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

On one occasion when Yakubovich had been summoned to interrogation, he found there a prisoner who had been tortured. The interrogator smiled ironically: “Moisei Isayevich Teitel-baum begs you to take him into your anti-Soviet organization. You can speak as freely as you please. I am going out for a while.” He went out. Teitelbaum really did beg: “Comrade Yakubovich! I beg you, please take me into your Union Bureau of Mensheviks! They are accusing me of taking ‘bribes from foreign firms’ and threatening me with execution. But I would rather die a counterrevolutionary than a common criminal!” (It was likelier that they had promised him that as a counterrevolutionary he wouldn’t be shot! And he wasn’t wrong either: they gave him a juvenile prison term, a “fiver.”) The GPU was so short on Mensheviks they had to recruit defendants from volunteers! (And, after all, Teitelbaum was being groomed for an important role—communication with the Mensheviks abroad and with the Second International! But they honorably kept the deal they had made with him—a “fiver.”) And with the interrogator’s approval Yakubovich accepted Teitelbaum as a member of the Union Bureau.

Several days before the trial began, the first organizing session of the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks convened in the office of the senior interrogator, Dmitri Matveyevich Dmitriyev—so as to coordinate things, and so that each should understand his own role better. (That’s how the Central Committee of the Prom-party convened too! That’s where the defendants “could have met”—to answer Krylenko’s earlier leading question.) But such a mountain of falsehood had been piled up that it was too much to absorb in one session and the participants got things mixed up, couldn’t master it in one rehearsal, and were called together a second time.

What did Yakubovich feel as he went into the trial? Should he not, in revenge for all the tortures to which he had been subjected, for all the falsehood shoved into his breast, create a sensational scandal and startle the world? But still:

1. To do so would be to stab the Soviet government in the back! It would be to negate his entire purpose in life, everything he had lived for, the whole path he had taken to extricate himself from mistaken Menshevism and become a right-minded Bolshevik.

2. After a scandal like that they wouldn’t just allow him to die; they wouldn’t just shoot him; they would torture him again, but this time out of vengeance, and drive him insane. But his body had already been exhausted by tortures. Where could he find the moral strength to endure new ones? Where could he unearth the required heroism?

(I wrote down his arguments as his heated words rang out—this being a most extraordinary chance to get, so to speak, a “posthumous” explanation from a participant in such a trial. And I find that it is altogether as though Bukharin or Rykov were explaining the reasons for their own mysterious submis-siveness at their trials. Theirs were the same sincerity and honesty, the same devotion to the Party, the same human weakness, the same lack of the moral strength needed to fight back, because they had no individual position.)

And at the trial Yakubovich not only repeated obediently all the gray mass of lies which constituted the upper limit of Stalin’s imagination—and the imagination of his apprentices and his tormented defendants. But he also played out his inspired role, as he had promised Krylenko.

The so-called Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks—in essence the entire top level of their Central Committee—formally dissociated themselves from the defendants in a statement published in Vorwarts. They declared there that the trial was a shameful travesty, built on the testimony of provocateurs and unfortunate defendants forced into it by terror; that the overwhelming majority of the defendants had left the Party more than ten years earlier and had never returned; and that absurdly large sums of money were referred to at the trial, representing more than the party had ever disposed of.

And Krylenko, having read the article, asked Shvernik to permit the defendants to reply—the same kind of pulling-all-strings-at-once he had resorted to at the trial of the Promparty. They all spoke up, and they all defended the methods of the GPU against the Menshevik Central Committee.

But what does Yakubovich remember today about his “reply” and his last speech? He recalls that he not only spoke as befitted his promise to Krylenko, but that instead of simply getting to his feet, he was seized and lifted up—like a chip on a wave—by a surge of anger and oratory. Anger against whom? After having learned what torture meant, and attempting suicide and coming close to death more than once, he was at this point in a real, honest-to-God rage. But not at the prosecutor or the GPU! Oh, no! At the Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks!!! Now there’s a psychological switch for you! There they sat, unscrupulous and smug, in security and comfort—for even the poverty of émigré life was, of course, comfort in comparison with the Lubyanka. And how could they refuse to pity those who were on trial, their torture and suffering? How could they so impudently dissociate themselves from them and deliver these unfortunates over to their fate? (The reply Yakubovich delivered was powerful, and the people who had cooked up the trial were delighted.)

Even when he was describing this in 1967, Yakubovich shook with rage at the Foreign Delegation, at their betrayal, their repudiation, their treason to the socialist Revolution—exactly as he had reproached them in 1917.

I did not have the stenographic record of the trial at the time. Later I found it and was astonished. Yakubovich’s memory—so precise in every little detail, every date, every name—had in this instance betrayed him. He had, after all, said at the trial that the Foreign Delegation, on orders from the Second International, had instructed them to carry out wrecking activities. He no longer remembered this. The foreign Mensheviks’ statement was neither unscrupulous nor smug. They had indeed pitied the unfortunate victims of the trial but did point out that they had not been Mensheviks for a long time—which was quite true. What was it, then, that made Yakubovich so unalterably and sincerely angry? And exactly how could the Foreign Delegation not have consigned the defendants to their fate?

We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.

Krylenko said in his summation for the prosecution that Yakubovich was a fanatic advocate of counterrevolutionary ideas and demanded therefore that he be shot.

And Yakubovich that day felt a tear of gratitude roll down his cheek, and he feels it still to this day, after having dragged his way through many camps and detention prisons. Even today he is grateful to Krylenko for not humiliating him, for not insulting him, for not ridiculing him as a defendant, and for calling him correctly a fanatic advocate (even of an idea contrary to his real one) and for demanding simple, noble execution for him, that would put an end to all his sufferings! In his final statement, Yakubovich agreed with Krylenko himself: “The crimes to which I have confessed [he endowed with great significance his success in hitting on the expression ‘to which I have confessed’—anyone who understood would realize that he meant ‘not those which I committed’] deserve the highest measure of punishment—and I do not ask any forgiveness! I do not ask that my life be spared!” (Beside him on the defendants’ bench, Groman got excited! “You are insane! You have to consider your comrades. You don’t have the right!”)

Now wasn’t he a find for the prosecutor?