, all we can say is that he is now named as one of Stalin’s three main opponents of the purge in the Politburo, and that Stalin procured the death of both the others (Kirov and Ordzhonikidze) by devious, though differing, means—the latter by a faked heart attack. So Kuibyshev’s “heart attack” is not by any means to be accepted simply at face value. Moreover, his survival through 1935 might have constituted a severe obstacle to Stalin’s plans, and he died at precisely the time Stalin was turning against the other main opponents of the killing of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
But as against that, we have no positive evidence of murder. We can, indeed, exculpate the doctors. If Kuibyshev was murdered, it was not done by them. On Kuibyshev’s death, documents now published in the Soviet Union show that he did indeed suffer from heart trouble and that, “feeling very poorly,” he asked to be excused from a session of Gosplan, on which the writer comments, “It is probable that this was a regular heart attack.”180 (But it has recently been speculated in a Soviet periodical that Stalin may indeed have killed Kuibyshev.)181
Gorky’s death is the most interesting and important. For here we have a case where the survival of a sick man for a few months might have gravely hampered Stalin’s plans for the August 1936 Trial, whose postponement until after the holidays could perhaps have led to resistance in the Politburo and Central Committee. But how could Gorky be silenced, apart from the international scandal of arrest? As Vyshinsky put it, though with different intent, in his concluding speech: “How in our country, in the conditions that exist in the Soviet State, could it be made impossible for Gorky to display political activity except by taking his life?”182
But again, it is clear that the doctors, or at any rate those tried, were innocent. Even such credulous observers as Walter Duranty strongly doubted their guilt.
A possible alternative is perhaps that Gorky was indeed murdered, but not by Pletnev and Levin, now long since rehabilitated.
As I write, in 1989, opinion is still current in Moscow that Stalin procured Gorky’s death. Such talk goes back a long way; for example, a “Gorkyist” doctor in one of the Vorkuta camps, wrongly identified as Pletnev, told a confidante in the early 1950s that Gorky had been given poisoned sweetmeats, which also killed one of his attendants.183 As evidence, this does not amount to much. However, there is one piece of more cogent testimony. In the summer of 1963, an old American acquaintance of Gorky visited his eighty-six-year-old widow, Ekaterina Peshkova, in Moscow. Of her son’s death, she said quite calmly that she had no doubt that it was natural. When the visitor remarked that people now said that Gorky’s, too, had been natural, she became very agitated and exclaimed: “It’s not quite so, but don’t ask me to tell you about it! I won’t be able to sleep a wink for three days and nights if I tell you.”184
Mme. Peshkova’s evident conviction that Peshkov’s death was natural and Gorky’s not fits in with Yagoda’s testimony in court. As with his evidence on the Kirov Case, we seem to be driven to the ironic conclusion that, alone among the accused, the story told by the ex-Police Chief was essentially true! And if this is so, his confession to the Kuibyshev murder, alone among the other three, is best explicable as indicating that Kuibyshev, too, was really murdered. But this is a matter of deduction rather than evidence: we cannot at present at all exclude the possibility that the timely death of these men Stalin wanted out of the way was, after all, natural. Nor does it seem very probable that more will be forthcoming even when the Soviet archives are opened up. For it is rather unlikely that plans for this style of killing are committed to paper.
And there we must leave this murky and horrible episode.
When the doctors and their organizers and accomplices had been dealt with, the Expert Commission, as we have said, made its report, confirming their guilt, and for full measure establishing the damage to Yezhov’s health, evidenced in his urine. Apart from a short session in camera at which Yagoda (it was announced) “fully admitted organizing the murder of Comrade M. A. Peshkov,” the hearing was concluded. But before adjournment, Vyshinsky recalled Rosengolts for one petty smear.
He described the good-luck token found in Rosengolts’s pocket (see here), and asked the court’s permission to read it. In a sneering tone, amid titters from the audience, he read out eight verses of the Psalms—“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered …”—and then asked Rosengolts, “How did this get into your pocket?”
Rosengolts:
My wife put it in my pocket one day before I went to work. She said it was for good luck.
Vyshinsky continued on a humorous note, “And you carried this ‘good luck’ in your hip pocket for several months?”
Rosengolts:
I did not even pay attention …
Vyshinsky:
Nevertheless, you saw what your wife was doing?
Rosengolts:
I was in a hurry.
Vyshinsky:
But you were told that this was a family talisman for good luck?
185
At this, he winked at the crowd, which roared with laughter,186 and the hearings were at an end.
THE LAST ACT
The court reassembled on 11 March for the final speeches and pleas. Vyshinsky’s speech for the prosecution lasted all morning. He started with a violent harangue:
It is not for the first time that the Supreme Court of our country is examining a case involving the gravest crimes directed against the well-being of our country, against our Socialist fatherland, the fatherland of the working people of the whole world. But I will hardly be mistaken if I say that this is the first time that our court has had to examine a case like this, to examine a case of such crimes and such foul deeds as those that have passed at this trial before your eyes, before the eyes of the whole world, a case of such criminals as those you now see in the prisoners’ dock.
With every day and hour that passed, as the court investigation on the present case proceeded, it brought to light even more of the horror of the chain of shameful, unparalleled, monstrous crimes committed by the accused, the entire abominable chain of heinous deeds before which the base deeds of the most inveterate, vile, unbridled and despicable criminals fade and grow dim.187
He then came to the whole crux, from the point of view of Stalinist logic:
… The historical significance of this trial consists before all in the fact that at this trial it has been shown, proved and established with exceptional scrupulousness and exactitude that the Rights, Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, and so on and so forth, are nothing other than a gang of murderers, spies, diversionists and wreckers, without any principles or ideals….