After the Bolsheviks seized power, Par Vaganian was appointed head of the Military Department of the Moscow Party Committee. Then he was actively involved in the civil war; when the revolutionary storm swept through Transcaucasia, Par Vaganian became the leader of the Armenian Communist Party. Under his leadership. Soviet power was established in Armenia.
Par Vaganian was rarely concerned with his personal career advancement. He was particularly keen on studying theoretical problems in Bolshevism and Marxian philosophy. When the Soviet power was fully consolidated in Transcaucasia, Par Vaganian devoted himself to theoretical work and wrote several books on Marxism. He founded the main theoretical journal of the Bolshevik Party, Under the Banner of Marxism, and became its editor-in-chief. When the left-leaning opposition emerged, Par Vaganian sided with Trotsky. He was later expelled from the Party for this and exiled to Siberia in 1933.
When Stalin was preparing for the first Moscow trial, he suddenly remembered Pal Vaganian. It was decided to use him as one of Trotsky’s three deputies in the trumped-up “Tozhi Joint Headquarters”. Par Vaganian was sent to Moscow, where Belman was in charge of his work.
When I learned about this, I rushed to Belman to talk about Parvaganian’s situation and begged him not to be too hard on my friend.
Berman admired Par Vaganian. Especially the latter’s unmistakably decent style was a source of great emotion for Berman. The more Berman got to know him, the deeper his respect and sympathy grew. As an interrogator in the Dagestan penal institutions, Berman developed a friendship with his interrogator in the special atmosphere of the formal interrogation of the latter’s “crimes”.
Of course, Berman was deeply sympathetic to Par Vaganian. But he could not open up to him. On the surface, he maintained his interrogator’s stance and tried to conduct the interrogation with a cliché that was in line with Stalinist party principles. At the same time, however, he did not force Par Vaganian to confess guilt, nor did he apply to him methods of torture that would instill in him a fear of death.
Berman did not insist on following the details of what the “authorities” considered to be the crime, but explained to Par Vaganian that since he, Par Vaganian, was also accused of being a participant in the conspiracy, the Politburo considered it necessary to use his “confession” to corroborate what had been obtained from other prisoners. The Politburo considered it necessary to use his “confession” to corroborate the confessions that had been obtained from other prisoners for framing Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. At the same time, Berman suggests that he should use these premises as a starting point. Choose your own course of action during the trial and in the courtroom.
Here is the content of several conversations he had with Teil Vaganian, all of which he told me in the past in his own words.
When refusing to make a false confession, Teil Vaganian said to Berman: “I am willing from the bottom of my heart to satisfy the hopes of the center, but to sign a false confession, I am not willing. Believe me, I am not afraid of death. I have been born and died many times in the barricade battles of the October Revolution and later in the civil war. At that time, did any of us think of saving our lives? If you are going to sign the confessions you need, then at least I must be convinced that they are really in the interests of the Party and the revolution. But I feel in my heart that these confessions can only trash the achievements of our revolution and can only bring true Bolshevism into disrepute before the people of the world.”
Berman countered that the center knew better what the party and the revolution really needed at the moment, and that it had a better say than Par Vaganian, who had been out of the political movement for a long time. Beyond that, every Bolshevik should have absolute confidence in the decisions of the highest organs of the party.
“Dearest Berman,” Pal Vaganian shot back, “you have repeatedly urged me to believe that I should not think independently, but only blindly obey the Central Committee, but I, for one, was born that way: I cannot stop thinking. See, I have come to the conclusion that the idea that the old Bolsheviks seem to have become murderous bandits will cause irreparable damage not only to our party and the revolutionary cause, but to the cause of socialism throughout the world. I swear that I do not understand this damned plan of the Politburo, and I am surprised that it has found its way into your head. Perhaps you think that I have gone crazy. If so, what would be the result of your request for a confession from an insane, neurologically incompetent person? Wouldn’t it be better to send me to a home for the sick?”
“How would you answer him?” I asked Berman.
Berman replied self-deprecatingly, “I said to him that his reasons could only prove this: the roots of the opposition were so deeply rooted in his consciousness that he had completely forgotten the discipline of the party.”
Par Vaganian contradicted him, saying that Lenin had pointed out that the main one of the four disciplines of party members was the recognition of the party program. This person on trial concluded the conversation by saying, “If the new program of the Central Committee now considers it necessary to destroy the reputation of Bolshevism and its founders, then I do not recognize this program and no longer consider myself subject to party discipline. Besides, I have long since been expelled from the Party, and therefore do not consider myself at all obliged to obey it.”
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