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STEPHEN SPENDER
was not the same as the old party members' confessions of sin in their hearts
against the ideology and the Party and its leader.
Solzhenitsyn cites Koestler as one of the few analysts who understood the
reasons for which the Old Guard communists who were victims of the purges
in 1937 made their confessions. He points out though that the legend that the
old Bolsheviks were extraordinarily tough and had proved themselves un–
breakable in Tsarist times is exaggerated. In fact "they had never in all their
lives experienced a
genuinely merciless interrogation
(because such a thing did
not exist at all in Tsarist Russia)." They had never undergone periods of
imprisonment as long and as cruel as those in Soviet Russia. As colleagues of
Stalin they were in the position of dealing with an "Oriental despot" of great
cruelty and cunning who was a genius at understanding and working on the
weaknesses of those whom he wished to destroy. Solzhenitsyn's study of
Stalin's long-drawn-out monstrously cruel treatment of Bukharin illustrates
this.
The attitude of many of Stalin's colleagues to him was the familiar one of
weaker people flattered by their proximity to ruthless power. They believe
that the powerful one will betray others but never them themselves. The great
man's loveable personality intervenes in their favor and at the expense of
everyone else. Even Yagoda the organizer of the show trials who had sent
millions of people to death in fulfillment of Stalin's wishes, could not believe
that Stalin would destroy
him.
This murderer of millions simply could not imagine that his superior
Murderer, up top, would not, at the last moment, stand up for him and
protect him. Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall,
Yagoda confidently and Insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I
appeal to you!
For you
I built two great canals!"
Part of the legend of the trials is that all those indicted could be produced
in court and made to reel off their abject confessions. But Solzhenitsyn points
out that there were some who committed suicide when they realized that they
were to be arrested (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik). And that "for some
reason" others "whose names would have embellished the trials" were not
produced at them. "They put on trial the most compliant. A selection was
made after all."
On the whole the trials were "troublesome and expensive. And Stalin
decided not to use open trials any longer." After a few attempts, he aban–
doned a scheme for local trials since "he couldn't find producers who were
good enough." Solzhenitsyn gives one example of such a local trial, at the
village of Kady. This account is one of the most humanly encouraging in the
book, which with all its horror and darkness is a tribute to the endurance and
