Gulag (25 page)

Yet not everyone agreed that such people were to be blamed. Lev Razgon, in his own memoirs, replied to Gorbatov, whom he called “arrogant and immoral”:

It is wrong to shift the blame from the torturers to their victims. Gorbatov was lucky, that’s all. Either his interrogator was lazy, or he had not been given a firm instruction to “put pressure” on his charge. Doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists have not done enough research to say whether an individual can be tortured into giving false testimony against himself. But this century has provided a vast amount of evidence on the subject. Of course it can be done.
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There are also mixed views, in retrospect, about whether holding out actually mattered. Susanna Pechora, who was interrogated for more than a year in the early 1950s—she was a member of a tiny youth group which was founded, quixotically, to resist Stalin—said, looking back, that “holding out” had not been worth it. Resisting confession simply prolonged the interrogation, she believes. Most were sentenced anyway, in the end.
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Nevertheless, the contents of Sgovio’s file clearly illustrate that subsequent decisions—about early release, amnesty, and so on—were indeed taken on the basis of what was in a prisoner’s file, including confession. If you had managed to hold out, in other words, you did stand a very, very slim chance of having your sentence reversed. Right up through the 1950s, all of these judicial procedures, however surreal, were taken seriously.

In the end, the interrogation’s greatest importance was the psychological mark it left on prisoners. Even before they were subjected to the long transports east, even before they arrived in their first camps, they had been at some level “prepared” for their new lives as slave laborers. They already knew that they had no ordinary human rights, no right to a fair trial or even a fair hearing. They already knew that the NKVD’s power was absolute, and that the state could dispose of them as it wished. If they had confessed to a crime they had not committed, they already thought less of themselves. But even if they had not, they had been robbed of all semblance of hope, of any belief that the mistake of their arrest would soon be reversed.

Chapter 8

PRISON

A Gypsy read the cards—a distant road,
A distant road—and a prison house.
Maybe the old central prison,
It waits for me, a young man, once again . . .

—Traditional Russian prisoners’ song

THEIR ARRESTS AND INTERROGATIONS wore prisoners down, shocked them into submission, confused them, and disoriented them. But the Soviet prison system itself, where inmates were kept before, during, and often for a very long time after their interrogations, had an enormous influence on their state of mind as well.

When looked at in an international context, there was nothing unusually cruel about Soviet prisons or the Soviet prison regime. Soviet prisons were certainly harsher than most Western prisons, and harsher than Czarist prisons had been too. On the other hand, prisons in China, or in other parts of the Third World in the mid-twentieth century, were extremely unpleasant as well. Nevertheless, elements of Soviet prison life remained peculiar to the Soviet Union. Some aspects of the daily prison regime, like the interrogation process itself, even seem to have been deliberately designed to prepare prisoners for their new life in the Gulag.

Certainly official attitudes to prisons reflect changes in the priorities of those running the camps. Genrikh Yagoda issued an order in August 1935, for example, just as arrests of political prisoners were beginning to pick up pace, making it clear that the most important “point” of an arrest (if these arrests can be said to have had a “point” in any normal sense of the word) was to feed the ever-more frenzied demand for confessions. Yagoda’s order put not only the prisoners’ “privileges” but also their most basic living conditions directly into the hands of the NKVD officers investigating their cases. Provided a prisoner was cooperating—which usually meant confessing—he would be allowed letters, food parcels, newspapers and books, monthly meetings with relatives, and an hour of exercise daily. If not, he could be deprived of all these things, and lose his food ration as well.
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By contrast, in 1942—after Lavrenty Beria had arrived, vowing to turn the Gulag into an efficient economic machine—Moscow’s priorities had shifted. The camps were becoming an important factor in wartime production, and camp commanders had begun complaining about the large numbers of prisoners arriving at camp workplaces totally unfit to work. Starving, filthy, and deprived of exercise, they simply could not dig coal or cut trees at the pace required. Beria therefore issued new interrogation orders in May of that year, demanding that prison bosses observe “elementary health conditions,” and limiting investigators’ control over prisoners’ daily life.

According to Beria’s new order, prisoners were to have a daily walk of “not less than one hour” (with the notable exception of those awaiting the death sentence, whose quality of health hardly mattered to the NKVD’s production figures). Prison administrators also had to ensure that their prisons contained a yard specially built for the purpose: “Not a single prisoner must stay in the cell during these walks . . . weak and aged prisoners must be helped by their cell mates.” Prison warders were told to ensure that inmates (except for those directly under interrogation) have eight hours of sleep, that those with diarrhea receive extra vitamins and better food, and that the
parashi
, the buckets that served as prison toilets, be repaired if leaking. The last point was thought to be so crucial that the order even specified the ideal size of a
parasha.
In men’s cells, they had to be 55 to 60 centimeters high, in women’s cells 30 to 35 centimeters high—and they had to contain .75 liters of depth per person in the cell.
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Despite these ludicrously specific regulations, prisons continued to differ enormously. In part, they differed according to location. As a rule, provincial prisons were filthier and more lax, Moscow prisons cleaner and more deadly. But even the three main Moscow prisons had slightly different characters. The infamous Lubyanka, which still dominates a large square in central Moscow (and still serves as the headquarters for the FSB, the NKVD’s and KGB’s successor), was used for the reception and interrogation of the most serious political criminals. There were relatively few cells—a 1956 document speaks of 118—and 94 were very small, for one to four prisoners.
³
Once the offices of an insurance company, some of the cells of the Lubyanka building had parquet floors, which the prisoners had to wash every day. A. M. Garaseva, an Anarchist who later served as Solzhenitsyn’s secretary, was imprisoned in Lubyanka in 1926, and remembered that food was still served by waitresses wearing uniforms.
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By contrast, Lefortovo, also used for interrogation, had been a nineteenth-century military prison. Its cells, never intended to hold large numbers of prisoners, were darker, dirtier, and more crowded. Lefortovo is shaped like the letter K, and at its center, recalled the memoirist Dmitri Panin, “an attendant stands with a flag and directs the flow of prisoners being led to and from interrogation.”
⁵
In the late 1930s, Lefortovo became so overcrowded that the NKVD opened an “annex” in the Sukhanovsky monastery outside Moscow. Officially named “Object 110,” and known to prisoners as “Sukhanovka,” the annex acquired a horrific reputation for torture: “There were no rules of internal order, and no defined rules for the conduct of investigations either.”
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Beria himself maintained an office there, and personally supervised torture sessions of the Sukhanovka prisoners.
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Butyrka prison, the oldest of the three, had been constructed in the eighteenth century, and was originally designed to be a palace, although it was quickly converted into a prison. Among its distinguished nineteenth-century inmates was Feliks Dzerzhinsky, along with other Polish and Russian revolutionaries.
⁸
Generally used to house prisoners who had finished interrogation and were awaiting transport, Butyrka was also crowded and dirty, but more relaxed. Garaseva records that whereas the Lubyanka guards forced prisoners to “exercise” by walking in a tight circle, “at Butyrka you could do what you wanted.” She, like others, also mentions the prison’s excellent library, whose collection had been formed by generations of prisoners, all of whom left their books behind when they were transferred away.
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Prisons also differed from era to era. During the early 1930s, large numbers of prisoners were sentenced to months or even years of isolation. One Russian prisoner, Boris Chetverikov, kept sane for sixteen months in solitary by washing his clothes, the floor, the walls—and by singing all the opera arias and songs that he knew.
¹⁰
Alexander Dolgun was kept in solitary during his interrogation too, and managed to keep his head by walking: he counted the steps in his cells, worked out how many there were to a kilometer, and started “walking,” first across Moscow to the American Embassy—“I breathed in the clear, cold, imaginary air and hugged my coat around me”—then across Europe, and finally across the Atlantic, back home to the United States.
¹¹

Evgeniya Ginzburg spent nearly two years in the Yaroslavl isolator, deep in central Russia, much of that time completely alone: “To this day, if I shut my eyes, I can see every bump and scratch on those walls, painted halfway up in the favorite prison colors, brownish-red and a dirty white above.” But eventually, even that “special” prison began to fill up, and she was given a cell mate. Ultimately, most of the
tyurzeks
, the “prison prisoners,” were moved to camps. As Ginzburg writes, “It was simply not practical to keep such multitudes in prison for ten or twenty years: it was inconsistent with the tempo of the age and with its economy.”
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In the 1940s, as the pace of arrests grew, it became far more difficult to isolate anyone, even new prisoners, even for a few hours. In 1947, Leonid Finkelstein was initially thrown into the prison
vokzal
(literally, “railway station”), a “huge, common cell where all the arrested are thrown in first, without any facilities. Then they are sorted out, gradually, sent to the baths, and then to the cells.”
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In fact, the experience of desperate overcrowding was far more common than that of solitary isolation. To choose a few random examples, the main Arkhangelsk city prison, which had a capacity of 740, held, in 1941, between 1,661 and 2,380 prisoners. The prison in Kotlas, in northern Russia, with a capacity of 300, held up to 460.
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Prisons in more distant provinces could be worse. In 1940, the prison of Stanislawwow, in newly occupied eastern Poland, contained 1,709 people, well above its capacity of 472, and possessed a mere 150 sets of sheets.
¹⁵
In February 1941, the prisons in the republic of Tartarstan, with a capacity for 2,710 prisoners, contained 6,353. In May 1942, the prisons of the central Asian city of Tashkent, with a capacity for 960, contained 2,754.
¹⁶
These crowded conditions had a particularly harsh effect on those under interrogation, whose entire lives were being subject to intense, hostile questioning every night, and whose days nevertheless had to be spent in the company of others. One prisoner described the effects:

The whole process of the disintegration of personality took place before the eyes of everyone in the cell. A man could not hide himself here for an instant; even his bowels had to be moved on the open toilet, situated right in the room. He who wanted to weep, wept before everyone, and the feeling of shame increased his torment. He who wanted to kill himself—in the night, beneath the blanket, trying to cut the veins in his arm with his teeth—would be quickly discovered by one of the cell’s insomniacs, and prevented from finishing the job.
¹⁷

Margarete Buber-Neumann also wrote that the overcrowding turned prisoners against one another. When prisoners were awoken, at half-past four in the morning, the effect on us was much as though an ant-heap had been turned over. Everyone grabbed her wash things in order to be first, if possible, because, of course, the washing accommodation was not remotely sufficient for all of us. In the room where we washed were five lavatories and ten water taps. I say “lavatories” but they were in reality five holes in the ground and nothing else. Queues immediately formed in front of all five holes and all ten taps. Imagine if you can going to the lavatory in the morning with at least a dozen pairs of eyes watching you, and being shouted at and urged on by others impatiently waiting for their turn . . .
¹⁸

Perhaps because they were aware of the crowding, prison authorities went to great lengths to break any semblance of prisoner solidarity. Yagoda’s order of 1935 already forbade prisoners to talk, shout, sing, write on the walls of the cell, leave marks or signs anywhere in the prison, stand at the windows of the cell, or attempt to communicate with those in other cells in any way. Those breaking these rules could be punished by deprivation of exercise or letters, or even by being placed in a specially constructed punishment cell.
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Enforced silence is frequently mentioned by those imprisoned in the 1930s: “No one spoke out loud and some of them made themselves understood by signs,” wrote Buber-Neumann of Butyrka, where “the half-exposed bodies of most of the women were of a peculiar greyish-blue tinge from long confinement without light or air . . .”
²⁰

In some prisons, the rule of silence remained absolute well into the next decade, in others less so: one ex-prisoner writes of the “complete silence” of Lubyanka in 1949, by comparison to which “cell number 106 at Butyrka seemed like visiting a bazaar after a small shop.”
²¹
Another, in prison in the central Soviet city of Kazan, remembers that when prisoners began whispering, “the lid of the food hatch would open with a bang and someone would hiss, ‘Sssh!’”
²²

Many memoirists have also described how guards, when moving prisoners between cells or from a cell to interrogation, would jangle their keys, snap their fingers or make some other noise, to warn off those farther down the corridor. In the case of an encounter, one of the prisoners would be quickly turned down another passageway, or placed into a special closet. V. K. Yasnyi, formerly a translator of Spanish literature, was once placed in a half-meter-square closet in Lubyanka for two hours.
²³
Such closets seem to have been in wide use: the basement of the former NKVD headquarters in Budapest, now a museum, contains one. The object was to prevent prisoners from encountering others who might be involved in their particular “case,” as well as to keep them away from siblings or other relatives who might be under arrest.

The enforced silence made even the walk to the interrogation rooms unnerving. Alexander Dolgun recalls walking down the carpeted hallways of Lubyanka: “The only sound as we moved along was the guard’s clucking of his tongue . . . all those metal doors were grey, battleship grey, and the effect of the gloom and the silence and the grey doors repeating themselves down the corridors until they merged with the shadows was oppressive and discouraging.”
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