Russia's Great Purge
Conspiracy of Silence. By Alex Weissberg. (Hamish Hamilton. 21s.)
I BELIEVE it is the duty of every COmmunist to subordinate himself to the necessities of the political struggle at all stages." Thus the provocateur Rozhansky puts in a nutshell the essence of Conspiracy of Silence, by an Austrian Jew, which is the most revealing book yet written about the great purge of Soviet Russia.
In 500 discursive and sometimes repetitive pages the author traces the development of the great purge against a background of experience which must have broken a less insensitive man, or one not so gifted with Mr. Weissberg's irrepressible curiosity and driving spirit of scientific enquiry. Someone once said that only a German could have found the patience to compile a proper dictionary of the Russian language ; perhaps only a German, if we may call Mr. Weissberg such, could have used the scraps of information which he collected in the prisons of the G.P.U. to compute in such an ingenious fashion the total number of arrests which were made during the purge. His book is packed with carefully noted detail, and the small inaccuracies to be expected from one who does not claim to speak good Russian enhance the unmistakable authenticity of the whole.
The author spent three years in Soviet prisons, during which period he was subjected to every process of the G.P.U. interrogation machinery, except physical torture in its old-fashioned Western sense. Although innocent of the crimes with Which he was accused, he confessed twice under the " Conveyor," the systein of non-stop mental battering, miscalled interrogation, used by his persecutors, only to retract at once when he had regained strength and reason. He drove his examiners to exasperation by the truly Homeric quality of his pig-headedness, until they finally gave him up as a bad job. Subsequently, and as if, after the Stalin-Hitler pact, the Soviet leaders wished to plumb the uttermost depths of treachery, this Communist Austrian Jew was fattened up to a stote of comparative physical well-being and handed over to the German Gestapo.
The book throws the clearest light yet seen on the extraordinary phase of Russian post-revolutionary history which brought execution or enslavement to some 9,000,000 souls. It traces and to some extent explains the chain-reaction of events started by the shot which killed Kirov at the end of 1934, and the opportunity which that shot gave to the vested interests of the Secret Police in playing on the fears of Russia's political leaders—a situation which was not unknown in Tsarist, times. The first wave of arrests enabled the G.P.U. to go into business as a labour-contractor on a huge scale. It is one of Mr. Weissberg's more important contributions that he places the date of the second great wave of arrests in the late summer of 1937, when the increase of numbers saturated the interrogation system, as it was at this point that flogging and torture replaced the time-wasting' Conveyor " as a method of extracting Confessions.
The author finds time for irony, and there are blessed gleams of humour amid the squalor. He quotes, with great effect, the Hans Andersen: story of The Emperor's New Clothes to illustrate the tacit understaliding which became established between the G.P.U. examiners and their victims. It is almost with sympathy that he records the embarrassment of the'G.P.U. officials who found them- selves unable to unearth a single " secret store of arms " to sub- stantiate the confessions of conspiracy and terrorism. He notes the lack of any sense of injustice in the Russian attitude towards inter- rogations, and the dumb acceptance of the incomprehensible behaviour of " the authorities." The types of his fellow-prisoners are vividly described—Eisenberg, the prodigy who beat his examiners in a marathon " Conveyor " of thirty-one days and nights • the peasant who dutifully confessed to sabotage, but could not be forced into admitting that he had poisoned cattle and horses ; and a Party member who arrived in the prison hospital after a week of continuous torture, but kept silent about what they had done to him until just before he died, when he told his fellow-prisoners that he had hurt himself in falling downstairs.
The, book, with all its technical faults, grips the attention as far as the epilogue, where the author deserts the safe, ground of his experience and makes a not very successful attempt to explain the causes of the great purge. It is a book which should be read without fail by all who seek to understand the mental climate of contemporary Russia.
RICHARD CHANCELLOR.
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