The Great Terror

Muralov’s disturbing reference to the alleged ravine as a “ditch” was presumably based on definite knowledge. Vyshinsky commented in his closing speech, “But the fact remains a fact. An attempt on the life of Comrade Molotov was made. That the car overturned on the brink of the 15-metre ‘ditch’, as Muralov here modestly called it, is a fact.”¹⁰⁷

It is curious, moreover, that the only terrorist plot (apart from the Kirov murder) which actually reached the stage of any action was not committed by one of the trained and devoted Trotskyites, but by the locally recruited petty adventurer “Arnold, alias Ivanov, alias Vasilyev, alias Rask, alias Kulpenen …” as Vyshinsky put it.¹⁰⁸ Although Trotsky had “insisted … particularly strongly” on committing a number of terrorist acts “more or less simultaneously,” only the one against Molotov had come to anything. It is true (even officially) that Molotov was only rather shaken. But still, none of the proposed victims of Prigozhin or Golubenko, or the other professional assassins, was even shaken.

And now the court found the difficulty of mixing fact with fiction. Since there really had been an accident, which it was decided to inflate into an assassination attempt, the assassin was not a picked NKVD agent provocateur but the chauffeur actually involved. This proved to be a mistake. Instead of an Olberg or a Berman-Yurin, chosen and groomed for the occasion, the court was faced with a man who was wholly unsuited to the part that chance had called on him to play.

At the evening session of 26 January, Vyshinsky came to the examination of Arnold, the driver who had allegedly, under orders from the Siberian conspirators, made the attempt. The whole exchange was a ludicrous interlude. Vyshinsky for once seemed to lose control of the situation.

¹⁰⁹

Arnold said that he had lost his nerve and only produced a slight accident. But it was perfectly clear that no conspirator could ever have expected a man of his type to sacrifice himself, as the plan allegedly intended. In fact, his final remark completely contradicted the idea that he would be dead after the accident, since he explained his motives in becoming a Trotskyite as being based on the Trotskyites’ promise that when they came to power “I would not be among the last people then.”

In the exchange (which goes on for thirty pages in the transcript), Vyshinsky no longer faced a more or less intellectual collaborator, but a small-time lumpen-proletarian crook and adventurer. It took five or ten minutes to straighten out Arnold’s real name from his various aliases, and even then this was not properly settled and caused further trouble later on.