However, it may not even have been these individual executions, with or without formally pronounced death sentences, which added up to thousands and inaugurated the new era of executions in 1918 that stunned and froze Russia. Still more terrible to us was the practice—initially followed by both warring sides and, later, by the victors only—of sinking barges loaded with uncounted, unregistered hundreds, unidentified even by a roll call. (Naval officers in the Gulf of Finland, in the White, Caspian, and Black seas, and, as late as 1920, hostages in Lake Baikal.) This is outside the scope of our narrow history of courts and trials, but it belongs to the history of morals, which is where everything else originates as well. In all our centuries, from the first Ryurik on, had there ever been a period of such cruelties and so much killing as during the post-October Civil War?
We would omit from view one of the characteristic ups-and-downs of the Russian capital-punishment story if we neglected to mention that capital punishment was abolished in January, 1920. Yes, indeed! And some students of the subject might conceivably be at a loss to interpret the credulity and helplessness of a dictatorship that deprived itself of its avenging sword when Denikin was still in the Kuban, Wrangel still in the Crimea, and the Polish cavalry were saddling up for a campaign. But, in the first place, this decree was quite sensible: it did not extend to the decisions of military tribunals, but applied only to extrajudicial actions of the Cheka and the decisions of tribunals in the rear. In the second place, the way was prepared for it by first cleaning out the prisons by the wholesale execution of prisoners who might otherwise have come “under the decree.” And, in the third place, it was in effect for a brief period—four months. (It lasted only until the prisons had filled up again.) By a decree of May 28, 1920, capital punishment was restored to the Cheka.
The Revolution had hastened to rename everything, so that everything would seem new. Thus the death penalty was rechristened “the supreme measure”—no longer a “punishment” but a means of social defense. From the groundwork of the criminal legislation of 1924 it is clear that the supreme measure was introduced only temporarily, pending its total abolition by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
And in 1927 they actually did begin to abolish it. It was retained solely for crimes against the state and the army—Article 58 and military crimes—and, true, for banditry also. (But the broad political interpretation of “banditry” was as well known then as it is now: from a Central Asian “Basmach,” right up to a Lithuanian forest guerrilla, every armed nationalist who doesn’t agree with the central government is a “bandit,” and how could one possibly get along without that article? Similarly, any participant in a camp rebellion and any participant in an urban rebellion is also a “bandit.”) But where articles protecting private individuals were concerned, capital punishment was abolished to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution.
And for the fifteenth anniversary, the law of Seven-eighths was added to the roster of capital punishment—that law so vitally important to advancing socialism, which guaranteed the Soviet subject a bullet for each crumb stolen from the state’s table.
As always happens at the start, they hurried to apply this law in 1932–1933 and shot people with special ferocity. In this time of peace in December, 1932 (while Kirov was still alive), at one time 265 condemned prisoners were awaiting execution in Leningrad’s Kresty Prison alone.5 And during the whole year, it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in Kresty alone.
And what kind of evildoers were these condemned men? Where did so many plotters and troublemakers come from? Among them, for example, were six collective farmers from nearby Tsarskoye Selo who were guilty of the following crime: After they had finished mowing the collective farm with their own hands, they had gone back and mowed a second time along the hummocks to get a little hay for their own cows. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee refused to pardon all six of these peasants, and the sentence of execution was carried out.
What cruel and evil Saltychikha, what utterly repulsive and infamous serf-owner would have killed six peasants for their miserable little clippings of hay? If one had dared to beat them with birch switches even once, we would know about it and read about it in school and curse that name.6 But now, heave the corpses into the water, and pretty soon the surface is all smooth again and no one’s the wiser. And one must cherish the hope that someday documents will confirm the report of my witness, who is still alive. Even if Stalin had killed no others, I believe he deserved to be drawn and quartered just for the lives of those six Tsarskoye Selo peasants! And yet they still dare shriek at us (from Peking, from Tirana, from Tbilisi, yes, and plenty of big-bellies in the Moscow suburbs are doing it too): “How could you dare expose him?” “How could you dare disturb his great shade?” “Stalin belongs to the world Communist movement!” But in my opinion all he belongs to is the Criminal Code. “The peoples of all the world remember him as a friend.” But not those on whose backs he rode, whom he slashed with his knout.
However, let us return to being dispassionate and impartial once more. Of course, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee would certainly have “completely abolished” the supreme measure, as promised, but unfortunately what happened was that in 1936 the Father and Teacher “completely abolished” the All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself. And the Supreme Soviet that succeeded it had an eighteenth-century ring. “The supreme measure” became a punishment once again, and ceased to be some kind of incomprehensible “social defense.” Even to the Stalinist ear the executions of 1937–1938 could hardly fit into any framework of “defense.”
What legal expert, what criminal historian, will provide us with verified statistics for those 1937–1938 executions? Where is that Special Archive we might be able to penetrate in order to read the figures? There is none. There is none and there never will be any. Therefore we dare report only those figures mentioned in rumors that were quite fresh in 1939–1940, when they were drifting around under the Butyrki arches, having emanated from the high-and middle-ranking Yezhov men of the NKVD who had been arrested and had passed through those cells not long before. (And they really knew!) The Yezhov men said that during those two years of 1937 and 1938 a half-million “political prisoners” had been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 480,000 blatnye—habitual thieves—in addition. (The thieves were all shot under Article 59-3 because they constituted “a basis of Yagoda’s power”; and thereby the “ancient and noble companionship of thieves” was pruned back.)
How improbable are these figures? Taking into consideration that the mass executions went on not for two full years but only for a year and a half, we would have to assume (under Article 58—in other words, the politicals alone) an average of 28,000 executions per month in that period. For the whole Soviet Union. But at how many different locations were executions being carried out? A figure of 150 would be very modest. (There were more, of course. In Pskov alone, the NKVD set up torture and execution chambers in the basements of many churches, in former hermits’ cells. And even in 1953 tourists were still not allowed into these churches, on the grounds that “archives” were kept there. The cobwebs hadn’t been swept out for ten years at a stretch: those were the “archives” they kept there. And before beginning restoration work on these churches, they had to haul away the bones in them by the truckload.) On the basis of this calculation, an average of six people were shot in the course of one day at each execution site. What’s so fantastic about that? It is even an understatement! (According to other sources, 1,700,000 had been shot by January 1, 1939.)
During the years of World War II, the use of capital punishment was occasionally extended for various reasons (as, for example, by the militarization of the railroads), and, at times, was broadened as to method (from April, 1943, on, for example, with the decree on hanging).
All these events delayed to a certain extent the promised full, final, and perpetual repeal of the death penalty. However, the patience and loy
alty of our people finally earned them this reward. In May, 1947, Iosif Vissarionovich inspected his new starched dickey in his mirror, liked it, and dictated to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet the Decree on the Abolition of Capital Punishment in peacetime (replacing it with a new maximum term of twenty-five years—it was a good pretext for introducing the so-called quarter).
But our people are ungrateful, criminal, and incapable of appreciating generosity. Therefore, after the rulers had creaked along and eked out two and a half years without the death penalty, on January 12, 1950, a new decree was published that constituted an about-face: “In view of petitions pouring in from the national republics [the Ukraine?], from the trade unions [oh, those lovely trade unions; they always know what’s needed], from peasant organizations [this was dictated by a sleepwalker: the Gracious Sovereign had stomped to death all peasant organizations way back in the Year of the Great Turning Point], and also from cultural leaders [now, that is quite likely],” capital punishment was restored for a conglomeration of “traitors of the Motherland, spies, and subversives-diversionists.” (And, of course, they forgot to repeal the quarter, the twenty-five-year sentence, which remained in force.)
And once this return to our familiar friend, to our beheading blade, had begun, things went further with no effort at all: in 1954, for premeditated murder; in May, 1961, for theft of state property, and counterfeiting, and terrorism in places of imprisonment (this was directed especially at prisoners who killed informers and terrorized the camp administration); in July, 1961, for violating the rules governing foreign currency transactions; in February, 1962, for threatening the lives of (shaking a fist at) policemen or Communist vigilantes, the so-called “druzhinniki”; then for rape; and immediately thereafter for bribery.
But all of this is simply temporary—until complete abolition. And that’s how it’s described today too.7
And so it turns out that Russia managed longest of all without capital punishment in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.
* * *
In our happy, blind existence, we picture condemned men as a few ill-fated, solitary individuals. We instinctively believe that we could never end up on death row, that it would take an outstanding career if not heinous guilt for that to happen. A great deal has still to be shaken up inside our heads for us to get the real picture: a mass of the most ordinary, average, gray people have languished in death cells for the most ordinary, everyday misdemeanors, and, although some were lucky and had their death sentences commuted, which was purely a matter of chance, they very often got the super (which is what the prisoners called “the supreme measure,” since they hate lofty words and manage somehow to give everything a nickname that is both crude and short).
The agronomist of a District Agricultural Department got a death sentence for his mistaken analysis of collective farm grain! (Maybe it was because his analysis wasn’t what his chiefs wanted from him?) That was in 1937.
Melnikov, the chairman of a handicraft artel that made spools for thread, was sentenced to death because a spark from a steam engine in his artel had caused a fire! That was in 1937. (True, his death sentence was commuted to a “tenner.”)
In that same Kresty Prison in Leningrad, in 1932, two of the men in death cells were Feldman, convicted of possessing foreign currency, and Faitelevich, a student at the conservatory, for having sold steel ribbon for pen points. Primordial commerce, the bread and butter and pastime of the Jew, had also become worthy of the death penalty.
Ought we to be surprised then that the Ivanovo Province village lad Geraska got the death penalty? In honor of the spring St. Nicholas holiday, he went off to the next village to celebrate; he drank heavily and, with a stick, he hit the rear end—no, not of the policeman himself, but of the policeman’s horse. (True, in a rage at the police he ripped a piece of board off the village soviet building and then yanked out the village soviet telephone by the cord, shouting: “Smash the devils!”)
Whether our destiny holds a death cell in store for us is not determined by what we have done or not done. It is determined by the turn of a great wheel and the thrust of powerful external circumstances. For example, Leningrad was under siege and blockade. And what would its highest-ranking leader, Comrade Zhdanov, think if there were no executions among the cases in Leningrad State Security during such difficult times? He would think the Organs were lying down on the job, would he not? Were there not big underground plots, directed from outside by the Germans, to be discovered? Why were such plots discovered under Stalin in 1919 and not under Zhdanov in 1942? No sooner ordered than done. Several ramified plots were discovered. You were asleep in your unheated Leningrad room, and the sharp claws of the black hand were already hovering over you. And yet none of this depended on you. Notice was taken of a Lieutenant General Ignatovsky, whose windows looked out on the Neva; he had pulled out a white handkerchief to blow his nose. Aha, a signal! Furthermore, because Ignatovsky was an engineer, he liked to talk about machinery with the sailors. And that clinched it! Ignatovsky was arrested. The time for reckoning came. Come on now, name forty members of your organization. He named them. And so, if you happened to be an usher at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, your chances of being named as one of his particular forty were minimal. But if you were a professor at the Technological Institute, there you were on that list (once more, that accursed intelligentsia). So how could it depend on you? To be on such a list amounted to execution for each one.
And so they shot all of them. But here is how Konstantin Ivanovich Strakhovich, a very important Russian scientist in hydrodynamics, remained alive: Some even higher bigwigs in State Security were dissatisfied because the list was too small and not enough people were being shot. Therefore Strakhovich was selected as a suitable center for uncovering a new organization. He was summoned by Captain Altshuller: “What’s this all about? Did you rush to confess everything so that you’d get shot and thereby conceal the underground government? What was your role in it?” Thus Strakhovich found himself in a new round of interrogations while he remained on death row. He proposed that they consider him the underground Minister of Education. (He wanted to get it over with as soon as possible!) But that wasn’t good enough for Altshuller. The interrogation continued, and by this time Ignatovsky’s group was being executed. During one of the interrogation sessions Strakhovich got angry. It wasn’t that he wanted to live but that he was tired of dying, and, more than anything else, the lies made him sick. And so while he was being cross-questioned in the presence of some Security police bigwig, he pounded on the table: “You are the ones who ought to be shot. I am not going to lie any longer. I take back all my testimony.” And his outburst helped! Not only did they stop interrogating him, but they forgot about him in his death cell for a long time.
In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.
Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such reading, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.
In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to collect—several dozen of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment—somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then
they leave without saying good-bye.
And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.
So that they should not have died in vain!
And I, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at these at least:
Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky—shot in Moscow in 1918.
Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student—shot in Petrograd in 1918.
Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov—shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.
Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General Staff—shot in 1935.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist—shot in Orel in 1938.
Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova—shot in a camp on the Yenisei in 1942.
How does all that happen? What is it like for people to wait there? What do they feel? What do they think about? And what decisions do they come to? And what is it like when they are taken away? And what do they feel in their last moments? And how, actually, do they . . . well . . . do they . . .?
The morbid desire to pierce that curtain is natural. (Even though it is, of course, never going to happen to any of us.) And it is natural that those who have survived cannot tell us about the very end—because, after all, they were pardoned.
What happens next is something the executioners know about. But the executioners are not about to talk. (Take, for instance, that famous Uncle Lyosha in the Kresty Prison in Leningrad, who twisted the prisoner’s hands behind his back and put handcuffs on him, and then, if the prisoner shouted down the nighttime corridor, “Farewell, brothers!” crammed a rolled-up rag into his mouth—just why should he tell you about it? He is probably still walking around Leningrad, well dressed. But if you happen to run into him in a beer parlor on the islands or at a soccer game, ask him!)
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 50