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PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 119Among the things needing to be "forgotten," besides the conditions inwhich the "building" was taking place, there was that which the day-to-daypolitics had by now become for Piatakov and many members of Stalin's circle:a succession of servile acts, of blackmail, of fear and desperation. Thistraumatic experience, for which the super-work at the NKTP could notcompensate, contributed to Piatakov's outbreak of "madness" in 1936,which we will discuss at the end of the next section.Ш. PSYCHOLOGYPiatakov's life is striking because of its tragic quality, the dramatic series ofups and downs, of suicides, massacres, insanity, alcoholism, betrayals, andintrigues that dogged its various phases. In this respect, his life is a faithfulmirror of the cataclysmic nature of Soviet history between 1917 and 1937(or even 1953). It also provides a clear window into the life of the "oldBolsheviks," showing us the state of "exhaustion" those few thousand peoplehad reached by 1936-1937. But Piatakov's life is also a mirror, thoughof smaller dimensions, of European history. We are, after all, discussing thelife of an intellectual with a European education and of a European culture,who adhered to a European ideology and whose destiny is deeply scarredby progressive personal regression and progressive barbarization.To follow the evolution of Piatakov's life from a "psychological" standpoint,we will mainly trust to the chronology outlined in the previous section.But here we must start with events preceding the outbreak of the war,with the anarchist experience of 1905-1907 in Ukraine. This experiencewas a scarring one, marked as it was by thousands of victims of both terrorand repression and by an astonishing level of desperation among its youngparticipants—a desperation that can be felt even today when lookingthrough Russian anarchist newspapers of the time, with their lists of suicides,accompanied by pictures of young, angry men, among whom, asWeizmann says in his memoirs, young Jews were particularly numerousand gloomy.The young Piatakov took an active part in those desperate events, sharingideas in which were reflected, though often coarsely, some of the"crisis" ideologies that had emerged in Europe at the end of the nineteenthcentury (referring to the Russian anarchists of those days, Avrich has spokenof "self-styled Nietzschean supermen," and Goethe's motto, "ImAnfang war die Tat," interpreted in a "heroic" key, was, for example, themasthead of the Chernoe znamia). Piatakov joined the group led by JustinZhuk, a young worker and a hero of anarcho-communism, who was latersentenced to death, then commuted to life katorga, for the murder of someguards during a robbery at one of the factories managed by Piatakov's