In early 1936, when preparations for the first trial were fully underway, Molchanov used Oliberg as an inside man, asking him to play the role of the accused and make false confessions in order to frame Lev Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks who had been arrested and brought to trial by Stalin’s decision.
No pressure was needed for Oliberg to play this role. The explanation given to him was very simple. He was chosen for this honorable task because of his outstanding performance in the struggle against Trotskyists; he was supposed to help the Party and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to eliminate Trotskyism, and he was supposed to expose Trotsky as the organizer of a conspiracy against the Soviet government in the forthcoming trial. At the same time, Oliberg was informed that he would be released from whatever sentence the court gave him. He was to be released. Then he went to the Far East to take up an important position.
Oliberg signed all the “interrogation transcripts” that the Ministry of Internal Affairs deemed useful. He even admitted under his signature that he had been sent to the Soviet Union by Sadov on instructions from Trotsky to organize the terrorist murder of Stalin. After arriving in the Soviet Union, he began working as a teacher in the city of Gorky, where he established contacts with other Trotskyists. Together they made plans to assassinate Stalin. According to Oliberg, the plan was to send a delegation of committed Trotskyist students to Moscow to participate in the May Day march. With the help of these students, Stalin was to be killed while he was standing on Lenin’s tomb as usual. Olimpiero also confessed that he was a Gestapo spy, and that Trotsky knew about it.
In order to crush “Trotsky’s plot,” Molchanov also ordered Oliberg to make some of his personal friends, mostly Lithuanians and Germans who had fled to the Soviet Union in 1932 as a result of Hitler’s persecution, look like terrorists. These demands to betray one’s friends took Olivier Berger by surprise. He understood Stalin’s motives for opposing Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky, but he could not understand why the powerful Ministry of the Interior was collecting false evidence to persecute the small group of fugitives who had been fortunate enough to find refuge in the Soviet Union. Oliberg pleaded with Morchanov not to force him to insult his friend, but Morchanov reminded him that orders must be carried out without accusations.
Oliberg was neither brave nor strong-willed. Although he knew that he was only a false defendant, and that he would be a false criminal in the future, he was not brave, nor strong-willed. But the cruel life behind bars and the desperation of the other defendants in the case scared him out of his wits. He feared that resisting Molchanov’s order would immediately turn him, a fake defendant, into a “real” defendant. Therefore, he finally signed everything that he was asked to testify.
Among the people mentioned in the official summary report of the first Moscow trial, only one was a friend of Olivier’s, a young man named Zorrokh Friedman (whom Olivier described as a “Gestapo agent”). However, in the unpublished interrogation transcripts of the Ministry of the Interior, signed by Oliberg, I saw other names as well. They were all old friends whom he was ordered to discredit. I remember them well, among them were the Behovsky brothers, both chemists. Morchanov wanted to use them because terror needed “bomb-making” criminals. There was also a man named Hatzik Gilevich, who was accused of attempting to kill Jirky. He was accused of attempting to kill Zhdanov, who had succeeded Kirov as the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee.
Isaac Reinhold was another very powerful weapon in the hands of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I had known this man since 1926. He was thirty-eight years old, with a large stature and an attractive, vivid face. He was well-dressed and did not look in any way like a member of the Soviet Communist Party, but rather like a pre-revolutionary aristocrat.
Although not an old party member, Reinhold rose through the political ranks through his superior abilities and his kinship with the Finance People’s Commissar Grigori Sokolnikov. At the age of twenty-nine, he became a member of the Soviet Economic Delegation. At the age of twenty-nine, he became a member of the Soviet economic delegation, took part in negotiations with the French government, and became a clerk in the Ministry of the People’s Commissar for Finance. At the villa in Sokolnikov. Reinhold befriended many prominent Bolsheviks, including Gaminev. Like thousands of young party members, Reinhold initially leaned toward the opposition, but soon left, never taking part in the internal party struggle again and devoting all his energy to administrative work. Before his arrest, he was director of the General Administration of the Cotton Industry.
In early 1936, when the Interior Ministry leaders, in cooperation with Yerevan, were selecting “accused” candidates for the trial they faced, Reinhold was also chosen. The reason was simple: he had personal contacts with Gaminev and Sokolnikov, and could be used as a witness against them. In addition, Reinhold had sided with the opposition. Although it was for a short period of time, it could still be used to blackmail him.
Reinhold was thus arrested. The interrogators announced to him that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was in possession of the materials that Gaminev had used to get him to join a terrorist organization, and that he was to expose Gaminev and Zinoviev as the leaders of a conspiracy against the Soviet government. Morchanov tried to convince Reinhold that by exposing these men he could save his life. Reinhold, however, categorically denied any involvement in the conspiracy, and tried to prove it to Molchanov. Before 1929, he had never met Gaminov.
Molchanov found nothing and had to hand Reinhold over to an interrogation team headed by Chertok, the second-in-command of the Operations Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior. Chertok was a notorious scoundrel and persecutor. He and his men battled Reinhold for nearly three weeks. They interrogated him incessantly. Sometimes a single interrogation lasted forty-eight hours, with no breaks, no food, and no sleep. Sometimes they took advantage of his attachment to his family by signing warrants for the arrest of his entire family in front of him. However, three weeks was not enough time to break Reinhold’s will and steel body.
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