‘Question to Bibikov: “Do you confirm the suspect Fedayev’s statement?”
‘Bibikov’s reply: “No. That is a lie. We never had such a conversation.’
‘This statement has been read to us and is accurate. (Signed) Fedayev. The accused Bibikov refused to sign.’
But in the end his defiance was useless, witnessed only by NKVD Lieutenants Slavin and Chalkov, who conducted the confrontation, and Fedayev himself, who was probably too terrified to think Bibikov’s stand was anything other than masochistic stupidity. Bibikov eventually broke completely.
‘At the Kharkov Tractor Factory we decided to sabotage an expensive, complicated machine which was crucial to the production of wheeled tractors…’ he wrote in blotted, tiny writing in his third and last detailed confession. ‘We persuaded engineer KOZLOV to leave a tool in the machine so that it would be broken for a long period. The machine alone cost 40,000 in gold and is one of only two in the whole country… At the KhTZ we plotted to throw an artillery round from the war into a blast furnace to put it out of action for two or three months… I also recruited my own deputy, Ivan KAVITSKY, into our organization… We attempted to undermine the work of the KhTZ by delaying the fulfilment of orders for the Hammer and Sickle Tractor station, and delayed the payment of wages to the workers.’
In the margin are inexplicable notes in his own writing, apparently written under dictation, saying, ‘Who, What, When?’, ‘More precise’, ‘Which organization?’
‘Our evil counter-revolutionary act was averted only by the vigilance of senior engineer GINZBURG,’ the last confession concludes. ‘This is how I betrayed my Party. Bibikov.’
The manuscript had been carefully torn across halfway down the page. Above the tear are signs of some kind of scribble, as though the writer had tried, in despair, to erase the death sentence he had just written for himself.
Then his voice disappears. There are excerpts from the transcripts of other accused in which Bibikov’s name is mentioned – sixteen interlinking confessions, all meticulously typed with angry, almost punched-through commas between the capitalized names, ‘ZELENSKY, BUTSENKO, SAPOV, BRANDT, GENKIN, BIBIKOV…’
He was brought to trial before a closed session of the Military Collegium in Kiev on 13 October 1937, the so-called troika courts of three judges who heard in camera the cases of those accused under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which covered ‘any act designed to overthrow, undermine or weaken the authority of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets’. The court’s conclusion is long and detailed, mostly repeating word for word the accounts of acts of sabotage included in the confessions. But for good measure, the final draft upped the charges and concluded that ‘Bibikov was a member of the k.r. [the term kontrarevolustionnaya is used so often that the typist begins to abbreviate it] Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist organization which carried out the wicked assassination of Comrade Kirov on 1 December 1934 and in following years planned and carried out terrorist acts against other Party and government leaders… We sentence the accused to the highest form of criminal punishment: to be shot and his property confiscated. Signed, A.M. ORLOV, S.N. ZHDANA, F.A. BATNER.’
Bibikov signed a form confirming that he had read the court’s ruling and sentence. They were the last recorded words he wrote. Signing off, with bureaucratic neatness, on the file which contained the state’s version of his life’s story. It was the final act of a life devoted to serving the Party.
The last form of the seventy-nine pages in the so-called ‘living’ file, the flimsiest of all, was a mimeographed quartersheet strip of paper roughly cut off at the bottom with scissors, which confirms that the sentence of the court has been carried out. There is no hint of where or how, though the usual method was ‘nine grams’, the weight of a pistol round, to the back of the head. The signature of the commanding officer is illegible; the date is 14 October 1937.
For the two days that I sat in Kiev exarrurung the file, Alexander Panamaryev, a young officer of the Ukrainian Security Service, sat with me, reading out passages of barely legible cursive script and explaining legal terms. He was pale and intelligent, about my age, the kind of quiet young man who looked as though he lived with his mother. He seemed, underneath an affected professional brusqueness, almost as moved as I was by what we read.
‘Those were terrible times,’ he said quietly as we took a cigarette break in the gathering dusk of Volodimirskaya Street, the granite bulk of the old NKVD building looming above us. ‘Your grandfather believed, but do you not think that his accusers believed also? Or the men who shot him? He knew that people had been shot before he was arrested, but did he speak out? How do we know what we would have done in that situation? May God forbid that we ever face the same test.’
Solzhenitsyn once posed the same, terrible question. ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?’
Bibikov himself would have perfectly understood, with his rational mind, as he stood in a cellar or faced a prison wall in his last moments, the logic of his executioners. And perhaps – why not? – he might, if he had met different people in his early days in the Party, found different patrons, have become an executioner himself. Did he not explain away the famine which his Party had brought to the Ukraine as a necessary purging of enemy elements? Did he not consider himself one of the Revolution’s chosen, ruled by a higher morality? Bibikov was no innocent, caught by an evil and alien force beyond his comprehension. On the contrary, he was a propagandist, a fanatic of the new morality – the morality which now demanded his life, however pointlessly, for the greater good.
‘No, it was not for show nor out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defence of all the government’s actions,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness – otherwise insanity was not far off.’
When people become the building blocks of history, intelligent men can abdicate moral responsibility. Indeed the Purge – in Russian chistka, or ‘cleaning’ – was to those who made it something heroic, just as the building of the great factory was heroic to Bibikov. The difference was that Bibikov made his personal revolution in physical bricks and concrete, whereas the NKVD’s bricks were class enemies, every one sent to the execution chamber another piece of the great edifice of Socialism. When one condones a death for the sake of a cause, one condones them all.
In some ways, perhaps, Bibikov was more guilty than most. He was a senior Party member. Men like him gave the orders and compiled the lists. The rank-and-file investigators followed them. Were these men evil, then, given that they had no choice but to do what they were told? Was Lieutenant Chavin, a man who tortured confessions from Party men like Bibikov, not less guilty than the Party men themselves, who taught their juniors that ends justify means? The men drawn to serve in the NKVD, in the famous phrase of its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either saints or scoundrels – and clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths. But they were not aliens, not foreigners, but men, Russian men, made of the same tissue and fed by the same blood as their victims. ‘Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?’ asked Solzhenitsyn. ‘Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.’