Chapter 21: Yagoda in the Cell
SHOOTING WITHOUT TRIAL and incomprehensible horror hung like a cloud over the whole Soviet Union. It was in this gloomy and terrible atmosphere that the preparations for the third Moscow trial began to accelerate. This Time, the last of the old Bolsheviks, who had been Lenin’s close comrades, would be put in the dock. Stalin’s torture experts were now more certain of their “success”. First, their methods of extracting confessions had been successfully tested in two trials; second, the massive wave of terror over the past few years had created a perverse psychosis of cowardice, which served as an aid to the interrogators in exerting pressure on their victims.
Intimidation is now much more effective than promises in breaking the will of those on trial. During the first two Moscow trials, many defendants did not believe that Stalin would carry out his threat to implicate their families. Now, however, no one on trial dares to treat this threat as a joke. Nevertheless, in order to completely disillusion the defendants, Yerev placed in each cell a prisoner dressed as a special agent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The task of the “Abbas” was to tell their “friends” in the same cell the stories of children of ten to twelve years old who accompanied their Parents to the execution. In this climate of terror, where murder and suicide are the order of the day. The accused, in a state of extreme mental anguish and panic, will believe any nonsense.
Here I am tempted to give a few real examples of the tragic fate of the children of the old Bolsheviks. I remember. In the autumn of 1937, we, the NKVD personnel in foreign countries, heard that Yerev had ordered the leaders of the NKVD subdivisions to arrest the youngsters whose parents had been shot throughout the country and to sentence them to death, as they had done to the adults. When I first heard this news, neither I nor any other comrade believed it to be true. Because it was impossible. How could Stalin accuse teenagers of plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime? However, this rumor was so “persistent” that it always came out of the country again and again, and from some “well-informed people”.
At that time, I had no access to concrete factual information about the persecution of the children of the old party members, and after leaving the Stalinist regime. I did not dare to hope to find such materials. However, Life is full of surprises – I soon found evidence confirming the above rumors, and it was revealed to me through open channels, i.e. the official Soviet press itself.
At the end of February 1939, the Soviet press published a story about the arrest of Lunikov, the head of the Kuznetsky internal affairs department in Leninsk, and his men for having arrested many children and forced them to confess their participation in a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet power, adding that the children had been thrown into the already overcrowded cells with criminal and political prisoners. The newspaper also revealed how a ten-year-old boy named Volodya was tortured day and night to confess to his membership in a fascist organization.
A witness for the prosecution testified in court that.
“For example, I asked the children where they had seen the fascists, and they replied to the effect: ‘We’ve only seen the fascists in movies. They all wear white made hats.’ When I asked again about Trotskyists and Bukharinists, the children replied: ‘These are the people we saw in prison, they were locked up with us.'”
Since the children saw Trotskyists and Bukharinists in prison, it means that those same Trotskyists and Bukharinists saw the children in prison and must have known that they were also accused of capital crimes – of participating in a conspiracy against the state and other crimes. There is no doubt that the defendants in the Third Moscow Trial would have paid any price to protect the lives of their relatives and children from Stalin’s severe beatings.
How could Stalin have allowed this “children’s case” to be tried in public and to appear in the press? Wouldn’t this be a disgrace to his own face? In fact, this is nothing to be surprised about, knowing that this is Stalin’s usual trick: whenever his own crimes are revealed (even if only internally), Stalin will immediately shift all the blame to his own men and pretend to bring these scapegoats to court. In the courtroom, the defendants were never heard to betray their masters, because they were equally concerned with their own lives and those of their families.
The third Moscow trial began in March 1938. The main defendants who appeared in court were: Nikolai Bukharin – the former leader of the Communist International, a member of the Politburo under Lenin, the best theoretician of the party. Aleksei Likov – member of the Politburo under Lenin and deputy chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars (after Lenin’s death he was chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars), Nikolai Krestinsky – former secretary of the Party Central Committee and Lenin’s deputy in charge of organizational work and Christian Rakovsky – an old and respected member of the party, who had made great achievements for the revolution and had been sent by Lenin to lead the work in Soviet Ukraine.
However, sitting side by side with the above-mentioned best activists of the party and the state, or, among these accused friends and comrades of Lenin, there was another very unpopular person. The appearance of this man in the dock immediately became a sensation throughout the world.
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