In his speech at a meeting of railway activists on 10 March 1937, Kaganovich said: “I cannot name a single road or a single system where there has not been Trotyskyite—Japanese sabotage. Not only that, there is not a single branch of railway transport in which these saboteurs have not turned up….” Under Kaganovich arrests of railway officials were made by lists. His deputies, nearly all road chiefs and political section chiefs, and other executive officials in transport were arrested without any grounds whatever.167
On 10 August 1937 Kaganovich wrote to the NKVD demanding the arrest of ten responsible officials in the People’s Commissariat of Transport. The only grounds were that he thought their behavior suspicious. They were arrested as spies and saboteurs and were shot. He wrote, in all, thirty-two personal letters to Yezhov, demanding the arrest of eighty-three transport executives.168
The North Donets railway was the only line not involved in these sweeping arrests of early 1937. In August, the heads of the line were called to Moscow and instructed to find saboteurs. An estimate by the Director of Locomotive Service of the line is that about 1,700 of the 45,000 employees were arrested within months. In mid-November, he himself was called to the NKVD and asked how he proposed to end sabotage. As he was unable to think of any cases of sabotage—the line being an exceptionally efficient one—he was bitterly harangued and during the next wave of arrests was pulled in, on 2 December 1937, without a warrant or charge. His wife and six-year-old son were thrown out of his house two days after his arrest, and he was subjected to severe interrogation, with beatings, together with a number of other prisoners, including several station masters and the deputy head of the line.169
Special railwaymen’s prisons were set up, in small towns like Poltava. Arrested railwaymen were kept in coaches in unused sidings. Special military courts traveled around the country dealing with them.170 They were almost invariably Japanese spies. The reason for this was that the Soviet Union had in 1935 handed over the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese. The Russian railwaymen who had operated it and who now returned to the Soviet Union were almost the only nondiplomatic Soviet personnel who had been living abroad, and on their return they were automatically high-grade suspects. (With their families, they are said to have numbered about 40,000.) And they had meanwhile worked on all the railway systems and recruited their colleagues.
INTERROGATION
Whether soldier or intellectual, Ukrainian or engineer, the arrested man might thus deduce or learn from his acquaintances what the exact charge would be. And this was important. For when he went to interrogation, it was NKVD practice not to tell him what he was in for, but to let him frame his own confession—unless he proved “obstinate” after a few interrogations, when he might be enlightened.
Article 128 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR laid down that the charge against a person under investigation must be presented not later than forty-eight hours after his arrest. This procedure was not observed. In fact, it contradicted the basic NKVD method. In many cases, charges were not presented until months or years afterward; and in some cases, not at all.
Sometimes there were special preliminaries. The Hungarian Communist writer Jozsef Lengyel describes being taken from the ordinary cell in which 275 men lived “on, between and under twenty-five iron bedsteads” to a much worse one for a fortnight’s softening up prior to interrogation. In this “hermetically closed space” in the moist heat from human beings and radiators, bread fresh in the morning was white with mold by midday. Some of his cell mates had strokes, and some went insane. Although Lengyel only got jaundice and open sores on arms and legs, his former cell mates did not recognize him when he was returned to the ordinary prison.171
A woman teacher held in solitary confinement in darkness for forty days to confess her espionage motive in approaching the British Consulate for a visa also returned to her cell quite unrecognizable.172 Worse was the “kennel” at the Lubyanka, described by the critic Ivanov-Razumnik—a true Black Hole with sixty men packed into a heated basement cell about fifteen feet square, with no ventilation but the slit under the door, for a week or even more. Eczema, nausea, and palpitations were universal.173 This was a variation on the old “steam room” technique used by the OGPU in the 1920s. A Soviet writer describes also the “standing cell,” where, in darkness, a prisoner had room only to stand with his hands at his side, virtually immured. A Secretary of the Tatar Provincial Committee was held thus for two days and taken out unconscious.174
Interrogation took place mainly at night. A warder would enter a mass cell and murmur the initial letter of a man’s name, upon which those this fitted would give their names until the right man answered. He would then be taken out.175
All accounts of experiences in the great prisons mention that when escorting prisoners along corridors to interrogation or for other purposes, the warders continually made a clicking sound with their tongues or with their belt buckles, so that others on similar errands would know in advance. The purpose of this, evidently a definite regulation, was to stop anyone from recognizing prisoners from other cells. If two prisoners were about to meet in a corridor, one had his face to the wall while the other went by. In the Butyrka yard, which sometimes had to be crossed, were little sentry-box-style sheds, into which one or the other of two passing prisoners could be shunted.
Eventually, down the stairs ringed with antisuicide nets, the prisoner would arrive at the office of the interrogator, where he might, for the moment, be fairly politely received. The routine questions started: “Do you know where you are? … You are in the heart of Soviet Intelligence … Why do you think you are here? …” A confession was now required. In the case of the ordinary prisoner, preparation for public trial did not arise, and the confession was merely a horrible formality required under NKVD custom to justify a sentence which was usually ready for issue. That is, as far as the accused himself was concerned. For interrogation had one further purpose—the implication of hitherto unnamed accomplices.
The interrogation technique almost invariably started, not with an accusation, but with the question “Will you tell me what hypothesis you have formed of the reason for your arrest?” This is said to have been based on a questionnaire used by the Holy Inquisition.176
The “Yezhov method,” as NKVD officers called it, threw the task of building the case against him on the arrested man. If the accused simply gave an innocent account of everything he had done, tougher methods were used, but it still remained up to the victim to find the right line of confession. Prisoners, with the more or less obvious connivance of the authorities, became expert in helping the newly arrested to devise suitable and satisfactory confessions, thus saving everybody trouble, on both sides.177
There were various tricks of interrogation. The interrogator might be polite and speak rather in sorrow, and then change to abuse. The obscene cursing of the interrogated was routine. In some cases, it had its effect. In others, not: Weissberg recounts that he found it quite interesting.178
Many NKVD interrogators were often aware of the complete falsehood of the charges, and some of them would even admit it. Most, however, even though not crediting the full details, “professed to believe that they contained a grain of truth, and this sufficed to justify their actions in their own eyes.”179 This applied particularly to the earlier generation of NKVD men. After they themselves were liquidated, the newer intake were much simpler Stalinists, who often seem to have believed to a great extent in the accused’s guilt.