Stalin полностью

On January 23, 1937, a second trial in Moscow of a parallel “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” opened, like the first, in the October Hall, after Stalin had hand-edited the charges.³⁴⁸ Ten of the seventeen defendants worked in Orjonikidze’s heavy industry commissariat.³⁴⁹ “And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes,” Pyatakov publicly confessed, “bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.” Yezhov had personally forced his erstwhile drinking buddy, in thirty-three days of torture, to capitulate to accusations of Trotskyism and plotting with Germany.³⁵⁰ (Yezhov was finally named to the highest rank, “general commissar of state security.”)³⁵¹ Radek, in court, delivered a tour de force fabricated history of Trotskyism. His “features,” an American correspondent observed, “seemed curiously out of focus, his teeth charred and uneven, his eyes very much alive behind thick glasses.”³⁵² Soviet newspapers and radio afforded wire-to-wire coverage, accompanied by orchestrated meetings at factories and farms. “Why such a great fuss over the trial?” Feuchtwanger would ask Dimitrov. “Incomprehensible. An atmosphere has been created of extreme unrest among the population, mutual suspicion, denunciations, and so forth. Trotskyism has been killed—why such a campaign?”³⁵³

Feuchtwanger found the allegations preposterous. And yet the oppositionists had organized a conspiratorial meeting, in summer 1932, at Zinoviev’s dacha, where expelled party members of the Leningrad opposition had discussed reviving their old links to Trotsky. A message from Trotsky to join forces had been carried into the Soviet Union. Stalin was also correct that the NKVD (then the OGPU) had missed these contacts, which was evidently part of the basis for his statement, in the September 1936 dismissal of Yagoda, that the NKVD was four years behind.³⁵⁴ Of course, this was a pathetic “bloc” incapable of consequential action (Smirnov, a supposed organizer of the conspiracy to murder Kirov in 1934, had been in prison since 1933).³⁵⁵ But the meeting was not an invention. The “terror” charges, too, contained the minutest kernel of truth. After a decree had rescinded Trotsky’s Soviet citizenship, he had written a spirited open letter to the central executive committee of the Soviet (which had nominal jurisdiction over citizenship) asserting that “Stalin has led us to a cul-de-sac. . . . It is necessary, at last, to carry out Lenin’s last insistent advice: remove Stalin.”³⁵⁶ Trotsky had not written “remove by assassination,” but how else could it be done?³⁵⁷

In the middle of the trial, on January 26, Shumyatsky showed Stalin and the inner circle a special newsreel of the dictator’s speech on the new constitution at the recent Eighth all-Union Extraordinary Congress of Soviets. The film depicted the Spassky Tower with its clock, the Grand Kremlin Palace interior, the congress delegates, Stalin’s appearance and the resulting ovation with shouts of hurrah, and then his entire speech, accompanied by documentary footage of Soviet achievements—factories, collective farms, the military, culture. This was the first time Stalin had been filmed in sound. “After it ended they applauded for a long time,” Shumyatsky noted. “I[osif] V[issarionovich] said: ‘It turned out to be good stuff, and you know, I had wanted to burn the negative when you previewed the fragments.’”³⁵⁸