The first development of some significance came in May 1936. In that month, fifteen prisoners “confessed,” nearly ten of whom were interrogated by Morchanov’s staff in the secret political bureau. This gave him reason to accuse the interrogators who had been transferred to him from his bureau. He said that they sat with the interrogated all night long and were neither motivated nor decisive. In one of his regular meetings, he gave an example. During one of his nightly rounds, he came across interrogator D, who had been transferred from the Secret Service, sleeping on his desk. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the interrogator was sitting across from Mr. D, who was also napping. This was a serious breach of protocol. It was likely to have serious consequences for Mr. D. For example, the prisoner could use the opportunity to escape. Morchanov harshly criticized the interrogator like D., while constantly praising the staff of the bureau.
In fact, all this happened for a very simple reason.
Interrogator D was a competent and experienced interrogator, but he was inexperienced in the use of blackmail and psychological abuse. At first, he listened to Morchanov silently and ignored him, but then he couldn’t stand it any longer and got up and declared that he had successfully interrogated many cases in the secret service, and that those cases were no less important than the cases that Morchanov’s interrogators had tried. Moreover, all present at the meeting understood the real reasons for the success of Molchanov’s interrogators.
Morchanov, being touched, asked D. what he was implying by these words, and D. replied. “Everything is in plain sight. It’s no big deal that your interrogators got all the confessions, knowing that the entire interrogation is in the hands of your bureau, and your people can select those prisoners who have children to interrogate …… and hand them over to us, who have no children. Besides, your people always give the prisoner a first hearing, and if he confesses, they keep him, and if he resists, they hand him over to us.
This was true, though Molchanov was reluctant to admit it. In a desperate attempt to curry favor with his superiors and bring glory to the cadres under his command, he classified the prisoner first, as D. had just said. But there was a deeper subtext to D’s words: the children of old party members could be taken hostage by the interrogators, and that alone could bring the strongest of men to their knees. Many of the old Bolsheviks, who were willing to die for their ideals but did not want to step on the bodies of their children, succumbed to violence.
An exasperated Morchanov accused D of trying to justify himself by insulting other staff members. He relieved D of his job and made a report to People’s Commissar Yagoda, recommending that D be imprisoned in Solovets concentration camp. Because of his irresponsible work, Mr. D slept through the night while performing his duties.
Mark Gay, D’s immediate superior, interceded for him in front of Yagoda, which saved D from being sent to the camp. However, getting rid of D was, after all, an easy task: he was demoted and transferred out of Moscow to the provinces.
At the same time, the day and night work, nervousness, and lack of sleep made the interrogators feel more and more physically demanding. The interrogators felt more and more exhausted. Their stamina was diminishing, and they had to rely on the compulsion of their superiors, especially on night patrols, to keep up with their work. In spite of this, the night interrogators were often the butt of jokes.
One interrogator, a former worker, couldn’t resist the all-night interrogations and simply carried a bottle of vodka with him. Whenever he couldn’t fight off the sleepyheads, he took out the bottle and sipped on it for a day, and for the first few nights it worked. But once, as they say, he took a few more gulps …… deserved his bad luck and came out on patrol that night. It was precisely Yagoda himself and his assistant Agranov. When they lifted the door of the interrogation room, they were greeted by the sight of the interrogator sitting on the table, shouting pitifully, “Today I interrogate you, tomorrow you interrogate me. Are our lives worthless?” The interrogator stood beside him, patting him on the shoulder like a father, trying to comfort him.
Following Morchanov’s instructions, Oliberg “gave up” a group of student terrorists from the Gorky Pedagogical Institute, saying that they were going to shoot Stalin with a pistol during the May Day parade. The authors of this farce found this story hardly convincing. Anyone with a little knowledge knows this. A real terrorist would never have pinned his hopes for success on such a murderous act. It should be remembered that the students were marching with the procession far from Lenin’s tomb, where the Politburo members were standing. It would have been hopeless to hit Stalin with a pistol from a distance while marching. If the terrorists had intended to use bombs, that would have been plausible. Moreover, the bomb has been the traditional weapon of Russian “monarch killers” since the days of the “Popular Will”. The purpose of arresting Nelidov, a chemistry teacher, was to accuse him of making bombs for terrorists in the chemistry laboratory of the Gorky Pedagogical School.
Yagoda and Yerov liked this idea. They sent an operation group to Gorky. The head of the team was Volodya Volovich, deputy head of the Operations Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The task was to search the chemistry and physics laboratories of the Pedagogical Institute and find material evidence that would confirm the idea. As soon as they found it, the interrogators forced Nelidov and his colleagues to confess at the trial that the explosives found belonged to the Trotskyists and were used to make bombs.
Volovich’s group stayed in Gorky for six or seven days. Upon his return, the show-off Volovich invited the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the various bureaus to Morchanov’s office to tell him about the amazing results of his trip.
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