Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (11 page)

Pyatakov Repents

What had supposedly happened was this. Sometime during July, secret police from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) had raided the apartment of Pyatakov’s ex-wife. There they had turned up incriminating documents concerning his activities in the 1920s, when he had been one of Trotsky’s closest allies. During August, Pyatakov was interviewed by the head of the NKVD, Yezhov. He protested his innocence and even wrote to the papers condemning Trotsky and Zinoviev. The August 21 edition of
Pravda
carried a letter from Pyatakov insisting that anti-Soviet plotters should be exterminated. “One cannot find words fully to express one’s indignation and disgust. These people have lost the last semblance of humanity. They must be destroyed like carrion that is polluting the pure, bracing air of the land of Soviets, dangerous carrion that may cause the death of our leaders.”
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Privately, Pyatakov offered to testify against Zinoviev and Kamenev at their forthcoming second trial, and volunteered to execute them himself should they be found guilty. He was, he told the authorities, sufficiently zealous even to execute his ex-wife. He also wrote to his immediate boss, Sergei Ordzhonikidze, to declare his innocence, and repeated this protestation in a letter to Stalin himself.

In September, however, he told a different story. When Ordzhonikidze went to see Stalin to argue for Pyatakov’s release, the general secretary handed him transcripts of confessions made by Pyatakov during interrogation. In these, Pyatakov admitted his continuing secret attachment to Trotsky since the latter’s exile, and his participation in planning acts of sabotage. When Ordzhonikidze was allowed to see his deputy in prison, Pyatakov confirmed that his confessions were voluntary. From this moment on, Pyatakov didn’t waver from his story. The 1931 meeting with Sedov had, he said at his trial, “only served as a fresh impetus” in his fight against the party and the Soviet Union. “Unquestionably, the old Trotskyite views survived in me, and they subsequently grew more and more.”

On the face of it, the trial proved that Pyatakov and his codefendants had been involved in treason. Day after day, they agreed with the prosecutors that they were indeed Trotskyites, saboteurs, assassins, and collaborators with foreign fascist and militarist regimes. They affirmed the details of their guilt, adding small embellishments of their own along the way. At only one point did Pyatakov demur from the charges against him, and that was during the morning session of January 29, in his final plea to the court in mitigation of sentence: “I cannot reconcile myself to one assertion made by the state prosecutor, namely that even now I remain a Trotskyite . . . The only motive that prompted me to make the statements that I have made was the desire, even now, even at too late a date, to get rid of my loathsome Trotskyite past.”
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He continued: “I have landed in the very heart, in the very center of the counterrevolution—counterrevolution of the most vile, loathsome, fascist type, Trotskyite counterrevolution.” The criminal mastermind deeply regretted, he said, that Trotsky was not in the dock beside him. And concluded: “In a few hours you will pass your sentence. And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his party, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.”
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His codefendant, the former journalist Karl Radek, spelled out the political significance of the trial. There were in the Soviet Union, he told the court, “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism . . . gave us this help. . . . Before this court and in this hour of retribution, we say to these elements: whoever has the slightest rift with the party, let him realize that tomorrow he may be a diversionist, tomorrow he may be a traitor if he does not thoroughly heal that rift by complete and utter frankness to the party.”
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A more comprehensive warning against setting foot on the slippery slope of dissent could not have been given.

The court resumed at the appalling hour of three a.m. on the morning of January 30. Eleven of the defendants, including Pyatakov, were sentenced to be shot, and four others, including Radek, were given prison sentences. According to Lion Feuchtwanger, a celebrated German novelist present at the trial, as the prisoners were led out, the reprieved Radek “turned around, raised a hand in greeting, shrugged his shoulders very slightly, nodded to the others, his friends who were condemned to death, and smiled. Yes, he smiled.”
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Within days, sixty hours at the most, Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov, who had so fortuitously escaped the White firing squad during the civil war, received a bullet in the base of his skull from a comrade GPU (secret police) officer who was just doing his duty on behalf of the Soviet state.

Home Truths

In many Russian minds, it was easy enough to believe that Pyatakov and company were guilty. Fueled by the latent antagonism of workers toward the privileged
spetz
and the bureaucrats, the idea of a conspiracy seemed somehow plausible. And the people must have been impressed that the accusations and confessions came from within the heart of Bolshevism itself. Within the party, the very making of such accusations had become a kind of loyalty test. In July 1936, at around the time that Pyatakov’s ex-wife’s apartment was raided, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution stating, “The indelible mark of every Bolshevik in the current situation ought to be his ability to recognize and identify enemies of the party no matter how well they may have camouflaged their identity.”
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There was only one way in which such a sentiment could be interpreted: the enemy is all around us and will often be the person you least suspect; not only that, but it is your duty to unmask him. In such a situation it could only make sense to issue as many denunciations as you could, lest you were thought to be soft on Trotskyism and therefore a secret Trotskyite yourself, ripe to be denounced by someone else. It was also wise to see in every accident and every act of incompetence something more deliberate and sinister. And not just accidents happening today, but those that happened five years ago. So rail crashes or disappointing production figures from the past had now to be scrutinized for the possibility that they had been caused by conspiracy.

An insight into the psychology of this process is gained from an incident that took place a few days after Pyatakov’s execution. The dead man’s boss was the popular Communist and friend of Stalin, Sergei Ordzhonikidze, who had refused at first to believe in his subordinate’s guilt. But on February 5, 1937, Ordzhonikidze met the heads of Soviet heavy industry. A transcript survived in the Soviet archives and was retrieved in the 1990s. Ordzhonikidze begins with a blast of total exasperation.

You think that if I had as my first deputy a man like Pyatakov, who had worked in industry for the past fifteen years, who had tremendous connections with all sorts of people. You think that this person couldn’t possibly sneak one or two of his people in. But sneak them in he did! Some of them were found out, others not. . . . You think a saboteur is someone who walks around with a revolver in his pocket, someone who waits in a dark corner for his victim? Who could think that Pyatakov could be a saboteur, and yet he turned out to be a saboteur and more still, a fine talker. He told the investigators how he did it. . . . Glebov was running the show at Borisov’s. Did you bother to examine what was going on there, did you tell me how to rectify the disgraceful situation there? The hell you did! . . . How could this have happened? . . . How could it have been that Pyatakov was on our staff and yet no one, by God, saw through him? You’ll say to me, “He was your deputy, but you didn’t see through him. So what do you want from us? ” It’s not right. . . . This damned Pyatakov, this damned Rataichak and others! They have played such filthy tricks on us. . . . Now we must answer for it.
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Meanwhile, the security services and party apparatuses were now given specific targets for how many Trotskyites and assorted terrorist-saboteurs they were to uncover, prosecute, imprison, and execute in each region and city. It stood to reason, as Ordzhonikidze—who committed suicide shortly afterward—had said, that they must be out there. During what came to be known as the Great Terror, the quotas were surpassed.

The Reaction Abroad

In the rest of the world, a large and influential slice of opinion also believed that a great Trotskyite conspiracy had existed, with people investing a great deal of effort, and not a little authority, in attempting to show that Pyatakov and his codefendants were guilty as charged. These people, in turn, influenced significant parts of Western liberal and labor movements. It helped that not only the expected Stalin-worshippers and Communists were convinced the Pyatakov trial was genuine. There were also people such as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies. In his diary of the time, later written up into a book,
Mission to Moscow
, and published during the Second World War, when the United States and Russia were allies, Davies reflected that, based on the best advice available to him, the seventeen codefendants were indeed traitors of some kind. “I have talked to many, if not all, of the members of the Diplomatic Corps here,” he wrote, “and, with possibly one exception, they are all of the opinion that the proceedings established clearly the existence of a political plot and conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
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Of course, Davies may have been guilty of selective listening, seeking out and obtaining confirmation of his own impressions; it was already his view that the accused were telling something close to the truth. In his contemporary account, he described Pyatakov’s statement as “dispassionate, logical [and] detailed.” Furthermore, said Davies almost axiomatically, “the impression of despairing candor, with which he gave it, carried conviction.” Davies, for one, could not conceive that Pyatakov was somehow playing a role.
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Others present at the trial were also swayed by Pyatakov’s manner. The exiled German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger believed that there was a difference of view between those who watched the proceedings from afar—and believed them to be bogus—and those who attended in person. He himself had had grave doubts about the trial, in August 1936, of Zinoviev and Kamenev on similar charges. The accusations had then seemed “utterly incredible,” the confessions fraudulent and obtained by some obscure but dubious method. Witnessing the proceedings themselves, however, had changed the novelist’s mind. “When I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw and heard Pyatakov, Radek, and their friends and heard what they said and how they said it,” confessed Feuchtwanger, “I was forced to accept the evidence of my senses and my doubts melted away as naturally as salt dissolves in water. If that was lying, then I do not know what truth is.”
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Feuchtwanger particularly noted the conduct of the leading conspirator:

I shall never forget how this [Georgy] Pyatakov stood in front of the microphone, a middle-aged man of average build, rather bald, with a reddish, old-fashioned, sparse, pointed beard and how he lectured. Calmly and at the same time sedulously . . . he expounded, pointed his finger, gave the impression of a schoolteacher, a historian giving a lecture on the life and deeds of a man who had been dead for many years, named Pyatakov.
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Then there was the evidence provided by a memoir from an American engineer, John Littlepage, who worked as a foreign expert in the Soviet mining industry from 1927 to 1937. When the Pyatakov trial opened, Littlepage became convinced that the confessions made there explained some of his own experiences in Russia.

Littlepage had been in Berlin at the same time as the purchasing commission headed by Pyatakov. He noted that the commission had issued contracts to several companies for equipment to be supplied on what appeared to be more favorable terms than those of their competitors, but which turned out, on examination, to be more expensive. “I reported my findings to the Russian members of the commission with considerable self-satisfaction,” wrote Littlepage. “To my astonishment the Russians were not at all pleased. They even brought considerable pressure upon me to approve the deal, telling me I had misunderstood what was wanted.” Littlepage’s immediate thought was that someone, somewhere was taking kickbacks. But “Pyatakov’s confession is a plausible explanation, in my opinion, of what was going on in Berlin in 1931. I had found it hard to believe that these men were ordinary grafters . . . But they had been seasoned political conspirators before the Revolution, and had taken risks of the same degree for the sake of their so-called cause.”
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And revelations about sabotage also chimed with things that Littlepage had encountered within the Soviet Union: sand in diesel engines, mining methods “so obviously wrong that a first-year engineering student could have pointed out most of their faults,” the ignoring of good advice, the ensnaring in red tape of any proposal for improvement. All of these disastrous and wasteful phenomena “became clearer, so far as I was concerned, after the conspiracy trial in January 1937.” “I am firmly convinced,” concluded Littlepage, “that Stalin and his collaborators took a long time to discover that discontented revolutionary Communists were his worst enemies.”