The standard had been set, and now it could be retained perennially and performed over again every season—according to the wishes of the Chief Producer. And in fact the Chief wanted another within three months. The rehearsal time was very short, but that was all right. Come and see the show! Only in our theater! A premiere.
M. The Case of the All-Union Bureau of the Mensheviks—March 1-9, 1931
The case was heard by a Special Assize of the Supreme Court, the presiding judge in this case, for some reason, being N. M. Shvernik. Otherwise everyone was in his proper place—Antonov-Saratovsky, Krylenko, and his assistant Roginsky. The producers were sure of themselves. For after all, the subject wasn’t technical but was Party material, ordinary stuff. So they brought fourteen defendants onto the stage.
And it all went off not just smoothly but brilliantly.
I was twelve at the time. For three years I had been attentively reading everything about politics on the enormous pages of Izvestiya. I read the stenographic records of these two trials line by line. In the Promparty case, I had already felt, in my boyish heart, superfluity, falsehood, fabrication, but at least there were spectacular stage sets—universal intervention, the paralysis of all industry, the distribution of ministerial portfolios! In the trial of the Mensheviks, all the same stage sets were brought out, but they were more pallid. And the actors spoke their lines without enthusiasm. And the whole performance was a yawning bore, an inept, tired repetition. (Could it be that Stalin felt this, too, through his rhinoceros hide? How else can one explain his calling off the case of the Working Peasants Party after it had already been prepared, or why there were no more trials for several years?)
It would be boring to base our interpretations once again on the stenographic record. In any case, I have fresher evidence from one of the principal defendants in this case—Mikhail Petrovich Yakubovich. At the present moment, his petition for rehabilitation, exposing all the dirty work which went on, has filtered through to samizdat, our savior, and people are reading it just as it happened.[248] His story offers material proof and explanation of the whole chain of Moscow trials of the thirties.
How was the nonexistent “Union Bureau” created? The GPU had been given an assignment: they had been told to prove that the Mensheviks had adroitly wormed their way into—and seized—many important government jobs for counterrevolutionary purposes. The genuine situation did not jibe with this plan. There were no real Mensheviks in important posts. But then there were no real Mensheviks on trial either. (True, they say V. K. Ikov actually was a member of the quiet, do-nothing illegal Moscow Bureau of the Mensheviks—but they didn’t know that at the trial. He was processed in the second echelon and received a mere eight.) The GPU had its own design: two from the Supreme Council of the Economy, two from the People’s Commissariat of Trade, two from the State Bank, one from the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, one from the State Planning Commission. (What a boring and unoriginal plan! Back in 1920, they had ordered, in the matter of the “Tactical Center,” that it include two from the Union of Rebirth, two from the Council of Public Figures, two from this and that, etc.) Therefore they picked the individuals who suited them on the basis of their positions. And whether they were Mensheviks or not depended on whether one believed rumors. Some who got caught this way were not Mensheviks at all, but directives had been given to consider them Mensheviks. The genuine political views of those accused did not interest the GPU in the least. Not all the defendants even knew each other. And they raked in Menshevik witnesses, too, wherever they could find them.[249] (All the witnesses, without exception, were later given prison terms too.) Ramzin testified prolifically and obligingly at this trial also. But the GPU pinned its hopes on the principal defendant, Vladimir Gustavovich Groman (with the idea that he would help work up this case and be amnestied in return), and on the provocateur Petunin. (I am basing all this on Yakubovich’s report.)
Let us now introduce M. P. Yakubovich. He had begun his revolutionary activity so early that he had not even finished the gymnasium. In March, 1917, he was already Chairman of the Smolensk Soviet. Impelled by the strength of his convictions, which continued to lead him on, he became a strong and successful orator. At the Congress of the Western Front, he impetuously called those journalists who were demanding that the war continue enemies of the people. And this was in April, 1917. He was nearly hauled from the rostrum, and he apologized, but thereafter in his speech he maneuvered so adroitly and so won over his listeners that at the end he called them enemies of the people again, and this time to stormy applause. He was elected to the delegation sent to the Petrograd Soviet, and hardly had he arrived there than—with the informality of those days—he was named to the Military Commission of the Petrograd Soviet. There he exerted a strong influence on the appointment of army commissars,[250] and in the end he became an army commissar on the Southwestern Front and personally arrested Denikin in Vinnitsa (after the Kornilov revolt), and regretted very much indeed (during the trial as well) that he had not shot him on the spot.
Clear-eyed, always sincere, and always completely absorbed in his own ideas—whether they were right or wrong—he was counted as—and was—one of the younger members of the Men-shevik Party. This did not prevent him, however, from presenting his own projects to the Menshevik leadership with boldness and passion, such as, in the spring of 1917, proposing the formation of a Social Democratic government, or, in 1919, recommending that the Mensheviks enter the Comintern. (Dan and the others invariably rejected all his plans and their variations, and quite condescendingly, for that matter.) In July, 1917, he was very pained by the action of the socialist Petrograd Soviet in approving the Provisional Government’s calling up army units for use against other socialists, considering it a fatal error even though the other socialists were using armed force. Hardly had the October coup taken place than Yakubovich proposed to his party that it should support the Bolsheviks wholeheartedly and work to improve the state structure they were creating. In the upshot, he was finally ostracized by Martov, and by 1920 he had left the ranks of the Mensheviks once and for all, convinced that he could not get them to follow the Bolsheviks’ path.
I have gone into all this detail to make it quite clear that throughout the Revolution Yakubovich had been not a Menshevik but a Bolshevik, and one who was entirely sincere and disinterested. In 1920 he was still one of the Smolensk food-supply commissars, and the only one of them who was not a Bolshevik. He was even honored by the People’s Commissariat of Food Supply as the best. (He claims that he got along without reprisals against the peasantry, but I do not know whether or not this is true. At his trial he did, however, recall that he had organized “antispeculation” detachments.) In the twenties he had edited the Torgovaya Gazeta (The Trade Gazette) and had occupied other important posts. He had been arrested in 1930 when just such Mensheviks as he, “who had wormed their way in,” were to be rounded up in accordance with the GPU plans.
He had immediately been called in for questioning by Krylenko, who, earlier and always, as the reader already knows, was organizing the chaos of the preliminary inquiry into efficient interrogation. It turned out that they knew one another very well, for in the years between the first trials Krylenko had gone to that very Smolensk Province to improve food-requisition work. And here is what Krylenko now said:
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32. He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his consolation, he has been granted a personal pension for his revolutionary activity! What monstrosities exist in our country.
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33. One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers’ group in the War Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Minister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr long-termers of Gulag. I do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from 1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in Spassk Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.
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34. He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff, who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.