Stalin полностью

Stalin constantly urged more public trials. Dozens had been staged in fall 1937 throughout the provinces, following an express order by the despot, who complained that “liquidation of wreckers is being undertaken in secret by the NKVD, and collective farmers are not being mobilized in the struggle.” He had dictated sentences by telegram (“shoot”), though a few local judges refused to impose the death penalty on their former party colleagues; prosecutors appealed the judges’ displays of mercy (i.e., ten-year Gulag sentences).²⁵⁰ Some Communists, despite brutalization in the NKVD cellars and threats to family members, refused to incriminate themselves. That included Martemyan Ryutin, author of the devastating internal condemnation of forced collectivization and Stalin’s dictatorship. Back in October 1936, while serving a ten-year sentence, he had been rearrested in solitary confinement and transferred to Lubyanka to furnish “testimony” for a planned trial of right deviationists. (His condemnation of collectivization made him a “rightist” in Stalin’s mind.) But Ryutin steadfastly denied the new charges of “terrorism,” and his “retrial” had taken place in camera in the military collegium (January 10, 1937). It had lasted forty minutes, after which he was executed in the basement.²⁵¹ Ryutin had written to the central executive committee of the Soviet—not to the degenerated party—that “I do not intend to and will not confess things about myself that are untrue, whatever it will cost me.”²⁵²

The Ryutin Platform had come up at the second Moscow trial in late January 1937, but it had not been a central aspect.²⁵³ Bukharin, who was being blackmailed with threats against his wife and daughter, cooperated and was afforded the highest possible profile in Stalin’s terror scenario. He had been in prison for almost a year, and at the prime of life (fifty years of age). During that period (February 1937–March 1938), he wrote an autobiographical novel (How It All Began), a philosophical treatise, a collection of poems, and several rambling “Dear Koba” letters pleading for his life and asking why Stalin needed him to die. It was an excellent question, but one with a ready answer. Whereas Ryutin had been the actual implacable opponent and Bukharin had never joined a party opposition, Bukharin was the preeminent symbol.²⁵⁴ Stalin’s invention of the “right deviation”—a tacit admission that it was not an opponent per se—and his attacks that twisted their policy positions involved a structural threat, a false or petit bourgeois class consciousness. Ultimately, this made Bukharin and the rightists central to Stalin’s terror scenario.

On March 2, 1938, the third Moscow trial finally commenced, like the first two, in the October Hall of the House of Trade Unions, in front of nearly 200 spectators, including the usual handpicked foreign journalists and diplomats. It lasted eighteen sittings. A total of twenty-one defendants, nine of whom had sat in the Central Committee, were in the dock. Three were doctors of the Kremlin medical staff. Stalin had edited chief procurator Vyshinsky’s script. (Vyshinsky would also edit the transcript, removing remarks exculpating the accused and discussions of the law by the defense lawyers.) The accused had spent long hours memorizing their testimony. Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rykov, Cristian Rakovski—staunch Bolsheviks—confessed that they had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin since 1918; had murdered Kirov, Mężyński, Kuibyshev, Gorky, Gorky’s son Maxim; had conspired with Nazi Germany, Japan, and Great Britain to partition the Soviet Union, hand over territory (Ukraine, Belorussia), and abolish collective farms.²⁵⁵ Yezhov had falsely promised at least some defendants their lives in exchange for self-incrimination.²⁵⁶ NKVD interrogators sat in the first row, a reminder that “re-interrogation” could take place between sessions.²⁵⁷ Krestinsky had been “beaten horribly,” according to the head of the Lefortovo prison’s hygiene department. “His entire back was a wound.”²⁵⁸ Still, on the first day, Krestinsky repudiated his confession and pleaded not guilty, causing a sensation. That night he was re-interrogated—he had a wife and children—and on the second day he nodded his assent when asked if he was guilty.²⁵⁹ “It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why, with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing, then of another,” Vyshinsky thundered. “It is these traitors who are responsible for it.”²⁶⁰