Inside the NKVD's basement during the cult of personality

(Top sign): Yes, Hello Stalin!!

(Left sign): Record from loose tongues!

(Right sign): The People's birthing doctor is dead!*

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to USSR's prosecutor general Vyshinsky**, all methods are "good" at getting confessions. NKVD staff applied these unusual tortures to "enemies of the people": automatic pump, electric solder, bottle shoved up the moist anus, rats placed in a tank (or bucket) and heated at the bottom with electric coil...etc.

*This may be a 1951-1952 reference to the purge of allegedly traitorous doctors in Moscow under the order of Joseph Stalin. Nicknamed the "doctors' plot", it was an unproven conspiracy plot of professional Soviet doctors who had been allegedly accused of planning an assassination attempt against the top Soviet leaders, after the supposed negligent death of Soviet Information Bureau director Alexander Shcherbakov in 1945 and later the Communist party secretary Andrey Zhandov in 1948. 

As a result of Stalin's hysteric paranoia, nine of the most educated medical specialists (six of whom were Jewish) were terminated from their jobs, arrested and then tortured to extract false confessions of the supposed treasonous plot (two of them died from the ordeal). It was not until after Stalin's death in 1953 that the fabrication was exposed and all of the doctors were exonerated by security NKVD chief Lavrentryia Beria (who ironically publicized the conspiracy plot initially to the press to gain political capital).

In addition, one the accusers named Mikhail Ryumin, Chief MGB investigator and Deputy Minister of State Security, was arrested and executed for perjury against the state.

**Andrey Vyshinsky was Joseph Stalin's main state prosecutor that oversaw the conviction of several alleged "counter-revolutionaries". When Vyshinsky came to power as the Procurator General of the Soviet Union in 1935, he used his position as the top judge to help lay the foundation of the Soviet Union's corrupt legal system that prosecuted several victims of the the sham Moscow Trials during Stalin's Great Purge. He encouraged investigators to extract confessions by any means necessary, even claiming that the "confession of the accused is the queen of evidence".

However, it was not until 1936 that he gained international notoriety during the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial (the first of many Moscow Trials) when he called the nine accused defendants "rabid dogs", "dogs of the fascist bourgeoisie", "accursed vermin" and other slanderous politically-biased insults in his rhetoric speech.

Reference: https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT0l_oI-qaYZ5DJGyZW-SlDNJHGiyuD9lVEq1kI1dzIYwD_0N0y