The Great Terror

The conveyor would break down almost anyone in four to six days, and most people in two. Its single disadvantage was that it consumed time and energy. There came a point when the arrests outpaced the interrogative capacity of the NKVD, and the simpler method of beating became routine, under the rubric “simplified interrogation procedures.”¹⁸⁶ We can date this change precisely. It was on 17–18 August 1937. In Moscow, Kharkov, and elsewhere, it suddenly came into force. At the Kholodnaya Gora Prison interrogation section, a prisoner describes having to stuff his ears with bread to get any sleep that night on account of the shrieking of women being beaten.

¹⁸⁷ In Kazan jail, the first victim was the wife of the Premier of the Tatar ASSR.¹⁸⁸

In the Butyrka that summer, one floor of a whole wing of one of the prison buildings was set aside for night interrogation. From 11:00 P.M. until 3:00 A.M., the inmates of nearby women’s cells were kept awake: “over the screams of the tortured we could hear the shouts and curses of the torturers.” A woman would go half-mad thinking that she recognized her husband’s screams.¹⁸⁹

The appearance of mere local initiative was preserved. The weapons were almost always boots, fists, and table legs. But Stalin and Yezhov no longer needed to heed any complaints from within the Party, and the rather half-hearted cover to a widely known reality seems more a matter of preserving conventions than anything else. Stalin seems, in fact, to have issued official instructions on torture proper as early as the beginning of 1937, though they remained confidential even from Provincial Party Secretaries until he confirmed the orders, both retrospectively and prospectively, in the secret telegram to them on 20 January 1939 when, after the fall of Yezhov, one or two objectors had begun to make themselves heard¹⁹⁰ (see here).

Several victims note that the NKVD respected certain formalities. Of course, their methods of interrogation were a clear breach of the law. But declarations signed by prisoners were very rarely suppressed. They had to be copied and filed in the dossier.’¹⁹¹

So when Beria took over, he found that some prosecutors were still attaching the complaints made by the accused about “illegal methods of investigation” to the examination record. He took this up with Vyshinsky, who gave instructions that it was not to occur again, though in some cases the prisoners’ statements could be preserved on file, not attached to the records of the case.¹⁹²

Whichever interrogation method was applied to a given victim, the required confession followed the same routines. As early as 1931, the foundations had been fully established. A surgeon had confessed his intention to poison the Dnieper River. A lawyer had confessed first to blowing up a bridge, then to planning terrorism, and finally to being a Japanese spy. An electrical engineer was to have commanded a battery of artillery to bombard the workingmen’s quarter of Dniepropetrovsk. Another accused confessed to having met former President Poincaré¹⁹³

There is a report of a former senior official in the Ukrainian timber industry who at the beginning of the 1930s had made a confession in connection with the Industrial Party Trial, that he had had too little timber felled in order to spare the woods for their former owners, whose rights he aimed to restore. He had been sentenced to ten years but released after a year and—like many members of this particular conspiracy—restored to high position. On his re-arrest, he was required to confess that he had had too much timber felled in order to ruin the forests. Another forester had had to confess that he had special tracks cut in the forests to open the way for Polish or German tanks.¹⁹⁴