The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  In the spring of 1938 the Secretary of the Kharkov Medical Council, himself a doctor, was arrested. As it happened he had an extraordinarily good memory and he knew every doctor in Kharkov by his Christian name as well as his surname. He was put into the brikhalovka with the rest and for a few days he silently observed the witches’ Sabbath going on around him and then he made his decision. Speaking to a fellow prisoner who was in my cell but who went to the brikhalovka daily at that time for interrogation, he declared:

  “Well, if that’s the way they want it that’s the way they shall have it. I’ll give them something to chew that’ll take them a damned long time to swallow.”

  And with these dark words he went off to his first interrogation. He pleaded guilty at once. Then came the two fatal questions which had worried us all so much. But they didn’t worry the doctor.

  “There will be quite a lot,” he said.

  “You will have to tell us all their names,” said the examiner innocently.

  “Of course I will,” replied the doctor, “but I shall have to think hard. Give me pencil and paper and I’ll write out the list in my cell.”

  The next day he was called out again and he arrived with the list. He had written out the names of all the several hundred doctors in Kharkov.

  The examiner was beside himself.

  “You’re mad,” he shouted angrily, “you can’t have recruited all the doctors in Kharkov.”

  “Why not?” replied the doctor calmly. “I was instructed to do so by my organization and I worked at it day and night, and as Secretary of the Medical Council I was in a very favorable position, you know.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that all the doctors in Kharkov are enemies of the people,” exclaimed the examiner.

  “I am,” retorted the other imperturbably. “And why not? The doctors in Kharkov have always been vaguely anti-Soviet. Many of them come from social classes which opposed the revolution, and I suborned the rest with my propaganda.”

  The examiner was in a quandary; he didn’t know what to do, so he sent the doctor away and went to his chief for advice. The next day the doctor was called out again.

  “Very well,” he was told, “write down the most important leaders of your organization, say three or four.”

  “Out of the question,” declared the doctor. “We were all of equal importance.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. If there’s an organization there must be leaders.”

  “Yes, of course, but there was only one, and that was I. I shared the counterrevolutionary work out among the others so justly that no one was unduly prominent.”

  The examiner tried to force him to write out a few names which he considered as of special importance, but the doctor refused. The examiner then drew up a deposition containing only a few names, but the doctor refused to sign it. He was a difficult case. There wasn’t much point in beating him up. He had admitted his guilt at once and he had answered all the questions put to him with alacrity. In the end the examiner called him an agent provocateur and sent him back to the brikhalovka to think it over.

  The doctor, who still had a piece of paper and his pencil, then wrote a letter to the head of the Kharkov G.P.U. He pointed out that he had repented of his sins against the Soviet power and made a full confession, but that now the examiner, probably for counterrevolutionary reasons, was trying to shield the other members of his organization, and he demanded that the chief of the G.P.U. should immediately intervene.

  The G.P.U. was in a quandary. It didn’t know what to do with the man. To arrest all the men he had denounced meant to deprive Kharkov of all its doctors, and even the G.P.U. jibbed at that.

  When I first heard this story I felt inclined to doubt it. For one thing it sounded much too good to be true, and then I hadn’t come into contact with the man myself. But it was told to me by an old Social Revolutionary named Kushnarenko who had been with the man in the brikhalovka, and subsequently I had good cause to know that Kushnarenko was an unusually reliable man. In addition, his story was soon confirmed by many other prisoners. A man who was put into our cell a couple of weeks later had been in the same cell with the doctor from the beginning, and he described the preliminaries.

  At first the doctor had been very silent. He had sat by himself in a corner and appeared to be brooding. Then one day he had joined in the general talk and told them a story about the days of witch burning in Germany in the Middle Ages. In either Bamberg or Würzburg—I can’t remember which was mentioned—the Inquisition had raged with particular severity and the population groaned under the flail. No one was safe any longer and one day a young theologian was arrested on the usual charge of intelligence with the devil. He pleaded guilty at once and named all the members of the Inquisition, including the Grand Inquisitor himself, as his accomplices. The Inquisition was in a quandary. It was unable to put the prisoner to the torture because he had confessed and answered all the questions put to him with alacrity. The cause was then taken to the Archbishop, who was perhaps not sorry to end the whole wretched business. The Inquisition was called off and the inhabitants breathed again.

  The recollection of this incident in medieval Germany had obviously persuaded our doctor to adopt the same tactics. Unfortunately, the G.P.U. was more persistent than the Inquisition, and there was no enlightened Archbishop to put a stop to the insanity. The parallel resuscitated by the doctor was a very good one, for in many ways the Great Purge was very similar to the witch hunting of the Inquisition. In both cases the “confessions” extorted by torture and fear were complete inventions. In neither case did the examiners bother whether the “confessions” had any relation to reality or not, or when they did it was most exceptional.

  There are many people who are prepared to admit that gross excesses were committed during the days of the Great Purge, but at the same time they excuse them by saying that Stalin and his G.P.U. had to crush a powerful “fifth column” which might otherwise have overthrown the Soviet power. “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs” is more or less their attitude. They will admit that millions were arrested, and then they ask innocently: “You’re not going to tell us that all these people were innocent? There must have been something in it. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, you know.”

  When I come up against such people I usually ask: “Do you believe in witches?” They invariably laugh, of course. Then I point out that during the course of approximately three centuries hundreds of thousands of women “confessed” that they were witches and were promptly burned for their pains. Their “confessions” are still on record, and they can be consulted. Whoever does consult them will find that in principle they are not very different from the “confessions” extorted by the G.P.U. during the Great Purge. And yet there was no such thing as a witch, and of all the people accused of being in league with the devil none was, in fact. In the same way none of my fellow prisoners was guilty of the crimes of which he accused himself.

  Every day brought us old hands new material for our investigations. We knew the mechanism of the examination process so well that we could soon accurately prophesy the probable development of each case. We knew the laws of growth which governed the advance of this grotesque avalanche. We heard daily of its ravages throughout the country. But one thing was still a mystery to us, and that was the motive, the impelling force behind it all. Again and again we asked ourselves and each other what the guiding idea could possibly be. What did Stalin really want? Whom was he really after? Was this whole business being secretly directed toward some to us invisible aim? Were the examiners intent on securing denunciations against people in certain definite social groups? Yes, there was no doubt that such tendencies were visible, but not until 1938. Up to then the G.P.U. had taken everything which came into its net. Who were the arch-recruiters who must have been arrested in 1936 and were now no longer in prison? Was at least the arrest of these forefathers of all the organizations which were later created by the G.P.U. a conscious and delibe
rate purge of the country from active enemies of the ruling powers?

  In the autumn of 1937 the answers to all these questions were unknown to us. About a year later, when the wave of arrests lapped over the G.P.U. apparatus as well and many arrested G.P.U. men came into the cells, a certain amount of light was let into the impenetrable darkness. Throughout 1937 I made a systematic note of the happenings and drew up statistics. I reckoned which groups of the population, according to age, nationality and class, were most represented among the arrested, and I never lost an opportunity of discussing the various hypothetical explanations put forward by my fellow prisoners. It was not until the autumn of 1938 that a theory gradually began to take shape to fit the facts as we knew them.

  As early as the spring of 1937 we began to calculate our numbers. There was one quite simple method of doing it. Every new prisoner who came in had some money with him and various objects which he was not allowed to have with him in the cells, for instance, his braces, a pocket knife, a metal comb and such things. When he was formally entered into the prison books, these things were taken away from him and he was given two receipts, one for the money and the other for the things. These receipts were all numbered so that when two prisoners came into our cell within a month of each other all we had to do was to compare the numbers on their receipts and we could tell approximately how many people had been arrested in that time. Now, the Kholodnaya Gora was the central prison for Kharkov and its surroundings, and this meant that all prisoners passed through it before they were sent off to the camps even if their interrogations had taken place in some other prison. It was in our prison that the camp transports were made up. In this way we were able to obtain the approximate number of prisoners and then we related it to the total population. By the time I left on February 20, 1939, we had arrived at the conclusion that within the past two years 5.5 per cent of the total population of Kharkov and its surroundings had been arrested.

  This is a fairly large territory and we were therefore in a position to draw approximate conclusions from the numbers arrested there as to the numbers arrested throughout the country as a whole. However, we were not entirely satisfied with that. From the prisoners who came to us from other towns or were brought back from the camps for further interrogation, or perhaps confrontation, we learned that our methods of counting were in operation in all central prisons everywhere, and that our results were approximately the same as those obtained elsewhere. The results varied between 5.5 and 6 per cent of the total population. If we take the lower figure it gives us a grand total of about nine million arrests.

  From this total we must deduct about two millions for men charged with criminal offenses and whose arrest had nothing to do with the purge. In the spring of 1938 the Commissar for the Interior, the notorious Yezhov, was able to announce smugly that he had found no difficulty in providing the forced-labor camps with millions of new workers. Appetite grows by what it feeds on, but at the same time it would have been dangerous to arrest further millions of politicals. The economic system was already creaking and to deprive it of still further skilled workers might have given it a coup de grâce. Yezhov therefore ordered the arrest of all criminals. Most of them were hardened offenders, but many of them were men who had come into conflict with the law, often many years before, and served their terms, and they were now, in fact, no longer criminals at all, but their names were still on the police lists. For instance, among these “criminals” I met a bookkeeper who had committed a minor offense in 1923, that is to say fifteen years previously, and had received a short sentence. Since then he had gone straight, but nevertheless he had to go off to the camps with the rest.

  These men were not brought before the courts, because there were usually no charges against them. They were dealt with by a special commission on the basis of police lists and sent off in hundreds daily. They were always given either three or five years of “correctional labor,” but why some received three years and others five I was never able to discover.

  The district police chiefs (militia commandants) had to provide fixed contingents of these criminals monthly. Moscow issued the “arrest plans” to the various provincial capitals and the authorities there distributed them among the various districts. Often the police chief of a particular district might be unable to provide his quota. The victims might be listed in the central register as belonging to his district, whereas in fact they had long ago left it. In such cases a police chief would make up the quota by arresting innocent people under various pretexts. I am perfectly well aware that for Western European minds this will sound incredible. Let me therefore tell of one case that came to my notice.

  In the late summer of 1938 I was in a cell with a hundred and thirty other prisoners under conditions difficult to describe. Sufficient to say that as the result of living under them for a long time without proper food I had developed a sort of scurvy and the lower part of my body was covered with painful boils. At first I could get nothing whatever done about this and it was only after I had gone on hunger strike that I was removed to the prison hospital. The doctor examined me and prescribed an ointment to be rubbed into the affected parts. Then I was taken to a room the sight of which made me shudder, used to incredibly bad conditions as I was. The floor of the room was covered with filthy old sacks. On these sacks lay naked bodies all smeared with a gray fatty ointment, the same as had been prescribed for me. I refused to be put in the room and I demanded to see the doctor.

  They fetched him. He was a well-meaning, friendly man and he was doing his best. He agreed with me at once that the place looked terrible, but he pointed out that it was not dangerous. The dirt I saw was really the gray ointment which had impregnated the sacks and it sterilized the whole room. I accepted his explanation—there was really nothing else I could do—undressed and lay down on the sacks.

  At the window stood a gypsy with his son, and they were both weeping. By that time the windows of our cells had all been covered over, but here in the prison hospital we could see the sky. I went over to the window and looked out. There was a large leafy tree and the sight of it cheered me tremendously. I hadn’t seen a green leaf for about a year. In the meantime the gypsy and his son still wept and I turned to them.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “We’ve been here two months,” the man answered.

  “I’ve been here twenty months,” I replied, “but I’m still not weeping.”

  “Yes, but you’re used to being shut in. We’re used to freedom. We can live only in the open.”

  It was a point of view, of course, but for me there was also a big difference between sleeping within four walls at home and sleeping in a prison cell with over a hundred others. However, I didn’t argue the matter; they were in no state to see my side of it. Instead, I began to question the man about their case. I was still zealously collecting all possible material.

  It appeared that he and his fellows were wandering laborers. With their wives and children they traveled in horse-drawn caravans throughout the country following the seasons. When they came to somewhere where building work was going on they engaged themselves as laborers in a gang. The men would dig and the women would cart away the earth. Their groups consisted of perhaps twenty-five men and about fifty women and children. When the job was finished they took their wages and wandered on. In Soviet jargon they were “toiling gypsies.”

  In the summer of 1938 they had finished off a job in the Crimea and were making their way north. One evening they camped in the Militopol district and asked permission to use the grazing land of the local collective farm for the night, and it was given. The horses nibbled away at the grass. The gypsies brought out their instruments and played and danced, and the young people from the farm came and danced with them. To amuse the peasants the gypsy women got out their cards and told fortunes as they always do. Finally the peasants went back to their huts and the gypsies settled down for the night.

  The next morning they had harnessed the horses and
were about to move off when a detachment of police, or militia, arrived and all the men were arrested.

  “We couldn’t find out why we had been arrested,” said the gypsy. “The police in Militopol just wanted to know our names and where we were born. We told them, but that was wrong. Three of our men didn’t know where they had been born and so they let them go. I kept on asking why we had been arrested and in the end the police chief said: ‘It’s because you’re parasites. You’ve stolen social property.” ‘We haven’t,’ I said, ‘and we’re not parasites. We work just as well as people in towns and villages do. We go from place to place. That’s all. Is there anything wrong with that? You see, we can’t always get work in one place.’”

  A week after their arrest these unfortunate gypsies were sent into Kharkov as the district capital and there they came before an administrative court. This gypsy, made wise by his experience in Militopol, refused to confirm the details of his identification until he had been told why they had all been arrested. In the end the chairman of the commission looked it up in the dossier and said:

  “Because you stole social property. Your horses grazed on the grass of a collective farm.”

  “But we asked the chairman for permission first,” the gypsy protested, “and he gave it. Wherever we go the peasants allow us to graze our horses in the evening. They’re decent people to us; not like you.

  “You are hostile elements,” the chairman persisted, “and your wives pretended to tell the future from cards.”

  ‘Well, if it was the women who did it,” said my simple gypsy from the depth of his wisdom, “why did you arrest us and not them? Where does the law say that we’re responsible for what our womenfolk do?”