Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 11
Interrogations were a primary tool for obtaining information. Here,
too, the gap between operational and socio-political knowledge was in full
display. The NKVD officers clearly knew where to find their targets but knew
abysmally little about their world, and the little they did know was filtered
through Soviet ideological blinders. The interrogation of Menachem Begin,
the leader of the mass Zionist Beitar movement in Poland and Czechoslovakia
and the future prime minister of Israel, was a case in point. Begin’s interrogators
“knew for a fact” that his predecessor, Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, was a
“colonel in British intelligence.” They were, however, unaware that the British
had banned Jabotinsky from pre-state Israel and that he was already dead.
This did not deter or embarrass the interrogators in the least (“Tell me, where
is Jabotinsky now? Jabotinsky is dead. Are you sure? Regrettably, yes. Well,
you see, nobody sheds tears over him”). The interrogators dismissed Begin’s
statement that he had joined Beitar voluntarily because he liked its program
and that no one recommended him. “Impossible,” uttered the interrogator.
“With us, when a youth wants to join the Komsomol, other members
recommend him.” 18
The NKVD was interested in two key questions: the political goals of their
target’s activities and the scope of the network of the target’s collaborators.
Multiple interrogation stenograms reveal a fixation with extracting confessions
of guilt for counterrevolutionary activities and retracing networks of alleged
conspirators. Begin’s initial interrogations focused on a detailed account of
his relatives, friends, and associates in Poland and Lithuania. 19 There was,
however, much more to it than the simple police method of investigating the
sources and conduct of actual and potential subversions. The mechanisms
of the interview shed light on the very essence of the Soviet surveillance
enterprise.
The terrible thing, reflected Begin, was not the accusations themselves but
the “fact that the interrogators were not lying to themselves. On the contrary,
they were convinced that they had in their hands genuine proof.” 20 Anxiety
over the uncertainty of his fate and that of his young wife was compounded by
successive late-night sessions and sleep deprivation. At least once he was forced
18 Menachem Begin, Beleilot levanim, 2nd ed. with NKVD protocols (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1995),
78–80. Ironically, four years later the NKGB was finally aware of Jabotinsky’s death but
marked his place of death as Poland. Jabotinsky actually died and was buried in New York
(LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 177, l. 4).
19 LYA f. K-1, ap. 58, b. R-12544, ll. 13–19, 26–28, 35. The fixation with opponents’
networks was punctuated four years later in a union-wide NKGB report on Beitar that called
on its regional branches to keep track of contacts between members of the Zionist organization
in the various Soviet republics and regions (LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 177, l. 2).
20 Begin, Beleilot levanim, 126.