The Accused

By Alexander Weissberg and Arthur Koestler

First published in 1951, this is both a personal narrative and forensic analysis of the methods employed by Stalin and the G.P.U. during the Great Purge from the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938.

It is the exploration of the systematic imprisonment, interrogation and extraction of false confessions from millions of people that is extraordinary. Weissberg explains how victims of the state police were forced to make confessions incriminating not only themselves but also co-conspirators. This practice was aimed at destroying the relations of trust between those who were responsible for the Russian revolution. Those who were not killed in camps in the Soviet Arctic were divided and conquered.

Hence, the central thesis in the book is that the Russian revolution and communism in the Soviet Union were irrevocably destroyed and ended in the 1930s during the terror of the Stalinist purges.

A remarkable and little known contribution to our understanding of the events in the Soviet Union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786259653

Alexander Weissberg

Alexander Weissberg (1901-1964) was a Polish-Austrian physicist, author and businessman of Jewish descent. His testimony in the trial David Rousset vs. Les Lettres francaises and his book The Accused contributed significantly to spreading knowledge about Stalinist terror and show trials in Western Europe Arthur Koestler, CBE (1905-1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany until, disillusioned by Stalinism, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Koestler was awarded the Sonning Prize in 1968 for contribution to European culture.

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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE ACCUSED

BY

ALEXANDER WEISSBERG

TRANSLATED BY

EDWARD FITZGERALD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

PREFACE 4

1 4

2 5

3 6

4 8

5 9

CHAPTER 1—The Great Purge 13

CHAPTER 2—Trapped 24

CHAPTER 3—The Inner Prison of the Kharkov G.P.U. 84

CHAPTER 4—The Confrontations Begin 113

CHAPTER 5—Every Inch of the Way 128

CHAPTER 6—The Provocateur 154

CHAPTER 7—The Conveyer 193

CHAPTER 8—The Confession 220

CHAPTER 9—Kholodnaga Gora 228

CHAPTER 10—Witches’ Sabbath 263

CHAPTER 11—Enemies of the People 276

CHAPTER 12—The Anteroom of Hell 317

CHAPTER 13—G.P.U. Men in the Cells 333

CHAPTER 14—The Great Change 350

CHAPTER 15—Kiev 358

CHAPTER 16—A Real Spy 379

CHAPTER 17—Moscow 394

CHAPTER 18—The Bridge of Brest-Litovsk 412

CHAPTER 19—The Memory Hole 421

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 430

PREFACE

1

THIS BOOK is in several respects unique in the voluminous literature on contemporary Russia. Its author, a scientist of Austrian origin, and a member of the Communist Party, was arrested during the Great Purge of 1937. He was charged with having recruited a gang of Nazi terrorists to assassinate Stalin and Voroshilov during a hunting trip in the Caucasus, and to blow up the main industrial plants of the Ukrainian capital in the event of war. He confessed to all these remarkable crimes, and lived to tell the tale.

It is a tale which brings closer to the reader than any published before the inner mechanism of the most extraordinary terror regime in human history. It describes from firsthand experience how, in the so-called political isolators or inner prisons of Soviet Russia, men are prepared by special methods to confess in public to imaginary crimes. The part allocated to the author was that of an accomplice of Nikolas Bukharin, former member of the Politburo, former President of the Communist International. He was to testify that, as a member of the Bukharinite Block, he had been instructed to kill Stalin, blow up the Kharkov plants, and so forth. He proved unfit for the part, and the producers dropped him quietly out of the cast.

This in itself is not very extraordinary. In show business, as in other spheres, many are called but few are chosen. The production of a political melodrama, staged in a courtroom in Moscow, Prague or Budapest, needs many months of painstaking preparation, just as a musical show or a motion picture does, only more so. For in this particular kind of show business the script must, up to a point, fit the real character and history of the actors. This greatly narrows the choice of possible participants. Thus a person fit to play the part indicated above must have, inter alia, the following qualifications: (a) He must have known Bukharin personally. (b) He must have had some contacts with Germans and Germany. As no Soviet citizen is allowed to have contact with foreigners or to travel abroad except on a Government mission, this is a decisive limiting factor. (c) He must have occupied a position of some influence, otherwise the confession would pass the borderline between the wildly improbable and the completely absurd. (d) Finally, the producers must be sure that, once he stands behind the footlights, the actor will stick to his text and not sabotage the show. It was on this last point that Weissberg proved to be an unfit candidate.

Even under these limiting conditions scores of possible candidates could be found for each part. To pick them, recondition them, transform their personalities, break them down and build them up for the selected part, was one of the functions of the O.G.P.U. Thus, let me repeat, the nature of the confession which Weissberg signed is extraordinary only in Western eyes. For the O.G.P.U. it was all a matter of routine, as it is for a talent scout to put a possible candidate for a part through a screen test. They found out fairly soon that from their point of view this candidate was hopeless. The no-ad procedure would then have been either to shoot him without trial by administrative decision, or to let him finish his days in one of the Arctic labor camps. That he survived was due to a chain of exceptional circumstances. But even that is less startling if one considers that, according to the rules of probability, where tens of thousands of cases are concerned, the improbable chain is bound to occur sooner or later.

2

I HAVE known Alex Weissberg since 1930; our life-stories intersect at various decisive points. He was born in 1901 in Kraków, which then belonged to Austria. His father was a prosperous Jewish merchant. A few years after his birth the family moved to Vienna and Weissberg retained his Austrian citizenship. This fact became important later on. He studied mathematical physics and engineering in Vienna, where he was graduated in 1926. He joined the socialist youth movement at the age of seventeen, and later the Austrian Social Democratic Party. In 1927 he left the Socialists and joined the Communist Party.

After his graduation he held various jobs, among them that of an assistant lecturer at the Berlin Polytechnic under Professor Westphal. Later he entered the service of the Argentine Government as a technical expert. The Argentine was a heavy buyer of German machine tools, and Weissberg traveled in the Saar and Ruhr to supervise the quality of the material, thus gaining a wide experience in plant management.

In 1931 he received a call from the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute (UFTI) in Kharkov, and moved to the Soviet Union for good. We met in Berlin, a few weeks before his departure for Russia, through a mutual friend, E. I had known her from early childhood and we had always remained close friends. She told me that she was engaged to many Alex, and that he was a very remarkable character.

My first impression of Alex was that of a prosperous and jovial businessman with a round face, rounded gestures, a great gusto for telling funny stories and a curious liking for sweets—there were little trays with chocolates around, which he kept gobbling up absent-mindedly by handfuls. I failed to see what E. found so remarkable about this character until the other guests were gone and we became involved in an argument on some of the finer points of Marxist theory. Then Alex’ eyes became narrow and piercing, every trace of humor left him and he made dialectical mincemeat of me. He had a lucid, trenchant and relentless way of arguing, and, not content with knocking his opponent down, he continued to hammer away at him. After a while he became jolly and jovial again.

I was at that time already a Communist by conviction and just about to take the decisive step of joining the Party. We met a number of times in Berlin; then Alex left, and later E. joined him in Kharkov, where they married. We corresponded occasionally; one year later I lost my job, owing to my Party activities, and decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union. My first and last port of call in that country was Kharkov, where I stayed in the Weissbergs’ flat. It was a small but by Russian standards luxurious flat in the vicinity of the Institutes.

The Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute is one of the largest and best-equipped experimental laboratories in Europe. During my stay with Alex and his wife, I met most of the scientists who appear as dramatis personae in this book. Among them were Leipunsky, in charge of the Department for Nuclear Fission, and Landau, the infant prodigy of Russian physics—both of whom are today probably playing a leading part in perfecting the Russian atom bomb. Incidentally, I remember a long discussion with Landau, who argued with great conviction that the works of all the philosophers from the beginning of time up to and excluding Marx are not worth the paper on which they are printed. We also sometimes played poker with Professor Shubnikov, a dear old donnish scientist who was later on to testify that Alex had tried to recruit him for the Gestapo—which offer he only refused because he had already been in the service of a German espionage organization since 1924. Our neighbors and most intimate friends were Martin and Barbara Ruhemann—of whom the latter, when I asked her to help Alex, affirmed that she had always known him to be a counterrevolutionary saboteur. Every member of that happy band of scientists who used to come in after dinner to play cards or drink tea stood up after Alex’ arrest and denounced him. They were neither cowards nor inferior human beings; they had to comply with orders or share the fate of the man whom they denounced. Even so, nearly all of them, including Landau, Leipunsky and Shubnikov, were arrested at a later stage of the purge and signed the usual fantastic confessions. About half of them were released and returned to their work at the end of the purge in 1939.

I left Russia in the autumn of 1933. During the three following years Alex worked hard and successfully. He founded and edited with others the Soviet Journal of Physics. In 1933 he was put in charge of the construction of a large experimental plant of which, after its completion, he was to become director.

Then came the assassination of Kirov, the first show trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev, the beginnings of the Terror. In April, 1936, Alex’ wife was arrested. They had separated in 1934 but had remained on friendly terms. The charges against her were that in her work as an artist she had surreptitiously inserted swastikas into her work, and that in addition she had hidden under her bed two pistols with the intent of killing Stalin. After that it was only a question of time before Alex was arrested too. He perhaps still had a chance, as an Austrian citizen, to secure an exit permit. Instead he went to Moscow and Leningrad to obtain testimonies from influential people to help his wife. In 1937 this would have been lunacy; in 1936 it was merely reckless. After eighteen months of detention, and a near-successful attempt at suicide, she was actually released, thanks to the extraordinary exertions of the Austrian Consul. But six months before she was freed and expelled from Russia, in March, 1937, Alex himself was arrested. That is where his book starts.

It ends three years later when Alex, together with a batch of other German and Austrian Communists, Socialists and anti-Nazi refugees, was handed over by the G.P.U. to the Gestapo. This act of unfathomable baseness was one of the consequences, and at the same time the ignominious symbol, of the Stalin-Hitler pact. How he survived the further ordeals of Gestapo treatment and the part which he later played in the Polish underground movement would, and I hope will, fill the pages of a further book.

3

DURING his three years in Soviet detention, Weissberg went through all the various phases of prison regime: solitary confinement, political isolator, punishment cell, mass detention cell—and even the luxury cell in the Butyrka where prisoners were served ham and eggs for breakfast to fatten them up before delivery to the Gestapo so that they would give a favorable impression of the amenities of the Soviet penitentiary regime.

The dramatic climax of his personal story is reached in Chapters 7 and 8, The ‘Conveyer’ and The ‘Confession.’ After seven days and seven nights of continuous interrogation by three alternating examining magistrates, interrupted only twice a day for a few minutes, he broke down and signed his confession. Twenty-four hours later he withdrew it. He was again put on the conveyer—the technical name under which the method of nonstop interrogation with deprivation of sleep is known—and after four days and nights signed another confession. He withdrew it and was put on the conveyer a third time; but this time only for twenty-four hours. After that his torturers realized that they were faced with a kind of human jack-in-the-box, whose springs they could strain but not break. They gave him up as a hopeless case and from then on they left him more or less alone.

Stronger men than Weissberg—old revolutionaries, partisan commanders, men who had risked their lives a dozen times—had capitulated under the same type of ordeal. The fact that Weissberg was able to hold out is due to a rare concurrence of circumstances. Some of these were external. His Austrian passport assured him a minimum of special consideration. The intervention of leading physicists like Einstein and Joliot-Curie on his behalf was an additional factor. Finally, the Soviet-Nazi mutual extradition agreement got him out of the country, which otherwise he would never have been allowed to leave.

But these external circumstances alone would not have saved him. What enabled him to hold out where others broke down was a specific mixture of just those character traits which survival in such a situation requires. A great physical and mental resilience—that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental. An extraordinary presence of mind—witness the story of the lost blueprint in the chapter The Provocateur. A certain thick-skinnedness and good-natured insensitivity, coupled with an almost entirely extroverted disposition—notice the absence of any contemplative passage, of any trace of religious or mystic experience which are otherwise almost inevitably present in solitary confinement. An irrepressible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising situations; that it can’t happen to me attitude which is the most reliable source of courage; and an inexhaustible sense of humor. Finally, that relentless manner of persisting in an argument and continuing it for hours, days or weeks, which I mentioned before. It drove his inquisitors nuts, as it sometimes had his friends. His marathon dialogues with the examining magistrates are dotted with gruesomely funny scenes in which an exasperated G.P.U. officer exclaims: Alexander Semyonovitch, why do you keep torturing us? There are moments when one almost pities the poor brute caught in his victim’s dialectical traps.

Practically all of my Central European friends have had experiences of varying severity in prisons and concentration camps. I don’t know a single one who, after three years in the hands of the G.P.U. and five years hunted by the Gestapo, has emerged physically and mentally so unscathed and pleased with this best of all possible worlds as Alexander Weissberg. He looked like a prosperous businessman when I first met him twenty years ago, before the roof collapsed over our heads; and he still looks like a prosperous businessman, with rounded gestures, a fondness for Viennese coffeehouse stories, munching pralines or his favorite Turkish Delight.

4

This is a rambling, sprawling, spouting whale of a book. The organization of the material is, from the craftsman’s point of view, atrocious. The narrative is interrupted by lengthy excursions into the past or future; at the most dramatic moment the author goes off on a dissertation on the Bukharinist opposition’s attitude to the Soviet rationing system. And yet the reader will find that in spite of these rambling digressions, or perhaps because of them, the book will grow on him steadily, entrance him more and more, and slowly carry him off his feet like a great muddy stream, until he finally realizes that he has become an eyewitness to a great saga of our time. For the Great Purge, with its round ten million victims, was more than an episode in a dictatorial regime. It was a catastrophe like the Black Death, a witches’ sabbath of human reason and the first full-sized example of the hitherto inconceivable ravages which modern despotism is capable of inflicting on the bodies and souls of its subjects.

And yet this is not a book of horrors. It is—and this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it—not even depressing to read. Partly this is due to the author’s courage and unquenchable optimism, which gradually infect the reader; partly to the cavalcade of colorful characters who march through the cells, each with a more fantastic story than the other, all described with a mastery rare in a first book. Some of these—like the Provocateur Rozhansky or the Anarchist Eisenberg—are unforgettable portraits which could find an honorable place in the great works of literature. Taken together, they add up to something out of The Arabian Nights. All of them seem to accept their fate with truly Russian resignation; nobody seems to care particularly what is going to happen to him; they curse, quarrel and argue in this exotic inferno which, through the author’s jovial eyes, seems at times quite a cozy place to live in. It is an astounding contrast to the high-pitched tone customary in books on prisons and concentration camps.

Even the defects of the book seem to turn into assets in the total picture. The repetitiveness of the dialogues with the examining magistrates is at first annoying; but after a while the reader is caught in the spirit of this game of psychological attrition and is steeped in the peculiar atmosphere in which confessions are extracted. The rambling flashbacks and diversions contribute to the scope and width of the panorama, to its typically Russian climate. Looseness of structure is an essential part of the Russian literary tradition; one wonders how much of its impact a masterpiece like The Brothers Karamazov would retain if it had been pruned and trimmed by an ambitious editor. The maxim that all really good cooks work in untidy kitchens seems to be equally applicable to the great masters of epic art.

Another exceptional feature of this book is the combination of broad narrative gusto with penetrating scientific analysis—two qualities which are rarely found together. The author’s methodological approach is derived from his training in the exact sciences and in political economy. The deductions at which he arrives in observing events around him are lucid and ingenious; they add up to a fairly complete blueprint of the machinery of the Russian Terror. Particularly striking is the system of computation by which Weissberg arrived at his estimate of the number of people arrested during the purge. It is a minor triumph of scientific method that, independently from Weissberg, Beck and Godin—two professors imprisoned during the purge—arrived by the same method of calculation at the same approximative result.

My only quarrel with the author’s theoretical conclusions concerns the last chapter of the book, in which the ultimate causes of the Terror are treated in what seems to me a somewhat one-sided fashion. To readers specially interested in this subject I should like to recommend the short and concise book of the two authors just mentioned: Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, by F. Beck and W. Godin. One of the authors behind these aliases is a scientist who plays an important part in this book.

5

I LEARNED of Alex’ arrest when I met E. in London in the spring of 1938 after her release and expulsion from Russia. We discussed methods of trying to save him, by getting several Nobel prize-winning physicists to appeal directly to Stalin. Albert Einstein had already been approached by mutual friends and written a letter to this effect. I drafted another letter to Vishinsky, which was signed by the three French Nobel prize winners, Jean Perrin, Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie.{1} The letters were never acknowledged or answered, but the whole action had a politically significant aftermath.

The Joliot-Curies were already Communist sympathizers at that time and two years later became members of the Party. Today Professor Joliot-Curie is, next to Picasso, the most celebrated Communist intellectual in Europe. In 1950 a political trial was held in France which became a European sensation and ended in a decisive defeat for the Communists. Technically, the trial was a libel suit brought by the writer David Rousset against the Communist weekly, Les Lettres Françaises, which had accused Rousset of falsifying a text from the Soviet penal code. The real purpose of the trial was to expose the facts about the Russian terror regime, its prisons and forced-labor camps. One of the witnesses cited by Rousset was Alex Weissberg.

He started testifying through an interpreter, in German. Counsel for the Communist paper, whose strategy was to turn the trial into a series of riots, tried to discredit Weissberg by appealing to anti-German sentiment:

THE PRESIDENT OF THE TRIBUNAL: We shall now hear the next witness.

COUNSEL FOR ROUSSET: Our next witness is Mr. Weissberg, who will testify in German.

COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: What, another Gentian!

[Tumult]

WEISSBERG: ...I shall now proceed to explain by what methods I have arrived at the figure of eight to ten million persons detained during the Great Purge of 1936....

COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: He must be talking about his own country, Germany.

[Tumult]

COUNSEL FOR ROUSSET: Don’t keep interrupting. You can cross-examine the witness afterwards.

COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: It turns my stomach to see a German testify before a French court....

[Tumult]

And so it went on, the Communist lawyers trying to discredit the witness by every rabble-rousing means. At last counsel for Rousset got up and read a long text testifying to Weissberg’s character and the loyal services which he had rendered to Soviet Russia. It was the text of the letter printed in this book. When at the end the names of the signers were read out and proved to include the Communist idol Joliot-Curie, the effect was that of a bombshell. The remainder of Weissberg’s testimony now appeared authenticated, as it were, by the Party itself. It carried decisive weight in the outcome of the trial, and thus contributed to one of the greatest moral defeats which the Communists have suffered in Europe since the war.

ARTHUR KOESTLER

May, 1951

[THE LETTERS REFERRED TO IN THE PREFACE ARE REPRODUCED BELOW.]

Mr. Joseph Stalin,

May, 18, 1938

Moscow,

U.S.S.R.

Dear Mr. Stalin:

I have recently learned of several cases in which scholars who had been invited to Russia—men who have, as human beings, the full confidence of their foreign colleagues—have been accused of serious offenses. I understand how easily suspicion may fall, in times of crisis and excitement, on innocent and valuable men. But I am also convinced that from a general human point of view as well as in the interests of the successful development of Russian construction it is of the highest importance to move only with the greatest care against men of rare energy and rare abilities.

So I urge you to direct your attention to the proceedings against Dr. Alexander Weissberg at Kharkov. Dr. Weissberg, an Austrian citizen, is a physicist and engineer who has been working at the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute in Kharkov. I would especially like to make sure that consideration is given to the judgment of Dr. Weissberg’s work for the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry which was given in the beginning of 1937 by Professor

Martin Ruhemann, head of the Experimental Institute on Low Temperatures.

Very respectfully yours,

(SIGNED) Albert Einstein

(TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN)

Paris, June 15, 1938

State Prosecutor Vishinsky,

Moscow, U.S.S.R.

Dear Mr. State Prosecutor:

The undersigned, friends of the Soviet Union, believe it to be their duty to bring the following facts to your attention:

The imprisonment of two well-known foreign physicists, Dr. Friedrich Houtermanns, who was arrested on December 1, 1937, in Moscow, and Alexander Weissberg, who was arrested on March 1 of the same year in Kharkov, has shocked scientific circles in Europe and the United States. The names of Houtermanns and Weissberg are so well-known in these circles that it is to be feared that their long imprisonment may provoke a new political campaign of the sort which has recently done such damage to the prestige of the country of socialism and to the collaboration of the U.S.S.R. with the great Western democracies. The situation has been made more serious by the fact that these scientific men, friends of the U.S.S.R. who have always defended it against the attacks of its enemies, have not been able to obtain any news from Soviet authorities on the cases of Houtermanns and Weissberg in spite of the time which has gone by since their arrest, and thus find themselves unable to explain the step that has been taken.

Their friends include many of the most eminent men of science, like Professor Einstein at Pasadena, Professor Blackett at Manchester, Professor Nils Bohr at Copenhagen, who are interested in their fate and will not abandon this interest. Mr. Weissberg, who is one of the founders and the editor of the Journal of Physics of the U.S.S.R., has been invited by Professor Einstein to the university at Pasadena, an invitation to which he has not been able to reply because of his arrest. Dr. Houtermanns had been invited to do scientific work at an institute in London, and he was arrested in the customs office of the station in Moscow just as he was leaving.

The only official information available on the reasons for the arrest of Weissberg is a communication from Soviet authorities in March, 1937, to the Austrian Embassy in Moscow in which Weissberg was accused of espionage for Germany and activity in support of an armed revolt in the Ukraine. As to Dr. Houtermanns, no official communication has been made.

All those who know Weissberg and Houtermanns personally are sincerely convinced that they were devoted friends of the U.S.S.R. and incapable of any actions hostile to it. They are sincerely convinced that the accusations made against Weissberg are absurd and must be based on a serious mistake which it is desirable to correct at once, for both political and personal reasons.

Official statements by responsible Soviet leaders have recently underlined the fact that errors, inevitable in critical times, have been made by subordinate offices in the course of the purge campaign which was necessary in a country so seriously threatened by external and internal enemies. These same leaders have insisted on the urgent necessity of correcting these errors and occasional abuses of authority. The undersigned and all the friends of the two accused are convinced that this is a mistake of just such a kind.

This is why they address themselves to the State Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R. on the cases of Houtermanns and Weissberg and urge him, in the interests of Soviet prestige in foreign scientific circles, to take the necessary steps to obtain their immediate freedom. The political significance of this question justifies us in sending a copy of this letter to Mr. Stalin, addressed to him through the Embassy of the U.S.S.R. in Paris.

We urge you to give us an answer as quickly as possible, considering the urgent character of this problem.

(SIGNED) Irène Joliot-Curie, former Under Secretary of State for Scientific Research, Nobel Prize winner.

Jean Perrin, former Under Secretary of State for Scientific Research, Nobel Prize winner.

Frédéric Joliot-Curie, professor at the Collège de France, Nobel Prize winner.

(TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH)

THE ACCUSED

CHAPTER 1—The Great Purge

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK IS TO DESCRIBE HAPPENINGS WITHOUT PRECEDENT in modem history. From the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938 the totalitarian state took on its final form in the Soviet Union. In this period approximately eight million people were arrested in town and country by the secret police.{2} The arrested men were charged with high treason, espionage, sabotage, preparation for armed insurrection and the planning of attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. After periods of examination which rarely exceeded three months, all these men, with very few exceptions, pleaded guilty, and where they were actually brought before the courts they confirmed their confessions in public. They were all sentenced to long terms of forced labor in the concentration camps of the Far North or of the Central Asiatic desert districts.

They were all innocent.

However, to protect myself from all-too-pedantic criticism, I must make two reservations. The one refers to the assassination of Kirov, the Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, who was also a member of the Politburo. Kirov was shot dead on December 1, 1934, after a meeting of the District Party Committee by a young student named Nikolayev, who was himself a member of the Party. The background of this murder has never been satisfactorily explained. Many people believe that the motive was jealousy, i.e., that it was personal and not political. Others, including Trotsky, believe that it was a provocation organized by the G.P.U. But in any case, Kirov was murdered almost two years before the beginning of the Great Purge. During that purge millions of people were accused of having planned attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders, but only one Soviet leader, Kirov, was ever killed. Despite their confessions, the men arrested during the Great Purge had nothing whatever to do with his death.

My second reservation refers to the espionage activity of foreign powers. Of course, such activity was carried on during the years in question, though its agents certainly had a more difficult task than elsewhere. The Soviet Union is almost hermetically sealed off. A Soviet citizen guilty of espionage could not hope to escape abroad. Money would not greatly attract him as a reward. He could not spend it without immediately making himself suspect. At one time Russians ready to spy for a foreign power for ideological reasons and not for hope of reward could have been found among the formerly well-to-do classes, but by that time those classes had been broken up. Their members had lost all courage and all belief in the ultimate victory of their cause. A man is seldom prepared to risk his life for a cause he believes lost.

Thus it must be a very difficult matter for foreign powers to recruit agents among Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, there may well have been such people in the early days, before the Soviet power was as firmly established as it is now, and, once having worked for a foreign power, such people may have found it impossible to withdraw. This foreign espionage network cannot have been large, but it probably existed. Now if great masses of the population are arrested indiscriminately, one or two real spies may well be among them. To put it primitively, if the G.P.U. were to arrest all the inhabitants of a certain quarter then it would incidentally arrest the spy who happened to live there too. The G.P.U. did not arrest all the inhabitants of a quarter, but the way in which it carried out the mass arrests of 1936-38 had much the same effect. The victims were accidental. In those days the G.P.U. operated in such a fashion that there was no probability that the arrested would really be enemies of the Soviet power rather than harmless citizens. But still further, the general atmosphere of fear created by Stalin’s slogan Vigilance!, the spy scare and the encouragement of denunciation crippled the activity of those whose official task it was to track down the real enemies of the state.

If the G.P.U. did arrest a few real spies accidentally, the investigation methods used effectively prevented them from distinguishing the real spy from the surrounding mass of fictitious spies, all of whom had already confessed under pressure. Thus it was an easy matter for real spies to remain unidentified amidst the featureless mass of other spies in the G.P.U. net. The real spy no doubt confessed with the rest, denounced innocent people as his accomplices and thus concealed his real activities and his real accomplices.

Sometimes the Soviet military authorities caught foreign agents crossing the frontier illegally. When such people came into the cells they were cut off from their fellow prisoners by an invisible but impenetrable wall. Once they had been caught in the act and brought before the examiners they made no attempt to deny their offense, and when they returned to the cells they readily admitted that they had crossed the frontier illegally as spies. The others, the fictitious spies, also admitted everything before their examiners, and they made signed statements confessing the most heinous crimes. But when they returned to their cells they assumed quite naturally that none of their fellow prisoners believed a word of what they had admitted, and, equally naturally, they assumed that none of the Soviet citizens imprisoned with them had conspired in any way against the Soviet power.

Thus if I make an exception for the few real foreign agents who may have been caught up in the vast net, and for Nikolayev, who had already been shot, I can say with a clear conscience that all the prisoners who passed through the G.P.U. machine in those years—whether they confessed or not—were legally, politically and morally innocent.

They were doubly innocent. Not one of them was guilty of spying; not one of them had betrayed his country to the Germans or to the Japanese; not one of them had planned or carried out any act of sabotage.

But perhaps they were guilty in the sense of Soviet public policy at the time while not being actually guilty of the crimes with which they were charged? Perhaps they really were conspirators, not against the Soviet power as such, but against the Party leaders and the Party regime? Perhaps they had attempted by underground methods to overthrow Stalin’s dictatorship in the Party? Perhaps the dictator’s secret police had nipped their conspiracy in the bud and then denounced them as counterrevolutionaries and agents of a foreign power in order to deprive them of that general sympathy on which the enemies of tyranny can reckon at all times and in all countries?

Nothing of the sort. The arrested men were not enemies of the socialist revolution but its most ardent supporters. And the overwhelming majority of them were not even opponents of the dictator. Very few of them had actually been in opposition, and even these had long since capitulated and abandoned all illegal activity. The overwhelming majority had neither belonged to the opposition nor sympathized with it. Many of them were actually enthusiastic Stalinists who had vigorously opposed the opposition. In short, the general political attitude of the arrested men was not one whit different from that of the millions who had been lucky enough to escape.

The arrests were made indiscriminately. In the depths of their hearts the victims certainly opposed the dictator, but even this carefully repressed feeling was shared with the great majority of the population, and they never allowed it expression because they knew what an ill-considered word could mean to them and their families. If this carefully repressed feeling was the criterion for the arrests, then the G.P.U. arrested not eight million too many, but 152 million too few. After the happenings of 1932 and 1933 the feelings of the people certainly turned against the dictator. The peasants had not forgiven him the hunger years and the death by starvation of millions of their fellows. The workers and intellectuals in the towns had not forgiven him for stifling all liberty. But all these feelings were repressed. The hunger years came to an end. The economic system gradually recovered. And the Russian people began to hope that they would regain their lost freedom. Men began to forget the bitter years and to take pleasure in the progress of their country. This process of emotional recuperation was interrupted in August, 1936, by the sudden publication of the indictment against Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates. A new era opened up in the development of the Soviet Union, the era of the Great Purge.

Even today, years later, public opinion in the West has not thoroughly grasped what it was all about. European and American newspapers devoted a great deal of space to the trials. Those people who believed in the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in astonishment how it came about that all the leading Bolsheviki of the revolutionary period had gone over to the side of the enemy, and had, on their own admission, committed the basest crimes against their own country, their own comrades and the ideas which had become part and parcel of their own lives—all in order to restore that capitalism which they had spent their lives in trying to overthrow.

Those who disbelieved the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in equal astonishment how it came about that men confessed to crimes they obviously could never have committed.

But without exception attention was concentrated on the show trials, on the proceedings against the leaders of the former opposition. Both capitalist and working-class observers confined themselves to the criminological aspect. No one went behind the façade. No one realized what was going on deep within Russian society.

The trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev was followed in January, 1937, by the trial of Piatakov and Radek, and, a year later, by the trial of Bukharin. Each of these big trials was preceded by mass arrests and followed by a flood of further arrests. The victims belonged to all political circles of Soviet society. The arrest of members of the former opposition began the process. The followers of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin came first. Then followed those who had once belonged to other political parties: Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries, Octobrists, Kadets, Armenian Dashnaki, Georgian Nationalists, Trudoviki, Anarchists, Pan-Russian Chauvinists and Ukrainian Nationalists.

It should not be thought that these men were still members of underground groups when they were arrested, or that they still propagated their former ideas. They had merely been at some time or other—often many years before the revolution—members of these parties, or known to have sympathized with them. Most of them had taken part in the revolution with the Bolsheviks, fought in the civil war side by side with the Bolsheviki and then joined the Communist Party and worked for the building up of socialism. Now they were suddenly destroyed because of the sins of their youth—perhaps because they had once fought against the Tsar as Social Revolutionaries instead of as Bolsheviks; perhaps because as young men they had once distributed Anarchist or Menshevik leaflets. Incidentally, Party membership in those pre-revolutionary days depended more on chance than on deliberate choice. The one would join the Mensheviki because his best friend at the university happened to be a Menshevik. The other would join the Social Revolutionaries because theirs was the only revolutionary organization in his district. The third would join the Bolsheviki because the strike in his factory was organized by them. But one and all, they were moved by a common hatred of Tsarism. They fought side by side for liberty and a better social order. In those days young workers and students were revolutionary in the general sense of the term and without any precise idea of the differences between the various political conceptions. They fought side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to prison side by side with the Bolsheviki; they went to Siberia side by side with the Bolsheviki. Later on most of them abandoned their former ideas and accepted the leadership of the Bolshevik Party because it fought with greater vigor and determination for the victory of revolutionary socialism. During the civil war they fought on all fronts; in the hunger years they tightened their belts; in the construction period they worked hard for the success of the Five-Year Plans. And now, after almost thirty years, during which they had become middle-aged and old men in the service of the revolution, they had to go to prison again; this time into the prisons of their former allies, the Bolsheviki.

They tramped up and down their cells and tried to understand. They remembered that some of their old comrades had gone to prison even in 1917 because they had refused to accept the dictatorship. But they had willingly suffered imprisonment, and the doors of their cells had stood wide open for years. All they had been required to do was to abandon their beliefs, and then not only would freedom have been theirs but the highest offices in the state. But they had still refused to support the policy of the ruling party. They had fought for the freedom of the whole people, and when the revolution finally came they refused to sacrifice even a fraction of that freedom to clear the way for working-class power and the socialist reorganization of society. They had sat in the prisons of the revolution as they had sat in the prisons of the Tsar. The highest arbiter for them was not world history, which invariably approves the ruling powers, but their own conscience, and that forbade all compromise.

These men had nothing in common with the prisoners of 1937, who had capitulated again and again to the ruling group in the Party, who had obediently accepted all the changes in the Party line, who, at the behest of the Party, had condemned their comrades when they had fallen into disgrace—and who now found themselves in prison nevertheless. They had lost their freedom because in those far-off days they had belonged not to the small Bolshevik group but to some other revolutionary group.

But it was only for a few weeks that such questions troubled them, and then they were joined by many of their old Bolshevik friends. At the beginning of 1937 the Party closed down the Old Bolsheviki’s Club, and that was the signal for mass arrests of old Party members. Whoever had been a Party member for a long time must have uttered a careless word on occasions, a word not dangerous at the time but fatal now. The secret records of the G.P.U. go back a long way, but if anything were overlooked there were no thousands of informers eager to drag it back into the light. But these former heretical utterances were not the real reason for the arrests. The old revolutionaries, whether Menshevik, Social Revolutionary or authentic Bolshevik, had fought for freedom against Tsarism. They had loved freedom then and probably loved it still in their hearts. The new regime of despotism had no use for men who had once fought for freedom. They must be got rid of.

But this liquidation of the politically conscious sections of Soviet society was only the preliminary to happenings which were so fantastically senseless that it is difficult to describe them—and still more difficult to persuade Western minds to believe them. Hundreds of thousands of old revolutionaries and old members of the Bolshevik Party had been arrested. The very foundations of Soviet life had been shaken. But ordinary people still believed it was exclusively a conflict within the ranks of the ruling party. Then in the second half of 1937 the character of the action changed. The scale of the arrests increased enormously and extended to those who had never been members of any political party. Day and night G.P.U. vans raced through the streets of town and village, taking their victims from their homes, factories, universities, laboratories, workshops, barracks and Government offices. All walks of life were involved, and workmen, peasants, officials and professional men, artists and officers found themselves together in the cells. All branches of the economic system were affected. Officials of heavy industry, agriculture, education and the armed forces were among the arrested. There were fifty republics and autonomous districts in the Soviet Union with their separate governments, and about five hundred People’s Commissars. Very few of these Commissars survived the storm. Not a single one of all the big Soviet undertakings retained its director or its leading engineers. New men took their places, but within a few weeks they too were arrested.

The arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky and eight leading generals opened the prison gates to the officers corps. The commanders of all Russian military districts, the strategic units of the whole system, changed their commands for prison cells. Their successors joined them a few weeks later before they had even had time to settle down in their new commands. Within the space of a few months some military districts changed their commanders half a dozen times, until before long there were not enough generals left and colonels took over, only to be relieved in their turn by majors. In the end many regiments were commanded by lieutenants.

The purge in the higher reaches of the Party and the labor unions was complete. At the head of the Communist Party is its Central Committee, which then consisted of seventy-one members and sixty-one deputies. These men had proved their revolutionary loyalty on a score of occasions. They had been picked out of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Party members. Every day of their lives had been carefully examined by the control organs of the Party and by the G.P.U. And yet more than three-quarters of them were arrested as spies. The Politburo of the Party, which consisted of ten members and five deputies, is an even narrower elite. It is the personal staff of the dictator, the actual government of the country. And yet at least five of these men fell victim to the G.P.U. The Comintern apparatus was formally extraterritorial, so to speak. According to the Comintern statutes, its Executive Committee was superior to any organ of the Russian Communist Party. Every Communist everywhere was supposed to be under its orders—including the officials of the G.P.U., who were almost all Communists. In reality the G.P.U. didn’t care a fig for the laws of the Comintern and they purged its apparatus ruthlessly. Even old revolutionaries known to the working-class movement all over the world, men like Bela Kun, were arrested as counterrevolutionaries and liquidated as spies.

Soviet cultural life was temporarily paralyzed and it never fully recovered. The control organs of the Party closely examined every new literary and scientific publication for Trotskyist contraband. An unhappy formulation was enough to seal the fate of its author. Many leading Soviet writers joined the masses in the concentration camps. Many of those who were spared stopped writing altogether for fear of suffering the same fate. Still others sought safety in writing only of the past and avoiding even the slightest reference to current affairs. Those who were totally unprincipled fulfilled their social task, i.e., they wrote whatever the ruling group required of them. They turned their coats again and again, condemned today what they had held sacred yesterday, only to damn tomorrow what they praised today. The result was a deplorable decline in literary standards, and such books as were published were no longer products of imagination and talent but belletristic comments on the decisions of the latest Party Congress. Ordinary people stopped reading them.

Scientific work suffered greatly from the G.P.U. excesses. The Terror paralyzed every creative endeavor. During the construction period the Soviet Government had spared neither money nor energy to build up a great network of scientific institutions. The scientist was the favored child of Soviet society. But when the Great Purge came he was not exempt. Many leading scientists were arrested and their colleagues were so intimidated that they stopped their work on the urgent problems of the day and turned to mere routine work in which they could not go wrong.

The arrest of Piatakov was the signal for the purging of Soviet heavy industry. The arrest of the Vice-Commissar for the Railways, Lifschitz, played the same role for transport. A special department of the G.P.U. attended to railway and other transport workers, and within a short space of time the painstaking reorganizational work of Kaganovitch was undone. Kaganovitch himself, People’s Commissar for Transport, was no more willing to protect his officials and his workers from the G.P.U. than his colleague in the War Department, Marshal Voroshilov, had been to protect his officers.

The preparations for the trial of Bukharin and other members of the right-wing opposition brought the peasants into the hands of the G.P.U. Peasants were arrested wholesale and the number of prisoners now rose to millions. With peasant fatalism they immediately signed everything the examiners demanded of them, and then went off in packed trains to the concentration camps of the Far North. They made no attempt to quarrel with their fate. They were so used to its being settled for them, for good or evil, by someone else, that they did not even ask why. A very few showed fight. These were the new-type peasants, the kolkhoz stalwarts of the social transformation in the villages. The remainder accepted it all as they would have accepted an earthquake or a flood, or any other act of God, and made no attempt to delve for meanings.

The victims of the purge came from all the peoples of the Union, but the national minorities were singled out for special attention. In all big towns there were small minorities whose main stock lived elsewhere, perhaps even outside the frontiers. The Germans had their independent republic on the Volga, the Armenians theirs in Southern Caucasia, the Uzbeks theirs in Central Asia. The origins of the groups of Letts, Lithuanians, Finns, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Persians and Chinese lay outside the Soviet Union. Groups of these peoples had lived for hundreds of years scattered over Russian territory without ever becoming fully assimilated. When they lived together in agricultural colonies, like the Germans in the Southern Ukraine, they obstinately retained their old national customs and their way of life. Lenin’s nationality policy not only gave the oppressed nationalities political independence in their homogeneous colonies, but it also gave cultural autonomy to the smaller groups scattered over the territory of the bigger nationalities. It gave them their own schools, their own clubs and their own national theaters in which they could hear pieces performed in their own tongue, and it ensured them equality before the law. In the first years of the revolution none other than Stalin was People’s Commissar for Nationalities, and under Lenin’s guidance he implemented this just and far-sighted policy which ended the everlasting nationality squabbles in Russia and won the oppressed peoples for the revolution. And now all these minorities were liquidated by Stalin’s own order. The men were all arrested, the women were banished from European Russia to Asiatic Russia and the children were often carried off to be brought up as Russian orphans in the children’s homes of the G.P.U.

A small colony of about six hundred Armenians lived in Kharkov. One day in the autumn of 1937 over three hundred of them were arrested. Within six weeks the rest followed. Most of them were illiterate or semiliterate shoeshine boys, cobblers or petty black-marketeers. For a long time they were unable to understand what had brought them into prison. The Letts and the Germans had preceded them, and the Greeks and Bulgarians (who were among the most skillful gardeners in the country) followed them. After that came Poles and Lithuanians, Finns and Estonians, Assyrians and Persians, Uzbeks and Chinese, and many other ethnic groups Europe has never heard of. It almost seemed as though the G.P.U. were determined to ensure the racial purity of Russia’s towns by administrative action.

All these people had to be spies; the G.P.U. insisted. Germans, Poles and Letts had to have spied for Hitler; Chinese, Koreans and Mongolians for Japan; while Armenians, Assyrians and Persians had to have spied for the British Intelligence Service. The G.P.U. was a stickler for order. The fact that the G.P.U. insisted that the Chinese should have spied for Japan, the archenemy of their own country, was a national injustice about which my Chinese cellmates—they were poor laundrymen—complained bitterly. On the other hand, in the examiner’s office the Armenians entered the service of the British without much protest.

Millions of ordinary people from town and country were thrown into prison. People who had never bothered their heads about politics; people who were quite prepared to be loyal to any government provided it did not oppress them too harshly. They were the type of people who rarely take part in mass movements and then only at certain psychological peak points of history. In normal times they do their work, bring up their children and dig in their own garden. They were hungry when the rest were hungry and they enjoyed their simple pleasures when the country’s economic situation improved. Now they were completely out of their depth. They had no idea what wave had swept them off their feet or where it was taking them. In the cells they looked at the representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia and their eyes seemed to ask: Where have you led us? What have you done to our country? And there was no answer to their unspoken questions because those they asked were themselves wrestling with those very questions, turning the same problems over and over in their minds and discussing them with each other. ‘What was the political significance of it all? Why did the dictator arrest his own followers? Not only the lukewarm who served him only with their lips, not only the weaklings who were always hoping that the Party policy would grow less extreme, but even his most ruthless and fanatical supporters. Why did the G.P.U. force them all to confess things which not even the G.P.U. men themselves believed in? Where was the lunacy to end?

The final organization to go through the mincing machine was the G.P.U. itself. The examiners came into their own cells to keep their former victims company. Prisoners would often find themselves in the same cell with the examiner who had been in charge of their cases. And then all the old questions would be asked again. But the G.P.U. men had no idea what they had done or why they had done it. They had no more idea of the significance of the happenings than their victims. It was only years later, when the whole thing was over, that the more intelligent prisoners gradually pieced together a general picture of the happenings and sought by analyzing innumerable incidents, which taken on their own seemed insignificant, to discover the motives of the dictator in launching the Great Purge.

I was the companion of these people for three years in the prisons of the G.P.U. in Kharkov, Kiev and Moscow. During that time I was held in a dozen different cells, and innumerable batches of prisoners came and went before my eyes. I remained. I was a careful observer of the unique process going on around me and I made a note of the facts with the intention of one day giving them to the outside world. I talked to hundreds of prisoners, classified them in the general framework of the events and sought an explanation. At no time did I ever lose hope that one day I should be free again. With calm certainty I waited for the change which I knew must come.

We all waited for that change. We all knew that things could not go on in the same way much longer. At some time or other the disastrous process would have to be curbed unless the country was to go down to ruin. Someone would have to put a stop to the G.P.U. madness. At some time or other the dictator would have to recognize the full extent of the damage which was being done by the purge he had ordered. For two terrible years we waited, and the whole country waited with us. Then the change came.

On December 8, 1938, the organizer of Stalin’s Great Purge, Nikolai Ivanovitch Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Home Affairs and head of the G.P.U., was removed from his post. A few months later he disappeared from the Central Committee and then he was arrested. We were never able to discover whether he was shot or not. At the same time a unique trial took place in the Moldavian Republic, in the south-west corner of the vast Soviet Union. The leader of the local G.P.U. and four of his examiners were charged before a military court with having arrested innocent people and forced them to make false confessions under torture. The accused pleaded guilty. But they did not defend themselves by saying that they had only carried out orders; instead, they confessed that they had acted under the instructions of a counterrevolutionary organization. They were found guilty, sentenced to death and shot. These men had done no more than every G.P.U. man had been doing with impunity for two years from Arkhangelsk to Odessa and from Vladivostok to the Polish frontier. The indictment and execution of these minor G.P.U. officials was Stalin’s signal for the change. The Great Purge was over.

On February 20, 1939, I was transferred to Kiev, and at the beginning of September to Moscow. By this time I reckoned with my speedy release, but I had seen so much during the previous three uncanny years that I feared that I should not be allowed to leave the country.

An improbable and unique historical conjunction of events came to my assistance. In the hope of turning German aggression against the Western powers Stalin signed the notorious pact with Ribbentrop. From that date, August 23, 1939, a period of carefully stressed friendship began between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and to celebrate it the Russians handed over all German nationals they were holding imprisoned, including even the Communists and the Jews. The prisoners were brought from all parts of the Soviet Union, from the Arctic Circle, from Yakutsk, from the Amur district and from the desert of Karaganda, to a central reception prison in Moscow, the Butyrka, where they were well fed for a few weeks and then sent off to Nazi Germany in batches of about fifty. At the bridge over the Bug at Brest-Litovsk G.P.U. men handed them over to Gestapo men.

I crossed the Bug in this way on January 5, 1940. For three months I was held by the Gestapo in various prisons in Byela Podlaska, Warsaw and Lublin, and then I was released in the Kraków ghetto. When the extermination of the Jews began in the spring of 1942 I went underground. In March, 1943, the Gestapo caught me and put me into the concentration camp of Kavencin. With the help of friends in the Polish underground movement I succeeded in escaping, and I remained in hiding in Warsaw, where I took part in two insurrections against the Germans. My wife, my father, my two brothers and almost all my friends were slaughtered by the S.S. On January 17, 1945, Russian troops occupied the suburb of Warsaw where I was in hiding and I could again walk the streets freely. Eighteen months later I left Poland and arrived in the Swedish port of Malmö, setting foot on free soil for the first time for a decade.

Since I