The Great Terror

As to the more obvious falsehoods of the trial itself, the Party was quite used to falsehood for Party reasons, and, if it came to that, to fake trials designed to impress the public. Stalin was, it might have been felt, getting rid of irreconcilable enemies.

None of this applied to Pyatakov and his fellow defendants. And, at the same time, the case produced all the anomalies and oddities of the previous one, in fact in an exaggerated form.

As with the Zinoviev group, it was alleged that Pyatakov and his fellow defendants had organized a vast underground of assassins. Radek referred, perhaps ironically, in his evidence to “scores of wandering terrorist groups waiting for the chance to assassinate some leader of the Party.”¹⁴⁵ At least fourteen separate groups or individuals are named who had the task of assassinating Stalin (several of them), Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Kossior, Postyshev, Eikhe, Yezhov, and Beria. Again, in spite of the protection and complicity of high officials everywhere, they had been unable to carry out any overt act, successfully or unsuccessfully, with the sole exception of the attempt to murder Molotov, and even this did not sound very professional. Indeed, the sentencing of Arnold to only ten years’ imprisonment was virtually an admission that he was not a political enthusiast. Why, when the conspiracy brimmed with fanatical Trotskyites, they should have entrusted this suicide operation to such a figure was not explained.

And the plotters were not even able to assassinate Kaganovich, though several of the men closest to him in his governmental post, like Livshits, Serebryakov, and Knyazev, were members of the conspiracy.

Vyshinsky had to deal with the fact that Zinoviev and his colleagues, who had supposedly made full confessions, had (as it now appeared) concealed much of the story. He said flatly, as we saw, that they “lied and deceived when they already had one foot in the grave.”¹⁴⁶ But in that case, while their confessions of fact might have been limited to what they could not deny, their abject expressions of guilt must have been insincere; that is, everything they said in their final speeches was retrospectively canceled. People who believed in the trials, however, had no difficulty in reconciling, or rather ignoring, these contradictory versions.

A minor anomaly is, as we have seen, that the accused now admitted that they had plotted with Zinoviev and Kamenev to kill Molotov as well as the other leaders. Zinoviev and Kamenev had not confessed to this crime, since they had not been required to do so.

Once again, important plotters were mentioned and not produced. When the Old Bolshevik Byeloborodov, who had ordered the execution of the Royal Family, was implicated in a fashion which could not be cleared up properly, Vyshinsky remarked, “So now it will be necessary to ask Byeloborodov himself?”¹⁴⁷ But Byeloborodov was not produced, then or ever. And the same applies, of course, to Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Uglanov, and other important links, who were simply omitted without explanation.

In addition there were, of course, the factual mistakes, and particularly the Oslo visit. Yet in a summary published in England under the sponsorship of the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, a preface by the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald

, R. T. Miller, could say “They confessed because the State’s collection of evidence forced them to. No other explanation fits the facts.” Neil Maclean, Labour M.P. for Govan and Chairman of this committee, noted in a foreword: “Practically every foreign correspondent present at the Trial—with the exception of course of the Japanese and German—have expressed themselves as very much impressed by the weight of evidence presented by the Prosecution and the sincerity of the confessions of the accused.” This is an interesting (though untrue) smear on correspondents who thought otherwise. They were clearly in the same boat as the minority of committed fascists, excluded from the company of all decent folk. (This is not the earliest or the only use of this polemical method.) Even when the trial was in progress, Pravda published a long article about how a British lawyer, Dudley Collard, had described it (in the Daily Herald) as judicially unexceptionable).¹⁴⁸