Word: weissberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ACCUSED (518 pp.)-Alexander Weissberg-Simon & Schuster...
Alexander Weissberg, an Austrian physicist, was in charge of the construction of an experimental plant in Kharkov. Every morning when he swept off to work in his chauffeur-driven car he would pass the prison of Kholodnaya Gora and "avert my gaze" from the distressing spectacle of "prisoners clinging to the bars." But one morning in 1937, Weissberg was unable to avert his gaze: he was clinging to the bars himself...
...Weissberg's arrest was part of the "Great Purge" that followed the first Moscow trials. The G.P.U. gave him a wide choice of crimes to "confess," but their highest hope was that he would admit to organizing a plot to murder Stalin. They were deeply offended when Weissberg not only resisted admitting this, but insisted that he was also innocent of such lesser delinquencies as planning to blow up the Kharkov tractor works, or of building a "counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist, fascist, terrorist, diversionist and espionage organization ... on the territory of the Soviet Union...