Morchanov divided the participants into several interrogation groups. He explained to them the technical details of the upcoming interrogation work and the procedure for coordinating the whole work. Finally, he read out a secret decree prepared by the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yagoda, warning the interrogation agencies not to use any illegal methods of torture, such as threats, promises, or intimidation, against the defendants.
After hearing all this, the participants were stunned, raising one question after another: Is it possible that such a huge conspiracy was uncovered without their direct involvement? You know, they are in charge of all the operations of the Ministry of the Interior and the entire secret intelligence network that monitors all the movements of the opponents. They let go of such a big conspiracy organization. And they are not even blamed. What is this all about? Isn’t it their job to expose conspiracies? What’s more, the conspiracy has now been identified as having existed for several years: ……
The outline of the trial and the procedure for its preparation were carefully studied and developed by Stalin and Yegev themselves. The actual executor of this action was People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Yagoda.
According to Stalin’s plan, it was necessary to bring to Moscow for “processing” nearly three hundred members of the former opposition who were known to be in exile and in various prisons. In this way, about one-fifth of the prison population would be “processed. About one-fifth of the prisoners would give in and admit their involvement in the conspiracy of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky. Then a few of these fifty or sixty would be selected and handed over to the organizers of the trial, who would use their confessions to direct the trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev, using threats, promises, or other methods of torture. The two activists, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were forced to confess that they were leading a conspiracy against Stalin and the Soviet government.
In order to carry out Stalin’s plans as quickly as possible, the Ministry of Internal Affairs decided to send several of its spies to prison to pose as defendants, who would claim at preliminary hearings and in court to be participants in the conspiracy and confess that Zinoviev and Kamenev were its leaders.
In the hands of the investigative leaders there was already a “talent pool”. Among them were Valentin Oliberg, a secret agent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; Isaac Voinhold, a high-ranking Soviet official who had personal ties to Kamenev; and Lihard Kankel, a former Soviet agent who had been a member of the Soviet Union’s secret service. -In the past, he was the head of the secretariat of Zinoviev. These three men played a key role in the preparation of the interrogations for the first Mosby trial.
As a special agent of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior, Oliberg spied for a time on German Trotskyists in Berlin. He worked as a secret intelligence officer. In 1930, he was dispatched by the chief of the German intelligence station of the General Directorate of State Political Security to try to infiltrate Trotsky’s secretariat. At the time, Trotsky was living in Turkey. This attempt was unsuccessful: he was unable to gain Trotsky’s trust. After Hitler came to power in Germany, the Directorate General of State Political Security recalled Oliberg to the Soviet Union and sent him temporarily to Tajikistan to work as a teacher. Oliberg did not last long in Stalinabad there, and was soon summoned by the Foreign Service for foreign assignments. He was sent to Prague to monitor the activities of the Czechoslovak-based German left-wing parties.
In 1935, Oliberg was again recalled to the Soviet Union and soon transferred to the Ministry of the Interior’s Secret Political Bureau under Morchanov. At that time, the Central Committee and the “Agency” were dealing with the growing pro-Trotsky sentiment in the Supreme Party School. Having studied the “original” works of Marxism-Leninism, the students of the party school came to understand that Trotskyism, which Stalin had denounced as heresy, was in fact genuine Marxism-Leninism.
The most serious situation arose at the Gorky Pedagogical Institute. Cadets formed secret groups to study the works of Lenin and Trotsky. Some banned documents from the party, including the famous “Lenin’s Will,” were secretly circulated in the school. Oliberg was considered to be one of the most experienced spies. Therefore, the Ministry of Internal Affairs assigned him to work at the teacher’s training college.
In the Soviet Union, the selection of instructors for higher party schools was particularly careful. Only communists who were absolutely reliable, who had never been in the opposition, and who were experienced in party higher education and education, were qualified to work there. The history and personal history of each person designated for such educational work were repeatedly examined by the party organizations and personnel offices at all levels of the unit to which he or she belonged, and the assembled materials were sent to a special commission composed of representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Party Central Committee for verification.
Obviously, Oliberg would never have been able to meet these stringent requirements without special care – he was not a member of the Communist Party of Russia, nor even a Soviet citizen. The official stenographic transcript of the first Moscow trial shows that he was a Lithuanian, and that the Honduran Republican identity card he carried as a tourist to the Soviet Union had been bought in Czechoslovakia. Besides that, Oliberg had no higher education. This alone would have made him ineligible to be an instructor in the social science faculty. But in spite of this, Molchanov forced the personnel office of the Central Supreme Party School to accept his appointees, pointing out that his agents could and must work in Gorky. Later, the Central Committee issued an additional written order appointing Oliberg as a teacher of the history of the revolutionary movement.
However, the appointment of Olivier Berger still encountered many problems. When he first arrived in Gorky, he was introduced to a man named Yellin. He was introduced to a man named Yellin, a member of the State Party Committee. This man was a member of the state party committee, and his job in the party was to get to know all the newly appointed teachers and instruct them on how to deal with political issues. In his conversation with Yellin, Oliberg was confused when answering questions. He gave contradictory accounts of his experiences and finally had to admit that he was not a student of history, not a member of the United Communist Party, and not a citizen of the Soviet Union. Elin suspected that Oliberg had forged documents, and immediately reported the situation to the internal affairs bureau of the city of Khogorky and to the Party Central Committee. When Morchanov learned of this, he hung up the phone with his hands and feet and went straight to the Central Committee. Yerev summoned Yelin. Ordered him not to make trouble with Oliberg. “Let him teach at the Academy!” This episode, as we will see later, played a very bad role in the first Moscow trial and led to the murder of Yellin.
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