In these few simple words this gypsy had denounced a principle which is hostile to all human liberty and destroys all security before the law: the principle of collective responsibility established by the Soviet authorities.
In general Soviet law and the Soviet constitution make no provision for this hateful principle, and there is only one case in which it was formally introduced by law, and that was in 1938 when Soviet citizens fleeing abroad were declared guilty of an offense against Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code—treason. The only punishment provided by Soviet law for this enormity—the flight from paradise—is death. In this one case Soviet law makes the relatives of the renegade co-responsible for his crime, and by virtue—if that is the right word—of Article 58 1a they can be sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp for his offense. However, in practice the principle of collective responsibility is part and parcel of Soviet life. It is not an invention of the Stalinist era and it operated during the civil war against the relatives of capitalists and landowners. The defeated aristocracy suffered the same harsh treatment during the French Revolution. However, it was Stalin who widened the field of its application and made the individual, whether worker, peasant or intellectual, personally responsible for what took place in his immediate circle, whether he was a member of the Party or not. The Party imposes an obligation of so-called “revolutionary watchfulness” on every Soviet citizen. Translated into the simple language of the Soviet man in the street it means that he is expected to denounce all “the enemies of the people” living in his circle—or else. Anyone who is suspected of harboring the slightest objection to anything the dictator does is ipso facto “an enemy of the people.” The circle for which a man was responsible was extended beyond his family to include his place of work and his circle of friends. If a number of engineers in any particular factory were arrested as enemies of the people their arrest would inevitably be followed by the dismissal of the director of the factory and the Secretary of the Party, and their arrest.
Unfortunately, we Communists had never condemned the principle of collective responsibility as such, and we had even defended it as necessary for the protection of the nascent revolution. The idea had become such a matter of course for us that even in the prisons of the G.P.U. I had not condemned it. It was the story of this unfortunate gypsy and the personal tragedy involved which first awoke me to the full horror of the thing and caused me to revise my views on the subject.
This gypsy received five years in a forced-labor camp, while his son, who was only sixteen years old, received three years. They were innocent victims of the “quota system” or the “arrests plan.” I have described their case in some detail to show that in the throes of the purge all respect for human rights went by the board even when no political motive whatever was involved.
Now, many of the criminals arrested en masse at Yezhov’s orders were persistent offenders. Some of them had already been in the camps in the Far North. In many cases they were picked up and sent back to the camps before they had had time to earn a new sentence. Perhaps that was a useful way of curbing persistent crime, like the preventive detention provisions in other countries, but nevertheless it violates my feelings for justice and fair play. In the Kholodnaya Gora we were in a position to register the percentage of criminals among the arrested; it varied between 15 and a maximum of 20 per cent.
The method of calculation I have described was not the only more or less reliable means of discovering the figures. We also knew how many prisoners were in the Kholodnaya Gora at any one time, thanks to the criminals who worked in the kitchen. From them we could discover how many bread rations were cut up. The prisoners who went back and forth to the brikhalovka pursued their investigations there to discover the strength of each cell and each block. We also knew the average period a prisoner stayed in the Kholodnaya Gora before he was sent away to a camp. From this we deduced the number of prisoners who passed through Kharkov every month on their way to the camps. We arrived at the same percentage.
The fact that this general method of calculation was used in various prisons all over the country and that it gave the same general result is very good reason to assume that it was on the whole reliable. In addition, our results were subsequently confirmed by the numerous G.P.U. men who came to join us in the cells in the summer of 1938.
The administration of the forced-labor camps was in the hands of a special department of the G.P.U.—the so-called GULAG. During the summer and autumn of 1938 many of its leading officials were arrested and found themselves in the cells with us. The prison transports from all over the country met in various centers such as Syzran and Kotlas, and there the prisoners were sorted out and sent to the various forced-labor camps according to requirements. These GULAG officials knew the arrest figures every month. In Kiev and subsequently in Moscow I met comrades who had been in the same cells with them. Their figures exceeded ours by between 10 and 15 per cent.
We arrived at a grand total of nine million arrests, and we deducted two millions for criminals, which left us seven million “politicals” for 1937 and 1938. We must now add about a million for those who were already in prison in 1936. I have no means of calculating even approximately the correct figures for 1935 and 1936 and I am relying here on what arrested members of the G.P.U. reported. After January 1, 1939, the arrests fell away practically to nothing, and, in fact, over a hundred thousand were actually released.
Our method of calculation must be slightly revised by taking the following circumstances into consideration: it sometimes happened that the same prisoner came to the Kholodnaya Gora twice and he therefore appeared twice in our statistics. There were also prisoners in the Kholodnaya Gora who were taken into the inner prison for the reopening of their examination and were sent back to the Kholodnaya Gora when the case was closed. There were further prisoners who had already been counted in other prisons by the same methods and who then came to the Kholodnaya Gora for some reason or other and were counted there again. Then there were even prisoners who were released after being arrested, but who were rearrested within a few weeks or months and were counted a second time. But the requisite adjustments to allow for these circumstances would not involve any material difference. And in fact they are more than made up for by the special prisons in Kharkov and other district capitals that sent their prisoners direct to the forced-labor camps. These were the prisons for railwaymen, who enjoyed—if that is the right word—a special status in the eyes of the G.P.U.
Taking all these things into consideration, I think I am justified in coming to a total of at least nine million political prisoners for the period of the Great Purge. My estimate is even regarded by others as too low. Before the Great Purge there was no “fifth column” in the Soviet Union. With a tremendous expenditure of energy over a period of almost three years the G.P.U. succeeded in laying a firm foundation for one over the whole country. Stalin’s policy had not succeeded in doing that previously—not even the enforced collectivization which had cost the lives of ten million peasants, nor even the insane policy of the Comintern, which had handed over the German working class to Hitler and plunged Europe into a Second World War. The masses of the people in the Soviet Union broke internally with the regime only under the impact of the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge.
CHAPTER 11—Enemies of the People
AT THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK IN OCTOBER I WAS REMOVED FROM the brikhalovka and sent back to Kholodnaya Gora. I had the feeling that for the moment my examination was at an end. I had been very depressed in August, fearing that I should be sentenced to death. Even at that time I had still believed that a confession like mine—the planning of a terrorist attempt against Stalin and Voroshilov—must be something out of the ordinary. The subsequent two months had taught me different. Tens of thousands had confessed much worse offenses and—what was more—never recanted. The fact that even after my confession they went on with the examination reassured me. In the past three months I ha
d often succeeded in securing a piece of paper and writing a letter to the Prosecutor or to the Central Committee of the Party. The last two letters I had sent to Stalin direct. In these letters I had retracted my confession and described the physical pressure to which I had been subjected. Something of all that must have come into my dossier. They would surely not shoot a foreigner by administrative sentence. I was no longer afraid of being brought before the Troika.
At this point I must describe an incident whose exact date I cannot fix, but which occurred in the late summer of 1937. After I had repeatedly asked to see the Prosecutor I was called out one evening to Tornuyev.
“You want to see the Prosecutor, I understand. He will soon be here and he will see you. Wait outside.”
I waited a few minutes in the anteroom, and then a man in a white uniform arrived, closely followed by a whole group of examiners. They all disappeared into Tornuyev’s room. A little later I was called in. The man in white uniform was sitting on the right of Tornuyev at a small desk.
“I am the Prosecutor,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I have already written to you about it,” I said. “I have been forced under physical pressure to make false admissions. I am absolutely innocent, but physically I was no longer able to sit sleepless on a stool.”
“Don’t slander the organs of the state. I know your case very well. There are few accused who are more guilty than you are. You owe it entirely to the patience of the N.K.V.D. that you are alive at all. I even proposed that you should be placed before a military tribunal last July.”
I was flabbergasted. This was the man I had expected to help me? Tornuyev intervened.
“Comrade Prosecutor, I was going to send over these twenty arrest warrants for your approval today, but as you are now here perhaps you would take them with you.”
With that he handed over a bundle of papers and the Prosecutor promised to deal with them the next day.
At that moment I turned round and noticed that all the examiners were standing in a semicircle behind me. From their faces I could see there was some joke which everyone but me understood. Tornuyev had difficulty in not grinning broadly. I thought quickly.
The whole thing must be a put-up job. Why should Tornuyev discuss arrest warrants with the Prosecutor in my presence? He had been alone with the Prosecutor for some minutes before I was called in. Generally G.P.U. men were extremely careful not to say anything about their affairs in the hearing of a prisoner. And it struck me that this man in the white uniform was not the Prosecutor at all, but someone who was being used by Tornuyev in a new attempt to break me down.
It was more than a year later, in the autumn of 1938, that I received confirmation of my suspicion. One of the examiners who had been in the room at the time was placed in a neighboring cell and he told the story of Weissberg and the pseudo-Prosecutor, which was then tapped through to me.
Most of the peasants were still in our cell, when I returned to the Kholodnaya Gora from the brikhalovka at the beginning of October, and also a number of new prisoners from town. I was welcomed very much like a son who had returned to the bosom of his family, and the new prisoners were introduced to me.
One of them was Komarovsky, a Communist and a high official of the Party, an intelligent even-tempered man, who was well aware of what was going on. For a very long time he had ceased to harbor any illusions, but he had stayed at his post in the hope that things would improve. In addition, people in his position had no possibility of withdrawing. To resign from the Party would have been a counterrevolutionary demonstration, and would have led to his immediate arrest. And to let things go and neglect his work in the hope of being expelled, apparently against his will, was no good either because since the summer of 1937 all those expelled from the Party were arrested at once. Even members who had been expelled years before and done nothing to secure their rehabilitation were arrested.
Komarovsky was silent and depressed. He received neither clothes nor money from home, and he didn’t know whether his wife had been arrested or not. His real worry was that his wife might have publicly denounced him. There were many women who did that as soon as their husbands were arrested in the hope of avoiding the same fate.
“I shouldn’t bother about her if I were you, Komarovsky,” declared Makedon. “If she’s left you in the lurch now that you’re in trouble she’s not worth worrying about.”
Komarovsky said nothing, but later when he had an opportunity he spoke to me:
“My wife’s not like that,” he said, “but she’s a member of the Party and on the Party committee. It’s quite certain they would have asked her to make a declaration. Should she have refused? She would have been expelled at once and arrested the next day. And who would have looked after our children then? So I expect she wrote to the papers that she had completely cut herself off from me, ‘an enemy of the people,’ that she regretted the day she had ever met me, and all the rest of the things you read in the papers every day. We were together eighteen years. She was in the same group of partisans with me when we fought against Petliura. She was sixteen years old then. In one engagement she was wounded and left lying. That night, against orders, I crawled to where she was and carried her back for over a mile. We got married. And now it’s all over.”
It was difficult to find words to console him. These public denunciations were a shameful thing. The imprisoned men suffered terribly. Some of them revenged themselves as soon as they heard that their wives had denounced them, by retaliatory denunciations of their wives as the ones who had “recruited” them in the first place, with the result that the overzealous wives were arrested at once and given an opportunity of “working with redoubled vigor for the building up of socialism” in a concentration camp. Finally these public denunciations of husbands by wives came to an end. I have reason to believe that the Party received instructions from above to stop the shameful practice.
Kaganovitch, a Ukrainian village Jew, was another “enemy of the people.” Before the revolution men of his type were hostlers or pot-men in the village dram shop. He was a powerful stocky fellow with broad shoulders and a round Tartar skull, as good-natured and cheerful a companion as one could wish for. In my absence he had been elected starosta, or cell senior. There were so many prisoners in the cell that someone had to keep order and maintain discipline. He could curse like a trooper—or a G.P.U. examiner—but he did so only when there was good cause. He never insulted or offended a comrade, and the peasants idolized him. They regarded him as one of their own and he talked to them in broad Ukrainian dialect. Even Make-don, who was a bit of a bully, felt respect for him. I had often met the type among village potmen in East Galicia. He had been a Communist since the days of the civil war and the Party had used him in all sorts of positions, but always in the village. He knew the mentality of the Ukrainian peasant thoroughly. He often used to talk frankly about the collectivization and the hunger years, and he described to us in detail how the lunatic policy of the Party had ruined the countryside. While I was still free I had taken an interest in such questions, and here in the cell I became acquainted with Soviet village life in all its aspects. The discussions about the helter-skelter collectivization never stopped. All the prisoners were quite convinced that the disastrous Great Purge was the legitimate successor of the disastrous collectivization.
The last post Kaganovitch had held was that of leader of the political department of a machine-tractor station. These posts were created by the Central Committee of the Party toward the end of 1932 at a time when everything in the village was topsy-turvy. The harvest had sunk to one-third of normal, and there was no bread or even seed grain left. The peasants lay apathetically in their huts with swollen limbs. In every hut there was at least one corpse, but there were no longer men with enough strength left to take out the bodies and bury them. And then at the very last moment Stalin retreated. The granaries of the Red Army were opened and the peasants were given seed and just enough to eat to put them on their fe
et again. Bread deliveries were abolished and fixed taxes were introduced by area instead of by yield, as before. These bread deliveries, the so-called klebozagatovka, had handed the peasants and their collectives over helplessly to the requisitioning commissions. If the peasants had worked well then everything was taken away from them with the exception of a small remnant which was supposed to cover their own needs—and from 1931 on they did not get even that. The members of the requisitioning commissions were not sadists, but they were under heavy pressure themselves. They were given their instructions and they had to get a certain tonnage out of a certain district. A collective which worked well had to suffer for its less efficient neighbors. In addition there was the impossibility of estimating the labor performance of the individual peasant either by quality or by quantity. The result was that the individual peasant and the collective as a whole lost all feeling for the fact that in the last resort their return depended on their own performance. The simple relation between work and wages was destroyed. In the first years of collectivization the hard-working peasant got no more than his lazy neighbor did, and the efficient collective was not allowed to retain any more for the use of its members than the inefficient collective. In consequence, from about 1930 on, the peasant was firmly convinced that there was no sense in working: the Government took everything anyway. It was not the destruction which took place at the beginning of collectivization which caused the famine, but the systematic and cumulative damage brought about by the bread deliveries. The peasants simply stopped working and the grain no longer grew in the fields.
At the beginning of 1933, Stalin announced the abolition of bread deliveries and the introduction of a tax in kind amounting to about two cwts. per hectare. With that the position was clarified. A collective harvesting ten cwts. a hectare would have to surrender one-fifth of the harvest, which was relatively tolerable. A collective which worked badly and harvested only four cwts. would still have to surrender two cwts. or 50 per cent of its harvest. Thus, once again it was worthwhile working.
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