The Defendants Zelensky and Ivanov

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The figure of Zelensky has flitted through the trial like a pale shadow. But he is not an unimportant figure. For several years Zelensky was the secretary of the Moscow Committee, the chief section of the party, and a member of the Central Committee. Later on he became head of the cooperative organization of the USSR, the powerful distributing apparatus which deals in billions. Fifteen years ago he was friendly with the now dead Kamenev, a member of the Political Bureau and president of the Council of Labor and Defense; but from the moment of open rupture between Kamenev and Stalin (1926), Zelensky went over to Stalin. In all probability he could not quietly accept the execution of the Old Bolsheviks to whom he himself belonged. This sealed his fate. Within these limits the fate of Zelensky does not differ from the fate of many other defendants. What appears astounding is the character of the accusation presented against him. If we are to believe the indictment, and Zelensky himself, he was an agent of the czarist police in Samara in 1911. A similar accusation is made against Ivanov. Concerning a former member of the Central Committee of the party and people’s commissar of the lumber industry, this accusation is truly stunning!

Is it true? We will not concern ourselves over psychological speculation, which in such cases always has an uncertain nature, but will use only unassailable facts. Immediately after the conquest of power by the Bolsheviks (November 1917), the party Central Committee and afterwards the Cheka began the study of the archives of the czarist police department and the local organs of the Okhrana. Numerous provocateurs were discovered, tried by the people’s courts, and the most vicious of them shot. The study of the archives, the classification of the material, and the detailed checking were fully completed by 1923. How then could Zelensky’s and Ivanov’s “provocateur” past have remained in the dark? How could they have occupied such responsible posts and why was the secret suddenly discovered only now, in connection with the present trial, that is, after a delay of twenty years? We consider it necessary here to reveal what the prosecutor of course keeps secret.

Among the revolutionists of the czarist epoch there were not a few who upon police questioning behaved with insufficient courage or lack of caution. Some repudiated their views. Others named their comrades. These people were not agents of the police and still less – provocateurs. They simply displayed cowardice at certain moments. Many of them, upon leaving prison, frankly revealed their mistakes to the leaders of the party organization. Depending upon their further conduct, the party either drove them out forever or accepted them once more into the ranks.

From 1923, Stalin, as the general secretary of the party, concentrated all such material in his archives, and they became in his hands a powerful weapon against hundreds of old revolutionists. Threatening exposure, compromise, or expulsion from the party, Stalin wrung from these people slavish submission and led them step by step toward complete demoralization.

One can fully allow for the possibility that in their political pasts Zelensky, a member of the Central Committee, and Ivanov, a people’s commissar, committed errors as characterized above. Stalin could not have failed to know these facts fifteen years ago, since for all responsible appointments the most meticulous inquiries about the candidates were made into the archives. One can say, consequently, with absolute assurance that neither Zelensky nor Ivanov ever were agents of the czarist police. But Stalin nevertheless possessed such documents as gave him the opportunity to break the will of these victims and to force them into the utmost degree of moral degeneration. That is how Stalin’s system operates!