The Great Terror

Olberg, next, told of his long membership in the German Trotskyite organization, through which he had met Sedov and by means of a forged Honduran passport had got to Russia. He gave no explanation of how, with a tourist visa on a Central American passport, he had got a job at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute; but there he had organized the terrorist act to be committed in Moscow on May Day 1936. Olberg’s plan to assassinate Stalin failed because he had been arrested. A peculiar item in Vyshinsky’s closing speech (not given in the compressed English version) was a piece of material evidence involving Olberg. This was the visiting card of Wladimir Tukalevsky, Director of the Slavic Library of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Tukalevsky wrote in the Prague press that Olberg had indeed done work in the library at various dates from 1933 to the spring of 1935.) The visiting card, Vyshinsky said, had on it “the letters ‘P’ and ‘F’ and the date ‘1936,’ which served as a code or password previously agreed on between Olberg and Tukalevsky.” This was supposedly discovered in Stalinabad, where Olberg had earlier worked in the Pedagogical Institute. What it was supposed to prove is unclear, and its omission in the English version is understandable.¹³² Olberg was one of those of whom it was noted even at the time that his evidence was given in an almost jaunty fashion: Fritz David and the two Luryes made the same mistake. Several observers at once concluded that they were agents provocateurs.

Following Olberg, Berman-Yurin gave evidence that Trotsky had personally sent him to shoot Stalin at a Comintern plenum. He gave a very detailed account of meetings with Trotsky and his entourage in Copenhagen in November 1932. This evidence had been constructed by the NKVD as follows. Jack Soble, the Soviet spy whose career only ended with his arrest in 1957 in New York, had infiltrated Trotsky’s circle in 1931. He met him for the last time in Copenhagen in December 1932 when Trotsky had been admitted there on a short lecture tour. Soble then lost Trotsky’s confidence. But his account of Trotsky’s moves in Copenhagen, as transmitted to the NKVD, was edited to form the basis of BermanYurin’s evidence.¹³³

Berman-Yurin concluded by saying that he had been unable to get a ticket for the XIIIth plenum at the Comintern, and so could not shoot Stalin after all.

Ever since the publication of the indictment, the Soviet press had been violently demanding the death penalty. Resolutions from all over the country came in and were printed. Workers in the Kiev Red Flag Factory and the Stalingrad Dzerzhinsky Tractor Works, Kazakh kollchozes and Leningrad Party organizations, calling for the shooting of the accused, day by day made an overwhelming build-up. Now, on the morning of 21 August, Pravda carried something new. There were still dozens of mass resolutions, and the usual hack verses by the poetaster Demyan Bedny, with the title “No Mercy.” But, in addition, there were manifestos from Rakovsky, Rykov, and Pyatakov, which showed another aspect of Party discipline. They, too, all demanded the death penalty. Rakovsky’s was headed “No Pity.” Rykov insisted that no mercy be shown to Zinoviev. The tone of all may be judged from Pyatakov’s contribution, which said:

One cannot find the words fully to express one’s indignation and disgust. These people have lost the last semblance of humanity. They must be destroyed like carrion which is polluting the pure, bracing air of the land of the Soviets; dangerous carrion which may cause the death of our leaders, and has already caused the death of one of the best people in our land—that wonderful comrade and leader S. M. Kirov…. Many of us, including myself, by our heedlessness, our complacency and lack of vigilance toward those around us, unconsciously helped these bandits to commit their black deeds.

… It is a good thing that the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had exposed this gang.

… It is a good thing that it can be exterminated.

… Honor and glory to the workers of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.¹³⁴

Under these mounting pressures, the accused continued with their evidence. For 21 August, the last day of testimony, only one leading figure—Ter-Vaganyan—remained. Otherwise, there were three more “assassins” and Trotsky’s alleged emissary, Holtzman.

Holtzman, a genuine ex-Trotskyite of junior rank, was a personal friend of Smirnov’s. His evidence turned out to be highly unsatisfactory to the prosecution, on two grounds.