And so on and so on. As well as with the Rights, he established connections with Muralov from the 1937 Trial. He had also organized a terrorist group in the Agriculture Commissariat, choosing Molotov as the prospective victim. He had carried out agricultural spying for Germany.
Zubarev’s main contribution, however, was his recruitment as a Tsarist agent in 1908 and later. For Vyshinsky now produced a surprise witness. This was a police inspector of pre-Revolutionary days, Vasilyev, who had allegedly recruited Zubarev. The production of this aged Tsarist gendarme was treated by the court and “public” as a sort of comic turn. Even Vyshinsky was comparatively amiable to him, baiting him only with that puny malice which was the closest he could evidently get to good humor.44
With that, the morning session dragged to a close.
When the court reassembled at 6:00 P.M., Ulrikh announced to a tense court that the examination of Krestinsky would now take place. Vyshinsky interposed to say that he first wanted to put a few questions to Rakovsky.
He asked the old Bulgarian about the letter to Trotsky abandoning Trotskyism, which Krestinsky had referred to in the previous day’s session. Rakovsky recalled it, and said it had been intended as a deception, and that Krestinsky had never broken with Trotskyism.
Vyshinsky then produced the letter, whose existence he would not acknowledge the previous day, and went on to argue that the letter itself, which spoke of the defeat of the opposition and the need to work in the Party, should be interpreted as a call to underhand subversion—a possible argument, indeed, but one scarcely compatible with an out-and-out deceptive surrender.
Finally he turned to Krestinsky. Did he accept this formulation?
Krestinsky, who was “looking more than ever like a small bedraggled sparrow,”45 accepted it.
Vyshinsky asked if this meant that Krestinsky would now cease to deceive the court. The answer was a full confirmation of the evidence given at the preliminary inquiry. He admitted his guilt. On the first day, Krestinsky had occasionally been roused by Vyshinsky’s taunts, but on the whole his tone is said to have been natural; it had now become flat and desperate.46
Vyshinsky pressed the point:
I have one question to ask Krestinsky: What, then, is the meaning of the statement you made yesterday, which cannot be regarded otherwise than as a piece of Trotskyite provocation in court?
Yesterday, under the influence of momentary keen feeling of false shame, evoked by the atmosphere of the dock and the painful impression created by the public reading of the indictment, which was aggravated by my poor health, I could not bring myself to tell the truth, I could not bring myself to say that I was guilty. And instead of saying ‘Yes, I am guilty,’ I almost mechanically answered ‘No, I am not guilty.’
Mechanically?
In the face of world public opinion, I had not the strength to admit the truth that I had been conducting a Trotskyite struggle all along. I request the court to register my statement that I fully and completely admit that I am guilty of all the gravest charges brought against me personally, and that I admit my complete responsibility for the treason and treachery I have committed.
47
And now, despite Ulrikh’s earlier announcement that the examination of Krestinsky was due, Vyshinsky at once dropped him and turned to the examination of Rykov. All this has very much the air of the prosecution playing safe, and not willing to risk a further retraction at this stage.
Stalin received regular reports on the case and gave advice. The latest Soviet account says that after he was informed of Krestinsky’s retraction, he said, “You worked badly with that filth,” and ordered a stop to be put to Krestinsky’s talk. On the night of 2 March, “special measures” were taken. The interrogators dislocated his left shoulder, so that outwardly there was nothing to be seen. Bessonov is named has having told this version to the German engineer Hans Metzger in a prisoners’ transfer train in l939.48 According to another variant, Krestinsky was also faced for hours with a battery of particularly bright lights, which damaged his already injured eyes, but only consented to confess on condition that the letter he had written to Trotsky should be put in the records.49
And if Krestinsky had hoped to rouse the other defendants to defy the court, he had had to recognize defeat. Indeed, he may never have hoped or intended his retraction to go beyond the first day, making what demonstration he felt to be in his power.
An alternative account leaked through NKVD circles was that Krestinsky’s retraction and reaffirmation were a put-up job. Stalin was wishing to show that the defendants did not all confess like automata and thought that this single and temporary lapse would add a touch of verisimilitude.50
