Very honourable Mr Stalin,
I have heard that recently, a number of scientists invited to Russia have been accused of committing all sorts of serious crimes. I am writing to you about people who are completely trusted by their professional colleagues. I understand that, in times of severe crisis, you can mistakenly suspect innocent and honest people, but I am also convinced that these people, with their extraordinary energy and rare abilities, must be treated with the utmost care. I therefore ask you to review the proceedings against Alexander Weissberg, an Austrian citizen, engineer and physicist, who works at the Ukrainian Technical Institute in Kharkiv. I also ask you to take into account the opinion of the management of the institute when making your decision.
Sincerely, Professor Albert Einstein
Pasadena, 16 May 1938
It was Sunday, 24 January 1937. Alexander Weissberg was happy to get some rest. Suddenly, the phone rang and a foreign voice ordered him: ‘Don’t repeat after me. It’s the NKVD speaking to you. Come to us at eleven o’clock and ask for room 222.
When he put down the receiver, his hand trembled. Ever since his ex-wife’s arrest, he could feel the ring around him tightening. The tension of the last few weeks was unbearable. He knew something was about to happen. The Kharkiv branch of the NKVD was close by. He entered the lobby, told the uniformed receptionist his name and got his pass. He stood outside room 222, knocked and entered. It was narrow, with a desk by the window and a cupboard against the wall. Behind the desk sat a stranger with a pile of papers in his hand. He told him to sit down, said a little prayer and then asked him what he had been doing in Moscow. “I intervened with a military prosecutor on behalf of my ex-wife,” Weissberg was clear.
But the stranger did not give up: ‘Your wife has been arrested as an enemy of the nation and you intervene for her? So you are helping the enemies of the nation. We know that you have had private contacts with enemies of the nation. Can you name them? Who are your friends? Tell us your CV.”
Alexander knew that the interrogator had his CV in a folder in front of him. He told him some of the names of colleagues with whom he had socialised. The interrogator then stood up and told him to wait outside the door because he needed to speak to a supervisor. He thought about what to do. Should he run away? But where? To Moscow to his acquaintances? They would look for him there first. Abroad? He knew that the border guards would shoot anyone who appeared in the border area and that if he even stepped on forbidden ground, he would surely be arrested. It would be best to wait and see what happened.
The interrogator returned and they went back into the room: ‘Admit that you came to our country with conspiratorial intentions. You should know that we have been following your defeatist work for many years. We are giving you one last chance to discover all your agents, to renounce your conspiratorial work and to come over to our side.”
Alexander’s throat tightened and he struggled to say, “That can’t be true. I am an Austrian Communist and I came to this country to take part in building socialism. I am here because I was invited by the Comintern, I was invited as an engineer and a professional.”
The interrogator did not give up: ‘We will have another talk with you in our cellars. Answer the questions in concrete terms. Who sent you here?” A similar dialogue continued for two hours, then the interrogator took him to another room. In it stood an NKVD captain in front of a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky. “Ah, Comrade Weissberg, nice to see you. You do not know me, but I have been dealing with you for a long time. But decide already to do for us what you have been doing for others.” Then he added menacingly, “Otherwise you will go and feed the polar bear.” He was probably referring to the work camp on Solovki Island in the Arctic Sea, where there were many polar bears.
Alexander lost his nerve and said in a raised voice: “You can’t talk to me like that. You can arrest me, but as long as I am a free man, I demand that you treat me like one.” The captain suddenly became kind and told him to think it over and come back to them in two days. Then he signed the pass and told him he could go.
Even though it was January, Alexander came home completely sweaty. It would be best to leave the Soviet Union, he thought, but he knew that without the Comintern’s permission this was impossible. Even if he got it, the exit visa application would go to the police and would be examined by the NKVD. They are probably already monitoring him and checking his mail. Then he suddenly remembered. He was going to volunteer for the International Brigades in Spain, because the Comintern was inviting them there.
The next day, he was already on the construction site thinking about who to hand over his business to. He went over the latest budgets again before sending them to Moscow for approval. He knew that as a foreigner he would not be able to stay in the Soviet Union forever anyway, and there were rumours that hundreds of foreigners had been arrested in Moscow, Leningrad and even Kharkov in recent weeks. His colleagues told him that this was right, because they were spies. When he mentioned to them that his wife was no longer a spy, but had nevertheless been in prison for several months, they consoled him that it was just a mistake.
Two days later, he was face to face with his interrogator again. “You were in contact with enemies of our country, the Party and the government. I have enough information about you to arrest you, but I have not done so yet. Think about our proposal and about your life so far. See you again in two days.”
He returned home full of evil forebodings. Could he really have made a mistake? Then it hit him. In 1933, he was involved in the construction of a factory in Grolovka, for which German engineers had contributed plans. All the plans were state secrets, although it was not clear to anyone why, since they were publicly available to everyone in Germany. He recalled that the factory in Grolovka had some specific features that were drawn in them. At that time he asked those responsible if he could go to Vienna with the documents and talk to the German engineers, otherwise the factory could not be completed. He got permission and the plans and went. Unfortunately, he could not remember to whom he returned them after his return to the Soviet Union.
Could it be that some part of the plan has been forgotten in Vienna and they have noticed and are monitoring it? What if he knew something careless about Trotsky? He did not agree with his ideas, but he did not believe that the founder of the Red Army was a counter-revolutionary. Incidentally, the high-ranking Party functionaries Pyatakov, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev were not foreign agents either, but they were destroyed anyway. Why should it have happened to him otherwise, since he was just an insignificant fish.
The reencounter with the interrogator was similar to the previous one, only worse and more verbally aggressive. He was asked to tell which enemy organisation he worked for and in which cities he had agents. The shouting lasted for eight hours and Alexander expected to be taken to prison. But again they gave him two days to change his mind and finally explained:
“Get it out of your head that you are going to Spain. We are responsible for it and we will not allow an enemy of our country and of the Spanish people to be there. As soon as you apply to go to Spain, we will arrest you.”
How did they even know I wanted to go to Spain, since I only told a few friends, Alexander wondered. Could there be an NKVD collaborator among them? He decided to talk to Ilyich Lajpunsky, the much-loved director of the Kharkiv Technical Institute, who was overseeing the construction of the factory. Lajpunski was a member of the city’s Party Committee and a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He listened to him somewhat embarrassed, shook his head and said that what had happened to him was not a good thing. He did not know how he could help him, but he told him that he would have to report their interview. Report it, but why, Alexander wondered.
He went home in a bad mood and turned on the radio. He had heard nothing new. The trial of Pyatakov, Deputy Commissioner for Heavy Industry, accused of trying to cause an accident in a Siberian mine, had ended. Prosecutor Vishinsky had the final word at the trial. Alexander had had enough and switched off the radio.
On his next visit to the NKVD, the interrogator greeted him by shouting, “Are you crazy, Weissberg? What came into your head that you were talking to Lajpunsky? Our conversations are a state secret. Don’t you understand that, you capitalist saboteur? Will you finally decide to confess?” He had to sign that he would not tell anyone about his talks with the NKVD, but after that he was only more determined to return to Austria and give up his job in Kharkov. He communicated his decision to Director Lajpunski.
In fact, he didn’t even know whether he would be let out of the Soviet Union, but he knew that if a foreigner wanted to leave the country, he first had to hand in his passport to the administration of the district committee, which then sent it to the NKVD. He must state where and when he will be crossing the border and attach two photographs of himself. One is sent immediately to the border post, with a note to let the foreigner leave the country. This is because a 60-kilometre strip of land along the border was under the strictest surveillance. All these measures were a guarantee that no one could leave the country without permission.
When he was informed at the beginning of March that his request to leave his job had been granted, he decided to apply for an exit visa the following day. Feeling a great sense of relief, he went in good spirits to visit a friendly family living in the next block. In the middle of the visit, the phone rang, the friend picked up the receiver, looked at him and said: “There is someone waiting for you at home.” Alexander stood up, saying, “They’re going to arrest me anyway. The NKVD is waiting for me at home. Welcome.”
He thought of running away, going to the train station and driving to Moscow, but realising that he would quickly be spotted and the police alerted, he went home. At the door of his apartment, a man in uniform handed him a search warrant. It lasted until half past one in the morning. They took all his documents and letters, his passport, books and foreign newspapers and wrote a report which he had to sign. They told him to pack his things and go with them. They took him away, and the few night-walkers just looked at him, terrified.
He found himself in a cold cell. Alone. When he tried to ask the guard something, he replied, “We only whisper here. Just lie down and fall asleep. Get up at six in the morning.” In the morning, he was woken by a bell. The opening on the door opened and he was given a cup of tea and a piece of bread, and in the evening a plate of cabbage soup. Sometimes he was alone in the cell, other times there were more than twenty people in the cell. Then they all stood and took turns sleeping on the single bed.
His fellow prisoners told him the procedure for arresting a party member. The NKVD sends a copy of the arrest warrant to the city party committee, which expels him from the party in secret and in his absence. From the time of expulsion to the time of arrest, there are usually several days, sometimes weeks, sometimes even months. There is a well-known case of a high-ranking Party official who was expelled from the Party, but it took several months before he was arrested. In the intervening period until his arrest, the “expelled” party official has been excluding other party members. Exclusion from the Party was therefore a precursor to arrest.
14 days later, he was taken for his first hearing. The interrogator was the same as the previous time, but now he introduced himself as Polevecki. After the usual question about whether he admitted to belonging to a counter-revolutionary group, he began to ask him about people whom Alexander had known many years before as communists. “Do you know Erwin Kohn?” was one of the questions. Of course, he knew him from his Berlin days. He was a member of the German Party and had come to Moscow in 1929 to take part in the building of factories. After that, Alexander did not see him for a long time.
Polevecki told him that he was a saboteur and leader of saboteur groups in the metallurgical industry. Alexander knew that this was not possible because Kohn had been injured in a factory accident and could not carry out sabotage operations. Polevecki shouted, “It was just a mask! He could organise sabotage actions from his bed!” He admitted that he had caused the explosion that killed many workers.
Alexander fell silent, seeing that there was no point in debating. The interrogation ended with Polevecki calling him a fascist dog and sending him back to his cell. He had barely fallen asleep before he was woken up half an hour later and sent for a new interrogation. Polevecki wanted to hear only one thing; a confession. That night he was woken up twice more and taken away for interrogation. “Take this dirty dog away. We’ll break his bones already,” he heard him say goodbye.
He returned to his cell at around half past six, and by six the bell had rung. During these night interrogations, he saw some people he knew from the construction site in the corridors. He did not know whether they had been arrested or were there as witnesses, but they were probably there for both reasons.
He was then spared interrogation for a few days and then, after a break, confronted with witnesses. The first to be confronted was his chauffeur Gerf, who testified that he had driven him and his friends around Kharkov on a Sunday. They stopped near a meadow, the women were picking flowers, and Alexander went into the nearby woods and took photographs of a hidden military airfield. “This is a pure lie”, Alexander protested. “I went into the shade of the forest with my friends, and a soldier appeared and ordered us to stand down. And we did. This is the first I have heard of a military airfield.” Polevecki clapped his hands in glee, “Now we have you, the witness has confirmed your espionage activities.”
In the second he confronted the factory party secretary Komarov, who claimed: ‘On that day I talked to Weissberg about the killing of Comrade Kirov in Leningrad by the Trotskyist organisation Nikolayev. He told me that he did not believe in it, because the Trotskyists, as Marxists, were supposed to be opposed to individual terror.” Alexander was beside himself, because Komarov had portrayed a perfectly ordinary conversation as a statement by a Trotskyist.
A few days later, a small man in a uniform that was neither military nor that of a member of the NKVD stood next to Polevetsky in his office. He introduced himself as Resnikoff and explained, “I have taken over your case. You will talk, and then you can poison yourself. I am a tough man and I will drain every last drop of blood from you. We will start tomorrow. We know only twenty of your crimes, you know a hundred, so get ready to tell us.” Thus began a new chapter in Alexander’s investigation.
Resnikov: “We know that you were one of the main representatives of the Trotskyist Bukharin in Ukraine. I personally discovered the organisation that you led. All your colleagues are already under lock and key. We are awake, we have disabled you. I am giving you one last chance. Go back to your cell and write a full confession to the head of the Kharkov NKVD. If you do this today, and I have it in my hands tomorrow, I will not only free you, but you will be given a higher position, one that you cannot even dream of.”
Alexander returned to his cell and wrote a complaint to the military prosecutor. He protested against the method used against him. When he gave the piece of paper to Resnikoff, Resnikoff went berserk, took a revolver from the table and started waving it in his face. “I see you have never been in the dungeon! We will no longer work with you wearing gloves because you are a foreigner. We deal with foreign spies on short notice.”
Mount Holodnaya
Over the next few days, Resnikov lost his nerve more and more. Every hearing began and ended with shouting and threats. But even Alexander had nerves in the end. He could no longer concentrate, he spoke sentences that were difficult to connect, and sometimes his hands shook. Despite this, he still refused to sign the confession that Resnikov had written and was dangling in front of him. And then there were the same questions about who had engaged him and who his colleagues were. He started thinking about suicide.
One day, a guard entered his cell and told him to get ready to leave. When asked where he was going, he replied that he was going to Holodnaya Gora prison. He was put into a maricab, an armed guard sat opposite him, refusing to say a word, and twenty minutes later they were on the outskirts of Kharkov, where the city’s main prison, Holodnaya Gora, was located, made up of several buildings dating back to the tsarist era.
He was pushed into a cell that used to be a solitary cell, but could now house a maximum of three prisoners. He was alone. The cell was four metres long and two metres wide, with the only light coming through a small barred window high up in the wall. You had to step on a chair to look out. He was left alone for a few days and then taken back to Kharkov to the NKVD headquarters for interrogation. There were many cells in the basement, called waiting rooms, and in them prisoners waited to be taken to the upper floors to face the interrogators. When the interrogation was over, they were taken back to Holodnaya Gora.
The waiting rooms were sometimes full of prisoners, and word soon spread that Marshal Tukhachevsky and eight other leading generals of the Red Army had been arrested. One prisoner found a piece of newspaper in the toilet and read the news about him. Alexander was alarmed. Up to now, the purges had mainly covered the political leaders of the opposition to Stalin and the old guard of the Bolsheviks, and Tukhachevsky and the generals did not belong to either of these groups. Officially, he was deputy to the incompetent Commissar for National Defence, Voroshilov, and was engaged in the modernisation and reorganisation of the army. When he fell out of favour with Stalin, he was not immediately arrested, but placed in a minor position along the Volga, as the NKVD feared that his arrest would cause resistance from the army.
Tuhachevsky and the generals were not tried in public. They were tried by a secret military court headed by Voroshilov and convicted as German and Japanese spies who had betrayed military secrets to the enemy. The conviction of Tukhachevsky also influenced the behaviour of the interrogators in Kharkov. Resnikoff was very agitated and the NKVD people only spoke to each other in a half-voice.
Alexander was again interrogated by Resnikov: “We have received news about you from Lugansk which makes my blood run cold. You are not some insignificant counter-revolutionary, as we took you for. You are a great master of counter-revolution. Until now we have not known of all your connections. With the confession of some of those involved, we have managed to break the entire network you have organised in Ukraine. We have arrested all your collaborators and they are already in Lugansk, Kiev, Kharkov and Dnipropetrovsk. They have all confessed to what they did and incriminated you.”
He replied that he had nothing to do with it and didn’t know what they were talking about. Now Resnikoff struck a different chord, trying to implicate the German intelligence services in the accusations of counter-revolution and to brand Tukhachevsky a German spy. Such a discovery would have brought praise and new titles for the interrogators. “Weissberg, it is now clear to us that your organisation was not only Trotskyist, but something much more dangerous. When you confess, it will count to your credit if you describe in detail what you know about the involvement of German officers in the conspiracy.”
Alexander almost lost his mind. Now the Germans are being implicated. This can only end badly for him. He was not German himself, but his mother tongue was German. So he thought it was better to keep quiet. Resnikoff, at the silence, raged: “You swine, you fascist provocateur, you would like to challenge the Soviet authorities while you are still in prison! Are you saying that we are forcing you to make a false confession? Say that again and I’ll tell the boss and you’ll rot in a dungeon. On your knees before the Soviet authorities.”
Then the interrogations continued non-stop. Six hours of interrogation, half an hour of sleep and so on for almost a week, night and day. Only the interrogators changed. In the end, most of the accused broke down and signed a confession.
Until the autumn of 1937, the NKVD used physical torture only exceptionally, with the approval of their superiors. However, from August 1937, when mass arrests began, this approval was no longer needed and beatings became the norm. But prisoners said that endless interrogation with practically no sleep was much worse.
On the fourth day of the interrogation, Alexander’s whole body ached and his head was spinning. If he closed his eyes or even hinted that he was going to sleep, he was woken up immediately. His body rebelled, his hips ached, his legs began to swell, his eyelids stuck together. On the sixth day he was a wreck. He could stand it no longer and told the interrogator to call Resnikov. He capitulated and with capitulation came confession. He was taken to the office of the head of the department, Captain Tornuev. Resnikov was there. He was sitting on a comfortable leather chair. Someone offered him a glass of wine and biscuits. Everybody was very kind to him.
The confession was actually dictated by Resnikov, and Alexander admitted to being the leader of a Trotskyist gang linked to the German Gestapo. He only listed his associates as those who were already dead or safe abroad. He admitted that he had been given the task of killing Stalin and Voroshilov. A lunch break followed, and then he was taken back to Holodnaya Gora prison. He was to continue his confession the next day, talking about the subversive and espionage work of the organisation and his role in it. He was considering what punishment he would receive. After Kirov was killed, a special law was passed against terrorists. Will he be tried quickly and shot immediately?
The next day, at the hearing, he revoked everything he had signed the previous day. But this false confession gave him a night’s sleep, and that made him stronger. He was shouted at, abused and threatened, but he stuck to his guns. The interrogations continued without end and after five days he fell unconscious. Then the interrogators gave up. They took him back to Holodnaya Gora, saying that they would use other means to soften him up.
Arrest of Tuhachevsky
The weeks were quiet and he spent most of the day lying down or looking out of the window. He needed peace and tried to think of happy things. Sometimes, when the prison was really full, a new prisoner would be assigned to his room for a while. Most of them were simple workers who didn’t know why they were locked up and couldn’t tell him what was going on outside. But they told him about people being imprisoned all the time.
Throughout this time, he has been struggling with health problems. He was physically very weak and had a stomach ulcer. He had constant diarrhoea because of the sauerkraut chowder, but they refused to take him to hospital. The bread they were given was sticky and sour, so he would not eat it and eventually became so weak that he could no longer walk. Only now was he sent to hospital and he stayed there for almost a month.
There was also an official in the room where he was lying who admitted to being a Trotskyist. When Alexander told him that he had confessed to espionage and conspiracy against Stalin and Voroshilov, and that he recanted the next day, the official just smiled: “Your recantation went in the dustbin and your confession went to the prosecutor. Do you really think they will allow you to go abroad after seeing such things here? No one comes out of here alive, least of all you.”
Now Alexander recalled the rumours he had heard about the work of the Troikas, the administrative tribunals that handed down death sentences to those who refused to confess. The sentences were handed down in the absence of the accused and were carried out immediately. Will he suffer the same fate?
His health slowly returned and soon he was ready to leave. After his return from hospital, he was rarely called for questioning, and later learned that it was because Resnikov had been imprisoned and sent to a camp. The last interrogation in Kharkov is the one that sticks in his mind the most. An unknown man sat in Captain Tornu’s room and began to tell a story:
“In 1931, Weissberg came to our factory from Germany as a Gestapo agent, with the task of organising sabotage and espionage. He tried to get me to do the job too, but I had been an agent of the German Intelligence Service since 1924 and I refused the offer. From then on, we worked in parallel, but without any contact with each other.”
Now Alexander has met him. He was Shubnikov, who worked at the institute. He asked him if he had gone mad. Shubnikov was silent and refused to look him in the eye. But Tornuv asked Alexander to confirm what Shubnikov had said. He nodded and explained that at the beginning of 1931 there was no Gestapo in Germany and that Hitler’s Nazis did not come to power until two years later. In his opinion, in view of this, Shubnikov’s accusation was pure nonsense.
Tornu started to look ugly, then said, “You can’t put your head through a wall. You’re a fool if you think you’re going to get out. Your madness could have dangerous consequences for you. In a month’s time, the Troika will be meeting. Do you know what that is? If you confess, you’ll be court-martialled and given three years in prison. If you don’t confess, I will hand your case over to the troika, which can either free you or sentence you to death. Of course, there is no question of liberation, the way things stand. It is certain death. There is no appeal against this judgment. Now get out of my sight.”
The interrogation was thus suspended and resumed twenty months later in Kiev.
In the autumn of 1937, all the brakes came off. State prosecutors were signing arrest warrants like clockwork and not even reading the files of the accused. The NKVD invented the most fantastic conspiracies, and finding the most spectacular crime against the state was the measure of success. Thus, Hitler was said to have had millions of spies in the Soviet Union – or, rather, in the NKVD prisons – and the experts and engineers who were trying to build factories by day were said to have sneaked into his laboratories at night to blow them up.
The prisoners knew what was going on outside, because every day there were new prisoners who had been arrested that night. They said that they felt almost relieved after their arrest, having lived in tension and fear for months beforehand. Almost all of them denied guilt, but after five days they still betrayed five to ten of their colleagues. And each of those five betrayed five to ten new ones.
Condemned by the Administrative Commission
Every prisoner who came to Holodnaya Gora had some things with him that he was not allowed to have in his cell. They were taken away from him on arrival and he was issued with a confession card with a running number. This was how the prisoners knew how many people had been arrested, based on the differences in the numbers, because every prisoner, even if he had been imprisoned and interrogated in the local prisons, had spent at least one day in Holodnaya Gora, where transports were assembled for transport to distant camps. The number of prisoners could also be determined by how many pieces of bread were cut off.
When Alexander left Holodnaya Gora in February 1939, he calculated that 5.5% of the population of Kharkov and the surrounding area had been arrested in the previous two years. This method of ascertaining arrests was also applied to all central prisons throughout the country, and from this it could be calculated that between nine and ten million inhabitants of the Soviet Union had been arrested. Probably two million of them were criminals.
One day, he was taken in for questioning again. When he refused to confess his crimes, they handed him a document to sign, authorising his brother, a lawyer in Vienna, to arrange the dissolution of his marriage. He was surprised. Does this mean that his ex-wife, with whom he was still on friendly terms, is free and abroad?
He told his interrogators that he had been divorced for a long time and that his wife lived in Moscow and he in Kharkiv. They did not register the divorce only because there was no time to do so. But he still had a lump in his throat. Maybe now Eva is walking on the Côte d’Azur or resting at the foot of the Alps. She is living among happy people and enjoying life. Does she ever remember him and wonder what his destiny is? Why did she send him this letter in the first place? Does she want to remarry, perhaps, because she is still young?
The interrogator then told him that the first divorce in the Soviet Union costs 50 roubles and suggested taking the money from his prison account. Alexander refused to allow him to do so, as it would have meant that he would have had to starve for a month or two. “I have 10,000 roubles in my account at the Kharkov Savings Bank. Take 50 roubles from this account because I need the money I have in prison for myself. I would also be grateful if you could send me 500 roubles from the savings bank, because I don’t know how much longer I will be in prison.” The interrogator replied, “Don’t worry, Weissberg. In a month at the latest they will shoot you. Until then, this money will be enough for you.”
7 November 1937, the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, was approaching. The voices of amnesty were still spreading across Holodnaya Gora. All those who had not yet been convicted were to be acquitted, and the sentences of the others were to be halved. Of course, nothing came of it, except that all the cells were thoroughly searched and all things red were confiscated. They were probably afraid of a demonstration in which the prisoners might use the colour red to emphasise the incompatibility of revolutionary principles with being in prison.
In the second half of November, those prisoners who had finished their interrogations began to be sent from Holodna Gora to work in the northern camps. None of them were tried in a court of law, but sentenced by a special administrative commission in Moscow, called the OSO, composed of three persons; a representative of the prosecutor’s office, a representative of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs and a secretary. Thousands of reports of completed interrogations arrived daily at its address in Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Of course, no one read them, only the secretary stamped his seal on them.
Until autumn 1937, the commission could not sentence anyone to more than five years in prison, and later to a maximum of 25 years in a labour camp. In fact, it did not matter how many years in a labour camp a prisoner was sentenced to, because the sentence served did not mean that the prisoner was free. He could only be free on the basis of a special decision by the NKDV in Moscow, and the NKDV only issued such a decision in very rare cases.
At the beginning of 1938, the number of arrests decreased. Even after three weeks, no new prisoners were brought to the cell where Alexander was held. The trial against Pyatakov was the last public trial, and Tukhachevsky and the generals were convicted and executed in secret. Everyone wondered what had become of Bukharin, who had been arrested a year earlier, and anxiously awaited his trial. Bukharin was the last great figure of the old guard of the Bolsheviks, the President of the Communist International and the last great theoretician of the communist workers’ movement. A man like him could not be liquidated quietly, administratively. But why has there not yet been a trial against him?
Then it was revealed that the NKVD leader himself, Genrich Jagoda, had been arrested. How everyone hated this man. The founder of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, from which the NKVD later developed, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was a hard and evil man, but he was convinced that he was doing the right thing. His successor, Menzhinsky, was more of a scientist and there were no major riots during his reign. But with the Yagoda, the madness of the regime was legitimised, and it was unparalleled. So why was he removed, because he had nothing in common with the old Bolsheviks, whom Stalin was so afraid of. Alexander stopped thinking, because he no longer understood anything.
Then a Ukrainian came from the interrogation and began to tell of the persecution of national minorities. In his town, all the German, Polish, Greek, Leton and other national minority clubs had been closed down. Anyone with a German or Armenian name had been arrested and accused of wanting to secede from the Soviet Union.
The NKVD waited until the harvest was over and then imprisoned a quarter of the people each week. Women were sent to Siberia as “voluntary emigrants”, children were taken in by various orphanages and given Russian names. Finally, a Ukrainian said: ‘According to Stalin’s Constitution, adopted a year ago, every nation has the right to secede from the Soviet Union. So how do they accuse people of doing something that is in accordance with the constitution?”
February was also quiet and no arrests were made. But by mid-March, the lull was over. One evening, the gates opened and fourteen new prisoners arrived, bringing important news. Hitler had annexed Austria and the trial of Buharin had begun.
One day, Alexander went to the toilet and noticed a children’s newspaper on the shelf. He turned the pages curiously and read on the back page: ‘The Presidium of the USSR has accepted the request of the National Commissar for Internal Affairs, Comrade Yezhov, to be relieved of his post. Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov will continue to head the Commissariat for Water Transport.” It was Yezhov who succeeded Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD.
He tore out the page with the news and put it in his pocket. A debate broke out in the cell. A Chechen said, “Jezov won’t be Commissioner for Water Transport for long. In two months it will all be over. First he will leave the Commissariat, then the Politburo, then the Central Committee, and finally he will say goodbye to life. He has finished his task and nobody needs him any more. Some will be released to underline the importance of this measure, others will go to the camps.”
Yezhov was fanatically devoted to Stalin, and during his time as head of the NKVD, the purges reached their peak. He was so ruthless that even Stalin was frightened by his cruelty. And so he removed him. Indeed, it was during his reign that the first public protests took place. First, the wives of imprisoned railway workers visited the National Commissar, Kaganovich, and asked him to help their husbands. Then petitions rained down on the various secretariats of the Central Committee of the Party, the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Of course, no one claimed that the NKVD had imprisoned innocent people. All they talked about were administrative errors.
The great purges are over
In December 1938, the interrogations resumed, but everything was different. Prisoners were no longer beaten, or only rarely. The accused were so emboldened that they began to recant their previous confessions. The interrogators took note of this without protest and wrote everything down in the minutes. The prisoners were asked why they had made false confessions, and at first they hesitated to say why. But even if they did say that they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened, their account went on the record as mere “physical pressure”. By interrogating them in this way, Stalin was signalling that the Great Purge was over.
One day in February 1939, a guard called out, “Weissberg, come and get your things!” He was taken to the station, he and a soldier got into a compartment in which they were alone, and after 12 hours of driving, they arrived in a big city at night. Alexander asked him where they were and where they were taking him. “We are in Kiev, I am taking you to the inner prison of the NKVD.”
Every major city had an outer prison, such as Kharkov’s Holodnaya Gora, which was on the periphery of the city, and a small inner NKVD prison in the very centre of the city. The inner prison, Alexander already knew this, was the tomb. The cells were clean and not overcrowded, each prisoner had his own bed and the bed linen was changed once a month. But the regime was unbearable. One could never hear a loud word. Everyone, including the guards, just whispered. They were in total isolation. A day was exactly the same as a day. There were few interrogations, because the prisoners and the interrogators had nothing more to say to each other.
One day, a new prisoner whispered to him, “We have made a pact with the Germans. Ribbentrop was personally in Moscow. He was received by Stalin and leading statesmen. Was Kaganovich there too? So did a Nazi toast a Jew?” A week later, Alexander still did not know that Germany had invaded Poland. He only found out about it when half of Europe was already at war and German troops had already penetrated as far as the Bug River.
In September, he was called to sign the final minutes of his interrogations. He was told that he could read the entire minutes and the annexed evidence, some 800 pages in all. He read for two nights, but only got halfway through. He saw that there was no point in correcting individual sentences, so he signed the whole thing. On 11 September 1939, he was taken to the station. The prison wagon had special compartments. The outside window had bars and through it he could see that they were travelling north. So to Moscow.
On arrival, he was immediately taken to the main prison in Butirka. It was undoubtedly the most orderly prison in the Soviet Union. The room was 9 m2 in size, with linoleum on the floor, which glistened with cleanliness. The table, the chair, the wardrobe and the bed, everything was clean. He was allowed to read books and write requests once a week, and the very next day he was given a new suit of clothes. Right from the start he was told that every day he had to polish the linoleum on the floor with a special paste, a brush and a toothbrush to make it shine.
Now he was sure he would be released. Why bother with him? A few days later, he was sent to the infamous Lubyanka for questioning. Once again he had to sign the final report, which was written as a one-page summary in Lubyanka, and then he was returned to Butirka. On 18 December 1939, at night, he was taken to the other part of Butirka. Blue lamps were burning in the corridors, probably because of the darkness. The door of a large cell opened and he stepped into the darkness. A few prisoners raised their heads and spoke to him in German. He asked who they were. “We are going home, they are sending us to Germany,” a voice answered him. “But I am a Jew, what am I supposed to do in Germany?” he asked them.
In the following days, he learned all the details of the mechanism of the expulsion from the Soviet Union. An entire floor was reserved for the prisoners they were about to deport. There were about 230 of them, including 30 women. They were mainly workers – German Communists, some of them professionals in various fields. On 30 December, they gave him a document to sign, saying that the proceedings against him were suspended and that he would be expelled from the Soviet Union as an undesirable foreigner. He signed and said that he did not want to go to Germany, but to Sweden. “For now, you are going to Berlin, and there you can write an application to go to Sweden,” he was told.
At around midnight, buses arrived and took 70 prisoners to the station. After midnight, on 1 January 1940, the train left. They were travelling through devastated Poland towards Brest-Litovsk. At the bridge on the Bug River, a completely different totalitarian regime was waiting for them – the Gestapo.
Alexander Weissberg was lucky enough to escape from Germany to Poland, where he hid for the whole of the Second World War, and then went to Sweden. He died in Paris in 1964, aged 62. Before that, he had written his account of events in the Soviet Union.
