Foreign Relations of the United States, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939

861.00/11675

Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in the Soviet Union (Kennan)⁹

Moscow, February 13, 1937.

During the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenyev, and others held in August 1936,¹⁰ evidence was given that in addition to that group, labeled as the “Trotskiite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center,” there also existed a so-called reserve center. This reserve center was supposed to have taken up the leadership of illegal activities in the case of the exposure of the first group. It was said to have been made up of Pyatakov, former Assistant Commissar for Heavy Industry; Karl Radek, famous journalist and publicist; Sokolnikov, formerly Ambassador in England and subsequently Assistant People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Commissar for the Timber Industry; and L. P. Serebryakov, a prominent Party official who had held important posts in the Government apparatus, including at one time that of Assistant People’s Commissar for Ways of Communication.

On January 23, 1937, these four men were brought to public trial in Moscow before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U. S. S. R. Together with them, on the defendants’ benches, there was a somewhat motley company of other accused persons. These included four other fairly well-known Trotskiists: Muralov, Drobnis, Boguslavski and Livshits, and nine lesser lights. The fact that some of these lesser defendants—evidently spies and stool pigeons—were people whom Radek and the other leading defendants had obviously never seen before in their lives or even heard of, caused little surprise among the public. It had long since been a practice of the Soviet Government—as was well illustrated in the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial—to emulate the practice of the old Romans and to crucify its most dangerous oppositionists in company with common thieves.

The defendants were accused of treason, of espionage, of committing acts of diversion,^* of wrecking activities and of the preparation of terrorist acts. Although all of the defendants immediately confessed in full to the charges against them, the State’s Attorney found it necessary to make them repeat in great detail before the assembled public the confession of their digressions. Only after this questioning and after a lengthy concluding speech by himself, did he ask the court for their deaths. The proceedings occupied approximately eight hours a day over a period of seven days. At the end of this time, the court sentenced four of the defendants, including Sokolnikov and Radek, to terms of imprisonment of eight or ten years and the remainder to be shot.

As in previous public Soviet trials, the evidence adduced during the proceedings consisted almost exclusively of the testimony of the defendants themselves. The two or three witnesses who were introduced had little to say of any importance and were themselves men awaiting trial for offenses equally as serious as those under discussion, so that their position differed very little from that of the defendants. A small amount of expert testimony introduced in connection with the alleged wrecking activities played no great part in the main questions of the trial.

In view of this situation, the question immediately arose in the minds of the public—as it has arisen in connection with many other Soviet trials—as to whether the accused were telling the truth or whether, for certain inscrutable reasons of their own, they had chosen to make themselves mouthpieces of the State in the promulgation of its political propaganda.

The answer to this question is not a simple one. It requires no very extensive acquaintance with the background and the proceedings of the trial to appreciate that the great mass of evidence produced in the court room was neither entirely true nor entirely false. Anyone who witnessed the magnificent verbal duel between the State’s Attorney¹¹ and Radek and who saw the repressed excitement which took possession of these two men when certain subjects were brought up, could not fail to realize that this was not the mere recitation by an intimidated prisoner of recantations which he had learned by heart, but that very real things were involved. Radek, on the other hand, made it perfectly evident through his testimony that he had never really committed some of the crimes for which he accepted such sweeping responsibility, and was confessing to them for ulterior motives. The question which presents itself, therefore, to the experienced observer is not one of whether or not the trial was bona fide; it is a question of to what extent it was bona fide and of what actually did lie behind it.

A cursory study of the published record of the proceedings is sufficient to show that the evidence given before the public was not only incomplete and conflicting but was also strangely ambiguous. Those who attended the sessions and watched the bearing and the faces of the State’s Attorney and the defendants had the distinct impression that they were talking in symbols,—that many of the expressions which they used repeatedly throughout the proceedings had different meanings in their minds than in the minds of the spectators,—that these expressions, in other words, were algebraic equivalents, behind which the real values were concealed,^† It seems almost certain, for example, that the phrase “terrorism,” which was used so frequently throughout the proceedings, was understood by all the participants in the spectacle to mean simply illegal opposition activity. Vyshinski endeavored to demonstrate, in his concluding speech, that when Trotski said the Stalin group could be removed “only by force”, this was the equivalent of a political platform of terrorism. Hence any underground Trotskiist activity was “terrorist” activity. This use of such dialectic “equivalents” is by no means peculiar to the trial in question. It has long been a standard method of Soviet publicity,^‡ and the average communist would probably fail to see anything out of the ordinary in its being applied in judicial proceedings.

If the use of such symbols be accepted as a working hypothesis (and only in this light do the proceedings begin to make some sense), then a more comprehensible general picture of the results of the trial presents itself.

Let us start first with the small fry among the defendants, who were accused of espionage, sabotage, et cetera. Some of these were quite probably guilty of a great deal. While the wrecking acts to which they confessed in open court did not all seem very convincing, the espionage connections are plausible enough. It is probable that they had on their consciences certain espionage activities in connection with military industries, which were the real cause of the death sentences.^§ Plenty of people of this sort get shot in Russia every year. That these particular ones should have ended up in this particular trial, was largely a matter of chance.

In the cases of the four important Trotskiists from the provinces—Muralov, Drobnis, Boguslavski and Livshits—it is highly probable that these men were active in the maintenance of the skeleton of a Trotskiist organization in Russia and had in that sense continued their opposition activity up to the time of their arrests. No evidence was produced, other than their own vague and unconvincing confessions, to show that they had any real connection with specific acts of wrecking and sabotage.

The testimony of the four leading defendants is the most revealing and the most interesting. In actuality, there is no real evidence,—nothing, in fact, except vague and general assertions,—to show that these men ever constituted anything resembling an organization. They saw each other extremely rarely. They appear to have consulted together only on two occasions (July, 1935, and January, 1936), and then only in a most informal way. Three of them were prominent Trotskiists; the fourth, Sokolnikov, was a man who had opposed Stalin on several occasions on intellectual grounds. It seems to have been agreed some years ago that it would be much too risky for them to have anything to do with any underground activities. It was realized that if they did so and got caught, the loss to the cause would be enormous. For this reason they kept in the background and the underground activities were left to other people.^ǁ This was sufficient, in the eyes of the State, to justify the accusation that they constituted (again a “dialectic equivalent”) a “reserve center.”

Each of these four men was in a different position.

Serebryakov seems to have been included in this group merely because he lived in Moscow and saw the others on rare occasions. He met Radek, according to the latter’s unchallenged testimony, only three times in four years. It was not shown that he had anything whatsoever to do with the alleged foreign connections of Radek and Pyatakov. The charges against him seem to have been confined to directing “wrecking” activities on the railways and keeping track of the underground opposition movements in the Transcaucasus.

Pyatakov was in a sense the center of the trial, and the real measure of his guilt is more obscure than in the case of any of the others. Whereas the other defendants were charged directly, as a rule, with only one or the other of the general categories of crime, Pyatakov was charged with everything, and confessed to everything.

Sokolnikov’s part is also a mysterious one. If Pyatakov was charged with practically everything, Sokolnikov may be said to have been charged with almost nothing. Except for one extremely cryptic conversation with a foreign diplomat, which might or might not have been criminal and which has been denied by the diplomat in question, he seemed to have nothing more on his conscience before 1935 than having heard certain rumors and hints of the existence of underground organizations. He, too, saw Radek only three times in the course of several years preceding the trial.

The central figure of the trial was Radek, and it was Radek’s testimony that came nearest to revealing the truth. Radek had evidently scrupulously refrained from having any direct contact with the underground Trotskiist movement until July 1935. At this time, for reasons which are not clear, he consulted with the other three defendants and they all came to the decision that it would be necessary for them to ascertain the character and strength of the underground Trotskiist organization, with which none of them was apparently familiar. Possibly they took this step because they felt that the danger of a military defeat had passed and with it much of the justification for the maintenance of this dangerous weapon. Possibly they did it because they were worried about the trend taken by the other oppositionists, the Zinovievites, and felt that they had to know something about the forces on which they could depend in case of emergency. In any case, Radek, in agreement with the others, took steps to get into touch with the man who appears to have been actually running the Trotskiist organization, Dreitser. This mysterious character, a former Trotski bodyguard, executed with the Zinoviev-Kamenev group in August 1936, was at that time in the Ukraine and was apparently either arrested or under police surveillance. It looks as though it were Radek’s unsuccessful attempts to get into touch with him and to get him to come to Moscow which led eventually to his own arrest. Before this arrest, however, Radek’s doubts as to the wisdom of maintaining an underground organization had so increased, for one reason or the other, that he was actually considering whether he should not urge the other Trotskiists, when he finally established contact with them, to join him in unburdening their consciences voluntarily before the Central Committee of the Party.

This is as much as can really be made out of Radek’s testimony. His alleged connections with Trotski and with a plot to sell out the Soviet Union to the Nazis can hardly be taken seriously. He himself pointed out that all the evidence regarding this angle of the indictment rested exclusively on the testimony of two persons, himself and Pyatakov. He based his own testimony on certain letters which he claimed to have received from Trotski and subsequently burned and which could not be produced in court.^¶ The basis of Pyatakov’s testimony in this respect was his account of a visit which he claimed to have paid Trotski in December 1935 and which involved a flight in a mysterious airplane from the Tempelhof airport in Berlin to Oslo and back. The truth of this story has been seriously questioned. The Norwegian and German authorities have denied that such a flight ever took place. The practical difficulties which such an exploit would have encountered are such as to render the story highly implausible in any case.

Radek himself took occasion on more than one instance to emphasize to the audience the flimsiness of the evidence regarding the alleged international conspiracy. When, at one point during the taking of his testimony, the State’s Attorney cast doubt on the veracity of his statements in certain other respects, Radek slyly reminded him that “you learned about the program and about Trotski’s instructions only from me,” thus implying that if anyone were to question the truth of his testimony, this whole angle of the proceedings would collapse. Again in his last words, after calling attention to the fact that the whole story of the foreign connections rested only on the testimony of himself and Pyatakov, he put the following daring question to the court: “If you were dealing with mere criminals and spies, on what can you base your conviction that what we have said is the truth, the firm truth?” He then went on to point out that while the court and the prosecutor knew very well the reasons why he and Pyatakov had told this story, the “diffused, wandering Trotski elements in the country” might have their own ideas on this subject.

Thus the story of the international conspiracy is based on a very shaky foundation, and cannot be regarded as in any sense proved by the evidence given at the trial.

The question remains—and it is one which has occasioned considerable speculation abroad—: Why did the defendants all confess so readily to all the charges on which they were indicted,—even to those on which their own evidence partly absolved them? The answer to this question may never be revealed to the outside world. The most probable explanation is that they hoped by playing the game with the State to save their own lives or at least the well-being of persons near to them.^** In doing so, they would only be relying on good Soviet precedents; for more than one person has saved his neck in the past, as a defendant, by turning himself into an organ for the propaganda of the Soviet regime, and a still greater number have probably lost theirs for refusing to do so. It is true that this was not the case in the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial, where all the defendants were executed, despite abject confessions; but there is nothing to show that the defendants in that case did not presume that they had good chances of saving their own lives. If they were double-crossed, in effect, by the State, that proves nothing. Nor is it any reason why a number of the defendants in the later trial should not have hoped for clemency as a reward for public self-chastisement. For some of these unfortunate people were already in jail at the time when the earlier trial took place. They had probably been in solitary confinement, and may never have known the fate of the Kamenev-Zinoviev group. It is perhaps significant that no reference to this fate was made at the trial, although the names of the persons concerned were mentioned on many occasions.

Astonishment is sometimes expressed at the unanimity of contrition which these trials reveal. People ask: “How is it that they get every single person to confess?” The answer to this question is comparatively simple: they don’t. The “G. P. U.”¹² has no shortage of raw material for this sort of affair. There are doubtless many who refuse to play the part, and who for this reason are never brought to public trial. It has been evident in this, as in former trials, that many of those who, judging from the evidence, should have been among the leading defendants, did not appear in court at all; nor was any mention made of their fate. For this reason, it cannot be said that all Soviet prisoners have been universally prepared to make complete confessions. The fact is simply that those who have been so prepared have been the ones who were brought to public trial. It is this particular feature of Soviet justice which called forth the diplomatic bon mot to the effect that the new Constitution, to be really effective, should have granted the Russians the right to be tried without having confessed.

If the above considerations have cast certain doubt on the accuracy of the published confessions, let this not be interpreted as an attempt to give any of the defendants a clean moral bill of health. They have probably done plenty, from the point of view of the regime, to warrant their humiliation and punishment. But it should be borne in mind that their real sins are probably not those to which they confessed in public. However much truth there may have been in the testimony produced before the court, it was by no means the whole truth. The main considerations which were in the minds of both the State and the leading defendants from the start were never mentioned in so many words before the public.

What had gone on behind the scenes may never be known, but it probably involved provocation and deceit on both sides. If it be true that some of the defendants had worked for Trotski and foreign espionage services while pretending to be in the loyal service of the Soviet Government, it is equally possible that others had really worked for the Soviet Government while pretending to be loyal adherents of other masters.

Even if all of the facts of the case were available, which they certainly are not and never will be, it is doubtful whether the western mind could ever fathom the question of guilt and innocence, of truth and fiction. The Russian mind, as Dostoevski has shown, knows no moderation; and it sometimes carries both truth and falsehood to such infinite extremes that they eventually meet in space, like parallel lines, and it is no longer possible to distinguish between them.

9. Transmitted to the Department in despatch No. 63, February 18, 1937. A companion appraisal of this trial was sent in despatch No. 57, February 17, 1937 (861.00/11676), by Ambassador Davies and has been reproduced with few significant deletions in his book, Mission to Moscow (New York, 1941), pp. 32–46. Mr. Kennan acted as interpreter for the Ambassador at the sessions of the trial.
10. For appraisal of the trial held in Moscow, August 19–24, 1936, and sentencing of the defendants led by the veteran members Lev Borisovich Kamenyev and Grigory Evseyevich Zinovyev see pp. 300–303.
11. The Soviet term referring to acts designed to make trouble in the rear of an army, with the aim of diverting the army’s attention away from the front on which it is fighting. [Footnote in the original.]
11. Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky, Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union.
12. A direct hint, to the effect that this system was practiced, was given by Pyatakov, during his testimony on the morning of January 25. Vyshinski tried to make him admit that he had instructed Rataichak to get into touch with agents of the German intelligence service. Pyatakov denied that he had given I a specific instruction of this sort. “I gave the instruction,” he said, “in a more algebraical formulation, in a general form, without being specific, because I also had in mind the remnants of the former wrecking groups among the specialists and other …” To this, Vyshinski replied: “It is not this that I want to know. I know what you mean by algebra, but I must now deal not with algebra but with facts.” [Footnote in the original.]
13. It might be recalled that for years the foreign socialists were uniformly referred to in the Soviet press as “Social-Fascists”. This designation was likewise based on the conclusion that opposition to the communists was “dialectically” equivalent to fascism, and therefore the use of the stronger—and really misleading—term was justified. [Footnote in the original.]
14. A number of the plants in which these men were employed were chemical plants, said to have been built largely by German engineers. Under these circumstances, espionage—in the Soviet sense—is almost inevitable. The wrecking activities seem less plausible. [Footnote in the original.]
15. In the stenographic report of the trial, the passage was included in which Radek tells of learning that his secretary, Tivel, belonged to a counter-revolutionary group. Radek asked Tivel if he had gone out of his mind. This passage was omitted in the text of the proceedings published by the Moscow press. [Footnote in the original.]
16. There is nothing to show that all these “letters” were actually addressed to Radek personally. It seems possible that some of them were open letters addressed by Trotski to his followers and published abroad, copies of which were smuggled into Radek by friends. This would justify the use of the term “letter.” [Footnote in the original.]
17. Pyatakov’s wife was said to have been arrested before he was. [Footnote in the original.]
12. The State Police Administration, the secret police, included within the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (N. K. V. D.) since 1934.