Word: weissberg
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...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...
...Conveyer." Weissberg soon learned that a claim to innocence was considered insufferable "provocation" by the G.P.U.-a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence of the police authorities. Moreover, his rank entitled him to fabricate a really stunning spy story, superior in every way, for instance, to that of the simple worker in a cooperative fishery, who could only "confess" to having told the Germans how many fish were caught each month. And finally, the G.P.U. expected his "confession" to be watertight, as befitted the work of a well-trained Communist. "You've got to make [it] as though...
...When Weissberg was obstinate, the G.P.U. shoveled him into "The Conveyer" -their nonstop interrogation belt which took innocent men in at one end and turned them out at the other as finished traitors, ready to be driven away to Siberia. They sat him on a plain stool while relays of examiners interrogated him day & night until his head was splitting and his splayed buttocks a mass of burning pulp. After a week of this, Weissberg "confessed"-a ticklish job, because his "crimes" had to dovetail exactly both into the "confessions" of his "accomplices" (i.e., his arrested friends who had incriminated...
...examiners rewarded Weissberg with 24 hours of food and sleep. Refreshed, he boldly recanted the whole document. "You whore! You counter-revolutionary bandit!" raged the examiner, shoving him back on the stool. Weissberg stood it another four days, "confessed" again, again recanted. He then stood the "conveyer" for a further five days-and staggered out triumphant. From then on, the G.P.U. merely kept him in prison and beat him up occasionally...
Nine Million? Weissberg was not the only prisoner who defied the G.P.U. One skinny little Jewish tailor, who openly declared himself an anarchist but refused to admit to counter-revolutionary charges, "survived an almost uninterrupted 'conveyer' lasting for 31 days and . . . nights." Another prisoner, a Kharkov doctor, won through by dint of sheer comic genius and a wonderful memory for names. He not only confessed instantly, but wrote down the names of all his "accomplices"-i.e., "all the several hundred doctors in Kharkov." When the examiner refused to accept such a sweeping statement, the doctor addressed a strong...