Eastern Approaches (10 page)

The Russian town, which like Alma Ata and the modern portion of Samarkand, is laid out in broad avenues of poplars, was for the most part built after the capture of the town by the Russians in 1865 but before the Revolution, though there are the usual square white factories, Government offices and blocks of flats in the strictly utilitarian style of modern Soviet architecture. I was not surprised to be told that the best block of flats was reserved for ‘specialists’, i.e. highly paid technical workers. In the station buffet an extremely ‘hot’ band with a good sense of rhythm played fairly recent jazz from New York. An institution inherited from the old regime is a formidable turreted and machicolated prison, the crenellated walls of which are continually patrolled by N.K.V.D. troops. On the way from the old town to the new I saw another heavily guarded and apparently fortified enclosure which I took to be the Headquarters of the Central Asian Military district, but not wishing to be arrested as a spy, I kept well away from it. Outside the town, the villages in the surrounding country are purely Uzbek, their inhabitants working for the most part in the cotton fields or in the mills.

I had seen Alma Ata; I had seen Tashkent; best of all I had seen Samarkand. I had done what I had set out to do and, having done it, immediately I conceived new ambitions.

First of all, there was Bokhara, not more than 200 miles southwards and westwards from Samarkand, but harder to get to, and further removed from Western influence, scarcely changed, it seemed, since the downfall of the last Emir. Now that I had come so far, might I not go a little further?

Then, over the mountains from Alma Ata lay Chinese Turkestan or Sinkiang, as it was called, an outlying province of China, which Soviet intrigue and the turbulent nature of its inhabitants had thrown into an uproar, temptingly near and temptingly inaccessible. Might it not be possible to slip across the passes of the Tien Shan to Kashgar, or join a caravan, travelling eastwards along the new road from Alma Ata to Urumchi?

But already I had exceeded my leave, and, if I exceeded it still further, I might well be granted no more. Besides, lucky as I had been so far, I
could scarcely hope to reach either Bokhara or Sinkiang without running into trouble with the N.K.V.D. And, with an eye to future enterprises, I wanted to avoid an actual show-down with them for as long as possible. And so, reluctantly, I turned my back, for the time being at any rate, on both these alluring projects, and after spending an entire night from dusk till dawn standing in a queue, I secured a ticket and boarded a train bound for Moscow by the most direct route.

My journey home was uneventful. I made it in a ‘soft’ carriage on a train with a well-stocked dining-car. The other berths in my compartment were occupied by one of the inevitable railwaymen and two youthful and extremely affected intellectuals from Leningrad with horn-rimmed spectacles and carefully trimmed beards who knew better than to talk to a foreigner and were too class-conscious to talk to a railway man. The result was that the railwayman and myself, thrown together and having exhausted all possible topics of conversation at an early stage in the proceedings, filled up the rest of the four-day journey with ceaseless games of chess. I had not played since I was seven, and so my opponent invariably won, much to his delight.

The first part of the return journey lay through the Kazakh steppe, this time further to the west, the train following the course of the Jaxartes or Syr Daria as far as the Sea of Aral, seen briefly as a glittering expanse of water stretching away into the distance. The second stage, by way of Orenburg, Kuibyshev and Penza to Moscow lay through a typical Russian landscape. All that remained of Asia was the crowd of Uzbeks and Kazakhs in the ‘hard’ carriages travelling to Moscow on business or for pleasure.

A few miles outside Moscow we passed a long prison train, eastward bound. It was composed of reinforced cattle trucks. At the end of each truck was a guard of N.K.V.D. troops with fixed bayonets. Through cracks in the sides one could see the prisoners’ faces, peering out. It served as a reminder that travel in the regions from which I was returning is not always undertaken at the traveller’s own wish.

B
ACK
in Moscow the first snows had fallen and I put aside any further thought of travel until the spring. There was a lot of work to be got through in the Chancery; there was the endless round of official parties. But, with a little ingenuity and enterprise, life could be made agreeable enough.

Chip and Avis Bohlen and Charlie Thayer of the American Embassy had a
dacha
, a country cottage, ten or twelve miles outside the town, and there we kept some horses which we had bought from the Red Army and which, as far as we knew, were the only privately owned saddle-horses in the Soviet Union. On them we ranged far and wide over the green, rolling country round about. When the snow made riding impossible, we took to our skis and plunged inexpertly down the frozen slopes immediately behind the
dacha
. In the evenings, after a hard day’s exercise, we would congregate round a roaring open fire in the
dacha
and Avis would dispense frankfurters and peanut butter and corned-beef hash and other unaccustomed delicacies, washed down by plenty of good American coffee and equally good Scotch whisky. Then we would lie about and talk and play the gramophone until it was time to go home. As we drove back to Moscow the air was icy and the stars shone down frostily on the sparkling snow.

Sometimes, at night, we went to the Park of Rest and Culture, an immense amusement park on the outskirts of Moscow. In the winter the whole of it was flooded and on skates one could go skimming along for miles over brilliantly lighted frozen avenues to the strains of Vienna waltzes and Red Army marches, while vast illuminated portraits of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin gazed benignly down on the whirling crowds beneath them. Sometimes, too, we would go to the Hotel Metropole, where the cream of the Red Army and of Soviet officialdom could be seen disporting themselves with their womenfolk beneath the same gilded candelabras that had witnessed the antics of their Tsarist predecessors.

But, of the various distractions that Moscow can offer, none surpasses the Theatre and Ballet. The tradition which they represent has endured unbroken from before the Revolution. They would, I think, play an important part in Russian life under any regime. It is in the foyer of the Bolshoi and of the First Arts that the ‘new proletarian aristocracy’ assemble, immaculate in uniforms and neat blue suits, their wives resplendent in sable and redolent of Soviet scent. In the former Imperial box Stalin and the members of his entourage make their rare public appearances. Round the persons of the leading ballerinas hangs an aura of glamour and romance shared by few save the greatest military and political leaders.

The Soviet authorities do all they can to encourage the Theatre and Ballet. Perhaps they see in them a relatively harmless outlet for a turbulent imagination. By a fortunate dispensation of providence, Russians possess a natural gift of make-believe. Listening to Chaikovski’s music and watching the transformation scenes of
Swan Lake
and
The Sleeping Beauty
unfold before them, they have the power to forget their troubles and miseries and transport themselves into a world of plenty, magnificence and romance, with nothing more frightening than an occasional witch or magician to take the place of the more substantial terrors of real life. For them, as for no other race, the real and the imaginary, the actual and the symbolic, the literal and the figurative, tend to overlap and become one. Even the foreigners, diplomats and journalists, sitting isolated in their stalls amid the serried rows of proletarian aristocrats, cannot but share the thrill of excitement that runs through the crowd as the curtain goes up, cannot but feel something of the rapt interest with which they follow every movement and every gesture until it goes down again.

But before the winter was out, the easy routine of our life was to be interrupted by an event which was to leave on me, at any rate, a more profound impression than any other experience during the years I spent in Soviet Russia.

By the beginning of 1938 no important State trial had been held in public for a year. Sentence had been passed on Tukachevski and the Generals behind closed doors; many other high functionaries of Army,
Government and Party had been liquidated, as far as one could ascertain, ‘administratively’. People were beginning to think that the unfavourable reaction even of Left-wing circles abroad to the trials of Piatakov and Radek and other Old Bolsheviks, with the fantastic public confessions, orgies of self-abasement of the prisoners and the bloodthirsty ravings of the Public Prosecutor, had at last convinced the Soviet authorities that in the long run displays of this kind did more harm than good, and induced them to abandon the public trial in favour of more discreet methods of liquidation. Every week since the last trial the removal from office of public figures of varying importance had been announced and their names cited in the Press as wreckers and enemies of the people. But after that, in general, no more was heard of them, and their demise was assumed as a matter of course. It seemed likely that there would be no more public trials.

Then, one day at the beginning of March, the news broke.

Outside it was dreary and overcast, and the big shiny black cars of the high Soviet dignitaries spattered the plodding crowds in the streets with half-frozen snow as they rushed past with klaxons blaring on their way to and from the Kremlin. But in the great white-pillared ballroom of the American Embassy it was agreeably warm and the crystal chandeliers shed a cheerful light on the silver trays of highballs and old-fashioneds.

Suddenly a newspaperman hurried in, displaying all the symptoms, the air of suppressed excitement, of scarcely veiled self-importance, of someone who has got a story. News was short in Moscow in those days, and we clustered round him, diplomats and journalists alike. In his hand he held the text of a communiqué which had just been released by the Soviet Government. It was the announcement of a big State trial, the biggest yet. Looking over one another’s shoulders, we read the names of the accused.

It was an impressive list: Bukharin, a former Secretary-General of the Communist International, for years the leading theorist of the Party and a close associate of Lenin; Rykov, Lenin’s successor and Molotov’s predecessor as Premier; Yagoda, who, until eighteen months ago, had been People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, and supreme head of the all-powerful N.K.V.D.; Krestinski, formerly Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs, whom most of us remembered meeting at
official parties and receptions; Rosengolts, until recently Commissar for Foreign Trade; Faisullah Khojayev, President of Uzbekistan, who ever since the Revolution had been the outstanding figure in Soviet Central Asia; three of the Kremlin doctors, Levin, Pletnev and Kasakov; and a dozen others, all men who had until recently held key positions in the Soviet hierarchy. The charges were equally sensational: espionage, sabotage, murder, high treason.

The trial was to open in a few days’ time. Admission would be restricted. A few representatives of the foreign Press and only one member of each Embassy would be allowed to follow the proceedings. On learning this, we dashed off to secure passes and make the necessary arrangements.

The court-room, a day or two later, was full of noise and chattering, like a theatre before the curtain goes up. People were laughing and talking, looking for their seats and waving to friends. The cameramen, setting up their apparatus, shouted to each other across the room. It was a large, high, bright room, rather floridly decorated in characteristic Russian nineteenth-century style: white Corinthian columns against light blue walls. Before the Revolution it had been one of the ballrooms of the Nobles’ Club. Now it was fitted with rough wooden benches, like a schoolroom. At the far end there was a raised dais with a long table on it; near it a kind of enclosure or pen. There was no space for a large audience. Admission was by special invitation, and the rows of solid-looking citizens, sitting there like schoolchildren out for a treat, in their neat blue suits and tidy dresses, were all representatives of different organizations, good Party men and women, members of the élite — ‘proletarian aristocrats’ every one.

These were the successors of the nobles who had danced here in the old days before the Revolution. Now they, too, had come here to enjoy themselves, to meet their friends and to witness proceedings which would be both entertaining and edifying. They were men and women who could be counted on to place the correct interpretation on what they saw and heard, to benefit from the lessons and, for that matter, the warnings which it might contain.

For, like all true drama, the performance on which the curtain was
about to go up had the power of affecting the audience personally and directly; the characters in it were familiar to them, were men in whose place they could without any great stretch of imagination imagine themselves. And so they had come not only to be excited and edified, but to be horrified, and perhaps even terrified, by a spectacle which would partake at once both of the medieval morality play and of the modern gangster film.

Suddenly a hush fell on the crowded room. Scores of inquisitive, greedy eyes turned in the direction of a little door in the corner at the far end. Through it filed the accused, twenty-one men, paler and smaller, somehow, than ordinary human beings. With them, herding them along, came a dozen giants in the uniform of the special N.K.V.D. Security Troops, bearing themselves like guardsmen in their well-fitting tunics and scarlet and blue peaked caps, their fixed bayonets gleaming, their sunburnt faces expressionless. One after another the prisoners took their places in the dock, with the guards surrounding them. A ripple of barely audible sound ran through the audience, something between a hiss of detestation and a murmur of horror. For an instant we stared, picking out familiar faces: Bukharin, with his pale complexion and little beard, strangely like Lenin as I had seen him in his glass coffin; Yagoda with his little toothbrush moustache; dark-skinned Faisullah Khojayev; Krestinski, small and nervous-looking.

Then another, larger door was flung open; and in a parade-ground voice an officer called out, ‘Silence. The court is coming. Stand up.’ We rose to our feet and stood waiting. There was a brief pause and then through the door tripped a fat man in uniform.

His shaven head rose to a point; his neck bulged over the collar of his tunic in rolls of fat; his little pig’s eyes darted here and there, from the prisoners to the crowd and back again. This was the notorious Ulrich, the President of the court, the man who had pronounced sentence of death on the prisoners at the previous State trials.

‘
Sadityes pojalusta
— pray be seated,’ he said, leering amiably at the crowd as he took his seat on the dais. Two other judges took their seats on either side of him; various lawyers, stenographers and technical experts arranged themselves at the foot of the dais.

To the right of the judges, facing the accused, stood Vyshinski, the
Public Prosecutor. His was the leading role. Neatly dressed in a stiff white collar, checked tie and well-cut blue suit, his trim grey moustache and hair set off against his rubicund complexion, he looked for all the world like a prosperous stock-broker accustomed to lunch at Simpsons and play golf at Sunningdale every weekend. ‘A rather decent chap. …’

In a rapid expressionless voice an officer of the court started to read out the indictment. The trial had begun.

For sheer blood and thunder the indictment left nothing to be desired. The prisoners were charged, collectively and individually, with every conceivable crime: high treason, murder, attempted murder, espionage and all kinds of sabotage. With diabolical ingenuity they had plotted to wreck industry and agriculture; to assassinate Stalin and the other Soviet leaders; to overthrow the Soviet regime with the help of foreign powers; to dismember the Soviet Union for the benefit of their capitalist allies and finally to seize power themselves and restore capitalism in what was left of their country. They had, it seemed, been arrested before they could put this plan into execution, but not before they had organized widespread sabotage and actually made away with several prominent personages, covering the traces of their crimes so that their victims were generally believed to have died a natural death. What is more, despite their distinguished careers and the responsible posts which they had held, they were shown for the most part to have been criminals and traitors to the Soviet cause ever since the Revolution — before it, even. Several were charged with having been Tsarist police spies and
agents provocateurs
posing as revolutionaries under the old regime, while Bukharin was accused of having plotted to murder Lenin and Stalin as early as 1918. They were also shown to have had connections, not only with the German, Polish, Japanese and British Secret Services, but with Trotski, with the accused at the two last big State trials, with Tukachevski and the Generals who had been shot the summer before, and with a number of other prominent citizens whose disappearance had hitherto passed uncommented on. Finally, before coming into court, they had all, it appeared, signed written statements, confessing in detail to the crimes with which they were charged and
thoroughly incriminating themselves and each other. The evidence accumulated filled no less than fifty large volumes which could be seen stacked on the judges’ desk.

After the reading of the indictment had been completed, the prisoners were asked whether they pleaded guilty. This, too, was pure routine. One after another, using the same words, they admitted their guilt: Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda.

Then, suddenly, the audience woke up to the realization that things were not going as they should. Krestinski, a pale, seedy, dim little figure, his steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his beaky nose, was saying something different from the others, something appalling. Interest revived; was focused on Krestinski. Even the other prisoners turned to look at him.

‘I do not,’ he was saying, ‘admit my guilt. I am not a Trotskist. I am not a member of the Rightist-Trotskist “Bloc”. I did not even know it existed. I am not guilty of any of the crimes with which I am charged. I never had relations with the German Intelligence Service.’