HOSTAGES
There is no doubt that threats to the family—the use, that is, of hostages for good behavior—was one of the most powerful of all Stalin’s safeguards. It seems a general rule that with confessions by prominent figures, members of the family were in the power of the NKVD. Bukharin, Rykov, and Zinoviev all had children of whom they were very fond, whereas at least some of those tried in private, such as Karakhan, did not. Several of the accused in their final pleas referred to their children—for example, Kamenev and Rosengolts.
Engineers under arrest as early as 1930 had been threatened with reprisals against their wives and children.81 And the decree of 7 April 1935, which extended full adult penalties down to children of twelve, was a terrible threat to those oppositionists with children. If Stalin could openly and publicly declare such an atrocity, they could be sure that he would not hesitate to apply the death penalty secretly to their own children in cases where he thought it would bring him advantage. According to Orlov, it became regular practice, on Yezhov’s orders, for interrogators to have a copy of the decree on their desks.82 We are also told that fear of reprisals was made more dramatic and emotionally effective by the display on the interrogator’s desk of private belongings of members of the family.83 Even if accepted and allowed for on the conscious level, this must have been a continual argument in the unconscious in favor of surrender.
The use of relatives as hostages, and their imprisonment or execution in other cases, was a new development in Russian history. In Tsarist times, revolutionaries never had this problem. Here again, Stalin recognized no limits. Moreover, it was not merely a matter of threats to relatives’ lives: “They tortured husbands in front of wives and vice versa.” Again, Roy Medvedev tells us that Kossior stood up under torture, and was only broken when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought to the interrogation room and raped in front of him.84
On the other side of the coin, it was suggested, even at the time, that there was something about the confessions which was specifically Russian. The Dostoievsky-style habit of self-abasement was much spoken of. Bukharin denied that the ame slave had any bearing on the confessions. He was himself a more intellectual and in a sense more Westernized character than many of the leaders. But in any case, these adumbrations of national psychology are very vague and in themselves unconvincing. It is not surprising that at the time people faced with the extraordinary phenomenon of the confessions should have sought out extraordinary explanations. Nevertheless, like any other, the Russian culture has its own characteristics, affecting the attitudes of all those brought up in it. We can hardly quite exclude some effect of a tradition of self-immolation (even though the Russian tradition also contains famous examples of most outright defiance or authority, as with Archpriest Avvakum, who spat in the face of the Tsar).
Another powerful motive was that of self-preservation. This is a paradox which confused observers in the West, and still confuses some. By the full and sometimes abject confession of capital crimes, it appeared that the defendants were actively seeking the death sentence, which, they themselves sometimes said, they fully deserved. The reality was different. The absolutely certain way for a defendant to get himself shot was to refuse to plead guilty. He would then not go before an open court at all, but either perish under the rigors of the preliminary investigation, or be shot, like Rudzutak, after a twenty-minute closed trial. The logic of Stalin’s courts was different from what is customary elsewhere. The only chance of avoiding death was to admit to everything, and to put the worst possible construction on all one’s activities. It is true that even this seldom saved a man’s life. But it did sometimes, for a while—as in the cases of Radek, Sokolnikov, and Rakovsky. At the August 1936 Trial, moreover, the defendants had actually been promised their lives and had reasonable expectation that the promise would be fulfilled. The same promise was evidently made to Pyatakov and others in the second trial. It must have lost a good deal of its efficacy; yet, even then, it represented the only possible hope. Besides, on the face of it, the Pyatakov situation was different. While Zinoviev and Kamenev had continued in effect to oppose the Stalin leadership, and had long since been excluded from decent Party society, Pyatakov had been of the greatest service to the dictator and had been admitted by him to his latest Central Committee. He was, in addition, under the apparently powerful protection of Ordzhonikidze. And a little hope goes a long way. Promises that confessions in court would save their lives continued to be made to various groups of accused—for example, the generals in the Tukhachevsky Case.85
As to Communist motives proper, the Party and the old opposition had already been smeared beyond relief. Even for a man like Sokolnikov, it may have appeared that no action he could take could affect the issue one way or the other, and that the only consideration left was to attempt to save his family. So much more admirable, then, is the sense of truth and personal courage shown by men like Ryutin, who even under the pressure of such arguments seem to have “died in silence.” For when everything is said of the pressures for confession, it is remarkable how many did not give way or—if they did—were not trusted to maintain their confessions in court. Nonconfessors were a special breed. Koestler analyses his friend Alexander Weissberg:
What enabled him to hold out where others broke down was a special mixture of just those character traits which survival in such a situation requires. A great physical and mental resilience—that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental. An extraordinary presence of mind…. A certain thick-skinnedness and good-natured insensitivity, coupled with an almost entirely extroverted disposition--notice the absence in Dr. Weissberg’s book of any contemplative passage, of any trace of religious or mystic experience which is otherwise almost inevitably present in solitary confinement. An irresponsible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising situations; that ‘it can’t happen to me’ attitude, which is the most reliable source of courage; and an inexhaustible sense of humour. Finally, that relentless manner of persisting in an argument and continuing it for hours, days or weeks, which I mentioned before. It drove his inquisitors nuts, as it sometimes had his friends.86
Similar attitudes can be seen in other known nonconfessors—for example, the Spaniard El Campesino. We can trace the tough temperaments elsewhere. In Pervouralsk, in 1938, the chief construction engineer at the Novo-Trubi Plant, who had been in prison for thirteen months, “little more than a skeleton in rags” and with patches of blood and bruises all over him, was interrogated by the local NKVD chief, Parshin. He was accused of having put wooden roofs over furnaces, which might well have caught fire. He continued to explain that though the roofs should have been made of iron, a Government order signed by Ordzhonikidze had ordered wood because of the iron shortage. To several similar questions, he answered in the same way.87 Similar accounts are given all through the literature, though they are always treated as most exceptional; as we have noted, only about one in a hundred failed to confess.88
It is significant that many oppositionists who had repudiated the Bukharin view of Party discipline in the early 1930s did not come to trial. Stalin must have wanted Ryutin in the dock, but he did not get him. The same no doubt applies to Uglanov, Syrtsov, A. P. Smimov, and the others who tried to organize resistance while the Right leaders were counseling patience. The absence in their make-ups of the Party fetishism noted in Bukharin, Zinoviev, and most of the other public confessors must be a factor. It is fairly clear that neither the pressures nor the arguments were enough to break many or, in other cases, to keep them broken. (Just as a number of prominent accused were not brought to trial with Slansky in Prague because they “would not behave in court,” of fifty or sixty leading functionaries available, only fourteen were used.)89