A further striking point is the proportion between the number of assassinations planned and those carried out. Two separate plans to kill Stalin at the meeting of the Communist International had been made, another to shoot Voroshilov, a third to assassinate Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze, and many others simply decided on in principle.
No reference was made during the trial to some of the previous trials in connection with the Kirov assassination. The action of NKVD officers in Leningrad was not referred to. The allegation about the Latvian Consul was not mentioned.
No documentary evidence (except Olberg’s Honduran passport and Tukalevski’s visiting card) was produced. The failure of the prosecution to produce documents should have struck observers as particularly odd. For in the arrest of underground Bolsheviks, the Tsarist police repeatedly discovered documents—without which, indeed, it is difficult to see how an underground could operate. When the February 1917 Revolution opened up the police archives, hundreds of secret Party documents were found in them, including letters written by Lenin himself. And the underground Bolsheviks of that time were at least as skilled in conspiracy as the men Stalin now arrested; indeed (as Orlov points out), “They were the same men.”
Again, prominent conspirators and witness were simply missing. Sokolnikov was clearly a relevant and important witness. But he was not called. Nor were Bukharin, or Tomsky, or Rykov—or any of the newly implicated. Among the Zinovievites who were not called but who had appeared at previous trials were Gertik, one of the main links with the “Leningrad Center,” which had allegedly assassinated Kirov,169 and Karev, who was supposed to have been personally instructed by Zinoviev and by Bakayev to prepare the Kirov murder with others of the Leningrad assassination group,170 with which Faivilovich was also a contact man.171 (Kuklin, actually named as a full member of the “Center,” seems to have died in the interim.)172
But meanwhile, questions of evidence, of logic, were not decisive. The prestige of the “Socialist State” was high. There was little choice between accepting the trial at its face value and branding Stalin as a vulgar murderer, and his regime as a tyranny founded on falsehood. The truth could be deduced, but it could not be proved. Few cared to hear it, given the more evident menace of Fascism.
In the Soviet Union itself, things were different. Few, perhaps, credited the confessions. But fewer still could even hint their doubts.
A week after the execution of Zinoviev and his fellow defendants, Stalin ordered Yagoda to select and shoot 5,000 of the oppositionists then in camps.173 At this time, the last privileges were withdrawn from political prisoners in camps. In March 1937, some rights were temporarily restored. But a few months later, another mass execution was ordered. The brick factory at Vorkuta became notorious as the center of the operation.174 The victims included Trotsky’s son Sergei Sedov. In March 1938, the Armenian So!crates Gevorkian and twenty other former Leftists were executed near their camp. From then until the end of 1938, groups of forty or so were executed there once or twice a week. Children under twelve alone were spared.175
There are reports of a last hunger strike by the oppositionists before they were separated, resulting in many deaths and, eventually, the disappearance of all concerned.176 Roy Medvedev tells us that of several thousand Old Bolsheviks who returned to Moscow after rehabilitation in 1956 and 1957, he was “only able to find two former Trotskyists and one former Zinovievist.”177
5
THE PROBLEM OF CONFESSION
He lies like an eyewitness.
Russian Saying
When, at 1:45 P.M. on 19 August 1936, Mrachkovsky started to confess in public to a series of appalling crimes, it marked the beginning of a series of events which shook and astonished the entire world. Mrachkovsky was a former worker and an Old Bolshevik, a member of the Party since 1905. He had actually been born in prison, where, in 1888, his mother was serving a sentence for revolutionary activity. His father, a worker like himself, was a revolutionary too, and became a Bolshevik when that party was organized. Even his grandfather, also a worker, had belonged to one of the first Marxist groupings, the Southern Russian Workers’ Union.
Mrachkovsky himself had come to prominence by leading a rising in the Urals. He had fought in Siberia in the Civil War, and had been wounded several times. He had later been one of the boldest of Trotsky’s followers, and had been the first to be arrested when, in 1927, he organized the Trotskyites’ short-lived underground printing press.
He was, in fact, a real epitome of revolutionary boldness, born and bred to resistance. He now stood up and complaisantly confessed to active membership in a plot to murder the Soviet leadership. Over the next few days, half a dozen other Old Bolsheviks followed suit, including leaders known the world over. Lastly, they made final pleas, condemning themselves for “contemptible treachery” (Kamenev), speaking of themselves as “the dregs of the land” (Pikel), “not only murderers but fascist murderers” (Holtzman). Several expressly said that their crimes were too foul to let them ask for clemency; Mrachkovsky described himself as “a traitor who should be shot.”
Twice in the next two years the same scene was to be repeated, always to the bafflement of commentators, friendly or hostile. The impression of unanimous surrender was not, indeed, entirely a correct one. Two of the 1936 accused (Smirnov and Holtzman) hedged considerably in their admissions, but this was hardly noticed among the self-abasement of so many others, including the two major figures, Zinoviev and Kamenev.
And similarly, the minor hitches and qualifications of later trials passed barely noticed. Krestinsky withdrew his confession on the first day of the 1938 Trial, and only reaffirmed it after a night in the hands of the investigators. Bukharin refused to confess to some of the major charges, such as that of having planned to kill Lenin. Radek, admitting that he was a treacherous liar, took occasion to point out that the case rested entirely on his evidence.
But such points were on the whole lost in the picture as it appeared in gross: everyone had confessed; the Old Bolsheviks had publicly avowed disgraceful plans and actions. The whole business almost passed belief. Were the confessions true? How had they been obtained? What did it all signify? We are told that the confessions were as little believed in Russia as abroad, “or even less,” but that the average Soviet citizen who had not been in jail found them as puzzling as foreigners did.1
It was curiously argued, not only by Vyshinsky, but also in the West, that the accused confessed owing to the weight of evidence against them, that they had “no choice.” Apart from the fact that there was no evidence against them except their confessions and those of others, this does not accord with common experience. People, especially on capital charges, plead not guilty even if there is a great deal of evidence against them. In the past, Communists had frequently denied facts. But in any case, it was not only confession which was so strange, but also repentance—the acceptance of the prosecution’s view that the acts confessed to were appalling crimes. If Zinoviev and Kamenev had really concluded that the way out of Russia’s difficulties was the assassination of Stalin, this would be to say that experienced politicians had made a definite political decision suited, as they thought, to the circumstances. It would not be a decision they felt guilty about. Their natural line of reasoning—as with the terrorists of the People’s Will—would have been, if the facts were admitted, to defend their plans and actions. The complete acceptance of the opinion of their accusers was the real and crowning implausibility of the whole affair.