After that routine meeting, the interrogators went to work on “catching up”. The interrogators started to do their best to “catch up on the lesson”. In the beginning, however, everything went on as usual, with no results. It was two weeks after the regular meeting with Morchanov that the army of interrogators managed to extract a “confession” from a defendant. And Stalin spent all day asking about the progress of the interrogations. In order to speed up the process, Morchanov enlisted Yakov’s help. Morchanov, with Yagoda’s permission, called another meeting of the interrogators and invited Central Secretary Yezhov to attend.
Yerov spoke at the meeting, emphasizing the great importance of the future trial for the whole Party. He then called on the interrogators to be tougher and more ruthless against the Party’s enemies. Yerev’s speech was full of slogans such as “There is no fortress before the Bolsheviks that cannot be breached! This was to stimulate the interrogators’ egos. But what impressed the participants the most was the new part of his speech that was directly addressed to them. He said: “If there is anyone among you who feels doubtful and uneasy, if there is someone who for some reason feels that he is not capable of defeating the Toddy gang, let him speak up so that we can keep him out of interrogation work. Then let him speak up, and we can stop him from doing interrogation work.” All the participants understood the consequences of this: the refusal to interrogate the Toddy gang would be seen as a protest against the organizers of the “case” themselves. The refusal would be met with immediate arrest and imprisonment. By now, every participant had realized that anyone who could not extract a “confession” from the person on trial was suspected of sympathizing with the person on trial.
Sure enough, the first week after the conference there was a sudden influx of “confessions. The interrogation team headed by Yuzhny, a notorious scoundrel and moral turncoat, head of a division of the Special Political Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was able to get confessions from five defendants at once, all of whom had confessions against Zinoviev and Kamenev. These five were Marxist-Leninist instructors from Leningrad and Stalingrad, who had been imprisoned only recently and had never been in the opposition. Their guilt lay only in the fact that illegal Trotskyist groups were found to be active in their schools. The secret of Yuzhny’s success was simple. As soon as he learned how the leaders had dealt with Reinhold and Pikel, he resorted to the same simple and easy methods with the poor teachers.
When Morchanov learned of this, he immediately called a special meeting to harshly criticize Yuzhny and his assistants for what they had done. It turned out that in the cases they were trying, it was not allowed to use the phrase “for the good of the party” to persuade the defendants to make confessions. Instead of exposing Zinoviev and Kamenev, they had to be forced to realize the enormity of their crimes and to repent; Morchanov said, “This is not a real interrogation at all!
“Even now I can go to Lubyanka Square,” continued Morchanov, “gather a hundred members of the party and tell them that party discipline demands that they rise up in the interests of the party and expose Zinoviev and Kamenev. In just one hour, I will receive a hundred confessions signed by them! No one has given you the right to make promises to prisoners in the name of the Party! This method,” Morchanov lectured, “can be used only in special circumstances and for particularly important defendants. And you must have the prior permission of Comrade Yerov. You, on the other hand, must conduct the trial in such a way that the persons on trial are convinced at every moment that you really believe them to be guilty. You can take advantage of their attachment to their families, you can take advantage of special decrees concerning the safety of their children, or simply, you can use any means you can think of. It is, however, inadmissible to accommodate the defendant to his own opinion, admitting his own innocence, in exchange for their confession.”
The organizers of the trial, having turned Olberg, Reinhold, and Pickerell into a “trio” at their beck and call, proceeded to expand the case.
First of all, those who were arrested by the Ministry of Internal Affairs were those whom Oliberg had framed under Morchanov’s orders. Many people were arrested in Minsk, because when Oliberg came to Moscow from Germany, he had stayed with relatives in Minsk. He had stayed with relatives in Minsk; there were mass arrests in Gorky as well. Because Oliberg had been a teacher there. Among those arrested in Gorky were Yelin, whom I mentioned, who was a member of the Gorky Regional Committee, and Fedotov, the director of the Pedagogical Institute, as well as Sokolov, Kantor, and Nelidov, who were all teachers at the Pedagogical Institute.
It was this same Yerin who had reported his suspicions about Oliberg to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Party Central Committee, and who had received on the telephone an order from Yerov not to make things difficult for Oliberg anymore. So Yelin understood that Oliberg was not a Trotskyist emissary at all, as the organizers of the trial had announced to the nation, but a spy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In short, Yelin knew too much, and was executed without any trial. However, Oliberg later mentioned Yelin’s name in court when listing the terrorists who had deliberately killed Stalin.
Fedotov, the head of the Pedagogical Institute, was also “given” by Oliberg. At first he was interrogated in the Gorky Regional Department of Internal Affairs, then he was taken to Moscow and interrogated under the supervision of Morchanov and Kosh. I had the privilege of reading Fedotov’s confession, so I expected that he would have a prominent place at the trial, since it stated that he was Okobel’s right-hand man and had deliberately killed Stalin. But he didn’t even appear in court. Perhaps the organizers of the trial believed him and were afraid that he would change his confession during the interrogation at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Fedotov himself also “confessed” to many people. Of course, they were “confessed” at Morchanov’s request. Among these “accomplices” there was also Yoffe, a famous physicist and member of the Academy of Sciences, who worked in Leningrad. But when Molchanov reported Fedotov’s confession to Stalin at the Kremlin meeting, Stalin suddenly said: “I’m not going to tell you what happened to him. Stalin suddenly said, “Delete Joffé’s name. We don’t need him at all!” This came as a surprise to Molchanov, since two weeks earlier it was he, Stalin, who had personally ordered that Joffrey be included in Fedotov’s confession as an accomplice. ……
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