But after the NKVD had proceeded on these lines for a few weeks, the line suddenly changed. Molchanov, in Yezhov’s presence, instructed a meeting of interrogators that “a new line of investigation” was to be pursued. The accused were to be required to confess that they had plotted to seize power and had worked with the Nazis for this purpose.28
Stalin had not, since Radek’s recantation in the 1920s, had anything to complain about from him. He had betrayed Trotsky’s emissary, Blyumkin, who as a result was shot in 1929. In early September 1936, Radek wanted to remind the General Secretary of these services in exposing Trotskyites, but feared that if he himself wrote to Stalin, his message would be intercepted by the NKVD. So he had asked Bukharin to write to Stalin about it if he himself were arrested.29 Radek was one man who had truly burned his bridges to the opposition; at the same time, he was nowhere regarded as a serious politician, and there was no question of his ever competing for even the lowest rung of power. What Stalin’s motive was in bringing Radek in particular into the plot at all is obscure. It may simply be that until he could secure the arrest of the Rightists, he was rather low on big names for another trial. And Radek was at least a very well-known man.
Sokolnikov seems to have had an interview with Stalin and to have been promised his life. It is not clear why Sokolnikov believed this promise. It was, in all probability, made before the execution of Zinoviev and his followers. But Sokolnikov seems to have been convinced of its efficacy even after the executions. But in any case, he had little choice. He had a young wife and a son by a previous marriage who was in his twenties.30
Sokolnikov was brought to a “confrontation” with Radek immediately after the latter’s arrest.31 This did not lead to anything at once. Radek was worked on on the “conveyor” system by Kedrov and other interrogators.32 At first he resisted stubbornly.
The sacrifice of Pyatakov is perhaps the clearest sign of Stalin’s motives. He had been, it was true, an oppositionist, and an important one. But he had abandoned opposition in 1928 and had worked with complete loyalty ever since. He was regarded by the Trotskyites as a deserter. Trotsky’s son Sedov, chancing to meet him on the Unter den Linden, had publicly insulted him.33 He had not liked, but he had honestly accepted, Stalin’s leadership. There was, in his case, no real question—as might have been thought of Zinoviev and Kamenev, and of Bukharin—of any desire to present an alternative leadership.
And his services to Stalin’s Government were extremely valuable. His energy and intelligence, probably unrivaled in the whole leadership, had been channeled into carrying out Stalin’s industrialization plans.
What was there to be said against him?
He had loyally accepted the Stalin leadership, but he would have accepted an alternative leadership if Stalin could have been overthrown; he supported him with reservations. He had been a major critic of Stalin’s in the 1920s. He had made it clear that he regarded his rise to power as unfortunate. Above all, he was even now, whatever his own desires, leadership timber. Lenin had named him among the six most important figures in the Party (of them all, Stalin was to allow none but himself to survive). He had even been thought of as an alternative Prime Minister to Lenin in the “Left Communist” plans of 1918.
Ordzhonikidze, as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, depended entirely on the genius of Pyatakov, and was generous enough to admit this. Pyatakov’s was the brain and the driving force behind the Plan, creating a major industrial base against all the handicaps that resulted from Stalin’s system—the wastages due to the purges of experts, the establishment of impossible prestige targets, and the suspicions and inefficiencies of administrators.
There is a report that after Pyatakov’s arrest, but before its announcement, the director of a scientific institute who knew of it made a public attack on him in Ordzhonikidze’s presence. Ordzhonikidze interrupted him with the remark “It is very easy to attack a man who is not there to defend himself. Wait till Yuri Leonidovich returns.”34
But Pyatakov broke down comparatively quickly—in thirty-three days (Radek held out for two months and eighteen days, Serebryakov for three months and sixteen days, Muralov for seven months and seventeen days). We have already noted the extravagance of Pyatakov’s earlier submission to “the Party.” When he was incriminated in August 1936, Yezhov had told him that he was being demoted to a post in the Urals. He denied the terrorist charges (Yezhov reported), but said that he deserved demotion for not having denounced his ex-wife’s connections with Trotskyites. To regain the trust of the Party, he would be willing to appear for the prosecution at a trial, and would personally offer to shoot all the accused, including his ex-wife, and announce this publicly. Yezhov said that this was absurd. Pyatakov then wrote to Stalin, denying the accusations and saying that he would die for the Party and Stalin. He was to have his wish, but not yet.35
SABOTEURS IN SIBERIA
One theme already well established in Soviet mythology, that of sabotage, had not been raised in the Zinoviev Trial. It would have been difficult, in fact, to charge men who were all either in prison or cut off from major work with such acts; anybody can commit assassination, but sabotage is carried out by industrialists and engineers or, anyhow, people with access to the relevant machines. Almost all those in the group now coming to trial had held, until shortly before their arrests, posts as People’s Commissars, Assistant People’s Commissars, leaders of industrial complexes, engineers, and so forth. And to show that no breach in tradition was intended, they were specifically linked with the saboteurs of the earlier period.
The concept of sabotage as a political weapon is in general an absurd one. The very word, with its implications of peasants throwing clogs into machinery, is a fair description of what is almost invariably an individual and illiterate protest. The only real exception is to be found in large underground movements in occupied countries in time of war, operating with the sympathy of most of the population. In those circumstances, on the one hand, it becomes possible on a fairly wide scale; and on the other, it becomes, or at least appears to be, a genuine contribution to the defeat of the enemy. In peacetime, a small conspiracy could scarcely hope to achieve any political result whatever by such means. In any case, plotters working to remove the political leadership by terror would hardly dissipate their forces, or run the extra risk of discovery, for local and indecisive actions of this type. Nor had any previous conspiracy of the sort ever done so. The illogic of the accusations was not the sort of consideration to stop Stalin, and over the following years sabotage became the theme of a mass purge at all levels.
The official definition of sabotage was now extended, and the penalties for it were made more severe: “On 29 November 1936, Vyshinsky ordered that within a month all criminal cases of major conflagrations, accidents and output of poor-quality products be reviewed and studied with the aim of exposing a counter-revolutionary and saboteur background in them and making the guilty parties more heavily liable.”36
In the new industrial region of the Upper Ob basin—the “Kuzbas”—almost 2,000 miles east of Moscow, a number of reconstructed Trotskyites held posts suitable to their condition. The great plants had gone up, amid a squalor for the workers—mainly deportees—which the old industrial revolutions in the capitalist West had not matched. At the same time, unrelenting pressure for results at all costs had led to the virtual abandonment of the usual sort of safety precautions. Frightful accidents were common.