Homework in the Lubyanka If you are tried in public
for a crime against the Soviet State, you are not generally put in the dock—if you are a person of eminence, that is—until you can be relied upon to stick very closely, while under cross-examination, to the terms of a confession which has been extorted from you while awaiting trial; and the preparation of these largely fictitious and often inconsequent apologiae is apt to Make some time. At the last big public trial in Moscow, in 1938, Yagoda (one of Beria's predecessors as head of the. NKVD), Bukharin, Rykov and the rest had been in prison for months before they were suddenly yanked before a military tribunal; and even then one of them—Krestinsky—almost upset the apple cart by retracting his confession on the first day. In 1937 Marshal Tukhachevsky, second in command of the Red Army, who was to have attended the Coronation of King George VI, was shot after a secret trial within a month of being demoted to a subordinate command. There is perhaps nothing especially odd about Beria's case going into cold storage, or even about the fact that there has never been an announcement of his arrest; but one does get the impression that retribution is being rather slow in overtaking so notable a villain.
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