One misunderstanding in particular results from the image of these men as old revolutionaries who had not trembled in Tsarist dungeons-- seasoned, tried and true, hardened, etc., fighters. But there is a plain and simple mistake here. These defendants were not those old revolutionaries. They had acquired that glory by inheritance from and association with the Narodniks, the SR's, and the Anarchists. They were the ones, the bomb throwers and the conspirators, who had known hard-labor imprisonment and real prison terms -- but even they had never in their lives experienced a genuinely merciless interrogation (because such a thing did not exist at all in Tsarist Russia). And these others , the Bolshevik defendants at the treason trials, had never known either interrogation or real prison terms. The Bolsheviks had never been sentenced to special "dungeons", any Sakhalin, any special hard labor in Yakutsk. It is well known that Dzerzhinsky had the harest time of them all, that he had spent all his life in prisons. But, according to our yardstick, he had served just a normal "tenner" , just a simple ten-ruble bill, like any ordinary collective farmer in our time. True, included in that tenner were three years in the hard-labor central prison, but that is nothing special either.

The Party leaders who were the defendants in the trials of 1936 to 1938 had, in their revolutionary pasts, known short, easy imprisonment, short periods in exile, and had never even had a whiff of hard labor. Bukharin had many petty arrests on his record, but they amounted to nothing. Apparently, he was never imprisoned anywhere for a whole year at a time, and he had just a wee bit of exile on Onega.(footnote 35). Kamenev, despite long years of propaganda work and travel to all the cities of Russia, spent only two years in prison and one and a half years in exile. In our time, even sixteen-year-old kids got five right off. Zinoviev, believe it or not, never spent as much as three months in prison.

...

True, the directors of this dramatic production seem to have had a harder task in selecting the performer than they'd had in the earlier trials of the engineers: in those trials they had forty barrels to pick from, so to speak, whereas here the available troupe was small. Everyone knew who the chief performers were, and the audience wanted to see them in the roles and them only.

Yet there was a choice! The most farsighted and determined of those who were doomed did not allow themselves to be arrested. They committed suicide first (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik). It was the ones who wanted to live who allowed themselves to be arrested. And one could certainly braid a rope from the ones who wanted to live! But even among them some behaved differently during the interrogations, realized what was happening, turned stubborn, and died silently but at least not shamefully. For some reason, they did not, after all, put on public trial Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yenukidze, Chubar, Kosior, and, for that matter, Krylenko himself, even though their names would have embellished the trials.

They put on trial the most compliant. A selection was made after all.