Molotov’s Rudzutak:

A blacked-out face, a blackened conscience

A few things struck me while I was working on Klutsis’sscissors. I’ll focus on just one of them here. I remembered that Molotov had made several remarks about Rudzutak in his conversations with Feliks Chuyev, and that they didn’t quite square with one another. But of course I couldn’t remember the details.

After publishing the article, I opened Molotov Remembers (Molotov Anlatıyor), found the passages on Rudzutak and reread them. Before turning to what Molotov had to say, I’ve reproduced the Klutsis photomontage from the previous article above. Among the leaders arranged around Stalin’s enlarged figure is the Politburo member Rudzutak. You can see him just to the right of Stalin as you look at the image, behind Stalin’s left shoulder. His face has been blacked out, and his name has been erased from the list at the foot of the poster.

Through Molotov’s eyes, we glimpse the man behind the black blot on the poster. In the same account, we encounter the political logic used to justify Rudzutak’s arrest, torture and execution by firing squad. Let’s hear from Molotov in his own words.

Now Rudzutak - he never confessed to anything about himself. He was executed by firing squad. A Politburo member.

He was unquestionably a very intelligent man.

He was my deputy, I met him at work. A fine, intelligent fellow.

Molotov knew Rudzutak well. He recounts Rudzutak’s imprisonment before the Revolution, his sentence of hard labour and his service to the party. He describes him as a capable and experienced Bolshevik. Molotov’s knowledge of the man went well beyond what he could have learnt from police reports. Rudzutak was his deputy, a fellow member of the Politburo and an old comrade he had worked with.

And Molotov knows what happened to him.

Rudzutak complained that the Chekists were using intolerable methods with him. He offered no evidence.

Rudzutak said he had been badly beaten and tortured. Nevertheless he held firm. Indeed, he seemed to have been cruelly tortured.

First Molotov says that Rudzutak ‘offered no evidence’. Then he concedes that Rudzutak seems to have been brutally tortured. We learn that Rudzutak told Molotov and the other Stalinist leaders what had been done to him. He denied the charges and said his interrogators were trying to force him to confess.

They heard about the torture from Rudzutak himself. He was still alive when he was brought before them and pleaded for help.

- Couldn’t you have protected him since you had known him for so long?

- But one must not act just on personal impressions! After all, we had materials incriminating him.

- If you were confident...

- I was not 100 percent confident. How could one be 100 percent confident if they say that ...

Rudzutak (1920s)

Molotov is not 100 per cent certain. By his own account, he knows Rudzutak, knows he was tortured and knows he denied the charges. Yet he still says, "After all, we had materials incriminating him."

But how had those materials been produced? Could statements extracted from others under torture really count as evidence? Wasn’t that exactly what the man standing before him was telling him? Wasn’t he saying that he had been beaten and tortured, and that they were trying to force him to confess?

Molotov’s doubts are not enough to stop the execution. That much he tells us himself. He leaves his reasons unstated, but we know he was unwilling to put himself at risk by intervening on Rudzutak’s behalf. After all, even when his own wife was arrested on patently false charges, he did not intervene. He could not bring himself to take the risk, even though he was 100 per cent certain she was innocent. We can hardly expect such candour from one of the principal architects of Stalinist terror.

Judging from the evidence produced at the trial, Rudzutak was an active accomplice of the right-wingers in their terrorist schemes and designs to overthrow the Central Committee and the leadership. So I consider him a guilty individual who doggedly put up a great deal of resistance. The very fact that he didn’t want to talk with the security men ...

We need to pause here and read Molotov’s words again.

In Molotov’s eyes, Rudzutak’s resistance to his torturers becomes evidence of his guilt. If he confessed, he was guilty. If he refused to confess and held out, he was still guilty. And his resistance showed just how determined a criminal he was!

How could anyone prove their innocence under that logic?

At one time I even expressed certain doubts that he had been justly condemned. But when I read the fresh material ... The trials fully exposed him as an active accomplice of the rightists.

He says he had doubts from time to time. Yet to put those doubts to rest, he went back to the ‘evidence’ produced by the very same machinery of repression. He acknowledges the torture, then reads the accusations made in its shadow and is convinced all over again. He ends up contradicting himself because he cannot bring himself to say the one thing that would explain his conduct. I couldn’t afford to put myself at risk.

He was given to leisure. He did not especially distinguish himself in energetic, dedicated work. But as a highly capable man of vast political experience, he was useful in discussion.

At the same time, however, I saw that he was entangled in personal affairs, mixed up with the devil knows what kind of people, with women ....

Rudzutak’s fondness for leisure and for women … Molotov dwells on these things too.

Could any of this count as evidence of espionage, terrorism or membership of a counter-revolutionary organisation? Of course not. Yet it serves a purpose in Molotov’s account. He acknowledges Rudzutak’s revolutionary record and abilities, then gradually paints him as a man who had grown lax, morally corrupt and untrustworthy. This portrait takes the place of concrete evidence of a crime and makes the conviction easier to accept.

As for Stalin’s role …

- “Do as you have to with him,” Stalin concluded. And Stalin had always had good relations with Rudzutak.

- And then he had him shot?

- Shot.

Stalin had always treated Rudzutak well, we are told. He had also told them to do what they had to do. In the end, Rudzutak was shot.

Soviet leaders at the celebrations marking the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution, 1929. From left to right: Stalin, Bukharin, Ordzhonikidze and Rudzutak. Nine years later, Bukharin and Rudzutak would be executed by firing squad. Ordzhonikidze took his own life in 1937. Photograph: Associated Press.

Stalin’s ‘good relations’ with Rudzutak did nothing to change the man’s fate. In Molotov’s account, the detail serves only to deflect blame from Stalin. Chuyev then puts the question to him directly.

- Then Stalin is to blame for all that?

- No. You can’t say Stalin is ...

- Who then?

- It couldn’t have been done without his consent, of course. He was in desperate straits. There were so many people around him who changed....

"It couldn’t have been done without his consent, of course." Behind Molotov’s defence lies the belief that Stalin was politically indispensable.

Once that premise is accepted, there is no room to question Stalin’s responsibility. You may know that a man you worked with was tortured. You may be unsure of his guilt and even wonder from time to time whether the verdict was just. None of that changes the outcome.

When Chuyev reminds Molotov of the persecution of others and asks how he could have allowed people he knew to be put to death, Molotov’s reply is even more explicit.

I would like to see you in our positions then. I wonder how you would have coped.

The question of whether the man who was killed was guilty gives way to a discussion of the difficult circumstances in which the leaders made their decisions. Rudzutak’s torture and death recede into the background as the focus shifts to the political burden borne by those who killed him.

We don’t know who blacked out Rudzutak’s face in Klutsis’s photomontage. Official institutions erased images of those who had been purged, and ordinary citizens were expected to do the same with their own hands. If anyone found out you’d left the images untouched, you could find yourself in serious trouble.

In Molotov’s account, though, we can see another kind of erasure at work. From time to time, the possibility that Rudzutak was innocent comes into view. Then it is blacked out again.

Source: Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev, edited with an introduction and notes by Albert Resis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 305-306.