The Great Terror

… An absolutely faulty plan of development was drawn up for the war-chemical industry … a plan providing for a smaller output capacity and, consequently, for a larger outlay of capital than was required.⁷⁴

Despite the fact that our country abounds in salt and raw materials for soda, and that the process of manufacturing soda is very well known, there is a shortage of soda in the country. The construction of new soda plants was delayed.⁷⁵

That is, the overt acts he directly admitted were ones of negligence and bad planning by subordinates—which may well have been genuine.

He bluntly denied certain incriminations:

Vyshinsky:

Accused Pyatakov, do you agree with what Shestov said?

Pyatakov:

Shestov perhaps talked with somebody, but not with me when he says that somebody with pencil in hand calculated the cost of the ore. There was no such conversation with me.

⁷⁶

And again:

Vyshinsky:

Do you now recall the conversation with Rataichak about espionage?

Pyatakov:

No, I deny it.

Vyshinsky:

And with Loginov?

Pyatakov:

I also deny it.

Vyshinsky:

And that members of your organization were connected with foreign intelligence services?

Pyatakov:

As to the fact that there were such connections, I do not deny; but that I knew about the establishment….

⁷⁷

Whether the line he took was on his own initiative, as Smimov’s had been, or whether he was permitted to evade the more extreme responsibilities as part of the encouragement to him (and to Ordzhonikidze) to think that his offenses would be held to be noncapital, is unclear.

Even as to his relations with Trotsky, he made certain vague reservations, as if to cast doubt on them. For example:

Vyshinsky:

The conversation you had with Trotsky in December 1935 and the line he gave, did you accept it as a directive or simply as something said in a conversation but not binding for you?

Pyatakov:

Of course as a directive.

Vyshinsky:

Hence, we can take it that you subscribed to it?

Pyatakov:

We can take it that I carried it out.

Vyshinsky:

And

carried it out.

Pyatakov:

Not ‘and carried it out,’ but ‘carried it out’.

Vyshinsky:

There is no difference in that whatever.

Pyatakov:

There is a difference for me.

Vyshinsky:

What is it?

Pyatakov:

As far as action is concerned, particularly criminally liable action, there is no difference whatever.

⁷⁸

The meeting with Trotsky here referred to was the central point of the whole conspiracy. Trotsky had then laid down the entire program of the plotters—seven pages in the official Report of Court Proceedings.⁷⁹ The difficulty was that Trotsky was in Norway, and Pyatakov never got nearer to him than Berlin, where, in December 1935, he was conducting Soviet Government business. His absence for any length of time would have been noticed, so his evidence was that by arrangement with an agent of Trotsky’s he met in the Berlin Zoo, he arranged to fly to Norway. On the morning of 12 December, he took off from the Tempelhof with a forged German passport, “landed at the airdrome in Oslo” at 3:00 P.M., drove to Trotsky’s home, and there conducted the conspiratorial business (in which Trotsky revealed for the first time that he had met the Nazi leader Hess and made arrangements for cooperation in war and peace).

This story was immediately proved false. Once again Stalin, at whose personal insistence this direct involvement of Trotsky had been inserted into the script,⁸⁰ was to find the disadvantages of a foreign venue for a fabrication. On 25 January, the Norwegian paper Aftenposten published the information that no civil aircraft had landed at Oslo’s Kjeller Airfield during the entire month of December 1935. On 29 January, the Norwegian Social Democratic Arbeiderbladet, after further investigation, established that no aircraft had used the field at all between September 1935 and May 1936.

Trotsky now published a demand that Pyatakov be asked the full details of his alleged flight, including the name on his passport, by which entry could have been further checked. He went on to challenge Stalin to seek his extradition in a Norwegian court, where the facts could be judicially established.

No effective cover story could be found to offset this glaring falsification. In leading Party circles, the truth soon circulated, as Raskolnikov, for example, makes clear (see here).

Vyshinsky’s counter, an extremely weak one, was made at the end of the trial, on 27 January:

Vyshinsky:

I have an application to the Court. I interested myself in this matter and asked the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to make an inquiry, for I wanted to verify Pyatakov’s evidence from this side too. I have received an official communication which I ask to have put in the records.

(Reads.)