Chapter 11 – Yerev’s revenge on Anna Arkus
Among those who were arrested in connection with the “Trotsky-Tenoviev joint headquarters” case was a woman named Anna Arkus. This is a charming and educated woman, who was the wife of Gligory Arkus, a member of the National Bank Administration. After the couple divorced, their two-year-old only daughter stayed with Anna. Soon after, Grigori married the famous ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre, Ily Sesenko, while Anna married an able staff member of the Bobryshev Ministry of Internal Affairs, the head of the political department of the Moscow Division. As the wife of a Cheka officer, she got acquainted with many “organ” leaders and was particularly close to the Slutskys, old friends of Bobryshev. The marriage of Anna Arkus did not last long, but her friendly relations with the friends of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were maintained. Her first husband also helped her and her own young daughter generously from time to time.
In the summer of 1936, Anna Arkus’s friends were surprised to learn that when Yagoda issued detention warrants for a large group of old Bolsheviks, he ordered her to be arrested as well. The staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs could not figure out how the arrest of a woman who had nothing to do with the party or politics could be connected with the trial of Lenin’s old comrades.
Anna Arkus was arrested in a sanatorium for senior employees of the National Bank outside Moscow. At the time, she was vacationing there with her daughter, who had turned five years old. Feeling innocent and not particularly afraid of the NKVD “agencies”, where many of her friends worked, Anna Arkus was more surprised than frightened by what was happening. Thinking that it was a misunderstanding and that she would be released as soon as the matter was cleared up, she entrusted her daughter temporarily to the wife of a bank leader.
Immediately after learning of Anna Arkus’s arrest, Slutsky went to Morchanov, who was single-handedly responsible for the trial preparations, to find out what was going on. Morchanov told him that the name was blacklisted by Yezhov himself. He also put the name of Anna’s ex-husband, Grigory Arkus, who was the head of the foreign branch of the National Bank, on it. Slutsky realized at once; Yerov probably wanted to put a charge on him for aiding Trotsky with foreign currency. The arrest of Anna Arkus under such circumstances must have been intended to put pressure on her ex-husband.
The case of Anna Arkus was taken care of by a rather famous staff member of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, C-something. Her only crime consisted of a single sentence in Reinhold’s confession. He insisted that he and two other members of the “Moscow Terrorist Group”, Pielke and Gligory, had secret meetings at Anna’s house in 1933 and 1934.
The interrogator C. was well aware of the purpose of Stalin’s trials and of the various methods used by the NKVD to obtain confessions, and therefore did not rely on Inhold’s confession. However, he felt that he had to conduct the interrogation formally. During the first interrogation, he asked Anna Alkus to name all the people who had visited her home since 1933. But when Anna realized that he intended to make a record, she immediately stopped talking and asked him whether it was appropriate to write down such a list in the interrogation records, since some of her guests were very famous people – leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and even members of the Central Committee. To give examples, she named the Slutskys, a notorious prosecutor general, and a few others.
All her friends, as if through a selection process, were either famous party members or big names in the Soviet People’s Commissariat, so Anna could not figure out at this point how her acquaintance with these people could bring her calamity. But then she finally remembered something: a prominent person had once called one of her friends a “two-faced” person. However, it was probably due to jealousy. Here’s what happened. One evening Nikolai Yezhov brought a diplomat from the center, Gomorov, to her house. Among the guests at her house was a friend named Pyatigorsky, who was a Soviet commercial counsellor in Iran. Later, while leaving, Yerov suddenly asked Anna how she could entertain such a “two-faced” person like Pyatigorsky in her own home. She felt insulted and said in return. “If Pyatigorsky is a two-faced person, why do you keep him in the party and why does the government entrust him with such important work?”
Yerev lashed out, calling her a vulgar little citizen. Anna was also furious. She claimed: “My friends, all decent people! And your soulmate Konar is a Polish spy!”
She was referring to the great Polish spy Poleciuk. In 1920, the Polish spy agency gave him the party card of a fallen Red Army soldier and sent him to the Soviet Union. In twelve years “Konar” managed to climb to the top of the Soviet bureaucracy and became a deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Agriculture.
“Konar and Yerov were close friends, and it was Yerov who helped him to steal such a prominent position. This was no longer a secret. Polesiuk’s exposure was purely accidental. A Communist who knew Konar reported to the General Directorate of State Political Security that the deputy People’s Commissar named Konar was not in fact Konar, but an impostor.
Anna Arkus told the interrogator that after that argument with Yezhov she had not invited him to her home and had stopped paying attention to his phone calls.
She did not know that Yerov had been appointed from Stalin to supervise the preparations for the trial of the old Bolsheviks, and that her whole fate was now in Yerov’s hands. But the interrogator was well aware of this. He now fully understood why Yezhov had included her name in the list of Old Bolsheviks, even though she had no involvement with them.
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