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.
The Secret Police machine proper was concentrated in the NKVD’s Chief Administration of State Security. This consisted of a highly organized array of departments, skilled in the ways of their trade, and practiced in all modes of investigation, interrogation, and falsification. Almost all its leading officers had been with it for a decade, and had coped with the great cases of the late 1920s and early 1930s. (The NKVD controlled, in addition to this Secret Police machine, the “militia” [ordinary police], the frontier guards, its own internal troop formations, the fire service, and the labor camps, whose main administration, Gulag, under Matvei Berman, was already receiving a vast number of assorted purgees.)
Yagoda and Agranov themselves, and Yezhov representing the Central Committee, played a prominent part in the organization of the trial, and Stalin personally conducted the key conferences. Under them, the Secret Political Department was technically responsible for the whole operation, though it now had at its disposal the services of a number of officers from the other departments of State Security, including their chiefs.
The Secret Political Department, which had been the kernel of the Cheka from the beginning,50 was still the key center of Secret Police operations. That is, it had the overall responsibility of supervising all the country’s organizations and carrying on the political struggle against all hostile political elements. It was headed by G. A. Molchanov, an unscrupulous careerist, and his deputy, G. S. Lyushkov.
The Economic Department had security responsibility for all industry and agriculture (except for transport, dealt with by the Transport Department). In Soviet conditions, this gave it a role as weighty, in a general way, as that of the Secret Political Department, and it had had the main responsibility for trials such as the Shalchty, which, though in a general sense political, were centered on economic crimes. Its Head, L. G. Mironov, was a man with an extraordinary memory, which was to be of great use in composing and mastering the details of the first two trials. At the same time as he ran his vast department, he acted as assistant to Yagoda in the whole of the State Security side of the NKVD. He is described as a conscientious Party man who was depressed by the prosecution of the Old Bolsheviks.51 Previous cases that he had organized, and which do not seem to have depressed him similarly, included the “Industrial Party” and the Metro-Vic Trials—cases, with all their political importance, definable as “economic.” The Zinoviev Trial had no economic component. Nevertheless, Mironov was given an important role.
The Operative Department was responsible for guarding leading personnel and installations and investigating terrorist acts against them. Its main concern at this time was the protection of Stalin. Its Head, K. V. Pauker, or his deputy, A. I. Volovich, was almost continually with him except when he was actually in his heavily guarded offices, and L. I. Chertok, one of their chief subordinates, also spent much time organizing his local defense.
Pauker was a sort of evil buffoon. He had been a barber and valet to opera stars in Budapest, and had himself a turn for comic acting. Taken prisoner by the Russians in 1916, he had become one of the group of Communists which emerged from that milieu. An ignorant and uneducated man without any political convictions, he was recruited to the Cheka, like so many other foreigners in those days, to work on searches and arrests. He rose by becoming a personal attendant again, this time to Menzhinsky, who came to rely on him and finally appointed him head of the Kremlin bodyguard and chief of the Operative Department. He was on close terms with Stalin, who even allowed him to shave him.52
The Special Department in general covered the armed forces. Its Head was M. I. Gay.
The Foreign Department dealt with espionage and terror abroad. Its Head, A. A. Slutsky, was a sly intriguer who played an important role in the major interrogations. His deputies were Boris Berman and M. Shpigelglas.
The Transport Department, under A. M. Shanin, was the only one not deeply involved, having its hands full with Kaganovich’s endless purges on the railways.
There was a good deal of flexibility in these arrangements. Postings between departments were fairly frequent. And reorganization involving the transfer of lesser matters between the departments was also quite common.
Such was the order of battle of the shock troops of repression that Stalin was now launching on the helpless prisoners in the Lubyanka.
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