For the police machine, too, was ruthlessly purged. We are told that “the staff of the Lefortovo Prison was wiped out entirely four times.”180 In all, as we have seen, 20,000 NKVD men perished.181
The turnover of interrogators, as the NKVD itself was purged, was good for the morale of resisting prisoners. Two mention that “each of the present writers outlasted more than ten of his examining magistrates; one of them outlasted more than a dozen. In both instances this included the magistrate who ordered the arrest.”182 In Chelyabinsk, one prisoner was saved from execution when the Head of the Provincial NKVD angrily exclaimed, “The investigation was conducted by enemies of the people. Now we’ve got to start all over again.”183 NKVD officers under arrest were usually interrogated more severely than others. They were more pessimistic about the outcome, and “were extremely stubborn and reluctant to confess for they knew what lay ahead of them.”184 They n are reported as highly nervous, expecting to be taken out and executed at any moment.
We have already dealt with the basic techniques of interrogation. In run-of-the-mill cases, the “conveyor” remained at first the main system, punctuated by physical assault. A typical case is that of the young secretary of a factory director arrested as one of a Trotskyite sabotage ring. She was kept standing for two days with short interruptions and then half-throttled by the examiner until she signed a confession which enabled the NKVD to arrest her chief and the thirty-odd other members of the factory’s sabotage group.185
The conveyor would break down almost anyone in four to six days, and most people in two. Its single disadvantage was that it consumed time and energy. There came a point when the arrests outpaced the interrogative capacity of the NKVD, and the simpler method of beating became routine, under the rubric “simplified interrogation procedures.”186 We can date this change precisely. It was on 17–18 August 1937. In Moscow, Kharkov, and elsewhere, it suddenly came into force. At the Kholodnaya Gora Prison interrogation section, a prisoner describes having to stuff his ears with bread to get any sleep that night on account of the shrieking of women being beaten.187 In Kazan jail, the first victim was the wife of the Premier of the Tatar ASSR.188 In the Butyrka that summer, one floor of a whole wing of one of the prison buildings was set aside for night interrogation. From 11:00 P.M. until 3:00 A.M., the inmates of nearby women’s cells were kept awake: “over the screams of the tortured we could hear the shouts and curses of the torturers.” A woman would go half-mad thinking that she recognized her husband’s screams.189
The appearance of mere local initiative was preserved. The weapons were almost always boots, fists, and table legs. But Stalin and Yezhov no longer needed to heed any complaints from within the Party, and the rather half-hearted cover to a widely known reality seems more a matter of preserving conventions than anything else. Stalin seems, in fact, to have issued official instructions on torture proper as early as the beginning of 1937, though they remained confidential even from Provincial Party Secretaries until he confirmed the orders, both retrospectively and prospectively, in the secret telegram to them on 20 January 1939 when, after the fall of Yezhov, one or two objectors had begun to make themselves heard190 (see here).
Several victims note that the NKVD respected certain formalities. Of course, their methods of interrogation were a clear breach of the law. But declarations signed by prisoners were very rarely suppressed. They had to be copied and filed in the dossier.’191 So when Beria took over, he found that some prosecutors were still attaching the complaints made by the accused about “illegal methods of investigation” to the examination record. He took this up with Vyshinsky, who gave instructions that it was not to occur again, though in some cases the prisoners’ statements could be preserved on file, not attached to the records of the case.192
Whichever interrogation method was applied to a given victim, the required confession followed the same routines. As early as 1931, the foundations had been fully established. A surgeon had confessed his intention to poison the Dnieper River. A lawyer had confessed first to blowing up a bridge, then to planning terrorism, and finally to being a Japanese spy. An electrical engineer was to have commanded a battery of artillery to bombard the workingmen’s quarter of Dniepropetrovsk. Another accused confessed to having met former President Poincaré193
There is a report of a former senior official in the Ukrainian timber industry who at the beginning of the 1930s had made a confession in connection with the Industrial Party Trial, that he had had too little timber felled in order to spare the woods for their former owners, whose rights he aimed to restore. He had been sentenced to ten years but released after a year and—like many members of this particular conspiracy—restored to high position. On his re-arrest, he was required to confess that he had had too much timber felled in order to ruin the forests. Another forester had had to confess that he had special tracks cut in the forests to open the way for Polish or German tanks.194
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