The Great Terror

When Stalin was retreating on the question of a death sentence for Kamenev, he was taking the first steps to gain the same result by his alternative method. A group of Komsomol students in the town of Gorky, said to have planned an attempt on Stalin, was one of many arrested at this time. They had not actually done anything beyond discussion, but already even this made the death penalty a foregone conclusion. This group was confessing to the plots to kill Stalin by early November 1935, though without implicating any of the Zinovievite or other accused of the August 1936 Tria1.⁴⁴ The trial routine was about to be gone through when the case was held for “further investigation,” under instructions from the Secretariat.⁴⁵

The NKVD selected this particular group because it had a ready-made way of linking the students with Trotsky, and hence of building a political conspiracy around them. The link was through one of its own men, Valentin Olberg.

Olberg was a former agent of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, and had worked in Berlin as a secret informer among the Trotskyites. In 1930, he had attempted to get a post as Trotsky’s secretary, one of the first of the many NKVD attempts to penetrate Trotsky’s ménage (which ended in success in 1940). Since 1935, Olberg had been working for the NKVD Secret Political Department, exposing Trotskyite tendencies in the important Gorky Pedagogical Institute, where the students in question worked: his appointment had been opposed by the local Party officials, in particular Yelin, Head of the Provincial Committee’s Propaganda and Education Section, since Olberg lacked qualifications and was a foreigner. Yelin, moreover, rightly complained that his documents seemed forged, and appealed to the Central Committee; but Yezhov then personally imposed Olberg.

By the beginning of 1936, the NKVD had made a good beginning in extending the scope of this Komsomol plot. Olberg and some professors at the Institute were arrested. Olberg, interrogated on 25 to 28 January, denied all the charges. Eventually, he is reported ordered as a matter of Party and police discipline to confess to being a link between the Gorky group and Trotsky. He was told that this was simply an NKVD assignment, and that whatever the verdict of the court he would be freed and given a post in the Far East. He then signed whatever was required of him.⁴⁶ This was, in brief, that he had been sent by Trotsky to arrange the assassination of Stalin, recruiting professors and students to make the attempt when they went to Moscow for the 1936 May Day Parade.

The processing of the Olberg case was not straightforward, and took time. Yelin, who knew too much, was executed without tria1,⁴⁷

though he was to be mentioned several times during the public hearings. Olberg’s brother, P. Olberg, was implicated, and his evidence was to be quoted in court, though he was not produced. Other accused included the Head of the Pedagogical Institute, I. K. Fedotov. He confessed, but perhaps did not seem reliable enough to present in public, for he was not brought to trial. Nelidov, a teacher of chemistry who was required as the hypothetical maker of bombs, was not a Communist and, in spite of violent pressure by one of the most vicious of the interrogators, the younger Kedrov, was not broken.

But by late February 1936, Olberg’s story had been worked up into a usable version,⁴⁸ and the NKVD definitely selected it as the basis of the “plot.”

The Head of the Secret Political Department, G. A. Molchanov, now held a conference of about forty NKVD executive officers. He told them that a vast conspiracy had been uncovered and that they would all be released from their ordinary duties and set to investigating it. The Politburo regarded the evidence as absolutely trustworthy, and the task was therefore simply to discover the details. The question of any accused being not guilty did not arise.⁴⁹

The officers at once realized that the whole business was a frame-up, since they themselves were the men who had for years been in charge of supervision of the oppositionists, and they had detected no such activity. Moreover, if such a plot had come into being without their discovering it, they would clearly have been reprimanded at the very least. How little Stalin himself must have believed in the existence of any real plots was shown by the mere fact of his withdrawing so many of the most experienced officers from all the active departments of the Secret Police into what he knew to be an investigative farce.

In the NKVD as it was now, Stalin had a powerful and experienced instrument. At its head stood Yagoda. His deputy in security matters was Stalin’s crony Agranov, who had finished his special operations at Leningrad and handed over that city to the dreadful Zakovsky, who is said to have boasted that if he had Karl Marx to interrogate he would soon make him confess that he was an agent of Bismarck.