Stalin

Stalin’s truculence, too, was evident. If in the Shakhty case he had willfully put several German citizens in the dock during negotiations for a Soviet-German trade agreement, now he targeted France, which he had recently called “the most aggressive and militarist country of all aggressive and militarist countries of the world.”³¹⁴ France had imposed restrictions on Soviet imports; the Soviets had countered with reductions in imports from France.³¹⁵ Krylenko elicited laughter by reading out French news accounts of Russian émigrés in Paris gathering in protest of the proceedings: grand dukes, clergy, merchants—that is, “former people.” But Ramzin testified at trial that he and other plotters had cooperated directly with none other than the former French president and prime minister Raymond Poincaré. The latter’s office issued a denial, which was adduced at trial as “proof” of the plot.³¹⁶ A foreign affairs commissariat official tried to render the charges credible, giving a briefing for foreign representatives that waved off necessarily simplistic propaganda of an imminent military intervention but insisted that influential anti-Soviet circles in capitalist countries were inciting war through provocations such as assassinations of Soviet foreign envoys, seizure and publication of secret Soviet documents, and press campaigns about Soviet kidnappings abroad.³¹⁷

Stalin needed no further evidence of such Western plots, but he had received a copy of a transcript of a recent confidential conversation between Winston Churchill, the former chancellor of the exchequer (out of office following the Labour party victory), and Prince Otto von Bismarck, a grandson of the famous chancellor. Churchill was recorded as telling the prince, who served in the German embassy in London, that “the growing industrialization of the Russian state presents all Europe with an extremely great danger, against which we can manage . . . only by creating a bloc of all the rest of Europe and America against Russia.”³¹⁸ Behind the scenes, Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, had sought to ingratiate himself with Moscow by telling the Soviet envoy in Prague (September 1930), “Confidentially, not long ago in Geneva, the French strongly insisted on action by Poland against the USSR with the active support of all members of the Little Entente” (an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, which the French hoped to direct against Germany and the members saw as directed against Hungary). Beneš shocked the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat by adding that if a military intervention against the USSR by France, Britain, and Italy took place, Czechoslovakia was “a member of the European states and will do the same that they do.”³¹⁹

Presiding judge Andrei Vyshinsky, as per instructions, read out guilty verdicts, sentencing three to prison terms and five, Ramzin included, to death. This came without right of appeal. The hall erupted in an ovation. Two days later, the regime announced that Soviet power was strong and had no need for revenge: the executions had been “commuted” to eight- or ten-year terms.³²⁰ The morning after sentencing, Ramzin was spotted at his institute office cleaning out his desk, without apparent guard.³²¹ He was permitted to continue scientific work while serving his prison term.³²² Some Soviet workers saw through the “wrecking” burlesque.³²³ But the leniency might have provoked the greater fury.³²⁴ Even émigré enemies of the USSR acknowledged that a majority of workers accepted the guilt of the “bourgeois” specialists. “They got 3,000 [rubles per month] and traveled in cars, while we live on bread and potatoes,” the well-informed Menshevik Socialist Herald quoted Soviet workers as saying. “They sold themselves to the capitalists.”³²⁵

Lurking in the background was Stalin’s long-standing personal nemesis, whose pen was once again prolifically engaged.³²⁶ Now forty-eight years old, Trotsky in 1930 published My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, in Russian, German, English, and French, aiming to document how he was the true Leninist. He also wrote a stirring three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, in which his own and Lenin’s roles were uppermost and Stalin’s nonexistent; the book’s preface was completed on Prinkipo on November 14, 1930. As it happened, that same day, Stalin returned a devoted young apparatchik of uncommon diligence to the central party apparatus as department head for economic personnel. His name was Nikolai Yezhov (b. 1895). Stalin received him on November 21, the first of what would be hundreds of private audiences connected to rooting out sabotage and treason.³²⁷

MYSTERY MAN