ABSTRACT
THERE WOULD BE no occasion for the question that we are raising if the Moscow Trials had established the charges of sabotage and espionage in the same way a fact is established in a laboratory, or if a series of convergent testimonies, cross- examinations, and documents had made it possible to follow the behavior of the accused month by month and to reveal the plot in the way a crime is reconstructed at the hearings. Whatever there may have been in the way of preliminary investigations, which remain secret, the Soviet tribunal could not have got through the job of trying twenty-one accused persons in the space of eleven days. 1 It rarely involved itself on this level, and when it did (with regard to the Copenhagen episode in Zinoviev’s trial, for example), the attempt was not very successful. Only once, in Bukharin’s trial, did the proceedings and cross-examinations take a classical turn; this, however, concerned a violent attack planned against the revolutionary leadership in 1918 and, as Vishynsky was careful to point out, these crimes committed more than twenty years ago were covered by the terms of the law. With regard to more recent events and the clandestine opposition, those who were in a position to testify found themselves ipso facto implicated in the trial: the only competent witnesses were the accused, 2 and as a consequence their state-ments never give us information on the brute reality. One can discern friendships and enmities, the struggle between partisans involved in twenty years of revolutionary politics, and occasionally the fear of death and servitude. In the best cases, these are political acts, or stands adopted on the question of Stalinist leadership. In a trial of this kind, where in principle all documents are missing, we are left with the things that were said, and at no time do we have any feeling of reaching through the words to the facts themselves. Some of the anecdotes have an air of truth, but they only acquaint us with the accused’s state of mind. The alliances with major foreign powers, the constitution of a veritable opposition bloc, even the offense itself—all inevitably rest at the level of hearsay. Guilt in this case is not a matter of a clear relation between a definite act with specific motives and specific consequences. It is not the guilt of a criminal, who is known from the porter’s testimony to have been the only one to have entered the house of the crime between nine and ten o’clock, and whom the gunsmith testifies bought on the eve of the crime a revolver of the same caliber as the fatal bullet, which the coroner testifies to be the cause of the death. The chain of causes, motives, means, and effects of the opposition’s activity is not reconstructed. There are only a few facts in a fog of shifting meanings. In writing this, it is not our intention to be polemical: we are limiting ourselves to the description of what the Moscow Trials could possibly be under the conditions in which they took place— and to the formulation of the impression of a ceremony of language conveyed by the Report of Court Proceedings.
