Walter Duranty of the New York Times spoke Russian, had been in Russia for years, and knew some of the accused. For years, he had built a disgraceful career on consciously misleading an important section of American opinion. He now described Ulrikh as “a hard judge but a just one”; said, “No-one who heard Pyatakof or Muralof could doubt for a moment that what they said was true”; and concluded, “The future historian will probably accept the Stalinist version.”81 He argued that Muralov and Pyatakov were so “impervious to pressure” that their confessions could not have been false, and found one of the strongest proofs of Pyatakov’s guilt to be the fact that he was “the brains of heavy industry” and therefore Stalin would not have killed him unless his crimes were beyond pardon. As we have seen, this sort of common sense did not, in fact, apply.
Duranty’s argument about Gamarnik’s suicide is another example of the muddled advocacy thought acceptable in the period: “His suicide … proves that he had been engaged in some deal with the Germans.”82 Of the other military conspirators, Duranty argued that “they confessed” without long preparation, and this was an indication of the truth of the charges, while it also showed that confession was not necessarily the product of long interrogation. But of course the evidence that the Generals had “confessed” was simply that Stalin’s press said they had done so! The trial was not public.
Professor Owen Lattimore was another noted apologist for the Stalin and similar regimes. In his Pacific Affairs, he wrote of Yezhov: “As to the suggestion that the new head of the secret service is likely to abuse his power just as Yagoda did, it is obvious that the publicity given in the Soviet Union itself to Yagoda’s turpitude is a safeguard against any such thing”; and he described the trials themselves as a triumph for democracy on the grounds that they could only “give the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever he finds himself being victimized by ‘someone in the Party’ or ‘someone in the Government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.”83
Not only Leftists and journalists wrote this sort of thing. The American Ambassador Joseph Davies reported to the Secretary of State that there was “proof … beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.”84
During wartime lectures, Davies used to get a laugh, which he greatly appreciated, to his answer to questions about fifth columnists in Russia: “There aren’t any, they shot them all.” Both parts of this piece of gallows wit are untrue. The men shot were not fifth columnists. And fifth columnists rose by the thousand, even in spite of the repulsive policies of the Germans. Most of them were, moreover, people who would never, under a moderately popular regime, have thought of going over to the enemy. Stalin’s policies created a vast pool of potential treason which, had the Nazis not been foolish as well as foul, might well have decided the war.
This sort of reporting is more or less ephemeral. We should perhaps take more serious and studious treatments as still more reprehensible. Scholars and Russian experts were duped to the same degree as journalists and lawyers. When Beatrice and Sidney Webb examined Soviet matters, and put their conclusions into their vast tome Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, the Constitution much impressed them. So did the constitutions and the statutes of the Party, the trade unions, the consumer cooperatives, the collective farms. And, indeed, if these documents had ever been put into operation, they might have produced the society the Webbs thought they saw. It doubtless never occurred to the Webbs, brought up in Britain, that official documents do not necessarily bear much relation to fact. As it is, their book is to be regarded less as an account of a real country than as a successor to the works of Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Plato, Harrington, and William Morris. It was unfortunate—and this, of course, applied not only to the Webbs—that the perfectly natural human activity of constructing Utopias should, through various misunderstandings, have been projected on to a real community with so little claim to it.
The Webbs assert flatly that Kirov’s assassin “was discovered to have secret connections with conspiratorial circles of ever-widening range.” On the executions immediately following the assassination, they say that those shot did not seem to have been proven accomplices in the assassination “or the conspiracies associated therewith,” but that they were “undoubtedly guilty of illegal entry and inexcusably bearing arms and bombs.”85 “Undoubtedly” seems a strong word, when the sole evidence was a brief announcement to that effect in the Soviet press.
They describe the Moscow trials as “a tragic hangover from the violence of the revolution and the civil war.”86 Of course, there is a sense in which all these events are connected, but the image does not seem appropriate as it stands. A hangover which suddenly reaches its climax sixteen years after the events supposed to have caused it requires some special explanation.
The Webbs comment, truly though not perhaps in the sense in which they meant it, that the trials produced some international revulsion against the Soviet Union and that therefore “the Soviet Government must have had strong grounds for the action which has involved such unwelcome consequences.” Claiming to attempt “a detached and philosophic interpretation” of the trials, they say that the whole manner of the confessions was convincing, and that “careful perusal of the full reports of the proceedings” left them with the same impression, though they express a reservation about Trotsky.87
They explain the confessions as due to Russian prisoners
behaving naturally and sensibly, as Englishmen would were they not virtually compelled by their highly artificial legal system to go through a routine which is useful to the accused only when there is some doubt as to the facts or as to the guilt or innocence of the conduct in question.88
This curious view of the comparability of the Soviet and British legal systems was shared by Professor Harold Laski, who noted that “basically I did not observe much difference between the general character of a trial in Russia and in this country.” In Vyshinsky, with whom he had a long discussion, he found “a man whose passion was law reform…. He was doing what an ideal Minister of Justice would do if we had such a person in Great Britain—forcing his colleagues to consider what is meant by actual experience of the law in action.”89 This was indeed published before Vyshinsky’s great days. But trials had already taken place in Russia, and with Vyshinsky’s active participation, which might have produced qualms.
Another serious student of Russia (and of agriculture in particular) was Sir John Maynard, from whom it had been possible to hide the Ukrainian famine. On the trials, he remarked, “However much falsity of detail there may be, the Trials of the leading personages in 1936–38 were substantially justified by facts: and were probably the means of saving the U.S.S.R. from an attempted revolution which would have given to the Nazi Government an earlier opportunity.”90
Sir Bernard Pares, a serious historian and long-established expert on all things Russian, was equally duped. The later editions of Pares’s History of Russia cover the period to the end of the Second World War. Dealing with the Purges, he permits himself to say, “Nearly all admitted having conspired against the life of Stalin and others, and on this point it is not necessary to doubt them…. Radek, who spoke with consummate lucidity, gave what is probably a true picture.”91 On the Tukhachevsky case—of which, it may be remembered, no evidence whatever was made public—he merely points out that the Russian and German General Staffs had earlier been in contact, and therefore “it is by no means unlikely that there was a plot.” A generation earlier, the conscience of the civilized world could be aroused by the false condemnation to imprisonment of a single French captain for a crime which had actually been committed, though not by him. The Soviet equivalent of the Dreyfus Case involved the execution of thousands of officers, from Marshals and Admirals down, on charges which were totally imaginary. It called forth instead, and not from Pares alone, comments like the above!