The Great Terror

For having gone into the habits of mind of the oppositionists who confessed, there are two major qualifications to add. First, as we have seen, not all the Communists held the ideas of Party unity and of self-abasement in the way that Zinoviev and Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov did; and from them it was often impossible to obtain public confessions. We are told that Syrtsov (interrogated by the dreadful Vlodzimirsky) “signed nothing” and that the same was true of Uglanov, Preobrazhensky, Shlyapnikov, Smilga, and others.⁴¹ And, second, public confessions were produced from non-Communists: the doctors in the 1938 Trial, most of the Polish underground leaders in 1945, the Bulgarian Protestant pastors in 1949. The motivations just described were of primary importance in the whole great cycle of party submission to Stalin, but in the trials themselves they were neither necessary nor sufficient causes of the particular surrender involved in public confession. In a number of the most important cases, they predisposed the leading accused to giving in to the pressures put on them, and they provided the rationale of the confessions made. But it was by the merely technical action of the NKVD interrogation system that these and other predisposing factors were brought to the full fruition of the scenes in the October Hall.

TORTURE

When it came to explaining how the confessions had been obtained, the first thought of hostile critics was torture. Indeed, Khrushchev was to remark in 1956,

How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—because of application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, depriving him of his judgment, taking away his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired.⁴²

The interrogation of the accused in the 1938 Trial was started with a laconic memo from NKVD Deputy People’s Commissar Frinovsky: “I authorize transfer to the Lefortovo. Beating permitted.”⁴³ And it is clear that Krestinsky, for example, was severely tortured.⁴⁴

Physical torture had, of course, been in use since the early days of the regime. There are many reports of police brutality in the early 1930s: in Rostov, prisoners were hit in the stomach with a sandbag; this was sometimes fatal. A doctor would certify that a prisoner who had died of it had suffered from a malign tumor.⁴⁵ Another interrogation method was the stoika

. It consisted of standing a prisoner against a wall on tiptoe and making him hold that position for several hours. A day or two of this was said to be enough to break almost anyone.⁴⁶

Other “improvised” torture methods included the “swallow,” which involved tying the hands and feet behind the back and hoisting the victim into the air.⁴⁷ One prisoner describes having her fingers slammed in a door.⁴⁸ Beating up was usual. Interrogators sometimes had to hand over prisoners to special heavily built thugs known to the prisoners as “boxers,” who would carry this out.⁴⁹

Nor was this done only with peasants and socially hostile elements: a colonel, later restored to the Party, reports being badly beaten up by the NKVD in 1935.⁵⁰ There are many accounts of women being beaten.⁵¹ In general, the provincial interrogators were the more brutal. A Red Army Choir accordionist had both legs broken at Khabarovsk;⁵² toenails were torn out at Baku; genitals beaten at Ashkhabad .⁵³

All this was, in a sense, “unofficial.” In most prisons, physical torture remained so. Needles, pincers, and so on are sporadically reported, and more specialized implements seem to have been in use at the Lefortovo.⁵⁴ But on the whole, some appearance of spontaneity was maintained. Feet and fingers were stamped on. Broken-off chair legs were the usual weapon for beatings, which were sometimes distinguished from “torture.” But as one very experienced prisoner says, this distinction was rather absurd when a man came back after such a beating with broken ribs, urinating blood for a week, or with a permanently injured spine and unable to walk.⁵⁵

Physical torture, though not uncommon, had been contrary to regulations until 1937. Then it suddenly became the usual method of interrogation, at least in the bulk of cases at the lower level. The time of the Zinoviev Trial saw the first official, though secret, permission to use “any method” put out on 29 July 1936.⁵⁶ Early in the following year, an authorization from the “Central Committee’

is, Stalin—was given to the NKVD. It was only on 20 January 1939 that a coded telegram formally confirming the system was circulated to the secretaries of Provincial Committees and Republican Central Committees of the Party, and the heads of NKVD organizations: