The Great Terror

They were assisted by another organization: the Prosecutor’s Office. This had not been centralized on an All-Union basis until 1933, when it became one of the most centralized bodies in the USSR, having all its legal agencies completely and uniformly subordinate to the Prosecutor-General in Moscow, who was now Vyshinsky. He announced his operative principle—that any discrepancies between the commands of the law and those of the Revolution “must be solved only by the subordination of the formal commands of law to those of Party policy.”⁵³ His chief assistant was G. Roginsky, a fanatic who was to defend mass liquidation even after he himself had been purged and sent to a penal camp.

By the end of February, the testimony of Olberg and others was satisfactory. One of those confessing, I. I. Trusov, had some of Trotsky’s archives from the 1920s; Stalin now proposed to the Politburo that Yezhov should examine these and that “the NKVD should question the accused together with Comrade Yezhov.” From now on, Yezhov plays a major role in the investigation.⁵⁴

A former oppositionist, Isak Reingold, Chairman of the Cotton Syndicate, had been arrested as a Trotskyite in January or February. He was a friend of Sokolnikov’s and was connected with Kamenev. A strong man, still only thirty-eight, he proved hard to break. He was interrogated for three weeks, often for periods of forty-eight hours at a time without sleep or food, by Chertok. The order to arrest his family was given in his presence. Finally, he was handed a death sentence and told it would be carried out automatically if he did not testify at once. He still refused to do so, but said that he would sign anything if so instructed by the Party. Yagoda refused to accept these terms, and the interrogation dragged on. Finally, Yezhov intervened and personally ordered Reingold in the name of the Central Committee to provide the evidence required.⁵⁵

The confessions had been obtained with some difficulty. Stalin is said to have brought about 300 former oppositionists from prisons and isolators⁵⁶ for the NKVD to test for suitability as accused. By May, about fifteen suitable confessions had been obtained, and more were coming in.

In mid-May, Stalin held a conference with a number of the leading NKVD officials, and ordered the NKVD to produce further links with Trotsky. Molchanov, much to the anger of the Foreign Department, nominated two more NKVD agents, who had been working as its representatives in the German Communist Party and in the Comintern, Fritz David and Berman-Yurin.⁵⁷

They were arrested in June⁵⁸ and had no choice but to accept their instructions. They, too, claimed that they had each visited Trotsky and received orders from him to kill Stalin.

Two more figures, Moissei Lurye, a scientist, and Nathan Lurye, a surgeon, whose conduct in court led even Western journalists to suspect them of being agents provocateurs, are also reported by fellow prisoners, in on different charges, as scarcely bothering to conceal this .⁵⁹ They, too, were supposed to be Trotskyite terrorists. With their evidence, a mass of material was now accumulating.

“THE TROTSKYITE–ZINOVIEVITE CENTER”

In March, Yagoda had reported to Stalin on “the liquidation of the Trotskyite underground and the exposure of the terrorist groups.” On 31 March, Stalin instructed Yagoda and Vyshinsky to submit a concrete proposal on the trial of these Trotskyites, of whom they shortly gave eighty-two names. By April, the leading Trotskyites accused—I. N. Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan—were under interrogation.⁶⁰

As was later pointed out, the “Center” contained “not … a single one of the old political leaders” from the Trotskyite side.⁶¹

Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, and Ter-Vaganyan were all, however, men of repute in the Party. (Trotsky’s Army Inspector-General, the heroic giant Muralov, had been arrested on 17 April, and it was doubtless intended to use him too; but he held out until December, and this plan had to be postponed.)

Smirnov alone had been a member of the Central Committee, but he at least was a most distinguished Old Bolshevik. A factory worker, he had been an active revolutionary from the age of seventeen, and had often been arrested.⁶² He had spent many years in Tsarist prisons and in Arctic exile. He had fought in the 1905 Revolution, and in the Civil War had led the Fifth Red Army to its victory over Kolchak. Known as “the Lenin of Siberia,” he had ruled there for some years after the Revolution.

Smirnov had been proposed as the leading Secretary of the Party in 1922, just before the job went to Stalin.⁶³ After being exiled with the other Trotskyites in 1927, he had recanted but, during the Ryutin period, had spoken approvingly of the proposals to remove Stalin and had been in jail ever since. Stalin thus had a particular grudge against him.