The Great Terror

This unpromising assassin was then transferred to Leningrad, where he was put in touch with “Zeidel’s terrorist group” (one of the miscellaneous assassin groups named throughout the trial; Zeidel was a historian). Here N. Lurye’s instructions were to assassinate Zhdanov. He planned to do this at the 1 May demonstration. Ulrikh established in detail the type of revolver (a medium-sized Browning), but as Lurye made no use of it, this point lost some of its significance:

President:

Why did you fail to carry out the attempt on the life of Zhdanov?

N. Lurye:

We marched by too far away.

¹⁴¹

He had now been involved in “assassination attempts” on four leading figures, and no overt action of any sort had been taken—comparing most unfavorably with the efficiency of the killers of Kirov.

Moissei Lurye’s evidence was of the same type. He also had instructions from Trotsky, through the German Communist oppositionist leaders Ruth Fischer and Maslow, and had met Zinoviev too. He had prepared his namesake for his various attempts.

Ter-Vaganyan

appeared next. He implicated a new group, the Georgian deviationists, who had been terrorists, “as is well known,” since 1928. This implied Mdivani and his followers, but the only person Ter-Vaganyan named was Okudzhava. He had also conducted the negotiations with his close friend Lominadze and with the Trotskyite historians Zeidel and Friedland.

Ter-Vaganyan also implicated Smirnov, who again put his denials in the record, though eventually conceding that one disputed meeting “may have taken place.”

The last accused, Fritz David, gave evidence of having been sent by Trotsky and Sedov and having attempted to carry out “two concrete plans to assassinate Stalin,” both of which failed, one because Stalin did not attend the meeting of the Comintern Executive Committee chosen as the occasion for action, and the other because, at the Comintern Congress, David had been unable to get near enough. Sedov had (not surprisingly) been furious when he earned of these hitches. Not a single one of all the terrorists sent into the Soviet Union at such trouble and expense had even slightly inconvenienced, let alone killed, any of the Stalin leadership. In spite of this, Vyshinsky remarked that “the Trotskyites operated with greater determination and energy than the Zinovievites”!¹⁴²

Dreitzer was recalled at the end of the evening session on 21 August to implicate Corps Commander Vitovt Putna (see Chapter 7), who had “ostensibly left the Trotskyites” but had actually carried instructions from Trotsky to Dreitzer for transmission to Smirnov. Smirnov here again intervened to deny that Putna was a Trotskyite, but Pikel, Reingold, and Bakayev confirmed it.

This concluded the evidence, but the published record of the case consists only of excerpts from the full record. Other allegations, doubtless also made at the trial itself, are contained in the Secret Letter of the Central Committee of 29 July 1936, mentioned above. There we read, in addition to the plotters in Gorky, of a group in the Ukraine confessing in December 1935 of plotting to kill Kossior and Postyshev (though without implicating the August 1936 accused), and also of planning robberies to obtain funds to support this venture; of various other conspirators not named in the trial report, one (under the leadership of I. S. Esterman) seeking the assassination of Kaganovich, others that of Voroshilov; and of the “nests” of Trotskyites in “a number of scientific-research institutes,” the Academy of Sciences, and other organizations in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk.

At the end of the 21 August session, Vyshinsky issued the following statement:

At preceding sessions some of the accused (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Reingold) in their testimony referred to Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Uglanov, Radek, Pyatakov,fn6 Serebryakov and Sokolnikov as being to a greater or lesser degree involved in the criminal counter-revolutionary activities for which the accused in the present case are being tried. I consider it necessary to inform the court that yesterday I gave orders to institute an investigation of these statements of the accused in regard to Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Uglanov, Radek and Pyatakov, and that in accordance with the results of this investigation the office of the State Attorney will institute legal proceedings in this matter. In regard to Serebryakov and Sokolnikov, the investigating authorities are already in possession of material convicting these persons of counter-revolutionary crimes, and, in view of this, criminal proceedings are being instituted against Sokolnikov and Serebryakov.¹⁴³

On 22 August, this announcement was printed, together with a prompt demand by a workers’ meeting at the Dynamo Factory that these charges be “pitilessly investigated.”