46. In the actual documents of the “spool of thread” case, they wrote down “200 meters of sewing material.” The fact remains that they were ashamed to write “a spool of thread.”
47. And the death penalty itself was kept veiled for a brief period only; the veil was removed, amid a show of bared fangs, two and a half years later—in January, 1950.
48. It has always been impossible to learn the truth about anything in our country—now, and always, and from the beginning. But, according to Moscow rumors, Stalin’s plan was this: At the beginning of March the “doctor-murderers” were to be hanged on Red Square. The aroused patriots, spurred on, naturally, by instructors, were to rush into an anti-Jewish pogrom. At this point the government—and here Stalin’s character can be divined, can it not?—would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people, and that same night would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia—where barracks had already been prepared for them.
1. Dr. S., according to the testimony of A.P.K—va.
2. K. S. T—e.
3. Cf. Part I, Chapter 8, below.
4. A. A. Akhmatova told me she was convinced that this was so. She even gave me the name of the Chekist who cooked up the case—Y. Agranov, it seems.
5. Article 93 of the Code of Criminal Procedure has this to say: “An anonymous declaration can serve as reason for beginning a criminal case”! (And there is no need to be surprised at the word “criminal” here, since all “politicals” were considered criminals, too, under the Code.)
6. N. V. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918–1922) (The Last Five Years [1918–1922]), Moscow-Petrograd, GIZ, 1923, p. 401.
7. Y. Ginzburg writes that permission for “physical measures of persuasion” was given in April, 1938. V. Shalamov believes that tortures were permitted from the middle of 1938 on. The old prisoner Mch is convinced that there was an “order to simplify the questioning and to change from psychological methods to physical methods.” Ivanov-Razumnik singles out the middle of 1938 as the “period of the most cruel interrogations.”
8. Perhaps Vyshinsky, no less than his listeners, needed this ideological comfort at this time. When he cried out from the prosecutor’s platform: “Shoot them all like mad dogs!” he, at least, who was both evil and quick of mind, understood that the accused were innocent. And in all probability he and that whale of Marxist dialectics, the defendant Bukharin, devoted themselves with all the greater passion to the dialectical elaboration of the judicial lie: for Bukharin it was too stupid and futile to die if he was altogether innocent (thus he needed to find his own guilt!); and for Vyshinsky it was more agreeable to see himself as a logician than as a plain downright scoundrel.
9. Compare the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Not be compelled! (The same thing appears in the seventeenth-century Bill of Rights.)
10. It is common talk that Rostov-on-the-Don and Krasnodar were particularly distinguished for the cruelty of their tortures, but this has not been proved.
11. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And, curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself considered evidence.
12. Today she says: “After eleven years, during rehabilitation proceedings they let me reread those ‘depositions,’ and I was gripped by a feeling of spiritual nausea. What was there to be proud of?” I myself, during the rehabilitation period, felt the very same way on hearing excerpts from my earlier depositions. As the saying goes: They bent me into a bow, and I became someone else. I did not recognize myself—how could I have signed them and still think I had not gotten off too badly?
13. This, evidently, is a Mongolian theme. In the magazine Niva (March 15, 1914, p. 218) there is a drawing of a Mongolian prison: each prisoner is shut in a separate trunk with a small opening for his head or for food. A jailer patrols between the trunks.
14. That, after all, is how somebody’s career was launched—standing guard over a prisoner on his knees. And now, in all probability, that somebody has attained high rank and his children are already grown up.
15. Just picture a foreigner, who knows no Russian, in this muddled state, being given something to sign. Under these conditions the Bavarian Jupp Aschenbrenner signed a document admitting that he had worked on wartime gas vans. It was not until 1954, in camp, that he was finally able to prove that at the time he had been in Munich, studying to become an electric welder.
16. G. M—ch.
17. Inspection, by the way, was so totally impossible and had so emphatically never taken place that in 1953, when real inspectors entered the cell of former Minister of State Security Abakumov, himself a prisoner by that time, he roared with laughter, thinking their appearance was a trick intended to confuse him.
18. In the case of the Secretary of the Karelian Provincial Party Committee, G. Kupriyanov, arrested in 1949, some of the teeth they knocked out were just ordinary ones, of no particular account, but others were gold. At first they gave him a receipt that said his gold teeth were being kept for him. And then they caught themselves just in time and took away his receipt.
19. In 1918 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal convicted the former Tsarist jailer Bondar. The most extreme measure of his cruelty that was cited was the accusation that “in one case he had struck a political prisoner with such force that his eardrum had burst.” (Krylenko, op. cit., p. 16.)
20. N.K.G.
21. Those familiar with our atmosphere of suspicion will understand why it was impossible to ask for the Code in a people’s court or in the District Executive Committee. Your interest in the Code would be an extraordinary phenomenon: you must either be preparing to commit a crime or be trying to cover your tracks.
22. And the interrogation there lasted eight to ten months at a time. “Maybe Klim [Voroshilov] had one of these to himself,” said the fellows there. (Was he, in fact, ever imprisoned?)
23. That same year in the Butyrki, those newly arrested, who had already been processed through the bath and the boxes, sat on the stairs for several days at a stretch, waiting for departing prisoner transports to leave and release space in the cells. T—v had been imprisoned in the Butyrki seven years earlier, in 1931, and says that it was overcrowded under the bunks and that prisoners lay on the asphalt floor. I myself was imprisoned seven years later, in 1945, and it was just the same. But recently I received from M. K. B—ch valuable personal testimony about overcrowding in the Butyrki in 1918. In October of that year—during the second month of the Red Terror—it was so full that they even set up a cell for seventy women in the laundry. When, then, was the Butyrki not crowded?
24. But this, too, is no miracle: in the Vladimir Internal Prison in 1948, thirty people had to stand in a cell ten feet by ten feet in size! (S. Potapov.)
25. By and large there is a good deal in Ivanov-Razumnik’s book that is superficial and personal, and there are many exhaustingly monotonous jokes. But the real life of the cells in the 1937–1938 period is very well described there.
26. In actual fact, he did lead his brigade at the parade, but for some reason he did not turn it against the government. But this was not taken into account. However, after these most varied tortures, he was sentenced to ten years by the OSO. To that degree, the gendarmes themselves had no faith in their achievements.
27. In part, the reason for this was the same as in the case of Bukharin many years later. They were, after all, being interrogated by their social equals, their class brothers, and so their desire to explain everything was only natural.
28. R. Peresvetov, Novy Mir, No. 4, 1962.
29. S. P. Melgunov, Vospominaniya i Dnevniki, (Memoirs and Dianes), Vol. 1, Paris, 1964, p. 139.
30. A member of the group, Andreyushkin sent a f
rank letter to his friend in Kharkov: “I am firmly convinced that we are going to have the most merciless terror—and in the fairly near future too. . . . Red Terror is my hobby. . . . I am worried about my addressee. . . . If he gets it, then I may get it too, and that will be unfortunate because I will drag in a lot of very effective people.” It was not the first such letter he had written! And the unhurried search this letter initiated continued for five weeks, via Kharkov, in order to discover who in St. Petersburg had written it. Andreyushkin’s identity was not established until February 28. On March 1, the bomb throwers, bombs in hand, were arrested on Nevsky Prospekt just before the attempted assassination.
31. One of our school friends was nearly arrested because of me at this time. It was an enormous relief to me to learn later that he was still free! But then, twenty-two years later, he wrote to me: “On the basis of your published works I conclude that you take a one-sided view of life. . . . Objectively speaking, you have become the standard-bearer of Fascist reactionaries in the West, in West Germany and the United States, for example. . . . Lenin, whom, I’m convinced, you love and honor just as much as you used to, yes, and old Marx and Engels, too, would have condemned you in the severest fashion. Think about that!” Indeed, I do think about that: How sorry I am that you didn’t get arrested then! How much you lost!
32. KRD = Counter-Revolutionary Activity.
1. There is no way of sidestepping this comparison: both the years and the methods coincide too closely. And the comparison occurred even more naturally to those who had passed through the hands of both the Gestapo and the MGB. One of these was Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich, an émigré and preacher of Orthodox Christianity. The Gestapo accused him of Communist activities among Russian workers in Germany, and the MGB charged him with having ties to the international bourgeoisie. Divnich’s verdict was unfavorable to the MGB. He was tortured by both, but the Gestapo was nonetheless trying to get at the truth, and when the accusation did not hold up, Divnich was released. The MGB wasn’t interested in the truth and had no intention of letting anyone out of its grip once he was arrested.
2. An affectionate term for torture.
3. This evidently refers to their own people.
4. Ilin in 1931.
5. The violent Yaroslavl interrogator Volkopyalov, appointed Plenipotentiary in Charge of Church Affairs in Moldavia.
6. Another Ilin—this one Viktor Nikolayevich, a former lieutenant general of State Security.
7. “Who are you?” asked General Serov in Berlin of the world-renowned biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, offensively using the familiar form of address. And the scientist, who was undismayed and who possessed a Cossack’s hereditary daring, replied, using the same familiar form: “And who are you?” Serov corrected himself and, this time using the formal and correct form, asked: “Are you a scientist?”
8. As happened with Vasilyev, according to Ivanov-Razumnik.
9. Esfir R., 1947.
10. Interrogator Pokhilko, Kemerovo State Security Administration.
11. The schoolboy Misha B.
12. For a long time I’ve been hanging on to a theme for a story to be called “The Spoiled Wife.” But it looks as though I will never get the chance to write it, so here it is. In a certain Far Eastern aviation unit before the Korean War, a certain lieutenant colonel returned from an assignment to find his wife in a hospital. The doctors did not hide the truth from him: her sexual organs had been injured by perverted sexual practices. The lieutenant colonel got in to see his wife and wrung from her the admission that the man responsible was the osobist in their unit, a senior lieutenant. (It would seem, by the way, that this incident had not occurred without some cooperation on her part.) In a rage the lieutenant colonel ran to the osobist’s office, took out his pistol, and threatened to kill him. But the senior lieutenant very quickly forced him to back down and leave the office defeated and pitiful. He threatened to send the lieutenant colonel to rot in the most horrible of camps, where he’d pray to be released from life without further torment, and he ordered him to take his wife back just as he found her—with an injury that was to some extent incurable—and to live with her, not to dare get a divorce, and not to dare complain. And all this was the price for not being arrested! The lieutenant colonel did just as he was ordered. (I was told the story by the osobist’s chauffeur.)
There must have been many such cases, because the abuse of power was particularly attractive in this area. In 1944, another gaybist—State Security officer—forced the daughter of an army general to marry him by threatening to arrest her father. The girl had a fiance, but to save her father she married the gaybist. She kept a diary during her brief marriage, gave it to her true love, and then committed suicide.
13. In 1954, although her husband, who had forgiven them everything, including a death sentence that had been commuted, kept trying to persuade her not to pursue the matter, this energetic and implacable woman testified against Kruzhkov at a trial. Because this was not Kruzhkov’s first offense, and because the interests of the Organs had been violated, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. Has he really been in the jug that long?
14. Roman Gul, Dzerzhinsky. Menzhinsky—Peters—Latsis—Yagoda, Paris, 1936.
15. This, too, is a theme for a story—and how many more there are in this field! Maybe someone will make use of them someday.
16. VOKhR: Militarized Guard Service, formerly the Internal Guard Service of the Republic.
17. This is true. On the whole, D. Terekhov is a man of uncommon strength of will and courage (which were what was required in bringing the big Stalinists to justice in an uneasy situation). And he evidently has a lively mind as well. If Khrushchev’s reforms had been more thoroughgoing and consistent, Terekhov might have excelled in carrying them out. That is how historic leaders fail to materialize in our country.
18. Here is one more of his eccentricities as a VIP: he used to change into civilian clothes and walk around Moscow with Kuznetsov, the head of his bodyguard, and whenever he felt like it, he would hand out money from the Cheka operations funds. Does not this smell of Old Russia—charity for the sake of one’s soul?
19. During the war, a certain Leningrad aviator, after being discharged from the hospital in Ryazan, went to a TB clinic and begged: “Please find something wrong with me! I’m under orders to go into the Organs!” The radiologists dreamed up a touch of TB for him—and the Organs dropped him posthaste.
20. An episode with Terekhov: Attempting to prove to me the fairness of the judicial system under Khrushchev, he energetically struck the plate-glass desk top with his hand and cut his wrist on the edge. He rang for help. His subordinates were at the ready. The senior officer on duty brought him iodine and hydrogen peroxide. Continuing the conversation, he helplessly held dampened cotton to the wound: it appears that his blood coagulates poorly. And thus God showed him clearly the limitations of the human being! And he had delivered verdicts, imposed death sentences on others.
21. Even in connection with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the retired bluecaps living on pensions objected because the book might reopen the wounds of those who had been imprisoned in camp. Allegedly, they were the ones to be protected.
22. Meanwhile, in East Germany, nothing of the sort is to be heard. Which means that there they have been shod with new shoes; they are valued in the service of the state.
1. KPZ = Cell for Preliminary Detention. DPZ = House of Preliminary Detention. In other words, where interrogations are conducted, not where sentences are served.
2. Alexander D.
3. To be absolutely precise, they were 156 centimeters by 209 centimeters. How do we know? Through a triumph of engineering calculation and a strong heart that even Sukhanovka could not break. The measurements were the work of Alexander D., who would not allow them to drive him to madness or despair. He resisted by striving to use his mind to calculate distances. In Lefortovo he counted steps, converted them into kilometers, remembered from a map how many ki
lometers it was from Moscow to the border, and then how many across all Europe, and how many across the Atlantic Ocean. He was sustained in this by the hope of returning to America. And in one year in Lefortovo solitary he got, so to speak, halfway across the Atlantic. Thereupon they took him to Sukhanovka. Here, realizing how few would survive to tell of it—and all our information about it comes from him—he invented a method of measuring the cell. The numbers 10/22 were stamped on the bottom of his prison bowl, and he guessed that “10” was the diameter of the bottom and “22” the diameter of the outside edge. Then he pulled a thread from a towel, made himself a tape measure, and measured everything with it. Then he began to invent a way of sleeping standing up, propping his knees against the small chair, and of deceiving the guard into thinking his eyes were open. He succeeded in this deception, and that was how he managed not to go insane when Ryumin kept him sleepless for a month.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 81