The Gulag Archipelago (63 page)

I have gone into all this detail to make it quite clear that throughout the Revolution Yakubovich had been not a Men- shevik 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 Krylen- ko, 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:

"Mikhail Petrovich, I am going to talk to you frankly: I con- sider you a Communist! [His words encouraged Yakubovich and raised his spirits greatly.]
I have no doubt of your innocence. But it is our Party duty, yours and mine, to carry out this trial.
[Krylenko had gotten his orders from Stalin, and Yakubovich was all atremble for the sake of the cause, like a zealous horse rushing into the horse collar.] I beg you to help me in every possible way, and to assist the interrogation. And in case of un- foreseen difficulties during the trial, at the most difficult moments, I will ask the chairman of the court to give you the floor." ! ! ! !

And Yakubovich promised. Conscious of his duty, he promised. Indeed, the Soviet government had never before given him such a responsible assignment.

And thus there was not the slightest need even to touch Yakubovich during the interrogation. But that was too subtle for the GPU. Like everyone else, Yakubovich was handed over to the butcher-interrogators, and they gave him
the full treatment
—the freezing punishment cell, the hot box, beating his genitals. They tortured him so intensively that Yakubovich and his fellow defendant Abram Ginzburg opened their veins in desperation. After they had received medical attention, they were no longer tortured and beaten. Instead, the
only
thing to which they were subjected was two weeks of sleeplessness. (Yakubovich says: "Just to be allowed to sleep! Neither conscience nor honor matters any longer.") And then they were confronted with others who had already given in and who urged them to "confess" ... to utter nonsense. And the interrogator himself, Aleksei Alekseye- vich Nasedkin, said: "I know, I know, none of this actually happened! But they insist on it!"

On one occasion when Yakubovich had been summoned to interrogation, he found there a prisoner who had been tortured. The interrogator smiled ironically: "Moisei Isayevich Teitel- baum begs you to take him into your anti-Soviet organization. You can speak as freely as you please. I am going out for a while." He went out. Teitelbaum really did beg: "Comrade Yakubovich! I beg you, please take me into your Union Bureau of Mensheviks! They are accusing me of taking 'bribes from foreign firms' and threatening me with execution. But I would rather die a counterrevolutionary than a common criminal!" (It was likelier that they had promised him that as a counter- revolutionary he wouldn't be shot! And he wasn't wrong either: they gave him a juvenile prison term, a "fiver.") The GPU was so short on Mensheviks they had to recruit defendants from volunteers! (And, after all, Teitelbaum was being groomed for an important role—communication with the Mensheviks abroad and with the Second International! But they honorably kept the deal they had made with him—a "fiver.") And with the inter- rogator's approval Yakubovich
accepted
Teitelbaum as a mem- ber of the Union Bureau.

Several days before the trial began, the
first
organizing session of the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks convened in the office of the senior interrogator, Dmitri Matveyevich Dmitriyev—so as to coordinate things, and so that each should understand his own role better. (That's how the Central Committee of the Prom- party convened too! That's
where
the defendants "could have met"—to answer Krylenko's earlier leading question.) But such a mountain of falsehood had been piled up that it was too much to absorb in one session and the participants got things mixed up, couldn't master it in one rehearsal, and were called together a second time.

What did Yakubovich feel as he went into the trial? Should he not, in revenge for all the tortures to which he had been sub- jected, for all the falsehood shoved into his breast, create a sensational scandal and startle the world? But still:

1. To do so would be to stab the Soviet government in the back! It would be to negate his entire purpose in life, everything he had lived for, the whole path he had taken to extricate himself from mistaken Menshevism and become a right-minded Bol- shevik.

2. After a scandal like that they wouldn't just allow him to die; they wouldn't just shoot him; they would torture him again, but this time out of vengeance, and drive him insane. But his body had already been exhausted by tortures. Where could he find the moral strength to endure new ones? Where could he unearth the required heroism?

(I wrote down his arguments as his heated words rang out— this being a most extraordinary chance to get, so to speak, a "posthumous" explanation from a participant in such a trial. And I find that it is altogether as though Bukharin or Rykov were explaining the reasons for their own mysterious submis- siveness at their trials. Theirs were the same sincerity and honesty, the same devotion to the Party, the same human weak- ness, the same lack of the moral strength needed to fight back, because they had no
individual
position. )

And at the trial Yakubovich not only repeated obediently all the gray mass of lies which constituted the upper limit of Stalin's imagination—and the imagination of his apprentices and his tormented defendants. But he also played out his inspired role, as he had promised Krylenko.

The so-called Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks—in es- sence the entire top level of their Central Committee—formally dissociated themselves from the defendants in a statement pub- lished in
Vorwärts
. They declared there that the trial was a shameful travesty, built on the testimony of provocateurs and unfortunate defendants forced into it by terror; that the over- whelming majority of the defendants had left the Party more than ten years earlier and had never returned; and that absurdly large sums of money were referred to at the trial, representing more than the party had ever disposed of.

And Krylenko, having read the article, asked Shvernik to permit the defendants to reply—the same kind of pulling-all- strings-at-once he had resorted to at the trial of the Promparty. They all spoke up, and they all defended the methods of the GPU against the Menshevik Central Committee.

But what does Yakubovich remember today about his "reply" and his last speech? He recalls that he not only spoke as befitted his promise to Krylenko, but that instead of simply getting to his feet, he was seized and lifted up—like a chip on a wave—by a surge of anger and oratory. Anger against whom? After having learned what torture meant, and attempting suicide and coming close to death more than once, he was at this point in a real, honest-to-God rage. But not at the prosecutor or the GPU! Oh, no! At the Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks!!! Now there's a psychological switch for you! There they sat, unscrupulous and smug, in security and comfort—for even the poverty of émigré life was, of course, comfort in comparison with the Lubyanka. And how could they refuse to pity
those
who were on trial, their torture and suffering? How could they so impudently dissociate themselves from them and deliver these unfortunates over to their fate? (The reply Yakubovich delivered was powerful, and the people who had cooked up the trial were delighted.)

Even when he was describing this in 1967, Yakubovich shook with rage at the Foreign Delegation, at their betrayal, their repudiation, their treason to the socialist Revolution—exactly as he had reproached them in 1917.

I did not have the stenographic record of the trial at the time. Later I found it and was astonished. Yakubovich's memory—so precise in every little detail, every date, every name—had in this instance betrayed him. He had, after all, said at the trial that the Foreign Delegation, on orders from the Second International,
had instructed them to carry out wrecking activities
. He no longer remembered this. The foreign Mensheviks' statement was neither unscrupulous nor smug. They had indeed
pitied
the unfortunate victims of the trial but did point out that they had not been Mensheviks for a long time—which was quite true. What was it, then, that made Yakubovich so unalterably and sincerely angry? And exactly how could the Foreign Delegation
not
have con- signed the defendants to their fate?

We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the argu- ments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.

Krylenko said in his summation for the prosecution that Yakubovich was a fanatic advocate of counterrevolutionary ideas and demanded therefore that he be
shot
.

And Yakubovich that day felt a tear of gratitude roll down his cheek, and he feels it still to this day, after having dragged his way through many camps and detention prisons. Even today he is grateful to Krylenko for not humiliating him, for not in- sulting him, for not ridiculing him as a defendant, and for call- ing him correctly a
fanatic
advocate (even of an idea contrary to his real one) and for demanding simple, noble execution for him, that would put an end to all his sufferings! In his final statement, Yakubovich agreed with Krylenko himself: "The crimes to which I have confessed [he endowed with great sig- nificance his success in hitting on the expression '
to which I have confessed'
—anyone who understood would realize that he meant 'not those
which I committed
'] deserve the highest measure of punishment—and I do not ask any forgiveness! I do not ask that my life be spared!" (Beside him on the defendants' bench, Gro- man got excited! "You are insane! You have to consider your comrades. You don't have the right!")

Now wasn't he a find for the prosecutor?

And can one still say the trials of 1936 to 1938 are un- explained?

Was it not through this trial that Stalin came to understand and believe that he could readily round up all his loud-mouth enemies and get them organized for just such a performance as this?

And may my compassionate reader now have mercy on me! Until now my pen sped on untrembling, my heart didn't skip a beat, and we slipped along unconcerned, because for these fifteen years we have been firmly protected either by legal revolution- ality or else by revolutionary legality. But from now on things will be painful: as the reader will recollect, as we have had ex- plained to us dozens of times, beginning with Khrushchev, "from approximately 1934, violations of Leninist norms of legality began." And how are we to enter this abyss of illegality now? How are we to drag our way along yet another bitter stretch of the road?

However,
these
trials which follow were, because of the fame of the defendants, a cynosure for the whole world. They did not escape the attention of the public. They were written about. They were interpreted and they will be interpreted again and again. It is for us merely to touch lightly on their
riddle
.

Let us make one qualification, though not a big one; the published stenographic records did not coincide completely with what was said at the trials. One writer who received an entrance pass—they were given out only to selected individuals—took running notes and subsequently discovered these differences. All the correspondents also noted the snag with Krestinsky, which made a recess necessary in order to get him back on the track of his assigned testimony. (Here is how I picture it. Before the trial a chart was set up for emergencies: in the first column was the name of the defendant; in the second, the method to be used during the recess if he should depart from his text during the open trial; in the third column, the name of the Chekist respon- sible for applying the indicated method. So if Krestinsky de- parted from his text, then who would come on the run and what that person would do had already been arranged.)

But the inaccuracies of the stenographic record do not change or lighten the picture. Dumfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic pro- ductions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over them- selves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed.

This was unprecedented in remembered history. It was par- ticularly astonishing in contrast with the recent Leipzig trial of Dimitrov. Dimitrov had answered the Nazi judges like a roaring lion, and, immediately afterward, his comrades in Moscow, mem- bers of that same unyielding cohort which had made the whole world tremble—and the greatest of them at that, those who had been called the "Leninist guard"—came before the judges drenched in their own urine.

And even though much appears to have been clarified since then—with particular success by Arthur Koestler—the
riddle
continues to circulate as durably as ever.

People have speculated about a Tibetan potion that deprives a man of his will, and about the use of hypnosis. Such explana- tions must by no means be rejected: if the NKVD possessed such methods, clearly
there were no moral rules
to prevent resorting to them. Why not weaken or muddle the will? And it is a known fact that in the twenties some leading hypnotists gave up their careers and entered the service of the GPU. It is also reliably known that in the thirties a school for hypnotists existed in the NKVD. Kamenev's wife was allowed to visit her husband before his trial and found him not himself, his reactions retarded. (And she managed to communicate this to others before she herself was arrested.)

But why was neither Palchinsky nor Khrennikov broken by the Tibetan potion or hypnosis?

The fact is that an explanation on a higher, psychological plane is called for.

One misunderstanding in particular results from the image of these men as old revolutionaries who had not trembled in Tsarist dungeons—seasoned, tried and true, hardened, etc., fighters. But there is a plain and simple mistake here. These de- fendants were
not those
old revolutionaries. They had acquired that glory by inheritance from and association with the Narod- niks, the SR's, and the Anarchists. They were the ones, the bomb throwers and the conspirators, who had known hard-labor im- prisonment and real prison
terms
—but even
they
had never in their lives experienced a
genuinely merciless interrogation
(be- cause such a thing did not exist at all in Tsarist Russia). And
these others
, the Bolshevik defendants at the treason trials, had never known either interrogation or real prison terms. The Bol- sheviks had never been sentenced to special "dungeons," any Sakhalin, any special hard labor in Yakutsk. It is well known that Dzerzhinsky had the hardest time of them all, that he had spent all his life in prisons. But, according to our yardstick, he had served
just a normal "tenner
," just a simple
"ten-ruble bill,"
like any ordinary collective farmer in our time. True, included in that tenner were three years in the hard-labor central prison, but that is nothing special either.

The Party leaders who were the defendants in the trials of 1936 to 1938 had, in their revolutionary pasts, known short, easy imprisonment, short periods in exile, and had never even had a whiff of hard labor. Bukharin had many petty arrests on his record, but they amounted to nothing. Apparently, he was never imprisoned anywhere for a whole year at a time, and he had just a wee bit of exile on Onega.

[All the information here comes from Volume 41 of the
Granat Encyclo- pedia
, in which either autobiographical or reliable biographical essays on the leaders of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) are collected.]

Kamenev, despite long years of propaganda work and travel to all the cities of Russia, spent only two years in prison and one and a half years in exile. In our time, even sixteen-year-old kids got
five
right off. Zinoviev, believe it or not,
never spent as much as three months in prison
. He never received
even one sentence!
In comparison with the ordinary natives of our Archipelago they were all
callow youths
; they didn't know what prison was like. Rykov and I. N. Smirnov had been arrested several times and had been imprisoned for five years, but somehow they went through prison very easily, and they either escaped from exile without any trouble at all or were released because of an amnesty. Until they were arrested and imprisoned in the Lubyanka, they hadn't the slightest idea what a real prison was nor what the jaws of unjust interrogation were like. (There is no basis for assuming that if Trotsky had fallen into those jaws, he would have conducted himself with any less self-abasement, or that his resistance would have proved stronger than theirs. He had had no occasion to prove it. He, too, had known only easy imprisonment, no serious interrogations, and a mere two years of exile in Ust-Kut. The terror Trotsky inspired as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council was some- thing he acquired very cheaply, and does not at all demonstrate any true strength of character or courage. Those who have con- demned many others to be shot often wilt at the prospect of their own death. The two kinds of toughness are not connected. ) And as for Radek—he was a plain provocateur. (And he wasn't the only one in these three trials!) And Yagoda was an inveterate, habitual criminal.

(This murderer of millions simply could not imagine that his superior Murderer, up top, would not, at the last moment, stand up for him and protect him. Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you!
For you
I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen. Whoever has been in Bakhchisarai may remember that Oriental trick. The second- floor windows in the Hall of Sessions of the State Council are covered with iron sheets pierced by small holes, and behind them is an unlit gallery. It is never possible to guess down in the hall itself whether someone is up there or not. The Khan remained invisible, and the Council always met as if in his presence. Given Stalin's out-and-out Oriental character, I can readily be- lieve that he watched the comedies in that October Hall. I cannot imagine that he would have denied himself this spectacle, this satisfaction. )

And, after all, our entire failure to understand derives from our belief in the unusual nature of these people. We do not, after all, where ordinary confessions signed by ordinary citizens are concerned, find their reasons for denouncing themselves and others so fulsomely baffling. We accept it as something we under- stand: a human being is weak; a human being gives in. But we consider Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, I. N. Smirnov to be supermen to begin with—and, in essence, our failure to understand is due to that fact alone.

True, the directors of this dramatic production seem to have had a harder task in selecting the performers than they'd had in the earlier trials of the engineers: in those trials they had forty barrels to pick from, so to speak, whereas here the available troupe was small. Everyone knew who the chief performers were, and the audience wanted to see them in the roles and them only.

Yet there was a choice! The most farsighted and determined of those who were doomed did not allow themselves to be arrested. They committed suicide first (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik). It was the ones who
wanted to live
who allowed themselves to be arrested. And one could certainly braid a rope from the ones who wanted to live! But even among them some behaved differ- ently during the interrogations, realized what was happening, turned stubborn, and died silently but at least not shamefully. For some reason, they did not, after all, put on public trial Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yenukidze, Chubar, Kosior, and, for that matter, Krylenko himself, even though their names would have embellished the trials.

They put on trial the most compliant. A selection was made after all.

The men selected were drawn from a lower order, but, on the other hand, the mustached Producer knew each of them very well. He also knew that on the whole they were
weaklings
, and he knew, one by one, the particular weaknesses of each. Therein lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and his life's achievement: to see people's weaknesses on the lowest plane of being.

And the man who seems, in the perspective of time, to have embodied the highest and brightest intelligence of all the dis- graced and executed leaders (and to whom Arthur Koestler ap- parently dedicated his talented inquiry) was N. I. Bukharin. Stalin saw through him, too, at that lowest stratum at which the human being unites with the earth; and Stalin held him in a long death grip, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, letting him go just a little, and then catching him again. Bukharin wrote every last word of our entire existing—in other words, nonexist- ent—Constitution, which is so beautiful to listen to. And he flew about up there, just below the clouds, and thought that he had outplayed Koba: that he had thrust a constitution on him that would compel him to relax the dictatorship. And at that very moment, he himself had already been caught in those jaws.