The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “What did he write?” I persisted.

  “He said his conscience wouldn’t let him go on any longer. He hadn’t fought for the revolution in order to see his good name and reputation used as a cloak for treachery and mass murder. He could see no other way out but to protest against it by his death.”

  He had said all this in a very low voice, almost a whisper, but just at that moment the warder lifted the spy-hole cover and looked through at us. It gave Bondarenko such a fright that it took him a long time to recover his composure.

  “Do you think he heard me, Alexander Semyonovitch?” he inquired anxiously.

  “Nonsense,” I assured him. “You were hardly speaking above a whisper. He couldn’t possibly have heard a thing.”

  The Maso affair had a particular interest for me. Leipunsky had intervened with Maso on my behalf and Maso had promised to let me leave the country. That was in February. On March 1st I had been arrested after all. Had Maso lied to Leipunsky to lull me into a sense of security? It was really hardly likely. Why should he have done so? A few months later I was in a cell with an arrested G.P.U. man and he told me that toward the end of February Maso had had to go to Kiev. During his absence my enemies had obviously persuaded his deputy to sign the warrant for my arrest. When Maso returned to Kharkov after two weeks’ absence I was already under arrest, and that was not so easy to undo. But, as I realized now, the interrogation methods of the first few months had been very considerate by comparison with what was to come. Polevedsky was a sucking dove compared with Shalit. Perhaps Maso had given special instructions in my case? It looked like it. It was only after Maso’s death that they used the “conveyer.” And Polevedsky had conducted the examination as though he intended to ask for my release, and perhaps my deportation.

  “General Dubovoy has also been arrested,” said Bondarenko. “It was just after the arrest of Tukhachevsky and Yakir. They say he’s already been shot.”

  I don’t know why I was so shocked by the news. After all, if Tukhachevsky could be arrested and shot, why not Dubovoy? Dubovoy was after all only the commandant of the Kharkov Military District, though a very high officer indeed. His name had never been mentioned in connection with any oppositionist trend. Like most high officers, he was really not a politician at all. Why had he been arrested—and perhaps already shot? And what did his men think of it? I asked Bondarenko how the people of Kharkov had taken it.

  “No one takes any notice of anything anymore,” he replied. “Hundreds of officers are being arrested all the time.”

  “But it’s simple lunacy to disorganize the Army like that!” I exclaimed. “Supposing the Germans attacked us.”

  “Tukhachevsky and Yakir were more than Dubovoy, and it didn’t save them. A week before my arrest they were already taking down the pictures of Budyenny, Blücher and Yegorov. Perhaps they’ve been arrested already. What to you think of the Tukhachevsky business, Alexander Semyonovitch?”

  “I don’t know what was behind it, but I’d stake my head the man was no traitor. A man doesn’t devote his whole life to the revolution, as Yakir and so many others did, for instance, and then suddenly hand over military plans to the deadliest enemy of the revolution. And Yakir was a Jew. He knew what to think of Hitler. If it had been just one man who was accused of treachery it might have been different. There have, of course, been traitors in all armies, though never in such high positions. The highest-ranking military traitor known to history was no more than a colonel. And now they want us to believe that practically the whole General Staff of the Red Army consisted of traitors. It’s just silly.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, but they must have done something or other. Would they have arrested the whole General Staff for nothing at all? Perhaps Tukhachevsky was preparing a coup against Stalin.”

  “That’s not impossible, of course. Kork was arrested with him, and he was commander of the Moscow garrison. It’s very difficult to make head or tail of the whole business.”

  My health had suffered from the “conveyer.” I was troubled with a form of colitis and it was getting worse instead of better. Unfortunately, at this period we were frequently given sour cabbage soup. I had constant diarrhea and needed to go to the lavatory a dozen times a day. The warders began to get irritable, so I reported sick. A doctor came and examined me and ordered me into the sick bay for a few days. Several days passed and nothing happened. I wanted to write to the commandant, but they wouldn’t give me writing materials. They were afraid that I would write to the Prosecutor.

  The Prosecutor in Soviet Russia was something more than a Public Prosecutor in other countries. It was also his task to see that the authorities respected the law. This meant that he was the official to whom all complaints had to be addressed. In each cell corridor there was a special box in which prisoners could drop letters intended for him. This box was emptied once a week by an official of the Prosecutor’s department. The examiners had no right to censor letters prisoners sent to the Prosecutor. That was the law. At one time I have no doubt it was respected, but during the Great’ Purge the G.P.U. gave its examiners quite arbitrary powers. The box was still there but the warders refused to let prisoners put anything into it, while the examiners refused writing materials so that prisoners were unable to write to the Prosecutor and withdraw extorted confessions.

  On one occasion I was called into the office to give some minor item of information and in an unguarded moment I took a sheet of notepaper. With a stump of pencil I had managed to conceal, I wrote a letter to the Prosecutor describing my ordeal and withdrawing the confession that had been extorted from me under it. Then I watched for a chance of slipping it into the box. The next time we were being taken out for exercise I darted out of the ranks toward the box. Unfortunately, the warder was quicker and he seized me and took the letter away.

  “You’ve no right to stop me from writing to the Prosecutor,” I declared indignantly.

  “I’m not,” he replied, “but you mustn’t break ranks without permission.”

  “What’s the box there for if I’m not allowed to use it?”

  “I didn’t say you mustn’t use it; I said you mustn’t break ranks.” “How can I get to the box to put my letter in if I’m not allowed to leave the ranks to do it?”

  “You can ask the nachalnik’s permission to be taken to the box.”

  But you could never see the nachalnik for such a purpose. Incidentally, in the Kholodnaya Gora prison the warders were not so taciturn as in the inner prison. In the center of the yard where we exercised there was a flower bed. There was nothing in it but dandelions, but at least they were flowers, and their bright yellow pleased us as we tramped around. One day the bed was dug over and the dandelions disappeared.

  “What was that for?” I asked. “Didn’t you like them?”

  “They’re not necessary here.”

  “Well, they weren’t doing anybody any harm.”

  “They weren’t any use.”

  I gave it up. The flowers had pleased us, and perhaps that was reason enough to destroy them. Hadn’t Stalin issued a new slogan: “Tiurma tiurmoy,” which may be translated: “Let the prisons be prisons.” It opened up a new era in Soviet prisons. In the years 1924, 1925 and 1926 they had been the most humane in the world. Later on, particularly during the Great Purge, things changed. There were months when prison life was almost intolerable, but at least even then Soviet prisons differed from fascist prisons in one very important respect: prisoners were not beaten, and when they did manage to see the governor they were at liberty to speak freely to him. The maltreatment of prisoners in the Soviet Union was confined to the G.P.U. Once in prison, a man was safe.

  My stomach trouble got worse, and there was still no sign that the authorities intended to take any notice of the doctor’s orders. I could now eat nothing at all. I gave my bread to the other two. The soup was sour and it made my trouble worse. In the end I managed to see the governor and I told him about my state. Like the block commandant, he ex
plained that he could do nothing without the examiner’s permission. When by six o’clock that evening I had heard nothing further, I formally went on hunger strike. At eleven o’clock I was transferred to the sick bay.

  I was astonished at how dirty it was. There were many prisoners there, mostly with diarrhea, and we were all treated with small doses of belladonna. At least the food was reasonably good. I began to get better almost at once, but it was three weeks before I was discharged. In the bed next to me was a disconsolate Soviet official who was not a member of the Party. One of his departmental colleagues had been arrested. This man had confessed to espionage in the usual way and had denounced all his colleagues, hence the presence of the other.

  “And what did you confess?” I asked him.

  “Everything they asked me to,” he replied, “but in particular espionage for Nazi Germany.”

  “Spies are usually after secret military or other important information; did you have access to anything of the kind?”

  “No. I was in the planning department of a building trust building chimney stacks for new factories.”

  “But once you confessed to espionage didn’t you have to say what you had spied out and to whom you had given the material?”

  “Oh, yes, I said I gave my material to Smirnov, who was our go-between with the German Consulate in Kharkov. The secret material was our production plan for the next six months.”

  “The Germans would have been thrilled to get that. It sounds very secret and confidential.”

  “Not in the least,” he answered seriously. “Everybody knew the plan. The secret correspondence was another matter, but I had no access to that.”

  There was another “spy” there too. He came from Taganrog, where he had worked in a co-operative fishery. He had informed the German secret service how many fish the co-operative caught monthly.

  In return for their confidences I told them about my case. My neighbor looked serious.

  “Did you know the Troika was at work again?” he asked. “I have heard something about it, but no details.”

  “Since August,” he said. “I don’t think I should like to be in your shoes. It sounds like a case for the Troika.”

  “You’re very encouraging,” I replied. “But what makes you think so?”

  “Well, what else can the G.P.U. do with you if you refuse to confess, or withdraw everything once you have confessed? Of course, the Troika might hand you over to ‘OSO’ and then you could get five years. The Troika can only pass death sentences.”

  “You don’t think they might let me go altogether, then?”

  “You’re mad, Alexander Semyonovitch. After all you’ve confessed to: an attempt on the lives of Stalin and Voroshilov! That’s a bit much.”

  “I withdrew my confession the very next day.”

  “They throw the recantation into the wastepaper basket; the signed confession remains.”

  “I’ll write to the Prosecutor.”

  “They won’t let you. But never mind about the confession; do you think they’d let a man who’s seen what you’ve seen go abroad to tell everyone all about it? Not likely, Alexander Semyonovitch!”

  I made no reply. His words depressed me. He saw the future in bleak colors.

  He annoyed me. I had always tried to encourage fellow prisoners who had lost heart. He did the opposite. My optimism made him indignant. His gloomy prophecies drove me into wild opposition.

  “I don’t quite know how,” I said to him, “but I feel sure that I shall leave not only this prison but also the Soviet Union. I’ll make a note of your name and in a couple of years’ time I’ll send you a packet of chocolate from Switzerland. When you receive such a packet in camp you’ll know that I’m at liberty.”

  I have forgotten the fellow’s name. In any case, no packet would ever have reached him.

  When I got better I was allowed up. There were a number of rooms in our department and walking patients were allowed to go from one to the other. That was an enormous concession for prison conditions. Two months later it was withdrawn. The patients in one of the rooms were all criminals and they talked a great deal about the prison camps in the Far North, where it appeared conditions were not too bad. Some of them had been there, served their terms and then been released, only to be picked up again for some new offense.

  Our department was on the ground floor. In the basement was the department for skin and venereal diseases. Most of the patients were women, prostitutes. At midday they used to exercise in the yard in front of our windows. Most of them were young and apparently unspoiled peasant girls who did not look at all like prostitutes. The male patients used to talk and joke with them out of the windows.

  The male prisoners had been months and sometimes years without women, and these women patients knew it and they deliberately set themselves out to provoke. They sang scabrous songs and they made dirty jokes. Strangely enough, the warders made no attempt to put a stop to it. It was also interesting to note that the girls had no time for the political prisoners; they were interested only in the criminals.

  The two nurses in our department were also prisoners, and I became quite friendly with one of them, Dasha, and we often chatted. She was a village girl, well built with a high firm bosom and lovely eyes. She was serving a two-year term for having migrated to town without permission. Since the introduction of the domestic passport no one was allowed to leave his place of domicile without the permission of the militia, as the Russians prefer to call their police. Dasha had been refused permission and so she had gone without it. At first she had worked as a servant, but she had hoped to be able to get work in a tractor factory later on, and that would have legalized her stay, but before she could do so some malicious nosey-parker had denounced her, and so she was here.

  The near presence of the women excited the male prisoners tremendously. The worse their situation became and the greater their anxiety about themselves and their families the more they sought relief in sexual fantasies and, where possible, in sexual acts. Despite heavy punishments it proved impossible to prevent sexual intercourse between male and female prisoners in the concentration camps in the North. In prison, however, such intercourse was impossible, and even in hospital it was only rarely possible and hedged around with all sorts of difficulties.

  Although I stayed in hospital for three weeks, I was really quite well again after about a fortnight. It was the goodness and humanity of the doctor which kept me there for a further week as reconvalescence. But after that I had to go back to the prison proper. My companions had been placed in a different cell and I was put into it with them. There was also a newcomer, a man named Grigori Makedon. Apart from Shalit himself, there was no one who made life in prison for me so difficult as this man did.

  He was about forty, but he looked much younger. He was well built and powerful but not above middle height, and when he was stripped in the washroom he looked more like a youth. He had been arrested only a few days before, and I never learned why or anything about his origin. He was a complicated psychological case, and he made a secret of everything which concerned himself, while at the same time trying to find out as much as possible about everyone else. He was tremendously vain, and almost pathologically sensitive. At the same time he had a most violent temper. He was uneducated but not unintelligent, though he would sometimes make statements which were obviously ridiculous and could be turned inside out in a couple of minutes, but he was quite prepared to prevent any correction of what he said by violence.

  He was not a good comrade. When the bread was distributed he always rushed to take the biggest piece. With twelve thousand mouths to feed, the kitchen staff could not always provide portions of exactly the same size, and there were therefore differences that were small but quite big enough to excite Makedon’s greed. He also took the best place in the cell, by violence if necessary. Most of the other prisoners were not as strong as he was, and he did not scruple to use his physical strength. It was an unwritten law in prison n
ot to draw the wardens into any differences between the prisoners, and Makedon exploited this tradition to the full—except when it concerned himself, and on one occasion when he thought someone had done him an injury he immediately denounced the man to the governor.

  His fellow prisoners hated him more than they hated their examiners, which is saying something. When he left our cell about a year later everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

  Bondarenko and Reibisch welcomed me back with open arms and then introduced me to Makedon. As the three beds in the cell were now all occupied, I asked the warder for a mattress and made myself up a bed on the floor. In August, 1937, there were still such luxuries as mattresses in Soviet prisons. Makedon, who had not yet been interrogated at that time, told us that he had been president of a trust and had been expelled from the Party six months previously. He also said he had played a prominent role in the civil war, having fought against Wrangel and taken part in the occupation of the Crimea. How much of it was true it was impossible to say because the man was a confirmed boaster. But while everything else varied from time to time as he told it, one thing remained always the same and it was therefore probably true. In 1918-19 there had been a discussion in the Ukraine as to whether a separate Ukrainian army should be formed or the men brigaded as ordinary units of the Red Army. Makedon would relate with pride a discussion between him, Piatakov and Voroshilov on the point. Piatakov, it appeared, had hesitated, but he, Makedon, had insisted that Ukrainian soldiers should form ordinary units of the Red Army without any nationalist distinction.

  A few days after my return Reibisch went, and soon after Bondarenko as well, and I was left with Makedon. In prison you get to know a man’s real character much more quickly because you are with him day and night and have more time to observe him, and then you see him under real test conditions. In comparatively comfortable circumstances egoism is not so obvious. In prison it is different, because the little extra bread or the slightly better place in the cell is important. Prisoners tend to drop their civilized inhibitions, and most of them are no longer interested in pretending to be what they are not. Their real character emerges clearly.