The Great Terror

Owing to the loose family life prevailing in the slums of Petrograd, he had already accumulated “three surnames by the age of seven,” Vyshinsky remarked. He had wandered to Finland, then to Germany and Holland, while still in his early teens, with yet another surname, and then, during the First World War, to Norway and England. On his return, he was conscripted, but deserted and was then jailed for six months. There are pages of this sort of interrogation, and now Vyshinsky again became entangled in the names, and also in a complicated muddle about the various regiments Arnold had joined and deserted from in the war and the ranks he had held as compared with those he had gained by simply sewing a stripe on. What he said, moreover, contradicted the story he had given during the investigation. The President had to call him to order, but still little progress was made. He had managed to steal some railway passes and got to Vladivostok and, finally, under yet another name, to New York, where he joined the U.S. Army, though he could not then speak English. In America, he was jailed for five or six months—though here Vyshinsky got bogged down in a further exchange about how many times he had been jailed (apparently twice). There was also confusion about whether he had or had not joined the U.S. Army twice or never. He claimed he had got to France with the U.S. Army, and a visit to South America also comes up. He had also enrolled as a Freemason in America, and at the same time as a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Twenty-three pages of evidence contain this extraordinary farrago, in which the only incriminating point established is the Freemasonry, which Arnold had concealed from the Party. He seems finally to have got himself shipped to Russia with a group of American specialists being sent to Kemerovo, and there joined the Russian Communist Party. In West Siberia, he had been an office manager, then in charge of water transport, then in a commercial department, and then in charge of a “telephone system,” in big enterprises in Kemerovo and Kuznetsk. In 1932, he finally got in touch with the Trotskyites, being recruited by Shestov. Arnold had already been dismissed from some job for anti-Soviet remarks, and Shestov had something more on him, having discovered two of his names—though to establish this latter point, Vyshinsky again became involved in a long argument about how many there were in all. The only relevant evidence is contained in about a page and a half.

This indicated that Shestov and Cherepukhin, the local Party Secretary, had ordered Arnold to have an accident with Ordzhonikidze, Eikhe, and Rukhimovich in the car. But he lost his nerve.

When Molotov came, the plan was the same. But the “ditch” had now become not a “gully,” but a “bank”:

Arnold:

… On this curve there is not a gully, as Shestov called it, but what we call an embankment, the edge of the road, about eight or ten metres deep, a drop of nearly ninety degrees. When I came to the station, Molotov, Kurganov, Secretary of the District Committee of the Party, and Gryadinsky, Chairman of the Territory Executive Committee, got into the car …

However, he again funked it, and only turned just off the road when another lorry, evidently hired by the conspirators, drove at him. No one was hurt.

He was reprimanded for negligent driving, got a job in Tashkent, returned to Novosibirsk, and became assistant manager in a supply department and, finally, manager of a garage. And that was all.

After Arnold came Assistant People’s Commissar of Railways Livshits

, and the other railway plotters. This section of the trial was evidently Kaganovich’s private preserve. In their final speeches, both Livshits and Knyazev were to speak of the forfeit of Kaganovich’s trust as a particularly heinous side of their offenses. Livshits remarked:

Citizen Judges! The charge advanced against me by the State Prosecutor is still further aggravated by the fact that I was raised by the Party from the ranks to a high position in state administration—to that of Assistant People’s Commissar of Railways. I enjoyed the confidence of the Party, I enjoyed the confidence of Stalin’s comrade-inarms, Kaganovich.¹¹⁰

while Knyazev mourned:

… I always experienced a dreadful feeling of pain when Lazar Moiseyevich [Kaganovich] said to me ‘I know you as a railway worker who knows the railways both from the theoretical and from the practical side. But why do I not feel in you that wide range of activity which I have a right to demand of you?’¹¹¹