The Accused

Alexander Weissberg, Edward Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786259653
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

First published in 1951, this is both a personal narrative and forensic analysis of the methods employed by Stalin and the G.P.U. during the Great Purge from the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938.It is the exploration of the systematic imprisonment, interrogation and extraction of false confessions from millions of people that is extraordinary. Weissberg explains how victims of the state police were forced to make confessions incriminating not only themselves but also co-conspirators. This practice was aimed at destroying the relations of trust between those who were responsible for the Russian revolution. Those who were not killed in camps in the Soviet Arctic were divided and conquered.Hence, the central thesis in the book is that the Russian revolution and communism in the Soviet Union were irrevocably destroyed and ended in the 1930s during the terror of the Stalinist purges.A remarkable and little known contribution to our understanding of the events in the Soviet Union.

THE ACCUSED

CHAPTER 1—The “Great Purge”

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK IS TO DESCRIBE HAPPENINGS WITHOUT PRECEDENT in modem history. From the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938 the totalitarian state took on its final form in the Soviet Union. In this period approximately eight million people were arrested in town and country by the secret police.{2} The arrested men were charged with high treason, espionage, sabotage, preparation for armed insurrection and the planning of attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. After periods of examination which rarely exceeded three months, all these men, with very few exceptions, pleaded guilty, and where they were actually brought before the courts they confirmed their confessions in public. They were all sentenced to long terms of forced labor in the concentration camps of the Far North or of the Central Asiatic desert districts.

They were all innocent.

However, to protect myself from all-too-pedantic criticism, I must make two reservations. The one refers to the assassination of Kirov, the Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, who was also a member of the Politburo. Kirov was shot dead on December 1, 1934, after a meeting of the District Party Committee by a young student named Nikolayev, who was himself a member of the Party. The background of this murder has never been satisfactorily explained. Many people believe that the motive was jealousy, i.e., that it was personal and not political. Others, including Trotsky, believe that it was a provocation organized by the G.P.U. But in any case, Kirov was murdered almost two years before the beginning of the Great Purge. During that purge millions of people were accused of having planned attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders, but only one Soviet leader, Kirov, was ever killed. Despite their “confessions,” the men arrested during the Great Purge had nothing whatever to do with his death.

My second reservation refers to the espionage activity of foreign powers. Of course, such activity was carried on during the years in question, though its agents certainly had a more difficult task than elsewhere. The Soviet Union is almost hermetically sealed off. A Soviet citizen guilty of espionage could not hope to escape abroad. Money would not greatly attract him as a reward. He could not spend it without immediately making himself suspect. At one time Russians ready to spy for a foreign power for ideological reasons and not for hope of reward could have been found among the formerly well-to-do classes, but by that time those classes had been broken up. Their members had lost all courage and all belief in the ultimate victory of their cause. A man is seldom prepared to risk his life for a cause he believes lost.

Thus it must be a very difficult matter for foreign powers to recruit agents among Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, there may well have been such people in the early days, before the Soviet power was as firmly established as it is now, and, once having worked for a foreign power, such people may have found it impossible to withdraw. This foreign espionage network cannot have been large, but it probably existed. Now if great masses of the population are arrested indiscriminately, one or two real spies may well be among them. To put it primitively, if the G.P.U. were to arrest all the inhabitants of a certain quarter then it would incidentally arrest the spy who happened to live there too. The G.P.U. did not arrest all the inhabitants of a quarter, but the way in which it carried out the mass arrests of 1936-38 had much the same effect. The victims were accidental. In those days the G.P.U. operated in such a fashion that there was no probability that the arrested would really be enemies of the Soviet power rather than harmless citizens. But still further, the general atmosphere of fear created by Stalin’s slogan “Vigilance!,” the spy scare and the encouragement of denunciation crippled the activity of those whose official task it was to track down the real enemies of the state.

If the G.P.U. did arrest a few real spies accidentally, the investigation methods used effectively prevented them from distinguishing the real spy from the surrounding mass of fictitious spies, all of whom had already “confessed” under pressure. Thus it was an easy matter for real spies to remain unidentified amidst the featureless mass of other “spies” in the G.P.U. net. The real spy no doubt “confessed” with the rest, denounced innocent people as his “accomplices” and thus concealed his real activities and his real accomplices.

Sometimes the Soviet military authorities caught foreign agents crossing the frontier illegally. When such people came into the cells they were cut off from their fellow prisoners by an invisible but impenetrable wall. Once they had been caught in the act and brought before the examiners they made no attempt to deny their offense, and when they returned to the cells they readily admitted that they had crossed the frontier illegally as spies. The others, the fictitious spies, also admitted everything before their examiners, and they made signed statements confessing the most heinous crimes. But when they returned to their cells they assumed quite naturally that none of their fellow prisoners believed a word of what they had admitted, and, equally naturally, they assumed that none of the Soviet citizens imprisoned with them had conspired in any way against the Soviet power.

Thus if I make an exception for the few real foreign agents who may have been caught up in the vast net, and for Nikolayev, who had already been shot, I can say with a clear conscience that all the prisoners who passed through the G.P.U. machine in those years—whether they “confessed” or not—were legally, politically and morally innocent.

They were doubly innocent. Not one of them was guilty of spying; not one of them had betrayed his country to the Germans or to the Japanese; not one of them had planned or carried out any act of sabotage.

But perhaps they were guilty in the sense of Soviet public policy at the time while not being actually guilty of the crimes with which they were charged? Perhaps they really were conspirators, not against the Soviet power as such, but against the Party leaders and the Party regime? Perhaps they had attempted by underground methods to overthrow Stalin’s dictatorship in the Party? Perhaps the dictator’s secret police had nipped their conspiracy in the bud and then denounced them as counterrevolutionaries and agents of a foreign power in order to deprive them of that general sympathy on which the enemies of tyranny can reckon at all times and in all countries?

Nothing of the sort. The arrested men were not enemies of the socialist revolution but its most ardent supporters. And the overwhelming majority of them were not even opponents of the dictator. Very few of them had actually been in opposition, and even these had long since capitulated and abandoned all illegal activity. The overwhelming majority had neither belonged to the opposition nor sympathized with it. Many of them were actually enthusiastic Stalinists who had vigorously opposed the opposition. In short, the general political attitude of the arrested men was not one whit different from that of the millions who had been lucky enough to escape.

The arrests were made indiscriminately. In the depths of their hearts the victims certainly opposed the dictator, but even this carefully repressed feeling was shared with the great majority of the population, and they never allowed it expression because they knew what an ill-considered word could mean to them and their families. If this carefully repressed feeling was the criterion for the arrests, then the G.P.U. arrested not eight million too many, but 152 million too few. After the happenings of 1932 and 1933 the feelings of the people certainly turned against the dictator. The peasants had not forgiven him the hunger years and the death by starvation of millions of their fellows. The workers and intellectuals in the towns had not forgiven him for stifling all liberty. But all these feelings were repressed. The hunger years came to an end. The economic system gradually recovered. And the Russian people began to hope that they would regain their lost freedom. Men began to forget the bitter years and to take pleasure in the progress of their country. This process of emotional recuperation was interrupted in August, 1936, by the sudden publication of the indictment against Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates. A new era opened up in the development of the Soviet Union, the era of the Great Purge.

Even today, years later, public opinion in the West has not thoroughly grasped what it was all about. European and American newspapers devoted a great deal of space to the trials. Those people who believed in the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in astonishment how it came about that all the leading Bolsheviki of the revolutionary period had gone over to the side of the enemy, and had, on their own admission, committed the basest crimes against their own country, their own comrades and the ideas which had become part and parcel of their own lives—all in order to restore that capitalism which they had spent their lives in trying to overthrow.

Those who disbelieved the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in equal astonishment how it came about that men confessed to crimes they obviously could never have committed.

But without exception attention was concentrated on the “show trials,” on the proceedings against the leaders of the former opposition. Both capitalist and working-class observers confined themselves to the criminological aspect. No one went behind the façade. No one realized what was going on deep within Russian society.

The trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was followed in January, 1937, by the trial of Piatakov and Radek, and, a year later, by the trial of Bukharin. Each of these big trials was preceded by mass arrests and followed by a flood of further arrests. The victims belonged to all political circles of Soviet society. The arrest of members of the former opposition began the process. The followers of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin came first. Then followed those who had once belonged to other political parties: Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Octobrists, Kadets, Armenian Dashnaki, Georgian Nationalists, Trudoviki, Anarchists, Pan-Russian Chauvinists and Ukrainian Nationalists.

It should not be thought that these men were still members of underground groups when they were arrested, or that they still propagated their former ideas. They had merely been at some time or other—often many years before the revolution—members of these parties, or known to have sympathized with them. Most of them had taken part in the revolution with the Bolsheviks, fought in the civil war side by side with the Bolsheviki and then joined the Communist Party and worked for the building up of socialism. Now they were suddenly destroyed because of the sins of their youth—perhaps because they had once fought against the Tsar as Social Revolutionaries instead of as Bolsheviks; perhaps because as young men they had once distributed Anarchist or Menshevik leaflets. Incidentally, Party membership in those pre-revolutionary days depended more on chance than on deliberate choice. The one would join the Mensheviki because his best friend at the university happened to be a Menshevik. The other would join the Social Revolutionaries because theirs was the only revolutionary organization in his district. The third would join the Bolsheviki because the strike in his factory was organized by them. But one and all, they were moved by a common hatred of Tsarism. They fought side by side for liberty and a better social order. In those days young workers and students were “revolutionary” in the general sense of the term and without any precise idea of the differences between the various political conceptions. They fought side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to prison side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to Siberia side by side with the Bolsheviki. Later on most of them abandoned their former ideas and accepted the leadership of the Bolshevik Party because it fought with greater vigor and determination for the victory of revolutionary socialism. During the civil war they fought on all fronts; in the hunger years they tightened their belts; in the construction period they worked hard for the success of the Five-Year Plans. And now, after almost thirty years, during which they had become middle-aged and old men in the service of the revolution, they had to go to prison again; this time into the prisons of their former allies, the Bolsheviki.

They tramped up and down their cells and tried to understand. They remembered that some of their old comrades had gone to prison even in 1917 because they had refused to accept the dictatorship. But they had willingly suffered imprisonment, and the doors of their cells had stood wide open for years. All they had been required to do was to abandon their beliefs, and then not only would freedom have been theirs but the highest offices in the state. But they had still refused to support the policy of the ruling party. They had fought for the freedom of the whole people, and when the revolution finally came they refused to sacrifice even a fraction of that freedom to clear the way for working-class power and the socialist reorganization of society. They had sat in the prisons of the revolution as they had sat in the prisons of the Tsar. The highest arbiter for them was not world history, which invariably approves the ruling powers, but their own conscience, and that forbade all compromise.

These men had nothing in common with the prisoners of 1937, who had capitulated again and again to the ruling group in the Party, who had obediently accepted all the changes in the Party line, who, at the behest of the Party, had condemned their comrades when they had fallen into disgrace—and who now found themselves in prison nevertheless. They had lost their freedom because in those far-off days they had belonged not to the small Bolshevik group but to some other revolutionary group.

But it was only for a few weeks that such questions troubled them, and then they were joined by many of their old Bolshevik friends. At the beginning of 1937 the Party closed down the Old Bolsheviki’s Club, and that was the signal for mass arrests of old Party members. Whoever had been a Party member for a long time must have uttered a careless word on occasions, a word not dangerous at the time but fatal now. The secret records of the G.P.U. go back a long way, but if anything were overlooked there were no thousands of informers eager to drag it back into the light. But these former heretical utterances were not the real reason for the arrests. The old revolutionaries, whether Menshevik, Social Revolutionary or authentic Bolshevik, had fought for freedom against Tsarism. They had loved freedom then and probably loved it still in their hearts. The new regime of despotism had no use for men who had once fought for freedom. They must be got rid of.

But this liquidation of the politically conscious sections of Soviet society was only the preliminary to happenings which were so fantastically senseless that it is difficult to describe them—and still more difficult to persuade Western minds to believe them. Hundreds of thousands of old revolutionaries and old members of the Bolshevik Party had been arrested. The very foundations of Soviet life had been shaken. But ordinary people still believed it was exclusively a conflict within the ranks of the ruling party. Then in the second half of 1937 the character of the action changed. The scale of the arrests increased enormously and extended to those who had never been members of any political party. Day and night G.P.U. vans raced through the streets of town and village, taking their victims from their homes, factories, universities, laboratories, workshops, barracks and Government offices. All walks of life were involved, and workmen, peasants, officials and professional men, artists and officers found themselves together in the cells. All branches of the economic system were affected. Officials of heavy industry, agriculture, education and the armed forces were among the arrested. There were fifty republics and autonomous districts in the Soviet Union with their separate governments, and about five hundred People’s Commissars. Very few of these Commissars survived the storm. Not a single one of all the big Soviet undertakings retained its director or its leading engineers. New men took their places, but within a few weeks they too were arrested.

The arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky and eight leading generals opened the prison gates to the officers corps. The commanders of all Russian military districts, the strategic units of the whole system, changed their commands for prison cells. Their successors joined them a few weeks later before they had even had time to settle down in their new commands. Within the space of a few months some military districts changed their commanders half a dozen times, until before long there were not enough generals left and colonels took over, only to be relieved in their turn by majors. In the end many regiments were commanded by lieutenants.

The purge in the higher reaches of the Party and the labor unions was complete. At the head of the Communist Party is its Central Committee, which then consisted of seventy-one members and sixty-one deputies. These men had proved their revolutionary loyalty on a score of occasions. They had been picked out of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Party members. Every day of their lives had been carefully examined by the control organs of the Party and by the G.P.U. And yet more than three-quarters of them were arrested as spies. The Politburo of the Party, which consisted of ten members and five deputies, is an even narrower elite. It is the personal staff of the dictator, the actual government of the country. And yet at least five of these men fell victim to the G.P.U. The Comintern apparatus was formally extraterritorial, so to speak. According to the Comintern statutes, its Executive Committee was superior to any organ of the Russian Communist Party. Every Communist everywhere was supposed to be under its orders—including the officials of the G.P.U., who were almost all Communists. In reality the G.P.U. didn’t care a fig for the laws of the Comintern and they purged its apparatus ruthlessly. Even old revolutionaries known to the working-class movement all over the world, men like Bela Kun, were arrested as counterrevolutionaries and liquidated as spies.

Soviet cultural life was temporarily paralyzed and it never fully recovered. The control organs of the Party closely examined every new literary and scientific publication for “Trotskyist contraband.” An unhappy formulation was enough to seal the fate of its author. Many leading Soviet writers joined the masses in the concentration camps. Many of those who ...