The Prince of the Soviets

19. THE SHAKHTY TRAIL

On the morning of the 18th of May, 1928, the House of Unions was surrounded by a double police cordon, struggling to restrain the public from breaking through to the recently refurbished building with its pillared facade.

There were crowds milling about—journalists, children, and foreign tourists holding cameras. People kept arriving, and soon the pavement outside the building was overflowing, stopping the cars and cabs from passing and unleashing a chorus of motor horns.

Klim showed his press card and was allowed into the House of Unions. Last minute preparations were taking place there. Smartly dressed young men in OGPU uniform were dashing up and down the staircases, and catering assistants with lace headdresses pinned to their hair were wheeling trolleys furnished with decanters of water.

Klim walked into the Pillar Hall and felt as if he was in a theater on the night of a grand premier. Crystal chandeliers lit up rows of red seats for the spectators of the trial, and red cloth banners hung on all the balconies. Several powerful floodlights stood in the aisles, directed toward the stage. The carpet beneath them bulged with cables.

“Gangway!” called a workman wheeling in a huge, cumbersome movie camera.

Although people were fussing around nervously, the mood was generally one of excited anticipation. There were high hopes of the forthcoming show.

The foreign journalists exchanged greetings and handshakes.

“Don’t expect to see any justice done here today. That’s all I can say,” the correspondent from the Christian Science Monitor told Klim. “The Soviet judges are quite openly guided by questions of class origin—with full official approval. If it turns out that the defendant is a former aristocrat or, God forbid, was born into a priest’s family, then no proof of guilt is required whatsoever.”

“But it would be stupid,” a French correspondent intervened, “to pass an obviously wrongful verdict when the whole world is watching. Bolsheviks would never resort to such a thing.”

“There will be executions, you mark my words,” said Luigi, a little Italian with a beaky nose. “The authorities want to force poorly performing employees to work harder. Soviet industry is rife with substandard production. They want to tackle it.”

Seibert would listen to no one and was loudly indignant about the fact that the OGPU had named among the saboteurs a number of German citizens who were working in the mines on contracts.

“When our ambassador reported to Berlin about this story,” he said, “Germany almost broke off diplomatic relations with Russia. The country is up in arms. The Russian secret police have arrested my compatriots simply to show that the saboteurs had foreign connections. I don’t know what the Kremlin is thinking of! The day after tomorrow, there will be an election to the Reichstag, and thanks to this scandal, the communists will lose a great many votes.”

“Don’t pretend to be so upset about it,” laughed Luigi. “You’ve made a career for yourself out of the story.”

Seibert had indeed become something of a celebrity in his own country. Following Germany’s defeat in the Great War, patriotic feelings were running high, and any report on the sufferings of the German people brought forth a storm of protest. Seibert had been allowed personal access to the Germans who had been arrested, and he had gone to Berlin several times to give interviews about his visits to a Bolshevik jail. He had even been invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had decided that he would, in future, most definitely go in for politics. He had hugely enjoyed his role as spokesman for the German people.

At last, the spectators were allowed in, and the hall filled with a hubbub of excited voices and the urgent shouts of stewards directing people to their places. The wealthier spectators took out field glasses and opera glasses and, in the absence of the main players, began to inspect the foreigners. Klim felt uneasy as if all the glittering lenses were directed at him alone.

When the guards brought in the defendants, a gasp of disappointment went up in the hall. Seibert even took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handkerchief as if he could not believe his eyes.

“So, these are the criminals?” he asked.

Klim was also amazed by the appearance of the saboteurs. Without realizing it, he had been infected by the mood of his colleagues and begun to picture the accused as fanatical, menacing individuals prepared to risk their lives to challenge the Bolshevik system. But on the defendants’ bench, he saw not proud counter-revolutionary conspirators but a bunch of ordinary-looking, disheveled men, glancing around them nervously.

If you picked out fifty passers-by at random, thought Klim, arrested them, and held them in a cell, this is what they would look like.

“All rise!” blared the loudspeakers. “This court is now in session.”

A hush fell on the room. The judges, some in three-piece suits and others in military-style jackets, went up onto the stage and sat down in high-backed chairs. In the light of the floodlights, the tacks in the leather upholstery shone like strange, square haloes around the judges’ heads.

According to the custom, everybody in the hall sang the “Internationale,” and then the session began.

During my chats with Weinstein, I occasionally allow myself to ask naïve questions.

“What do you think it cost the counter-revolutionaries to hire all those saboteurs, flood coal mines, and break equipment? It must have run into millions.”

Weinstein nodded his head sadly and lamented the fact that our enemies will stop at nothing in their efforts to undermine the new Soviet state.

I continued to express disbelief. “And why, if they spent millions on all this, didn’t they do it somewhere important? Why Shakhty—a town lots of Russians can’t even find on a map? In any case, what were the conspirators hoping to achieve? All right. So, they damage industry in several towns. Then what?”

But for Weinstein, it’s all a question of the cunning machinations of imperialism, or the devil, if you like. As he sees it, there’s no point in looking for logic in the enemy’s actions.

In actual fact, no evidence has been produced at all except for the confessions of the accused. But not one of them can provide any specific details about the sabotage—not a thing!

My colleagues are terribly disappointed: the “trial of the century,” for which we have all been waiting with baited breath, has turned out to be an utterly pointless affair devoid of any intrigue. Instead, it’s like watching prisoners in chains being brutally beaten as they beg for mercy and try to escape the blows raining down on them.

Of all the defendants, there are only two engineers of the old school who behave with dignity, denying all the accusations against them. The others repent tearfully, and when they talk about themselves, they say things like “my capitalist childhood” or “my circle made up entirely of devious counter-revolutionaries” or “being a class enemy in a working-class environment,” etc.

It makes me want to look away and stop my ears. No matter how I try, I just can’t see these men as conspirators. The whole thing’s an absurdity—to talk for an hour about how, by virtue of your class identity, it was inevitable that you would become a saboteur.

I want somebody to explain to me why all the defendants are giving false testimony against one another. Are they being tortured? It doesn’t look like it. Are they being pumped with drugs? Apparently not. If they’re being threatened, why can’t they say so before the assembled court? They will be heard. There are hundreds of people in the room, including representatives of the press. Or have the defendants in the Shakhty Trial been specially selected for their cowardice and spinelessness?

It is all the worse because the German defendants are behaving admirably, and the contrast is striking.

“What did you expect?” Magda asked me indignantly when I confided my woes to her. “Those men know that people in Germany are concerned about their fate. They get letters from their families, and Seibert and the diplomats are visiting them just about every day. You’ll see, they’ll be exonerated by the USSR in exchange for some trade concessions. But what can the Russian defendants hope to get? Everybody hates and despises them. Even you.”

Say what you like, Magda has a way of getting to the heart of the matter.

Every time “my” engineers approach the microphone, I pray that they will stay firm, that they, at least, will not be transformed into cowards, ready to bear false witness against anybody and everybody, including themselves.

For the time being, they have held out.

Kitty is still sick. On the days when she feels a little better, she is afraid to turn her head or to bend her neck. She thinks of her pain as something alive, a creature that is punishing her for something.

“Daddy,” she says, “why is it back again? Can’t you stop it getting in?”

I hold her in my arms until she goes to sleep, sometimes in thirty minutes, sometimes in three hours. There are nightingales singing outside, and I curse them. This is my own personal madness: I think they stop Kitty from sleeping.

The doctor tells me she has some sort of inflammation that should not be allowed to get any worse. Otherwise, things could end badly.

I need to take her south. You can rent rooms in Crimea or in Caucasus through the Resort Department; maybe I can find something for us. Owen has told me I can go as soon as the Shakhty Trial is over, but I have to wait a full month until then.

I asked Weinstein to help me sort out a holiday to the south. He was delighted as if this was just what he had been waiting for.

“You can have everything,” he said. “Tickets in your own separate railroad compartment and a wonderful hotel in Sochi with full board. All you need to do is write us an article for the New York Times. The editors won’t take anything straight from us, but you’re an official correspondent for a well-respected agency.”

He gave me “special materials” from the Shakhty Trial that had been promised to “friendly journalists,” but it was nothing but empty claims and abuse directed at the saboteurs.

“You have no proof of any of this—” I began.

“If the New York Times publishes this material,” Weinstein interrupted me, “that’s the best proof we can have. Thousands of specialists on the USSR will quote your article.”

He doesn’t hide the fact that the Shakhty Trial has nothing to do with justice. His line is as follows: the defendants need to be convicted for the sake of “state business,” and if I love my daughter, I must play my part in this business.

From the very start of the Shakhty Trial, the engineer named Scorutto has behaved with courage and denied all the accusations that were leveled at him by his colleagues. But yesterday, he came to the microphone and announced in a dull voice, staring into space, that he admitted his guilt and was prepared to testify against his colleagues.

“Kolya, darling, don’t lie!” a woman’s voice cried out. “You know you’re innocent!”

There was a commotion in court, people jumped up from their seats, and the presiding judge was forced to declare a recess. Scorutto was led away, sobbing.

When he appeared again, something quite unprecedented took place.

“Comrades, I have slandered myself and others,” he announced to the entire courtroom.

There was a deathly silence.

“Were you threatened?” asked the state procurator in a stern voice.

“No. It’s just that my friends betrayed me, so I—I betrayed them too.”

Scorutto looked around the court with wild eyes and suddenly cried out, “Don’t you understand? I just can’t take it anymore!”

He apologized—not for carrying out sabotage as the others had done but for making false accusations of those who had betrayed him. The guards barely managed to pull him away from the microphone.

Seibert cursed under his breath, the French journalists gasped at the bravery of the little engineer. And this is what I was thinking:

Scorutto has no allies left, apart from his wife, who is as small and defenseless as himself. He knows that there is no way he can get out of the trap he is in. Just try standing firm and keeping your personal dignity intact faced with a situation like that! But nonetheless, he didn’t give in.

I had been ready to strike a deal with Weinstein, and I was even beginning to regard my own treachery in a heroic light just because it was not in my own interests but for the sake of my daughter’s health.

But if I think about it, what can Weinstein do to me? All right, I won’t get an all-expenses-paid holiday to Sochi, but Kitty and I can go south and rent some little beach hut by the sea as thousands of people have always done.

The most important thing is to get train tickets. That might be difficult since all of the tickets are bought up two months in advance, but I’ll figure something out.

Even if Weinstein has me fired, it doesn’t matter. I have a lot of friends precisely because I can be trusted. I have, up to now, never betrayed or sold anybody. If I need to find a new job or a good doctor for Kitty, my friends will help. But if they find out that I capitulated to Weinstein’s demands, everyone would know I can be bought—just name your price.

To cut a long story short, I refused to write the article for Weinstein, and he was furious.

“It’s quite impossible to have a normal working relationship with you!” he said. “Do you understand that there will be consequences?”

I answered that there are always consequences and that we choose those that suit us the best.

Kitty, as a matter of fact, is feeling much better as if her health depended on me passing this test with my integrity intact.

I wish I could thank Scorutto for saving me from descending to the level of a swine! I’d like to shake him by the hand and tell him he is not alone and that his battle with the system was an amazing lesson in personal courage. But the professional villains in the OGPU do everything they can to make sure their victims receive no support from outside.