Volovich first showed the bomb that had been confiscated during the search of the laboratory at the Teachers College in Gorky. He placed half a dozen hollow iron balls, about three inches in diameter, on it. The iron ball was rusty and unremarkable.
With a wry grin on his face, Volovich said it was a bomb casing hidden by the Trotskyists. He then read aloud several official certificates that he had concocted in Gorky. One of the certificates was sufficient to confirm that the bomb casings were buried in sand in the physics laboratory of the Pedagogical Institute and were only discovered during a search, and that the hollow iron spheres were not noted in the laboratory’s equipment list. Volosovic’s goal was clear: he wanted to prove that the iron spheres did not belong to the laboratory, but that the terrorists had brought them to the Academy to hide them for later bomb-making.
Volosovic also boasted shamelessly that “a lab technician said that the shells belonged to the laboratory and had been used in physics experiments. I immediately grabbed him and asked, ‘Is it true? Looks like. What else do you know about these shell casings? Take a closer look at them and then tell me. Is it the original ones! The boy shuddered with fear and quickly said that he was mistaken, that he was seeing the shells for the first time”.
Volovic also read an official appraisal by an expert from the local army. The conclusion affirmed that the shells of these iron spheres, once loaded with explosives, had “tremendous destructive power. Morchanov and his assistants were overjoyed, praising Volovich for his skill in transforming harmless metal spheres, which were part of a physics laboratory, into terrifying “bomb casings”. Volovic also felt like a hero. The proofs he read at the conference did work, but the ball itself was worthless. But the metal ball itself was worthless, and anyone who glanced at it would immediately realize what a fraud Volovich was.
Frontier Corps Commander Vrinovsky picked up an iron ball from the table, scrutinized it for a while, and, with a contemptuous sneer on his face, said to Volovich.
“If you need bomb casings, you can come to me. I can give you some real ones. I have all kinds of hand grenades, German, English, Japanese, whatever you want. If you want, but you can’t make bombs out of the stuff you get. Anyone who knows anything about grenades will tell you the same thing I did. Anyone who knows anything about it will say the same thing to you.
Immediately after the play, those who were enthusiastic about the “bomb story” lost their enthusiasm. Moreover, Niridov, who was scheduled to play the role of the bomb-maker, repeatedly refused to sign the false confession. The organizers of the trial, however, found it difficult to discard the idea completely. The report of the search at the Gorky City Pedagogical Institute, as well as other materials that Volovich brought back, were included in the case file. It was all put together in the case file. As far as I remember, the State Prosecutor did not show the metal balls in court, nor did he ask the judges to mention the bomb.
Chapter 6 Zorrokh Friedman – the unsung hero of history
Among those framed by Valentin Oliberg was an old friend of his from Lithuania, Zorrokh Friedman, who was not put in the dock with the other defendants and did not appear as a witness, and is mentioned only in the official stenographic record of the first Moscow trial in the following words.
Wyszynski: What do you know about Friedman?
OLBERG: Friedman was a member of a Berlin Trotskyist organization that was sent to the Soviet Union.
Vyshinsky: Did you know that he was connected to the German police?
Olivier Berger: I have heard of it.
With these few seemingly passing words, no one, of course, can understand the tragic fate that befell this brave and honest man. In spite of the incredible pressure exerted on him by the torturing authorities, he was unwilling to lose his human dignity and refused to exchange his life for the price of pleasing his persecutors.
In 1936, Zorrokh Friedman was twenty-nine years old. He was tall, a typical Jewish young man born in a small town. He had fiery red hair and light blue eyes. A devout believer in Marxist-Leninist doctrines, he became involved in the revolutionary movement as a teenager and later joined the Lithuanian Communist Party, but soon after, he was forced to flee to Germany to escape the police. In Germany, Friedman joined the Communist Party of Germany again. When Hitler came to power, he had to leave Germany and, like many Communists in other countries, was “fortunate” to find refuge in the Soviet Union. In March 1933, he arrived in Moscow on the same train as Olivier Berger.
In 1935, Zorrokh Friedman was suddenly arrested. The charge against him was that he had complained in a private conversation that the Soviet government was exploiting the workers more than the capitalists. The informant was probably Olivier Berger. The Special Committee sentenced Friedman in absentia to ten years in the Solovets concentration camp for counter-revolutionary propaganda.
When the year 1936 arrived, the heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while selecting candidates for the upcoming trial of the “Joint Headquarters of Trotsky”, noticed the fact that Friedman was a friend of Oliberg and had come to the Soviet Union with him, and the idea of describing Friedman as a terrorist sent to the Soviet Union by Trotsky himself came to their attention. In addition, Friedman was put in the “Joint Headquarters” for one more serious reason: he was already behind bars. He still has ten years left to serve. So the Ministry of Internal Affairs believed that Friedman, who was under the full control of the “authorities”, would agree to play the role assigned to him in the farce of the trial in order to reduce his sentence. After being transferred from Solovets to Moscow, Friedman was sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to be “processed” by Boris Berman, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau.
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