Dr. Landowsky was a Russianized Pole and lived in Russia. His father, a Colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, was shot by the Bolsheviks during the 1917 revolution.
The life-story of Dr. Landowsky is astonishing. He finished the Faculty of Medicine in Russia before the revolution and then studied two years at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he spoke fluent French. He was interested in the effects of drugs on the human organism, to help surgeons in operations.
Being a talented doctor, he carried out experiments in this field and had achieved considerable results. The all-seeing NKVD (secret police) became interested in these works and easily discovered the real author. His specialty was very valuable for them. One day in 1936 there was a knock at the doctor’s door.
He was invited to follow, and he was never again allowed to rejoin his family.
He was placed in the building of the chemical laboratory of the NKVD near Moscow. He lived there and was forced to carry out various jobs given to him by his masters, he was a witness at questionings, tortures and the most terrible happenings and crimes.
This book is an exact recorded report of the questioning of the former Ambassador in France, C.G. Rakovsky during the period of the trials of the Trotskyists in the USSR in 1938, when he was tried together with Bukharin, Rykoff, Yagoda, Karakhan, Dr. Levin and others. The questioning took place in French by this agent. The doctor was present in order to put drug pills unnoticed into the glass of Rakovsky, to induce energy and a good mood. Behind the wall the conversation was registered on apparatus, and the technician who operated it did not understand French.
Then Dr. Landowsky had to translate into Russian, with two copies, for Stalin and Gabriel. Secretly he dared to make a carbon copy, which he hid anyway.