Interrogating Les Kurbas

The Soviet Political Police: interrogating Ukraine writers and artists during the 1930s. Chapter 5 of PhD by Polly Corrigan.

In the last chapter, it became clear that that the Soviet political police in Ukraine was an institution with a contradictory internal dynamic. While the Ukrainian political police were extremely active in their work, arresting and executing many thousands of suspects during the 1930s, they were also under considerable pressure from both internal and external sources to improve their work, due to serious failings identified by those within the organisation as well as by those in the Soviet leadership. This led to a high level of upheaval within the organisation. Yet, despite all the chaos, the work of arresting suspects went ahead, accompanied by the meticulous record keeping of the NKVD, most notably in the form of the files that were kept of interrogations of suspects. Katerina Clark sums up this paradox neatly:

‘Western historiography has tended to foreground the arbitrariness of the purges and the insubstantiality, not to say fantastic nature, of the charges levelled, yet generally for each purge victim care was taken to provide a written record of the interrogation justifying the verdict.’

In fact, interrogation files did not exist for many of the victims of the great terror of the 1930s, particularly those who were executed as part of the so-called ‘mass operations’ that took place in the second half of the 1930s. These executions were carried out at speed by troikas in batches, and often the only documents that relate to the deaths of these citizens are the lists of victims. More usually, interrogation files were only maintained for more visible members of Soviet society, such as members of the political elite, or those who were in some other way socially significant. These individuals were arrested and tried not by troika but by the Military Collegium (i.e. within the formal legal, judicial proceedings of the established courts), and thus needed a more comprehensive degree of paperwork to justify their fate.

However, one group of Ukrainian intellectuals had the misfortune of belonging to both groups. Many members of this group were arrested in the early 1930s, long before the ‘mass operations’ were underway. As members of the intelligentsia their arrests demanded that proper notes be made in their interrogation files. A large group of Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested by the Military Collegium and imprisoned (many of them in Solovki) in 1933. However, as the mass operations got underway in 1937, they were identified as being among the ‘usual suspects’ marked down for execution.

As such, the files of these intellectuals give us an extraordinary level of insight into the functioning of the SPP in the early 1930s – a period that has been somewhat overlooked in the literature on the great terror. While the early 1930s might seem to be a comparatively calm period when we consider the carnage of the second half of that decade, in reality these years too saw their share of turmoil, particularly in the republic of Ukraine. In this chapter, we will examine in close detail the interrogation file, and in particular the file of noted Ukrainian theatre director Les Kurbas. Kurbas was an exceptional figure in the world of Ukrainian culture, and his file allows us not just an insight into the functioning of the NKVD but also the broader social and legal pressures of the era.

The interrogation files allow us to come as close as we possibly can to the procedural world of the NKVD officers, but despite their length and level of detail, these documents often they raise more questions than they answer. As well as the questions that are implicit in Katerina Clark’s observations, such as why the interrogation files were created, and why at such great length, there are also basic questions as to the truth of the information contained in the files. These questions have been extremely difficult for historians to answer. Even before the interrogation files were declassified, there was great debate about the confessions of prominent Bolsheviks, how they might have been extracted and what they really represent. The declassification of a great number of interrogation files has only served to further multiply the number of different views as to what exactly we are to make of these long, detailed confessions to crimes that mostly never took place.

A systematic review of the debate on interrogation files demonstrates that the only question on which scholars who have used and discussed interrogation files as sources agree is that the files are not to be trusted. However, in fact the reverse is true. The interrogation file is a trustworthy source – albeit a very complex one – as long as it is viewed in context. If, rather than searching for what the files tell us about the suspects of the NKVD, we ask what they can tell us about the political police itself, we find that they are reliable sources. The files, with their neat layout, meticulous detail, careful organisation and predictable formula, tell us a huge amount about the NKVD officers that compiled them.

In this chapter we will first review the existing literature on the interrogation file, a literature that is typified by the lack of consensus on what the contents of the interrogation files really mean. Then, we will suggest two important factors in deciphering the files. Lastly, we will look at the file of Les Kurbas in order to illustrate the great complexity of the situation.

Interrogation files in context

The first surprising thing about the many archives of the Soviet Union, documenting in incredible detail its leadership, institutions, and citizens, is that they exist at all. As Gregory and Harrison have observed, the Soviet system was surprisingly committed to the conservation of the documents that it created, including those that recorded decisions that now seem controversial in the extreme: ‘While political power and economic organization always rested on a bedrock of informal relationships, the degree to which the exercise of power was expressed in writing is nonetheless staggering.’

The creation of the Soviet archive system was originally, at least partly, intended to demonstrate the transition from the old imperial Russian ways to a new and modern system of government. The French had set up their Archives Nationales in 1790, and the rest of Europe followed suit soon afterwards. This development was itself rooted in European nineteenth century historical thought, specifically the belief the use of historical archives would enable future historians to render the past as it really was through the ‘scientific’ presentation of the ‘facts’. The documents that were saved were bestowed with an unshakeable authority simply by the fact of their place in the archive. Meanwhile, Russia under the Tsars had no system of archives. Therefore, in June 1918, Lenin’s signature on the decree ordering the formation of a ‘Unified State Archival Fund’ was another step along the road of modernization, establishing the Soviets as an equal with their European neighbours.

The legacy of Lenin’s 1918 decree is that, as of 1992, the Soviet archives held an estimated 138.7m files, with billions of individual documents therein. As historians when we use these files, we are conscious of the normal problems of bias present in any source (and in our own comprehension of those sources), whether archival or not. All archival documents raise questions of how accurately they reflect the reality of the meeting or interrogation they are supposed to describe. The writers may have ‘improved’ the record in some way, or been tempted to fall back on using a familiar formulation, in order to avoid irritating superiors with ‘unexpected news’. Once again, we know that these problems are not unique to the Soviet archives – minutes of government department meetings have been ‘tidied up’ the world over. For example, in the UK, a new Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee in the 1950s experienced the challenges of writing minutes that reflected the spirit rather than the letter of what had actually been said. On presenting his first set of – completely accurate – minutes to his superior, he received the horrified reply: ‘… but it’s absolute tripe… your job is to make the minutes readable and correct and not send out absolute nonsense.’ In future, to avoid further reprimand, the Secretary made sure that any ‘absolute nonsense’ was omitted: ‘We didn’t alter them factually, we just made them sound like they were uttered by intelligent and gifted and knowledgeable people.’

While much has been written on the interpretation of Soviet archival sources in general, the historiography is still lagging behind when it comes to analysis of the files of the political police. In his essay on Soviet archives, Graziosi acknowledges that FSB still closed to normal scholars, so these files are beyond his methodological attention. By comparison to other similar archives – perhaps most notably that of the East German political police, the Stasi – very little work has been done on actual interpretation of the files. Most of the analysis is still focused on communicating the contents of those files that are available, with any commentary on a more general approach to the files reserved for passing mention by the author. In the debate over the significance of the archives of the Stasi, there is a much deeper level of analysis of the position of the files in the wider historiography of East Germany, although in fairness this debate too has thrown up more questions than answers.

The French historian Marc Bloch, one of the founders of the Annales School of history, once wrote that the historian is like a fairy-tale ogre: ‘… where he smells human flesh, there he finds his prey.’ The Annales School was itself a response to the idea that it is possible to recreate history through the contents of a dusty archive, instead aiming to build a more complete history using sources from literature and other disciplines. For the historian of the political police of the 1930s, Bloch’s ogre comparison has an extra resonance, because of the nature of the ‘prey’ in this instance. Any historian planning to conduct research using interrogation files from Soviet 1930s has more to consider than questions of bias and interpretation. They also face further delicate methodological problems rooted in the tragic and desperate nature of the events about which they are writing, and how far they can legitimately enquire into these events.

In the literature it is clear that historians have reflected on these questions, and allowed themselves to connect with their inner anthropologist, dropping for a moment a more remote narrator’s persona and remarking on the impact the sources had on them as people. Lynne Viola in her study of the Ukrainian NKVD personnel notes that the files are deeply unpleasant to work with given the extensive discussion of torture that lies within. Stephen Kotkin has also spoken about the trauma he experienced reading through the files for his biography of Stalin, acknowledging that prolonged exposure to sources of this nature can be upsetting:

‘It’s oppressive, there’s no question. Imagine that there are some documents that are interrogation protocols – that is people who were beaten to confess to crimes they didn’t commit – and on those documents there are lingering traces of those people’s blood… And you see that again and again. It’s very hard…’

James Harris has also questioned if it is ethically acceptable to use the texts of forced confessions as historical sources, concluding that close reading of these sources can tell us far more than the interrogator may have wished to convey and that this does, to an extent, justify the use of interrogation files as sources.

Whatever the ethical considerations, it is clear from the literature on the interrogation file is that these files represent something extraordinary in terms of historical sources: an insight into a period of history that is complex and beyond comparison. However, aside from this there is surprisingly little consensus about the contents of these files and what they really signify. Whereas the dialogue on other political police archives has had time to mature – taking in more complex questions like the political legacy of the contents of the archive – the debate over the archives of the Soviet political police still revolves around basic questions such as whether the contents of the files are true or not – and even on this question there is little agreement among historians. In order to start to make sense of the existing literature, one way we can usefully divide it up is by looking in turn first at the political police and then at the suspects themselves.

Some scholars have approached the situation from the perspective of the suspects themselves and questioned why those suspects confessed to crimes that they did not commit. Others have focussed on the point of view of those working within the political police and how they came to fabricate so much of the content found in the interrogation files.

The suspects in focus

In the analysis of many scholars, the spotlight falls on the role of the suspects. No matter to what extent the charges against them were false, the central issue for these scholars was that the suspects – freely or under inducement – confessed to crimes that they did not commit. Their analysis centres on the level of involvement that the suspects had in their own confessions. An early and influential reading was Arthur Koestler’s fictionalised portrayal of Nikolai Bukharin in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. This novel was written after it was reported in the European and American press that former Politburo member Bukharin had confessed to a wildly convoluted plot to murder Stalin, in one of the great show trials of the 1930s. Bukharin’s interrogation produced a confession that was fifteen pages long. The shock of this news was enormous, both in the USSR and beyond. In Koestler’s novel, the character that represented Bukharin (Rubashov) made a false confession as a last service to the Soviet state, believing that it would somehow contribute positively to the fight against fascism. Koestler’s reading was, of course, wide of the mark. Far from offering up his confession – and his own life – as a last token of his faith in Bolshevism, the real Bukharin protested his innocence at length both in writing and in person at the Plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937. Nevertheless, as Kuromiya points out, even if Koestler’s conception of Bukharin’s confession had been accurate, it would not really help to explain the rest of the events of the great terror, as most of those arrested in the 1930s were not members of the Politburo, but ordinary Soviet citizens.

Igal Halfin’s examination of interrogations of academics working at a Leningrad University suggested an explanation that carried echoes of Koestler’s portrayal of Bukharin. Halfin came to the conclusion that the Soviet population had internalized Bolshevik ideology to such a great extent that they actually began to suspect themselves. However, once more, it has since been argued that the case studies used in the book represent too narrow a section of Soviet society to be meaningfully applied to the hundreds of thousands of others who were arrested.

Another possible variant of Koestler’s and Halfin’s explanation that could potentially be more successfully applied to a broader section of the population is that the officers of the NKVD kept truthful and honest notes of the confessions made by those arrested – that they just wrote down what their suspects actually said to them. In this interpretation, the suspects do not see their confession as a sacrifice for the party, nor do they honestly believe that they have committed a crime, but they make a confession as a bargaining tool. There is evidence to suggest that those who had been arrested somehow understood that giving away those close to them to the political police might improve their own chances of self-preservation. Therefore, it is possible that although the records of the interrogations might seem to some to be completely false, they are simply a true record of the suspect’s remarks.

The question of the confession as a bargaining tool throws up other, more disturbing explanations for the acquiescence of the suspect in their own fabricated guilt. Torture was undoubtedly a tool that was used by the officers of the NKVD to extract confessions, and constitutes perhaps the simplest explanation as to why suspects gave confessions that were false. As an extension of this, it is possible that the officers made promises to the suspects as to the treatment of their family members if the suspect co-operated with the interrogation.

The officers

In some interpretations scholars put more emphasis on the political police officers as having the greater share of responsibility for the contents of the files. This view is implicit in Hiroaki Kuromiya’s reading of the contents of the interrogation files, which he describes as ‘essentially fictions’, thereby placing responsibility for these fabricated confessions on the ‘authors’- the officers who wrote them. Kuromiya’s thesis is expanded by other scholars who identify an element of genuine creativity in the work of the NKVD officers who created the interrogation file. Cristina Vatalescu describes the NKVD’s interrogation files as ‘a singularly powerful genre of writing…’ and one that actually had some impact on the Soviet creative writing of the time, perhaps even on writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov. Halfin also suggests an element of creativity on the part of those NKVD officers, describing victims of the NKVD as ‘a fictitious persona, a protagonist in a literary creation composed by the investigation team’.

Arch Getty also foregrounds the role of the officers, but he contradicts the view that the confessions are invented, arguing that this is too simple an explanation:

‘Soviet archival documents were written for internal consumption and use, rather than for propaganda; they were the fuel that made the bureaucratic machine run. It would have been pointless and stupid for bureaucrats to lie to one another outrageously and constantly (and it was particularly dangerous to lie to Stalin), because they had jobs to do. Of course, like all archival documents, each was written by someone for a purpose; each had a specific vocabulary and discursive style. By carefully asking of them the same kinds of questions we ask all primary sources, we can learn a great deal.’

The key to Getty’s analysis of the ‘truth’ or otherwise in the language of the interrogation files is his emphasis on the importance of the language used by those in the Soviet leadership to reinforce their own power and stability. A case in point is the language used to describe the enemies of the Soviet state. During the Cold War, some Soviet historians believed that the epithets that were attached to ‘enemies’ of the Soviet state, such as ‘kulak’ or ‘Trotskyist’ were convenient euphemisms that allowed the Soviet authorities to do away with those who did not agree with them, or make an example in order to terrify the rest of Soviet society into submission. As Getty argues in ‘The Road to Terror’ this idea of language as part of a performance makes sense in a superficial way:

‘Because Stalinist rhetoric was a purposeful and deliberate production, we are tempted to think that those producing it were completely cynical politicians who in no way believed what they were broadcasting to society. We are perhaps inclined to think that they could not possibly have credited such widespread conspiracies of traitor, spies, and saboteurs.’

Yet Getty argues the reality was much more complex, to do with the way that those in power in the Soviet Union constructed the narrative of their own brand-new nation, not in a premeditated and conspiratorial fashion, but unconsciously and on the hoof. Getty demonstrates that the evidence for this is that Soviet government members used labels such as ‘kulak’ in private discussions as well. This is not to say that they necessarily believed that there were thousands of wealthy peasants withholding grain when they spoke of kulaks, but more to do with the entrenched views of opposition:

‘Given the self-understanding and political traditions of the Bolsheviks, such blanket labels were not really mendacious or contradictory. According the well-known formula, anyone who opposed the Bolsheviks was objectively and by definition opposing the revolution, opposing socialism, and opposing human welfare, regardless of that person’s subjective intent.’

However, one element of the communication method that Getty identifies may be misleading. In Getty’s book on the culture of clans under Stalin, he argues that suspects were not only forced to confess, but also obliged to divulge the names of their own close family, colleagues or friends – their clan – in order that they too might be investigated and probably arrested. Getty argues that this theory is supported by the way that the text appears in the interrogation file. In every file, the suspects’ names and the clan members that they have named appear are capitalised: ‘In all these transcripts, every family name appears in capitals, to make it easy to scan later for this most important information.’ However, an examination of the files of other intelligence agencies outside the USSR demonstrates that this practice also occurs in the files of their suspects. For example, the FBI used this form of capitalization of names in their files, as can be seen from the FBI’s file on journalist Hunter S. Thompson, suggesting that this is a common device rather than something directly related to the clan theory:

‘The following investigation was conducted by VINCENT R. JONES… On 3/16/67 [the] store operator at Woody Creek, Colorado, advised that HUNTER S. THOMPSON, with wife SANDRA, and son, presently are renting a house on a ranch located about five miles east of Woody Creek.’

Mark Harrison has added an additional dimension to Getty’s view of the role of the NKVD officers. Harrison’s focus is also on the employees of the political police, and he clearly agrees that the question is more difficult than simply establishing whether the contents of the interrogation files are true or not. In his reading of the files, there were certain principles, or ‘revolutionary insights’ held by Stalin to be true that were so important as to over-ride the need for factual evidence in a given investigation. These principles – that the USSR was under constant and extreme threat from external and internal enemies, that the threat of war was also enormous, and that enemies by their nature do not leave documentary evidence of their plots – provided the basis for NKVD officers to create what we might now interpret as fictitious cases against their suspects. Crucially in Harrison’s reading, the limits of what NKVD officers could ‘invent’ were clearly defined within the principles that Stalin had set out.

This argument has value, although Harrison is less accurate on how these principles and their limits were communicated to the NKVD officers in question. He describes the officers as an ‘elite group’, which may be partly true, but it is certainly not the whole picture: many were ill-educated and even former prisoners. He also describes the NKVD as ‘modestly staffed and funded’ and calls it post-war successor a ‘relatively small organization’, yet we know that the KGB was one of the largest intelligence organisations in the post-war world, and that its pre-war incarnation was also a massive operation. Lastly, he claims that the Soviet political police were simply the tool of their political masters, who completely controlled their investigative agenda in contrast with similar organisations in democratic nations, which ‘speak truth unto power’. While this point may be theoretically true, the reality is somewhat debatable. The CIA’s motto may be ‘And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free’, but there are not many within that organization who believe that their investigations are completely unshackled from political necessity. Indeed, the troubled relationships between the intelligence community and the leaders of democratic nations during the Cold War and since are well documented.

Another explanation that focuses on the part played by the NKVD officers themselves arises when we consider the shifting nature of the political police during the 1930s. As has already been made clear, the ranks of the political police grew by several thousand members during the first half of the decade, and many were purged during the second half of the decade. This inevitably meant that officers with very little experience sometimes conducted interrogations. They may have been keen to please their superiors, and been aware of the need for fast results. As part of this explanation, we can also include the tendency of the Soviet political police since its very beginnings to rely on interrogation as its primary tool, rather than more time-consuming investigation.

I think Penny Roberts’ material would make a good context section for the next two sections.

Before the Soviet

External pressure: the evolution of the Soviet legal system

To understand the interrogation file a little better, we need to go beyond the question of who is telling the truth and who is lying, and beyond the dichotomy between the investigator and the suspect. To arrive at a deeper understanding of these files – and more generally the implications of what the files can tell us about the broader role of the SPP and this extraordinary decade in Soviet history – we need to consider two important factors, which had a considerable impact on the Soviet political police in this decade. First, we need to appreciate the constantly shifting and evolving nature of the political, legal and cultural landscape in the Soviet 1930s. Secondly, we must consider the internal pressures on the SPP, and particularly how their work in the 1930s was overshadowed by the problem of ‘groupthink’ – a condition that is common to intelligence organisations all over the world.

The legal powers of the SPP had always had a convenient element of the arbitrary, ever since the formation of the Cheka in 1917. However, after the catastrophe of collectivisation the party seemed to sense a need for a more stable legal basis for Soviet society, and in particular in the actions of the SPP. However, this was not a straightforward process. Even as some members of the Politburo, including Stalin began to discuss the need to operate within clearer legal parameters, others continued to vocally support extraordinary legal powers, in order to stop those ‘enemies’ of the Soviet state who the leadership believed were encircling the Soviet Union.

Between 1931 and 1934, several attempts were made to reform the powers of the political police, and to reform the context in which it was operating – the Soviet legal system. As early as 1931, the Politburo tried to circumscribe the powers of the OGPU, due to a rise in the number of technical experts being accused of ‘sabotage’. In February 1932, Pavel Postyshev called for an end of the mass deportation of kulaks and A.A. Solts, a member of the Supreme Court, criticised the judiciary of Ukraine and Belorussia for the excessive severity of their sentencing. In the summer of 1932, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich about the question of a new piece of legislation to protect state property. Mentioning OGPU’s role in the implementation of the law, Stalin said: ‘… the OGPU’s role will not be diminished but, on the contrary, will be strengthened and legitimised.’ Here, Stalin encapsulates precisely the dilemma of these years – the need for the OGPU to operate within the ‘rules’ (to be ‘legitimised’), without damaging its capacity to defeat anti-Soviet elements (to be ‘strengthened’). Nevertheless, despite this continuing tension between legality and ‘strength’, in the main the struggle to rein in the more extreme activities of the OGPU prevailed through the early part of the 1930s.

The leaders of the USSR were not unique in being caught in this tension between legality and pragmatism. Many leaders find that the laws and practices of their countries can act as a brake for the policies that they wish to implement. Samantha Power, a recent US ambassador to the United Nations, gave an interview to the New Yorker in which she commented that ‘as time wears on, I find myself gravitating more and more to the G.S.D. [Get-Shit-Done] people.’ The Soviet interrogation file is the physical embodiment of the need of the Soviet leadership to ‘get shit done’, and yet still observe the legal requirements.

On 7 May 1933, the Politburo decided that the OGPU troiki would no longer have the power to use the death sentence. On 20 June of the same year, an all-union Procuracy was established. Although the first all-Union Procurator – Andrei Vyshinsky – began his new position by announcing that he did not believe there was a difference between ‘legality’ and ‘extraordinary’ legislation, the procuracy continued to reduce the types of courts in which the death penalty could be used. The question of whether the OGPU should continue to be allowed to use the death penalty for political crimes drove the debate that led to the ‘reorganisation’ of the OGPU into the NKVD. This was not simply reforming or tinkering with the legal system, but a real attempt to establish exactly what sort of legal system the Soviet Union needed – and what the very concept of revolutionary legality meant. As such, it was accompanied by deep disagreement within the party. The question of what constituted an anti-Soviet crime was also evolving during this period. Throughout the 1920s, the definition of the crime had broadened taking in agitation against the Soviet state, the possession of counter-revolutionary literature, and action that might ‘weaken’ the Soviet state. As the early 1930s got underway, the numbers arrested for such crimes grew rapidly.

In Ukraine, the situation was further muddled by the cultural shifts taking place. In the 1920s the Soviet leadership had positively encouraged a policy known as korenisatsiia, which aimed to quell nationalist opposition to the Bolsheviks through the development of the national cultures of each Soviet republic. However, by the 1930s Ukrainian nationalism was seen as a major threat to Soviet power, and the policy was quickly and callously reversed, leaving those who had previously been members of the Ukrainian cultural vanguard suddenly dangerously exposed. These two effectively meant that the legal system was in flux, and also that in Ukraine, the concept of what constituted a crime was also changing. These two conditions produced an extraordinary situation of doubled risk, especially for those working in the cultural arena.

Internal pressure: the possibility of ‘intelligence failure’

While the SPP is very different from its international counterparts in many respects, – the great terror itself is one of the very most important differences: MI5 have never carried out a massive campaign against the British people – it is possible to identify some characteristics that are common to all intelligence organisations.

In the discipline of intelligence studies, one concept that has generated a great deal of literature is the idea of ‘intelligence failure’. To summarise very briefly, the literature on this subject focuses on why mistakes in intelligence occur: why intelligence estimates and forecasts are wrong, why surprises and unforeseen events continue to take national governments by surprise, and why intelligence organisations fail to predict events that, when viewed with hindsight, look so blindingly obvious. One important element of this discussion is the problems that ensue when organisations become enmeshed in their own methods and beliefs, to the detriment of their own ability to see the evidence clearly. Most scholars agree that intelligence organisations ought to strive for a degree of objectivity and balance an ideal world, but in fact agencies in the real world often become overly influenced by the political decision-makers that they serve and that this – as well as a number of other factors both internal and external – contributes to the likelihood of intelligence failure. According to one intelligence scholar, Richard Betts, intelligence failure is so endemic throughout intelligence agencies that there is almost no point in trying to avoid it through reform or re-education of intelligence officers, and instead policy-makers and the general public alike should learn to increase our ‘tolerance for disaster’.

One theory posited to explain intelligence failures is ‘groupthink’. As the name suggests, this is the tendency for one idea or train of thought to prevail throughout an entire group of people or a whole organisation. A notorious case of intelligence failure in which groupthink was a probable cause is the infamous failure by the US and UK intelligence community to ascertain correctly whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the decision was taken to go to war against that nation. While many saw this failure a problem of the politicisation of intelligence,

others argued that there was no deception or manipulation of the intelligence. Instead, scholars such as Richard Aldrich suggest that the western intelligence community was afflicted by problems more associated with groupthink. First, there was already an institutional awareness that past assessments of WMD in Iraq had been too lenient, and this was a mistake that must not be repeated. Secondly, it was just an accepted fact within the community that Iraq had the weapons, and this was reinforced within the western intelligence community by the fact that other nations’ intelligence agencies agreed. Aldrich describes the situation thus:

‘There was a systemic belief – almost an ideological conviction – that all militarist dictators wish to acquire WMD and that they are all working busily to do so. This belief was so entrenched among intelligence analysts that the possibility that Iraq had no WMD was not really considered. In other words, a lack of current evidence of WMD could not simply mean that there were no WMD.’

This fascinating element of intelligence failure, the failure to think differently, is perhaps understandable when collecting intelligence about the capabilities of a distant nation, where there are not just barriers of distance, but also of culture and language. But what of similar failures in a domestic setting, where the suspects are your fellow citizens? Surely it is not possible to make such a great misjudgement in this case, when the evidence is so readily available, and the suspects share both language and culture with those investigating them. Under normal circumstances, this is certainly true. It is very rare to find intelligence failure taking place in a domestic setting. However, it may be possible in extreme circumstances, such as in the first few years of a new nation when the political police are under extreme pressure themselves.

It is possible that the Soviet Union in the 1930s provides just such extraordinary circumstances, so that groupthink could be a contributing factor to the way that the Soviet political police began to suspect Soviet citizens. As Getty has noted, the role of language was key in the creation of the formation of not just the Soviet government but the Soviet nation. As part of this, he discovered that use of the ‘enemy’ labels by the Soviet leadership was not euphemistic, they used those labels in private meetings. Furthermore, James Harris has demonstrated how completely Stalin and the rest of the Politburo believed the threat. Mark Harrison has suggested that the ‘truth’ of the interrogations of suspects was guided – and circumscribed – by these beliefs, or as he terms them, ‘revolutionary insights’. In the language of intelligence studies literature, what are these insights, if not the seeds of ‘groupthink’?

In Harrison’s reading of the situation, Stalin’s ‘revolutionary insights’ were transmitted throughout the Soviet political police because it was a small and disciplined elite force. Yet we know that the SPP was a large and disorderly organisation, with deep-seated problems of communication between the senior leadership and the officers. It seems much more likely that Stalin’s ‘revolutionary insights’ were transmitted throughout the SPP as groupthink, not because of some secret plot cooked up between Stalin and Yezhov, but because the employees of the political police absorbed the language of the new Soviet state and had such a powerful need to fulfil the wishes of their political masters. They took their cue from the discourse in which they were totally submerged, not just in their place of work, but from what they read in books or via their newspapers. And that they did this was nothing out of the ordinary. Groupthink is in fact a natural state for an intelligence organisation, where the pressure from policy-makers to reach a particular goal is intense, and anything resembling proof is immediately leapt upon as concrete evidence. Making decisions based on groupthink, rather than on existing evidence is very common.

Rewrite all above to make less clunky and add in conclusions from Penny Roberts.

The interrogation file of Les’ Kurbas

Review the Kurbas file in light of the ideas from Penny Roberts

The Ukrainian writers who were arrested and killed in the purges of the 1930s were different in subtle but important ways from their Russian counterparts. In Russia, writers were often arrested and interrogated over the content of their novels or poems. Probably the most famous instance of this phenomenon is the poetry of Osip Mandel’stam. In Mandel’stam’s interrogation file, his investigating officer explicitly cites one of his poems as evidence of a counter-revolutionary crime. The poem, known as the Stalin Epigram in which the Soviet leader is memorably described as the ‘Kremlevskogo gortza’ (usually translated as the ‘Kremlin crag-dweller…’ or ‘Kremlin mountaineer’), ends with a couplet that suggests the pleasure Stalin receives from the execution of his citizens. The poem is discussed at some length in Mansdelstam’s interrogation file, and the text of the poem is included as a key part of the interrogation.

In general, the Ukrainian writers who were arrested in 1933 were arrested for crimes that were a not quite so closely associated with the actual words that they had produced. More often, writers and intellectuals were suspected of the same sort of political crime – that of counter-revolutionary or anti-Soviet activity – but expressed slightly differently, often bound up in the specifically Ukrainian setting. As discussed in detail in the previous chapter, in the 1930s Ukrainian nationalism was seen as a major threat to Soviet power, and this had a very specific impact on the way that the repression took place there. Ukrainian intellectuals, many of whom had been at the forefront of the Ukrainian cultural resurgence of the 1920s, often found themselves accused of plotting to overthrow the Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. They were not persecuted for who they were in the context of Ukrainian scholarship, education and culture. Of course, it was certainly not always the case that writers who had participated in the renaissance of Ukrainian culture had been anti-Soviet. Olena Palko makes clear in her essay on the eminent Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi that the distinction that has since evolved in the literature between Ukrainians who were pro-Ukrainian and those who were pro-Soviet is a false one. Writers do not often fall into neat ideological boxes and Khvyl’ovyi was no exception. He made his own journey through the events of the 1920s, adjusting the style and the content of what he was writing due to a complex variety of circumstances and events.

Another Ukrainian intellectual who had been at the forefront of the cultural resurgence of the 1920s only to find himself accused of plotting to overthrow the Soviet authorities in the early 1930s was Oleksandr (‘Les’) Stepanovich Kurbas. Kurbas was a theatre director and practitioner in Ukraine in the 1920s, now acknowledged as one of the foremost theatrical talents of his age, and founder of the Berezil’ Theatre. His theatre practice has been compared with that of Bertolt Brecht, and he once was described by Vsevelod Meyerhold as the ‘greatest living Soviet theatre director’.

Kurbas was arrested in Moscow on the 25 December 1933. The moment of his arrest is noteworthy, in the middle of the ongoing debate about socialist legality, and a mere two months before Stalin’s decision to replace the OGPU with the NKVD. He was accused of crimes under articles 58/8 and 58/11 of the constitution, in other words the crime of anti-Soviet agitation. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment, but he did not serve the full five years, and instead was executed in 1937.

Kurbas’s interrogation file is roughly 240 pages long. Of the 240 pages, a total of around 100 relate to his interrogation or investigation. The second half of the file is mostly paperwork for his rehabilitation, which took place in the 1950s, and then a large amount of correspondence from the 1980s, from Ukrainian theatre journals wanting to find out the details of his arrest and death.

The first few substantive pages of the file are typed testimonies from Kurbas’s peers, accusing him of (somewhat far-fetched) anti-Soviet crimes. For example, one of Kurbas’s contemporaries, Tkachik, suggested that Kurbas was involved in a plot to kill Stalin. Tkachik began by explaining Kurbas’s opinion on the need for terrorism, saying: ‘… he explained to us the importance and necessity of terror… In Ukraine, we need to kill Balitsky, Kossior and Postishev. Gasko threw back the reply: ‘Postishev is Stalin’s henchman. We need to kill Stalin…’ The interrogator then asks: ‘Speaking of Stalin, did Gasko have any concrete proposals?’ To which Tkachik limply replies: ‘He did not give any concrete proposals at this meeting.’

Following these testimonies, around 30 pages in, a typed resolution written by one Commissioner (Plenipotentiary?) Ioselevich of the 2nd Department of the SPO OGPU on 24 February 1934 notes that Kurbas has been accused of crimes under articles 58/8 and 58/11 of the constitution. Article 58 was the section of the constitution that dealt with the crime of anti-Soviet agitation, and in this case, the numbers following the number 58 indicate that Kurbas was specifically suspected of terrorism and connections to an anti-Soviet organisation. The anti-Soviet organisation is later named as the Ukrainian Military Organisation. Ioselevich also notes that Kurbas has been exposed by the testimony of his Ukrainian peers, and recommends that he be moved to Kharkov so that the OGPU there can continue with his investigation.

Once the investigation moves to Kharkov, Kurbas’s interrogation really seems to get underway. The first document is Kurbas’s confession, dated 10 March 1934. It begins with the following rather formulaic declaration: ‘I hereby declare my complete and final surrender (разоружении) before the Sov[iet]… authorities and admit that I belonged to the counter-revolutionary organisation the UMO.’ Although one of the testimonies from earlier in the file attempts to suggest that Kurbas was involved in a (rather vague-sounding) plot to kill Stalin, most of the rest of the notes in his file focus on his work at the Berezil’ Theatre. As such, Kurbas’s ‘crimes’ have a striking level plausibility to them. Indeed, as we will see, what he describes is not a tissue of lies, but a veritable description of his work as a director.

He begins by explaining succinctly that his counter-revolutionary work was confined to the Berezil’ Theatre:

My work in the organization unfolded in the theatre, its purpose on the theatrical front to guide the course of cultural and creative process in Ukraine along bourgeois-nationalistic rails, to educate new cadres in the nationalist spirit, the establishment of connections with other theatre centres, other nationalists, to support their national tendencies.

He continues to explain his work in the theatre, confirming that his work on the ‘theatrical front’ was designed to sabotage the political campaigns of Soviet power and the Communist Party, although he sounds a tiny note of doubt by adding the phrase ‘as far as possible’, perhaps suggesting that it would take a great deal more to undermine Soviet power than the work of one theatre director. The end of his confession returns with a flourish to the formulaic confession-speak with which it opened:

This statement is the result of an analysis of all my previous activities in terms of Soviet, Communist and political criteria – the result of a reassessment of all values. I hope that the organs of Soviet power will note the absolute sincerity of my repentances and this statement, as well as the related further testimony, and will give me the opportunity not only to live but also to correct the harm I have done with selfless work for the benefit of the Socialist Fatherland.

Aside from the formulaic quality of the text, it is also worth noting the first sentence here, one of the first moments when Kurbas discusses his ‘crimes’ within the context of the shifting landscape of the cultural and legal context of the times.

Following Kurbas’s initial confession, there are the minutes of his interrogation. First, the are 12 handwritten pages of questions and answers, all in Kurbas’s script and signed and dated by him on 17 March 1934. Directly behind is a typewritten copy of the handwritten original. The interrogation begins with some in-depth reflection from Kurbas about the origins of his nationalism. He points out that he was raised in Galicia, which was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in what he describes as ‘an atmosphere of extremely sharp inter-ethnic conflict’. It was this environment, Kurbas argues, that encouraged strong nationalist feeling within him from a very young age:

‘Age 7 I opposed myself to the Poles, and age 11 I decided I was not Russian but Ukrainian. This circumstance… determined my development on the basis of special Galician and Ukrainian conditions and followed from me a nationalist, as I was for the continuation of life up to the most recent days.’ (p57)

From the very first months of his life in the theatre, he says that this nationalism was with him, and this did not change after the revolution: ‘Although my further work took place in the conditions of the victorious proletarian revolution, its governing moments were not only social, artistic, but also national-political motives.’ (p57) He cites his nationalist attitudes as playing an important and ‘often prevailing’ role in the setting up of his theatre, the Berezil, in 1920-21.

He is then asked when his active counter-revolutionary work as a member of an underground organisation began and he says: ‘My vividly (Ярко) nationalist… activities began in the Theatre Berezil period in 1926.’(p58) When later pressed on the issue of the exact nature of his counter-revolutionary activity, he states:

I made Berezil Theatre a mouthpiece for nationalist dramatic art… Only under pressure from party organs and the proletarian public, I entered into the repertoire the plays of proletarian playwrights… My c-r [counter-revolutionary] work had a generally bourgeois western orientation, which led to the separation of the theatre from the tastes of the mass working audience.

He adds that educating his staff at the theatre in the ‘nationalist spirit’ took ‘the most prominent place’ in his counter-revolutionary work.

Everything in Kurbas’s testimony up until this point is all quite true; Kurbas did stage plays and poetry by Ukrainian writers, and also modified plays by western playwrights to sit more comfortably with his Ukrainian sensibilities. Furthermore, there was no Chekhov to be found at the Berezil’ – Kurbas did not stage plays by Russian writers. However, at the time of his ‘vividly nationalist’ counter-revolutionary activity, these acts did not constitute crimes but were a part of a state-endorsed cultural movement.

Kurbas goes on to explain that he had tried to cultivate links with theatres in other Soviet republics as part of his counter-revolutionary work, saying that the main thing he did was try to build a relationship with Georgian theatre:

‘For this I used Ukrainian month in Georgia, in particular the Berezil theatre tour in Tiflis.’ (p62). Kurbas explained that he saw the task as to build links with Georgian nationalists, using artistic sympathies, in order to build an anti-Soviet block. (p62).

The interrogation progresses chronologically, and the question move away from Kurbas’s early nationalism as a motive for counter-revolutionary activity, and instead begin to probe how he responded to events in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Kurbas makes specific reference to the famine in Ukraine as a new cause for his anti-Soviet action, saying: ‘Generally, 1932 should be considered a turning point for the organisation.’ Citing the famine and grain procurements as the central issue, Kurbas talks of the growing number of voices within his circle of colleagues calling for a coup (perevorot). By the following year, Kurbas explains, the impact of the famine in Ukraine coupled with other political developments began to have a dramatic impact on the atmosphere:

‘But in 1933, when I started working again in February against the backdrop of an even more acute famine in the country, I noticed a new general mood. This can be characterized as a craving for a single national front… After the arrival of c.[omrade] Postishev and the first article in ‘Communist’ signifying a turn in the national politics of Ukraine, the atmosphere of the organisation, judging by several meetings… became unprecedentedly grave.’

He describes how this changed the way that he approached his work, saying: ‘I reduced my work at the theatre… I made every effort to disrupt the political campaigns of the theatre,’ although he explains that he was ‘not once’ successful because of the ‘great vigilance’ of the theatre staff.

In 1933 Khvyl’ovyi committed suicide and again this event increased Kurbas’s antagonism towards the Soviet leadership: ‘In addition, especially after the suicide of Khvyl’ovyi I used all sorts of opportunity in conversations with the actors at the meetings to discredit the measures of the party…’ He describes emphasising the colonial element Postyshev’s policies, and even comparing it with fascism. He describes using the facts of the Ukrainian famine in theatre as ‘kindling’ for nationalist and actively anti-Soviet attitudes.

There follows a second interrogation, carried out by Comrade Krainnii who is the deputy procurator of the Ukrainian GPU, with the assistance of two further officers of the SPO. This interrogation builds on the first, going beyond the facts of the crimes at hand to discuss how Kurbas himself reflects on what he has done.

Kurbas begins by confirming the truth of his previous testimony, and he also confirms that he has not been ill-treated by the officers of the political police but has been treated absolutely ‘correctly and politely’. (p66). He is asked once again to reflect on his testimony and how his outlook has changed with regard to his work at the theatre. He says, ‘Here I gave a sharp analysis of my political past, based on the position of the communist party…’ When he is asked why he did not see things in the same way before he gives the main reason as the ‘approach of the investigation’ (p67). The interrogating officer does not let the matter rest, asking Kurbas what how he would describe his relationship with the Soviet authorities now, to which he answers: ‘I consider myself a staunch supporter without reservations of Soviet power as the main bastion (oplota) of world proletarian revolution.’ Yet again the interrogator will not let the matter drop, asking:

Would it be true if I said that you are not quite recovered from nationalism?

‘No, I am completely recovered.’

But you said that you have uncertainty (neyasnosti) about Soviet power?

Interestingly, at this point Kurbas does allow himself a little equivocation, referring to the importance of language in understanding culture, but of course, he does not agree that he is uncertain about Soviet power. (p69)

The interrogation closes with yet another moment of reflection for Kurbas on his re-education. Asked to comment on what his arrest means, Kurbas describes it a as a catastrophe both for himself and for his community. But yet again he takes the opportunity to remark on his rebirth as a Soviet citizen:

‘But as a political and creative subject I feel recovered and the treatment prompts to me to compare: I feel like a hysteric after very successful treatment by doctor FREUD.’ (P72)

Conclusion

The contrast highlighted by Katerina Clark between the fantastical nature of the testimony and meticulous way the files were transcribed and preserved is manifestly clear. As with so many archive files, there is a danger that we go to them and find what we believed we would find. However, and with this in mind, the first conclusion from these files is that, as Clark hints, the great length and detail of the files has very little to do with prosecuting the case against the suspect, whose fate was in effect already decided.

Some historians have suggested that the files are a complete falsehood, but this does not seem to be the case. What is also clear is that despite massive structural and bureaucratic upheaval within the Ukrainian NKVD at this time, the files are clear, logical and well organised. Some have suggested that these files were created in order to clearly document how and when decisions were made as a form of self-protection, although if this was the strategy then Lynne Viola’s recent book suggests that it did not work, as over 20 per cent of the NKVD staff were themselves purged in 1939 after Stalin called a halt to the purges, despite the evidence of the interrogation files. However, those operatives could not have seen what the future held, we should not totally discount the motive of wanting to document carefully the guilt of each suspect.

The question remains: was Kurbas therefore guilty of the crime with which he was charged: anti-Soviet activity? We know that he is innocent. Documents later on in the file, from the 1950s attest to the fact that after a complaint was made, the case against Kurbas was dropped for ‘lack of a crime’.

So how do we understand the earlier testimony? Is it false? Without wanting to sound too philosophical, looking for absolute truth or absolute falsehood here is misleading. Perhaps we can only understand Kurbas’s confession by understanding the intersection of the very particular forces that were at work at the start of the 1930s. First, the political shift from the policy of Ukrainianisation to the rejection – and fear – of Ukrainian nationalism. Many of Kurbas’s ‘crimes’ in fact sprang from his enthusiastic participation in the Bolsheviks endorsement of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s.

This is confirmed by Kurbas’s own references throughout his interrogation to his re-education. He is regularly asked to reflect on his ‘crimes’, and he gives various versions of the same reply, which is that he now sees his activities in a new light. Kurbas’s own understanding of how his actions have mutated from the actions of a theatre director into a crime demonstrates that he really does seem to apprehend how the landscape has changed (of course, what he thinks about this change is a separate matter and one that is hard to speculate about). That the SPP repeatedly ask him the same questions confirms that this is their view too.

The questions posed by those SPP officers who interrogated Kurbas also show interesting evidence of groupthink on their part, in the sense that the questions show that they are looking for particular types of evidence. For example, again and again they circle back to the question of Kurbas’s nationalism as confirmation of his criminal intent. The questions also often revolve about how Kurbas views events ‘now’ (ie in the 1930s), as opposed to how he saw them at the time.

Despite all the indications to the contrary, one answer is that what Kurbas did was a crime. But only a crime in that very specific moment in history in which it took place. Kurbas’s deeds had not been criminal in the decade previously, nor would they be two decades afterwards. However, in that decade, because of the extraordinary nature of events – collectivization and the ensuing famine, the changes in Soviet legality, not to mention Hitler’s coming to power – Kurbas’s actions could be construed as a crime. This may not make sense to us today, but it does at least begin to help us to understand the interrogation file as a source.