As explained by Muralov, the plan was for the driver to sacrifice himself by plunging Molotov to destruction:
Muralov:
The car was to turn into a ditch while at full speed. Under such circumstances, the car by its own momentum would overturn and get smashed, while the people …
Vyshinsky:
Was the attempt made to overturn the car in the ditch?
Muralov:
The attempt was made, but then the chauffeur funked and the car did not fall into the ditch….
Shestov:
… One spot—for those who know Prokopyevsk—was near Pit No. 5 on the way to the Mine Management Office, and the second spot was between the workers’ settlement and Pit No. 3. There is a gully there, not a ditch, as Muralov said, a gully, about 15 metres deep.
Vyshinsky:
A ‘ditch’ 15 metres deep! Who chose this spot?
Muralov:
Permit me to say something about Shestov’s explanation. I will not argue with Shestov about whether it was a ditch or a gully….
Vyshinsky:
Have you yourself been at the spot where this ditch is?
Muralov:
No, I have never been there.
Vyshinsky:
So you have not seen it?
Muralov:
No, but there are many gullies in Prokopyevsk, gully upon gully, hill after hill.
Vyshinsky:
If you have not seen the place you cannot argue about it.
Muralov:
I will not argue about it.’
106
Muralov’s disturbing reference to the alleged ravine as a “ditch” was presumably based on definite knowledge. Vyshinsky commented in his closing speech, “But the fact remains a fact. An attempt on the life of Comrade Molotov was made. That the car overturned on the brink of the 15-metre ‘ditch’, as Muralov here modestly called it, is a fact.”107
It is curious, moreover, that the only terrorist plot (apart from the Kirov murder) which actually reached the stage of any action was not committed by one of the trained and devoted Trotskyites, but by the locally recruited petty adventurer “Arnold, alias Ivanov, alias Vasilyev, alias Rask, alias Kulpenen …” as Vyshinsky put it.108 Although Trotsky had “insisted … particularly strongly” on committing a number of terrorist acts “more or less simultaneously,” only the one against Molotov had come to anything. It is true (even officially) that Molotov was only rather shaken. But still, none of the proposed victims of Prigozhin or Golubenko, or the other professional assassins, was even shaken.
And now the court found the difficulty of mixing fact with fiction. Since there really had been an accident, which it was decided to inflate into an assassination attempt, the assassin was not a picked NKVD agent provocateur but the chauffeur actually involved. This proved to be a mistake. Instead of an Olberg or a Berman-Yurin, chosen and groomed for the occasion, the court was faced with a man who was wholly unsuited to the part that chance had called on him to play.
At the evening session of 26 January, Vyshinsky came to the examination of Arnold, the driver who had allegedly, under orders from the Siberian conspirators, made the attempt. The whole exchange was a ludicrous interlude. Vyshinsky for once seemed to lose control of the situation.109
Arnold said that he had lost his nerve and only produced a slight accident. But it was perfectly clear that no conspirator could ever have expected a man of his type to sacrifice himself, as the plan allegedly intended. In fact, his final remark completely contradicted the idea that he would be dead after the accident, since he explained his motives in becoming a Trotskyite as being based on the Trotskyites’ promise that when they came to power “I would not be among the last people then.”
In the exchange (which goes on for thirty pages in the transcript), Vyshinsky no longer faced a more or less intellectual collaborator, but a small-time lumpen-proletarian crook and adventurer. It took five or ten minutes to straighten out Arnold’s real name from his various aliases, and even then this was not properly settled and caused further trouble later on.
Owing to the loose family life prevailing in the slums of Petrograd, he had already accumulated “three surnames by the age of seven,” Vyshinsky remarked. He had wandered to Finland, then to Germany and Holland, while still in his early teens, with yet another surname, and then, during the First World War, to Norway and England. On his return, he was conscripted, but deserted and was then jailed for six months. There are pages of this sort of interrogation, and now Vyshinsky again became entangled in the names, and also in a complicated muddle about the various regiments Arnold had joined and deserted from in the war and the ranks he had held as compared with those he had gained by simply sewing a stripe on. What he said, moreover, contradicted the story he had given during the investigation. The President had to call him to order, but still little progress was made. He had managed to steal some railway passes and got to Vladivostok and, finally, under yet another name, to New York, where he joined the U.S. Army, though he could not then speak English. In America, he was jailed for five or six months—though here Vyshinsky got bogged down in a further exchange about how many times he had been jailed (apparently twice). There was also confusion about whether he had or had not joined the U.S. Army twice or never. He claimed he had got to France with the U.S. Army, and a visit to South America also comes up. He had also enrolled as a Freemason in America, and at the same time as a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Twenty-three pages of evidence contain this extraordinary farrago, in which the only incriminating point established is the Freemasonry, which Arnold had concealed from the Party. He seems finally to have got himself shipped to Russia with a group of American specialists being sent to Kemerovo, and there joined the Russian Communist Party. In West Siberia, he had been an office manager, then in charge of water transport, then in a commercial department, and then in charge of a “telephone system,” in big enterprises in Kemerovo and Kuznetsk. In 1932, he finally got in touch with the Trotskyites, being recruited by Shestov. Arnold had already been dismissed from some job for anti-Soviet remarks, and Shestov had something more on him, having discovered two of his names—though to establish this latter point, Vyshinsky again became involved in a long argument about how many there were in all. The only relevant evidence is contained in about a page and a half.
This indicated that Shestov and Cherepukhin, the local Party Secretary, had ordered Arnold to have an accident with Ordzhonikidze, Eikhe, and Rukhimovich in the car. But he lost his nerve.
When Molotov came, the plan was the same. But the “ditch” had now become not a “gully,” but a “bank”:
Arnold:
… On this curve there is not a gully, as Shestov called it, but what we call an embankment, the edge of the road, about eight or ten metres deep, a drop of nearly ninety degrees. When I came to the station, Molotov, Kurganov, Secretary of the District Committee of the Party, and Gryadinsky, Chairman of the Territory Executive Committee, got into the car …
However, he again funked it, and only turned just off the road when another lorry, evidently hired by the conspirators, drove at him. No one was hurt.
He was reprimanded for negligent driving, got a job in Tashkent, returned to Novosibirsk, and became assistant manager in a supply department and, finally, manager of a garage. And that was all.