Roosevelt’s envoy to the court of Stalin and the Great Terror

Joseph E Davies was a distinguished man. He had shone in the American administration, and was sent to Moscow by his friend, Franklin D Roosevelt, to see what the Russians were like. Litvinov was still the Soviet Foreign Minister, trying to construct an alliance against the Third Reich. If that was on the cards, Davies was the man to help pull it off. He was one of the very few American diplomats who, on the whole, was in favour of collaborating with the Russians. By the time he got accredited in November 1936, the Moscow trials were in full swing; by the time he left his post in June 1938, they were mostly over. All those in the dock were past leaders of the Communist Party and of the Soviet State. They were accused of spying for foreign governments, for wanting to assassinate Stalin, for wanting to destroy the Soviet state and for pro-Nazi sympathies. Davies was there in the courtroom, followed the proceedings, sent diplomatic dispatches about them to his boss in Washington, mentioned them in his letters to family members and published them in a book titled Mission to Moscow. It sold 700,000 copies worldwide, a popular book.

Davies had rather less success with diplomats and historians. At best he was regarded as na ï ve, at worst a Communist sympathiser, someone for the postwar House Committee on Un-American Activities to watch closely a decade later. Well, yes, he was a sympathiser of sorts. Later, when war broke out, he did his best to procure help for the Russian war effort. But by that time this was simple Realpolitik. America needed the Russians. It is not my intention to go into any details of the Soviet-American relationship during the Second Word War. I would like to devote the rest of this article to arguing that Davies was not as na ï ve as he is usually depicted. He was unlucky. He tried to seek out the truth in unparalleled historical circumstances. He did not jump to conclusions hastily. He reached them after a long and painful process, as described in his book:

“ I must confess that I was predisposed against the credibility of the testimony of these defendants, The unanimity of their confessions, the act of their long imprisonment (incommunicado) with the possibility of duress and coercion extending to themselves or their families all gave me grave doubts as to the reliability that could attach to their statements. Viewed objectively, however, and based on my experience in the trial of cases and the applications of the tests of credibility which past experience had afforded me, I arrived at the reluctant conclusion that the state has established its case, at least to the extent of proving the existence of a widespread conspiracy and plot among the political leaders against the Soviet government and which under their statutes established the crimes set forth in the indictment.”

Clearly, Davies had doubts but convinced himself that it could not all just be a pre-arranged show. Once more he expresses some doubts:

“ There still remains in my mind, however, some reservation based upon the facts, that both the system of enforcement of penalties for the violation of law and the psychology of these people are so widely different from our own that perhaps the tests which I would apply would not be accurate if applied here. Assuming however that basically human nature is much the same everywhere, I am still impressed with the many indications of credibility which obtained in the course of the testimony. To have assumed that this proceeding was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of Shakespeare and the genius of Belasco in stage production. The historical background and surrounding circumstances also lend credibility to the testimony.”

Now we have the crucial argument: If it was all theatre how was it arranged? Who wrote the script, who was the director, who was the stage manager? Under Gorbachev’s glasnost all kinds of things were admitted, even the Katyn massacre, so why don’t we know more about the preparation of the trials? I believe that even in Gorbachev’s time Soviet leaders were just too ashamed to confess to this momentous crime, arguably the biggest of all. The accused were all innocent. Not a single statement in the trial was true. But it was never disclosed why the accused were willing to play parts in a macabre play in an attempt to mislead the whole world — both those who believed in Communism and those who did not.

Roy Medvedev in his Let History Judge provides plenty of examples why those who had braved the cruelties of the tsarist regimes surrendered to the Soviet secret police and signed whatever was put in front of them. It was refined torture, practised on an enormous scale. Perhaps the mechanism was the one described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon. The prosecutors managed to convince the accused that their confession was the last service they could provide to defend the interests of the Communist Party. It was the Party ’ s will that they should confess, so good Communists confessed. Nobody knows what happened, and I very much doubt that that part of the archives will be ever be opened. Or it may already be too late: all the relevant archives were burnt in the thirties. What is in no doubt is that there was mass terror. The Soviet archives do give information on that count. In the period 1937-38 as many as 1,372,000 people were arrested, of whom 681,000 people were executed.

In the absence of any hard evidence I hope to be forgiven for offering an explanation, fanciful though it may be. To start with, this kind of trial needs a script. I presume, the KGB went for the best scriptwriters. Some novelists of the first rank must have got the commission. There must have been many rehearsals, with a courtroom built far from Moscow, perhaps somewhere in the Urals. It must have looked all too real. The players did not know that it was only a rehearsal. If any of those in the dock decided to withdraw his confession, thinking that they had faced an international audience, they soon learned the painful consequences of not sticking to the script. They would have behaved better at the next rehearsal, or the one after.

As for the script: if it was found wanting by the prosecutors, a new script was demanded, the old one discarded, the scriptwriter shot. Stalin would have regarded it as too risky to leave a single scriptwriter alive. Anyway, so many writers were shot in that period that having a few more suddenly disappear was barely noticeable.

Davies was not the only, nor even the most distinguished, diplomat or politician at the time to be duped by the Soviets. Many fell for the Soviet explanation hook, line and sinker. The assumption that the accused were somehow guilty was even taken up by one of our greatest statesmen.

“ In all not less than five thousand officers above the rank of Captain were ‘ liquidated ’ . The Russian Army was purged of its pro-German elements.”

Thus wrote Winston Churchill in the first volume of his history of the Second World War: no hint of scepticism there.

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