Gulag Voices (3 page)
Authors: Anne Applebaum
About a fortnight after sentences had been pronounced we were all summoned “with belongings” (on Solovky the call was different: “Fly out like a bullet with your things”) and sent off in Black Marias
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to the Nikolayevsky (now Moskovsky) Station. We drew up at the extreme right platform, from which the dacha trains now leave. One at a time we got out of the Black Marias and a crowd that was there to see us off in the twilight (it was an October evening) shouted, as they recognized each of us, “Kolya!” “Dima!” “Volodya!” Soldiers who formed the escort, bayonets fixed, drove back the crowd of parents, friends, and colleagues from school or work. Two soldiers, brandishing their bayonets, walked up and down in front of the crowd while one escort passed us over to the other, checking off the list. They put us in two Stolypin cars,
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which had been considered terrible in tsarist times but in the Soviet era had gained a reputation for actually being comfortable. When we had finally been crammed into our cages another escort began handing out everything that our relations had brought us. I got a big confectioners’ cake from the university library, and some flowers too. When the train moved from behind the bars the head of the commander of the escort appeared (Oh bliss!) and said in a friendly manner, “Look here, lads, don’t hold it against us: it’s orders. What if we don’t get the counting done?” Somebody answered, “All right, but why start on the people seeing us off with swearing and bayonets?”
1
. A printing house founded by Tsar Nicholas I, still in operation after the Revolution.
2
. A reference to Henry Ford’s
The International Jew,
one of a series of virulently antisemitic books written by the founder of the American automobile industry. It describes Jews as both vicious capitalists and vicious Bolsheviks.
3
. Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the acronym for the domestic Soviet secret police, earlier referred to as Cheka or OGPU and later variously known as the MGB, from Ministry of State Security, and the KGB.
4
. The investigative prison in Leningrad.
5
. Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) was a Russian religious philosopher and medieval historian.
6
. In 1921 Lenin launched his New Economic Policy (NEP), which restored a limited amount of free enterprise and private business to the Soviet Union, but the policy was ended by Stalin. “Nepmen,” always suspicious figures, were small-time entrepreneurs who tried to take advantage of the policy.
7
. N. P. Antsiferov (1889–1958) was a Russian historian and ethnographer.
8
. Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) was a prominent late-Romantic poet and painter; Vasily Zhukovsky (below; 1783–1852) the preeminent early-Romantic poet.
9
. Aleksandr Vvedensky (1904–41) was a Russian avant-garde poet and philosopher; S. I. Povarin was a prerevolutionary logician.
10
. Trucks used for transporting prisoners.
11
. Cars used for transporting prisoners. Also called “Stolypinki,” they were named for Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911), prime minister of tsarist Russia 1906–11.
2.
A
lexander Dolgun’s story will shock many modern American readers, not least because of what it reveals about the past practices of their own government. Dolgun was an American, born in the Bronx in 1926. In 1933, in the depths of the Depression, his unemployed father, Michael Dolgun, moved to the Soviet Union to take a job as a technician at the Moscow Automotive Works. After a year he brought over his American wife and children. It was a disastrous decision: when they tried to return home, Soviet bureaucrats prevented the family from leaving the country. Both Michael and his wife spent the rest of their lives in the Soviet Union. Alexander, who went to work as a clerk at the U.S. embassy, was arrested in 1948, “kidnapped,” as he put it, right off the street. He remained incarcerated until 1956, but even after his release he was not allowed to leave the country. During that time and the decades that followed, no member of the U.S. government and none of Dolgun’s former embassy colleagues made the slightest attempt to help him. In the days before the birth of the modern human rights movement and Amnesty International, diplomats rarely concerned themselves with the fate of private U.S. citizens.
Dolgun did finally return to the United States in 1971, thanks to the efforts of his sister, who had escaped the Soviet Union by marrying a British diplomat, and aided as well by the onset of détente. His memoir,
Alexander Dolgun’s Story,
caused a small sensation when it was published in 1975. But although there are many arresting passages—the perspective of an American in the Soviet Gulag is an unusual one, to say the least—the most famous part of the book is Dolgun’s description of his interrogation. Dolgun had been a young embassy employee with a mischievous streak who “borrowed” cars from the embassy garage and books from library and would sneak into parties with older staff. From this the Soviet secret police concluded that he must be a spy: no low-ranking clerk could otherwise have the kind of access Dolgun did. As a result, his case was treated with grim seriousness. Among other things, Dolgun was interrogated in Sukhanovka, a prison and torture chamber from which few emerged either alive or sane. Other prisoners considered Dolgun’s survival so exceptional that Solzhenitsyn sought out his testimony when writing
The Gulag Archipelago.
The selection that follows describes an earlier period of Dolgun’s interrogation, in Lefortovo Prison. Some elements of his interrogation were unique; others are recognizable from descriptions by other prisoners. Usually the goal of Soviet interrogations was to get prisoners to confess, no matter how improbable the charges or how innocent they might know the prisoner to be. The interrogators’ purpose in these cases seems to have been twofold: to gather further evidence—the confession invariably included a condemnation of other members of the conspiracy—and to reassure the interrogators of the validity, moral and legal, of their methods. If a prisoner confessed, after all, then he or she must be guilty.
Dolgun describes the methods he used to resist confessing—and to stay sane. Among other things he sang popular songs, hid his face under a hat to “train” the guards not to recognize when he was snatching an extra hour or two of illicit sleep, and “walked” from his prison cell in Moscow to America, counting tens of thousands of steps. He also made a “calendar” using dried bread balls and matchsticks.
Eventually, he even learned the prisoners’ “Morse code,” tapped on the walls between cells, and was able to communicate with the prisoner next door to him. Invented in tsarist Russia, this code remained in use throughout the Gulag era, and even afterward (Senator John McCain remembers using the same code in the prisons of North Vietnam). Dolgun learned it the way most prisoners did—from the prisoner in the neighboring cell. In the excerpt reprinted here he begins to work out the code; later he would come to understand that each group of “taps” represented a different letter of the Russian alphabet.
Toward the end of the first month in Lefortovo things began to get very bad. Except on the weekends, I was never able to steal more than at the most an hour of sleep every day, and looking back it seems that an hour is too much; it may have been no more than a few minutes some nights. Effectively it was the same as no sleep at all, and my mind began to go blank fairly frequently. The effort to keep counting my steps and converting them to kilometers and remember where I had stopped walking the day before was almost more than I could summon up. My eyes pained constantly, both burning and aching. Sudden bright light was an agony. In the singing periods, I would find myself drifting off into incoherent mutterings and then I would have to lecture myself very sharply to get back on the road. One day I became acutely terrified sitting on my bunk staring at the wall. The wall had been painted and repainted to try to obliterate the scratches of earlier residents of the psychic cell.
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The traces of half-obscured scratchings combined with cracks running through the masonry made patterns that my mind naturally reshaped into concrete images, the way the interlaced lines in the patterned wallpaper used to turn into ships and animals and cars when I lay in bed as a child. One pattern had begun to fascinate me. If I stared long enough at a certain section of the wall I would begin to see the face of an old man emerge from the random scars and etchings. At first it was agreeable to look for this pattern and relax and wait for the old face to take shape in the half light. Later it began to look like an evil face, but I still looked for it sometimes out of a vague curiosity. What frightened me that day suddenly was that the face, as I stared at it, narrowed its eyes and curled back its lips in a fierce and menacing silent snarl. The hallucination was quite real. The intentions of this evil old creature were clear. He intended to hurt me somehow. But the fear that started my heart beating fast and sent me walking up and down the cell and counting like mad was not the same fear as in a nightmare, when you believe in the terrible things you dream and are in a real way pursued by them. My fear was that I was going out of my mind. I was enormously, morbidly afraid of going crazy.
Sidorov
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had increased the intensity of his questioning at night. He had begun to suggest that I was particularly interested in certain Soviet naval officers. He told me that my association with a navy lieutenant at our own embassy, Bob Dreyer, a guy I often went out with, drinking and dancing and so on, was suspect because they had long had him marked as an intelligence agent. Not long before I was kidnapped, Dreyer had gotten into trouble over our stores warehouse. The MGB accused him, falsely, of peddling embassy stores on the black market. He was declared persona non grata, and the embassy had been forced to ship him back to the United States.
Sidorov would say, “We have indisputable evidence that you were engaged in espionage activities with Bob Dreyer. Why do you deny it?”
My answer: “I deny it, that’s all.”
All this futile dialogue was dutifully recorded on protocols, day after day, and brought across the room for me to read and sign. Sidorov was angry all the time at night. He was angry at each denial, angry at the changing signature, angry at my silences while I tried desperately to shut out my hunger and my confusion and my searing need for sleep by concentration on my arithmetic and my line across the map of western Russia.
One morning when I stumbled into the cell it was so cold I could see my breath. Now I had to increase the pace of my walking to keep warm, and since I was losing weight on the miserable rations, I had little fuel in my body to burn for warmth.
But even with all these growing threats to my stamina and my mind, I still believed I would find some way to get some sleep and that, once found, it would keep me going in spite of everything they could hit me with.
Sidorov had produced a collection of photographs, mostly of army and navy officers, Soviets, in uniform, and began to show them to me one after another during interrogation, demanding that I identify these unknown men and cursing me when I said I did not recognize any of them.
Over and over again, the same photographs, street photographs taken surreptitiously, formal photographs in a studio, face after face of strangers. Over and over again, with the sense of violence coming nearer and nearer to the surface. “I’m giving you another chance. We know you know some of these men. Point out the ones you know! Those were taken in 1945. Why do you deny that you know some of these men!”
My answer: “I deny it.”
Sign the protocol.
Sidorov would tell me, correctly, that I was very knowledgeable about Soviet ships and planes. He would quiz me about this: tonnages, armaments, and so on. I don’t know now whether it was foolish to answer him accurately, but I did. If agents in the embassy, and it became clear that in one case a charwoman, as well as many others, had reported on my reading and my conversations, then there was no point claiming I was ignorant in military and especially naval matters. They were a hobby with me, and anyone who had been around the embassy would know about it. Sidorov claimed that the books I had taken from the embassy library—like
Jane’s Fighting Ships
and
Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft
and so on—marked me as a spy for sure, and he would not believe me when I told him that in a free country you could buy such books in any bookstore. I told him that thousands of young kids in the States memorized the details of planes and ships just as others memorized batting averages and other baseball details, but he just accused me of lying to cover up my “demonstrated anti-Soviet activities.”
And then, around three in the morning, he put photographs on my little table and yelled at me from across the room to keep turning them over until I was prepared to admit that there was someone in the collection I recognized. I sighed and put my head down and began to turn them over. I said, “It’s no use; we’ve done this over and over. I don’t recognize anyone. Not one!” I kept turning the photographs over dumbly, placing them face down after I had scanned them. I did not see him come at me until it was too late to throw up my hands or duck. His fist came in hard and caught me on the side of the face with enough force to spin me right out of my chair and onto the floor. I was dizzy with the shock of the blow. I lay as still as I could on the floor with my hands over my eyes and my head pounding. The blow was still reverberating inside my skull. Sidorov barked, “Liar! Liar! Liar!” He came and stood over me where I huddled in the corner. “Get up!” he screamed. “Get up and go through them again and again until you come to your senses and confess you know him!”
“Who? Who?” I yelled back at him, still on the floor. “I never saw any of these men! None of them!”
Suddenly I felt as if my right shin had been cracked open. I sat up and grabbed for it, almost screaming myself, when the toe of his hard high boot landed on the other shin. I felt sick and my stomach began to heave but there was nothing in it to bring up. I got to my hands and knees somehow. My eyes were blurred and red and I could vaguely see his feet scuffing the floor beside me. I was afraid he was going to kick again. I knew I could never stand another blow on top of the first. I pushed myself up as hard as I could, breathing hard and fast to keep the tears back and to keep from yelling.
“The photographs!” he screamed. And hardly able to see them at all, I bent over them again. I had begun to
believe
that there was someone here I should recognize. I knew, too, that his continual insistence that I knew someone in these pictures could lead me to believe it even if it was not so. I was determined not to be trapped like that. My hands were shaking with anger and pain, but I started going through the photographs as quickly as I could, identifying the few streets or buildings I recognized, and muttering, “I’ll try, I’ll try as hard as I can.” Sidorov paced the room. I bent my head hard over the pictures so he could not see my face. I worked at composing myself. Gradually I got my heartbeat slowed down and my breathing a good deal easier. I really peered closely at those pictures. I waited until Sidorov got tired of walking and sat down, and then I looked right in his eyes and smiled a big smile. I said, “Maybe you’ve got some better pictures?” His eyes went very narrow. I was taking the risk of another fist or a boot, but I knew that this was the precise moment when I had to show him he was not winning. He did not get up out of his chair. He did not yell. He just stared. I think there might have been a faint hint of admiration in that stare.
Back in the frigid cell I rolled up my pants and looked at my shins. The left was angry red and bruised. The right was cut open, and when I pulled up the long prison underwear, a bit of clotted blood was pulled off and a thin trickle of blood began to ooze. I washed it in cold water. It seemed a little before six. My head was pounding terribly. I was shivering and nauseated. I climbed under the blanket and
willed
that there should be time for sleep. For a while my pounding head kept me awake with a sensation of lights pulsing. Then I dropped off and slept for perhaps ten or twenty minutes before the slot opened and that squat, ugly hag
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yelled at me.
The moment I opened my eyes the pain began again. The hag brought my coat for exercise time, and I said I wanted to stay in the cell, that I felt sick.
“
Ne polozheno!
”
4
I went out and shut my eyes against the hard light in the corridors to cut down the pain. Somehow I remembered to count. I was in the countryside, dodging towns big enough to have a police station, and beginning to wonder what it would be like when I had to negotiate the border. But that was a long way off. I had only made about forty or fifty kilometers [twenty-five to thirty miles], but it was a relief to have Moscow far behind me.
Breakfast made me more nauseated, but I worked at keeping it down. I feverishly worked a few minutes on my calendar. I prayed for the wind tunnel
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to start up so I could shout out some curses, tell some jokes, sing a rousing song. At the same time I was afraid the noise might split my head. The wind tunnel did not start. No wing-stress research today, I told myself.
