Fear Itself (13 page)

The charges, running to some thirty closely printed pages, were submitted by State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, the key theorist of Soviet law, whose 1932 book,
Revolutionary Legality in the Contemporary Period,
provided the basis for the political jurisprudence that governed such cases, making the case for class law rather than what he dismissed as bourgeois legal formalism. Under Communism, he insisted, law is neither autonomous nor a protector of individual rights, but an integral part of the state’s revolutionary purposes: “Law and state cannot be regarded as separate from each other,” as “the law obtains its power and content from the state.”
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Later foreign minister, then Soviet ambassador at the United Nations, he referred to the show trial defendants as “hybrids of foxes and pigs,” “reptiles” and “filthy dogs . . . from whose mouth a bloody venom drips . . . mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let’s push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!”
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This, the first of the three sensational stage-managed trials, the others following in January 1937 and March 1938,
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produced surreal scenes. “Stalin orchestrated the proceedings from behind an opaque screen, occasionally signifying his presence with puffs of smoke from his Dunhill pipe” as the trial unfolded beneath a large slogan reading “Workers of Moscow! To the mad dogs—a dog’s death.”
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No documentation was offered by the prosecution. No defense was produced by the accused. Each person, having “refused” a lawyer, responded to his examination by confession. In a last plea, Mrachkovsky declared, “I took a despicable path, the path of deception of the party. . . . I want to depart from life without carrying any filth with me.” Evdokimov averred that “the difference between us and the fascists is very much in our disfavour. Fascism openly and frankly inscribed on its banners, ‘Death to Communism.’ On our lips we had all the time, ‘Long Live Communism,’ whereas by our deeds we were fighting socialism victorious in the U.S.S.R.” Bakayev announced, “I am heavily oppressed by the thought that I became an obedient tool in the hands of Zinoviev and Kamenev, became an agent of the counter-revolution, that I raised my hand against Stalin.” In turn, each defendant, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, acknowledged culpability. “And the proletarian state will deal with me as I deserve,” Berman-Yurin declared. “It is too late for contrition.” Kamenev averred, “No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just,” and advised his sons, “Go forward . . . Follow Stalin.”
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Zinoviev confessed to how “my defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at Fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of Fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trostskyism.”
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Just before Nikitchenko, only seven years before his appearance at Nuremberg, led his colleagues to the Council Chamber to consider their verdicts, Ter-Vaganyan added, “I am crushed by the weight of all that was revealed here. . . . I bow my head before the Court and say: whatever your decision may be, however stern your verdict, I accept it as deserved.”
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Vyshinsky closed his summary speech with “the demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them.”
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Years later, Khrushchev reported that Stalin had prepared their death sentences before the proceedings had begun.
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Each of the sixteen was shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison hours after the trial terminated, in contravention to promises that had been offered six of the political prisoners, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, that, with contrition, their lives would be spared.
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Nikolai Bukharin, the Marxist theorist and member of the Central Committee who was to lose his own life in March 1938 after being convicted for conspiring to overthrow the state at the third show trial, told Vyshinsky, “I am terribly glad the dogs have been shot.”
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The 1939
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, later numbered among Stalin’s
Collected Works,
offered the official version of these proceedings. The illiberal flavor of the prose is remarkable. It included a litany of “villainies over a period of twenty years” that had been committed “to destroy the Party and the Soviet state, to undermine the defensive power of the country, to assist foreign military intervention, to prepare the way for the defeat of the Red Army, to bring about the dismemberment of the U.S.S.R., to hand over the Soviet Maritime Region to the Japanese, Soviet Byelorussia to the Poles, and Soviet Ukraine to the Germans, to destroy the gains of the workers and collective farmers, and to restore capitalist slavery in the U.S.S.R.” Stalin reported how, after the execution of these “dregs of humanity,” “whiteguard pigmies” and “whiteguard insects,” the USSR “passed on to next business.”
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For their loyal work, Nikitchenko and Vyshinsky were awarded the Order of Lenin.
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Like Nikitchenko, Vyshinsky would prominently surface after the war. During the Nuremberg proceedings, despite having no official role, he acted as Stalin’s proxy by advising, indeed supervising, Nikitchenko and the Soviet delegation. At a party for the judges and the prosecutors on November 27, the day he first arrived, unheralded, for a monthlong stay as a member of the Soviet prosecution team, Vyshinsky proposed a toast in Russian: “Death as soon as possible to the defendants,” he declared, thereby betraying a rather off-center sensibility.
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His recurring visits sought to ensure that various embarrassments would not enter into the proceedings, like the secret protocols of the August 23, 1939, Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, and the March 5, 1940, mass execution of 22,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest, including 8,000 officers who had been taken prisoner during the fall of 1939 in the Soviet conquest of eastern Poland.
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Not only did Vyshinsky seek to bury this Soviet crime but he also pressed an audacious counterstrategy, insisting that the Germans should be charged with this atrocity.
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Nikitchenko died in 1967. We know little about how or why. Attempts by American and British lawyers to stay in touch after his return to Moscow had been blocked. Letters and presents were never acknowledged. No reply ever came. Of his life after the trial, nothing is “known beyond a Soviet report of his death.”
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His April 1967
New York Times
obituary observed that “when he was named to serve . . . at the Nuremberg war crimes trial before this trial, Major General Nikitchenko already had wide experience in the judiciary.”
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III.

A
FTER A
rose had been placed in a vase to mark the absence of the late senator Theodore Bilbo, Republican congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois observed at the May 1948 congressional memorial service that Bilbo had been “a man of deep and abiding conviction.”
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He had been just that. “The course of Bilbo’s career,” the Mississippi historian Chester Morgan has commented, singled him out as one of the New Deal’s “most effective evangelists,” a supporter whose commitment to “New Deal liberalism . . . never wavered,” but with a caveat—“so long as the rights of the people of his state were not infringed.”
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In that regard, Bilbo had been the Senate’s most furious racist, a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan.

This severe racism was curious. His political base had not been in the state’s plantation-dominated black belt or the urbanized and relatively cosmopolitan Gulf Coast, but in the hill country of central and northern Mississippi, where the farms were small, the soil poor, and the land without great value, as well as in the primarily white, fundamentalist, impoverished piney woods region of the state’s south, the location of Bilbo’s own Pearl River County, where most of the once-fecund forests had been stripped by the timber industry and where growing cotton on small parcels with relatively primitive methods produced deep poverty. There, literacy rates were low, schools were pitiful, and housing consisted mainly of wooden shacks lacking electricity and running water. Because the legislature apportioned seats by population, the minority of whites in the heavily populated, predominantly black Delta counties enjoyed a structural advantage. Nearly sixty years earlier, in 1890, the planter-dominated Democratic Party had convened a constitutional convention that established a literacy test and a four-dollar poll tax payable during the course of the two years before an election. These measures not only eliminated black voting but radically reduced the white electorate, as well.

Bilbo could not have risen as a political force had the state’s Democratic Party continued to select nominees for governor by a nominating convention dominated by Delta politicians.
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In 1902, despite the opposition of those counties, white legislators from the other sections, no longer concerned about black voters or multiracial populism, substituted a primary system, thus giving birth to a new type of flamboyant popular politics based primarily on appeals to mostly poor rural whites. The first governor to be elected this way, the fiercely racist James K. Vardaman, pioneered in combining exuberant campaigning at mass rallies, antiblack rhetoric, including support for lynching, and class-based appeals against the “money power.”
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Serving as mentor, Vardaman nourished Bilbo’s early political career, successfully boosting his election as lieutenant governor in 1911. With Vardaman’s move to the U.S. Senate, Bilbo was elected to his first term as governor in 1916. As a populist Democrat in the nation’s poorest state, he championed a politics of class resentment despite the reduced white electorate, a politics whose rhetoric railed against the planters of the Delta and against Yankee capitalism. In office, he became “the undisputed leader of the reform wing of the state Democratic party,” by initiating a vibrant program of progressive legislation, including the equalization of land assessments, banking and prison reform, hospital construction, conservation, road building and the redistribution of public school funds to poorer districts to equalize education across the state.
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Despite his very unaristocratic origins in the Deep South, Bilbo ardently supported Governor Roosevelt of New York for president in 1932. Shortly after FDR’s inauguration, Bilbo found himself rewarded by a patronage appointment at the new Agricultural Adjustment Administration, having been recommended by Pat Harrison, his state’s senior senator.
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Bilbo then ran successfully for the Senate against the two-term incumbent Hubert Stephens in 1934, as an enthusiastic New Dealer “pledging himself to support the efforts of the Roosevelt administration to bring the Nation out of the depression, to aid the farmer and the laboring man.” After winning the Democratic primary, assuring his election in November, he promised to make “noise for the common people,” and “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt.” He recalled his loyalty to the national party, even when, in 1928, it had nominated a Catholic for president: “I stumped the state for Al Smith in 1928—me a Baptist a dry and a Ku Klux Klansman—and I saved the state for the Democrats.”
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Mississippi’s members in the House of Representatives also stressed Bilbo’s New Deal liberalism in their chamber’s memorial event. As a “representative of the toiling masses,” noted that state’s John Rankin, arguably the chamber’s most vocal racist, Bilbo’s “heart went out to the toiling people of his state, and whenever their interest was at stake they knew exactly where he stood.” William Whittington recalled how Bilbo, as “the champion” of “progressive and liberal policies . . . advocated measures in the interest of the average man. With him, the welfare of the common man was paramount.” Jamie Whitten rightly observed how “contrary to the reputation built up in the national press during recent years, Senator Bilbo was identified with liberal measures.”
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Joseph Keenan, the secretary of the Chicago Federation of Labor, who had just moved to serve on President Roosevelt’s National Defense Advisory Commission (the agency that oversaw the mobilization of the defense industries in the face of Hitler’s successes on the ground in Europe), had had good reason to write to Bilbo in 1940 to express the administration’s appreciation for his recent primary win: “I was delighted to learn of your splendid victory . . . assuring six more years of a real friend of liberal government.
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Running for reelection that year, Bilbo pronounced himself, and his state, to be “100 percent for Roosevelt . . . and the New Deal.”
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When a leading historian of the South in twentieth-century American politics reflected on how “President Roosevelt’s leadership inspired and directed a hardy band of southern liberals in Congress,” his list included Maury Maverick and Lyndon Johnson in the House, and Alben Barkley, Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, and Bilbo in the Senate.
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He had been a “liberal fire-eater,” a political scientist observed shortly after Bilbo’s death, “despite his ranting on the race issue.”
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He also had been, as Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge admiringly assessed, “a bulldog for protecting traditions of the South.”
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John Stennis’s eulogy in the Senate did not shy away from Bilbo’s fierce avowal of racial segregation. Stennis saluted his late colleague for having fought “back with all the vigor of the rough-and-tumble political fights that had enlivened his public career . . . when measures were brought before the Congress affecting the established customs and traditions of Mississippi and the Southern States.” Congressman Rankin likewise commented that “Senator Bilbo stood for those traditions which have characterized the people of the South from the earliest settlements and for those policies of segregation by which alone the two races can live together in peace and harmony in that great section of the country.”
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