From 1920 on, he had been a professor at the Mining Institute and a consultant to the Gosplan—the State Planning Commission. (For more details about him see Part III, Chapter 10.)
They picked this Palchinsky to be the chief defendant in a grandiose new trial. However, the thoughtless Krylenko, stepping into what was for him a new field—engineering—not only knew nothing about the resistance of materials but could not even conceive of the potential resistance of souls… despite ten years of already sensational activity as a prosecutor. Krylenko’s choice turned out to be a mistake. Palchinsky resisted every pressure the OGPU knew—and did not surrender; in fact, he died without signing any sort of nonsense at all. N. K. von Meek and A. F. Velichko were subjected to torture with him, and they, too, appear not to have given in. We do not yet know whether they died while under torture or whether they were shot. But they proved it was possible to resist and that it was possible not to give in—and thus they left behind a spotlight of reproach to shine on all the famous subsequent defendants.
To cover up his defeat, on May 24, 1929, Yagoda published a brief GPU communique on the execution of the three for large-scale wrecking, which also announced the condemnation of many other unidentified persons.[233]
But how much time had been spent for nothing! Nearly a whole year! And how many nights of interrogation! And how much inventiveness on the part of the interrogators! And all to no avail. And Krylenko had to start over from the very beginning and find a leader who was both brilliant and strong, and at the same time utterly weak and totally pliable. But so little did he understand this cursed breed of engineers that another whole year was spent in unsuccessful tries. From the summer of 1929 on, he worked over Khrennikov, but Khrennikov, too, died without agreeing to play a dastardly role. They twisted old Fedotov, but he was too old, and furthermore he was a textile engineer, which was an unprofitable field. And one more year was wasted! The country was waiting for the all-inclusive wreckers’ trial, and Comrade Stalin was waiting—but things just couldn’t seem to fall into place for Krylenko.[234] It was only in the summer of 1930 that someone found or suggested Ramzin, the Director of the Thermal Engineering Institute! He was arrested, and in three months a magnificent drama was prepared and performed, the genuine perfection of our justice and an unattainable model for world justice.
L. The Promparty (Industrial Parly) Trial—November 25-December 7, 1930
This case was tried at a Special Assize of the Supreme Court, with the same Vyshinsky, the same Antonov-Saratovsky, and that same favorite of ours, Krylenko.
This time none of those “technical reasons” arose to prevent the reader’s being offered a full stenographic report of the trial[235] or to prohibit the attendance of foreign correspondents.
There was a majesty of concept: all the nation’s industry, all its branches and planning organs, sat on the defendants’ benches. (However, only the eyes of the man who arranged it all could see the crevices into which the mining industry and railroad transportation had disappeared.) At the same time there was a thrift in the use of materiaclass="underline" there were only eight defendants in all. (The mistakes of the Shakhty trial had been taken into account.)
You are going to exclaim: Can eight men represent the entire industry of the country? Yes, indeed; we have more even than we need. Three out of eight are solely in textiles, representing the industrial branch most important for national defense. But there were, no doubt, crowds of witnesses? Just seven in all, who were exactly the same sort of wreckers as the defendants and were also prisoners. But there were no doubt bales of documents that exposed them? Drawings? Projects? Directives? Summaries of results? Proposals? Dispatches? Private correspondence? No, not one! You mean to say, Not even one tiny piece of paper? How could the GPU let that sort of thing get by? They had arrested all those people, and they hadn’t even grabbed one little piece of paper? “There had been a lot,” but “it had all been destroyed.” Because “there was no place to keep the files.” At the trial they produced only a few newspaper articles, published in the émigré press and our own. But in that event how could the prosecution present its case? Well, to be sure, there was Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko. And, to be sure, it wasn’t the first time either. “The best evidence, no matter what the circumstances, is the confessions of the defendants.”8
But what confessions! These confessions Were not forced but inspired—repentance tearing whole monologues from the breast, and talk, talk, and more talk, and self-exposure and self-flagellation! They told old man Fedotov, who was sixty-six, that he could sit down, that he had talked long enough, but no, he kept pouring out additional explanations and interpretations. For five sessions in a row, no questions were asked. The defendants kept talking and talking and explaining and kept asking for the floor again in order to supply whatever they had left out. They presented inferentially everything the prosecution needed without any questions whatever being asked. Ramzin, after extensive explanations, went on to provide brief resumes, for the sake of clarity, as if he were addressing slow-witted students. The defendants were afraid most of all that something might be left unexplained, that someone might go unexposed, that someone’s name might go un-mentioned, that someone’s intention to wreck might not have been made clear. And how they reviled themselves! “I am a class enemy!” “I was bribed.” “Our bourgeois ideology.” And then the prosecutor: “Was that your error?” And Charnovsky replied: “And crime!” There was simply nothing for Krylenko to do. For five sessions he went on drinking tea and eating cookies or whatever else they brought him.
But how did the defendants sustain such an emotional explosion? There was no tape recorder to take down their words, but Otsep, the defense attorney, described them: “The defendants’ words flowed in a businesslike manner, cold and professionally calm.” There you are! Such a passion for confession—and businesslike at the same time? Cold? More than that: they appear to have mumbled their glib repentance so listlessly that Vyshinsky often asked them to speak louder, more clearly, because they couldn’t be heard.
The harmony of the trial was not at all disturbed by the defense, which agreed with all the prosecutor’s proposals. The principal defense lawyer called the prosecutor’s summation historic and described his own as narrow, admitting that in making it he had gone against the dictates of his heart, for “a Soviet defense lawyer is first of all a Soviet citizen” and “like all workers, he, too, is outraged” at the crimes of the defendants.9 During the trial the defense asked shy and tentative questions and then instantly backed away from them if Vyshinsky interrupted. The lawyers actually defended only two harmless textile officials and did not challenge the formal charges nor the description of the defendants’ actions, but asked only whether the defendants might avoid execution. Is it more useful, Comrade Judges, “to have their corpses or their labor?”
…How foul-smelling were the crimes of these bourgeois engineers? Here is what they consisted of. They planned to reduce the tempo of development, as, for instance, to an over-all annual increase in production of only 20 to 22 percent, whereas the workers were prepared to increase it by 40 to 50 percent. They slowed down the rate of mining local fuels. They were too slow in developing the Kuznetsk Basin. They exploited theoretical and economic arguments—such as whether to supply the Donets Basin with electricity from the Dnieper power station or whether to build a supertrunk-line between Moscow and the Donbas—in order to delay the solutions of important problems. (The work stops while engineers argue!) They postponed considering new engineering projects (i.e., they did not authorize them immediately). In lectures on the resistance of materials, they took an anti-Soviet line. They installed worn-out equipment. They tied up capital funds, for example, by using them for costly and lengthy construction projects. They carried out unnecessary (!) repairs. They misused metals (some grades of iron were wanting). They created an imbalance between the departments of a plant and between the supply of raw materials and the capacity for processing them industrially. (This was particularly notable in the textile industry, where they built one or two factories more than they needed to process the cotton harvest.) Then they leaped from minimal to maximal plans. And obvious wrecking began through the accelerated development of that same unfortunate textile industry. Most importantly, they planned sabotage in the field of electric power—even though none was ever carried out. Thus wrecking did not take the form of actual damage done but remained within the area of operational planning, yet it was intended to lead to a nationwide crisis and even to economic paralysis in 1930! But it didn’t—and only because of the competitive industrial and financial plans of the masses (doubling the figures!)….
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6. And it is quite possible that this failure of his was held against him by the Leader and led to the symbolic destruction of the prosecutor—on the very same guillotine as his victims.
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7.