In the confession prepared for him by Mironov, Pickerel admitted that he had been at Zinoviev’s insistence. He, together with Bakayev and Reinhold, carried out the preparations for the assassination of Stalin. He also testified to Reinhold’s confession that the Trotskyist Drescher had attempted to plan the assassination of Voroshilov. But the main part of Pikel’s confession was directed at Zinoviev.
Pickerell was different from Reinhold. Reinhold was always ready to sign any confession that he was asked to sign, believing that this was a task for the party. Pickel, on the other hand, basically refused to make false confessions to victimize other defendants. The only exception was the accusation against Zinoviev, because he thought it was a quid pro quo for the promises made to Yagoda. He was also asked to testify against other defendants, but Pickerel made one rule for himself. He agreed to corroborate statements only if the arrested person had already “confessed,” or if he had been framed by other defendants. At the same time, he adamantly refused to frame those whose black materials were not even in the possession of the Ministry of the Interior. Whereas Reinhold was devoted to helping the interrogators with his characteristic vigor, Pickerill was passive and indifferent. He gradually lost his sociable nature and became very withdrawn and depressed to the extreme. ……
However, we already know that Pickerill was assigned the role of a direct slanderer against Zinoviev, so the interrogation leaders began to feel uneasy about his psychological condition. They feared that he would lose his mind. So Yagoda ordered Pikl’s old friends to visit him often in prison, to express their concern and sympathy for him. They expressed their concern and sympathy for him. Pickerel was transferred to a more comfortable cell. Shainin, Ghai and Ostrovsky visited him often. They always carried a deck of cards, some ham and bread, and a drink with them, and sat with him until late at night. Their visits helped to stabilize Pickerel’s mood a bit. He began to cheer up again, making his usual wisecracks, sometimes forgetting that he was in prison, but sometimes sobering up again and shouting very seriously: “Oh, men, what a terrible thing to do, what a dirty business you have gotten me into. You’ll see, you’ll never meet a brilliant poker player like me again!
The confessions of Valentin Oliberg, Isaac Reinhold, and Rihad Pikel provided the necessary materials for the prosecution of the Ministry of Internal Affairs leaders against Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Bakaev, Parvaganian, and Mrachkovsky, and laid the groundwork for the trial. Now the trial organizers were faced with the task of using these false confessions to blackmail the former opposition leaders into extracting “confessions” of their participation in the anti-government conspiracy.
In fact, the testimonies of Olberg, Reinhold, and Pickerell alone were not sufficient. In order to achieve the goal of both eliminating the opposition and suppressing its members in general, Stalin demanded that the people be shown in the courtroom that the opposition was active all over the country, and that terrorist cells of the opposition were active in almost every state and city.
Every day, groups of opposition members were being taken to Moscow from distant prisons and concentration camps. According to Stalin’s intention, these people should be accused of being members of the terrorist cells, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs interrogators should first select from this “treasure trove” and “process” them to play ordinary roles in the farce of the trial.
But if the I.A. chiefs had an easy time getting “confessions” from people like Reinhold and Pickerell, the interrogators, who started at the same time in the middle of the chain, did not get the results they deserved. The prisoners who dealt with them. The inmates who dealt with them categorically denied participating in this terrorist activity. Moreover, most of them have hard evidence of their alibi – they have been held for years in prisons, concentration camps, and exile in remote areas. Morchanov often pushed the interrogators, whose pride was hurt by their inability to get the results their superiors needed, and whose energy was almost exhausted. Finally, realizing that it was hopeless, they expressed their opinion at a regular meeting chaired by Morchanov that they lacked the strongest means to make the “accused give in” and extract a confession from him. Yagoda’s secret decree prohibiting the use of threats and promises effectively disarmed them from fighting the interrogators.
Morchanov was surprised that they, experienced Cheka, with years of practice in the work of the “organs,” could understand the orders of the People’s Commissar so rigidly! He said.
“The Chekist should be not only a good interrogator, but also an expert politician. Then he added, with a strangely different tone: “He should be able to distinguish between what concerns him and what does not, between what he must and what he cannot carry out at the moment because of the ideals of the highest people.”
“But how exactly should one discern?” An interrogator asked. “The order was issued by the People’s Commissar himself, and it was issued specifically to us!”
“You’ll see how to tell the difference in a minute!” Morchanov interrupted him. “I give you an official order in the name of the People’s Commissar: go to your interrogators and kick their asses! Kick them to the ground and step on one foot until they confess!”
The attendees of the conference know from whom this outrageous statement came. Back in 1931. Stalin was told this by Prokofiev, the former head of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, when he reported to Stalin about the arrest of the Mensheviks Sukhanov, Grohman, Scher and others. At the time, Stalin was extremely dissatisfied with Prokofiev’s failure to force these men to confess that they had negotiated with the foreign General Headquarters, and told him, “Kick them over and put a foot on the ground until they confess.”
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