Chapter 19: The Purge of the Cheka
On the same day that the Soviet newspapers announced the execution of the sentences of the defendants in the Second Moscow Trial, a cadre of the secret political bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who had participated in the interrogation, committed suicide. He had left a suicide note, but its contents were not known. As a result, rumors arose among the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the suicide was due to “the torment of conscience”.
Less than two months later, Pogrebinsky, the head of the Gorky city internal affairs department, shot himself again. In preparation for the first Moscow trial, he personally led the arrest of several teachers from the city’s Marxist-Leninist school and forced them to confess that they had attempted to assassinate Stalin during the May Day parade.
In fact, Pogrebinsky was not a cruel and ruthless torturer. He was kind and gentle by nature, although he was forced to carry out some so-called “party tasks”. It was he who developed the idea of using labor to rehabilitate prisoners: to establish labor communes for criminal prisoners, where they could be rehabilitated and helped to start an honest Life again; to establish labor schools for homeless children. This idea of his was fully reflected in the film “Toward Life”, which was widely publicized and highly appreciated both at Home and abroad. Pogrebinsky was very close to Gorky, although not quite as close as a friendship. The latter was also attracted by the Soviet idea of “transformation of man”.
Before Pogrebinsky committed suicide, he left a letter to Zhendalin. Since this letter passed through the hands of several important cadres of the Ministry of Internal Affairs before it was delivered to the Kremlin, its content is slightly known. In the letter, Pogrebinsky wrote.
“With one hand I transformed criminal prisoners into honest newcomers, only to have to submit to party discipline and use the other hand to brand the most honest revolutionaries in our country as criminal criminals ……”
This type of suicide was by no means the case with one or two people such as Pogrebinsky. From the beginning of the thirties onwards, suicides among the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs became more and more frequent. In particular, suicides were common among the cadres of the secret political bureau who had “successfully” suppressed the opposition.
Noteworthy among them was the suicide of Kozelisky, the head of the secret political service of the Ukrainian NKVD. He killed himself before the Moscow trial. Kozelisky was born in Poland in a Catholic Family. He had a four-year-old son, whom he considered his greatest treasure. Once, his son became seriously ill. To save him, Kozelisky called in the best doctors in the Soviet Union. Despite three skull ring-sawing operations, the child could not be saved. The death of his son dragged the father down – Kozelisky shot himself. In his suicide note he wrote that as a father he had arrested and exiled many innocent people, and for these sins of his God punished his son.
In party terms, this suicide note was a shameful confession of a heretic, but nevertheless, after his death, Kozelisky was not designated as a “heretic who had penetrated the party”. The authorities found a more appropriate conclusion: he was declared a “mystic” due to schizophrenia. The Ukrainian NKVD also held a solemn funeral for him, and his family received a pension.
In fact, during the preparation of the Moscow trial, if the leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had carefully analyzed the instructions given by Stalin (not only from a purely operational, interrogation point of view, but also with the purpose of analyzing the nature of Stalin’s ideas and secret plans), they would have been surprised They would have been surprised to find that Stalin would eventually have to eliminate them because they were directly involved in the conspiracy to eliminate Lenin’s Old Guard and were unwelcome witnesses to Stalin’s various crimes. Moreover, Stalin had to eliminate the little people who had contributed to the farce of the trial, because once they became witnesses, they were fully capable of exposing Stalin’s plan to eliminate the head organs of the NKVD to the light of day.
In the past, when Mironov submitted Reinhold’s confession of slander against Zinoviev and Kamenev to Stalin for examination, Stalin ordered him to add to it the following: “Zinoviev and Kamenev thought that the State Political Security Directorate probably had information about their organization of a conspiracy against the state. Therefore, they considered that their first task after seizing power was to eliminate any evidence of guilt that might remain. To this end, they would appoint Bakayev as the chairman of the State Political Security Directorate and propose that he be authorized to physically eliminate all those who had directly carried out the assassination of Stalin and Kirov, as well as to eliminate those State Political Security Directorate staff members who had knowledge of the criminal premeditation.”
The leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the investigators knew very well that Zinoviev and Kamenev had killed no one at all and had no intention of killing anyone. Therefore, reading the passage that Stalin asked to be added to Reinhold’s confession, they should have come to the extremely important and, for them, even more life-threatening conclusion that, according to Stalin’s logic, all politicians who go out of their way to eliminate their political enemies by assassination in order to seize power must do whatever it takes to eliminate all traces of their crimes, including taking out the executors of their assassination orders without mercy. How did Mironov not realize that Stalin had revealed in this statement (which, of course, was extremely rare for him) the principle of his unswerving secrecy when he added this passage from Stalin to Reinhold’s confession?
The heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs understood that it was no one else but Stalin himself who directed the farce of the trial! Therefore. They should have realized that Stalin, after eliminating his political enemies, would kill all those who were involved in the planning and knowledge of the Moscow trial, even if the latter were leaders and general staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Pity the Cheka! They were like a pack of faithful hounds, stalking their prey without watching out for the hunter behind them. They could not have imagined that Stalin would be so ruthless and treacherous, and would not have been able to use the great power of their own organs to save their own lives.
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