In the new industrial region of the Upper Ob basin—the “Kuzbas”—almost 2,000 miles east of Moscow, a number of reconstructed Trotskyites held posts suitable to their condition. The great plants had gone up, amid a squalor for the workers—mainly deportees—which the old industrial revolutions in the capitalist West had not matched. At the same time, unrelenting pressure for results at all costs had led to the virtual abandonment of the usual sort of safety precautions. Frightful accidents were common.
On 23 September 1936 there was an explosion in the Tsentralnaya Mine at Kemerovo. Its director, Noskov, and several of his subordinates were at once arrested. His superior, Norkin, Head of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust since 1932, was arrested on 30 September.37
For the NKVD this was a most useful line of responsibility, as Norkin was an immediate link with Drobnis and, through him, with Muralov. A whole “Trotskyite nest” in West Siberia, operating moreover under the direct orders of the Deputy People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, Pyatakov, was thus laid open to easy attack. To make it yet easier, the NKVD ordered its representative in the Kemerovo industrial area, Shestov, to accept the role of accomplice.38It was thus possible to establish the idea of widespread sabotage before Pyatakov and the others came to trial. From 19 to 22 November, a great trial took place in Novosibirsk, before a court of the Military Collegium under Ulrikh, in which the accidents in the mines and factories of that city and Kemerovo were charged against Noskov and eight other defendants, including a German engineer, Stickling. In addition, the charge was now put forward that an attempt had been made to assassinate Molotov. The defendants were linked, through Drobnis and Shestov (who appeared as “witnesses”), with Muralov and Pyatakov.
At this trial there were confessions, and even documents, about an anti-Soviet printing establishment. It seems that this actually existed. The cellar where it had stood still showed signs of its presence three years later. But the whole thing had been an NKVD operation. The job had been done at night by prisoners under guard awaiting execution. As to the thousands of leaflets supposed to have been distributed, it was clear that this had not happened, since anyone caught with such a leaflet would have been arrested, and no one in Kemerovo knew of any such arrests. One local commented, “Maybe the conspirators printed them up just to provide themselves with bedtime stories.”39
One of the accused, the German engineer Stickling, was not given a death sentence. Later, in the Gestapo prison in Lublin, he said that his confession was false, and implied that it had been obtained because the NKVD was able to blackmail him about his private life.40
A Soviet industrialist who was sent to Kemerovo in 1939, and actually took over the very office from which Norkin had allegedly organized his crimes, has produced an account of the background of the trial. As a prominent local figure pointed out, though the saboteurs were now dead, the accidents still went on. In any case, if engineers had really wished to make trouble, it was clear that they could have blown the whole place to pieces. Moreover, in the files there were many reports from the executed men sent by them to the Commissariat of Heavy Industry coal administration warning about the conditions which were bound to lead to accidents.41
But the Tsentralnaya Mine disaster was not the only one which a determined investigation could turn up in the Kuzbas. On 29 October, a Commission of Experts was sent to Kemerovo to investigate two explosions and other accidents which had taken place in the plants of the Kemerovo Combined Works Construction Trust in February, March, and April 1936. A similar body started work on a series of pit fires in the nearby Prokopyevsk coal mines—sixty of these had occurred up to the end of 1935.42
The experts produced findings of sabotage. The material now available was sufficient by any standards to damn the West Siberian defendants.Although this West Siberian group was to provide no less than seven out of the seventeen accused in the forthcoming trial, two other sabotage groups were also being prepared. One was headed by Rataichak, Chief of the Central Administration of the Chemical Industry in Pyatakov’s Commissariat: on 22 October 1936 the Head of the Gorlovka Nitrogen Fertilizer Works, Pushin, was arrested in connection with an explosion there on 11 November 1935. He confessed at once and implicated his chief.43
This group of saboteurs was completed by an NKVD agent, Hrasche,44 who worked in the Foreign Division of Rataichak’s Administration, and so formed a useful link with Japanese espionage and other sinister foreign forces.