The Accused Read online

  Another exceptional feature of this book is the combination of broad narrative gusto with penetrating scientific analysis—two qualities which are rarely found together. The author’s methodological approach is derived from his training in the exact sciences and in political economy. The deductions at which he arrives in observing events around him are lucid and ingenious; they add up to a fairly complete blueprint of the machinery of the Russian Terror. Particularly striking is the system of computation by which Weissberg arrived at his estimate of the number of people arrested during the purge. It is a minor triumph of scientific method that, independently from Weissberg, Beck and Godin—two professors imprisoned during the purge—arrived by the same method of calculation at the same approximative result.

  My only quarrel with the author’s theoretical conclusions concerns the last chapter of the book, in which the ultimate causes of the Terror are treated in what seems to me a somewhat one-sided fashion. To readers specially interested in this subject I should like to recommend the short and concise book of the two authors just mentioned: Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, by F. Beck and W. Godin. One of the authors behind these aliases is a scientist who plays an important part in this book.

  5

  I LEARNED of Alex’ arrest when I met E. in London in the spring of 1938 after her release and expulsion from Russia. We discussed methods of trying to save him, by getting several Nobel prize-winning physicists to appeal directly to Stalin. Albert Einstein had already been approached by mutual friends and written a letter to this effect. I drafted another letter to Vishinsky, which was signed by the three French Nobel prize winners, Jean Perrin, Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie.{1} The letters were never acknowledged or answered, but the whole action had a politically significant aftermath.

  The Joliot-Curies were already Communist sympathizers at that time and two years later became members of the Party. Today Professor Joliot-Curie is, next to Picasso, the most celebrated Communist intellectual in Europe. In 1950 a political trial was held in France which became a European sensation and ended in a decisive defeat for the Communists. Technically, the trial was a libel suit brought by the writer David Rousset against the Communist weekly, Les Lettres Françaises, which had accused Rousset of falsifying a text from the Soviet penal code. The real purpose of the trial was to expose the facts about the Russian terror regime, its prisons and forced-labor camps. One of the witnesses cited by Rousset was Alex Weissberg.

  He started testifying through an interpreter, in German. Counsel for the Communist paper, whose strategy was to turn the trial into a series of riots, tried to discredit Weissberg by appealing to anti-German sentiment:

  THE PRESIDENT OF THE TRIBUNAL: “We shall now hear the next witness.”

  COUNSEL FOR ROUSSET: “Our next witness is Mr. Weissberg, who will testify in German.”

  COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: “What, another Gentian!”

  [Tumult]

  WEISSBERG: “...I shall now proceed to explain by what methods I have arrived at the figure of eight to ten million persons detained during the Great Purge of 1936....”

  COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: “He must be talking about his own country, Germany.”

  [Tumult]

  COUNSEL FOR ROUSSET: “Don’t keep interrupting. You can cross-examine the witness afterwards.”

  COUNSEL FOR Lettres Françaises: “It turns my stomach to see a German testify before a French court....”

  [Tumult]

  And so it went on, the Communist lawyers trying to discredit the witness by every rabble-rousing means. At last counsel for Rousset got up and read a long text testifying to Weissberg’s character and the loyal services which he had rendered to Soviet Russia. It was the text of the letter printed in this book. When at the end the names of the signers were read out and proved to include the Communist idol Joliot-Curie, the effect was that of a bombshell. The remainder of Weissberg’s testimony now appeared authenticated, as it were, by the Party itself. It carried decisive weight in the outcome of the trial, and thus contributed to one of the greatest moral defeats which the Communists have suffered in Europe since the war.

  ARTHUR KOESTLER

  May, 1951

  [THE LETTERS REFERRED TO IN THE PREFACE ARE REPRODUCED BELOW.]

  Mr. Joseph Stalin,

  May, 18, 1938

  Moscow,

  U.S.S.R.

  Dear Mr. Stalin:

  I have recently learned of several cases in which scholars who had been invited to Russia—men who have, as human beings, the full confidence of their foreign colleagues—have been accused of serious offenses. I understand how easily suspicion may fall, in times of crisis and excitement, on innocent and valuable men. But I am also convinced that from a general human point of view as well as in the interests of the successful development of Russian construction it is of the highest importance to move only with the greatest care against men of rare energy and rare abilities.

  So I urge you to direct your attention to the proceedings against Dr. Alexander Weissberg at Kharkov. Dr. Weissberg, an Austrian citizen, is a physicist and engineer who has been working at the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute in Kharkov. I would especially like to make sure that consideration is given to the judgment of Dr. Weissberg’s work for the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry which was given in the beginning of 1937 by Professor

  Martin Ruhemann, head of the Experimental Institute on Low Temperatures.

  Very respectfully yours,

  (SIGNED) Albert Einstein

  (TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN)

  Paris, June 15, 1938

  State Prosecutor Vishinsky,

  Moscow, U.S.S.R.

  Dear Mr. State Prosecutor:

  The undersigned, friends of the Soviet Union, believe it to be their duty to bring the following facts to your attention:

  The imprisonment of two well-known foreign physicists, Dr. Friedrich Houtermanns, who was arrested on December 1, 1937, in Moscow, and Alexander Weissberg, who was arrested on March 1 of the same year in Kharkov, has shocked scientific circles in Europe and the United States. The names of Houtermanns and Weissberg are so well-known in these circles that it is to be feared that their long imprisonment may provoke a new political campaign of the sort which has recently done such damage to the prestige of the country of socialism and to the collaboration of the U.S.S.R. with the great Western democracies. The situation has been made more serious by the fact that these scientific men, friends of the U.S.S.R. who have always defended it against the attacks of its enemies, have not been able to obtain any news from Soviet authorities on the cases of Houtermanns and Weissberg in spite of the time which has gone by since their arrest, and thus find themselves unable to explain the step that has been taken.

  Their friends include many of the most eminent men of science, like Professor Einstein at Pasadena, Professor Blackett at Manchester, Professor Nils Bohr at Copenhagen, who are interested in their fate and will not abandon this interest. Mr. Weissberg, who is one of the founders and the editor of the Journal of Physics of the U.S.S.R., has been invited by Professor Einstein to the university at Pasadena, an invitation to which he has not been able to reply because of his arrest. Dr. Houtermanns had been invited to do scientific work at an institute in London, and he was arrested in the customs office of the station in Moscow just as he was leaving.

  The only official information available on the reasons for the arrest of Weissberg is a communication from Soviet authorities in March, 1937, to the Austrian Embassy in Moscow in which Weissberg was accused of espionage for Germany and activity in support of an armed revolt in the Ukraine. As to Dr. Houtermanns, no official communication has been made.

  All those who know Weissberg and Houtermanns personally are sincerely convinced that they were devoted friends of the U.S.S.R. and incapable of any actions hostile to it. They are sincerely convinced that the accusations made against Weissberg are absurd and must be based on a serious mista
ke which it is desirable to correct at once, for both political and personal reasons.

  Official statements by responsible Soviet leaders have recently underlined the fact that errors, inevitable in critical times, have been made by subordinate offices in the course of the purge campaign which was necessary in a country so seriously threatened by external and internal enemies. These same leaders have insisted on the urgent necessity of correcting these errors and occasional abuses of authority. The undersigned and all the friends of the two accused are convinced that this is a mistake of just such a kind.

  This is why they address themselves to the State Prosecutor of the U.S.S.R. on the cases of Houtermanns and Weissberg and urge him, in the interests of Soviet prestige in foreign scientific circles, to take the necessary steps to obtain their immediate freedom. The political significance of this question justifies us in sending a copy of this letter to Mr. Stalin, addressed to him through the Embassy of the U.S.S.R. in Paris.

  We urge you to give us an answer as quickly as possible, considering the urgent character of this problem.

  (SIGNED) Irène Joliot-Curie, former Under Secretary of State for Scientific Research, Nobel Prize winner.

  Jean Perrin, former Under Secretary of State for Scientific Research, Nobel Prize winner.

  Frédéric Joliot-Curie, professor at the Collège de France, Nobel Prize winner.

  (TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH)

  THE ACCUSED

  CHAPTER 1—The “Great Purge”

  THE AIM OF THIS BOOK IS TO DESCRIBE HAPPENINGS WITHOUT PRECEDENT in modem history. From the middle of 1936 to the end of 1938 the totalitarian state took on its final form in the Soviet Union. In this period approximately eight million people were arrested in town and country by the secret police.{2} The arrested men were charged with high treason, espionage, sabotage, preparation for armed insurrection and the planning of attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders. After periods of examination which rarely exceeded three months, all these men, with very few exceptions, pleaded guilty, and where they were actually brought before the courts they confirmed their confessions in public. They were all sentenced to long terms of forced labor in the concentration camps of the Far North or of the Central Asiatic desert districts.

  They were all innocent.

  However, to protect myself from all-too-pedantic criticism, I must make two reservations. The one refers to the assassination of Kirov, the Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, who was also a member of the Politburo. Kirov was shot dead on December 1, 1934, after a meeting of the District Party Committee by a young student named Nikolayev, who was himself a member of the Party. The background of this murder has never been satisfactorily explained. Many people believe that the motive was jealousy, i.e., that it was personal and not political. Others, including Trotsky, believe that it was a provocation organized by the G.P.U. But in any case, Kirov was murdered almost two years before the beginning of the Great Purge. During that purge millions of people were accused of having planned attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders, but only one Soviet leader, Kirov, was ever killed. Despite their “confessions,” the men arrested during the Great Purge had nothing whatever to do with his death.

  My second reservation refers to the espionage activity of foreign powers. Of course, such activity was carried on during the years in question, though its agents certainly had a more difficult task than elsewhere. The Soviet Union is almost hermetically sealed off. A Soviet citizen guilty of espionage could not hope to escape abroad. Money would not greatly attract him as a reward. He could not spend it without immediately making himself suspect. At one time Russians ready to spy for a foreign power for ideological reasons and not for hope of reward could have been found among the formerly well-to-do classes, but by that time those classes had been broken up. Their members had lost all courage and all belief in the ultimate victory of their cause. A man is seldom prepared to risk his life for a cause he believes lost.

  Thus it must be a very difficult matter for foreign powers to recruit agents among Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, there may well have been such people in the early days, before the Soviet power was as firmly established as it is now, and, once having worked for a foreign power, such people may have found it impossible to withdraw. This foreign espionage network cannot have been large, but it probably existed. Now if great masses of the population are arrested indiscriminately, one or two real spies may well be among them. To put it primitively, if the G.P.U. were to arrest all the inhabitants of a certain quarter then it would incidentally arrest the spy who happened to live there too. The G.P.U. did not arrest all the inhabitants of a quarter, but the way in which it carried out the mass arrests of 1936-38 had much the same effect. The victims were accidental. In those days the G.P.U. operated in such a fashion that there was no probability that the arrested would really be enemies of the Soviet power rather than harmless citizens. But still further, the general atmosphere of fear created by Stalin’s slogan “Vigilance!,” the spy scare and the encouragement of denunciation crippled the activity of those whose official task it was to track down the real enemies of the state.

  If the G.P.U. did arrest a few real spies accidentally, the investigation methods used effectively prevented them from distinguishing the real spy from the surrounding mass of fictitious spies, all of whom had already “confessed” under pressure. Thus it was an easy matter for real spies to remain unidentified amidst the featureless mass of other “spies” in the G.P.U. net. The real spy no doubt “confessed” with the rest, denounced innocent people as his “accomplices” and thus concealed his real activities and his real accomplices.

  Sometimes the Soviet military authorities caught foreign agents crossing the frontier illegally. When such people came into the cells they were cut off from their fellow prisoners by an invisible but impenetrable wall. Once they had been caught in the act and brought before the examiners they made no attempt to deny their offense, and when they returned to the cells they readily admitted that they had crossed the frontier illegally as spies. The others, the fictitious spies, also admitted everything before their examiners, and they made signed statements confessing the most heinous crimes. But when they returned to their cells they assumed quite naturally that none of their fellow prisoners believed a word of what they had admitted, and, equally naturally, they assumed that none of the Soviet citizens imprisoned with them had conspired in any way against the Soviet power.

  Thus if I make an exception for the few real foreign agents who may have been caught up in the vast net, and for Nikolayev, who had already been shot, I can say with a clear conscience that all the prisoners who passed through the G.P.U. machine in those years—whether they “confessed” or not—were legally, politically and morally innocent.

  They were doubly innocent. Not one of them was guilty of spying; not one of them had betrayed his country to the Germans or to the Japanese; not one of them had planned or carried out any act of sabotage.

  But perhaps they were guilty in the sense of Soviet public policy at the time while not being actually guilty of the crimes with which they were charged? Perhaps they really were conspirators, not against the Soviet power as such, but against the Party leaders and the Party regime? Perhaps they had attempted by underground methods to overthrow Stalin’s dictatorship in the Party? Perhaps the dictator’s secret police had nipped their conspiracy in the bud and then denounced them as counterrevolutionaries and agents of a foreign power in order to deprive them of that general sympathy on which the enemies of tyranny can reckon at all times and in all countries?

  Nothing of the sort. The arrested men were not enemies of the socialist revolution but its most ardent supporters. And the overwhelming majority of them were not even opponents of the dictator. Very few of them had actually been in opposition, and even these had long since capitulated and abandoned all illegal activity. The overwhelming majority had neither belonged to the opposition nor sympathized with it. Many of them were actually enthusiastic Stalinist
s who had vigorously opposed the opposition. In short, the general political attitude of the arrested men was not one whit different from that of the millions who had been lucky enough to escape.

  The arrests were made indiscriminately. In the depths of their hearts the victims certainly opposed the dictator, but even this carefully repressed feeling was shared with the great majority of the population, and they never allowed it expression because they knew what an ill-considered word could mean to them and their families. If this carefully repressed feeling was the criterion for the arrests, then the G.P.U. arrested not eight million too many, but 152 million too few. After the happenings of 1932 and 1933 the feelings of the people certainly turned against the dictator. The peasants had not forgiven him the hunger years and the death by starvation of millions of their fellows. The workers and intellectuals in the towns had not forgiven him for stifling all liberty. But all these feelings were repressed. The hunger years came to an end. The economic system gradually recovered. And the Russian people began to hope that they would regain their lost freedom. Men began to forget the bitter years and to take pleasure in the progress of their country. This process of emotional recuperation was interrupted in August, 1936, by the sudden publication of the indictment against Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates. A new era opened up in the development of the Soviet Union, the era of the Great Purge.

  Even today, years later, public opinion in the West has not thoroughly grasped what it was all about. European and American newspapers devoted a great deal of space to the trials. Those people who believed in the indictments and the confessions asked themselves in astonishment how it came about that all the leading Bolsheviki of the revolutionary period had gone over to the side of the enemy, and had, on their own admission, committed the basest crimes against their own country, their own comrades and the ideas which had become part and parcel of their own lives—all in order to restore that capitalism which they had spent their lives in trying to overthrow.