The Great Terror

Koestler’s account is in fact extremely well founded on the facts. For instance, when he describes an attempt to break Rubashov’s morale by dragging a badly tortured prisoner past his cell to execution, he can base this firmly on the evidence.³⁰ Briefly summarized, Rubashov’s surrender is based on a feeling that his own past actions have deprived him of the right to judge Stalin’s, coupled with a feeling of loyalty to the Party and its conception of history; and it is largely a conscious process—the pressure of the interrogation, toothache, and so on merely intensifying his reflection leading up to the decision. In fact, he is shown in court as resisting the temptation not to confess. They key thought in his confession is formulated thus:

‘I know’, Rubashov went on, ‘that my aberration, if carried into effect would have been a mortal danger to the Revolution. Every opposition at the critical turning-points of history, carries in itself the germ of a split in the Party, and hence the germ of civil war. Humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy, when the masses are not mature, is suicide for the Revolution. And yet my oppositional attitude was based on a craving for just these methods—in appearance so desirable, actually so deadly. On a demand for a liberal reform of the dictatorship, for a broader democracy, for the abolition of the Terror, and a loosening of the rigid organization of the Party. I admit that these demands, in the present situation, are objectively harmful and therefore counter-revolutionary in character…³¹

We have here, though in more extreme form, that extravagant identification with Party which is to be found in Bukharin’s private utterances before his arrest and in Pyatakov’s 1928 outburst. Bukharin was to say publicly in his last plea,

For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while I was in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ‘If you must die, what are you dying for?’—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented…. And when you ask yourself, ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for?’ Isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life.³²

Koestler does not, as we have noted, put forward his account as a general theory of the motivation of confessions. He is simply giving an account of one presumable mechanism: and it is clear from much that has been written since that what he describes, or something like it, was genuinely involved in certain cases.

These considerations did not apply to all Party members. Ryutin and his associates were clearly prepared to remove Stalin. And similarly with the confessions. Ivan Smirnov was only induced to make his partial and derisory confession on the grounds that without it he would be shot in secret and his name dragged in the mud by those who had already decided to confess, and by the promise to spare his former wife and his family,³³ while his presence would to some extent check the smears of the Prosecutor. Even so, he is said to have gone to his death remarking that he and the other defendants had behaved despicably.³⁴

And what greater contrast could there be between Pyatakov’s words and those reported of Ter-Vaganyan:

But in order to sign the testimony which is demanded of me, I must be sure first that it is really needed in the interests of the Party and the Revolution….

… You suggest that I do not think and rely blindly on the Central Committee, because the Central Committee sees everything more clearly than I. But the trouble is that by my very nature I am unable to stop thinking. And when I do think, I come to the inescapable conclusion that the assertions that the oldest Bolsheviks have turned into a gang of murderers will bring incalculable harm not only to our country and the Party, but to the cause of Socialism all over the world….

… If now the new program of the Central Committee deems it necessary to discredit Bolshevism and its founders, then I don’t agree with that program and I no longer consider myself bound by Party discipline. And besides, I am already expelled from the Party, and for that reason alone I am not obliged to submit to Party discipline.³⁵

When he was finally persuaded that there was no point in resisting while Zinoviev and Kamenev, greatly senior figures, were going to smear the Party anyhow, and he was advised by the interrogator Boris Berman, with whom he had become friendly, that he might just as well save his own life this way, he gave in. Berman remarked that in this way he hoped, after years had passed, to see Ter-Vaganyan rehabilitated and given an important post. Ter-Vaganyan is said to have replied,