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PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 125protection do not rale out, I believe, an element of sincerity. 17We thus come back to the dualism of the 1930s, which we mentioned inthe last section. On the one hand there was the NKTP first deputy—inWeissberg's words, a man "of iron will and boundless energy," who "knewpersonally every important works or factory in the country," who "neverseemed to stop working and at three o'clock in the morning could still befound hard at it in his office." On the other, there was Stalin's slave and victim,the fearful "red-haired Judas," to use the words of Trotsky's son, whomet him by chance in Berlin and saw him turn and ran away (very differentbehavior, for example, from that of I. N. Smirnov, who promised and gavehis old friends information about the crisis in the USSR).And yet Piatakov, too, must have "seen" what was happening, the conditionsin which building was taking place, the famine in Ukraine, the suicidesof old acquaintances like Mykola Skrypnyk. And, even if Piatakovwas no Bukharin, who reacted with bursts of tears and depression, theevents of those years must in some way have marked him. In view of hisworking rhythms, though, it is hard to believe what Berger, the ex-secretaryof the Communist party of Palestine, said of a Piatakov entirely aware ofthe harm he was doing, of the lie he was living, and who was again drowningthese feelings in drink. Perhaps Berger was mixing him up with Preobrazhenskii,who apparently drank, or with Smilga and Smirnov who, in1931, were, in fact, again of the opposition. But it is certain that Piatakov inthose years knew little or no stability, had no private life, and lived throughextremely difficult moments psychologically (apart from anything else, itseems that his wife, from whom he eventually separated, had become analcoholic).It is not surprising, therefore, that when it became clear that Stalin hadalso got the NKTP—Piatakov's reason for living—in his sights, Piatakov'scrisis reached a new stage. The attack on the NKTP, which began in 1935,became a full-fledged one in 1936. By June of that year, after having triedto defend his creation and having failed, Piatakov was a man ready to doanything.In line with the above-mentioned dualism, his reactions followed twolines. On the one side, Piatakov put, as never before, his fate in the hands ofOrdzhonikidze, renewing up to the last minute his pledges of friendship andpersonal devotion ("you appear for me not only as a member of the Politburoand a People's Commissar; you are for me the comrade to whom I ampersonally attached with all my soul") as well as of unselfish dedication to a17See also fh. 16.