Report (machine translated)
V.M. Kirshon[1] on Yagoda's behavior in prison.
Major of State Security Tov. Zhurbenko
Yagoda met me with the phrase: “We will not talk to you about the case, I gave my word to the comkor not to talk to you on these topics.”
He began to question me in detail about his wife, about Nadezhda Alekseevna Peshkova, about what was written and spoken about him in the city.
Then Yagoda said to me: “I know that you have been planted with me, and otherwise you would not have been, I have no doubt that everything I tell you or say to you will be passed on. And what you say to me will be prompted to you. And besides, our conversation is written down in a notebook at the door by those who sent you.”
So he didn't talk to me much, mostly about personal matters.
I scolded him and told him that he had asked for me to be locked up.
“I know,” he said, ”that you refuse. I just wanted to ask you about Ida, Timosha, the child, relatives and to look at a familiar face before death.”
Yagoda talks about death all the time. All the time yearns that he has one way to the cellar, that on January 25 he will be shot and says that he does not believe anyone that he will remain alive.
“If I were sure that I would remain alive, I would still take the burden of declaring to the nation that I am the murderer of Max and Gorky,” he says.
“It is unbearably hard for me to declare this before everyone historically and no less hard before Timosha.”
“At the trial,” says Yagoda, ”I shall probably weep, which is even worse than if I had recanted everything.
Once, in a half delirious state, he said, “If it is all the same to die, it is better to declare at the trial that I did not kill, I have no strength to confess it openly.”
Then he added: “But that would mean uniting the counter-revolution around me - it is impossible.”
Speaking of Timosha, Yagoda once mentioned that 15,000 dollars had been given to her. Moreover, he was so bad-tempered that he began to assure me that the money had been sent to Peshkova's apartment by Bulanov without his knowledge, which is, of course, absolutely absurd.
Yagoda keeps saying that he is being deceived by promising a date with his wife. So he's being deceived about the firing squad. “And if I had seen Ida, said a few words about my son, I would have felt differently at the trial, everything would have been easier.”
Yagoda often talks about how good it would be to die before the process. This is not about suicide, but about illness. Yagoda is convinced that he is mentally ill. He cries many times a day, often says that he suffocates, wants to scream, and in general he has dissolved and descended shamefully.
1938 V. Kirshon
[1] V.M. Kirshon (1902-1938), Bolshevik from 1920, Soviet writer and playwright.
