The Great Terror

No documentary evidence (except Olberg’s Honduran passport and Tukalevski’s visiting card) was produced. The failure of the prosecution to produce documents should have struck observers as particularly odd. For in the arrest of underground Bolsheviks, the Tsarist police repeatedly discovered documents—without which, indeed, it is difficult to see how an underground could operate. When the February 1917 Revolution opened up the police archives, hundreds of secret Party documents were found in them, including letters written by Lenin himself. And the underground Bolsheviks of that time were at least as skilled in conspiracy as the men Stalin now arrested; indeed (as Orlov points out), “They were the same men.”

Again, prominent conspirators and witness were simply missing. Sokolnikov was clearly a relevant and important witness. But he was not called. Nor were Bukharin, or Tomsky, or Rykov—or any of the newly implicated. Among the Zinovievites who were not called but who had appeared at previous trials were Gertik, one of the main links with the “Leningrad Center,” which had allegedly assassinated Kirov,¹⁶⁹ and Karev, who was supposed to have been personally instructed by Zinoviev and by Bakayev to prepare the Kirov murder with others of the Leningrad assassination group,¹⁷⁰ with which Faivilovich was also a contact man.

¹⁷¹ (Kuklin, actually named as a full member of the “Center,” seems to have died in the interim.)¹⁷²

But meanwhile, questions of evidence, of logic, were not decisive. The prestige of the “Socialist State” was high. There was little choice between accepting the trial at its face value and branding Stalin as a vulgar murderer, and his regime as a tyranny founded on falsehood. The truth could be deduced, but it could not be proved. Few cared to hear it, given the more evident menace of Fascism.

In the Soviet Union itself, things were different. Few, perhaps, credited the confessions. But fewer still could even hint their doubts.

A week after the execution of Zinoviev and his fellow defendants, Stalin ordered Yagoda to select and shoot 5,000 of the oppositionists then in camps.¹⁷³ At this time, the last privileges were withdrawn from political prisoners in camps. In March 1937, some rights were temporarily restored. But a few months later, another mass execution was ordered. The brick factory at Vorkuta became notorious as the center of the operation.¹⁷⁴ The victims included Trotsky’s son Sergei Sedov. In March 1938, the Armenian So!crates Gevorkian and twenty other former Leftists were executed near their camp. From then until the end of 1938, groups of forty or so were executed there once or twice a week. Children under twelve alone were spared.¹⁷⁵

There are reports of a last hunger strike by the oppositionists before they were separated, resulting in many deaths and, eventually, the disappearance of all concerned.¹⁷⁶ Roy Medvedev tells us that of several thousand Old Bolsheviks who returned to Moscow after rehabilitation in 1956 and 1957, he was “only able to find two former Trotskyists and one former Zinovievist.”¹⁷⁷

5

THE PROBLEM OF CONFESSION

He lies like an eyewitness.

Russian Saying

When, at 1:45 P.M. on 19 August 1936, Mrachkovsky started to confess in public to a series of appalling crimes, it marked the beginning of a series of events which shook and astonished the entire world. Mrachkovsky was a former worker and an Old Bolshevik, a member of the Party since 1905. He had actually been born in prison, where, in 1888, his mother was serving a sentence for revolutionary activity. His father, a worker like himself, was a revolutionary too, and became a Bolshevik when that party was organized. Even his grandfather, also a worker, had belonged to one of the first Marxist groupings, the Southern Russian Workers’ Union.

Mrachkovsky himself had come to prominence by leading a rising in the Urals. He had fought in Siberia in the Civil War, and had been wounded several times. He had later been one of the boldest of Trotsky’s followers, and had been the first to be arrested when, in 1927, he organized the Trotskyites’ short-lived underground printing press.

He was, in fact, a real epitome of revolutionary boldness, born and bred to resistance. He now stood up and complaisantly confessed to active membership in a plot to murder the Soviet leadership. Over the next few days, half a dozen other Old Bolsheviks followed suit, including leaders known the world over. Lastly, they made final pleas, condemning themselves for “contemptible treachery” (Kamenev), speaking of themselves as “the dregs of the land” (Pikel), “not only murderers but fascist murderers” (Holtzman). Several expressly said that their crimes were too foul to let them ask for clemency; Mrachkovsky described himself as “a traitor who should be shot.”