It was time for Zinoviev to make his final statement. It was hard to believe that the man standing in front of them was the same talented orator who had captivated the audience at the Party Congress and the Congress of the Communist International on several occasions. He breathed heavily and spoke with neither confidence nor expression. He did not even look at the audience, nor did he seek their empathy, contrary to his habit of many years. It was only after several minutes of speaking that he gradually gained self-control and his words flowed. He stood upright behind the fence and read from the script prepared for him by Stalin’s men. His appearance was reminiscent of a mediocre understudy, and the actor was trying to imitate Zinoviev’s past style of speech in order to make the role of the respected old Bolshevik look more real, and thus to make people believe that Zinoviev’s past merits were all lies, because today the facts show that Zinoviev has always been an enemy and a traitor to socialism.
Zinoviev’s final statement is the same as Kamenev’s. Instead of defending himself, he gave a round of defense of Stalin, concluding with a set of vague, clearly Stalinist, poorly reasoned words: “I first distorted Bolshevism, then became opposed to Bolshevism, and then went to fascism through Trotskyism. Trotskyism is a variant of fascism, and my Zinovievism, a variant of Trotskyism ……”
Reinhold, Pickerer and the three secret agents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs – Ollie Berger, Fritz, Davide and Berman-Yu cup – also made their respective “final statements”. With the exception of Ollie Berger, the other four told the court that they were not asking for leniency. However, no matter what they said, there was no doubt in their minds that their lives were not in danger.
At 7:30 p.m. on August 23, the members of the trial court left the courtroom and entered the conference room. Yagoda followed them in. The text of the verdict had already been prepared, and it would take at most two hours to copy it. However, the members of the court stayed in the conference room for seven hours. They reappeared behind the bench at 2:30 in the middle of the night, in the early hours of August 24. In dead silence, the presiding judge, Ullrich, began to read out the verdict. He read for fifteen minutes in a stilted manner before reaching the sentencing section. At this point, nervous coughs rang out from all corners of the hall. The presiding judge paused for a moment and waited for the hall to calm down before reading out the names of all the defendants one by one, followed by a long pause, and finally announced that he had sentenced all the defendants to capital punishment – “death by firing squad!”
The staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who were familiar with the procedures of trials in political cases, expected that the presiding judge would then speak the usual formulaic language of such occasions, “However, considering the past revolutionary merits of the defendants, this court considers that the death penalty may not be applied to them, and commutes the death penalty to ……”
However, this old routine did not occur. No matter how stunned and puzzled people were, the trial still ended with a death sentence. By the time those present realized this, Malliher had unhurriedly placed the copy of the verdict that had just been read into the folder in front of him.
At that very moment, a hysterical, shrill, piercing roar broke the silence in the courtroom: “Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin!” It was the defendant Rullier who shouted this slogan. He was small and thin, and his dark eyes gleamed under a head full of untamed hair.
According to Soviet law, a person sentenced to death has the right to submit a petition for pardon within seventy-two hours. Generally speaking, within this time limit, even if the request for pardon is rejected, the death penalty cannot be carried out. This time, however, Stalin trampled on this legal provision. On the morning of August 25, only a day and a night after the death sentence was pronounced, an official notice appeared in the Moscow newspapers. The death sentence had been carried out. All sixteen defendants were shot, none of them spared.
Chapter 15 Stalin Realizes His Blunder
It never occurred to the investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that Stalin was not satisfied with the humiliation of sending the old Bolsheviks to court and did not send them back to prison or concentration camps to preserve their lives. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the fact that the accused were all shot was no less shocking to the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs than to the entire Soviet people.
Only such persecutionists as Chertok and Yuzhny continued to look as if they were heroes who had fulfilled their civic duty. Most of the investigators, on the other hand, were so downhearted and disheartened that they avoided talking about the recently concluded trial. Many of them were busy booking train tickets to leave Moscow as soon as possible for their long-overdue vacation. What awaited them, however, was a great disappointment. At the end of August they were summoned again to the Secret Political Bureau. Morchanov made an unexpected and surprising announcement to them: “This year, you will have to forget about your leave, because the interrogation work is not over, it is just beginning!”
Morchanov told the attendees that the Politburo had entrusted them with the preparation of a second trial. This time it was Radek, Serebryakov, Sokolnikov and others who were to be charged. None of the interrogators dared to say “no” to this new task given by Stalin. Of course, there were a few complaints that months of interrogations and late nights had exhausted them and that they were now unable to work on new cases. But no one paid any attention to these heady words.
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