Rakovsky was now questioned. He was the son of a landowner in the Southern Dobrudja, at first part of Bulgaria, but transferred to Romania a few years after his birth. He was prominent as a Bulgarian Socialist at the age of twenty, when he represented the party at the Congress of the Second International. He took a doctorate of medicine at Montpellier, and went back to the Balkans, where he was arrested a number of times for involvement in the Romanian revolutionary movement. In 1916, he was again arrested in Romania, and imprisoned at Jassy, where the Russians freed him in May 1917. He went to Petrograd and in 1919 became a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukraine. Becoming attached to Trotsky’s views, he lost his high posts and from 1924 to 1927 was Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in London and then Ambassador in Paris. He was recalled to Moscow in November 1927 and was expelled from the Central Committee in the same month, for supporting the Left opposition. He defended the opposition viewpoint at the XVth Party Congress. In January 1928, he was expelled from the Party and deported to Astrakhan, and later to Barnaul. It had not been until February 1934, one of the very last, that he had recanted and been readmitted to the Party. He had been implicated in the Pyatakov Trial and was arrested on 27 January 1937.87 Apart from the doctors, he was easily the oldest of those in dock. And even among his veteran fellow accused, his record stood out as long and legendary.
The sixty-five-year-old revolutionary had refused to testify to the NKVD for eight months,88 one of the best records in the trials. He now confessed that he had been a British spy since 1924. His disavowal of Trotskyism in February 1934 had been designed to deceive the Party.89
On his rehabilitation, he had been sent to Japan at the head of a Red Cross delegation, and this was made the occasion for him to incriminate the then Soviet ambassadors in the Far East, Yurenev and Bogomolov. He himself became a Japanese as well as a British spy.
Vyshinsky got in one particular unfair smear. Rakovsky’s father had been a landlord.
Hence I am not mistaken when I say that you were a landlord?
You are not mistaken.
Well, now. It was important for me to establish whence you received your income.
But it is important for me to say what this income was spent for.
This is a different matter.
90
Everyone among the Old Bolsheviks knew that Rakovsky had spent everything he had on the revolutionary movement—financing the Romanian Socialist Party, which he had founded, and its paper, which he edited, and also subsidizing Russian and other revolutionaries. Now provoked enough to try to draw attention to these facts, he was instantly silenced.
When Rakovsky began to refer to the “opposition,” Vyshinsky interrupted briskly:
In your explanations today you are generally permitting yourself to use quite a number of such expressions, as if you were forgetting that you are being tried here as a member of a counter-revolutionary bandit, espionage, diversionist organization of traitors. I consider it my duty to remind you of this in my interrogation of you and ask you to keep closer to the substance of the treasonable crimes which you have committed, to speak without philosophy and other such things which are entirely out of place here.91
Rakovsky finished by explaining that his surrender after eight months had been due to getting information, during the summer of 1937, about the Japanese attack on China and the extent of Nazi and Italian intervention in Spain.92 This “had a stunning effect on me. Rancour and ambition fell from me.” He decided that his “duty was to help in this struggle with the aggressor, that I would go and expose myself fully and entirely, and I told the investigator that on the following day I would begin to give complete, exhaustive testimony.”
This sounds, in the context of interrogation and exhaustion, a credible exposition of the “Rubashov” motive—more so, indeed, than the reluctant and partial confession of Bukharin, on whom “Rubashov” was founded.
