“To Overcome Evil”: Andrey Platonov and the Moscow Show Trials

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin systematically eliminated all his possible rivals. By mid–1938 he had disposed of well over half of the Soviet political and military elite. There were now few Old Bolsheviks (i.e., Party members from before 1917) still alive, and of 1,966 delegates to the Party Congress of 1934, 1,108 had been arrested. Stalin’s power was now so absolute that it was hard even to conceive of an alternative to his rule. He evidently considered it not enough simply to execute his real and imaginary rivals; it was equally important to him to discredit them politically and humiliate them morally. To this end, Stalin had many of the most important figures put on trial, with huge publicity, in a series of three trials held in central Moscow between August 1936 and March 1938. These show trials led to the execution of—amongst others—Nikolay Bukharin (former head of the Communist International), Alexey Rykov (former Prime Minister), and Genrikh Yagoda (former head of the NKVD or secret police). Before being sentenced, many of the accused had “confessed” to all kinds of inconceivable crimes—from working for Trotsky and Western intelligence agencies to plots on Stalin’s life. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) is the first serious exploration of the psychological mechanisms that led these men to confess to sins they had not committed. Vasily Grossman explores these questions more subtly still, above all in the chapters towards the end of Life and Fate (1959) devoted to Commissar Krymov’s self-doubts and self-justifications while he awaits interrogation in the Lubyanka prison.

The show trials were meticulously orchestrated—the second took over a year to prepare—and they were accompanied by meetings in almost every Soviet institution, from factories to universities and cultural establishments, at which all present were required to demonstrate their hatred for the “Trotskyists,” “Western spies,” and “enemies of the people” placed on trial; often people were expected to sign petitions or approve resolutions calling for their execution. Stalin’s aim, of course, was to render as many people as possible complicit in the trials and subsequent executions, thus effectively castrating them too. Few refused to comply; to do so was equivalent to signing one’s own death warrant— although compliance, in these years of often random terror, was no guarantee of safety.

A curious aspect of the deification of Stalin that was gathering momentum during the years of the show trials, perhaps reaching its peak with the proclamation of the new Soviet Constitution of December 5, 1936, is how closely it coincided in time with the official celebrations of the centenary of Pushkin’s death on February 10, 1937. At this moment, Pushkin too was being turned into a godlike figure. This process of deification can be seen, among other things, as an attempt to impose collective thinking not only with regard to politics but also with regard to culture; Stalin wanted no competition, and therefore no independent thinking, in any realm of life. And, since so much of Russian culture is embodied in Pushkin, the battle for his legacy was crucial. All the greatest Russian poets of the time had been turning to Pushkin for moral and spiritual support. Anna Akhmatova, whose own poetry was growing ever more cryptic, wrote about Pushkin’s talent for “encryption.” Marina Tsvetaeva, always an outsider herself, emphasized in her idiosyncratic “My Pushkin” the ways in which Pushkin was an outsider—both because of his African blood and because every poet is, in her view, an outsider. Boris Pasternak, who survived the Stalin years partly because of his gift for playing the role of holy fool, wrote of “the childlike Russian quality of Pushkin and Chekhov.” Both Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov wrote plays about Pushkin. Even a writer so removed from the mainstream as Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky wrote long and important articles devoted to Pushkin, as well as adapting Eugene Onegin for the stage. Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, émigrés such as Nabokov and Khodasevich—all were claiming Pushkin as their comrade or ancestor.

The Soviet State was...