Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

That’s what it was, the thin, delicate fabric of the truth. That is what it really was.

But to utter such thoughts aloud in 1930 meant being shot.

And yet it was still too little and too invisible to arouse the wrath of the mob.

It was therefore necessary to reprocess the silent and redeeming collusion of the engineers into crude wrecking and intervention.

Thus, in the picture they substituted, we nonetheless caught a fleshless—and fruitless—vision of the truth. The work of the stage director began to fall apart. Fedotov had already blurted out something about sleepless nights (!) during the eight months of his imprisonment; and about some important official of the GPU who had recently shaken his hand (?) (so there must have been a deal: you play your roles, and the GPU will carry out its promises?). And even the witnesses, though their role was incomparably less important, began to get confused.

Krylenko: “Did you participate in this group?”

Witness Kirpotenko: “Two or three times, when questions of intervention were being considered.”

And that was just what was needed!

Krylenko (encouragingly): “Go on.”

Kirpotenko (a pause): “Other than that nothing is known!”

Krylenko urges him on, tries to give him his cue again.

Kirpotenko (stupidly): “Other than intervention nothing is known to me.” 22

Then, when there was an actual confrontation with Kupriyanov, the facts no longed jibed. Krylenko got angry, and he shouted at the inept prisoners:

“Then you just have to fix things so you come up with the same answers.”

And in the recess, behind the scenes, everything was once more brought up to snuff. All the defendants were once again nervously awaiting their cues. And Krylenko prompted all eight of them at once: the émigré industrialists had published an article abroad to the effect that they had held no talks at all with Ramzin and Larichev and knew nothing whatever about any Promparty, and that the testimony of the witnesses had in all likelihood been forced from them by torture. Well, what are you going to say to that?

Good Lord! How outraged the defendants were! They clamored for the floor without waiting their turns. What had become of that weary calm with which they had humiliated themselves and their colleagues for seven days? Boiling indignation at those émigrés burst from them. They demanded permission to send a written declaration to the newspapers in defense of GPU methods. (Now, wasn’t that an embellishment? Wasn’t that a jewel?) And Ramzin declared: “Our presence here is sufficient proof that we were not subjected to tortures and torments!” (And what, pray tell, would be the use of tortures that made it impossible for the defendants to appear in court!) And Fedotov: “Imprisonment did me good and not only me…. I even feel better in prison than in freedom.” And Ochkin: “Me too. I feel better too!”

It was out of sheer generosity that Krylenko and Vyshinsky declined their offer of a collective declaration. They certainly would have written one! And they certainly would have signed it!

But maybe someone had some lingering suspicions still? Well, in that case, Comrade Krylenko vouchsafed them a flash of his brilliant logic. “If we should admit even for one second that these people were telling untruths, then why were they arrested and why did they all at once start babbling their heads off?” [241]

Now that is the power of logic for you! For a thousand years prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they had been arrested, that meant they were guilty!

And, indeed, why had they started babbling away?

“The question of torture we discard!… But let us put the question psychologically: Why did they confess? And I ask you: What else could they have done?” 24

Well, how true! How psychological! If you ever served time in that institution, just recollect: what else was there to do?

(Ivanov-Razumnik wrote 26 that in 1938 he was imprisoned in the same cell in the Butyrki as Krylenko, and that Krylenko’s place in the cell was under the board bunks. I can picture that vividly—since I have crawled there myself. The bunks were so low that the only way one could crawl along the dirty asphalt floor was flat on one’s stomach, but newcomers could never adapt and would try to crawl on all fours. They would manage to get their heads under, but their rear ends would be left sticking out. And it is my opinion that the supreme prosecutor had a particularly difficult time adapting, and I imagine that his rear end, not yet grown thin, used to stick out there for the greater glory of Soviet justice. Sinful person that I am, I visualize with malice that rear end sticking out there, and through the whole long description of these trials it somehow gives me solace.)

Yes, the prosecutor expounded, continuing along the same line, if all this about tortures was true, then it was impossible to understand what could have induced all the defendants to confess, unanimously and in chorus, without any arguments and deviations. Just where could such colossal collusion have been carried out? After all, they had no chance to communicate with each other during the interrogation period. [242]

(Several pages further along, a witness who survived will tell us where.)

Now it is not for me to tell the reader but for the reader to tell me just what the notorious “riddle of the Moscow trials of the thirties” consisted of. At first people were astounded at the Promparty trial, and then that riddle was transferred to the trials of the Party leaders.

After all, they didn’t put on trial in open court the two thousand who had been dragged into it, or even two or three hundred, but only eight people. It is not as hard as all that to direct a chorus of eight. And as for his choices, Krylenko was free to choose from thousands over a period of two years. Palchinsky had not been broken, but had been shot—and posthumously named “the leader of the Promparty,” which is what he was called in the testimony, even though no word of his survived.

And they had hoped to beat what they wanted out of Khrennikov, and Khrennikov didn’t yield to them either; therefore he appeared just once in the record—in a footnote in small type: “Khrennikov died during the course of his interrogation.” The small type you are using is for fools, but we at least know, and we will write it in double-sized letters: TORTURED TO DEATH DURING INTERROGATION. He, too, was posthumously named a leader of the Promparty, but there wasn’t one least little fact from him, not one tiny piece of testimony in the general chorus, not one. Because he did not give even one! (And then all at once Ramzin appeared! He was a find. What energy and what a grasp! And he was ready to do anything in order to live! And what talent! He had been arrested only at the end of the summer, just before the trial really—and he not only managed to enter fully into his role, but it seemed as though he had written the whole play. He had absorbed a whole mountain of interrelated material, and he could serve it up spick-and-span, any name at all, any fact at all. And sometimes he manifested the languid ornateness of a bigwig scientist: “The activity of the Promparty was so widespread that even in the course of an eleven-day trial there is no opportunity to disclose it in total detail.”) (In other words, go on and look for it, look further!) “I am firmly convinced that a small anti-Soviet stratum still exists in engineering circles.” (Go get ’em, go get ’em, grab some more!) And how capable he was: he knew that it was a riddle, and that a riddle must be given an artistic explanation. And, unfeeling as a stick of wood, he found then and there within himself “the traits of the Russian criminal, for whom purification lay in public recantation before all the people.” [243]