The Great Terror

On his right was another veteran of these trials, Matulevich, who had presided over the mass slaughter of the Leningrad “White Guards” in December 1934. On his left was a figure of great interest to Westerners, the unimpressive, thin-faced Divisional Military Jurist I. I. Nikitchenko. Ten years later, he was to appear on the Supreme Allied Tribunal at Nuremberg, with the most distinguished judges of Britain, America, and France, to preside over the trial of Goering and others.fn4 He represented a judicial tradition so different from that of the rest of the Tribunal that his mere presence may be thought to have made a mockery of those proceedings.

One important respect in which Soviet justice differed from that practiced by his future colleagues in Nuremberg was that sentences had been prepared beforehand by nonjudicial authorities. “The vicious practice was condoned of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons whose cases were under jurisdiction of the Military Collegium and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the proposed punishment … He approved these lists.”¹⁰⁶ It was even the case that “Kaganovich, before court sittings on various cases had come to an end, would personally edit the draft sentences and arbitrarily insert charges that suited him, such as allegations that acts of terrorism had been planned against his person,”¹⁰⁷

while Molotov is described as personally changing a sentence on a “wife of an enemy of the people” from imprisonment to death when the list when through his hands.¹⁰⁸ In the case now before Nikitchenko and his colleagues, there is no reason to doubt that the sentences were part of the original script, and had been imposed by the General Secretary himself.fn5

Three large and healthy NKVD soldiers, with rifles and fixed bayonets, escorted the prisoners to the dock, behind a low wooden bar along the right-hand wall of the courtroom, and took up positions guarding them. The accused had gained a little weight and caught up on their sleep in the few days past. But they still looked pale and worn.

Just before the trial, Yagoda and Yezhov had a conference with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, Bakayev, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan. Yezhov repeated Stalin’s assurance that their lives would be spared, and also warned them that a single attempt at “treachery” would be regarded as implicating the whole group.¹⁰⁹

Now they sat, ill at ease among the agents provocateurs scattered among them and separating them. The practice of trying a group of important political prisoners with various second-rate crooks (or alleged crooks), as though they formed one group, is an old technique. At the trial of Danton and the Moderates on 13 and 14 Germinal, he and his four closest followers were mingled in with men accused as thieves and common spies, and each was carefully linked with the others by joint accusations. The Soviet press was doing just such a job. An angry and violent campaign filled the papers in which, meanwhile, other and contrary themes were appearing—in particular, almost daily photographs of a series of airmen, like those of the astronauts a generation later. These were men like Chkalov, who with his crew flew a new Soviet plane on a round tour of the country to the Far East and back, and Kokkinaki, who produced a series of altitude records. They were photographed with Stalin and others, being received in the Politburo, being awarded Orders, and simply on their own. Through them, an air of youth and progress, of the triumph of the young Stalinist generation, was projected at the same time as the forces of darkness represented by the Old Bolsheviks were being dissipated.

At the side of the room, opposite the doomed representatives of anti-Stalinism, Vyshinsky sat at a small table, with his trim gray moustache and hair, neatly dressed in stiff white collar and well-cut dark suit.

Ulrikh went through the formalities of identification and asked if there were objections to the court and if the accused wanted defending lawyers. The answer to both questions was a unanimous negative. The secretary of the court then read the indictment. This based itself on the trial of January 1935, at which, it said, Zinoviev and his colleagues had concealed their direct responsibility for the Kirov murder. The since-revealed circumstances showed that they and the Trotskyites, who had practiced terrorism earlier still, had formed a united bloc at the end of 1932. The bloc had been joined also by the Lominadze group. They had received instructions, through special agents, from Trotsky. In fulfilling them, they had organized terrorist groups which had “prepared a number of practical measures” for the assassination of Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Zhdanov, Kossior, Postyshev, and others;¹¹⁰ one of these terrorist groups had actually murdered Kirov. They had no program other than murder.