On the first day of the trial, when the presiding judge asked Krestinsky if he admitted his guilt, the latter categorically denied it, saying.
“I do not admit my guilt. I am not a Trotskyist. I have never been a member of the ‘Right-Trotskyist Union’, I don’t even know about the existence of this organization. The charges against me have been imposed, and I have not committed any of them. In particular, I do not admit to having committed the crime of collusion with the German spy agencies.”
This was the first and, of course, the last Time during a total of three successive Moscow trials that the defendant dared to affirm his innocence in court and tried to overturn all the charges against him.
Klystinsky’s declaration of innocence drew a lot of discussion. Those who had been following the trial waited with great interest to see whether Krestinsky would be able to see his duel with the court through to the end and win.
The next day, March 3, 1938, Krestinsky was again escorted into the courtroom together with the other defendants. During the morning session he did not say a word, and the prosecutor did not put any questions to him. It was only during the evening session that he stood up and said this to the court.
“Yesterday, as a result of being escorted to the dock and hearing the indictment read, my heart was very heavy, and because I was sick and suddenly dominated by a strong feeling of false shame, I was unable to speak the truth and did not dare to admit my guilt. Therefore, I should have said: ‘Yes, I am guilty,’ but instead I mechanically blurted out: ‘No, I am not guilty.'”
Those abroad who followed the trial closely, after reading the newspaper reports, naturally had a question: Why did Krestinsky look different between the night of March 2 and March 3? Any unbiased person could not help but think of the terrible torture to extract confessions.
In fact, however, Krestinsky’s sudden change of position was not due to any torture methods used on him by the NKVD, they did not need to do so at all. Krestinsky’s retraction and subsequent confession was, to put it bluntly, a fake act in the farce of a trial concocted by Stalin. In the first two Moscow trials, all the defendants admitted their guilt with one voice, and instead of finding mitigating circumstances for themselves, they competed to take the main charges against them, an anomaly that naturally aroused the suspicion of Westerners, of which Stalin was aware.
Stalin knew in his heart that the foreign critics had caught the weak link in his carefully planned farce of a trial, and no wonder; the defendants had worked too hard in performing their prescribed roles and overacted. Now. Stalin was determined to show the world that not every defendant in the courtroom was a puppet at the mercy of others. He chose Krestinsky as such a “brainy” defendant because the latter was most willing to cooperate with the interrogators when he was tried by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Besides, Krestinsky, having worked as a judicial officer in the past, was the best at picking up and realizing the encouraging cues from the Prosecutor General, and entering the role at the most appropriate moment.
As is well known, the third trial, like the two previous ones, the primary defendant was still Trotsky, even though he was in a foreign country thousands of kilometers away from the trial hall. It was for Trotsky that Stalin once again activated the powerful disinformation machine. During the trial, each of the accused clearly felt Stalin’s bitter hatred for Trotsky, who was far away, and his strong desire to exact revenge. Stalin’s hatred for Trotsky was matched only by his jealousy of the latter’s prodigious talent and revolutionary achievements over the years.
Stalin knew that slander was a potent poison, the use of which had to be strictly and carefully controlled. At first, he accused Trotsky of “underestimating the peasantry” and “not believing in the power of the working class” (which was somewhat justified). Trotsky was then accused of planning terrorist activities. In the second Moscow trial, Trotsky’s charges were raised to spying for fascist Germany. Now that the third trial, which will guillotine the last of Lenin’s comrades, is about to begin, the latest instructions must be issued to put another “hat” on Trotsky. Admittedly, it was not so easy to find a “hat” more terrible than “spies and spies of the German General Command”, but as the saying goes, if you want to add a crime, there is nothing to be done! Sure enough, Stalin found a new charge and wanted to make it public through Krestinsky’s mouth. Stalin promised to spare Krestinsky’s Life if he agreed to “cooperate”. Whereas in the past Trotsky had sold out to Fascist Germany in 1935, Krestinsky was now ordered to declare in court that he himself had been a spy for the German Generalissimo together with Trotsky in 1921!
Stalin was so concerned with prolonging Trotsky’s “service” as a foreign spy that he did not realize that this would destroy the basic premise on which the whole myth of Trotsky’s “service to the Germans”, which he had so carefully crafted, rested. This premise was the affirmation that Trotsky and the other leaders of the Opposition wanted to be involved in such a despicable crime mainly because they wanted to regain the power they had lost.
However, in 1921 there was no possibility that Trotsky would have to fight to regain power, because at that time there was no attempt to take away his power. Trotsky in that period was at the peak of honor and power. He was recognized as the legendary hero of the October Revolution and the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, which, moreover, had just crushed the entire enemy of the nascent Red regime on a dozen fronts. Why did Trotsky at that time have to act as a German spy? Was it, for the sake of spying on information in his own hands? Or was it to dismantle the Red Army, which he had created with his own hands and was moving from victory to victory under his command?
Krestinsky told everything Stalin had to say without compromise, but Stalin, as usual, did not keep his word. Krestinsky was shot anyway, and his wife, the director and doctor of a certain children’s hospital, was also arrested and, I think, she will not escape being executed. As for his daughter Natasha, whose fate I do not know.
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