The Great Terror

On 10 August 1937 Kaganovich wrote to the NKVD demanding the arrest of ten responsible officials in the People’s Commissariat of Transport. The only grounds were that he thought their behavior suspicious. They were arrested as spies and saboteurs and were shot. He wrote, in all, thirty-two personal letters to Yezhov, demanding the arrest of eighty-three transport executives.¹⁶⁸

The North Donets railway was the only line not involved in these sweeping arrests of early 1937. In August, the heads of the line were called to Moscow and instructed to find saboteurs. An estimate by the Director of Locomotive Service of the line is that about 1,700 of the 45,000 employees were arrested within months. In mid-November, he himself was called to the NKVD and asked how he proposed to end sabotage. As he was unable to think of any cases of sabotage—the line being an exceptionally efficient one—he was bitterly harangued and during the next wave of arrests was pulled in, on 2 December 1937, without a warrant or charge. His wife and six-year-old son were thrown out of his house two days after his arrest, and he was subjected to severe interrogation, with beatings, together with a number of other prisoners, including several station masters and the deputy head of the line.¹⁶⁹

Special railwaymen’s prisons were set up, in small towns like Poltava. Arrested railwaymen were kept in coaches in unused sidings. Special military courts traveled around the country dealing with them.¹⁷⁰ They were almost invariably Japanese spies. The reason for this was that the Soviet Union had in 1935 handed over the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese. The Russian railwaymen who had operated it and who now returned to the Soviet Union were almost the only nondiplomatic Soviet personnel who had been living abroad, and on their return they were automatically high-grade suspects. (With their families, they are said to have numbered about 40,000.) And they had meanwhile worked on all the railway systems and recruited their colleagues.

INTERROGATION

Whether soldier or intellectual, Ukrainian or engineer, the arrested man might thus deduce or learn from his acquaintances what the exact charge would be. And this was important. For when he went to interrogation, it was NKVD practice not to tell him what he was in for, but to let him frame his own confession—unless he proved “obstinate” after a few interrogations, when he might be enlightened.

Article 128 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR laid down that the charge against a person under investigation must be presented not later than forty-eight hours after his arrest. This procedure was not observed. In fact, it contradicted the basic NKVD method. In many cases, charges were not presented until months or years afterward; and in some cases, not at all.

Sometimes there were special preliminaries. The Hungarian Communist writer Jozsef Lengyel describes being taken from the ordinary cell in which 275 men lived “on, between and under twenty-five iron bedsteads” to a much worse one for a fortnight’s softening up prior to interrogation. In this “hermetically closed space” in the moist heat from human beings and radiators, bread fresh in the morning was white with mold by midday. Some of his cell mates had strokes, and some went insane. Although Lengyel only got jaundice and open sores on arms and legs, his former cell mates did not recognize him when he was returned to the ordinary prison.¹⁷¹

A woman teacher held in solitary confinement in darkness for forty days to confess her espionage motive in approaching the British Consulate for a visa also returned to her cell quite unrecognizable.¹⁷²

Worse was the “kennel” at the Lubyanka, described by the critic Ivanov-Razumnik—a true Black Hole with sixty men packed into a heated basement cell about fifteen feet square, with no ventilation but the slit under the door, for a week or even more. Eczema, nausea, and palpitations were universal.¹⁷³ This was a variation on the old “steam room” technique used by the OGPU in the 1920s. A Soviet writer describes also the “standing cell,” where, in darkness, a prisoner had room only to stand with his hands at his side, virtually immured. A Secretary of the Tatar Provincial Committee was held thus for two days and taken out unconscious.¹⁷⁴

Interrogation took place mainly at night. A warder would enter a mass cell and murmur the initial letter of a man’s name, upon which those this fitted would give their names until the right man answered. He would then be taken out.¹⁷⁵