Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

14 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
The annihilation of the interrogated was completed by the dogged
obsession with obtaining confessions of repentance. For Begin, this was the
ultimate politicization of a paternal pattern that ran through Soviet public
life. The regime’s absolute political and economic authority was translated
into a practice by which it acted like a father who “is not content with merely
punishing his son who has sinned, but demands that he admit his error, that
he repent, that he beg forgiveness.” 30 Hence interrogations were a venue to
convey the invincibility of Soviet power. When Begin inquired how article
58 of the Soviet Criminal Code (counter revolutionary activity, treason, and
diversion) could be applied to activities that were considered legal in thensovereign
Poland, his interrogator did not hesitate: “Ah, you are a strange
fellow [chudak], Menachem Wolfovich. Article 58 applies to everyone in the
world. Do you hear? In the whole world. The only question is when he will
get to us or we to him.” 31 Since arrest established guilt and not vice versa, and
Soviet reach was bound by neither time nor geography, overwhelming the
target to the point of helplessness was as important as extracting information.
In the meantime, the NKVD was recruiting informants from the ranks
of oppositional groups with impressive speed and skill. On the very day that
Soviet soldiers entered Szczebrzeszyn, the newly created Red militia had
already enrolled some members of Polish patriotic organizations and local
postmen, noted an astonished diarist. In a matter of weeks, one operational
group in L´viv had already recruited 130 agents who were instrumental in
penetrating networks of the Polish and Ukrainian undergrounds. 32 Even in
the Baltic states, which generally offered less fertile ground for recruitment
among dissatisfied ethnic minorities, the number of agents and informants
but an agent of the international bourgeoisie and an enemy of the proletarian revolution.
Knowing all this, he must have asked himself one night: What is the use?” His own young
interrogator, Begin noted repeatedly, “believed without any doubt that Bukharin was a spy
when he stood at the head of the Comintern and that Trotskii was an agent of the bourgeoisie
when he was at the head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army” (ibid., 163–64).
30 Ibid., 157. Notably, Begin’s interrogation followed a trope that was perfected in the course
of the interwar purge waves and was now applied to the new territories. Alexander Weissberg’s
classic memoir of his arrest and interrogation at the height of the terror in the late 1930s
conveys almost identical patterns to those of Begin (The Accused, trans. Edward Fitzgerald
[New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951]).
31 Begin, Beleilot levanim, 123. Italics in the original.
32 Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–1944, trans. George
Klukowski (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 32; Ihor Il´iushyn, “Operatyvnochekists´ki
hrupy NKVS v zakhidnykh oblastiakh Ukraïny v veresni–zhovtni 1939 roky
(za materialamy Derzhavnoho arkhivu sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny),” in 1939 rik v istorychnii
doli Ukraïny i Ukraïntsiv, ed. K .K. Kondratiuk et al. (L´viv: LNU imeni Ivana Franka,
2001),181–82.