Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (13 page)

After all the threats, the beatings, the use of prisoners’ families as bargaining chips, there was also that weird loyalty to the party and the Revolution that forms the psychological core of Arthur Koestler’s famous novel
Darkness at Noon
. It is possible, at the end, that some of the confessors may have come to believe that in toeing one last party line, they were somehow doing the right thing.

Why the Lie Was Believed

More important than the question of how the confessions were elicited is the issue of how Soviet society could accept such outlandish propositions. And how could men as intelligent as Ambassador Davies, a good portion of the diplomatic corps, a job lot of foreign correspondents, many independent intellectuals, and courageous labor leaders the world over not see through the dark farce of the proceedings in Moscow?

Clearly, Russians had private doubts about the veracity of the confessions. From 1935 to 1939, Lyubov Shaporina, wife of the composer Yuri Shaporin, kept a diary, which is now in a library in Saint Petersburg. Her entry for January 30, 1937, the day Pyatakov was sentenced, reads:

Each People’s Commissariat has in its leadership a traitor and a spy . . . They are all party members who have made it through all the purges . . . For the last fifteen years, there’s been a continual process of decay, treachery and betrayal going on, and all of it in full sight of the Chekists [secret police]. And what about the things that are not being said at the trial? Think how much more terrible they must be. And worst of all is the very openness of the defendants. Even Lafontaine’s lambs tried to justify themselves before the wolf, but our wolves and foxes—people like Radek, Shestov, Zinoviev, old hands at this business—lay their heads down on the block like lambs, say “mea culpa” and tell everything; they might as well be at confession. Feuchtwanger [whose impressions of the trial must have been covered in the Soviet press] wondered why everyone is so forthcoming—how naive can you get! What’s hypnosis for, anyway?
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Obviously worried lest her writings were discovered, Shaporina employed a tone that was a mixture of irony and contempt. She seems to be beyond belief or disbelief. But Shaporina was a member of the intelligentsia, an elite that had been an earlier target of the Stalinists. Many of her compatriots were more credulous.

In early 1937, Russia was just emerging from extraordinary and appalling social upheavals. An essentially agricultural nation badly damaged by war and civil war had been transformed from a peasant economy into a heavily industrialized and urban society. The peasants had been reorganized into collective farms or else had left the land to find work in new plants and mines. Central control had at first been weak: there had been substantial movements of population, dislocating and destroying ancient communities and creating entirely new ones. Millions had starved; millions had moved; millions had joined the Communist Party, mostly for practical rather than ideological reasons. At certain points during the Great Experiment, packs of feral children were to be found living wild in the cities and towns.

Hardly surprisingly, all kinds of strange things had happened. People had acquired positions of expertise or leadership despite their lack of qualifications for either. Raw engineers had been turned out from new institutes and immediately assumed complete responsibility for machinery they barely understood. Managers whose knowledge of running large enterprises was rudimentary were appointed nonetheless. And enormous discussions raged among senior Bolsheviks about whether and when to apply the brakes on the runaway train. But many of the difficulties encountered during what came to be known as the Soviet miracle—the human cost and the terrible errors committed along the way—had never been discussed overtly or even acknowledged. And somehow, from quite early on, the alteration of disastrous policies or the placing of blame for the hardships suffered by the Soviet people became entwined with a series of trials in which scapegoat figures were arraigned for deliberately creating the problems that society faced. One by one, starting in 1928, these trials first created and then elaborated on the idea that everything was the fault not of the Communist Party, nor of “scientific socialism,” but of plotters. In other words, evil was not a consequence of something endemic in the system but of external, conscious decisions by ruthless enemies.

To understand this better, it’s worth looking at what some have called the warm-up trials, which began by seeking explanations for a series of catastrophic accidents in fledgling Soviet industry. In the year that Trotsky was exiled, 1928, more than fifty Russian and foreign engineers were accused of blowing up mines in the Donbas region, close to the town of Shakhty. Eleven were given the death sentence, which was carried out on five of them. Two years after the Shakhty Trial came what was known as the Industrial Party Trial. During these proceedings, the prosecution alleged the existence of a clandestine Industrial Party two thousand strong, which, in collaboration with anti-Communist Russians based in Paris and with the assistance of French intelligence, planned to overthrow communism. Five were sentenced to death, but their sentences were later commuted.

Within three months, as we have seen, the Union Bureau of the Menshevik Party was on trial, accused of attempting to sabotage the Soviet Union’s economic program and of planning an armed revolt. All of the accused “confessed,” receiving long terms of imprisonment. In April 1933, in the Metropolitan Vickers Trial, six British electrical engineers were accused, alongside a large number of Russians, of “wrecking” and sabotage. Two of the British engineers confessed.

So, by the time of the murder of Kirov in December 1934, there was a long history of trials and confessions, of elaborate plots and complex conspiracies, all adding up to the idea that there was a constantly shifting but ever-present group in Soviet society determined to wreck progress by any means necessary. It was after the Kirov assassination, however, that this process became identified with leaders and former leaders of the Communist Party itself, and that old Bolsheviks found themselves in the dock.

First, Nikolayev—the assassin of Kirov—asserted at his trial, just before New Year 1935, that Trotsky may have contributed five thousand rubles to the plotters. Two weeks later, at the Moscow Center Trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others were given prison sentences for having organized counterrevolutionary activities, and thus having incited the assassins of Kirov. By the end of July of the same year, Kamenev and thirty-seven others had been tried for plotting against Stalin. Two were shot and Kamenev received yet another long prison sentence. By August 1936, a doubtless exhausted Kamenev was back in the dock for the first of the great show trials, this time with his longtime ideological soulmate Zinoviev and a number of others, in what the authorities called the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center or, more colloquially, the Main Center. This time every single one of the defendants, including Kamenev, was shot—not before, however, implicating Pyatakov and others yet to be tried in their testimonies. One trial led to another.

And each added a new element. Pyatakov’s trial partly focused on alleged complicity with fascist governments. Later in 1937, the secret trial of Marshal Tukhachevsky and some of his fellow officers suggested the possibility of a military coup d’état. Finally, the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-one, including Nikolai Bukharin, once known as the darling of the party, established a supposed connection between anyone who had belonged to the right opposition to Stalin and those on the Trotskyite left.

As one bestselling apologia for Stalinism, printed in the United States during the Second World War, had it, there had been three layers of Trotskyism uncovered. They had been separate, so that “if one of the layers was exposed, the others would carry on.”
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The taxonomy was something like this: layer one was the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center, headed by Zinoviev and responsible for directing terrorism and assassination. Layer two, the Trotskyite Parallel Center, led by Pyatakov, was charged with sabotage. And finally, the most important and secret layer was the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, with Bukharin as its organizing genius. “The entire apparatus,” said the author of
The Great Conspiracy Against Russia
, “consisted of not more than a few thousand members and twenty or thirty leaders.”

And the separation of the layers helped explain why it was that the devious Pyatakov, despite his very full confession, failed to reveal the others, and why the Soviet authorities, as a consequence, had been able to cut into one layer at a time without messily slicing through the whole infernal conspiracy.

This possibility had been alluded to by at least one foreign observer in the period after Pyatakov’s trial. Dennis Nowell Pritt KC, Labour MP for the constituency of Hammersmith, had noted that the statements from the dock in the Zinoviev Trial had, remarkably, failed to mention the extraordinary campaign of sabotage uncovered in court just five months later. In his preface to Dudley Collard’s book, Pritt—who had been in Moscow for the Zinoviev Trial—acknowledged that the very testimony he had heard there might well be part of the conspiracy itself. Was it not possible, he asked his British readers, that “the real motive for the apparent complete abjectness of the confessions of some of the accused . . . was to lead the authorities to the belief that they had got to the bottom of the conspiracy, in order that the second or parallel center might escape detection?”
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Thus was a possible question mark over the veracity of these proceedings turned instead into a confirmation of the next trial.

Similar thoughts must have impressed themselves on the minds of millions of ordinary Russians. Had Zinoviev not, after all, endorsed the reality behind the Shakhty Trial? Had Pyatakov not given his assent and backing to the prosecution of the Industrial Party? Had Bukharin not stayed in his Politburo seat during the arraignment of both? And if the Mensheviks had been guilty of such strange and complex plots—as everyone agreed they were—then why should not Pyatakov be guilty too?

As early as December 1930, the leading Communist V. V. Kuibyshev could address a plenum of the Central Committee with this dire warning of the dangers and treacheries ahead:

The enemy has been dislodged, but the enemy has not given up. He has become hardened. He will resist and oppose us fiercely. Sabotage within the country, the resistance of the kulaks who are in the process of being liquidated—all of this expresses a bitter class struggle. The threats of an intervention—this is the other side of the same coin . . . We demand of a leader of the party and of a leader of the Soviet state a relentless struggle against all attempts at concealing ideologically class-alien tasks from us.
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If you took a prophecy like this seriously, then little that happened subsequently would surprise you.

The Stalinist Buttress

To some extent, foreign sympathizers with the Soviet Union and the cause of the international proletariat had been subjected to the same indoctrination process as those inside the country. They had seen the young socialist state as being under external and internal attack from the very outset. During the civil war of 1918-1920, armies from the United States, Britain, France, and Japan had all intervened to lend assistance to a variety of anti-Soviet Russian generals and admirals. Not only were Soviet sympathizers inclined to believe that hostile forces would use any opening they could to destroy communism in the future, but many of them also routinely disbelieved everything their own governments or newspapers said about anything, let alone about Russia.

Many more were simply desperate for Russia to succeed in creating something new. They were sick of the capitalist system, which they blamed for war, colonialism, and the immiseration of millions, and the Soviet Union, flawed though it might be, remained their best hope. “The air which one breathes in the West,” wrote Feuchtwanger, “is stale and foul. In the Western civilization there is no longer clarity and resolution.” Whereas in Russia, “There is still everywhere debris and dirty scaffolding, but already the framework of the mighty building is rising up, pure and clear-cut . . . It is good, after all the compromise of the West, to see an achievement like this, to which a man can say, ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes,’ with all his heart; and,” concluded the novelist, “because it seemed ungrateful to keep this ‘Yes’ within me, I wrote this book.”
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Such idealists clung to the pronouncements of sympathetic and more moderate experts, like the socialist writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, that Stalin and his colleagues were indeed building a better society, or, in Keynes’s words, were “engaged in a vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully.”
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Some liberals and social democrats were actually happier with Stalin’s apparently more practical (if brutal) attempts to build Socialism in One Country than with Trotsky’s more radical and utopian demand that the revolution be spread all over the world. Their pragmatism led them to endorse the tough but concrete efforts made by the Stalinists to create their new society, as opposed to the windy posturing of the Trotskyists. It was, according to the late François Furet, a “revenge of the experts on revolutionary Marxism. . . . They believed their universe was taking shape in Russia.”
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So even those who were not Communist dogmatists or party members were already halfway to believing that Stalin was essentially good and Trotsky essentially bad.