Gulag kilde: KGB sag om italiensk kommunist - 1940

From the KGB File of Italian Communist Edmondo Peluzo:

Fragments from His Unsuccessful Petition for Release
SOURCE: KGB Archive, Moscow. 

Police file of PELUZO, Edmondo Petrovich, an Italian Communist working in the Communist International in Moscow because he had fled from the Italian fascists. Peluzo was arrested for conspiring against the Soviet state and working as a foreign spy in April, 1938. The description below is from his petition for release, written in his own hand in French on 14 May 1941. Peluzo's petition for release was declined, and he died in hard labor 18 months later.

[Cover of the file:]
USSR People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs
Investigative File
Section of the NKVD of the USSR
File Number 19062
Regarding the charges against
PELUZO, Edmondo Petrovich
14 May 1940

[page 7 of Peluzo's petition; page 111 in the police file]

[Peluzo was arrested on the night of 13-14 May, 1938. He was thrown into solitary confinement at KGB headquarters on Kuznestkii most' in Moscow -- an underground ‘special cell’ in old Lefortovo prison].

The first torture began, if my memory does not betray me, on the fourteenth of May, the last [was] in August 1938.
Two, then four men took part in this torture. On the fourth of June at 4 o'clock in the morning four men armed with different instruments savagely beat me for almost forty minutes. So that I would not lose consciousnesss, they hung me upside down with my legs in the air and dragged me through a large room. Then they furrowed my back [with a belt buckle] to the point that I almost lost consciousness. The result of this was, as the doctor at Lefortovo determined, a blood clot in the veins [of my back] and a serious contusion of my spinal column. . . . I still feel [the pain] today. Then, the torture was continued under the direction of investigators Arsenovich and Krepkin, as a result of which my side was broken, I was spitting up blood. . . .

Only after this savage method in order to force me to recognize my guilt did the interrogator Arsenovich say to me: "We don't want to kill you, but [merely] compel you to sign the confession which we want." I was supposed to resign myself [to this].
In order to be saved from my inquisitors as soon as possible, I -- in as much as Krepkin added that the Party required this [of me] -- signed the affidavit in which I admitted guilt to all sorts of crimes.