Eastern Approaches (13 page)

The disappearance from the public scene of the three Left-wing Communists had been comparatively recent; but nothing had been heard of the Social Revolutionaries for twenty years. Their resuscitation was almost as much of a
tour de force
as that of the Tsarist Chief of Police.

One after the other they made their appearance; their bodies clothed in neat blue suits, issued for the occasion, their faces grey and corpselike. Karelin, in particular, looked as if he had been dead a long time. ‘Not quite the man he was,’ commented Bukharin, with a suspicion of irony, on being asked whether he recognized him.

Beginning with the woman Jakovleva, a squat figure in her dark blue coat and skirt, they gave the evidence that was required of them in flat toneless voices. There had been a plot in 1918 to murder Lenin, Stalin and Sverdlov. Both the Left-wing Communists and the Left-wing Social Revolutionaries had been associated in it. Bukharin, as the leader of the Left-wing Communists, had been the instigator.

But Bukharin claimed the right to cross-examine the witnesses himself and this, grudgingly, was granted him. Soon he was dominating the scene. His questions were embarrassingly to the point: was it not a fact that he had been in Petrograd and not in Moscow at the time of the alleged conspiracy? That the Social Revolutionaries, with whom he was supposed to have been in league, had sought to assassinate him? Vyshinski did his best to interfere, but Bukharin was irrepressible. If it was really considered necessary to go so carefully into everyone’s political history, might it not, he asked, be worth recording that such prominent statesmen as Menzhinski, Kuibyshev and Jaroslavski had all been Mensheviks at that period? And others, too. …

And others too. Vyshinski’s normally rubicund complexion went
several shades paler. He himself had been a Menshevik and did not like being reminded of it. It was not a healthy thing to have been. Was his own position, after all, so very secure? Had not Yagoda taken a leading part in preparing the case against Bukharin and Rykov, only to find himself, when the time came, side by side with them in the dock, an author who suddenly finds himself mixed up in the plot of his own novel? It was a thing that might happen to anyone.

But fortunately it was getting late. Hastily, the proceedings were brought to a close. It had been a bad day for the prosecution. In a final attempt to redress the balance Vyshinski asked Bukharin flatly whether, in view of what the witnesses had said, he still denied having plotted to murder Lenin. Flatly he replied that he did; that what the witnesses had said was a lie. There was no getting away from it, the prisoner, in spite of everything, had scored a moral victory. The court adjourned and one after another the witnesses filed out, shadowy, unsubstantial figures.

But Vyshinski had other fish to fry. Yagoda still remained to be dealt with. Yagoda, who, as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, as Supreme Head of the O.G.P.U., of the N.K.V.D., had until eighteen months before wielded power second only to that of Stalin himself; whose task it had been to make all arrangements for the personal security of the military and political leaders; who had held their lives in his hand; whose task it was also to keep a check on the activities, public and private, of everyone in the Soviet Union, great or small; in whose power it lay to get rid, by one means or another, of anyone who crossed his path; who for years had, with the approval of the Party and the Government, used these powers to keep up a reign of terror unparalleled in the history of mankind; who had been charged with preparing all the previous State trials; who, in all probability, had made the preliminary arrangements for the present trial.

Having brought his dialectical tussle with Bukharin to a not very satisfactory conclusion, Vyshinski now turned his energies to a task which also seemed likely to present certain difficulties. For Yagoda clearly knew a great deal. Enough of the innermost secrets of the regime to discredit it eternally; enough about everyone’s past (Vyshinski’s for example) to ruin them irreparably. Besides, might not his
technical knowledge of the Soviet judicial machine make him a difficult subject, now that the roles were reversed? The situation was full of interesting possibilities.

Again Vyshinski adopted the technique of methodically blackening his adversary by means of the confessions of his alleged partners in crime. This was the role assigned to the three Kremlin doctors. The story they told was fantastic, more fantastic than anything that had gone before. At Yagoda’s instigation they had, it appeared, made away with four of their patients: Maxim Gorki, the writer; his son, Maxim Peshkov; Menzhinski, Yagoda’s predecessor as Head of the O.G.P.U.; and Kuibyshev, once the scourge of Turkestan. In a matter-of-fact way, as though they had been addressing a medical congress, they described in detail how they had done it. Menzhinski and Kuibyshev had simply been given the wrong treatment for heart trouble; Maxim Gorki had deliberately been sat in a draught and had caught pneumonia; his son Maxim Peshkov they had got drunk and left in the snow to cool off. In each case the victim had died an apparently natural death. They had not, it seemed, done this of their own accord. Yagoda had terrorized them. They were helpless in his hands. He had both bribed and threatened them. Sometimes, he made them presents of foreign wine, hot-house flowers and even country houses and allowed them to import what they liked duty-free from abroad. But, when the time came, he would remind them that, if they did not comply with his wishes, not only they, but their families would suffer a most unpleasant fate. Coming from the head of the O.G.P.U., such hints were bound to make an impression. They knew that he meant what he said; that he could do anything with them that he liked. And they complied.

Or so they said. But Yagoda himself took a different line. Asked to confirm the testimony of the doctors, he admitted without hesitation, as if it had been quite a normal thing, that he had given instructions for the murder of Kuibyshev and Maxim Gorki, but denied flatly that he had in any way been concerned with the death of Maxim Peshkov or of Menzhinski.

There was a stir among the spectators, a gasp of excitement. Like the filmgoers or readers of penny dreadfuls who in Western
countries get a vicarious thrill from the real or imaginary adventures of the titled or criminal classes, they felt that they were seeing life at first hand. The bit about the country houses and the foreign wines and the hot-house flowers had been good. But this was better. It was like a detective story; they could work it all out for themselves. Menzhinski had been Yagoda’s boss at the O.G.P.U. He had had him murdered because he wanted his job. It had always been said that Menzhinski, a notoriously vicious character, had died of incurable syphilis, and that it had been a remarkable feat on the part of Dr. Kasakov to keep him alive as long as he did. But now they knew better. And why had Yagoda wanted to get rid of Max Peshkov? Some of the better informed among them knew that too: Max had had an attractive wife, Nadyezhda. Since her husband’s death she was rumoured to have become Yagoda’s mistress.

And now, while he readily admitted the two ‘political’ murders with which he was charged (what, after all, did an extra ‘liquidation’ or two mean to him? He had been responsible for so many thousands in the course of his official duties), Yagoda was steadfastly denying the two crimes for which he might have had personal grounds. From some last remnant of professional pride, perhaps; or from some strange feeling of delicacy, surviving all other emotions. All eyes were on him. Fascinated, the crowd watched the man who up to a few months ago had had power of life and death over every one of them, over every one in court, in fact, judges, prisoners, guards, Public Prosecutor, all of them.

He stood in the dock and contradicted. Contradicted in a tired, an utterly weary voice. A very different figure from the Yagoda we remembered a year or two before. Then he had been youngish and self-satisfied looking. Now he was a broken, white-haired man. His toothbrush moustache, once jaunty, now had a pathetic air. Clearly the Heroic Defenders of the Security of the People had required all their skill in order to subdue their former Commander. Yet something of his former authority still remained. Broken as he was, he still seemed to exercise a strange fascination.

Kasakov had declared that, on instructions given to him personally by Yagoda, he had brought about the death of Menzhinski. Asked by Vyshinski to confirm this, Yagoda rose slowly to his feet. ‘The first
time I ever saw Kasakov was in this court,’ he replied in a low toneless voice. ‘I have never dicussed any such matters with him.’

‘Then why,’ asked Vyshinski, ‘did you say that you had done so in the statements which you made before coming into court?’

‘Those statements were untrue.’

‘And how was it that you came to make statements that were untrue?’

There was a pause. Yagoda put his head a little on one side and looked at Vyshinski. Then he spoke, and his voice, as low as ever, was full of meaning. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you will allow me not to answer that question.’

Everyone knew what he meant. Hurriedly Vyshinski turned to another prisoner. This time the charge was the murder of Max Peshkov. Again it was alleged that the murder had been committed at Yagoda’s instigation. Again Yagoda denied having had any hand in the matter. Again Vyshinski confronted him with his previous statements out of court.

‘I was lying,’ said Yagoda in a low, level voice.

‘And now?’

‘I am telling the truth.’

‘And why did you lie?’

‘Once again,’ and this time there was a note of impatience, almost of irritation, in Yagoda’s voice. ‘Once again, I must ask to be allowed not to reply to that question.’

Earlier in the trial Krestinski had said that his preliminary statements had been obtained from him against his will. This scarcely veiled allusion to the methods of the N.K.V.D., coming from their former Chief, was even more telling.

But, in the long run, even Yagoda could not hold his own. When the court reassembled, it was all too clear that corrective measures had been applied. In a few hours he had aged by ten years. Before, he had looked broken; now, he looked crushed.

Before cross-examining him, Vyshinski called his former private secretary, Bulanov, an individual of sinister but intellectual appearance. There could be no doubt as to the purpose of Bulanov’s testimony. It was solely designed to incriminate his master. He began by
saying, that during the years he worked for Yagoda, he had fallen completely under his influence, to such an extent that he had lost all contact with the Party. Knowing his devotion, Yagoda had told him all his plans. He had thus at an early stage become aware that Yagoda was a Rightist; that he was in league with the Trotskists and with Tukachevski; and that he was plotting to get rid of the present leaders of the Government and the Party by means of a
coup d’état
and to install himself and his associates in their place. An ardent admirer of Hitler, he had chosen for himself the post of President of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, while Bukharin, as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, was to play the part of Dr. Goebbels. Realizing that it would be impossible for them to do this without outside help, the members of the ‘bloc’ had planned to make their
coup
coincide with a war, and, in anticipation of this, had established contact with the foreign powers most likely to attack their country.

It was the same familiar story over again, with Yagoda’s part in it more clearly defined. According to Bulanov, he had used his position at the Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the immense power that went with it to shield his fellow plotters and cover up their treachery and to get rid of anyone who stood in his way. The N.K.V.D. had become a hive of anti-Soviet activity, with Yagoda’s men in all the key positions. In detail Bulanov told of the cold-blooded deliberation with which Yagoda had planned the murder of his own chief, Menzhinski, first of all, and then, when he had succeeded him, of Kirov, Kuibyshev, Gorki and Peshkov. When, in spite of his precautions, the activities of some of his associates had been unmasked, he had done everything to prevent their cases from being properly investigated, and had actually visited some of them in prison and ‘suggested to them the line they should take when they were brought to trial’.

Finally, towards the end of 1936, he had been relieved of his post as Commissar for Internal Affairs and transferred to the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs. Terrified that his successor, Yezhov, would discover his guilty secrets, he had decided to make away with him before it was too late. For some time past he had been interested in poisons. Indeed, he had established a special branch of the N.K.V.D. entirely devoted to their study. It was largely by means of poison that
he had planned to carry out his
coup d’état
. Now, with his back to the wall, his thoughts again turned to poison. Summoning the faithful Bulanov, he had produced some bottles of different sizes and a large metal spray. All were of non-Russian, in fact of foreign manufacture.

Taking their cue with both hands, the audience gasped with appreciative horror and disgust: of course such things would be of foreign manufacture. Then they settled down to listen avidly to what was coming next. It did not fall short of their expectations.

Armed with this foreign apparatus, Bulanov continued, he and his master had proceeded to spray with foreign poison the walls and curtains and carpets of the Commissar’s office which in a few days would be taken over by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. After his master had left, he had repeated the process hopefully two or three times. But in vain. Yezhov, though his health had been affected by the fumes, had survived this ingenious attempt on his life, had continued conscientiously to hunt down the enemies of the people, and in the following spring both Yagoda and Bulanov had been arrested.

The audience gasped again; this time with relief. There had been a happy ending. All was well. The dog it was that died, or, rather, was going to die.

And now, once again, Yagoda was on his feet. Clearly the treatment which he had received this time, whether physical or mental, had been of the most drastic description. His former pupils had done their work well. Nothing remained of that faint flicker of defiance; all the spirit had been knocked out of him. In a voice that was utterly weary and so faint that it could scarcely be heard in the hushed court, he proceeded to stumble through a written statement, reading it as though for the first time. In it he confirmed what Bulanov and the doctors had said, adding that Bukharin and Rykov must bear their full share of blame for crimes which had been committed in accordance with their orders. But, while no longer denying responsibility for any of the murders, he asked to be allowed to give details of the murder of Max Peshkov in private, and this request was granted. That, even in his present condition, with only a few more hours to live, this poor battered wreck should struggle so tenaciously to keep this one matter from being discussed in public, pointed all too clearly to some internal conflict, to
stresses and strains beneath the surface, at the nature of which one could only guess.