The executions took place when many Party leaders were on holiday. Stalin himself had left for the Caucasus, and only a quorum of the formal State body, the Central Executive Committee, was available to hear appeals, which their general instructions were to reject unless ordered to the contrary by the Politburo. Yezhov had remained in Moscow to see that nothing could interfere with the processes Stalin had set in motion.166 Nothing did.
THE CREDIBILITY OF THE TRIAL
The trial had on the whole been a success for Stalin. The Communists and the Soviet people could make no overt objection to his version. And the outside world, whose representatives he had allowed in to authenticate it, as it were, was at least inclined not to reject it outright, from the start, as a fabrication. There was very considerable uneasiness about the confessions. But even if they had been obtained by unwarrantable methods, that did not in itself prove that they were untrue. In fact, the one phenomenon which was difficult to reconcile with the complete innocence of the accused was precisely their confessions. Thus to a considerable degree, the confession method justified itself politically.
The case itself must come as something of an anticlimax to us today, who know the falsehood of the charges and something of the ways in which the whole thing was prepared. At the time, to the world, and to the Party itself, it appeared differently—as a terrible public event. The allegations were examined in detail. They were found convincing by various British lawyers, Western journalists, and so forth, and were thought incredible by others. As so often, this appears to be a case in which alleged facts were accepted or rejected in accordance with preconceived opinion. Most people felt either that it was incredible that old revolutionaries should commit such actions, or that it was incredible that a Socialist State should make false accusations. But neither position is really tenable. It was by no means absolutely inconceivable that the opposition might have planned the assassination of the political leadership. There are various reasons for thinking it was out of character and contrary to their previous views, but that is a much weaker argument.
Some Western commentators, applying “commonsensical” criteria to the situation, argued that the oppositionists should logically have seen that the removal of Stalin was the only way of securing their own lives and a tolerable future, from their point of view, for the Party and the State. So it was, yet history gives many examples of inadequate common sense.
But in any case, it seems perfectly clear that the opposition, up to the actual execution of the Zinoviev–Kamenev group, never expected that Stalin would really kill off the old leadership. The whole of their maneuvers up to that point had been designed to keep themselves alive and, if possible, in the Party, until such time as Stalin’s failures and excesses would swing Party feeling back in their favor and give them another chance. After the first executions, no oppositionists of any standing were in a position to attempt assassination whether they thought it suitable or not. The only people with any chance of getting rid of the General Secretary were those close to him.
It seems certain that Stalin himself was really afraid of assassination. He must have known that the leading oppositionists could scarcely organize such plots, so closely did he have them watched. But at a lower level in the Party, there were thousands and thousands of potential enemies. Individual assassination was indeed contrary to established Marxist principles. In fact, Zinoviev had been supposed to be banking on this idea. Reingold remarked: “Zinoviev told me … ‘When under examination the main thing is persistently to deny any connection with the organization. If accused of terroristic activities, you must emphatically deny it and argue that terror is incompatible with the views of Bolsheviks-Marxists.’ “Nikolayev, the assassin of Kirov, had been a dupe; but, himself a Communist, he had shot down a Party leader with a quite clear idea of what he was doing. That others should refrain on Marxist principle from individual terror was not a certain hope. Desperation had already, for example, driven the Bulgarian Communist Party to the bomb outrage in Sofia Cathedral in 1925.fn7
Again, the selective assassination of NKVD defectors and of other political enemies in the West was soon to become routine. And Stalin himself—an Old Communist too!—had organized the killing of Kirov. In the circumstances, we may agree with the idea that after all assassinations by Zinoviev and Kamenev were possible, that Reingold could have been telling the truth when he deposed: “In 1932, Zinoviev, at Kamenev’s apartment, in the presence of a number of members of the united Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre argued in favor of resorting to terror as follows: although terror is incompatible with Marxism, at the present moment these considerations must be abandoned…”167
Moreover, some of the ideas placed in the mouths of Zinoviev and Kamenev were plausible. It was quite reasonable to suppose that if Stalin had been assassinated, as a result of the leadership struggle that would ensue, “negotiations would be opened with us.” As Kamenev said, “Even with Stalin we, by our policy of double-dealing, had obtained, after all, forgiveness of our mistakes by the Party and had been taken back into its ranks.”168 And it was also plausible that they had anticipated the rehabilitation of Trotsky as a later result.
But to support either view of the case, there was very little genuine reference to the facts. Yet at this level, the only one worth a sensible examination, the outward semblance of an established plot could easily be shown to rest on absurdities and contradictions. For its composition, as in later cases, bears many marks of crudity. It seems that these are not attributable to Molchanov and Yagoda, but to Stalin himself, who personally insisted, for example, on the inclusion of Smirnov.
In spite of the inconsistencies and incredibilities, Pravda, on 4 September 1937, was able to give prominence to a statement by “the English jurist Pritt” from the London News Chronicle on the complete propriety and authenticity of the trial. And this was one case among many.
But Zinoviev and Kamenev had been in exile or prison for most of the period of the active plot. Mrachkovsky had been in exile in Kazakhstan. Smimov had been in a prison cell since 1 January 1933. Vyshinsky had spoken of ways in which “even those not at liberty” had been able to take part in the plot. But no evidence had been produced of their methods of liaison. It might have been thought that even observers like Pritt would have found it odd that a conspiracy directed from outside the country should, when one of its members was actually in prison in a distant area, have continued to pass instructions through him, rather than use alternative channels--of which, the evidence implied, they had a profusion.