… Bolotin in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Trade, carried on undermining activities, created a shortage of goods, goods difficulties in the country…. Zelensky, on the instructions of the bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, sent huge quantities of goods to the districts where there was a poor harvest and small quantities of goods to the districts where there were good harvests, and this caused goods to remain on the shelves in some districts and a shortage of goods in others.
27
But once again, Vyshinsky diverged to attack Krestinsky. Again he was rebuffed by a firm, “I deny that I talked with Fascists for Trotskyite purposes.”
At this, Rykov was called on. He, too, confirmed Krestinsky’s guilt. Krestinsky once more asserted flatly that he knew nothing of any illegal activities, and the intervention of Ulrikh could get no more out of him.
But Rykov, too, proved unsatisfactory, though in a different way. In the period before his arrest, he had taken to heavy drinking, and reduced himself to a bad condition which the long strain of his imprisonment had, in its different way, done nothing to help. During cross-examination, he sometimes seemed to have gone to pieces, punctuating his answers with inane giggles.28 But he rallied. At first he was vague:
From Rykov I learnt that Yagoda belonged to this organization, but I had no direct connections with Yagoda.
(to the court): Permit me to question Rykov. Accused Rykov, did you tell Grinko about this?
I do not remember exactly, but I cannot exclude such a fact.
Hence, you told him about Yagoda’s membership?
Yes.
Now, wrecking was raised:
Accused Rykov, do you corroborate this conversation with Grinko about wrecking?
I don’t accept that. I deny it, not because I want to minimize my guilt. I have done much worse things than this.
30
But then he got into his stride on the line which both he and (much more forcefully and consistently) Bukharin were to take throughout. That is, they admitted forming an illegal organization, confessed to giving it a terrorist “orientation,” accepted full responsibility in the abstract for all the acts allegedly committed, but denied personal knowledge of or connection with any particular crime. They were thus able to point out that they were freely confessing to capital crimes, so that their denials of the particular acts could not be interpreted as attempts to evade the penalty.
The last to be examined on 2 March was Chernov. Ex-Menshevik and ex-theological student (like Bessonov—and Mikoyan and Stalin), he had been in charge of grain collection in the Ukraine in 1929 and 1930, and had more recently been serving as All-Union People’s Commissar for Agriculture. He had been a ruthless executer of Stalin’s will in the collectivization campaign, but apparently not a convinced one. He is reported as having said, during the 1930 slaughter of their livestock by the peasantry, that at least “for the first time in their sordid history, the Russian peasants have eaten their fill of meat.”31 He had started to confess on the day of his arrest.32
He now confessed to qualms about collectivization, and admitted sharing them, at the time, with a wide range of Ukrainian officials, including Zatonsky. But his main role in the dock was to take the blame for agricultural failures. He had only been removed from his post on 30 October 1937,33 and could reasonably be blamed for much.
For example, there had been a good deal of livestock mortality. Back in September 1937, a spread of infective anemia among Soviet horses had been countered by the arrest of the Head of the Veterinary Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, Nedachin, the Head of the Veterinary Services of the Red Army,fn1 Nikolsky, and a leading veterinary official in the Agricultural Commissariat, Chernyak, whose forthcoming trial was announced.34 They had never again been heard of, but Chernov was now able to accept the blame for similar epidemics, spread through the agency of a different set of veterinarians:
… I performed the following acts of diversion. In order to cause heavy cattle mortality in Eastern Siberia, I instructed Ginsburg, Chief of the Veterinary Department, who belonged to the organization of the Rights, and through him the Chief of the Veterinary Supply Department, who also belonged to the organization of the Rights, not to supply anti-anthrax serum to Eastern Siberia, knowing that Eastern Siberia was particularly liable to anthrax. The serum was not supplied to Eastern Siberia. The preparations for this were made in 1935, and when there was an outbreak of anthrax there in 1936 it turned out that no serum was available, with the result that I cannot say how many exactly, but at any rate over 25,000 horses perished.
