The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  He had been a so-called brigadier; that is to say, he had been in charge of a labor group known as a brigade. His brigade had always done well and he had been decorated several times. He was not a member of the Party, but he had done more of what was called “politically important work” than most Communists, and in particular he had propagated agricultural collectivization. He was keenly interested in all questions of scientific agriculture and had gone out of his way to talk with the agricultural experts from the district capital, and spent much of his spare time in the tractor and machinery station helping to repair damaged tractors and at the same time increasing his own technical knowledge. The future of collectivization depended on a minority of people like him who were enthusiastically in favor of the socialist transformation of the village. Now they were being swept away indiscriminately in the wave of arrests.

  Boikov was a good comrade in prison. He was personally clean in his habits and therefore an agreeable sleeping neighbor. Often before we went to sleep we would talk for hours about technical questions. He was also keenly interested in history, and for my part I was delighted to think that even in prison I could still be of use to someone.

  A few days later a third peasant arrived. His name was Satina, and he was a very different type. When he came in he put his bundle down on the floor, looked round at us, then crossed his hands over his breast and bowed low. He was a small, gray-haired man and his manner was self-effacing. The great respect he felt for all things intellectual was always very obvious. He was a peasant of the old school brought up in the traditions of serfdom. He was religious and fate was something to be accepted without cavil. He was honest, kind-hearted and helpful. He always took his food last; he never squabbled about where he slept, and he repaired our clothing when it needed it without being asked. When my interrogations began again about a month later our cell was full and some of the inferior types took advantage of my frequent absences to steal my food. I was much too nervous and too occupied with my own affairs to bother to take the food with me as the others did, so when I was gone Satina took charge of it.

  “You must keep up your strength, Alexander Semyonovitch,” he would say. “You’ve got a long way to go and you’re not used to privations as we are.”

  He was a truly good man and he held me in such high esteem that I really felt a bit uncomfortable and unworthy. I think his respect for me was based on the experiences of his early youth when on many estates, where the owners were men of feeling and understanding, patriarchal relations developed between master and serf.

  From September, 1937, to December, 1938, the peasants dominated the picture in the Kholodnaya Gora. There is not a great deal to be written about their fate; it was always exactly the same. First of all the chairman of their collective farm would be arrested. He would then give the names of all his committee as his “accomplices” in whatever crimes he was supposed to have committed. These men were also arrested, and they promptly gave the names of the foremen, or brigadiers, and when these latter were arrested they involved the ordinary peasants. And then they tramped up in droves with their bundles.

  It was very rare for any of them to be kept for more than three months. None of them resisted the beatings for long, and by October even the newly arrested ones knew what was expected of them. They realized that what they always referred to anonymously as “the Power” now demanded that they should confess themselves guilty of counter-revolution, and they did so. Formerly it had demanded that they should collectivize their farms, then that they should surrender their grain, then their cattle, and so on. They made no attempt to resist their fate; they did not even quarrel with it—except Boikov. There were tears in his eyes when he finally went off to prison camp.

  “Worse men than I are still safely at home with the women,” he sighed.

  I tried to console him.

  “Never mind, Boikov. In a couple of years you’ll be back again. You’re not politicians. They’ll need you on the land.”

  “They need us even more in the Far North,” he said.

  And he was right.

  “Goodby, Boikov.”

  “Goodby, Alexander Semyonovitch, I shall never see you again.” The cell door closed behind him and my heart ached for him.

  There were so many peasant prisoners that by September there were fourteen people in a cell which had been used in Tsarist times for one, and in the early Soviet days for three. We had to leave the beds folded up against the wall and sleep on the floor. We older prisoners had at least the advantage of being able to use the mattresses. There were now far too many prisoners and not enough mattresses to go round.

  Rarely did a peasant need more than two or three interrogations. All the G.P.U. had to do was to let them know what it required of them, and this it did through its own agents in the brikhalovka. After that it wasn’t necessary to beat them. Only those who insisted on their innocence were beaten, but before long they gave way and the G.P.U. stool pigeons would help them to formulate their “confessions.” These stool pigeons were not professional agents provocateurs; they were merely prisoners who had already confessed and got to know the ropes. Generally speaking, the chairmen of the collective farms were chosen for this job, because they knew the psychology of the peasants. Or perhaps former Party secretaries from the rural area. Twice a week batches of peasants whose “examination” had been concluded were sent off to the prison camps in the Far North.

  The intellectuals in our cell—during September a number of them had joined the company—often discussed the political significance of these extraordinary arrests. Not one of us had any really convincing theory to offer. One theory was that Stalin was planning great things in the north: railways in Siberia, canals, and in general the opening up of the Arctic regions. As it was difficult to get voluntary labor in such terrible conditions, Yezhov was providing forced labor. The chief upholder of this theory was an old anarchist named Zariuk.

  “That might apply to peasants,” I admitted, “but what about factory directors, engineers and skilled workers? What is the sense of sending them to the north to shovel up earth? This country has expended simply enormous sums in order to create what you might call a technical intelligentsia, and now highly skilled workers and trained engineers are being used for navvying. Production is being ruined in the Donetz Basin in order to cut a canal at the White Sea.”

  “Perhaps the projects there are so strategically important that it’s worth it,” said Zariuk.

  “In that case they could get voluntary labor merely by paying enough to make it worthwhile.”

  “There you are, Alexander Semyonovitch: it would cost too much; Yezhov can do it cheaper.”

  “No, Comrade Zariuk. It may look as though he’s doing it cheaper, but in fact, and quite apart from all other considerations such as what’s happening in the meantime to production in the Donetz Basin, forced labor is the most unproductive and therefore the most expensive of all forms of human labor power. If free labor were not, in fact, far more productive than forced labor, slavery and serfdom would never have come to an end.”

  Such arguments went on interminably. Every new group of arrested men brought in their own ideas and the discussions started up all over again.

  Zariuk had been wounded in the leg during a demonstration in 1905 when Cossacks had fired on the crowd. He had been taken to prison and his leg had been amputated. After that he had been banished to Siberia. Amnestied in 1913, he had returned and become a teacher. He had never abandoned his anarchist ideas and he had never joined the Communist Party, but for all that he was a loyal Soviet citizen. We were together until January, 1938. I criticized the G.P.U. regime far more sharply than the others and sometimes he was honestly indignant and reproached me for being a bad Communist.

  During my renewed interrogation I got to know the brikhalovka myself.

  In the basement there were perhaps twelve large cells. They were absolutely bare and the prisoners sat or lay on the cement floors—that is to say, they did
when there was room; sometimes the cells were so crowded that prisoners had to stand up all the time. I met all sorts of people there, but it was not until the middle of 1938 that I came across anyone from the Institute, though most prominent scientists had already been arrested.

  I found that this was quite usual. Many of the other prisoners “belonged to counterrevolutionary organizations” which were alleged to consist of scores of people. The investigation was always conducted by one examiner with perhaps two or three assistants to help him, but the “members” never met each other in the brikhalovka and they heard about the fate of their friends only from third parties.{10}

  I was kept in the brikhalovka for several days before I was called out, and in that time I met a good many people, but not many who were sufficiently interesting to have left any lasting impression.

  There were two young Jews in their late teens. They were accused of belonging to a counterrevolutionary Zionist organization. In fact neither of them had ever even heard of Zionism. An acquaintance, who was also alleged to be a Zionist, was supposed to have “recruited” them, and now they wanted to know what Zionism was. The Zionist movement had been declared illegal at some time in the twenties and its supporters had been persecuted in the same way as anarchists, Mensheviki, Social Revolutionaries and so on. The result was that Zionist propaganda among the Jews of the Soviet Union ceased completely, and the younger generation of Jews knew nothing about it, or even about its former existence. I began to tell them what Zionism was, but a Red Army captain interrupted.

  “Why tell them things they’d be better left in ignorance of?” he demanded.

  “Why shouldn’t they know?” I asked.

  He drew me to one side.

  “Listen,” he said, “if they don’t know anything about Zionism they can’t confess anything. But if you tell them all about it then they’ll be able to fabricate a confession. Do you want to do the work of the examiner for him? Those two are about the only ones here who stand a chance of being released, but you look like spoiling it for them.”

  “Why do you think they’ve got a chance of being released?”

  “First of all, they’re only eighteen, whereas generally arrested people are all thirty and over. That’s the dangerous age: you can remember things. It’s true that you sometimes meet prisoners between twenty and thirty, but never boys in their teens. And then again, they’re here together. That’s not an accident. I’ve never heard of people supposed to belong to the same organization being here together. Those two have got a good chance of getting out, I tell you.”

  The captain was right. Two weeks later the two young Jews were released.

  There was one other prisoner I met who was to be released. He was a German Communist from Leipzig. He was a tall, slim man with very delicate features. It was a treat for me to talk to him. It was a long time since I had been able to speak German with anyone and he spoke really beautiful German. He was an historian and he had been arrested casually while traveling from Dniepropetrovsk to Kharkov. A G.P.U. agent who was in the train had noticed that he spoke German and at the Kharkov station he had been arrested. In two interrogations the examiner had accused him of being a spy, but in the third he had as good as said that he would be released. He was a complete stranger in Kharkov. There was thus no one who might have “recruited” him or whom he might have “recruited.” It was therefore difficult to fit him into any “counterrevolutionary organization.” For the examiner he was just a nuisance.

  It was in the brikhalovka that I learned more about the operations of the so-called Troika. It was an exceptional tribunal of three members, formed to deal with men who refused to confess publicly. The only sentence it could pass was one of death. I was afraid the G.P.U. might hand my case over to the Troika. They had the deposition I had signed at the end of my first “conveyer,” and they could easily suppress my recantation. I could be sentenced to death and shot without my end arousing the least notice. As far as I could see there was little else open to the G.P.U., and the idea was very disturbing.

  Although I come from a very orthodox family, I have always been fundamentally nonreligious. I have never been able to understand how intelligent and educated men with some knowledge of modem science can still flirt with religious beliefs, or why people bother so much about their posthumous fame. I have devoted a part of my life to the struggle for socialism, but for me socialism was a matter for the present generation and not merely something for the future. But now in face of death a strange “metaphysical” feeling came over me. It was no longer a matter of indifference what my friends abroad might think of me after my death. I feared that if I were shot there would never be any possibility of exposing the lies and deceit of the G.P.U. I spoke about the matter to my German fellow prisoner.

  “My name is Alexander Weissberg, and I come from Vienna. If you ever get out please tell my friends in the Austrian Party that I was never a counterrevolutionary. I don’t know whether I shall survive the next few months, but I don’t want to die with the feeling that my comrades might think I had been an enemy after all.”

  The German promised to do so. When I look back I wonder at my naïve vanity. Millions of people had already been arrested, including the whole Old Guard of the revolution, the closest friends of Lenin, the heroes of the civil war and the leaders of socialist construction—and I was still afraid that people abroad might not see through Stalin’s gigantic swindle. However, it did take them some time, and not all of them have done so even now, or it would be unnecessary for me to write this book.

  The nights in the brikhalovka were difficult. Even if there happened to be enough room in the cell to lie down it was impossible to sleep. From the windows of the examiners’ rooms opposite came the shrieks of maltreated prisoners. The worst shrieking came from women. We tried closing the windows in order to shut out the sounds, but then the atmosphere became intolerable because the cellars were overcrowded. In addition, the doors were constantly being opened and shut as prisoners were taken out or brought back from interrogation. You waited your own turn and in the meantime your mind was occupied with fears of what was going to happen to you.

  The G.P.U. rarely put a seriously injured man back into a cell, and then only when they had failed to realize just how severely they had manhandled him. In addition, it was rarely necessary to go to such lengths. They generally succeeded in making a prisoner say what they wanted him to say by threats. Systematic torture was rare. Beatings were more common, but even they were not utterly reckless. In this respect the G.P.U. was very different from the Gestapo, as I had personal cause to learn six years later when I was in Paviak, the Central Prison of Warsaw, during the Gestapo regime. The G.P.U. was much cleverer than the Gestapo. Up to the second half of August, 1937, it had rarely used physical violence at all, unless you include the “conveyer” under that heading. But now it had no time for the “conveyer” because the mass arrests had begun and the prisons were packed.

  They were therefore anxious to get the examination over as quickly as possible and to send the prisoners off to the labor camps in the Far North. The “conveyer” was very effective, but it kept several examiners occupied for perhaps a week on one prisoner. In that time beatings or the threat of beatings would provide them with two hundred confessions instead of one. It was a more brutal method, but it worked.

  About a year later men came to us from many other prisons all over the country for confrontations, etc., and they all said the same thing, namely, that on a certain day—it was always August 17th or 18th—the G.P.U. had begun to beat its prisoners. It was the same everywhere from Negoreloye to Vladivostok and from Odessa to Arkhangelsk, and it looked as though there had been some central order from Moscow.

  My interrogations were renewed on September 29th. This time I was not taken to Room No. 222, which was Ryeznikov’s, but straight to Captain Tornuyev. In the captain’s room was another G.P.U. man in civilian clothes. He struck me as an hysterical type and I noticed in particular how
bloodshot his eyes were. For a while they talked without taking any notice of me, but then the stranger came up to me.

  “Have you been beaten?” he wanted to know.

  I made no answer.

  “Come closer,” he said.

  I took a step toward him.

  “Still closer.”

  I took another step forward. He looked at me savagely for a while and I stared him straight in the face.

  “Now are you going to confess?” he demanded.

  “I have nothing...”

  Before I could complete my usual denial he had punched me full in the face. I staggered and immediately I received a second blow which knocked me down. While I was still on the floor he aimed a kick at me. I sprang to my feet. Suddenly I was furious rather than afraid and I shouted at the top of my voice while I defended myself from his blows with my arms:

  “You’ve no right to beat me. It’s illegal.”

  “Put your arms down,” he shouted. “Come nearer.”

  He continued to punch away at me. I noticed that Captain Tomuyev had turned away and was looking out of the window. I knew from what others had said that the thing to do if you were beaten was to shriek like a stuck pig. They never liked that. And I did my best. I raved and howled as loud as I was able. My tormentor certainly didn’t like it. He had now picked up a stick and was hitting me about the arms and body with it. I rushed over to the window so that my shouting should be heard in the street.

  Captain Tomuyev put an end to the scene and the other man left the room.

  “You know, Alexander Semyonovitch,” said Captain Tornuyev calmly, “it’s high time you stopped all this disagreeable business. Will you confess now?”

  “I’ve nothing to confess,” I persisted.

  He took hold of my wrist and twisted it so that I was forced to the floor, but I noticed at once that he was half-hearted about it and found it very disagreeable. The other man seemed to be a sadist. Tornuyev had no feelings of enmity toward me, and he soon gave up and called in a G.P.U. man who took me away into a room in which three officials were sitting at their desks.