The Great Terror

Livshits, as a senior figure, was also involved in various assassination schemes, but the main evidence of the railway accused was of wrecking trains and conducting espionage for Japan. The extent of the “hostile” ring in the railways bears all the marks of Kaganovich’s root-and-branch style. All the accused named whole lists of wreckers, pervading entire railway systems. Vyshinsky was particularly concerned to pin the killing of innocent citizens on the saboteurs:

Vyshinsky:

You do not remember if these twenty-nine Red Army men were badly mutilated?

Knyazev:

About fifteen were badly mutilated.

Vyshinsky:

But what sort of serious injuries were there?

Knyazev:

They had arms broken, heads pierced ….

Vyshinsky:

Heads pierced, arms broken, ribs broken, legs broken?

Knyazev:

Yes, that is so.

Vyshinsky:

This happened by the grace of you and your accomplices?

¹¹²

But the extent of the criminal ring was equally well developed, as can be seen from the list of those involved in a single act of sabotage:

Vyshinsky:

… But why was such a violation of railway service regulations possible? Was it not because the administration of the station was in league with the Trotskyites?

Knyazev:

Quite right.

Vyshinsky:

Name these persons.

Knyazev:

Markevich, the station master, Rykov, the acting station master, Vaganov, assistant station master, Rodionov, assistant station master, Kolesnikov, head switchman.

Vyshinsky:

Five.

Knyazev:

Switchman Bezgin.

Vyshinsky:

Six.

Knyazev:

And then there was also the permanent way manager of that section, Brodovikov.

Vyshinsky:

Yes, and the chief of the railroad, himself.

¹¹³

On his single line, the South Urals Railway, Knyazev now implicated a long series of accomplices, in a way which adumbrates the extraordinary scope of the purge among railwaymen throughout the Soviet lines. Leading figures at his own headquarters were supplemented by the permanent-way managers of the various sections; the traffic managers; the traffic inspectors; the heads of traction departments; locomotive foremen; depot engineers; and station masters, assistant stationmasters, drivers, switchmen. He named thirty-three men in all as the “cadres of my Trotskyite organization on the South Urals Railway.”¹¹⁴

Knyazev went on to say:

From thirteen to fifteen train wrecks were organized directly by us. I remember in 1934 there were altogether about 1,500 train wrecks and accidents.

Powerful locomotives of the F.D. type were introduced in the Kurgan depot. Taking advantage of the fact that not much was known about them in this depot, the management deliberately slackened the supervision of current repairs, frequently compelled the engine-drivers to leave before repairs were completed. Almost all the water gauges were reduced to a ruinous condition. As a result of this neglect, a boiler burst in January 1936 on the Rosa–Vargashi stretch….

Vyshinsky:

… The train wreck on 7 February 1936, on the Yedinover–Berdyaush section, was carried out on your instructions?

Knyazev:

Yes.… Railwaymen have a notion that if a rail splits no one on the road is to blame.

Vyshinsky:

That

is to say, they attribute it to objective causes?

Knyazev:

They did not find the culprits.

¹¹⁵

Last of all came the chemical criminals. The familiar charges recurred in a slightly different context. Rataichak made a slight attempt to defend himself:

Rataichak:

… No, but I had to do that, Citizen Prosecutor, because if we had not taken this measure of precaution there was a danger that the lives of hundreds of workers might have been lost. That is why I myself directed the clearance work on the spot.

Vyshinsky:

You directed it in such a way that 17 workers were killed and 15 wounded. Is that so?

Rataichak:

(Remains silent.)

Vyshinsky:

You directed the clearance operations in such a way that 17 workers were killed and 15 injured.

Rataichak:

That is true, but it was the only thing to do.

¹¹⁶

The prosecution ended with the reports of various Commissions of Expert Witnesses, who blamed all the explosions and pit fires on the accused. But Stroilov commented shrewdly that the excavating system the wreckers were accused of bringing in for their own purposes had in fact been in use for some time previously.

On 28 January at 4:00 P.M., Vyshinsky started on his speech for the prosecution:

This is the abyss of degradation!

This is the limit, the last boundary of moral and political decay!

This is the diabolical infinitude of crime!¹¹⁷