Whatever the source of the NKVD’s fixation on confessions, police interrogators usually pursued them without either the deadly singlemindedness shown in the case of the “Polish spies,” or the indifference applied to Thomas Sgovio. Instead, prisoners generally experienced a mixture of the two. On the one hand, the NKVD demanded that they confess and incriminate themselves and others. On the other hand, the NKVD seemed to feel a slovenly lack of interest in the outcome altogether.
This somewhat surreal system was already in place by the 1920s, in the years before the Great Terror, and it remained in place long after the Great Terror had subsided. As early as 1931, the officer investigating Vladimir Tchernavin, a scientist accused of “wrecking” and sabotage, threatened him with death if he refused to confess. At another point, he told him he would get a more “lenient” camp sentence if he confessed. Eventually, he actually begged Tchernavin to give a false confession. “We, the examining officers, are also often forced to lie, we also say things which cannot be entered into the record and to which we would never sign our names,” his interrogator told him, pleadingly.63
When the outcome mattered more to them, torture was deployed. Actual physical beatings seem to have been forbidden in the period before 1937. One former Gulag employee confirms that they were certainly illegal in the first half of the 1930s.64 But as the pressure to get leading Party members to confess increased, physical torture came into use, probably in 1937, although it ended again in 1939. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly admitted this in 1956: “How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—because of applications of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, depriving him of his judgment, taking away his human dignity. In this manner were ‘confessions’ acquired.”65
So widespread did the use of torture become during this period—and so frequently was it questioned—that in early 1939, Stalin himself sent out a memo to regional NKVD chiefs, confirming that “from 1937 on in NKVD practice the use of physical pressure [on prisoners] was permitted by the Central Committee.” He explained that it was permitted only with respect to such overt enemies of the people who take advantage of humane interrogation methods in order to shamelessly refuse to give away conspirators, who for months don’t testify and try to impede the unmasking of those conspirators who are still free.
He did, he continued, consider this to be a “totally correct and humane method,” although he conceded that it might have occasionally been applied to “accidentally arrested honest people.” What this notorious memo makes clear, of course, is that Stalin himself knew what sorts of methods had been used during interrogation, and had personally approved of them.66
Certainly it is true that during this period many, many prisoners record being beaten and kicked, their faces smashed in and their organs ruptured. Evgeny Gnedin describes being hit on the head simultaneously by two men, one on the left, one on the right, and then being beaten with a rubber club. This took place in Beria’s private office, in Beria’s presence, in the Sukhanovka prison.67 The NKVD also practiced methods of torture known to other secret police forces in other eras, such as hitting their victims in the stomach with sandbags, breaking their hands or feet, or tying their arms and legs behind their backs and hoisting them in the air.68 One of the most sickening accounts of physical torture was penned by the theater director Vsevelod Meyerhold, whose formal letter of complaint has been preserved in his file:
The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force . . . For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height . . .
One time my body was shaking so uncontrollably that the guard escorting me back from such an interrogation asked: “Have you got malaria?” When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after eighteen hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.69
Although this sort of beating was technically forbidden after 1939, the change of policy did not necessarily make the investigation process more humane. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, many hundreds of thousands of prisoners were tormented not with actual beatings or physical attacks, but with psychological torture of the sort Abakumov alludes to in his letter to Stalin. Those who remained stubborn and refused to confess could, for example, be slowly deprived of creature comforts, first walks, then packages or books, then food. They could be placed in a specially harsh punishment cell, very hot or very cold, as was the memoirist Hava Volovich, who was also being deprived of sleep by her interrogator at the time: “I will never forget that first experience of prison cold. I can’t describe it; I’m not capable of it. I was pulled one way by sleep, the other by cold. I would jump up and run around the cell, falling asleep on my feet, then collapse on the bed again, where the cold would soon force me up.”70
Others were confronted with “witnesses,” as was Evgeniya Ginzburg, who watched as her childhood friend Nalya “recited like a parrot,” accusing her of membership in the Trotskyite underground. 71 Still others were threatened with harm to family members, or were placed, after long periods of isolation, in cells with informers, to whom they were only too glad to open their hearts. Women were raped, or threatened with rape. One Polish memoirist told the following story:
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, my cross-examiner became extremely flirtatious. He got up from behind his desk, and came and sat beside me on the sofa. I stood up and went to drink some water. He followed me and stood behind me. I neatly evaded him and returned to the sofa. Down he sat himself again beside me. And once again I got up and went to drink water. Maneuvers like these lasted for a couple of hours. I felt humiliated and helpless . . .72
There were also forms of physical torture less crude than beatings, and these were used regularly from the 1920s on. Tchernavin was early on given “the standing test”—prisoners were told to stand, facing the wall, without moving—albeit briefly. Some of his other cell mates suffered worse:
One, Engraver P., over fifty years of age and heavily built, had stood for six and a half days. He was not given food or drink and was not allowed to sleep; he was taken to the toilet only once a day. But he did not “confess.” After this ordeal he could not walk back to the cell and the guard had to drag him up the stairs . . . Another, Artisan B., about thirty-five years old, who had one leg amputated above the knee and replaced by an artificial one, had stood for four days and had not “confessed.” 73
Most commonly, however, prisoners were simply deprived of sleep: this deceptively simple form of torture—which seemed to require no special advance approval—was known to prisoners as being put “on the conveyor,” and it could last for many days, or even weeks. The method was simple: prisoners were interrogated all night, and afterward forbidden to sleep during the day. They were constantly awoken by guards, and threatened with punishment cells or worse if they failed to stay awake. One of the best accounts of the conveyor, and of its physical effects, is that given by the American Gulag inmate Alexander Dolgun. During his first month in Lefortovo, he was virtually deprived of any sleep at all, allowed an hour a day or less: “Looking back it seems that an hour is too much, it may have been no more than a few minutes some nights.” As a result, his brain began to play tricks on him:
There would be periods when I suddenly knew that I had no recollection of what had happened in the last few minutes. Drop-outs in my mind. To
tal erasures . . .
Then, of course, later on, I began to experiment with sleeping upright, to see if my body could learn to hold itself erect. I thought if that would work I might escape detection in the cells for a few minutes at a time, because the guard at the peep-hole would not think I was asleep if I was sitting upright.
And so it would go, snatching ten minutes here, half an hour there, occasionally a little longer if Sidorov called it quits before six in the morning and the guards left me alone till the wake-up call. But it was too little. Too late. I could feel myself slipping, getting looser and less disciplined every day. I dreaded going crazy almost worse—no, really worse—than dying . . .
Dolgun did not confess for many months, a fact that provided him with something to be proud of throughout the rest of his imprisonment. Yet when, many months later, he was called back to Moscow from his camp in Dzhezkazgan and beaten up again, he did sign a confession, thinking “What the hell. They’ve got me anyway. Why didn’t I do it a long time ago, and avoid all that pain?”74
Why not indeed? It was a question many others asked themselves, with varying answers. Some—a particularly high percentage of memoir writers, it would seem—held out either on principle, or in the mistaken belief that they would thereby avoid being sentenced. “I’d rather die than defame myself,” General Gorbatov told his interrogator, even as he was being tortured (he does not specify how). Many also believed—as Solzhenitsyn, Gorbatov, and others point out—that a ridiculously lengthy confession would create an atmosphere of absurdity which even the NKVD could not fail to notice. Gorbatov wrote with horror of his prison comrades:
They impressed me as being cultured and serious-minded people. I was all the more horrified to hear that during their interrogations every single one of them had written the most unmitigated rubbish, confessing to imaginary crimes and incriminating other people . . . Some even held the strange theory that the more people were jailed the sooner it would be realized that all this was nonsense and harmful to the Party.75
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.76
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. 77
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.1
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.2
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 Lu
byanka, 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.4
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.” 6 Beria himself maintained an office there, and personally supervised torture sessions of the Sukhanovka prisoners.7
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.9
Gulag Page 21