The Great Terror

One typical style of charge was that against Mrs. Weissberg, arrested in April 1936. She was a ceramicist, and it was alleged that she had surreptitiously inserted swastikas into the patterns of teacups she had designed, and had hidden two pistols under her bed with a view to killing Stalin.¹⁹⁵ A Jewish engineer was accused of having designed a large scientific institute in the form of half a swastika, for reasons of Nazi ideology.¹⁹⁶ A woman potter had designed an ashtray which resembled, or could be made to resemble, a Zionist Star of David. She was arrested, and the stock destroyed.

¹⁹⁷ Koestler mentions a German Communist doctor who was charged with injecting patients with a venereal disease, spreading rumors that venereal disease was incurable, and being a German spy.¹⁹⁸ Professor Byelin, of Kiev University, was charged with espionage for mentioning in a textbook the depth of the Dnieper at various points. Another professor—a Jewish refugee from Germany—had given German agents details about the navigability of the Siberian River Ob. A third had forwarded to the Japanese reports about the political attitude of Jewish children.¹⁹⁹

One Kiev workman confessed to having tried to blow up a kilometer-long bridge over the Dnieper with a few kilograms of arsenic, but having had to abandon the attempt owing to rainy weather.²⁰⁰ Speaking of a middle-aged washerwoman type, accused of consorting with foreigners in expensive restaurants and seducing Soviet diplomats to worm secrets out of them, a Soviet writer bitterly comments, “This was July 1937, when no one cared any longer whether charges bore the slightest semblance of probability or not.”²⁰¹

There is a Soviet account published in Khrushchev’s time of an Old Bolshevik serving a fifteen-year sentence for “terrorism,” in that he had murdered himself. The NKVD maintained that he had stolen the dead man’s papers and passed himself off in his place. When he had NKVD officers call a witness who had known him since childhood, and identified him at once, they threw her out and sentenced him notwithstanding.²⁰²

When a big case was afoot, local interrogators sometimes tried to gain credit by finding accomplices for it, on their own initiative, among their prisoners. After the Tukhachevsky Case, a junior interrogator attempted to involve Weissberg in a connection with the Reichswehr, to build up a new military conspiracy. His superior, on the other hand, meant to produce Weissberg as a witness in the Bukharin Trial, a role to which he was better suited, since he had at least met Bukharin.²⁰³

There is an account of a case in the Ukraine in which fifty students were charged with forming an organization to assassinate Kossior, who had been named as one of the senior intended victims in the great Moscow Trials. A year’s work on this case, which was a structure of great intricacy, had been performed by the interrogators. In 1938, however, it became known that Kossior himself had been arrested as a Trotskyite. Everyone thought that the students would be released. But a new interrogation immediately started, and they were beaten up for having lied to the NKVD. After a few days, the stool pigeons in the cells let them know what they were supposed to confess this time. It was to change their deposition, putting in the name of Kaganovich for that of Kossior. The NKVD could not face the trouble of constructing a completely new fabrication. Finally everything was in order, and the students were sent off to labor camps.²⁰⁴

The demand for denunciation was a difficult matter of conscience with many. One Armenian priest with a good memory confessed to recruiting all his countrymen he had buried in the past three years. A newly arrested prisoner would sometimes find a list of unused dead men made available by his cell mates.²⁰⁵ The denunciation of people already arrested and sentenced was not regarded as discreditable.

But, of course, such tactics only seldom satisfied the examiners, and most people gave way enough to implicate outside contacts whose names were presented to them as already suspect by the very fact of acquaintance.

On the whole, the NKVD officers showed a niggling, self-righteous, and bureaucratic brutality, treating the prisoners like cattle about whom any question of sympathy simply did not arise. But there are many reports of odd exceptions, showing that even in these circumstances the Russian style of humanism sporadically persisted. Two ex-prisoners note,

There were many officials of all grades, from simple warder to prison governor, who again and again defied regulations and risked their own freedom by finding opportunities of making prisoners’ lives easier by secretly giving them food or cigarettes, or even merely speaking a cheering and comforting word to them,²⁰⁶