The Great Terror

Serebtyakov, who followed, exposed a number of railway chiefs and explained that the system of railway organization prior to Kaganovich’s appointment in 1935 had amounted to intentional sabotage. Otherwise, he only contributed accounts of a few more terrorist groups to the already large pool. It is uncertain if he knew that Vyshinsky had taken over his dacha.⁹⁰

On 25 and 26 January came the questioning of the “Siberians.” The evidence was mainly concerned, on the one hand, with the establishment of the links between these men and Pyatakov and the Moscow Center; and, on the other, with the detail of the ways in which they had contrived accidents and explosions.

Drobnis started with the usual examples of faulty planning in industry:

Needless to say, this retarded the speed and progress of construction work. It must be said that this was done rather cleverly. For example, there were plans for the main, basic buildings of the Combined Fertilizer Works, but for things like the gas mains, the steam supply pipes and so forth, which might appear of secondary importance but were really of very great importance for starting the plant on schedule, plans were not prepared in time, and of course this constant fussing in dealings with the organizations responsible for the designs led to the plan arriving much too late….⁹¹

… The Kemerovo district power station was put into such a state that, if it were deemed necessary for wrecking purposes, and when the order was given, the mine could be flooded. In addition, coal was supplied that was technically unsuitable for the power station, and this led to explosions. This was done quite deliberately.⁹²

He went on to the case of the Tsentralnaya Mine. He ended, but only after considerable bullying from Vyshinsky, with the confession that the plotters had hoped for as much loss of life as possible from the explosions. Although he had been in jail at the time of the disaster, he accepted responsibility.

Shestov, the NKVD agent, confirmed Sokolnikov on the old saboteurs. He gave a useful warning to engineers throughout the country: “… Although Ovsyannikov was not a member of our organization he was the sort of manager who left everything to the engineers and did not do anything himself, and he could quickly be converted into a Trotskyite.”⁹³

His own excavation system in Prokopyevsk had resulted in no fewer than sixty underground fires by the end of 1935.⁹⁴

Shestov explained that it was Trotskyites rather than Government policy which was rendering the worker’s life intolerable:

Instructions were issued to worry the life out of the workers. Before a worker reached his place of work, he must be made to heap two hundred curses on the heads of the pit management. Impossible conditions of work were created. Not only for Stalchanovite methods but even for normal methods.⁹⁵

Norkin and Stroilov gave similar evidence of sabotage. Norkin had “planned to put the State District Power Station out of action by means of explosions. In February 1936 there were three explosions.”⁹⁶ He had also been responsible for a faulty investment program.⁹⁷ When asked the motives of his confession, he contrived to hint at the truth:

Vyshinsky:

And why did you afterwards decide to give way?

Norkin:

Because there is a limit to everything.

Vyshinsky:

Perhaps pressure was brought to bear upon you?

Norkin:

I was questioned, exposed, there were confrontations.

Vyshinsky:

You were confronted with evidence, facts?

Norkin:

There were confrontations.

⁹⁸

Stroilov’s evidence is chiefly interesting for what is presumably Stalin’s view of Trotsky’s writings: “I said that I had read Trotsky’s book, Mein Leben. He asked me whether I liked it, I said from the literary point of view he, as a journalist, wrote well, but because of the infinite number of ‘I’s’ in it, I did not like it.”⁹⁹

At the end of his testimony, Vyshinsky, who had not bothered to check the Oslo airfield situation, went through a long rigmarole to establish the reality of a minor contact of Stroilov’s from Berlin:

Vyshinsky:

I request the court to have attached to the records a statement by the Savoy Hotel: ‘Foreign tourist H.V. Berg, born 1874, German subject, merchant by profession, Hotel Savoy, Room 223 (it is identical with the telephone number), December 1–15, 1930, arrived from Berlin.

    ‘In the room occupied by Berg there was a telephone No. 8–50, ext. 223. Director of the hotel. Seal and reference number.’

¹⁰⁰

Immediately afterward, he was doing the same thing about an address in Berlin Stroilov had visited:

Vyshinsky:

I request the Court to have attached to the record this Berlin address and telephone number taken from this official publication [hands to the Court a big book in a red binding].

Here

, against No. 8563 there is Wüster, Armstrasse, and the address of this Wüster, which is mentioned also in Stroilov’s notebook.

¹⁰¹