Interviews:

Brownell,
Herb

De Toledano,
Ralph

Eisenberg,
Frances

Goldstucker,
Eduard-1

Goldstucker,
Eduard-2

Kinoy,
Arthur

Lardner,
Ring

Nowak,
Jan

Robeson,
Paul

Service,
John

Swearingen,
M. Wesley



     
   


INTERVIEW WITH Professor Edouard Goldstucker

Continue

Q:

What:

A:

Did you know Gillian Rose at Sussex?

Q:

Yes I remember the name, yes.

A:

Yes sociology, philosophy. A very bright, she died. She died of cancer, at forty-eight years. I am receiving the bulletins of the University of Sussex, and in the last one I read it.

Q:

Yes somebody else did, somebody who was in our year. It's terrible actually. Too young really.

A:

Yes, yes.

Q:

Forty eight, she would have been?

A:

Oh she came to Sussex as a very young lecturer, and then she was, she was appointed professor at Warwick.

Q:

Professor Goldstucker, we just spoke about the process of interrogation, what were they actually trying to extract from you?

A:

Oh they were trying to extract me, as from all other people who they got into their power, the admission that we were enemy agents and that we were out to undermine the regime. That we were enemies of the people, the state, enemies of socialism. That was the aim, and that we were prepared, cooked to be presented to the public as, well, the worst criminals against it's interest.

Q:

So what were they actually doing to you?

A:

They were preparing us to present us as such criminals. Look it was a very simple device really. It was a device thought out by the notorious General Procurator of the Soviet Union, Vishinsky, he was later, I met him as a diplomat at the Paris Peace conference and at the United Nations General Assembly. The very simple change in the legal requirements. It means the key was the confession of the indicted person. And then there was no need of any proofs. As soon as the confession was obtained, that was enough for the trial and the sentence. So we were put at the disposal of the Secret Police, with almost unlimited powers over us, to bring us into a state where we were prepared to make that confession. Very simple. Because the other guarantees of criminal procedure were not necessary, and that was, that was the, the I don't know, the trick if you like to call it that, of those show trials, from the beginning, from the 1930's in Moscow.

Q:

How did you survive, psychologically that kind of process?

A:

How did I survive. People have more resilience than they would think, and well, the main thing was what I, you see at the end, my main worry was not surviving. My main worry was to finish with that interrogation, and that, being at the disposal of the Secret Police altogether, even if I had to pay for it with my life. Just to get that behind me.

Q:

Why was that so important?

A:

Because that was a horrible existence. Unsupportable on the edge of what was supportable, all the time. And to have it behind me, to have finished with it. It was the main concern at the end.

Q:

During the time of the interrogation without today's hindsight, were you actually aware at that time, of any evidence that Russians were involved in the investigation?

A:

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. I knew very well that the Russians, although I never came face to face with any of them, during the interrogation, that the Russians were behind it. Because the questioning officer had before him every morning when he started my interrogation, a series of questions, to put to me on that day. And sometimes the questions he put, he was a very, well he had a very limited education let's say. Some of the questions he put to me were badly translated questions from the Russian. Very clearly, so I knew that the questions were being prepared by somebody of Russian language, the Russian language, it was clear. Because the system as I knew, as I learned afterwards was such, that for those trials, a special ministry was created, in 1950, a Ministry of State Security, and the, that Ministry was really led by the Russian so-called advisors. Russia sent here specially trained, highly trained people as advisors to more or less all ministries, but especially to that Ministry of Social, of national Security. And all the trials were conceived and conducted in the background by these people. You see for instance Gottwald refused for a while the idea that he should, he should allow Slansky to be arrested. Slansky. was his core fighter from the very beginning of his political career. From the beginning of the 1920's, and it was not a simple problem for him to consider Slansky suddenly as the head of a conspiracy against him, because Slansky was one of the most loyal helpers of his whole, during his whole political career. So to break his resistance, Stalin sent here one of the highest positioned Soviet ministers, to persuade him, and Gottwald had a very complicated attitude towards Stalin. He admired him, and he was afraid of him. Because he went through, he lived in Moscow during those years of the first anti-communist show trials in the thirties, and he knew what Stalin is capable of. So he yielded at the end. Accepted everything that went with it. That means the Soviet actual Soviet management of these trials.