Defense Tactics of Free Chekists

During the campaign to restore socialist legality, NKVD personnel developed and put into practice four main defensive tactics. The first tactic was to elicit as many confessions as possible from among suspects and those whose cases had been returned for further investigation.

As prisoners became increasingly aware of the “shifting winds” at the summit of Soviet political power in November 1938, those under investigation began to renounce their confessions en masse, stating to procurators and courts that they had confessed and named their “accomplices” while under psychological and physical torture by the NKVD. These accusations led many Chekists to move as many cases forward as quickly as possible, hoping to prove that they were in the right. As a result, it is plausible that the pressures against suspects, physical ones included, not only did not diminish after 17 November 1938, but may even have increased.

There is a massive amount of evidence supporting this supposition within the criminal case files. The director of the Lunacharsky Sovkhoz (State Farm), Suslov, reported in his 27 November 1939 statement to the Secretary of the Odessa Oblast Party Committee, A. G. Kolybanov, that on 16 January 1939 the deputy chief of the UNKVD, Gaponov, “categorically” demanded from him confirmation of the interrogation transcripts he had signed in 1938. After Suslov’s refusal, Gaponov personally beat the suspect to the point of unconsciousness.

Yet as the waves of the released grew, the workers of the SPO invented yet another defensive mechanism. Konochuk described it as follows: “Berenzon and Abramovich, upon the release of a suspect from detention... [and] in order to avert the writing of complaints or statements against them [would say]: ‘as far as how you were dealt with, there were orders for it from the Central Committee.’ ”³⁶ A sense of impunity, a maniacal confidence in their infallibility, a feeling of corporate solidarity, and a fear of potential punishment resulted in NKVD workers’ acting in concert to block any outside attempts to denigrate them.

Further, it is important to note that the NKVD was suspicious of procurators, regarding them as weak representatives of the “formal” trappings of legality. It was dangerous for procurators to oppose Chekists even in the context of the campaign to restore socialist legality. For example, the assistant military procurator of the 434th Military Procuracy, regimental commissioner Ia. T. Novikov, who led the questioning of suspects of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD in late 1938 and early 1939, played a role in the release of Shpak. Novikov had participated in Shpak’s interrogation.³⁷ The latter, upon realizing that a procurator was before him, gave him a statement of complaint against illegal methods of investigation. Novikov was receptive and heard out this complaint.³⁸ In order to neutralize the officious procurator, the SPO workers went so far as deciding, in May 1939, to open a dossier on him, which signified a covert investigation of the procurator with the prospect of arrest.³⁹ In court, in 1943, however, Gaponov stubbornly denied that his subordinates had done this.

The aggressive defensive tactics to which these state security workers resorted at the end of the 1938–1939 period resulted from the severe imbalance caused by the transfer of power from the party-state to the organs of the NKVD in the course of the Great Terror. At the same time, the suspicious and malicious attitude toward procurators was largely a direct consequence of NKVD workers’ having lost their fear of and respect for the party.