16

Take Your Partners; Mount Your Prisoners: The Show Trial

Oblivious of these lengthening shadows, Stalin’s birthday party, attended by the magnates, Beria and the family, was “noisy and cheerful.” Voroshilov was resplendent in his new white Marshal’s uniform while his dowdy wife stared jealously at Maria Svanidze’s dress from Berlin. After dinner, there were songs and dancing like old times: with Zhdanov on harmonies, they sang Abkhazian, Ukrainian, student and comic songs. Stalin decided to order a piano so Zhdanov could play. Amid general hilarity, Postyshev, one of the Ukrainian bosses, slow-danced with Molotov—and “this couple very much amused Joseph and all the guests.” Here was the first example of the notorious stag slow dancing that was to become more forced after the war.

Stalin took over the gramophone and even did some Russian dancing. Mikoyan performed his leaping lezginka. The Svanidzes did the foxtrot and asked Stalin to join them but he said he had given up dancing since Nadya’s death. They danced until four.¹

In the spring of 1936, the arrests of old Trotskyites spread further and those already in camps were resentenced. Those convicted of “terror” offences were to be shot. But the real work was the creation of a new sort of political show: the first of Stalin’s great trials. Yezhov was the supervisor of this case—this hopeful theoretician was even writing a book about the Zinovievites, corrected personally by Stalin.² Yagoda, Commissar-General of State Security, who was sceptical about this “nonsense,” remained in charge but Yezhov constantly undermined him. This process exhausted frail Yezhov. Soon he was once again so debilitated that Kaganovich suggested, and Stalin approved, that he be sent on another special holiday for two months with a further 3,000 roubles.³

The chief defendants were to be Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their old friends were arrested to help persuade them to perform. Stalin followed every detail of the interrogations. The NKVD interrogators were to devote themselves body and soul to achieving the confessions. Stalin’s instructions to the NKVD were suggestive of this terrible process: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”

The NKVD defector Alexander Orlov left the best account of how Yezhov rigged up this trial, promising the “witnesses” their lives in return for testifying against Zinoviev and Kamenev who refused to cooperate. Stalin’s office phoned hourly for news.

“You think Kamenev may not confess?” Stalin asked Mironov, one of Yagoda’s Chekists.

“I don’t know,” replied Mironov.

“You don’t know?” said Stalin. “Do you know how much our State weighs with all the factories, machines, the army with all the armaments and the navy?” Mironov thought he was joking but Stalin was not smiling. “Think it over and tell me?” Stalin kept staring at him.

“Nobody can know that, Joseph Vissarionovich; it is the realm of astronomical figures.”

“Well, and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?”

“No,” replied Mironov.

“Well then . . . Don’t come to report to me until you have in this briefcase the confession of Kamenev.” Even though they were not physically tortured, the regime of threats and sleeplessness demoralized Zinoviev, suffering from asthma, and Kamenev. The heating was turned up in their cells in midsummer. Yezhov threatened that Kamenev’s son would be shot. ⁴

While the interrogators worked on Zinoviev and Kamenev, Maxim Gorky was dying of influenza and bronchial pneumonia. The old writer was now thoroughly disillusioned. The dangers of his Chekist companions became obvious when Gorky’s son Maxim died mysteriously of influenza. Later, Yagoda would be accused, with the family doctors, of killing him. After his death, Maxim’s daughter Martha remembers how Yagoda would visit the Gorky household every morning for a cup of coffee and a flirtation with her mother, on his way to the Lubianka: “he was in love with Timosha and wanted her to return his affection,” said Alexei Tolstoy’s wife.

“You still don’t know me, I can do anything,” he threatened the distraught Timosha: the writer Alexander Tikhonov claimed they began an affair; her daughter denies it. When Stalin visited, Yagoda lingered, still in love with Timosha and increasingly worried about himself. After the Politburo had left, he asked Gorky’s secretary: “Did they come? They’ve left now? What did they talk about? . . . Did they say anything about us . . .?” ⁵

Stalin had asked Gorky to write his biography, but the novelist recoiled from the task. Instead he bombarded Stalin and the Politburo with crazy proposals such as a project to commission Socialist Realist writers to “rewrite the world’s books anew.” Stalin’s apologies for late replies became ever more extreme: “I’m as lazy as a pig on things marked ‘correspondence,’ ” confessed Stalin to Gorky. “How do you feel? Healthy? How’s your work? Me and my friends are fine.” The NKVD actually printed false issues ofPravda especially for Gorky, to conceal the persecution of his friend, Kamenev.⁸⁹ Gorky himself realized that he was now under house arrest: “I’m surrounded,” he muttered, “trapped.”

In the first week of June, Gorky slept much of the days as his condition worsened. He was supervised by the best doctors but he was failing.

“Let them come if they can get here in time,” said Gorky. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were pleased to see that he had recovered—after a camphor injection. Stalin took control of the sickroom: “Why are there so many people here?” he asked. “Who’s that sitting beside Alexei Maximovich dressed in black? A nun, is she? All she lacks is a candle in her hands.” This was Baroness Moura Budberg, the mistress Gorky shared with H. G. Wells. “Get them all out of here except for that woman, the one in white, who’s looking after him . . . Why’s there such a funereal mood here? A healthy person might die in such an atmosphere.” Stalin stopped Gorky discussing literature but called for wine and they toasted him and then embraced.

Days later, Stalin arrived only to be told that Gorky was too ill to see him: “Alexei Mikhailovich, we visited you at two in the morning,” he wrote. “Your pulse was they say 82. The doctors did not allow us to come in to you. We submitted. Hello from all of us, a big hello. Stalin.” Molotov and Voroshilov signed underneath.

Gorky started to spit blood and died on 18 June, of TB, pneumonia and heart failure. Later it was claimed that his doctors and Yagoda had murdered him deliberately: they certainly confessed to his murder. His death was convenient before Zinoviev’s trial but his medical records in the NKVD archives suggest that he died naturally.⁶

Yagoda was skulking in the dining room at Gorky’s house but Stalin had already turned against him. “And what’s that creature hanging around here for? Get rid of him.”⁷

Finally in July, Zinoviev asked to be able to talk to Kamenev on his own. Then they demanded to speak to the Politburo: if the Party would guarantee there would be no executions, they would confess. Voroshilov was itching to get at the “scum”: when he received some of the testimonies against them, he wrote to Stalin that “these bad people . . . all typical representatives of petit bourgeois with the face of Trotsky . . . are finished people. There’s no place for them in our country and no place among the millions ready to die for the Motherland. This scum must be liquidated absolutely . . . we need to be sure the NKVD starts the purge properly . . .” Here, then, was one leader who genuinely seemed to approve of a terror and the liquidation of the former oppositions. On 3 July, Stalin replied to “dear Klim, did you read the testimonies . . . ? How do you like the bourgeois puppies of Trotsky . . . ? They wanted to wipe out all the members of the Politburo . . . Isn’t it weird? How low people can sink? J.St.”

Yagoda accompanied these two broken men on the short drive from the Lubianka to the Kremlin, where they had both once lived. When they arrived in the room where Kamenev had chaired so many Politburo meetings, they discovered that only Stalin, Voroshilov and Yezhov were present. Where was the rest of the Politburo?

Stalin replied that he and Voroshilov were a commission of the Politburo. Given Klim’s venom, it is easy to see why he was there, but where was Molotov? Perhaps the punctilious Iron-Arse was worried about the etiquette of lying to Old Bolsheviks: he certainly did not object to killing people.

Kamenev begged the Politburo for a guarantee of their lives.

“A guarantee?” replied Stalin, according to Orlov’s version. “What guarantee can there be? It’s simply ridiculous! Maybe you want an official treaty certified by the League of Nations? Zinoviev and Kamenev forget they’re not in a market-place haggling over a stolen horse but at the Politburo of the Bolshevik Communist Party. If an assurance by the Politburo is not enough, I don’t see any point in talking further.”

“Zinoviev and Kamenev behave as if they’re in a position to make conditions to the Politburo,” exclaimed Voroshilov. “If they had any common sense, they’d fall to their knees before Stalin . . .”

Stalin proposed three reasons why they would not be executed—it was really a trial of Trotsky; if he had not shot them when they were opposing the Party, then why shoot them when they were helping it; and finally, “the comrades forget that we are Bolsheviks, disciples and followers of Lenin, and we don’t want to shed the blood of Old Bolsheviks, no matter how grave their past sins . . .”

Zinoviev and Kamenev wearily agreed to plead guilty, provided there were no shootings and their families were protected.

“That goes without saying,” Stalin finished the meeting. ⁸

Stalin set to work on the script for the Zinoviev trial, revelling in his hyperbolic talent as a hack playwright. The new archives reveal how he even dictated the words of the new Procurator-General, Andrei Vyshinsky, who kept notes of his leader’s perorations.⁹

Stalin issued a secret circular of 29 July which announced that a terrorist leviathan named the “United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre” had attempted to assassinate Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Sergo, Zhdanov and others. These lists of purported targets became a bizarre honour since inclusion signified proximity to Stalin. One can imagine the leaders checking the list like schoolboys rushing to the noticeboard to make sure they are in the football team. Significantly, Molotov was not on the team, which was interpreted as a sign of opposition to the Terror but it seems he was indeed temporarily out of favour because of a different disagreement with Stalin. Molotov boasted, “I’d always supported the measures taken,” but there is one intriguing hint in the archives that Molotov was under fire from Yezhov. The NKVD had arrested the German nurse of his daughter Svetlana Molotova⁹⁰ and the Premier had grumbled to Yagoda. A Chekist denounced Molotov for “improper behaviour . . . Molotov behaved badly.” On 3 November, Yezhov sent Molotov the denunciation, perhaps a shot across his bows.¹⁰

Yezhov was Stalin’s closest associate in the days before the trial while Yagoda, now in disfavour for his resistance to it, was received only once. Stalin complained about his work: “You work poorly. The NKVD suffers a serious disease.” Finally he called Yagoda, shouting that he would “punch him in the nose” if he did not pull himself together. We have Stalin’s notes from his 13 August meetings with Yezhov, which catch his mood. In one, he considers sacking an official: “Get him out? Yes, get him out! Talk with Yezhov.” Again and again: “Ask Yezhov.”¹¹

The first of the famous show trials opened on 19 August in the October Hall upstairs in the House of Unions. The 350 spectators were mainly NKVD clerks in plain clothes, foreign journalists and diplomats. On a raised dais in the centre, the three judges, led by Ulrikh, sat on portentous throne-like chairs covered in red cloth. The real star of this theatrical show, the Procurator-General Andrei Vyshinsky, whose performance of foaming ire and articulate pedantry would make him a European figure, sat to the audience’s left. The defendants, sixteen shabby husks, guarded by NKVD troopers with fixed bayonets, sat to the right. Behind them was a door that led to the suite that might be compared to the “celebrity hospitality green room” in television studios. Here in a drawing room with sandwiches and refreshments sat Yagoda who could confer with Vyshinsky and the defendants during the trial.

Stalin was said to be lurking in a recessed gallery with darkened windows at the back where the orchestras once played for aristocratic quadrilles and whence puffs of pipe smoke were alleged to be emanating.

On the 13th, six days before the trial began, Stalin departed by train for Sochi, after a meeting with Yezhov. It is a mark of the impenetrable secrecy of the Soviet system that it has taken over sixty years for anyone to discover that Stalin was actually far away, though he followed the legal melodrama almost as closely as if he had been listening to it in his office. Eighty-seven NKVD packages of interrogations plus records of confrontations and the usual pile of newspapers, memos and telegrams arrived at the wicker table on the veranda.

Kaganovich and Yezhov checked every detail with Stalin. The protégé was now more powerful than his former patron—Yezhov signed his name ahead of Kaganovich in every telegram. While the will of the great actor-manager controlled all from afar, the two in Moscow doubled as PR-men and impresarios. On the 17th, Kaganovich and Yezhov reported to the Khozyain that “we’ve fixed the press coverage . . . in the following manner: 1. Pravda and Izvestiya to publish a page-length account of the trial daily.” On the 18th, Stalin ordered the trial to proceed next day.

The accused were indicted with a fantastical array of often bungled crimes ordered by the shadowy conspiracy led by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev (“The United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre”) that had successfully killed Kirov but repeatedly failed to kill Stalin and the others (though never bothering with Molotov). For six days, they confessed to these crimes with a docility that amazed Western spectators.

The language of these trials was as obscure as hieroglyphics and could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which “terrorism” simply signified “any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.” All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two “terrorists” was a “conspiracy” and, putting together such killers from different factions, created a “Unified Centre” of astonishing global, indeed Blofeldian, reach: this reveals much about Stalin’s internal melodrama as well as about Bolshevik paranoia, formed by decades of underground life. ¹²

While these crushed men delivered their lines, Procurator-General Vyshinsky brilliantly combined the indignant humbug of a Victorian preacher with the diabolical curses of a witch doctor. Small with “bright black eyes” behind horn-rimmed spectacles, thinning reddish hair, pointed nose, and dapper in “white collar, checked tie, well-cut suit, trimmed grey moustache,” a Western witness thought he resembled “a prosperous stockbroker accustomed to lunching at Simpson’s and playing golf at Sunning-dale.” Born into an affluent, noble Polish family in Odessa, Vyshinsky had once occupied a cell with Stalin with whom he shared hampers from his parents, an investment that may have saved his life. But as an ex-Menshevik, he was absolutely obedient and ravenously bloodthirsty: during the thirties, his notes to Stalin constantly propose shooting of defendants, usually “Trotskyites preparing the death of Stalin,” always ending with the words: “I recommend VMN—death by shooting.”

Vyshinsky, fifty-three, was notoriously unpleasant to his subordinates but cringingly sycophantic to his seniors: he used the word “Illustrious” in his letters to Molotov and even Poskrebyshev (whom he cleverly cultivated). Even his subordinates found him a “sinister figure” who, regardless of his “excellent education,” believed in the essential rule of Stalinist management: “I believe in keeping people on edge,” but he was always on the edge himself, suffering bouts of eczema, living in fear and helping to breed it. Alert, vigorous, vain and intelligent, he impressed Westerners as much as he chilled them with his forensic mannerisms and vicious wit: it was he who later described the Romanians as “not a nation, but a profession.” He was very proud of his notoriety: presented to Princess Margaret in London in 1947, he whispered to the diplomat introducing them, “Please add my former title as Procurator in the famous Moscow trials.”¹³

Every day, Yezhov and Kaganovich, who must have been listening to the trial in the “hospitality suite,” reported to Stalin on the proceedings like this: “Zinoviev declared that he confirms the depositions of Bakaiev on the fact that the latter had made a report to Zinoviev on the preparation of a terrorist act against Kirov...” They revelled in recounting to the actor-manager-playwright the successful “unfolding” of this theatrical piece.

However, there was severe doubt among many of the journalists, exacerbated by the NKVD’s comical blunders: the court heard how Trotsky’s son, Sedov, ordered the assassinations in a meeting at the Hotel Bristol in Denmark—yet it emerged that the hotel had been demolished in 1917.

“What the devil did you need the hotel for?” Stalin is said to have shouted. “You ought to have said ‘railway station.’ The station is always there.”¹⁴

This show had a wider cast than the players actually onstage because others were carefully implicated, raising the prospect of other famous “terrorists” appearing in later trials. The defendants took great care to implicate a couple of military commanders and then both Leftists, such as Karl Radek, and Rightists, such as Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. Vyshinsky announced that he was opening new cases against these celebrated names.

The members of this off-stage cast performed their roles very differently: the gifted journalist Karl Radek, a famous international revolutionary who cut an absurd figure with his round glasses, whiskers, pipe, leather boots and coats, had been close to Stalin during the early thirties, advising him on German politics. Writers always imagine they can write their way out of danger so Radek offered his pen to the Master. Now Stalin decreed that “although not very convincing, I suggest to delay for the moment the question of Radek’s arrest and to let him publish in Izvestiya a signed article . . .” Opportunities, even temporary indulgence towards old friends, could change Stalin’s meandering progress.⁹¹

On the 22nd, the accused refused to plead for their defence. The Politburo—Kaganovich, Sergo, Voroshilov and Chubar—along with Yezhov, asked for instructions: “It’s not convenient to authorize any appeal,” Stalin retorted, at 11:10 the next night giving exact instructions on the press coverage of the sentences. Revealingly, the playwright thought the verdict required a little bit of “stylistic polishing.” Half an hour later, he wrote again, worrying that the trial would be regarded as just a “mise-en-scène.” 15

Stalin’s spin doctors engineered public outrage against the terrorists. Khrushchev, rabid supporter of the trials and shootings, arrived one evening at the Central Committee to find Kaganovich and Sergo bullying the poet Demian Bedny to produce a blood-Curdling ditty for Pravda. Bedny recited his effort. There was an awkward pause:

“Not what we had in mind, Comrade Bedny,” said Kaganovich. Sergo lost his temper and shouted at Bedny. Khrushchev glared at him.

“I can’t!” protested Bedny, but he could. His “No Mercy” was published the next day, while Pravda shrieked: “Crush the Loathsome Creatures! The Mad Dogs Must Be Shot!”

In the court, Vyshinsky summed up: “These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of our Soviet land”—Kirov. “I demand that these mad dogs should be shot—every one of them!” The dogs themselves now made their pathetic pleas and confessions. Even seventy years later, they are tragic to read. Kamenev finished his confession but then rose again, obviously off-message, to plead for his children whom he had no other means of addressing: “No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just. Don’t look back,” he told his sons. “Go forward . . . Follow Stalin.”

The judges withdrew to consider their pre-decided verdict, returning at two-thirty to sentence all to death, at which one defendant shouted: “Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!”¹⁶

Back in prison, the scared “terrorists” shakily appealed for mercy, remembering Stalin’s promise to spare them. As Zinoviev and Kamenev waited in their cells, Stalin, waiting in sunny Sochi, received a telegram at 8:48 p.m. from Kaganovich, Sergo, Voroshilov and Yezhov who informed him that the appeal of the defendants had been received. “The Politburo proposed to reject the demands and execute the verdict tonight.”⁹² Stalin did not answer, perhaps congratulating himself on his imminent revenge, perhaps having dinner, but surely aware that the murder of two of Lenin’s closest comrades marked a giant step towards his next colossal gamble, an intense reign of terror against the Party itself, a slaughter that would consume even his own friends and family. Stalin waited for three long hours. ¹⁷