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PARTISAN REVIEW
and later Auschwitz, that Hitler was bent on conquest and, there–
fore , prepared for war and wanted to fan it into flames while he was
still young enough to lead it personally . One knew that the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was not governed by soviets, and not by
workers and peasants, but by the Communist Party, which meant a
tiny group of men who slavishly obeyed a single man who was identi–
fied with the nation, the state, and the Party, so that ultimately he
was everything, hence the millions of deportations , imprisonments ,
and witch trials. All this was known to everyone. Everyone could,
had to hear about it, insofar as he wanted to .
On January 23 , 1937, began the trial against Radek , Piatakow
and so many other comrades-in-arms of Lenin and Trotsky . I do not
give the other names , for what can they mean to readers who are to–
day forty years old or even younger?
In these show trials the innocent accused themselves of crimes
which they had not committed, which were only fabrications . They
expiated with their deaths these crimes which had been dreamed up
by Stalin and his unimaginative police, and their followers and
friends paid with exile and precipitate downfall .
After the last war the delirious anti-Semites spread the rumor
that Adolf Hitler had been a Jew, an agent of the Elders of Zion , and
on their orders had ruined Germany morally , militarily , and eco–
nomically. But the charges and confessions at the Moscow trials and
at those that were to follow in Sofia, Budapest, and Prague were not
less farfetched, and were a no less shameless insult to the intelli–
gence . Yet not only in the communist press but also in countless
bourgeois newspapers the world over, one could read articles whose
authors testified that the defendants were guilty and that their execu–
tion was necessary for the salvation of peace and freedom.
The left had hoped that the first show trial would be the last.
Back then, in August 1936, the most significant events were the
Spanish Civil War, which had just broken out, and the progress of
the Popular Front in France. The new trial appeared all the more
horrible . It was not only a question of Radek and his fellow defen–
dants, most of whom were guilty in quite the opposite sense , having
repeatedly submitted to Stalin and his clique.
I was less troubled by their account than by my own capitula–
tion, my own double dealing, and was humbled and debased in my
own eyes by this ghastly spectacle . Of course I did not for a moment
overestimate the importance of what I had done for the movement-
