Gulag (23 page)

The shock of such searches could be worse for women. One remembered that the jailer performing the search “took our brassieres, corset-belts which held our suspenders, and some other parts of our underwear essential to women. There followed a brief, disgusting, gynecological examination. I kept silent, but felt as if I had been deprived of all human dignity.”
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While enduring a twelve-month stay in Aleksandrovsky Tsentral prison in 1941, the memoirist T. P. Milyutina was searched repeatedly. The women of her cells would be taken onto an unheated staircase, five at a time. They were then told to undress completely, put their clothes on the floor and their hands up. Hands were put “in our hair, in our ears, under our tongues; also between our legs,” both while standing up and sitting down. After the first such search, wrote Milyutina, “many burst into tears, many were hysterical . . .”
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Following the search, some prisoners were isolated. “The first hours of imprisonment,” continues Solzhenitsyn, “are designed to break the prisoner down by isolating him from contact with other inmates, so that there is no one to keep his spirits up, so that the full force of the whole, vast, ramified apparatus is felt to be bearing down on him and him alone . . .”
⁴⁰
The cell of Evgeny Gnedin, a Soviet diplomat and son of revolutionaries, contained only a small table, attached to the floor, and two stools, also attached to the floor. The folding bed, on which prisoners slept at night, was attached by a bolt to the wall. Everything, including the walls, stools, bed, and ceiling, was painted light blue. “It gave you the feeling of being inside the peculiar cabin of a ship,” Gnedin wrote in his memoirs.
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It was also quite common to be put, as was Alexander Dolgun, in a
boks—
a cell “about four feet by nine feet. An empty box with a bench”— during the first hours following arrest, and held there for several hours or even a few days.
⁴²
Isaac Vogelfanger, a Polish surgeon, was put in a cell with open windows in the middle of winter.
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Others, like Lyubov Bershadskaya, a survivor who later helped lead a prisoners’ strike in Vorkuta, were isolated during the entire period of their interrogation. Bershadskaya spent nine months in solitary, and wrote that she actually looked forward to being questioned, just to have someone to talk to.
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Yet to the newcomer, a crowded prison cell could be an even more horrifying place than a solitary one. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg’s description of her first cell reads like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch:

The cell was huge. The arched walls were dripping. On either side, leaving only a narrow passage between them, were low continuous bed boards packed with bodies. Assorted rags were drying on lines overhead. The air was thick with the foul smoke of strong cheap tobacco, and loud with arguments, shouts and sobs.
⁴⁵

Another memoirist also tried to recapture his feeling of shock: “It was such an awful sight, men with long hair, bearded, the smell of sweat, and nowhere even to sit down or rest. You must use your imagination to try to grasp the sort of place I was in.”
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Aino Kuusinen, the Finnish wife of Otto Kuusinen, the leader of the Comintern, believed that on her first night she had been deliberately placed within earshot of prisoners under interrogation:

Even today, after thirty years, I can hardly describe the horror of that first night at Lefortovo. In my cell I could hear every noise from outside. Near by, as I later discovered, was the “interrogation department,” a separate structure which was in fact a torture chamber. All night long I heard inhuman screams and the repeated sound of the lash. A desperate and tormented animal could hardly have uttered such dreadful cries as the victims who were assaulted for hour on end with threats, blows and curses.
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But wherever they found themselves on their first night under arrest, whether in an old Czarist prison, a railway station lockup, a converted church or monastery, all prisoners faced an urgent, immediate task: to recover from shock, to adjust to the peculiar rules of prison life—and to cope with interrogation. The speed with which they managed to do this would then help determine how well, or how badly, they emerged from the system and, ultimately, how they would fare in the camps.

Of all the stages that prisoners passed through on their road to the Gulag, the interrogation is perhaps the one that is most familiar to Westerners. Interrogations have been described not only in history books, but also in Western literature—Arthur Koestler’s classic
Darkness at Noon
, for example —in war movies, and in other forms of high and low culture. The Gestapo were infamous interrogators, as were the agents of the Spanish Inquisition. The tactics of both are the stuff of popular legend. “We have ways of making you talk . . .” is a phrase children still use when playing war games.

Interrogations of prisoners also take place, of course, in democratic, law-abiding societies, sometimes in accordance with the law, sometimes not. Psychological pressure, even torture, during interrogation is hardly unique to the USSR. The “good cop, bad cop” technique—the nice, polite man asking questions, alternating with the angry inquisitor—has made its way not only as an idiom into other languages, but also into (now outdated) American police manuals as a recommended tactic. Prisoners have been pressured under questioning in many if not most countries at one time or another; indeed, it was evidence of such pressure that led the American Supreme Court to rule, in the
Miranda
v.
Arizona
case of 1966, that criminal suspects must be informed, among other things, of their right to remain silent, and of their right to contact a lawyer.
⁴⁸

Still, the “investigations” conducted by the Soviet secret police were unique, if not in their methods, then in their mass character. In some eras, “cases” routinely included hundreds of people, who were arrested all over the Soviet Union. Typical of its time was one report filed by the Orenburg regional department of the NKVD on “Operational measures for the liquidation of clandestine groups of Trotskyites and Bukharinites, as well as other counter-revolutionary groups, carried out from 1 April to 18 September 1937.” According to the report, the Orenburg NKVD had arrested 420 members of a “Trotskyite” conspiracy and 120 “right-wingers”— as well as more than 2,000 members of a “right-wing military Japanese cossack organization,” more than 1,500 Czarist officers and civil servants exiled from St. Petersburg in 1935, some 250 Poles indicted as part of the case against “Polish spies,” 95 people who had worked on the Harbin railway in China and were considered to be Japanese spies, 3,290 former kulaks, and 1,399 “criminal elements.”

In all, the Orenburg NKVD arrested more than 7,500 people in a fivemonth period, which did not allow much time for careful examination of evidence. This hardly mattered, as the investigations into each one of these counter-revolutionary conspiracies had in fact been launched in Moscow. The local NKVD were merely doing their duty, filling in the numerical quotas that had been dictated from above.
⁴⁹

Because of the high volume of arrests, special procedures had to be put in place. These did not always entail extra cruelty. On the contrary, the large numbers of prisoners sometimes meant that the NKVD reduced investigations to a minimum. The accused was hurriedly questioned, and then equally hurriedly sentenced, sometimes with an extremely brief court hearing. General Alexander Gorbatov, an admired military leader, remembered that his hearing took “four or five minutes,” and consisted of a confirmation of his personal details, and one question: “Why did you not admit to your crimes during the investigation?” Afterward, he received a fifteen-year sentence.
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Still others had no trial at all: they were sentenced in absentia, either by an
osoboe soveshchanie—
a “special commission”—or by a troika of three officials, rather than by a court. Such was the experience of Thomas Sgovio, whose investigation was completely perfunctory. Born in Buffalo, New York, Sgovio had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1935 as a political émigré, the son of an Italian American communist who had been forcibly deported to the Soviet Union from the United States for his political activities. During the three years he lived in Moscow, Sgovio gradually became disillusioned, and decided to reclaim his American passport—he had relinquished it upon entering the USSR—in order to return home. On March 12, 1938, he was arrested walking out of the American Embassy.

The record of Sgovio’s subsequent investigation (which, decades later, he photocopied in a Moscow archive and donated to the Hoover Institution) is sparse, matching his own recollection of the same events. The evidence against him includes a list of what was found during his first body search: his trade union membership book, his telephone and address book, his library card, a sheet of paper (“with writing in a foreign language”), seven photographs, one penknife, and an envelope containing foreign postage stamps, among other things. There is a statement from Captain of State Security, Comrade Sorokin, testifying that the accused walked into the U.S. Embassy on March 12, 1938. There is a statement from a witness, testifying that the accused left the U.S. Embassy at 1:15 p.m. The file also includes the protocols of the initial investigation and the two brief interrogations, each page signed by both Sgovio and his interrogator. Sgovio’s initial statement reads as follows: “I wanted to regain my American citizenship. Three months ago I went to the American Embassy for the first time and applied to regain my citizenship. Today I returned . . . the clerk receptionist told me the American employee in charge of my case was out for lunch and for me to return in an hour or two.”
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During most of the subsequent interrogation, Sgovio was asked to repeat the details of his visit to the embassy over and over again. Only once was he asked, “Tell us all about your espionage activities!” When he replied, “You know I’m not a spy,” they appear not to have pushed him further, although the interrogator was fondling a rubber hose, of the sort normally used to beat prisoners, in a vaguely threatening manner.
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Although the NKVD were not much interested in the case, they never seem to have doubted its outcome. Some years later, after Sgovio demanded a review of his case, the prosecutor’s office dutifully did so, summing up the facts as follows: “Sgovio does not deny that he did make an application at the American Embassy. Therefore I believe there is no reason to review Sgovio’s case.” Damned by the fact that he had confessed to entering the embassy—and had confessed to wanting to leave the USSR—Sgovio received a sentence from one of the “special commissions” of five years of forced labor, condemned as a “socially dangerous element.” His case had been treated as routine. In the crush of arrests at the time, the investigators had simply done the bare minimum required.
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Others were convicted on even less evidence, after even more cursory investigations. Because falling under suspicion was in itself considered a sign of guilt, prisoners were rarely released without serving at least a partial sentence. Leonid Finkelstein, a Russian Jew arrested in the late 1940s, had the impression that although no one had managed to invent a particularly plausible case against him, he had been given a relatively short sentence of seven years, simply in order to prove that the arresting organs never made a mistake.
⁵⁴
Another ex-prisoner, S. G. Durasova, even claims that he was specifically told, by one of his investigators, that “we never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren’t guilty, we can’t release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people.”
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On the other hand, when the NKVD were more interested—and, it seems, when Stalin himself was more interested—the investigators’ attitude to those picked up during periods of mass arrest could rapidly change from indifferent to sinister. In certain circumstances, the NKVD would even demand that investigators fabricate evidence on a massive scale—as happened, for example, during the 1937 investigation into what Nikolai Yezhov called the “most powerful and probably the most important diversionist-espionage networks of Polish intelligence in the USSR.”
⁵⁶
If Sgovio’s interrogation represents one extreme of indifference, the mass operation against this alleged Polish spy ring represents the other: suspects were interrogated with the single-minded goal of making them confess.

The operation began with NKVD Order 00485, an order that set the pattern for later mass arrests. Operational Order 00485 clearly listed the sort of person who was to be arrested: all remaining Polish war prisoners from the 1920–21 Polish-Bolshevik war; all Polish refugees and emigrants to the Soviet Union; anyone who had been a member of a Polish political party; and all “anti-Soviet activists” from Polish-speaking regions of the Soviet Union.
⁵⁷
In practice, anyone of Polish background living in the Soviet Union—and there were many, particularly in the Ukrainian and Belorussian border regions—was under suspicion. The operation was so thorough that the Polish Consul in Kiev compiled a secret report describing what was happening, noting that in some villages “anyone of Polish background and even anyone with a Polish-sounding name” had been arrested, whether a factory manager or a peasant.
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But the arrests were only the beginning. Since there was nothing to incriminate someone guilty of having a Polish surname, Order 00485 went on to urge regional NKVD chiefs to “begin investigations simultaneously with arrests. The basic aim of investigation should be the complete unmasking of the organizers and leaders of the diversionist group, with the goal of revealing the diversionist network . . .”
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In practice, this meant—as it would in so many other cases—that the arrestees themselves would be forced to provide the evidence from which the case against them would be constructed. The system was simple. Polish arrestees were first questioned about their membership in the espionage ring. Then, when they claimed to know nothing about it, they were beaten or otherwise tortured until they “remembered.” Because Yezhov was personally interested in the success of this particular case, he was even present at some of these torture sessions. If the prisoners lodged official complaints about their treatment, he ordered his men to ignore them and to “continue in the same spirit.” Having confessed, the prisoners were then required to name others, their “co-conspirators.” Then the cycle would begin again, as a result of which the “spy network” grew and grew.