In the 1920s–early 1930s, the OO played a special role in the VCheKa/NKVD. Almost all its leaders (Table 1-2) were later appointed to leading positions in other branches of the security services. Menzhinsky succeeded Dzerzhinsky after the latter died in 1926, and Genrikh Yagoda, once Menzhinsky’s deputy and OO head from 1922–29, became the first NKVD Commissar in 1934.22 On December 20, 1920, foreign intelligence, part of the OO, became a separate Inostrannyi otdel or INO (Foreign Department; later the all-powerful First Directorate, and currently, Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki, SVR or Foreign Intelligence Service). On July 7, 1922, the OO was divided in two parts, the OO (counterintelligence in the armed forces) and Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi otdel or KRO (Counterintelligence Department; later the Second Directorate) in charge of internal counterintelligence, i.e. capturing spies and White Guard agents.
Artur Artuzov (born Frauchi), a long-time officer of the OO, was appointed head of the KRO.23 Vasilii Ulrikh, also an OO officer and the future chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, became his deputy.24 However, from 1927 to 1931, the OO and KRO existed as a united structure with a joint secretariat. It was headed by Yan Olsky, who headed army OO departments during the Civil War and then became Artuzov’s deputy in the KRO (Table 1-2).25
Through the beginning of World War II the OOs were part of the VCheKa’s successors, first the OGPU and then the NKVD, and military counterintelligence was focused on the destruction of military professionals whom Stalin did not trust or hated. In 1927, he ordered Menzhinsky, the OGPU chairman, ‘to pay special attention to espionage in the army, aviation, and the fleet’.26
In 1928, the OGPU prepared the first show trial, the so-called Shakhtinskoe delo (Mining Case) against top-level mining engineers in the Donbass Region (currently, Ukraine) and foreigners working in the coal-mining industry.27 Yefim Yevdokimov, OGPU Plenipotentiary (representative) in the Donbass Region, persuaded Stalin that the numerous accidents in the Donbass coal mines were the result of sabotage. Allegedly, the accidents were organized by a group of engineers, who had worked in the mining industry in pre-revolutionary times, and foreign specialists.28 According to Yevdokimov, these vrediteli (from the Russian verb vredit’ or to spoil; in English the word vrediteli is usually translated as ‘wreckers’) followed orders from the former owners of the mines who now lived abroad. The idea of sabotage conducted by wreckers played an important role in Soviet ideology and propaganda and was usually applied to members of the technical intelligentsia and other professionals. Stalin ordered arrests, and 53 engineers and managers were duly apprehended.
During the investigation, the OGPU worked out principles that were followed for all subsequent political cases until Stalin’s death. Before making the arrests, investigators invented a plot based on operational materials received from secret informers. This was not difficult because, beginning in the VCheKa’s time, the Chekists’ work, especially that of military counterintelligence, was based on reports from numerous secret informers. Thus the OGPU and its successors always had a lot of information about an enormous number of people and could easily fabricate any kind of ‘counterrevolutionary’ group. After the alleged perpetrators were arrested, the investigators’ job was to force the arrestees to ‘confess’ and sign the concocted ‘testimonies’. Since during interrogations new individuals were drawn in (during interrogations, people were forced to name their friends and coworkers), the case could snowball.
During the investigation of the Shakhtinskoe delo, OGPU interrogators applied primarily psychological methods to the arrestees, not the physical torture they widely used during the Red Terror and later. The arrestees were deprived of sleep for days, as the investigators repeatedly read the concocted ‘testimonies’ and continually threatened to persecute family members. A special Politburo commission, with Stalin’s participation, controlled the OGPU investigation. Two months before the end of the investigation the official Communist Party daily newspapers Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia started to publish articles condemning members of the ‘counterrevolutionary organization’ in the Donbass Region and the ‘bourgeois specialists’ guilty of sabotage. Stalin made the same accusations in his speeches.
An open session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court began on May 18, 1928 and continued for 41 days. Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s main legal theorist, presided. 23 defendants of 53 pleaded not guilty, and 10 admitted to partial guilt. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death (of them, only six were executed). Most of the others were given terms of imprisonment from one to ten years, while eight defendants were acquitted. Yevdokimov was promoted to head of the OGPU’s Secret Operations Directorate that included the OO and KRO; in other words, for the next few years he supervised the OO’s activity.
The Shakhtinskoe delo became a model for the trials that followed in the late 1920s–early 1930s, of which the Prompartiya (Industrial Party) show trial in November–December 1930 was the most important.29 During the investigation, Stalin not only read transcripts of interrogations of the arrestees, but personally suggested questions for additional interrogations. At the trial Nikolai Krylenko, RSFSR (Russian Federation) Prosecutor, declared that in political cases a confession from perpetrators prevails over the proof of their guilt: ‘In all circumstances the defendants’ confession is the best evidence.’30 Krylenko referred to the old Roman principle Confessio est regina probatum or ‘Confession is the Queen of evidence’, commonly used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. Later Vyshinsky, USSR Prosecutor from 1935 to 1939, supported this thesis.31 This gave a legal basis for the Chekists to apply every means to force confessions.
All these trials created a mass hysteria among the Soviet population. People became afraid of plots organized from abroad and of numerous foreign spies who supposedly wanted to destroy ‘the first proletarian state’. The OGPU successfully promoted a belief that the ‘Organs’ (as security services were generally called) ‘never make a mistake’, meaning that if a person was arrested on political charges his or her arrest was justified without proof.
It wasn’t long before the military was targeted. Between 1930 and 1932 the OOs prepared the first purge against Red Army officers, charging them with treason and espionage. It became known as the Vesna (Spring) Case.32 From 1924 onwards, the OOs collected materials about czarist officers who served in the Red Army. Known under the operational name Genshtabisty (General Staff Members), in 1930 these materials were used to create the Vesna Case. Up to 10,000 officers were arrested throughout the country on false charges and many were sentenced and imprisoned, while 31 high-level former czarist officers were executed.
In early 1931, 38 Navy commanding officers were arrested as ‘wreckers’ in the Baltic Fleet alone.33 Interestingly, Olsky and Yevdokimov were against the Vesna Case and were dismissed. Izrail Leplevsky, who had started the Vesna Case in Ukraine, replaced Olsky.34 Stalin personally wrote a draft of the Politburo decision that accused Olsky, Yevdokimov and some other OGPU functionaries of disseminating ‘demoralizing rumors that the case of wreckers among the military was supposedly falsified [in the original, Stalin used a colloquial Russian expression “dutoe delo”].’35