Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials
§ 233. A careful examination of the trial records and other evidence adduced in previous sections of this report has convinced this Commission that the confessions of the accused and witnesses in the Moscow trials were false in so far as they implicated Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov in the criminal activities to which they confessed. But since the charges against Trotsky and Sedov were crucial in both trials, the discrediting of the testimony purporting to convict Trotsky and Sedov inevitably discredits the trials as a whole. The Commission does not pretend to know whether or not the accused were guilty, or if guilty what crimes they had committed. We can, and do, state in the most categorical fashion that on the basis of all the evidence we find them not guilty of having conspired with Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov for any purpose whatever. We repeat, moreover, that it is impossible for any honest person, on the basis of records so full of contradictions and deliberate falsifications as the records of both trials, to come to any conclusion concerning their guilt or innocence of other charges, or the nature of their crimes if any.
The question naturally arises, If the accused were innocent of having conspired with Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov for the criminal purposes stated in the charges and the testimony, then why did they confess? We do not know; and since our inquiry is concerned with the truth or falsity of their confessions in so far as they implicate Trotsky and Sedov, our report is conclusive irrespective of any theory as to the reasons why they confessed. But material in our hands bears directly upon the important question whether the extortion of false confessions, and their use to inculpate those confessing and other persons, is a common practice of the Soviet police. Because of the historic significance of this question, we judge it proper to present this material.
§ 234. We quote, first, from an article by Anton Ciliga (identified § 290) in La Revolution Prolétarienne, January, 1937, entitled “Judicial Investigation in the U.S.S.R., as I Saw It.” This article, to which Dr. Ciliga refers in his statement to the Comité pour l'Enquête sur le Procès de Moscou, has been sent to us with that statement. Ciliga says:
The [Zinoviev-Kamenev] trial was only the latest and most sensational of a whole series of trials of a political nature which I had the opportunity to witness on the ground. The means of preparation and presentation of the preceding trials (against the engineers in 1929 and 1930, against the Russian Social Democrats in 1931) were simply perfected and carried to the point of absurdity in the latest trial. (Com. Exh. 5, 2.)
Ciliga was arrested on May 21, 1930, in the night. It is a general rule, he says, to make searches and arrests at night, furtively as it were, and without commotion.
The purpose of this method of acting secretly is to weaken the arrested person’s will to resist. On the order of arrest which was shown to me, not the slightest reason for the arrest was indicated. Nor was this detail accidental; it is the general rule.
He was conducted to prison in a private vehicle, he says, this “privilege” being due to the fact that he was living in a Leningrad palace in which resided Kirov and the other high party officials.
... The appearance of a closed police-wagon before the “House of the Party” would have made too great a sensation. All that I was able to see in Russia has brought me to the conviction that the fundamental tactical rule of bureaucratic justice is as follows: all sorts of vexations, lies and violence are permitted, but everything must be done quietly, without scandal; appearances must be saved. (Ibid.)
On the third night after his arrest he was taken before the examining judge.
It is a general rule of the GPU to call arrested persons for examination during the night; a sleepy man is less concentrated, less prepared to resist. Psychology is the favorite science of the policemen of the GPU.
“You know why you have been arrested? No, you don’t know? Well, then, why do you suppose?”
Such were the first questions. Some time later I read in prison a work on the Spanish Inquisition, and to my great astonishment I learned that these were also the classical first questions of the Inquisitorial examiners. (Ibid.)
Ciliga says that he was later informed that he had been arrested as an Oppositionist; and that he was offered his liberty at the price of a declaration renouncing the Opposition and condemning Oppositional activity. At that time, he states, the GPU and the Party did not demand that one change one’s point of view, but were content with a simple declaration. They even admitted privately that the Opposition might be right “in some things.” But they were all the more insistent that the declarations should affirm that the majority was 100 per cent right, and the Opposition loo per cent wrong. This was demanded in the name of safeguarding and reinforcing the authority of the Party.
This fact is of great importance to an understanding of the mechanism of social and political life in the U.S.S.R. The Russian Communists are absolutely impregnated, more exactly infected, with this theory of two truths: one, the real truth, for the initiates, for a small governing circle; the other, the lie-truth, for the non-initiates, the great mass of the people. In its ultimate development this philosophy of two truths has led to the lie which permeates the whole social life to the point of hypocritical and lying declarations and testimony and the monstrous trials of the “penitents.” (Ibid.)
He states that at the time of his arrest he did not believe that torture was employed by the Soviet government to obtain false depositions:
Are tortures and false depositions, so shameful to the revolution, employed in the Soviet Union? are they employed systematically? each of you will ask in painful perplexity. Before being imprisoned not only did I doubt these facts, but I believed that all statements to this effect were wicked calumnies against Russia, even against the Russia of Stalin! ...
One evening, my cell-mate pricked up his ears. “What’s the matter?” “Don’t you hear a muffled noise?” he replied. And, indeed from the end of the corridor came muffled sounds. “What can it be?” I asked. “They are torturing someone.” I was indignant. “That people abroad believe all these petit-bourgeois tales circulated against the GPU may be understandable, but to believe such stories here, in Russia, is shameful! Come now, the GPU is not the Tsarist Okhrana! Evidently the GPU kills, annihilates, when it is necessary; but it does not torture.” My companion looked at me uneasily, not knowing what to think of me. Then he said, “I wish you a long stay in the hands of the GPU; then you will come to understand what it is. You foreign Communists really know nothing. If a Russian Communist had said such a thing to me I would simply have stopped talking to him.” (Ibid.)
The prison at that time, says Ciliga, was full of engineer “saboteurs.” Among them were several who had “confessed.”
Little by little, with great difficulty, I was able to learn the history of their affairs, the history of their connection with “sabotage.” “They kept me five months in isolation,” said one of them who had “confessed,” “without papers, without anything to read, without mail, without contact with the outside world, without visits from my family; I was hungry, I suffered from solitude; they demanded of me that I confess having committed an act of sabotage that never took place; I refused to take upon myself crimes that had never been committed, but they told me that if I was really for the Soviet power, as I said I was, I ought to confess in this affair, for the Soviet power needed my confession; that I need have no fear of the consequences; the Soviet régime would take into consideration my open-hearted confession, and would give me the opportunity to work and to make good my mistakes through work. At the same time I would have visits from my family, letters, walks, newspapers. But if I persisted in maintaining silence I would be subjected to pitiless repression, and not myself alone, but my wife and children also. For months I resisted; but my situation became so intolerable that nothing, it seemed to me, could be worse; in any case I had become indifferent to everything. And I signed everything the examining judge demanded of me... .”
After having spent several months side by side with these engineer “saboteurs,” I realized that this was no case of an honest although pitiless terror; it was a lugubrious terror, combined with the most detestable blackmail... . It was as if the state said to its adversaries: “Do what we demand of you, sell your conscience and your honor, take upon you crimes which you have never committed, and you will receive in recompense all the good things of this earth.” (Ibid.)
Ciliga tells of a young sailor who was brought into the overcrowded cell in which he was confined.
... During his detention in an isolated cell the GPU had tried to extort from him a confession to his participation – fictional – in a plot – fictional – against Stalin. The GPU tried to get this result by inquisitorial means. They summoned him from his cell several times during the evening; they told him they were going to shoot him because of his criminal obstinacy; they led him into the court, stood him against the wall, and afterwards – led him back to his cell. “After all, you are a worker. We don’t want to shoot you like some white guardist. As a worker you ought to confess honestly.” The sailor, in spite of everything, did not confess; but after these tortures he became half-crazy; then they let him alone. The most important point of this story is – perhaps – that this did not happen after the assassination of Kirov, in 1934, but long before, in 1930. In the story of this sailor there is another circumstance to which I did not attach any importance at the time, but which takes on today, after the three trials against Zinoviev, a symptomatic significance: They tried – but without results – to extract from this sailor the false confession that he belonged to the Trotskyist Opposition. In reality he was a non-political worker. Employed on one of the Soviet ships in the foreign trade, he had become guilty of contraband – the only crime of which he could justly be accused. (Ibid.)
§ 235. We shall return later to this article by Ciliga. Another eye-witness to the methods employed by the GPU, the Franco-Russian writer, Victor Serge, testified before the Commission Rogatoire that he belonged to the Left Opposition from 1923 to 1936; that he was arrested twice: In 1928 on the eve of May 1, and in 1933 on March 7 or 8. The first time, he was in prison only about six weeks and his treatment was not particularly severe. The second time he did not fare so well. No accusation, either oral or written, was ever brought against him, and even the people who questioned him began by declaring that they were not, in the strict sense of the word, functionaries of the judiciary but armed representatives of the Party – in other words, that it was not primarily a question of discussions of fact and law of a juridical character, but of a political discussion. He was held incommunicado, without correspondence, without books or exercise, for three months.
During those three months I was questioned about ten times. Except twice, when they took place during the day, the interrogations took place at night ... after we had been obliged to go to bed at the prescribed hour, that is at 9:00 P.M., we were brusquely awakened – at least they awakened me brusquely, after eleven o'clock, ordering me to get up to go to be questioned... .
The questioning, in the beginning, assumed the aspect of psychological conversation much more than of a judicial examination; that is to say, not only did they not give any information about the accusations, but they tried to establish an atmosphere now of confidence, now of menace, not in order to establish such or such a fact but in order to lead me in a very general discussion of my life and my ideas. They would say, “Describe your life in such a way that it will be possible to establish the truth regarding you.” Naturally, when I resisted such a procedure, they reached the point of trying to excite my pity for the situation of those dear to me, or of threatening me. But I wish to emphasize that never, during these interviews, did I have counsel at my side; never did I see a clerk take down a verbatim report. There was no clerk – a fact which probably does not preclude the probability that either in an adjoining room or elsewhere some one took very precise notes, for on one occasion the judge was able to remind me in detail of a previous interrogation.
... Once, after other functionaries, I had to do with Rudkovsky, who greeted me by saying without mincing words that I was lost, but that he wished nevertheless to save me and offer me a life preserver. The life preserver consisted of this: He began to read a pretended statement of my sister-in-law, Anita Russakova, in which she, in the most nonsensical fashion, had purportedly enumerated a whole series of persons with whom I was supposed to be in contact, although I did not know any of them. Knowing my sister-in-law, and hearing what I heard, I understood at once that it was a question of a forgery. But at one point I was struck by the fact that among the persons with whom I was supposed to be in contact was one who lived in a military city. This detail, as false as the rest, made me think that they were trying to arrive at a capital verdict either against me or against my sister-in-law. It was then, restraining myself no longer, that I allowed my indignation to burst forth in harsh terms, refusing even to listen to any further reading of this pretended examination. On the contrary, I demanded to be confronted with my sister-in-law. Rudkovsky understood that there was nothing to be got from me, offered me a glass of water, and urged me to calm myself. The questioning ended. (CR 41.)
The false deposition having failed of its intended effect, said Serge, it was abandoned. His sister-in-law was liberated, and he himself was deported to Orenburg. However, he was never able to question his sister-in-law concerning the matter, for when he was passing through Moscow and could have seen her, he learned that she had just been deported to Verka, where she is still serving out five years of exile.
Serge described several episodes of his imprisonment which, he said, indicate “how things are done in the judicial domain in the U.S.S.R.” In a Leningrad prison where he spent a night he met one P., who had been in solitary confinement for several months,
... and he told me that they always tried to make him confess by the same method; that is to say, by making him believe that friends of his had confessed, and that there was nothing he could do henceforth but ratify these confessions. Naturally he did not fail to tell me that he was perfectly convinced that these confessions did not exist, and for my part I did my best to strengthen his morale. (CR 42.)
In the Lubianka prison in Moscow, said Serge, he was placed in a cell with some thirty other prisoners. One of them, he learned, was a professor who had been undergoing a long investigation, in the course of which he had finally confessed to everything they wished and even more,
in such a way that the judge himself had ended up by no longer understanding anything about it. And so they had finally sent him with the judge and another of the accused to Moscow to try to untangle the imbroglio of complicated and implausible confessions that both he and his co-defendant had ended by making. Travelling for this purpose, and with his judge, he had had the best treatment in the world; had been well-lodged and well-fed. And the funniest thing was that on one of the following days I met the other of the co-defendants, a veterinary who also confirmed with enormous amusement having made confessions so improbable as to be ridiculous. He laughed especially over having confessed to spreading epidemics, a thing in his opinion completely impossible; which confirms my belief that the system of confessions that are not confessions was practiced at that time (1933), well before the two trials in question at present. (CR 42-3.)
§ 236. The Russian refugee, A. Tarov (identified § 30), also testified to the methods of the GPU in extorting confessions. Under the heading, “How the GPU Manufactures ‘Cases’ and Tortures Prisoners,” Tarov says:
The ordinary procedure is as follows: A list of people, handed down from above with the instructions to arrest them, manufacture such and such a case against them, extort a confession, sentence and shoot them. At the same time, the examining magistrate is supplied with a prepared draft of the case by the highest authorities. (Com. Exh. 6.)
In 1931, says Tarov, during the night of January 21-22, the GPU carried out mass arrests of Oppositionists in different cities and places of exile. He was among a colony of exiles at Akmolinsk who were arrested on that night.
... They accused me of having tried to construct a shortwave radio broadcasting station in order to establish communication with Trotsky, abroad. This was recorded in my indictment. I knew nothing about a radio broadcasting station, short wave or any other kind. If it were not for the arrest, it would have been comic. In Kazakhstan, at Akmolinsk, a place where there was not yet a railway, a man trying to construct with bare hands a broadcasting station to communicate with Trotsky abroad! But the GPU had “located” a witness who declared that we had attempted to build this station together. They even found material proof at the “witness’s” house, that is, parts of radio apparatus. This witness was a direct agent of the GPU. He was incarcerated together with us during the preliminary investigation and “accompanied” us to the Verkhne-Uralsk isolator. There, after three days, he handed in a “declaration of recantation” and was set free so that he could continue his work elsewhere.
From Akmolinsk we were transferred to Petropavlovsk. The investigation of our case was carried on in the inner prison of Petropavlovsk. We were isolated from each other at the start. After a preliminary questioning I was placed with ordinary criminals. In a cell intended for two or three men, there were from twenty-six to twenty-eight prisoners. We could only sit down. To stretch out, it was necessary to ask the only one lying under the bench to yield his place. We suffered excruciating torture from the lack of ventilation in the cell. It was well-nigh impossible to breathe. It was hot, stifling; bathed in sweat, we felt ourselves suffocating. Our lungs seemed compressed. Even the tiny peep-hole was barred from the outside. I shall never forget these days of terrible torture. The prisoners organized demonstrations, demanding air, but not a sound came from the corridor; the guards were under orders to maintain absolute silence. They had placed me among the ordinary criminals to force me to give false testimony. But after the questioning, I wrote on the pages of the record: “I consider the entire testimony of the witness, agent of the GPU, to be provocative insinuations of the GPU.” The examinations were terminated. I was sentenced to three years hard labor, with Jantiev, Khudaev, Peter Popov, Zalaev, and two local workers whom they had mixed into our case. The rest were deported to the depths of Siberia.
According to Tarov,
When the GPU men arrest anybody in the street or at home, they never say, “Hands Up!” or “Don’t move!” but shout, “Lie down!” I first discovered this in Petropavlovsk prison in 1931. The one-eyed executioner of the GPU (well-known in the city; of German origin; I forget his name) thus arrested kolkhoz and worker “wreckers.” In the beginning, there were very few who consented to lie down before the GPU agent. But the régime ruthlessly destroyed men, and it taught the Soviet citizen to lie down before the GPU agent whenever he demanded it. Thus are Soviet citizens treated from the moment of arrest, that is, when it is not yet established whether they are guilty or not. (Ibid.)
Tarov tells of a peasant in the Akmolinsk district who was arrested in 1930 and accused of “non-delivery of wheat to the state.” He had been denounced to the GPU, says Tarov, by the kulaks in the village soviet.
The GPU ... subjected him to unheard-of tortures to make him reveal the spot where the wheat was supposed to be hidden. The tortures were so intolerable that the poor peasant, who had no wheat, falsely confessed that he had. The GPU demanded that he show them the place. The peasant agreed. He conducted the GPU agents through the streets, as if he were going to point out the hiding place. He sought only to escape, if but for a few hours, the terrible torture. In the end, he could obviously show nothing, and the GPU men, beside themselves, believing he was still deceiving them, threw him into a ditch and poured water over him. It was the dead of winter, with the thermometer far below zero. The local poor peasants and agricultural laborers, aroused by this bestial treatment of their comrade, expressed their indignation in strong agitation. Then the official press insincerely undertook the defense of the poor peasant who had been turned into an icicle three months previously. A few “minor” shifts were made in the lower ranks of the GPU personnel. But if this case reached the press, how many thousand similar cases remained unpublicized! (Ibid.)
Tarov testifies to other means of intimidation than physical torture or mental torture of the kind described by Serge and Ciliga:
In the inner prison of Petropavlovsk, where the author of these lines remained for six months waiting for the sentence pronounced in contumacy in Moscow, the GPU shot the condemned in a special structure erected exactly in the center of the courtyard where the prisoners took their daily walks. Generally when at night they dragged the victim along the corridors to the “slaughter-house” – as the prisoners called this place – they gave him the opportunity to cry out, howl, implore, beg for mercy, etc. This was done with the purpose of frightening the other prisoners. It was not until they reached the courtyard that they gagged the condemned man and the cries ceased. We knew, by counting the shots, the number of bullets it took to finish the victim. The next day, while walking in the courtyard around this strange structure that reeked of blood, we could learn which of us was missing. (Ibid.)
He tells the story of an Oppositionist who was arrested in 1928 for distributing Opposition literature, and tortured in the effort to make him reveal its source. Since the work was arranged in such a way that even those who distributed the literature did not know where it came from, he could not tell. The examining magistrate, says Tarov,
was not satisfied with an explanation that corresponded to the truth. They put Andrusha in a cell. There he was tied to the cot, so arranged that water dripped constantly on him. At night, he was transferred to an even more terrible place, he was undressed, the barrel of a loaded revolver was pressed against his belly, and they threatened him: “We are going to fire all seven shots if you do not confess.” The Young Communist Leaguer gave in, but he did not know whom to name. The GPU gave him time to “regain his senses.” The YCL'er “regained his senses” and remembered me, for he knew that I belonged to the Opposition (he knew nothing else). He decided then to tell the GPU that it was I who had given him the propaganda material. But he could not remember my name and exact address. He therefore undertook to conduct the GPU agents to my lodging. (Ibid.)
One more quotation from Tarov, and we are through for the moment with this depressing evidence:
It must be stressed that the GPU carries on its operations at night, unexpectedly, when the victim is in bed. The GPU behaves toward the prisoner in such a way that he feels himself to be constantly on the brink of the grave. In the GPU, they torture a man, but they do not let him die, in order to continue to torture him. After all, death is sometimes a welcome deliverance from intolerable torture. In the hands of the GPU the tortured man is deprived even of this means of “salvation.” Many cry out, begging to be shot. But the orders provide only for torture. (Ibid.)
§ 237. This Commission holds that the testimony cited above, given from first-hand knowledge on the part of the deponents, indicates that the extortion of confessions through torture, both mental and physical, is a common practice of the Soviet police today. We find that this testimony, taken in connection with the fantastic discrepancies which we have pointed out in the confessions of the accused and witnesses in the two Moscow trials, and the demonstrated falsity of the testimony implicating Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov, justifies the presumption of duress in the obtaining of these confessions. We find, moreover, that duress in the cases of several accused is indicated in the records themselves. Before adducing illustrations on this point, we quote once more from Strogovich-Vyshinsky on the principles of Soviet criminal procedure:
... The accused has the right to give evidence but he is not obligated to do so. For refusing to give evidence, just as for giving false evidence, in contrast to the witness, he does not bear criminal responsibility. It is prohibited to force the accused to give evidence and in those cases where, during examination, illegal methods for forcing the accused to give evidence are applied (violence, threats, terrorization, tricks, etc.) the person in charge of the investigation is criminally liable according to Section 2, Article 115, UK. (P. 73.)
Prosecutor Vyshinsky, under whose editorship the foregoing passage was written, himself made it clear (if he spoke the truth) in his final speech in the August trial that the refusal of the accused Smirnov to give evidence was by no means accepted by the examining officials. Smirnov, at first, says Vyshinsky,
denied everything; he denied the existence of a Trotskyite organization, he denied the existence of a center, he denied his participation in the center, he denied connection with Trotsky, he denied that he gave any secret instructions, even those which he gave in 1936... . He denied everything – he denied the existence of a Trotskyite center in 1931, he denied the existence of such a center in 1932. He denied everything. The whole of his examination of May 20 consisted solely of the words: “I deny that, again I deny, I deny.” That is the only thing left for him to do.
Accused Smirnov, your experience, your skill in deceit, has betrayed you. Exposed by the evidence of Safonova, Mrachkovsky and Ter-Vaganyan, you were compelled to admit that there was a center, that you were a member of this center. Your denials were of no avail. You denied that you had received any instructions on terrorism, but you were exposed on this matter by Gaven, and you confessed; you were exposed by Holtzman who received instructions from Trotsky ... Smirnov was exposed as a terrorist by Holtzman, by Mrachkovsky, by Safonova and by Dreitzer.
On July 21, you, Smirnov, gave somewhat different evidence, that is to say, at first you denied that you had received any instructions from Trotsky to organize terrorism, but here you admitted that you did receive them. Your denials came to naught.
When confronted with Mrachkovsky, you continued to deny that you had received from Trotsky and conveyed to Mrachkovsky instructions to organize a terrorist group. Mrachkovsky put you to shame by saying: “Why, Ivan Nikitich, you want to get out of a sordid bloody business with a clean shirt?” ... In reply to Mrachkovsky you said: “Invention and slander,” but later you did confess to something... .
I want to remind you that the confrontation with Safonova during the preliminary investigation, which, in the main, reproduced what we saw in this Court, was very characteristic. Smirnov does not venture to deny Safonova’s evidence. He invents an elastic form of lies. He knows that Safonova will not slander him, Safonova was formerly his wife, and has no personal grudge against him; therefore, he cannot plead a personal grudge. He says: “I do not remember,” “evidently such a conversation may have taken place.” He is asked: Was there any talk about organizing terrorism? He replies: “There was not, but there might have been.” When now, masking himself, he says: “I have nothing to reply to that,” he is guided by the same animal cowardice. But on August 13 he was compelled to admit that this conversation did take place in 1932, that he, Smirnov, bears full responsibility for this, and that now he does not intend to evade responsibility. (ZK 158-60.)
We have quoted Vyshinsky at length because his account of the methods by which Smirnov – who under Soviet law was not under the slightest obligation to give evidence against himself – was forced to confess tallies remarkably (except that Vyshinsky does not mention physical torture) with the evidence we have cited above concerning GPU methods of extorting confessions. And his corroboration of that testimony lends strength to the supposition that for once he was telling the truth. It will be noted that according to Vyshinsky, Smirnov’s preliminary examination lasted at least from May 20 to August 13 (only six days before the opening of the trial), when he finally “did confess to something.”
Speaking of the accused Ter-Vaganyan, Vyshinsky says:
He, too, at first adopted a position of denial; but on August 14 he gave more truthful evidence. (ZK 160.)
He does not, however, indicate the length of Ter-Vaganyan’s ordeal; we only learn that his confession was obtained five days before the trial opened.
In view of the Prosecutor’s own revelation of the methods used to obtain the confession of Smirnov, this Commission does not find particularly convincing the statements which he elicited from several accused in the January trial to the effect that they were well treated and that no pressure was brought upon them to make them confess; more especially since there is evidence in that trial also that various accused were questioned for several months before they finally consented to testify against themselves, and that there, too, the system of “confrontations” was employed. Muralov, for example, according to his own testimony, held out for eight months before he finally agreed to confess, and finally
said to myself, almost after eight months, that I must submit to the interests of the state for which I had fought actively in three revolutions, when my life hung by a thread dozens of times. (PR 233.)
Radek stated that he was first questioned on September 22, 1936, and “denied everything” until December 4 (PR 133-5). In his last plea he said that
When I found myself in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the chief examining official ... said to me: “You are not a baby. Here you have fifteen people testifying against you. You cannot get out of it, and as a sensible man you cannot think of doing so. If you do not want to testify it can only be because you want to gain time and look it over more closely. Very well study it.” For two and a half months I tormented the examining official... . For two and a half months I compelled the examining official, by interrogating me and by confronting me with the testimony of other accused, to open up all the cards to me, so that I could see who had confessed, who had not confessed, and what each had confessed... . And one day the chief examining official came to me and said: “You are now the last. Why are you wasting time and temporizing? Why don’t you say what you have to say?” And I answered: “Yes, tomorrow I shall begin my testimony.” (PR 549.)
The accused Norkin stated that he refused to testify for two months; and that although there were “confrontations” no “outward pressure” was brought to bear upon him. Pyatakov in his final speech said that
of course no measures of repression or suasion have been employed in regard to me. (PR 540.)
We repeat that it is impossible to pronounce upon the motives which prompted the accused and witnesses to confess. But we repeat also that in the light of the evidence cited above, their denials of duress are not convincing, since it may logically be assumed that the same pressure which forced them to confess was exercised to force them to deny duress. We note, moreover, that the testimony to repeated questionings and confrontations corroborates that of Serge, Ciliga, and Tarov; and if true it indicates that several of them were questioned over long periods during which they refused to state what was demanded of them; that they were confronted with confessions by other people incriminating them; and that only after such repeated interrogations and confrontations did they consent to make the confessions which cost all but four of them their lives. We note that this procedure is in direct violation of Soviet law as defined by Strogovich-Vyshinsky in the quotation cited above. In our opinion, such a procedure, in violation of the immunity conceded to accused persons under Soviet law as stated in that quotation, itself constituted duress, irrespective of any other possible means that may have been employed; and the use of duress in the cases of Smirnov, Muralov, Radek, and others constitutes presumptive evidence that it was used in the cases of all accused.
§ 238. The indication of duress in those cases on which the records are explicit, and the presumption of duress in other cases, again taken in connection with the character of the charges and the evidence in both trials, constitutes, in our opinion, strong presumptive evidence that the trials were frame-ups. We have repeatedly noted the Prosecutor’s contention that the alleged criminal activities of the accused in the two trials followed logically from their opposition to the policies of the Communist Party in 1926-27, and even earlier; and we have pointed out that the Prosecutor deliberately identified political opposition to the regime with criminal activity against it. We shall now examine Trotsky’s counter-charge that the trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937, were the logical culmination of a series of frame-ups by the ruling majority of the Party, directed against the Left Opposition.
First, we would remind our readers of the change in Stalin’s attitude toward opposition, even within the Party, between 1924 and 1927 (§ 219). The Opposition was expelled in December, 1927, and the wholesale arrests and exile of Oppositionists followed shortly after. The testimony of Serge, Ciliga, and Tarov contains much information, part of which we have cited in Chapter VIII, concerning the treatment to which Oppositionists were subjected in exile and in Soviet prisons. Serge and Tarov were first arrested in 1928, and Ciliga in 1930. Serge informed the Commission Rogatoire that at Orenburg he met two militants of the Trotskyist movement who were there to serve sentences of four and five years in exile. These men, he said, were in no position to do anything that should have led to their being accused in connection with the Kirov assassination. Nevertheless they were both arrested and tried after the assassination of Kirov, and were both sentenced to five years more of imprisonment. Another Trotskyist, Eleazar Solntsev, was sentenced by the same methods.
This militant, after having had a three-year sentence, saw his penalty increased by two more years when the former sentence was completed, and without trial. After which he was deported, and at the time of the Kirov assassination he was again arrested and again sentenced to five years in prison, which he did not serve for the very simple reason that he preferred a hunger strike, from which he died. And it should be known that they took care to deport his wife and son to another place. (CR 43.)
The testimony already quoted from Tarov (§§ 30, 236) deals largely with the treatment of Oppositionists in Soviet prisons, in the attempt to extort denunciations of their comrades, or false confessions to criminal activity. Tarov says that
The extortion of false testimony under the threat of cruel measures began a long time ago, at least ten years ago. If that is now being done in the cells of the GPU prisons, in 1924-1927 it was done in the offices of the Party committees and control commissions. (Com. Exh. 6.)
He describes the tortures of an Oppositionist worker, Gassanov, who was arrested in Baku in 1929 and deported to Siberia. There he was arrested again, and driven into insanity in the attempt to force him to renounce the Opposition and name the Oppositionists of the Baku organization.
His renunciation of the Opposition would have been very important for the Stalinist apparatus, for Gassanov was very popular among the Baku workers. As a result of these tortures, Comrade Gassanov’s nervous system was shattered. The GPU transferred him to Akmolinsk, to our colony, in a state of dementia. In spite of that, the GPU arrested him with us in 1931 and shut him up also in the Petropavlovsky prison. Repeatedly we sent protests to Moscow, to the GPU, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, but we received no reply. Mentally ill, Gassanov was kept in prison. Only when his malady assumed a violent character did they send him under convoy to the psychiatric clinic at Omsk. (Ibid.)
He tells of an Oppositionist, Guloyan, now chairman of the Central Executive Committee of one of the Soviet republics, who was expelled from the Party and dismissed from his job on the charge of having stolen 500 rubles from the treasury of the local committee, of which he was secretary; and who was reinstated and promoted after having capitulated and betrayed his comrades. But, says Tarov,
hundreds and thousands of Oppositionists who did not yield to this kind of “training” had to suffer in prisons and concentration camps; their wives and children were doomed to hunger and death. From among these thousands of men I should like to mention the following Oppositionists: Krapivsky, Popov, Boltoboy Vanush, the machinist Tatekhsian, the locksmith Gornilov, and thousands of others who had three, four, or five, and sometimes more, small children. Each of these was the sole support of his family. After arresting them, the Stalinist apparatus deprived their wives and children of all civil rights.
According to Ciliga,
After the assassination of Kirov in December, 1934, the whole Leningrad Opposition was deported to Siberia – as many as thirty thousand families, mostly workers... .
In July, 1933, at Yeniseisk, they arrested a group of ten Communist Oppositionists; the Trotskyist Maximov, the Detzists [DTZists] Davidov and Boiko, and two Zinovievists, Lifshitz and another whose name I no longer remember. The first three were accused of having tried to propagandize among the arrested Zinovievists, that is, Lifshitz and the other. The charge was invented in toto, and the Trotskyists as well as the Detzists categorically rejected it. The GPU was forced to attempt to persuade the Zinovievists to give false testimony. This time they did not succeed. So far from that: Lifshitz and the one whose name I do not recall sent the Prosecutor, Vyshinsky, a written statement on the subject of the GPU’s methods of extortion and provocation. (Com. Exh. 5, 1.)
This testimony indicates that as far back as 1928 the identification of political opposition with crime which characterized the attitude of Vyshinsky in the two Moscow trials was the common practice of the Soviet regime; that provocative and repressive measures, often of the most revolting kind, were employed against Oppositionists; and that their families were often included in the repressive measures against them.
§ 239. Among the exhibits introduced before the Preliminary Commission is a compilation of quotations from statements to the C.C. of the C.P.S.0 and to the Party members, letters, and articles from the Left Opposition press, showing that the attempts of the majority to inculpate the Left Opposition began in 1927 and culminated in the two Moscow trials. These quotations corroborate the testimony of Tarov, Serge, and Ciliga. They also show that the leaders of the Opposition predicted and warned the Communist Party against those very developments which afterward took place. The first attempt was an effort to link the Left Opposition with a counter-revolutionary military conspiracy. (Leon Trotsky, in his testimony before the Preliminary Commission, told about the effect of this attempt upon the Central Committee – PC 326.) We quote from a letter to all members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dated Moscow, October 4, 1927, and signed by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bakayev, Evdokimov, Peterson, and Smilga:
... On September 13, the GPU sent a communication to the C.C.C. to the effect that Bolsheviks working in an Opposition “printing plant” had been shown to be connected through a non-party member with a Wrangel officer, who, on his part, had been shown to be connected with a military conspiracy aiming to organize an overturn in the Soviet Union “in the near future.” The Secretariat of the C.C.C. approved the action of the GPU in conducting raids on Communists who had allegedly joined the “counter-revolutionary organization.” The Political Bureau of the Central Committee and the Praesidium of the C.C.C., on September 22, sent out to the entire Party a special communication to the effect that members of the Opposition, who printed our platform destined for the Party Congress, were connected with a counter-revolutionary conspirator. This communication was and is being read in all the nuclei, even in the most forsaken parts of the country. The rumor about the “connection” between the Opposition and the military conspiracy is spreading among ever wider circles of nonparty members. On what is this unheard-of accusation based? On the fact that one of the members of the Opposition “printing plant” had an alleged conversation about a mimeograph machine with some Wrangel officer. That is the version of the GPU.
On September 23, comrades Zinoviev, Smilga and Peterson (Oppositionists) addressed themselves to the C.C. and to all party organizations with the following letter of inquiry:
“Who is this Wrangel officer? What is his name? Why is it concealed? Has he been arrested?”
Only under the whip of these questions did the chairman of the GPU communicate by letter that the so-called Wrangel officer was simply an agent of the GPU, who had more than once helped to discover White Guard conspiracies. In this way the whole communication about the Wrangel officer and about the connection between the “printing plant” and the military conspiracy was shown to be false... .
The affair of the military conspiracy has no connection whatever with the printing of the Opposition platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists. This was completely proved at the trial of the participants in the so-called Opposition printing plant. Not one of the accusers from among the Central Control Commission referred by so much as a single word to any connections with the military conspiracy. This is a lie based on this, that a GPU agent has been passed off on the Party as a conspirator.
... What is the essence of the deposition of Tverskoi about the preparation of “the military overturn in the Soviet Union in the near future"? Referring to some citizeness, who refers to another citizen, etc., Tverskoi says:
“In military circles there was a movement on foot, headed by comrades Trotsky and Kamenev, obviously the military one, and ... this organization is active. No mention was made that this organization intended to perpetrate an overturn, but that was self-understood.”
It follows from the communication of the GPU itself that Tverskoi on his own initiative told a GPU agent that he had heard at third or fourth hand about the existence of a military “movement” headed, you see, by Trotsky and Kamenev. Who were the Communists that entered into the counter-revolutionary organization? Those who printed the platform? No, the Praesidium of the C.C.C. itself categorically rejected this accusation. Who, then, are the Communists referred to? Perhaps Trotsky? Tverskoi names Trotsky and only Trotsky. But the concocters of this abominable business apparently dare not as yet to put in circulation this second and much more peppery dish concerning a military conspiracy headed by Trotsky. They manifestly think that the hour has not yet struck... .
... All threads lead to Stalin. Without his consent, without his sanction, without his encouragement, nobody would have ever dared to launch accusations, based on a frame-up, in the Party ranks against Opposition Communists about their participation in a counter-revolutionary organization... . (PC Exh. 33, 2.)
The following extract from a statement to the Joint Plenum of the C.C. and the C.C.C. in reply to a speech by Molotov on the “insurrectionism” of the Opposition indicates that the accusation of “defeatism” is not new. It is signed by Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Smilga, Soloviev, Muralov, Trotsky, Bakayev, Avdeyev, Rakovsky, Evdokimov, Lisdin, and Peterson:
... By using the term “insurrectionism” in referring to the Opposition, the nucleus of the Stalinist fraction intends to accustom the Party to the idea of the destruction of the Opposition.
... It is not correct that the Opposition holds the viewpoint of “conditional defensism.”
... It is not correct that the path of the Opposition leads to the insurrection against the Party and the Soviet power. On the contrary, it is an incontestable fact that the Stalinist fraction is cold-bloodedly planning to place the emphasis on our physical destruction in order to attain its goals. From the side of the Opposition there is no trace of a threat of insurrection-ism. On the contrary, from the side of the Stalinist fraction there is a real threat of a further usurpation of the supreme rights of the Party. Through the mouth of Molotov this threat has been pronounced openly. While preparing in fact, step by step, the destruction of the Opposition on the pretext of its “insurrectionism” the Stalinist tops soothe the hesitating members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission with verbal assurances that matters will never go so far, but that it is merely necessary to frighten the Opposition. In this way the Stalin group gradually draws into its orbit wider circles and accustoms them to its plan which in its pure form would repel them today... .
... At the same time, we declare again that we are ready to accept every proposal that can ameliorate the internal relations, allay the internal struggle, facilitate for the Party and the Central Committee a more efficient utilization of all the forces – in any work – for the needs of the Party and the Soviet government, so as to create ultimately the conditions which will assure a general examination of the real differences by the Party and the elaboration of a correct line at the Fifteenth Congress of the Party. (Ibid., 3.)
The following excerpt from a private letter by a Russian Communist on the exile of Trotsky and other Oppositionists in 1928, is quoted from page 353 of “The Real Situation in Russia”:
As the Government gets deeper into the economic difficulties of which the Opposition forewarned them, they try to blame these difficulties upon the Opposition. Will it be long, at this rate, before they frame up a prosecution that will end in executions? (Ibid., 5.)
On January 18, 1929, Leon Trotsky, then in exile at Alma Ata, Was condemned to exile beyond the borders of the Soviet Union on the ground of
counter-revolutionary activity expressing itself through the organization of an illegal anti-Soviet party, activity which during the last period was directed toward the provocation of anti-Soviet demonstrations and toward preparation of the armed struggle against Soviet power. (From the Minutes of the Special Committee of the Collegium of the GPU, January 18, 1929.) (Ibid., 6.)
On March 4, 1929, Trotsky wrote as follows:
There remains only one thing for Stalin: to try to draw a line of blood between the Party and the Opposition. He must absolutely connect the Opposition with terrorist attempts, preparation for armed insurrection, etc... . (Published in the Bulletin of the Opposition, Nos. 1-2, July, 1929.) (Ibid., 7.)
The following quotations are from a declaration of Oppositionist deportees at Kansk to the 16th Congress of the C.P.S.U. (excerpts were published in The Militant, New York, of February 15,
For two and a half years the vanguard of the Bolshevik Party has been subjected to merciless repressions, ... calumny and provocation, raids and arrests, deportations and solitary confinement, up to assassination itself... .
The most monstrous and absurd accusations have been flung at the Opposition, and continue to be flung without being supported by any proof... . Very often the prisoners are subJected to icy douches (Upper Urals), to the threat of being shot, which fortunately was not carried out thanks to the revolutionary consciousness of the Red soldiers (Tobolsk). They had medical assistance refused to the very ill (Tomsk, Uralsk, etc.), suffered imprisonment under conditions which condemned them to physical extermination (for example, at Upper-Uralsk, where the prisoner does not have a space equal to that of a tomb), continual raids applied to the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionists, the White Guards, until the arrival of our comrades in solitary (Suzdal)... .
... Provocation serves as a mask for a shameful repression; slander encourages the criminal method of struggle. With this object, the apparatus blackmailed the Party on the eve of the Fifteenth Congress with the aid of the “Wrangel officer,” allegedly connected with the Opposition... . With this object, criminal and charlatanist, Yaroslaysky, on the eve of the Sixteenth Congress, attributes to the Opposition the intention of “putting itself at the head of peasant uprisings”; and to the Bolshevik-Leninists who are arrested in deportation the false accusation is presented “of creating anti-Soviet organizations on the U.S.S.R. scale” (Kansk). We warn the Sixteenth Congress that the Stalinist faction, in the struggle against the Opposition, is employing an ever-increasing system of repression... . (Ibid., 13.)
A letter from the U.S.S.R., in the Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 25-26, November-December, 1931, says:
... Before the Sixteenth Congress, the Rights displayed a very energetic activity. At that time, Stalin decided to present them with a remodeled “Wrangel officer.” A series of meetings of the Rights took place in the apartment of Kozelev. Among the participants at these meetings was an agent provocateur who expressed himself to the effect that the only way out was the physical extermination of Stalin. The next day Kozelev was accused of “failing to denounce” an “attempt” against Stalin (by Stalin’s own agent!). The question was immediately taken up in a session of the Politburo. In this session Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky participated. Mikoyan moved: “to shoot Kozelev.” Stalin replied that it was enough for the time being to expel him from the Party. (Ibid., 16.)
After the Kirov assassination, Trotsky wrote an “Answer to Some American Friends,” which appeared in the Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 42, February, 1935:
... As far as I can see from a distance, as an isolated observer, the strategy developed around the corpse of Kirov has not brought Stalin any greater laurels. But precisely for this reason he can neither stop nor retreat. Stalin will be forced to cover up the unsuccessful amalgams with new, broader and ... more successful ones. We must meet them well-armed. (Ibid., 23.)
After the assassination of Kirov, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested and confessed to “moral responsibility.” They were sentenced to prison. The following letter from Anton Ciliga, then in prison in Russia, dated December 9, 1935, which appeared in the New Militant of January 25, 1936, tells about a second trial of Kamenev:
... Kamenev has received as the outcome of a new trial a sentence which runs to ten years. The second trial was based on the charges of a plot against “himself” (that is to say, Stalin). The principal hero of the accusation was Kamenev’s own brother, the painter Rosenfeld. There were 36 indicted, a mixed and very suspicious collection... . Kamenev denied categorically that he knew anything about this affair and insisted that he saw the principal accused individuals for the first time in his life during the trial... . For his categorical refusal to know anything about this affair, Kamenev received not only an increase of about ten years, but was sent to a common cell (No. 57, third tier, north isle of the penitentiary, with 12 men in a large cell). (PC Exh. 33, 24.)
§ 240. In connection with the conclusions inevitably flowing from the mass of material on which previous sections of this report are based, we find that this compilation, largely corroborated by the evidence of such eye-witnesses as Tarov, Ciliga and Serge, substantiates the argument that the Moscow trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937, were the culmination of a series of repressive measures against a political opposition. We have noted in previous sections of this report that the men actually tried were not Trotskyists. They were, however, accused as Trotskyists, and confessed as such; and the effect of their confessions was to discredit the Trotskyist Opposition as surely as if they had actually belonged to it, and to discredit them in the eyes of opponents of Trotsky by linking their names with his. We quote again from Ciliga on the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial:
In the measure that the GPU did not succeed in pushing into false confessions for the Moscow trial Trotskyists who remained loyal to their organization, it had to be satisfied with the false confessions of former Trotskyists who had capitulated four or five years before and who had been in prison three or four years. The mechanism of the ordeal that they endured and of the staging of the trial was prepared – as I have said – by the previous trials, by the methods and by the means which have become common in Russia in the last few years. The application of those methods on a vast scale gave me the opportunity to meet in the Stalinist prisons how many men, how many victims, broken physically and morally! (Com. Exh. 5, 2.)
After the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, Trotsky wrote from his Norwegian internment a letter to his lawyer, Puntervold, dated September 15, 1936, in which he predicted that Stalin would try to bolster up the charges against him by “uncovering” new “attempts” and “treasons,” and would remove the base of the “terrorist activities” from Copenhagen to Oslo. (PC Exh. 19, III/2.) The January trial, with Pyatakov’s testimony about his flight, bore out this prophecy. In his final argument before the Preliminary Commission, Trotsky prophesied once more:
Tomorrow we shall hear about new misdeeds of the Trotskyists in Spain, of their direct or indirect support of the fascists. Echoes of this base calumny, indeed, have already been heard in this room. Tomorrow we shall hear how the Trotskyites in the United States are preparing railroad wrecks and the obstruction of the Panama Canal, in the interests of Japan. We shall learn the day after tomorrow how the Trotskyites in Mexico are preparing measures for the restoration of Porfirio Diaz. You say Diaz died a long time ago? The Moscow creators of amalgams do not stop before such trifles. They stop before nothing – nothing at all. Politically and morally, it is a question of life and death for them. Emissaries of the GPU are prowling in all countries of the Old and the New World. They do not lack money. What does it mean to the ruling clique to spend twenty or fifty millions of dollars more or less, to sustain its authority and its power? These gentlemen buy human consciences like sacks of potatoes. We shall see this in many instances. (PC 584.)
Time alone will show whether or not Trotsky has correctly forecast events here too. In our opinion the trial records themselves warrant expectation of a new trial, that of the “Rights.” In both trials Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky (who had committed suicide) were implicated by the accused. We refer our readers especially to §§ 119 and 120 of this report. We refer them also to § 205 concerning the reasons given by Radek for his failure to call a conference about Trotsky’s alleged agreements with foreign powers. In his testimony, Radek referred to his attempts to get Dreitzer to come to Moscow at all costs, and said:
I will tell why – it is perhaps the most important thing in this case. (PR 121.)
Either he did not tell why, or his testimony was not printed. He turned to the subject in his final speech, saying,
... why did I not tell about the December instructions and about Pyatakov’s meeting with Trotsky even to a man so close to me as Bukharin, who knew about the contacts with the representatives of the West-European and Eastern powers? I shall speak about this because it may later have a practical significance and supply the answer to the question whether something still remains undisclosed. I think it does; that something remains hidden both from us and from the authorities and could be disclosed... . (PR 547.) (Our emphasis.)
Then follows Radek’s confused statement (§ 205) of his reasons for assuming that Trotsky
was creating some other devilish business in addition to the parallel center. (PR 548.)
Since our inquiry has established the fact that all testimony implicating Trotsky in the alleged conspiracy is false, it is obvious that these insinuations of Radek are also false. And since, as we have shown in Chapter XXVI, there is reason to believe that the accused confessed falsely under duress, we hold that there is reason also to believe that the statements of Radek, quoted above, were put into his mouth by the prosecution in order to prepare the public mind for a subsequent trial of Bukharin, Rykov, and others implicated by the accused in the August and January trials.[39]
In the light of this evidence, and of the long series of forewarnings subsequently justified by the events which we have cited above,- Trotsky’s prediction of future amalgams directed against opponents of the Soviet regime appears justified.
§ 241. In his final speech in the January trial, the Prosecutor referred to
other detachments of capitalist agents in our country: the “Industrial Party,” Kondratyev’s “Toiling Peasants’ Party,” a kulak party, the “Union Bureau of the Mensheviks,” the activities of which were examined by the Supreme Court – all these organizations exposed as organizations of wreckers and groups of diversionists who welcomed Trotsky’s struggle against our Party, against the Soviet government... . (PR 465.)
This statement, used as proof of the “historical connection,” leads us to consider some aspects of trials previous to August, 1936, and January, 1937, as indicating an historical connection of a kind quite the opposite of that alleged by Vyshinsky.
In the first place, an examination of the records of previous trials reveals that political motivation on the part of the Prosecution is not exceptional. The whole pattern – charges, confessions, procedure, even the language – is in each case so nearly identical with the trials of August and January as to engender a disturbing suspicion that the accused were not so much “exposed” as selected to fit into a prearranged scheme for discrediting current enemies of the regime or whitewashing its leading officials by shifting to other shoulders the responsibility for their mistakes. And this suspicion receives ample warrant from the evidence we have cited above; as also from such universally known facts as that Professor Ramzin, the leading “traitor” of the Industrial Party (Promparty) trial in 1930, was almost immediately liberated and reinstated in his professional work (see Ciliga, § 234, on the engineer “saboteurs”), and that two of his alleged co-conspirators, Riabushinsky and Vishnegradsky, had died some time before he conspired with them; also that Abramovich, the well-known Menshevik exile who was accused in the Menshevik trial of 1931, was able to establish photographically that the ‘testimony implicating him was false.
We shall briefly consider the records of these two previous trials.
§ 242. In each case the accused (eight in the first trial,[40] fourteen in the second) were charged with having formed an anti-Soviet center for the purpose of bringing about the overthrow of the Soviet regime and the restoration of capitalism through wrecking activities, disruptive work in the army, and the furthering of armed intervention against the Soviet Union. According to the indictment in the trial of the “Promparty,” the
Industrial Party or the “Council of the Allied Engineers’ Organizations” ... united in a single organization all the different wrecking organizations in the various branches of industry and acted not only in accordance with the orders of the international organizations of former Russian and foreign capitalists, BUT ALSO IN CONTACT WITH AND UPON DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS OF THE RULING CIRCLES AND THE GENERAL STAFF OF FRANCE IN PREPARING ARMED INTERVENTION AND ARMED OVERTHROW OF THE SOVIET POWER. (Pravda, November 11, 1930.)
The indictment was outspoken on the alleged connections with foreign imperialism, as the following headings show:
(a) THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT AND ITS ROLE IN PREPARING THE INTERVENTION.
(b) PRIVATE NEGOTIATIONS OF POINCARÉ AND BRIAND WITH THE TORGPROM.[41]
(c) THE JOINT ACTIVITIES OF THE TORGPROM, THE WRECKERS AND THE FRENCH GENERAL STAFF.
(d) THE TIES WITH THE ENGLISH GENERAL STAFF. (Ibid.)
It was charged and held proved that France and Great Britain were extending help to the conspirators in return for territorial and other concessions. According to the accused Fedotov:
A secret communication was received from Ramzin that during his stay in Paris he had been compelled in the name of the Allied Wrecking Organizations to agree to the concessions which the Torgprom had made at the expense of Russia, to wit: a section of the Caucasus, primarily the oil-bearing regions, to be ceded to England; and a section of the right shores of the Ukraine to Poland and France. (Ibid.)
We note a remarkable similarity between this passage and the testimony of Radek and Pyatakov concerning the territorial concessions allegedly agreed to by Trotsky. In 1930, it appears, not Trotsky but Poincaré was the arch-enemy and impatient moving spirit of the alleged plot. According to the indictment:
... As a matter of fact the French ruling circles, through the person of Poincaré, merely used the Torgprom as a tool for their aims. It was not for nothing that Poincaré INSISTED ON THE URGENT NEED OF INTENSIFYING THE ACTIVITIES OF THE WRECKING ORGANIZATION WITHIN THE U.S.S.R. (Ibid.)
The accused who were tried confessed to everything: to wrecking activities in the principal industries; to espionage; to diversionist activity in the war industries, power stations, and railways – which was to coincide with intervention; to treasonable activities in the Red Army. Exhaustive accounts of the trial appeared in Pravda of November 25 to December io, and for several issues thereafter; preceded, in the interval between the publication of the indictment and the beginning of the trial, by a campaign stressing the danger of intervention and the role of the imperialists, especially of France. No evidence was introduced except the confessions of the accused. The Prosecutor, Krylenko, said in this connection:
What evidence can there be? I have cross-examined [the accused] on this point. It transpires that in all those instances where documents did obtain, they were destroyed. (Pravda, December 8, 1930.)
§ 243. In the indictment of the “Menshevik counter-revolutionary organization of Groman, Sher, Ikov, Sukhanov et al.” the accused were charged with a series of alleged crimes against the state; and the charges were buttressed by lengthy quotations from the political program of the Mensheviks. The accused were charged with plotting
to restore the capitalist system through the armed assault of foreign imperialist gangs upon the U.S.S.R. (Official Minutes of the trial, Moscow: Sovietskoye Zakonoizdatelstvo, 1930
The foreword to the trial record states that the trial has proved to the hilt
on the one hand the close tie between the Russian Mensheviks and the emigrés abroad, and through the latter with the Second International; and on the other hand a close tie with the Promparty and through the latter with the Torgprom, through which in turn they were connected with the French General Staff and the ruling circles of the imperialist French bourgeoisie – in the common cause of preparing the armed overthrow of the Soviet power and the armed restoration of capitalism in the U.S.S.R. (Ibid., p. 5.)
The platform of this “alliance” is specified in the indictment as follows:
(a) The restoration of capitalist relations in the U.S.S.R. was the common aim in [plotting] the counter-revolutionary coup d'état.
(b) They banked on intervention as the sole feasible and quickest method for the overthrow of the Soviet power.
(c) Wrecking as the principal method of counter-revolutionary work within the U.S.S.R. together with carrying on disruptive work in the army.
(d) Receipt of material means, in particular from one source, the Torgprom.
(e) Organizational connection with the ruling circles of Western Europe, in particular that of the Mensheviks with the leading circles of the Second International. (Ibid., p. 11.)
All the defendants confessed their guilt of the charges; and their confessions, like those in the trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937, contained remarkable discrepancies. In this trial Krylenko had some documentary “evidence” to introduce. Two letters which the accused Ikov had attempted to smuggle abroad, forewarning against and denouncing the impending “frameup,” were introduced as “exhaustive proof” of the fact that there was
direct contact between the accused and the center abroad. (Ibid., p. 45.)
Krylenko also introduced as exhibits two speeches by the accused Petunin, member of the directorate of the Tsentrosoyus, one of which had been delivered at a session of the praesidium of that directorate on April 23, 1929, and the other at a session of the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection on July 13, 1929. Also the Menshevik program and the publication of the Mensheviks abroad, Sotsialisticheski Vestnik. One of the accused, Rubin, confessed that there were incriminating documents which established the link between the “wreckers” and the imperialists. All he could recall, however, was that they were “on thin paper and began with the words, Dear Comrades.” (Ibid., p. 29.)
§ 244. The similarities between these two trials and those of August, 1936, and January, 1937, are too apparent to need pointing out. The only significant difference, indeed, is in the names of the foreign powers and interests which the accused were alleged to be serving – and in the comparative mildness of the punishment (five to ten years imprisonment) meted out to the accused.
The nature of the foreign alliances to which the accused confessed seem to us more explicable in terms of Soviet foreign relations than of their uncorroborated confessions. The years 1930 and 1931 were part of the famous “third period” in which the Soviet government regarded British and French imperialism as its main enemies, and the Second International as the ally of those imperialisms. In 1936, however, the Soviet government was in alliance with French “imperialism” and courting British “imperialism”; and the sections of the Communist International were united in a “popular front” with the Social Democracy. German fascism on the West and Japanese imperialism on the East had become the most menacing enemies of the Soviet Union; and the pattern of the Moscow trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937, reflected this shift in Soviet foreign relations – even to the point of dating the alleged alliance of the “Trotskyists” with Hitler’s Gestapo back to a period before the Gestapo existed.
Within Russia, in 1930-31, the agitation over the danger of foreign intervention, and the punishment of alleged wreckers and diversionists in the employ of interventionist powers must have had – irrespective of the question whether or not it was justified in fact – the effect of rallying the population to the support of the regime during the period of strains and stresses due to the rapid tempo of collectivization and industrialization, and of convincing the Russian masses that the ills from which they suffered were due to deliberate sabotage in the interests of foreign powers.
We quote again from Ciliga. Referring to the practice of eliciting false confessions from engineer “saboteurs” he says:
If you ask me what was the reason for such a method, I can answer in a few words that it was a specific act in the political fight of the bureaucracy of the Party against the non-Party specialists. It had to do with rather important matters: The specialist intellectuals dreamed – and this dream then had a chance to be realized – that the peasants, in revolt against forced collectivization, would overthrow the power of the “Communist” bureaucracy; this overthrow of the existing power might lead – according to them – to a government of engineers, of specialists. The Stalinist government, on its part, meant not only to destroy its enemies physically, but also to compromise them morally and to disunite them – all this with the aid of show trials and false confessions. The Stalinist government hoped, at the same time, to place upon its political enemies the whole responsibility for the economic and political difficulties which were upsetting the country. (Com. Exh. 5, 2.)
Ciliga points out the evident absurdity of the charges and confessions in the Menshevik trial, and says:
If in the trial against the engineers most of the accusations were lies, here, in the trial against the Mensheviks, all the accusations and self-accusations were 1 00% false. From this point of view that trial was like a dress-rehearsal of the future trial of Zinoviev and his associates. (Ibid.)
The men sentenced in this trial, he says, were brought to the political prison at Verkhne-Uralsk, where he was imprisoned.
The new prisoners were distributed in the prison in such a way that they could not communicate either with the earlier prisoners or with one another. Manifestly the GPU feared something. But in spite of that we found ways of communicating. In a letter to them I put the question: How could they have made such monstrous confessions? “We ourselves do not understand,” they answered, “how such a nightmare could have taken place.” Victor Serge has now brought out of Russia more complete information concerning this group. Permit me to repeat here one of his observations: “One of the principal accused, the well-known historian and publicist Sukhanov, circulated in the isolator a copy of his protest to the Soviet government, in which he demanded that it fulfill its promise to set him free after he had consented to make false confessions.” (Ibid.)
The political trials of 1929-31, says Ciliga, were staged by the regime because of the economic crisis due to the difficulties involved in the Five-Year Plan. That of August, 1936, was due to the social and economic bankruptcy of the Plan. The masses feel that they have been duped by these five-year plans – that the fruits of their sacrifices have been appropriated by others. New trials were needed to dull their minds and smother their discontent.
The trial of the Sixteen was above all a trial against Trotskyism. But not only against Trotskyism. Along with the Trotskyists they accused all oppositionist Communist groups, among others the Right opposition also... . In the latest trial of Novosibirsk they accused, alongside the alleged Trotskyists, engineers belonging to no party. This proves that the slogan “Against Trotskyism” serves Stalin as a pretext – like Hitler’s slogan, “Against Communism” – for a fight against all discontented social strata, as against all the oppositional political groups in the country. (Ibid.)
§ 245. In our opinion the analysis of the records of the August and January trials, in previous chapters of this report, and the mass of evidence which, with that analysis, has formed the basis of our previous conclusions, furnish, when taken together with the material in the present chapter, convincing corroboration of these statements of Ciliga. In the light of all this evidence the conclusion appears inevitable that the indictments and confessions in the widely publicized series of trials of alleged plotters against the Soviet regime were determined in each case – including the trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937 – by the current internal difficulties, economic and political, and by the current situation in the foreign relations, of the Soviet regime. In other words, we find that the trials have served not juridical but political ends.
§ 246. On the basis of all the evidence herein examined and all the conclusions stated, we find that the trials of August, 1936, and January, 1937, were frame-ups.
§ 247. On the basis of all the evidence herein examined and all the conclusions stated, we find Leon Trotsky and Leon Sedov not guilty.
JOHN DEWEY, Chairman
JOHN R. CHAMBERLAIN
ALFRED ROSMER
E. A. ROSS
OTTO RUEHLE
BENJAMIN STOLBERG
WENDELIN THOMAS
CARLO TRESCA
F. ZAMORA
SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE, Secretary
JOHN F. FINERTY, Counsel, Concurring.