The Great Terror

Similar attitudes can be seen in other known nonconfessors—for example, the Spaniard El Campesino. We can trace the tough temperaments elsewhere. In Pervouralsk, in 1938, the chief construction engineer at the Novo-Trubi Plant, who had been in prison for thirteen months, “little more than a skeleton in rags” and with patches of blood and bruises all over him, was interrogated by the local NKVD chief, Parshin. He was accused of having put wooden roofs over furnaces, which might well have caught fire. He continued to explain that though the roofs should have been made of iron, a Government order signed by Ordzhonikidze had ordered wood because of the iron shortage. To several similar questions, he answered in the same way.⁸⁷ Similar accounts are given all through the literature, though they are always treated as most exceptional; as we have noted, only about one in a hundred failed to confess.⁸⁸

It is significant that many oppositionists who had repudiated the Bukharin view of Party discipline in the early 1930s did not come to trial. Stalin must have wanted Ryutin in the dock, but he did not get him. The same no doubt applies to Uglanov, Syrtsov, A. P. Smimov, and the others who tried to organize resistance while the Right leaders were counseling patience. The absence in their make-ups of the Party fetishism noted in Bukharin, Zinoviev, and most of the other public confessors must be a factor. It is fairly clear that neither the pressures nor the arguments were enough to break many or, in other cases, to keep them broken. (Just as a number of prominent accused were not brought to trial with Slansky in Prague because they “would not behave in court,” of fifty or sixty leading functionaries available, only fourteen were used.)⁸⁹

According to most reports, there were several hundred candidates for the Moscow Trials, but only about seventy actually came into court. Of those named for complicity in the Zinoviev Trial, sixteen appeared at the time, three committed suicide, and seven were tried later. Forty-three others were never brought to trial and so never made public confessions. (They included men as prominent as Uglanov, Shlyapnikov, and Smilga. At least twenty-two of them must have been dropped at a fairly late stage. For the dossiers quoted from the preliminary investigation are numbered intermittently from 1 to 38.)

In the Pyatakov Trial, where dossiers ran from 1 to 36, there are nineteen missing. The leading figures have the low numbers: Pyatakov, 1; Radek, 5; Sokolnikov, 8; Drobnis, 13. Serebryakov and Muralov do not happen to be quoted; but even inserting their names, there are clearly missing volumes, and the presumption is that they existed and covered figures at this political level not brought to trial. This presumably includes those shot in secret a couple of weeks earlier, among them Ryutin and Smilga.

THE IDEA OF CONFESSION

The question naturally arises, not only why the accused made the confessions, but also why the prosecution wanted them. In the public trials, indeed, as Radek pointed out in the dock, there was no other evidence. A case in which there was no evidence against the accused, who denied the charges, would clearly be rather a weak one by any standards.

In fact, confession is the logical thing to go for when the accused are not guilty and there is no genuine evidence. For in these circumstances, it is difficult to make people appear guilty unless they themselves admit it. And it is easier to stage-manage a trial of this sort if one can be sure that no awkward defendant is going to speak up at unpredictable intervals.

In general, moreover, in the public trials of Zinoviev and the others, the confession method can be easily accounted for. Stalin wanted not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically. It would have been difficult simply to announce the secret execution of Zinoviev. It would have been equally difficult to try him publicly, without any evidence, on charges which he could vigorously and effectively deny.

Even if confessions seem highly implausible, they may have some effect on skeptics, on the principles that there is no smoke without fire and that mud sticks. Even if the confession is disbelieved, a defendant who humbly confesses and admits that his opponents were right is to some extent discredited politically—certainly more than if, publicly, he had put up a stout fight. Even if the confession is disbelieved, it is striking demonstration of the power of the State over its opponents. It is more in accordance with totalitarian ideologies that a defendant should confess, even under duress: it is better discipline and a good example to all ranks. (Those who would not confess properly in court were sometimes provided with posthumous confessions, to keep up the standards, as with the Bulgarian Kostov in 1949.)