Other records emerged that revealed how certain victims were forced to testify against their family members in so-called “confrontation interrogations.” In March 1938, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker named Victor Tyskewicz-Voskov confessed that his mother had been recruited into “espionage in favor of Germany.” Under extreme duress, Tyskewicz-Voskov denounced his mother to his interrogator as a “Trotskyist, inclined antagonistically against the Soviet power.” The NKVD officers then placed his forty-three-year-old mother in the same interrogation room while her son repeated his denunciation
...more
