PARTISAN REVIEW
561
courage of most of the victims. The purpose of this trial was
to
engineer the
destruction of one Fyodor Ivanovich Smirnov, the First Secretary of the Dis–
trict Party Committee, and Stavrov, a literate and conscientious peasant who
was head of the District Agricultural Department. When Smirnov was away
on holiday, his deputy the second Secretary, a man called Romanov, arranged
to have a resolution passed by the District Party Committee, censoring Stav–
rov. However another leader, Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov, got up at the Party
meeting and proposed that Romanov be expelled from it for slandering Stav–
rov. The District
NKVD
intervened and arrested Stavrov, who, having con–
fesssed to everything, died under torture. There followed a trial staged in the
village and conducted under the light of kerosene lamps in which Stavrov's
written testimony, given before he died , was read as evidence. The other
defendants, who had also confessed under interrogation, were questioned
and
''All
of them
repudiated
the testimony they had given during the interroga–
tion." The trial continued, with the prosecution failing to break the spirit of
the defendants. Vlasov stated: "I consider you not a court but actors pretend–
ing to be a court in a stage farce where roles have already been written for
you. You are engaged in a repulsive provocation on the part of the
NKVD.
You
are going to sentence me to be shot no matter what I say. I believe one thing
only: the time will come when you are here in my place."
At various points in his book Solzhenitsyn raises the question of why
more people did not resist arrest. How could individuals let themselves be
spirited away in a crowded street by plain clothes police, without raising a cry of
protest or appealing to passersby? Why did people who had been warned that
they were in danger, not leave their homes and go to another city? He cites
examples of exceptional cases of those who did act courageously and who
escaped or who were even let go by rebuffed interrogators. He is convinced
that these appalling waves of murders and imprisonment could not have
happened if enough people had protested, made their indignation known.
He never quotes George Orwell, but some of his conclusions seem rather
Orwellian. One is that the peculiar insidiousness of ideological arguments
used by people in power, can only be resisted by common sense, by insisting
that two and two make four. He gives an example from the dialectics of the
public prosecutor Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky of the ideological argufy–
ing which can terrify a Bukharin but which could scarcely affect someone who
insists that two plus two make four :
Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics . .. pointed
out in a report . . . that it is never possible for mortal men to establish
absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further
step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to
take : that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be
absolute, but only, so
to
speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sen-
