The Gulag Archipelago (62 page)

So what it comes down to is that all Krylenko and the GPU had to do was select the right people. But the risk was small. Goods spoiled in interrogation could always be sent off to the grave. And whoever managed to get through both the frying pan and the fire could always be given medical treatment and be fattened up, and put on public trial!

So then where is the riddle? How they were
worked over?
Very simply: Do you want to
live?
(And even those who don't care about themselves care about their children or grandchildren.) Do you understand that it takes absolutely no effort to have you shot, without your ever leaving the courtyards of the GPU? (And there was no doubt whatever about that. Whoever hadn't yet learned it would be given a course in being ground down by the Lubyanka.) But it is useful both for you and for us to have you act out a certain drama, the text for which you, as specialists, are going to write yourselves, and we, as prosecutors, are going to learn by heart . . . and we will try to remember the technical terms. (Krylenko sometimes made mistakes during the trial. He said "freight car axle" instead of "locomotive axle.") It will be unpleasant to perform and you will feel ashamed, but you just have to suffer through it. After all, it is better to
live
. And what assurance have we that you won't shoot us afterward? Why should we take vengeance on you? You are excellent specialists and you have not committed any crimes and we value you. Look at how many wrecking trials there have been; you'll see that no one who behaved has been shot. (Mercy for the defendants who cooperated in one trial was an important prerequisite for the success of the next. And hope was transmitted via this chain right up to Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves.) But the under- standing is that you have to carry out
all
our conditions to the very last! The trial must work for the good of socialist society.

And the defendants would fulfill
all
the conditions.

Thus they served up all the subtlety of engineers' intellectual opposition as dirty wrecking on a level low enough to be com- prehensible to the last illiterate in the country. (But they had not yet descended to the level of ground glass in the food of the workers. The prosecutors had not yet thought that one up.)

A further theme was ideological motivation. Had they begun to wreck? It was the result of a hostile motivation. And now they jointly collaborated in confessing? It was once again the result of ideological motivation, for they had been converted (in prison) by the blazing blast-furnace face of the third year of the Five-Year Plan! Although in their last words they begged for their lives, that wasn't the main thing for them. (Fedotov: "There is no forgiveness for us. The prosecutor is right!") The main thing for these strange defendants right at that moment, on the threshold of death, was to convince the people and the whole world of the infallibility and farsightedness of the Soviet govern- ment. Ramzin, in particular, glorified the "revolutionary con- sciousness of the proletarian masses and their leaders," who had been "able to find immeasurably more dependable paths of economic policy" than the scientists, and who had calculated the tempos of economic growth rate far more correctly. And then: "I had come to understand it was necessary to make a jump ahead, and that it was necessary to make a
leap
forward, that it was necessary to capture by storm," etc., etc.

[
Protsess Prompartii
, p. 504. And that is how they were talking here in the Soviet Union,
in our own country
, in 1930, when Mao Tse-tung was still a stripling.]

And Larichev declared: "The Soviet Union is invincible against the weakening capitalist world." And Kalinnikov: "The dictatorship of the pro- letariat is an inevitable necessity." And further: "The interests of the people and the interests of the Soviet government merge into one purposeful whole." Yes, and in addition, in the country- side "the general line of the Party, the destruction of the kulaks, is correct." They had time, while awaiting execution, to deliver themselves of judgments about everything. And the repenting intellectuals even had enough voice for such a prophecy as this: "In proportion to the development of society, individual life is going to become more circumscribed. . . . Collective will is the highest form."

Thus it was that with eight-horse traction all the goals of the trial were attained:

1. All the shortages in the country, including famine, cold, lack of clothing, chaos, and obvious stupidities, were blamed on the engineer-wreckers.

2. The people were terrified by the threat of imminent inter- vention from abroad and therefore prepared for new sacrifices.

3. Leftist circles in the West were warned of the intrigues of their governments.

4. The solidarity of the engineers was destroyed; all the in- telligentsia was given a good scare and left divided within itself. And so that there should be no doubt about it, this purpose of the trial was once more clearly proclaimed by Ramzin:

"I would like to see that, in consequence of the present trial of the Promparty,
the dark and shameful past of the entire intelli- gentsia
will be buried once and for all."29

Larichev joined in: "This caste must be
destroyed!
. . . There is not and
there cannot be loyalty among engineers!
"30 And Och- kin too: The intelligentsia "is some kind of mush. As the state accuser has said, it has no backbone, and this constitutes un- conditional spinelessness. . . . How immeasurably superior is the sensitivity of the proletariat."

[
Ibid
., p. 509. For some reason, the main thing about the proletariat is always, believe it or not,
sensitivity
. Always via the nostrils.]

So now just why should such diligent collaborators be shot?

And that was the way the history of our intelligentsia has been written for decades—from the anathema of 1920 (the reader will remember: "not the brains of the nation, but shit," and "the ally of the black generals," and "the hired agent of imperialism") right up to the anathema of 1930.

So should anyone be surprised that the word "intelligentsia" got established here in Russia as a term of abuse.

That is how the public trials were manufactured. Stalin's searching mind had once and for all attained its ideal. (Those blunderheads Hitler and Goebbels would come to envy it and rush into their shameful failure with the burning of the Reichstag. )

The standard had been set, and now it could be retained perennially and performed over again every season—according to the wishes of the Chief Producer. And in fact the Chief wanted another within three months. The rehearsal time was very short, but that was all right. Come and see the show! Only in our theater! A premiere.

M. The Case of the All-Union Bureau of the Mensheviks— March 1-9, 1931

The case was heard by a Special Assize of the Supreme Court, the presiding judge in this case, for some reason, being N. M. Shvernik. Otherwise everyone was in his proper place—Antonov- Saratovsky, Krylenko, and his assistant Roginsky. The pro- ducers were sure of themselves. For after all, the subject wasn't technical but was Party material, ordinary stuff. So they brought fourteen defendants onto the stage.

And it all went off not just smoothly but brilliantly.

I was twelve at the time. For three years I had been attentively reading everything about politics on the enormous pages of
Izvestiya
. I read the stenographic records of these two trials line by line. In the Promparty case, I had already felt, in my boyish heart, superfluity, falsehood, fabrication, but at least there were spectacular stage sets—universal intervention, the paralysis of all industry, the distribution of ministerial portfolios! In the trial of the Mensheviks, all the same stage sets were brought out, but they were more pallid. And the actors spoke their lines with- out enthusiasm. And the whole performance was a yawning bore, an inept, tired repetition. (Could it be that Stalin felt this, too, through his rhinoceros hide? How else can one explain his call- ing off the case of the Working Peasants Party after it had already been prepared, or why there were no more trials for several years?)

It would be boring to base our interpretations once again on the stenographic record. In any case, I have fresher evidence from one of the principal defendants in this case—Mikhail Petrovich Yakubovich. At the present moment, his petition for rehabilitation, exposing all the dirty work which went on, has filtered through to samizdat, our savior, and people are reading it just as it happened.

[He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his insolation, he has been granted a
personal
pension for his revolutionary activity! What monstrosities exist in our country.]

His story offers material proof and ex- planation of the whole chain of Moscow trials of the thirties.

How was the nonexistent "Union Bureau" created? The GPU had been given an assignment: they had been told to prove that the Mensheviks had adroitly wormed their way into—and seized —many important government jobs for counterrevolutionary purposes. The genuine situation did not jibe with this plan. There were no real Mensheviks in important posts. But then there were no real Mensheviks on trial either. (True, they say V. K. Ikov actually was a member of the quiet, do-nothing illegal Moscow Bureau of the Mensheviks—but they didn't know that at the trial. He was processed in the second echelon and received a mere
eight
.) The GPU had its own design: two from the Supreme Council of the Economy, two from the People's Commissariat of Trade, two from the State Bank, one from the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, one from the State Planning Com- mission. (What a boring and unoriginal plan! Back in 1920, they had ordered, in the matter of the "Tactical Center," that it include two from the Union of Rebirth, two from the Council of Public Figures, two from this and that, etc.) Therefore they
picked
the individuals who suited them on the basis of their positions. And whether they were Mensheviks or not depended on whether one believed rumors. Some who got caught this way were not Mensheviks at all, but directives had been given to consider them Mensheviks. The genuine political views of those accused did not interest the GPU in the least. Not all the de- fendants even knew each other. And they raked in Menshevik witnesses, too, wherever they could find them.

[One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers' group in the War Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Min- ister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr
long-termers
of Gulag. I do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from 1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in .Spassk Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.]

(All the wit- nesses, without exception, were later given prison terms too.) Ramzin testified prolifically and obligingly at this trial also. But the GPU pinned its hopes on the principal defendant, Vladimir Gustavovich Groman (with the idea that he would
help
work up this
case
and be amnestied in return), and on the provocateur Petunin. (I am basing all this on Yakubovich's report.)

Let us now introduce M. P. Yakubovich. He had begun his revolutionary activity so early that he had not even finished the gymnasium. In March, 1917, he was already Chairman of the Smolensk Soviet. Impelled by the strength of his convictions, which continued to lead him on, he became a strong and success- ful orator. At the Congress of the Western Front, he impetuously called those journalists who were demanding that the war con- tinue
enemies of the people
. And this was in April, 1917. He was nearly hauled from the rostrum, and he apologized, but there- after in his speech he maneuvered so adroitly and so won over his listeners that at the end he called them enemies of the people again, and this time to stormy applause. He was elected to the delegation sent to the Petrograd Soviet, and hardly had he arrived there than—with the informality of those days—he was named to the Military Commission of the Petrograd Soviet. There he exerted a strong influence on the appointment of army com- missars, [He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff, who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.] and in the end he became an army commissar on the Southwestern Front and personally arrested Denikin in Vinnitsa (after the Kornilov revolt), and regretted very much indeed (during the trial as well) that he had not shot him on the spot.

Clear-eyed, always sincere, and always completely absorbed in his own ideas—whether they were right or wrong—he was counted as—and was—one of the younger members of the Men- shevik Party. This did not prevent him, however, from presenting his own projects to the Menshevik leadership with boldness and passion, such as, in the spring of 1917, proposing the formation of a Social Democratic government, or, in 1919, recommending that the Mensheviks enter the Comintern. (Dan and the others invariably rejected all his plans and their variations, and quite condescendingly, for that matter.) In July, 1917, he was very pained by the action of the socialist Petrograd Soviet in approv- ing the Provisional Government's calling up army units for use against other socialists, considering it a fatal error even though the other socialists were using armed force. Hardly had the Octo- ber coup taken place than Yakubovich proposed to his party that it should support the Bolsheviks wholeheartedly and work to improve the state structure they were creating. In the upshot, he was finally ostracized by Martov, and by 1920 he had left the ranks of the Mensheviks once and for all, convinced that he could not get them to follow the Bolsheviks' path.