In August 1941 a young NKVD officer was taken captive by the Germans. He pretended to be a peasant's son who had studied agronomy and mathematics, before being “mobilized” to work in the political police in the spring of 1938, at the age of twenty-five. He also pretended to have rendered some services to German intelligence in Riga in 1940. His interrogators were impressed by his willingness to cooperate and to present himself in a favorable light. They were equally impressed by his manifestly sincere conviction that there was hardly any sphere of Soviet society where conspiracies were not present in the 1930s. In some respects the young man was far from being poorly informed. Apparently assigned to the surveillance of Komintern officials and foreign Communists in Moscow, he possessed pertinent information about people who must have been unknown even to police cadres, if they were not specialized in his field.

Nevertheless, the interrogators could not help wondering if he was able to distinguish between his undeniable familiarity with certain facts and rumors stemming from the NKVD's obsession with the ubiquity of spies and plotters. Indeed, the young man reported a profusion of conspiracies in educational institutions, enterprises, and offices as well as in the highest spheres of government in the 1930s. He even presented a chart of the complicated relations among secret organizations of “leftist” and “rightist” groups that included defendants in the show trials, commanders of the army, and leading officials of the Komintern and the NKVD.