I date my rupture with Trotsky and Trotskyism from 27 November 1927, when, through Serebryakov, who had returned from America and was in Moscow, I sent Trotsky a sharp letter containing sharp criticism….
That letter is not in the records. We have another letter—your letter to Trotsky.
The letter I am referring to is in the possession of the Court investigator, because it was taken from me during the search, and I request this letter to be attached to the records.
The records contain a letter dated 11 July 1927, taken from you during the search.
But there is another letter of 27 November….
There is no such letter.
That cannot be.…
21
This was to be significant.
Pressed continually in a long exchange, Krestinsky gave his motives for earlier confessions:
At the preliminary investigation, before I was questioned by you, I had given false testimony.
… And then you stuck to it.
… And then I stuck to it, because from personal experience I had arrived at the conviction that before the trial, if there was to be one, I would not succeed in refuting my testimony.
22
Vyshinsky now called on Rosengolts, who confirmed Krestinsky’s Trotskyism. Krestinsky, who had not been feeling well, slumped. Vyshinsky told him to listen. He replied that when he had taken a pill, he would be all right, but asked not to be questioned for a few minutes.
Rosengolts, then Grinko, gave evidence of Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky, recovering, continued to deny it:
Here are three men on good terms with you who say what is not true?
Yes.
After several more denials, Vyshinsky again asked him directly, “When we interrogated you at the preliminary investigation, what did you say on this score?”
In giving testimony I did not refute any of my previous testimony, which I deliberately confirmed.
You deliberately confirmed it. You were misleading the Prosecutor. Is that so, or not?
No.
Why did you have to mislead me?
I simply considered that if I were to say what I am saying today—that it was not in accordance with the facts—my declaration would not reach the leaders of the Party and the Government.
23
This clear statement of the position was greeted with a “shocked hush” from the audience.24
Questioning further about the preliminary examination, Vyshinsky asked, “If you were asked whether you had complaints, you should have answered that you had.” And Krestinsky replied, “I had in the sense that I did not speak voluntarily.”25
Vyshinsky then abandoned this line of questioning and turned to his official prey, Bessonov, who developed his connections with Trotsky at length, adding that Trotsky had hinted at the physical extermination of Maxim Gorky. The session ended with a further exchange with, and denial from, Krestinsky.
After a two-hour adjournment, the evening started off with the evidence of Grinko, former People’s Commissar for Finance. He had been a Borotbist, and in the early 1920s had been dismissed from his post as Ukrainian Commissar for Education for excessive haste in carrying out Ukrainianization. In this capacity, he now implicated Lyubchenko and other lesser Ukrainians, such as Porayko, Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, as members of the “national-fascist” organization. In his Moscow role, he brought in a number of other leading figures, such as Antipov, Rudzutak, Yakovlev, and Vareikis, as Rightist plotters. He described how Yakir and Gamarnik had instructed the Head of the Department of Savings Banks to “prepare a terrorist act” against Yezhov, and how other conspirators had arranged for an official of the Northern Sea Route to do the same against Stalin. His own main activity had been financial sabotage, which he had defined at the preliminary examination:
The main object of undermining work in the People’s Commissariat of Finance was the following: to weaken the Soviet rouble, to weaken the financial power of the U.S.S.R., to dislocate the economy and thus rouse among the population discontent with the financial policy of the Soviet power, discontent over taxes, discontent with bad savings bank service, delays in paying wages, etc., which were to result in wide, organized discontent with the Soviet power and were to help the conspirators to recruit adherents and to develop insurrectionary activities.26
This sort of theme—the blaming of all the errors and malpractices of the Soviet economy on sabotage by the accused—was to run through the trial. For all spheres of life, there was someone in the dock to answer for popular discontents. And the evidence tells us a huge amount about Soviet conditions.
Grinko, similarly, had been involved with Zelensky and others in trade hold-ups:
