Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (12 page)

Britons, meanwhile, and in particular those of a progressive inclination, could turn to a two-hundred-page book, published by the Left Book Club within weeks of Pyatakov’s execution, laying out a detailed case for believing both that the trial was entirely fair and criticisms of it entirely unfair. The author was Dudley Collard, a barrister at the famous law offices at the Temple in London, whose
Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others
was completed in February 1937.
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Attacking what he described as “distorted” accounts in the British press, Collard, like Davies, felt that his reading of the events in the courtroom was vindicated by the reaction of other observers, including “all those British and American correspondents present at the trial with whom I had an opportunity of discussing the case.”
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He confidently concluded that “the trial was conducted fairly and regularly according to the rules of procedure, that the defendants were fully guilty of the crimes charged against them and that in the circumstances the sentence was a proper one.”

One by one, Collard took on and disposed of the arguments of those who saw the trial as a put-up job. Were, for instance, the confessions fabricated? Collard was incredulous. For that to be the case, “Someone other than the defendants must have written a seven-day play (to play eight hours a day) and assigned appropriate roles to the seventeen defendants, the five witnesses, the judges and the public prosecutor.” It just wasn’t possible. The accused would have needed to spend the entire period between their arrest and the trial rehearsing together what they were going to say “in such a way as to deceive all those who were present into thinking the play was real.”
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Besides, there was corroborative evidence from expert witnesses and documentary evidence including a diary with the phone numbers of German secret agents in it, names which checked off against the appropriate German telephone directory.

Might torture or some form of duress have been used to procure the confessions? No. “The defendants bore no visible signs of ill treatment . . . They behaved freely, spoke coherently and gave long and complicated accounts of their activity over several years with dates, names and places.”
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And wouldn’t the dock of a trial conducted in front of international observers and the world’s press have been the perfect place to complain of torture, had any been used? Yet none of the defendants made such a complaint.

Wasn’t it beyond strange, though, that not one of the defendants pleaded not guilty and that all of them confessed fully? If they had been such steadfast foes of the new Russia, wasn’t it improbable that they would not only have confessed, but also have described themselves as treacherous? One possibility, said Collard, was that they had simply changed their minds. A few years earlier, when they started the plotting, it “was easier to discover plausible reasons for maintaining that Stalin’s policy was wrong than it is today when the success of his policy has been visibly demonstrated in the greater prosperity and comfort of life in the Soviet Union . . . The rising standard of living,” concluded Collard, “must have had at any rate an unconscious effect upon most of them.” And if that hadn’t worked, then it was “likely too, that the opportunity for reflection which prison afforded them gave form to their subconscious doubts about the correctness of their own policy.”
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The thing that many found truly unbelievable—that so many old Bolsheviks who had sacrificed so much for the cause should betray their country and principles in such an excessive fashion—Collard found all too credible. The list of crimes might seem shocking to people in peaceful England, he argued, but the context of the Russian struggle was very different. Here it was easy to imagine that political opposition might harden into enmity, and that enmity could mutate into treachery. In this way, Collard speculated, the former Communists “were logically and inexorably driven into the position of allies of all those forces hostile to the Soviet Union. Why should not they, wrecking railways because they disapproved of Stalin’s policy, cooperate with the Japanese, wrecking railways in preparation for an armed attack on the Soviet Union? Nothing could be more natural.”
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The Temple barrister reserved his most inventive shot for last. He acknowledged that much of world opinion was skeptical about the trial and consequently doubtful about the Soviet Union’s claim to represent a new pinnacle in the achievement of human justice. But didn’t the very fact of holding a public tribunal that was bound to be extremely embarrassing and lead to criticism suggest strongly that the crimes must be genuine?
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Collard’s lawyerly ingenuity was matched by the dexterity with which the novelist Feuchtwanger deployed classical history and great literature in support of his argument about the integrity of the process. “If Alcibiades [a leader of the Athenian Greeks] went to the Persians why not Trotsky to the Fascists?” he asked. And had not the piqued Roman general Coriolanus gone over to the Volscians? “ ‘Now this extremity hath brought me to this hearth,’ ” Feuchtwanger quoted. “ ‘But in mere spite, to be full quit of those my banishers, stand I before thee here.’ ” He then added, “This is Shakespeare’s opinion on the likelihood of Trotsky’s having come to an arrangement with the Fascists.”
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Shakespeare’s prescient view of Stalin’s great rival was supplemented by Feuchtwanger’s own rule that in any case all those who had been Bolsheviks were by nature and history plotters. Courageous, brave, and adventurous, they were born to create change by dramatic means. But when the defendants changed their minds and all simultaneously decided that Trotsky was wrong, then they strained every sinew to confess, to assist the authorities and thereby render one final service to the Revolution.

And Feuchtwanger had a final psychological ace in the hole. He was one of the relatively few outsiders who had managed to obtain an audience with Stalin, and he rested his final judgment on his assessment of the personality of the Soviet leader. “It at once becomes as clear as daylight,” he concluded, “that this modest, impersonal man cannot have committed the colossal indiscretion of producing, with the assistance of countless performers, so coarse a comedy, merely for the purpose of holding a sort of festival of revenge.” It was unimaginable. Why would anyone, let alone a modest, impersonal sort of man, do it?
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Trotsky, it seemed, could be a conspirator by virtue of his revolutionary past, but Stalin couldn’t.

The Truth

Whether Stalin himself “did it” will be discussed later, but the fact is that it was indeed done. Today only a few eccentric Stalinist diehards can be found to argue that the confessions were in any way true. Davies, Feuchtwanger, Collard, and the many, many more who accepted the show trials at something like face value—who thought that there had indeed been a gigantic conspiracy to destroy Stalin and his Soviet Union—are now seen as dupes, fools, or fellow travelers.

At the time, however, arguments raged within socialist and labor movements throughout the world. In America, Trotsky sympathizers even felt the need to set up a parallel tribunal, presided over by the famous philosopher John Dewey, to investigate the charges made against their hero and his supposed secret supporters. It was during the course of this inquiry that evidence was first heard that no planes had flown into Oslo airport at the time that Pyatakov was supposed to have landed there from Berlin, and a letter from Leon Sedov from the autumn of 1931 was cited in which he was supposed to have written, “Do you know whom I saw on Unter den Linden? The redhead. I looked him squarely in the eye, but he turned his face away as though he didn’t recognize me. What a miserable fellow!”

This account was substantiated when, after 1990, Soviet secret police files were opened up. Among the reports was one from Agent B-187, variously code-named Max, Mack, Kant, and Tulip, who had infiltrated Sedov’s immediate circle in the summer of 1934. Known to Sedov as Etienne (Sedov’s secret-police code name was Sonny), Max had become an intimate of Sedov’s wife, among others. Max reported to his bosses in Moscow that he understood from conversations with Sedov that Pyatakov had never met Trotsky after the latter’s exile. He had therefore not been to Oslo.
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Furthermore, Sedov had also told him that he had seen Pyatakov briefly in Unter den Linden on May 1, 1931. “Pyatakov had recognized him,” reported Max, “but turned away and did not want to speak to him. Pyatakov then went off with someone else, apparently Shestov.”
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If Pyatakov didn’t meet Sedov and didn’t meet Trotsky, then the entire conceit collapses. There was no moment of decision, no explanation to Pyatakov of the need to betray his country, no revelation of dealings with Nazi Germany, no conversations, nothing. And if that wasn’t true, then the notes in shoes, the sabotage, the assassination plots, these too must all be seen as part of an extraordinarily elaborate and lethal fantasy.

A fantasy with the faintest glimmer of truth. That there were secret discussions between people who wanted Stalin’s defeat cannot be denied—such meetings, after all, could not have been held in the open. According to American historian J. Arch Getty, the evidence shows that by 1932 Trotsky was indeed “actively trying to forge a new coalition in which former oppositionists from both Left and Right would participate.” In one letter, Trotsky acknowledged that under the circumstances, “One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence.”
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There were probably illicit gatherings and the smuggling of prohibited literature. But there is an immense gap between agitating against a dictator and a conspiracy on the scale claimed at the show trials.

How then do we explain the weird complexity of the confessions and the sangfroid of the accused? Feuchtwanger described them as “well-groomed, well-dressed men of a careless, natural bearing. They drank tea, had newspapers in their pockets and often looked toward the public. The whole thing was less like a criminal trial than a debate carried on in a conversational tone by educated men.” Why didn’t those old Bolsheviks, standing in front of the world, take the opportunity to indict the process itself? Surely, by January 1937, having seen Zinoviev and Kamenev sentenced to death, they couldn’t have been hoping for clemency?

As we shall see, the famous Moscow Trials, of which Pyatakov’s was the middle one of three, were actually the end of a process, not the beginning. Before senior party leaders were put on trial, others less exalted had been through the same ordeal. In the early spring of 1931, there had been a trial of alleged leaders of the Menshevik Party in Moscow—the so-called Union Bureau. As an exiled official of the party, Rafael Abramovich Rein, told a Berlin rally in March of that year, the defendants had confessed to all kinds of impossible meetings and contacts. For example, contacts had been cited that he knew—given that many of them were supposed to have involved him—had simply never happened.

Then Rein asked rhetorically, “How is it that experienced and honor-able people can make such ridiculous confessions and admissions?”

The answer lies in the methods used by the GPU [secret police] in such trials. The accused are subjected to continuous interrogation for up to 24 and 48 hours, during which time the investigators change, while the accused is made to wait for hours or even days, often in a corridor without food or rest. Prisoners are kept in strict isolation, frequently in windowless rooms, in which they lose all sense of time. They are given no information, they can send no messages, and are given no newspapers or books, nor pencils and paper. They are continually threatened with shooting, and put up against the wall. And if they continue to resist, they are put into a system of stone cubicles, alternately hot and cold, without the most elementary sanitation, which has a murderous effect not just on the health of the defendant, but also on his sanity. [Cries of indignation.] The accused is presented with the false testimony of his friends and comrades, threats are made against his family, provocateurs are placed in the room, and he is given false information about the well-being of his family, about the death of small children . . . And all this continues until the accused, finally, gives in. And then a cynical process of bargaining begins between the accused and the investigator as to what “admissions” he should make. This ends with the defendant simply signing and then obediently repeating in court everything that has been dictated or suggested to him by Soviet justice.
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Defectors from the Soviet security apparatus, such as Alexander Orlov, detailed how prisoners were subjected to intense physical and psychological abuse, including—crucially—promises that confessions would lead to safety for the victim’s family, promises which were often not kept. Unsurprisingly, such testimony was often regarded as suspect in the West, as propaganda confected by “anti-Soviet” forces. But many years later, long after Stalin’s death and Pyatakov’s rehabilitation, the old dictator’s right-hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, was interviewed by the writer Felix Chuyev. Yes, he agreed, those who had been accused of crimes were often worked over during interrogation.
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