The Great Terror

… investigations at the NKVD are carried out according to the Code of Criminal Procedure. But the grounds for initiating a criminal case are somewhat broader.

… the accused must not be allowed to get the better of you…. During the investigation the accused must be kept strictly in line.

… Failure to confirm the evidence [already obtained] is indicative of poor work by the interrogators.⁷⁹

There is no doubt that not only nonpolitical defendants, but even strong political opponents can be broken by the “Yezhov method.” In this connection the statements of the Bulgarian Protestant pastors in their February 1949 Trial are the most relevant, since no one could possibly argue that loyalty to Party or creed induced them. In their confessions, they all remarked that they now saw Communist rule of their country “in a new light.” In their final pleas, Pastor Naumov thanked the police for their “kindness and consideration” and said, “I have sinned against my people and against the whole world. This is my resurrection”; Pastor Diapkov was in tears as he admitted his guilt and said, “Do not make of me a useless martyr by giving me the death sentence. Help me to become a useful citizen and a hero of the Fatherland Front”; Pastor Bezlov, who had earlier stated that he had read 12,000 pages of Marxist literature while in prison and that this had entirely changed his outlook, declared, “I have now an intellectual appreciation of what the new life means and I want to play my part in it.”fn2

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 26 October 1953, Dr. Mayo drew attention to the parallel between the similar treatment of the American prisoners of war in Korea to obtain confessions of “germ warfare” and the work of Pavlov in establishing conditioned reflexes in dogs. Soviet psychologists and physiologists always treated Pavlov as the basis of their work, and his method of associating stimuli to provide an automatic response accords with the reduction of prisoners to the point at which they associate survival with the single response of accepting what their captors tell them. In a human being, this involves considerable degradation. An animal’s response—at least to situations which it recognizes (the only ones it can cope with)—is in principle unconditional and without discrimination. Man’s higher status consists precisely in his ability to distinguish and discriminate. To put it another way, among men it is only the psychotic who gives an unconditional reaction to a stimulus.

But a man, even in this state, is not an animal. He needs at least the appearance of rational motives. In the case of Communists, as we have seen, this was ready to hand in their Party principles: a survivor of the 1949 purges in Hungary describes how Laszlo Rajk, after severe torture, regarded service to the Party as a “Golden Bridge” back to his self-respect.⁸⁰ There were other pressures.

HOSTAGES

There is no doubt that threats to the family—the use, that is, of hostages for good behavior—was one of the most powerful of all Stalin’s safeguards. It seems a general rule that with confessions by prominent figures, members of the family were in the power of the NKVD. Bukharin, Rykov, and Zinoviev all had children of whom they were very fond, whereas at least some of those tried in private, such as Karakhan, did not. Several of the accused in their final pleas referred to their children—for example, Kamenev and Rosengolts.

Engineers under arrest as early as 1930 had been threatened with reprisals against their wives and children.⁸¹ And the decree of 7 April 1935, which extended full adult penalties down to children of twelve, was a terrible threat to those oppositionists with children. If Stalin could openly and publicly declare such an atrocity, they could be sure that he would not hesitate to apply the death penalty secretly to their own children in cases where he thought it would bring him advantage. According to Orlov, it became regular practice, on Yezhov’s orders, for interrogators to have a copy of the decree on their desks.⁸²

We are also told that fear of reprisals was made more dramatic and emotionally effective by the display on the interrogator’s desk of private belongings of members of the family.⁸³ Even if accepted and allowed for on the conscious level, this must have been a continual argument in the unconscious in favor of surrender.

The use of relatives as hostages, and their imprisonment or execution in other cases, was a new development in Russian history. In Tsarist times, revolutionaries never had this problem. Here again, Stalin recognized no limits. Moreover, it was not merely a matter of threats to relatives’ lives: “They tortured husbands in front of wives and vice versa.” Again, Roy Medvedev tells us that Kossior stood up under torture, and was only broken when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought to the interrogation room and raped in front of him.⁸⁴