Mme. Peshkova’s evident conviction that Peshkov’s death was natural and Gorky’s not fits in with Yagoda’s testimony in court. As with his evidence on the Kirov Case, we seem to be driven to the ironic conclusion that, alone among the accused, the story told by the ex-Police Chief was essentially true! And if this is so, his confession to the Kuibyshev murder, alone among the other three, is best explicable as indicating that Kuibyshev, too, was really murdered. But this is a matter of deduction rather than evidence: we cannot at present at all exclude the possibility that the timely death of these men Stalin wanted out of the way was, after all, natural. Nor does it seem very probable that more will be forthcoming even when the Soviet archives are opened up. For it is rather unlikely that plans for this style of killing are committed to paper.
And there we must leave this murky and horrible episode.
When the doctors and their organizers and accomplices had been dealt with, the Expert Commission, as we have said, made its report, confirming their guilt, and for full measure establishing the damage to Yezhov’s health, evidenced in his urine. Apart from a short session
He described the good-luck token found in Rosengolts’s pocket (see here), and asked the court’s permission to read it. In a sneering tone, amid titters from the audience, he read out eight verses of the Psalms—“Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered …”—and then asked Rosengolts, “How did this get into your pocket?”
My wife put it in my pocket one day before I went to work. She said it was for good luck.
Vyshinsky continued on a humorous note, “And you carried this ‘good luck’ in your hip pocket for several months?”
I did not even pay attention …
Nevertheless, you saw what your wife was doing?
I was in a hurry.
But you were told that this was a family talisman for good luck?
185
At this, he winked at the crowd, which roared with laughter,186 and the hearings were at an end.
THE LAST ACT
The court reassembled on 11 March for the final speeches and pleas. Vyshinsky’s speech for the prosecution lasted all morning. He started with a violent harangue:
It is not for the first time that the Supreme Court of our country is examining a case involving the gravest crimes directed against the well-being of our country, against our Socialist fatherland, the fatherland of the working people of the whole world. But I will hardly be mistaken if I say that this is the first time that our court has had to examine a case like this, to examine a case of such crimes and such foul deeds as those that have passed at this trial before your eyes, before the eyes of the whole world, a case of such criminals as those you now see in the prisoners’ dock.
With every day and hour that passed, as the court investigation on the present case proceeded, it brought to light even more of the horror of the chain of shameful, unparalleled, monstrous crimes committed by the accused, the entire abominable chain of heinous deeds before which the base deeds of the most inveterate, vile, unbridled and despicable criminals fade and grow dim.187
He then came to the whole crux, from the point of view of Stalinist logic:
… The historical significance of this trial consists before all in the fact that at this trial it has been shown, proved and established with exceptional scrupulousness and exactitude that the Rights, Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, bourgeois nationalists, and so on and so forth, are nothing other than a gang of murderers, spies, diversionists and wreckers, without any principles or ideals….
The Trotskyites and Bukharinites, that is to say, the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ , the leading lights of which are now in the prisoners’ dock, is not a political party, a political tendency, but a band of felonious criminals, and not simply felonious criminals, but of criminals who have sold themselves to enemy intelligence services, criminals whom even ordinary felons treat as the basest, the lowest, the most contemptible, the most depraved of the depraved.188
Interrupting his argument with remarks about “a foul-smelling heap of human garbage,”189 he traced the continuity of counter-revolution back to the Shakhty and “Industrial Party” Trials.
Attacking the entire past careers of Bukharin and the others, he rehearsed their current crimes. Of Zelensky, for example, he said:
