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

And, after all, our entire failure to understand derives from our belief in the unusual nature of these people. We do not, after all, where ordinary confessions signed by ordinary citizens are concerned, find their reasons for denouncing themselves and others so fulsomely baffling. We accept it as something we understand: a human being is weak; a human being gives in. But we consider Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, I. N. Smirnov to be supermen to begin with—and, in essence, our failure to understand is due to that fact alone.

True, the directors of this dramatic production seem to have had a harder task in selecting the performers than they’d had in the earlier trials of the engineers: in those trials they had forty barrels to pick from, so to speak, whereas here the available troupe was small. Everyone knew who the chief performers were, and the audience wanted to see them in the roles and them only.

Yet there was a choice! The most farsighted and determined of those who were doomed did not allow themselves to be arrested. They committed suicide first (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik). It was the ones who wanted to live who allowed themselves to be arrested. And one could certainly braid a rope from the ones who wanted to live! But even among them some behaved differently during the interrogations, realized what was happening, turned stubborn, and died silently but at least not shamefully. For some reason, they did not, after all, put on public trial Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yenukidze, Chubar, Kosior, and, for that matter, Krylenko himself, even though their names would have embellished the trials.

They put on trial the most compliant. A selection was made after all.

The men selected were drawn from a lower order, but, on the other hand, the mustached Producer knew each of them very well. He also knew that on the whole they were weaklings, and he knew, one by one, the particular weaknesses of each. Therein lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and his life’s achievement: to see people’s weaknesses on the lowest plane of being.

And the man who seems, in the perspective of time, to have embodied the highest and brightest intelligence of all the disgraced and executed leaders (and to whom Arthur Koestler apparently dedicated his talented inquiry) was N. I. Bukharin. Stalin saw through him, too, at that lowest stratum at which the human being unites with the earth; and Stalin held him in a long death grip, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, letting him go just a little, and then catching him again. Bukharin wrote every last word of our entire existing—in other words, nonexistent—Constitution, which is so beautiful to listen to. And he flew about up there, just below the clouds, and thought that he had outplayed Koba: that he had thrust a constitution on him that would compel him to relax the dictatorship. And at that very moment, he himself had already been caught in those jaws.

Bukharin did not like Kamenev and Zinoviev, and way back when they had first been tried, after the murder of Kirov, he had said to people close to him: “Well, so what? That’s the kind of people they were; maybe there was something to it….” (That was the classic formula of the philistine in those years: “There was probably something to it…. In our country they don’t arrest people for nothing.” And that was said in 1935 by the leading theoretician of the Party!) He spent the period of the second trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, in the summer of 1936, hunting in the Tien Shan, and knew nothing about it. He came down from the mountains to Frunze—and there he read that the death sentence had been imposed on both men, and read the newspaper articles which made clear what annihilating testimony they had given against him. But did he hasten to stop that act of repression? And did he protest to the Party that something monstrous was being done? No, all he did was send Koba a telegram asking him to postpone the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev so that he, Bukharin, could get there to confront them and prove himself innocent.

It was too late! Koba had enough of the sworn testimony; why did he need living confrontations?

However, they still didn’t arrest Bukharin for a long time. He lost his job as editor-in-chief of Izvestiya and all his other Party assignments and jobs, and he lived for half a year in his Kremlin apartment—in the Poteshny Palace of Peter the Great—as if in prison. (However, in the autumn he used to go to his dacha—and the Kremlin guards would salute him as though nothing at all had changed.) No one visited him or phoned him any longer. And all during these months he wrote endless letters: “Dear Koba! Dear Koba! Dear Koba!” And he got not one reply.

He was still trying to establish friendly contact with Stalin!

And Dear Koba, squinting, was already staging rehearsals. For many long years Koba had been holding tryouts for various roles, and he knew that Bukharchik would play his part beautifully. He had, after all, already renounced those of his pupils and supporters who had been arrested and exiled—they were few in number in any case—and had allowed them to be destroyed. [252]He had stood by and allowed his own line of thinking to be wiped out and pilloried before it was fully developed and born. And more recently, while he was still editor-in-chief of Izvestiya and a member of the Politburo, he had accepted as legal the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Neither at the top of his lungs nor even in a whisper had he expressed any indignation over that. And yet these had all been tryouts for his own future role.

Way back in the past, when Stalin had threatened to expel him (and all the rest of them) from the Party, Bukharin (like all the rest) had renounced his views in order to remain in the Party. And that, too, had been a tryout for his role. If that was how they acted while still in freedom and still at the height of honor and power, then they could certainly be depended on to follow the script of the play faultlessly when their body, their food, and their sleep were in the hands of the Lubyanka prompters.

And what did Bukharin fear most in those months before his arrest? It is reliably known that above all he feared expulsion from the Party! Being deprived of the Party! Being left alive but outside the Party! And Dear Koba had played magnificently on this trait of his (as he had with them all) from the very moment he had himself become the Party. Bukharin (like all the rest of them) did not have his own individual point of view. They didn’t have their own genuine ideology of opposition, on the strength of which they could step aside and on which they could take their stand. Before they became an opposition, Stalin declared them to be one, and by this move he rendered them powerless. And all their efforts were directed toward staying in the Party. And toward not harming the Party at the same time!

These added up to too many different obligations for them to be independent.

In essence, Bukharin had been allotted the starring role, and nothing was to be overlooked or abridged in the Producer’s work with him, in the working of time on him, and in his own getting used to the role. Even sending him to Europe the previous winter to acquire manuscripts by Marx had been essential—not just superficially, for the sake of the whole network of accusations about his establishing contacts, but so that the aimless freedom of life on tour might all the more insistently demand his return to the main stage. And now, beneath black thunderclouds of accusations, came the long, the interminable state of nonarrest, of exhausting housebound lethargy, which ground down the will power of the victim even more effectively than the direct pressure of the Lubyanka. (Nor would the Lubyanka run away either—it, too, would last for a year.)