The Great Terror

During the 1940s and 1950s, there were many attempts to silence or discredit the evidence of men who had been in the camps, or otherwise given information about the Purge. This was particularly the case in France. In 1950, the writer David Rousset, of the Commission Internationale Contre la Régime Concentrationnaire, sued the Communist weekly Les Lettres françaises for libel. It had alleged that he had falsified a quotation from the Soviet penal code. As often in French political cases, themes much broader than the point supposedly at issue were developed. And, against a venomous defense by Communist lawyers, the facts of the forced-labor system were publicly established. One of the witnesses was Alexander Weissberg. An Austrian, a Jew, and (up to the time of his period in a Soviet prison) a Communist, he was continually subjected to abuse by the defense counsel in the style, “It turns my stomach to see a German testifying before a French court.” The campaign to smear the witness did not work well in this instance, as he was able to produce an appeal which had been sent at the time of his imprisonment to the Soviet authorities testifying to his character and to his loyal service to the Soviet Union, and had been signed by a number of leading physicists, including the Communist Joliot-Curie.

The most useful and interesting I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko was similarly smeared in one of the most thorough and vicious campaigns of the time. Older readers will probably recall the title with a vague feeling of unease, or hostility, induced by these methods.fn5 Kravchenko, too, became involved in a court case in France, and in this instance the Russians sent witnesses to oppose him, while the French Communist Party mobilized a powerful legal and extralegal team.

The French Communist Les Lehres françaises had published an article supposedly by an American journalist called Sim Thomas, who had allegedly claimed that a friend of his in the OSS had admitted that Kravchenko’s book was faked by that organization. Thomas was never produced, and it was later revealed by the editor concerned that he never existed. The trial proved a disaster to the Communists, though the French literary men concerned invariably countered facts supported by an impressive array of eyewitnesses by emotional appeals about the Battle of Stalingrad. They also put forward, to refute men who had actually been in labor camps and had otherwise suffered, witnesses such as the Dean of Canterbury and Konni Zilliacus, who found themselves able to assert that full, or at least admirable, liberty prevailed in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government also sent a number of witnesses, but they proved unused to hostile cross-questioning, and were on the whole disastrous.

For example, the Soviet witness Vassilenko, who had been an official in the Ukraine during the Purges, answered questions about the period:

Izard:

What became of the following members of the Politburo who were in office before the purges in the Ukraine: Kossior?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know him.

Izard:

Zatonsky?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

They were the members of the Government of the Ukraine when you were working there. Balitsky?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

Petrovsky?

Vassilenko:

He’s working in Moscow.

Izard:

He wasn’t purged?

Vassilenko:

No.

Izard:

Khatayevich?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know where he is.

Izard:

Naturally! Lyubchenko?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

lzard:

Disappeared! Sukhomlin?

Vassilenko:

I don’t recall that name.

Izard:

Yakir?

Vassilenko:

I don’t know.

⁹⁶

It will be seen that Vassilenko, under pressure, seems to have forgotten that the deaths in disgrace of both Yakir and Lyubchenko had been publicly announced. He was then asked what had happened to the four Secretaries of his own local provincial Party, and “did not know.” Although himself a leading industrialist in the area, when asked about fifteen of the main managers and engineers, he denied knowing anything about what had happened to ten of them (two had died natural deaths). Unfortunately, when pressed about the missing ten, he snarled back, “Why do you make yourself the defender of people like them?”⁹⁷ a remark not compatible with ignorance of their fate. This public illustration of the official Soviet mind at work is of interest far beyond the particular context of the trial.