But it was not even necessary to speak a foreign language in order to come under suspicion. Anyone with a foreign connection was suspected of spying: stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone with a pen pal or with relatives abroad. The NKVD also arrested all Soviet citizens who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway, a railway line across Manchuria whose origins dated from the Czarist era, and accused them of having spied for Japan. In the camps, they were known as the “Kharbintsy,” after the city of Harbin, where many had lived.6 Robert Conquest describes the arrests of an opera singer who had danced with the Japanese ambassador at an official ball, and of a veterinarian who attended to dogs belonging to foreigners.7
By the late 1930s, most ordinary Soviet citizens had worked out the pattern, and wanted no foreign contacts at all. Karlo Stajner, a Croatian communist with a Russian wife, remembered that “Russians only rarely dared to have private dealings with foreigners . . . My wife’s relatives remained virtual strangers to me. None of them dared visit us. When her relatives learned of our plan to marry, Sonya was warned by all of them ...” 8 Even as late as the mid-1980s—when I first visited the Soviet Union—many Russians remained wary of foreigners, ignoring them or refusing to make eye contact with them on the street.
And yet—not every foreigner was picked up by the police, and not everyone accused of having foreign connections actually did have foreign connections. It also happened that people were picked up for far more idiosyncratic reasons.9 As a result, asking the question “What for?”—the question Anna Akhmatova so disliked—produces a truly astonishing range of ostensible explanations.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s husband, Osip Mandelstam, for example, was arrested for his poetic attack on Stalin:
We live, not feeling the land beneath us
We speak, and ten steps away no one hears us
But where there’s even a whispered conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer will be mentioned.
His fat fingers, like grubs, are greasy
His words, like lead weights, are final
His cockroach moustache sneers
His boot rims shine
And all around him, a gaggle of spineless leaders,
Half-humans, serve as his toys
One whinnies, one purrs, one whines
Only he shouts and points
Throwing decrees like horseshoes
Hitting a groin, a head, an eye—
Every death sentence tastes sweet
For the broad-chested Ossete10
Although different reasons were officially stated, Tatyana Okunevsksaya, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved film actresses, was arrested, she believed, for refusing to sleep with Viktor Abakumov, the wartime head of Soviet counter-intelligence. To make sure she understood that this was the true reason, she was (she claims) shown an arrest warrant with his signature on it.11 The four Starostin brothers, all of them outstanding soccer players, were arrested in 1942. They always believed it was because their team, Spartak, had the misfortune to defeat Lavrenty Beria’s favorite team, Dynamo, a touch too decisively. 12
But it was not even necessary to be extraordinary. Lyudmila Khachatryan was arrested for marrying a foreigner, a Yugoslav soldier. Lev Razgon recounted the story of a peasant, Seryogin, who, on being told that someone had killed Kirov, replied, “Damned if I care.” Seryogin had never heard of Kirov, and assumed he was someone who had died in a fight in the neighboring village. For that mistake, he received a ten-year sentence.13 By 1939, telling a joke, or hearing one, about Stalin; being late for work; having the misfortune to be named by a terrified friend or a jealous neighbor as a “co-conspirator” in a nonexistent plot; owning four cows in a village where most people owned one; stealing a pair of shoes; being a cousin of Stalin’s wife; stealing a pen and some paper from one’s office in order to give them to a schoolchild who had none; all of these could, under the right circumstances, lead to a sentence in a Soviet concentration camp. Relatives of a person who had illegally tried to cross the Soviet border were liable to arrest, according to a 1940 law, whether or not they had known about the attempted escape.14 Wartime laws—on being late to work and forbidding job changes—would add more “criminals” to the camps as well, as we shall see.
If the reasons for arrest were many and varied, so too were the methods. Some prisoners had ample warning. For several weeks prior to his arrest in the mid-1930s, an OGPU agent repeatedly called Alexander Weissberg in for questioning, asking him over and over again how he had come to be a “spy”: Who recruited you? Whom did you recruit? What foreign organization are you working for? “He put exactly the same questions over and over again, and I always gave him the same answers.” 15
At about the same time, Galina Serebryakova, the author of The Young Marx and the wife of a high functionary, was also “invited” every evening to Lubyanka, kept waiting until two or three o’clock in the morning, interrogated, released at five in the morning, and returned to her apartment. Agents surrounded her building and a black car followed her when she went outside. So convinced was she of her coming arrest that she tried to kill herself. Nevertheless, she endured several months of this sort of harassment before actually being arrested.16
During heavy waves of mass arrest—of kulaks in 1929 and 1930, of Party activists in 1937 and 1938, of former prisoners in 1948—many knew their turn was coming simply because all those around them were being arrested. Elinor Lipper, a Dutch communist who had come to Moscow in the 1930s, was living in 1937 in the Hotel Lux, a special hotel for foreign revolutionaries: “every night a few more persons vanished from the hotel . . . in the morning, there would be large red seals pasted on the doors of a few more rooms.” 17
In times of real terror, some even experienced the arrest itself as a sort of relief. Nikolai Starostin, one of the unlucky soccer stars, was trailed by agents for several weeks, and became so annoyed that he finally went up to one of them and demanded an explanation: “If you want something from me, call me into your office.” As a result, at the moment of arrest he felt not “shock and fear” but “curiosity.” 18
Still others were taken completely by surprise. The Polish writer Alexander Wat, then living in occupied Lvov, was asked to a party at a restaurant with a group of other writers. He asked the host what the occasion was. “You’ll see,” he was told. A brawl was staged, and he was arrested there and then.19 Alexander Dolgun, the American Embassy clerk, was hailed on the street by a man who turned out to be a secret policeman. When the man called out his name, Dolgun recalled, “I was completely mystified. I wondered if it was some nut . . .”20 Okunevskaya, the actress, was in bed with a bad case of flu at the time of her arrest, and demanded that the police return another day. They showed her the arrest warrant (the one with Abakumov’s signature on it) and dragged her down the stairs. 21 Solzhenitsyn repeats the possibly apocryphal tale of a woman taken out to the Bolshoi Theater by her boyfriend, a professional interrogator, who took her straight from the theater to Lubyanka.22 The survivor and memoirist Nina Gagen-Torn recounts the tale of a woman who had been arrested while taking linen down from a clothesline in a Leningrad courtyard; she was dressed in a bathrobe, and had left her baby alone in her apartment, assuming she would be back in a few minutes. She pleaded to be allowed to get him, to no avail.23
In fact, it seems as if the authorities deliberately varied their tactics, picking up some people at home and some at work, some on the street and some on trains. One memo to Stalin from Viktor Abakumov, dated July 17, 1947, confirms this suspicion, noting that prisoners were routinely “surprised” by police in order to prevent escape, to prevent resistance, to prevent the suspect from warning others in his counter-revolutionary “conspiracy.” In certain cases, the document continued, “a secret arrest in the street is carried out.”24
The most common arrest, however, was one that took place at a person’s home, in the middle of the night. In times of mass arrest, fear of the midnight “
knock on the door” became widespread. There is a very old Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came—and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire. A Soviet proverb also has it that “Thieves, prostitutes and the NKVD work mostly at night.” 25 Usually, these nighttime arrests were accompanied by a search, although search tactics varied over time too. Osip Mandelstam was arrested twice, once in 1934 and then again in 1938, and his wife has described the differences between the two procedures:
In 1938 they wasted no time looking for papers and examining them—indeed, the police agents didn’t even seem to know the occupation of the man they had come to arrest . . . they simply turned over all the mattresses, swept his papers into a sack, poked around for a while and then disappeared, taking M. [Mandelstam] with them. The whole operation lasted no more than twenty minutes. But in 1934 they stayed all night until the early hours.
During the earlier raid, secret police, who clearly knew what they were looking for, had carefully gone through all of Mandelstam’s papers, discarding old manuscripts, looking for new poetry. The first time around they also ensured that civilian “witnesses” were present, as well as—in their case—a “friend” in police pay, a literary critic known to the Mandelstams, presumably told to be there in order to ensure that the Mandelstams did not secretly start burning papers once they heard the knock at the door.26 Later, they did not bother with such details.
Mass arrests of particular nationalities, such as those that took place in what had been eastern Poland and the Baltic States, the territories occupied by the Red Army from 1939 to 1941, usually had an even more haphazard character. Janusz Bardach, a Jewish teenager in the Polish town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski, was forced to act as a civilian “witness” during one such mass arrest. He accompanied a group of drunken NKVD thugs who went from house to house on the night of December 5, 1939, rounding up people who were to be either arrested or deported. Sometimes they attacked the wealthier and better-connected citizens, whose names were marked on a list; sometimes they simply hauled in “refugees”—usually Jews who had escaped to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland from Nazi-occupied western Poland—without bothering to write down their names at all. In one house, a group of refugees tried to defend themselves by pointing out that they had been members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement. Nevertheless, upon hearing that they came from Lublin, at that time on the other side of the border, Gennady, the leader of the NKVD patrol, began to shout:
“You filthy refugees! Nazi spies!” The children began to cry, which further irritated Gennady. “Make them shut up! Or do you want me to take care of them?”
The mother pulled them close to her, but they couldn’t stop crying. Gennady grabbed the little boy’s hands, jerked him loose from his mother’s arms, and threw him against the floor. “Shut up, I said!” The mother screamed. The father tried to say something but could only gasp for air. Gennady picked up the boy and held him for a second, looking closely at his face, then threw him forcefully against the wall . . .
Later, the men destroyed the home of Bardach’s childhood friends:
Off to the side was Dr. Schechter’s office. His dark mahogany desk stood in the middle, and Gennady walked straight to it. He ran his hand over the smooth wood and then, in a moment of unexpected rage, smashed it with a crowbar. “Capitalist swine! Motherfucking parasites! We need to find these bourgeois exploiters!” He smashed harder and harder without pause, making several holes in the wood . . .
Unable to find the Schechters, the men raped and murdered the gardener’s wife.
Those who conducted such operations, often members of the convoy guards—soldiers who manned the deportation trains—rather than the NKVD itself, had far less training than the secret police who conducted “normal” arrests of “normal” criminals. Violence was probably not officially mandated, but, since these were Soviet soldiers arresting “capitalists” in the wealthier “West,” drunkenness, disorderliness, and even rape seem to have been condoned, as they were later on, during the Red Army’s march through Poland and Germany. 27
Nevertheless, certain aspects of their behavior were stringently dictated from above. The Main Administration of the Convoy Guards in Moscow decided in November 1940, for example, that guards doing the arresting should tell their arrestees to bring enough warm clothes and personal goods to last three years, as the Soviet Union was currently experiencing a shortage of such supplies. They hoped the arrestees would sell their belongings. 28 Earlier, soldiers had usually been instructed not to tell prisoners anything about where they were going, or for how long. The accepted formula was, “Why worry? Why bring anything at all? We’re only bringing you in for a short chat.” Sometimes they told deportees that they were only being moved to another area, farther from the borders, “for your own protection.”29 The aim was to prevent arrestees from becoming frightened, from fighting back, or from running away. The result was to deprive people of the basic tools they would need to live in a harsh and unfamiliar climate.
Man Entering His First Prison Cell: a drawing by Thomas Sgovio, completed after his release
While Polish peasants encountering the Soviet regime for the first time might be excused their naïveté in believing such lies, the very same formulas worked equally well on Moscow and Leningrad intellectuals and Party apparatchiks, possessed, as they often were, by the certainty of their own innocence. Evgeniya Ginzburg, at the time a Party worker in Kazan, was told, when arrested, that she would be gone “forty minutes, perhaps an hour.” As a result, she did not take the opportunity to say goodbye to her children.30 Yelena Sidorkina, an arrested Party member, walked down the street to prison with her arresting officer “chatting peacefully,” certain that she would be home soon.31
Sofia Aleksandrova, the ex-wife of the Chekist Gleb Boky, was discouraged from taking a summer coat with her when the NKVD came to take her away (“it’s warm tonight and we’ll be back within an hour, at most”), prompting her son-in-law, the writer Lev Razgon, to ponder the strange cruelty of the system: “What was the point of sending a middle-aged woman in not very good health to prison, without even the tiny bag of underclothes and washing things that an arrested person has always been allowed to take with him since the time of the Pharaohs?”32
At least the wife of the actor Georgy Zhenov had the sense to begin packing his spare clothes. When told he would be returning home soon, she snapped: “Those who fall into your hands don’t return quickly.” 33 Her view was close to the truth. Most of the time, when an arrestee walked through the heavy iron doors of a Soviet prison, it would be many years before he or she saw home again.
If the Soviet method of arrest seems to have been almost whimsical at times, the rituals that followed arrest were, by the 1940s, virtually immutable. However a prisoner had come to enter the gates of his local prison, once he arrived events followed a distinctly predictable course. As a rule, prisoners were registered, photographed, and fingerprinted well before they were told why they had been arrested or what their fate would be. For the first few hours, and sometimes the first few days, they encountered no one more senior than ordinary prison wardens, who were completely indifferent to their fate, had no idea of the nature of their alleged crimes, and answered all questions with an indifferent shrug.
Many former prisoners believe that their first few hours in captivity were deliberately designed to shock them, to render them incapable of coherent thought. Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, arrested for being the daughter of an enemy of the people, felt this happening to her after only a few hours in Lubyanka, Moscow’s central prison:
Here in Lubyanka, you are already not a person. And around you there are no people. They lead you down the corridor, photograph you, undress you, search you mechanically. Everything is done completely impersonally. You look for a human glance—I don’t speak of a human voice, just a human glance—but you don’t find it. You stand dis
heveled in front of the photographer, try to somehow fix your clothes, and you are shown with a finger where to sit, an empty voice says “face front” and “profile.” They don’t see you as a human being! You have become an object ...34
If they were being taken into one of the main city prisons for interrogation (and not put, as exiles were, immediately onto trains), arrestees were thoroughly searched, in several stages. A 1937 document instructed prison wardens specifically not to forget that “the enemy doesn’t halt his struggle after his arrest,” and might commit suicide in order to hide his criminal activity. As a result prisoners were deprived of buttons, belts, braces, shoelaces, garters, underwear elastic, whatever they could conceivably use to kill themselves.35 Many felt humiliated by this edict. Nadezhda Joffe, daughter of a leading Bolshevik, was deprived of her belt, garters, shoelaces, and hairpins:
I remember how I was struck by the degradation and absurdity of all this. What could a person do with hairpins? Even if the absurd idea popped into someone’s head to hang himself by his shoelaces, then how could this actually be done? They simply had to place a person in a revolting and humiliating position, where one’s skirt would fall down, stockings would slip and shoes would shuffle.36
The body search that followed was worse. In his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the arrest of Innokenty, a Soviet diplomat. Within hours of arrival at Lubyanka, a warder was examining every orifice of Innokenty’s body:
Like a horse-dealer, his unwashed fingers prodding inside Innokenty’s mouth, stretching one cheek, then the other, pulling down the lower eyelids, the warder convinced himself that there was nothing hidden in the eyes or mouth and tipped back the head so that the nostrils were lit up; then he checked both ears, pulling them back, told Innokenty to spread out his hands to show there was nothing between the fingers, and to swing his arms to show there was nothing under his armpits. In the same flat, irrefutable tone, he ordered:
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