The Great Terror

On the other end of the judicial process, the trials themselves, we have already quoted one or two Western reports. Of others, that of the eminent British pro-Communist lawyer Pritt, who attended the Zinoviev Trial, is especially interesting, since in his autobiography published in 1966, long after the Khrushchev revelations, he wrote that he still had “a Socialist belief that a Socialist state would not try people unless there was a strong case against them.” He added, “What the Soviet views are now … I don’t know.”⁸⁰

Every journalist Pritt spoke to thought the trial fair, and, he remarks, “certainly every foreign observer thought the same.” This is not so, of course, but the fact that even considerable partisanship could suggest it is presumably a sign that far too many did think so. One can certainly detect in some of the journalists, in particular, a certain professional vanity—that they could be duped was inconceivable. Then, once committed, a sort of blindness came over them.

Walter Duranty of the New York Times

spoke Russian, had been in Russia for years, and knew some of the accused. For years, he had built a disgraceful career on consciously misleading an important section of American opinion. He now described Ulrikh as “a hard judge but a just one”; said, “No-one who heard Pyatakof or Muralof could doubt for a moment that what they said was true”; and concluded, “The future historian will probably accept the Stalinist version.”⁸¹ He argued that Muralov and Pyatakov were so “impervious to pressure” that their confessions could not have been false, and found one of the strongest proofs of Pyatakov’s guilt to be the fact that he was “the brains of heavy industry” and therefore Stalin would not have killed him unless his crimes were beyond pardon. As we have seen, this sort of common sense did not, in fact, apply.

Duranty’s argument about Gamarnik’s suicide is another example of the muddled advocacy thought acceptable in the period: “His suicide … proves that he had been engaged in some deal with the Germans.”⁸²

Of the other military conspirators, Duranty argued that “they confessed” without long preparation, and this was an indication of the truth of the charges, while it also showed that confession was not necessarily the product of long interrogation. But of course the evidence that the Generals had “confessed” was simply that Stalin’s press said they had done so! The trial was not public.

Professor Owen Lattimore was another noted apologist for the Stalin and similar regimes. In his Pacific Affairs, he wrote of Yezhov: “As to the suggestion that the new head of the secret service is likely to abuse his power just as Yagoda did, it is obvious that the publicity given in the Soviet Union itself to Yagoda’s turpitude is a safeguard against any such thing”; and he described the trials themselves as a triumph for democracy on the grounds that they could only “give the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever he finds himself being victimized by ‘someone in the Party’ or ‘someone in the Government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.”⁸³

Not only Leftists and journalists wrote this sort of thing. The American Ambassador Joseph Davies reported to the Secretary of State that there was “proof … beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason.”⁸⁴

During wartime lectures, Davies used to get a laugh, which he greatly appreciated, to his answer to questions about fifth columnists in Russia: “There aren’t any, they shot them all.” Both parts of this piece of gallows wit are untrue. The men shot were not fifth columnists. And fifth columnists rose by the thousand, even in spite of the repulsive policies of the Germans. Most of them were, moreover, people who would never, under a moderately popular regime, have thought of going over to the enemy. Stalin’s policies created a vast pool of potential treason which, had the Nazis not been foolish as well as foul, might well have decided the war.