How did NKVD breakdown their suspects into confessing...

How did NKVD breakdown their suspects into confessing? They managed to get the confessions out of some pretty powerful people, so I want to know more about their methods and their efficiency, in all their gory details.

They tickled their balls into submission

Unrelated but funny, the NKVD only had three people in command of it for its entire existence, and every one of them was executed.

They read Das Kapital to them.

>lock person in box slightly shorter than they are
>torture when they show any signs of sleeping
>signing the confession ends this process immediately
>the torture lasts as long as the prisoner desires it to
>if you last over a month they normally upped the torture because boxes aren't cheap you know

Dont know about the NKVD, but here's some of the techniques their predecessor, the Cheka, used:

Each local Cheka had its own specialty.

In Kharkov they went in for the ‘glove trick’ – burning the victim’s hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with ‘human gloves’.

The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels.

In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head.

In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victims torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape.

In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water.

A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues.

Source : Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy

I heard they also turned their victims into bars of soap and used their skin to make lampshades

I believe one of the tactics involved keeping your suspect awake for extended periods of time showering them in cold water when they fall asleep.

Yeah but the Cheka were actually mental though. During the period 'War Communism' they would go to requisition grain and just butcher entire villages full of old people and female farmers.
I'm not him but from what I know of them it doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

My grandfather (Polish)was tortured by them.
Didn't really do anything, just a rebel farmer.

Took his nails out,
Isolated him for days,
Fake old newspapers,
Beatings,
fake executions innawoods,
hints of friends snitching,
Making you stand for hours staring at the wall without moving.

Those were probably just the appetizers.
No idea what the full meal was.

Imply! oh the imply! please stop! Please god make him stop no more!

How's it going comrade It's going so well comrade Ivan can't even read all he is doing is showing him the blurb

With the exception of Marx, I don't think anybody has read Das Kapital...

Not even the translators?

They batter their bollocks

Touche...

Not even Marx himself

Didn't they copy that from the Okhrana?
>In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water.

Holy crap I'm glad I didn't live in that age. You would need some Saint-tier heroism not to talk under that kind of torture.

>Fake old newspapers
MY GOD, THE HORROR

but really, a standard package desu.

Solzhenitsyn wrote thatNKVD would first starve you, and then try to bribe you with a warm soup. To amp up the perfidy, bread that was given with the soup was cut diagonally.

> straight up beatings
> mock executions
> serious sleep deprivement
> interrigation tactics like good cop/bad cop, blackmail, we'll ruin your family, etc.

The more gruesome have already been mentioned, Im pulling these from "This I cannot forget" by Buhkarins wife. He was an old bolshevik that was purged and forced to confess in a show trial. He gave a pretty damning closing statement though. Reading this made it pretty obvious that its pretty easy to get a confession from someone even without touching them. Sleep deprivement and forceful interrogation will get everyone eventually. Add to this modern day psych drugs and you can get anyone to sign anything.

Somewhat misleading though, it was the Cheka before NKVD and the KGB after. Albeit there were some differences they essentially performed the same function.

these seem more like cruel and unusual forms of punishment and execution than ways to get a corrupt official or conspirator to sign a confession

Read gulag archipelago, or atleast the chapter on interrogation. They used everything, sleep deprivation was standard as was cramped solitary confinement cells. Then came threats to family, beatings, stomping genitals, heat, cold, loud noise and bright light 24/7, classic hot poker up the anus, no water and only salty food (confess and well give you water!), stress positions ( forced standing, kneeling etc.), smashing your tail bone with a truncheon and whole lot more inventive things too.

Yea thats not interrogation thats just straight up red terror under Lenin during and after the civil war

>To amp up the perfidy, bread that was given with the soup was cut diagonally.
explain

They were pretty brutal with the torture. Iirc they castrated and killed one terrorist guys brother and said they would do it to the rest of his family if he didn't turn himself in.