The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  The prohibition of group activities went so far that even the collection of signatures for petitions to the Party or the Government was regarded as a counterrevolutionary act. A Soviet citizen had the right to send a letter to the Government, but Soviet citizens collectively had no right to draw up petitions unless it was done through the Communist Party. Any initiative organized by groups other than the official Party immediately brought the G.P.U. onto the scene. The aim was no longer to prevent the formation of uncontrolled organizations but to prevent mass pressure on the Government.

  Thus the G.P.U. was unable to recognize any organization on the part of the prisoners without coming into conflict with its own laws. Its logic was simple: an organization of counterrevolutionaries was a counterrevolutionary organization, and that could not be permitted. In the smaller cells the prisoners could get on without any sort of organization, but in the mass cells, which often held up to two hundred prisoners, normal life was not possible without a starosta to organize the distribution of food, the arrangements for exercise and so on. The prison staff would have had to be greatly increased, and some of the prisoners would have got their food in the middle of the night. It was a dilemma but it was solved. The starosta was elected “illegally” by the prisoners. The prison governor heard about it through his spies and then officially appointed the prisoners’ choice, giving him official instructions to keep order in the cell, count the prisoners every morning and report to the authorities, arrange the distribution of food and so on.

  The peasants had gone, and the one-legged anarchist. Then Kornarovsky’s turn came to leave. He was sad. He had no hope of ever returning. He knew perfectly well that men like him never came back, and he was not physically strong enough to survive the rigors of a Siberian winter in camp. As long as he was still there I managed to keep up appearances, but as soon as he was outside the door my feelings got the better of me.

  I remained behind with Makedon and Gevondi. Makedon’s aggressiveness was a great trial to my nerves, but the presence of the Armenian was the neutral substance in catalysis. But in December Gevondi fell ill and was transferred for a few weeks to the prison sick bay, and life with Makedon alone became hell. Every discussion led to a fierce quarrel, and so I tried to keep silent, but that didn’t suit him either, and an atmosphere developed which depressed us both. Finally I found a solution. He was a primitive fellow and he loved listening to stories, and particularly historical tales, so I obliged him. More than once he woke me up in the middle of the night to ask me to tell him some tale or other over again.

  Another way in which we passed the time was playing dominoes. I formed pieces of bread into the right shape with the help of a piece of glass. It was usually my bread because although Makedon loved to play he seldom sacrificed any of his bread, knowing perfectly well that I would use mine. I would prepare a paste from chalk, make holes in the bread with a matchstick and then fill them with the paste. I developed real skill at this, and before long my domino and chess sets were works of art. We would play for hours until finally the warder caught us and confiscated the pieces. I believe he gave them to his children. We were not punished and all we had to do was to make another set.

  But Makedon was an awkward character. Even domino playing with him wasn’t an unalloyed pleasure, because he frequently cheated. Often he would turn up the pieces and look at them before choosing one, or he would surreptitiously push pieces he couldn’t use over to my pile. On one occasion I caught him red-handed. Immediately he began to storm and curse, swept the dominoes to the floor and began to trample on them. The set had been finished only that day, and it was a very good one. I pushed him away and tried to save the pieces, and there was a scuffle.

  In the middle of it the cell door opened.

  “What’s all this?” the warder demanded.

  “Weissberg has made a domino set,” declared Makedon virtuously, “and I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s against the rules.” “Don’t try to stuff me up with lies like that,” returned the warder. “You play with him. I’ve seen you. Give me the dominoes.”

  Generally speaking, the warders were sympathetic toward us, though they did not often show their sympathy openly because that would have been dangerous, but there was hardly one who went out of his way to make our lot worse, and in all my prison experience I can hardly recall an example of deliberate sadism on the part of a warder.

  Unlike the prisoners in German Gestapo prisons, we had not lost all human rights. What physical pressure was applied came from the G.P.U., and then only when it was necessary to extort confessions. The Gestapo’s job was easier. They were after real illegal organizations. Their G.P.U. colleagues had to invent them.

  The warders were not allowed to say anything to us beyond what was absolutely necessary, but there was one man with fair hair and a rosy good-natured face who never lost an opportunity of talking to me though he risked immediate arrest if he were caught. When there were fewer prisoners and he had more opportunities for chatting I learned quite a lot from him.

  We first became friendly as a result of a dirty trick Makedon played on me. One of the other prisoners had given me a piece of paper with the rules for the prison Morse code on it, and I soon became expert at tapping. In the night I would tap out messages to the next cell and sometimes to the cell below, and they would tap back. Makedon was always encouraging me to get into touch with other prisoners in this way, but he wouldn’t do it himself for fear of getting caught, though he said it was because he couldn’t learn the code. On one occasion while I was tapping away Makedon had one of his bouts of anger about something and immediately resorted to violence. It was against the unwritten code to call for assistance, so I answered his curses in the loudest voice I could muster, and that brought the warder along. The cell door opened.

  “What’s all this?” he demanded.

  I said nothing, but Makedon rushed to my bed and pulled out the piece of paper which was hidden under the mattress.

  “Here you are,” he said to the warder. “Weissberg taps all night. I can’t sleep.”

  The punishment for tapping was solitary confinement under conditions of great severity. I had come back to the cell only three days previously after a terrible week of it, and the thought of going back again to the punishment cell was frightening. But the warder was on my side.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said angrily to Make-don. “Stand by each other; don’t do that sort of thing.”

  He took the piece of paper.

  “I won’t report it,” he whispered to me.

  Later on when we were being taken out to the lavatory he drew me to one side on some pretext or other.

  “When you’re in a cell with a fellow like that you want to be careful,” he said. “You can’t afford to go back to the punishment cell.”

  The other warders treated us coldly but correctly. The prison regulations were strict, and only examiners could ignore them with impunity. If a warder did anything improper we were entitled to protest. How different the situation was under the Gestapo! In March, 1943, I was imprisoned in the notorious Central Prison of Warsaw in Paviak. The prisoners were mortally afraid of the S.S. men. As soon as we arrived they kicked us down the stairs. When it amused them they made prisoners strip and then whipped them as they crawled around on the dirty floor. Under the Gestapo we had no rights at all. We were not even allowed to speak except in answer to a direct question.

  In Kholodnaya Gora the maltreatment of a prisoner by a warder would not have been suffered passively. On one occasion—I was in the reception center at the time—a new warder called me out. I don’t know what he wanted, but he looked a brutal type and he pushed me roughly against the wall and appeared as though he were going to strike me. I reacted vigorously and then he let me alone. Had there been an exchange of blows and had the matter come to the notice of the governor, then, provided the facts of the case could be clearly established, the warder would have been punished.

 
I can remember what was practically a mutiny and yet when the governor came to investigate the matter he decided in favor of the prisoners. I was in a mass cell at the time with two hundred and sixty other prisoners. The cell was on the ground floor at the back of the prison, and we walked almost directly out into the yard for exercise. It was in January, 1939, and the day was terribly cold. The warder in charge of our exercising had apparently determined to teach us what discipline meant, and he refused to begin with our walk until we were all properly lined up. Then he demanded that we should take our hands out of our pockets, though many of us had no gloves. Finally we had had enough of his pettiness, and our starosta gave the command and we all trooped back to our cell, leaving the fellow flabbergasted. He immediately reported our insubordination and the governor arrived to investigate. We heard nothing more about the affair and the warder disappeared. However, it must be said that this incident occurred after December 1, 1938, the great turning point.

  In the middle of January Makedon went off for his interrogation. Gevondi had not yet come back from hospital, and so I was alone. Nine months before isolation had been a great burden; now it was a relief. I could lie down at my ease and think. For six months I had spoken only, and not thought. I considered my situation from every possible angle and came to the conclusion with some satisfaction that I had summed it up correctly. The wave of arrests seemed to have ebbed, for we had seen no fresh prisoners for three weeks. The last big show trial had been that of Piatakov. Only Bukharin was left now.

  Bukharin was the last great figure of the Bolshevik Old Guard. He had been a member of Lenin’s Politburo. He was also the last great Communist theoretician. It was impossible to dispose of a man like him by administrative decision. But why didn’t they bring him to trial? He had been arrested in 1937, and for a year or more everyone had expected the trial. Was he proving awkward and refusing to make fictitious confessions?

  Yagoda was already under arrest. He had been chief of the G.P.U. for many years, and we all hated him. The founder and first head of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovitch Dzherzhinsky, had been hard and ruthless, but no one could deny his absolute honesty of purpose. The nobility of his features was sufficient evidence of his character. His successor Menzhinsky had looked more like a scholar than the all-powerful head of the secret police, and under his regime there were none of those excesses which subsequently marked Yagoda’s years of office, and finally turned the feelings of the masses against the G.P.U. During the days of the civil war many upright and idealistic revolutionaries had entered the service of the Cheka and the masses regarded it as “the sharp sword of the revolution.” From Yagoda’s time onward every decent citizen did his best to avoid contact with the G.P.U. and it came to be held in general abhorrence. Yagoda’s picture rarely appeared in the press. His features were mean and cruel, those of a servile bureaucrat and a merciless killer. He was the first leader of the G.P.U. on a par with Himmler. When he was dismissed after the trial of Zinoviev and subsequently arrested the whole country breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that Stalin had seen through the swindle at last and called Yagoda to book. Thus his successor, Yezhov, had everything in his favor, but it was not long before people were cruelly disappointed. What happened under Yezhov was no longer the cruel suppression of even imaginary enemies of the regime but stark staring lunacy which furiously ripped up all the deep roots that still attached the regime to the people.

  So why had Yagoda been arrested? Would he also be made the center of a show trial? And would the G.P.U. technique prove equally effective against its own head? It was all very difficult to understand. The trial of Bukharin would have been the logical end of the whole process. With his liquidation the Bolshevik Old Guard would have been wiped out to the last man—but one. And that one sat alone and all-powerful in the Kremlin. But what had a man like Yagoda got to do with the Old Bolsheviki? His appearance in the dock through which they had all passed would dishonor their memory.

  But perhaps there would never be a Bukharin trial? Perhaps Stalin had at last realized the terrible damage done to the country by the Great Purge? Perhaps the turning point was near?

  I could find no answers to these questions, and I was tired of going over the matter again and again. I got up and began to put my things in order. There were the fur gloves my mother-in-law had sent me in October. Her supposition had been wrong. I had not been sent away to camp. Idly I drew on the gloves. And suddenly I thought I heard the rustle of paper. Eagerly I cut open the seams with a piece of glass. There it was: a scrap of paper. I unfolded it with trembling fingers and read:

  “Ena is free and in Austria. Vicki too. He has been in Vienna for a month now. We expect you soon, but be careful. Make a halt in Prague on your way back and get in touch with us from there. Because of your arrest everyone knows now that you’re a Communist—including the police.”

  “Vicki” was my wife’s brother. The message excited me tremendously and I walked up and down restlessly. So they were all free and in Vienna—and they were expecting me. Was that just an empty phrase, or did my mother-in-law have some good reason to think that I would be released? Had she been in touch with the Prosecutor as I had been previously on behalf of her daughter? Had he promised her that I would be released? I continued my tramp up and down, up and down. I had no feeling, no inner intimation that I would soon be released. In fact, I was convinced that I would go through the Great Purge to the end. Someday I hoped to be free again, but not yet.

  Makedon was away for three days. When he returned to the cell he was pale and drawn. He said nothing, but I knew that they had broken him. He had confessed, but he was a proud man, and he was unwilling to humiliate himself by telling me. He had been very contemptuous when I had told him how I had temporarily broken down in the summer. They’d never make him confess! They could break every bone in his body, but he still wouldn’t confess! And now he had. He denied it, but it was too obviously true. It was much later that I received confirmation from a prisoner who had been in the same group.

  Mercifully, Gevondi very soon returned. He was in good spirits, and full of jokes and stories. Once again he served as a sort of lightning conductor for the tension between me and Makedon. A few days later we had a newcomer from the brikhalovka, a Ukrainian, who gave us details about the persecution of the national minorities. All the Polish, Bulgarian, German, Greek, Latvian and Armenian clubs in the town had been raided and closed down. About fifteen national minority groups were being harried. All the men were being arrested. Anyone with a German or an Armenian name was liable to sudden arrest, although many Russians had such names, men who had remote German forefathers but who now had not the slightest connection with their antecedents and spoke not a word of German.

  “What about the German Volga Republic?” I asked. “And the Armenian Federal Republic? They can’t arrest the whole population.”

  “No, of course not, but they’ve arrested far more people in the German Volga Republic than they have on an average in Russia. It seems that it’s just the national minorities in Russian and Ukrainian towns they want to liquidate.”

  “Were there many in the brikhalovka?”

  “The place was full of them.”

  “That’s funny. We haven’t seen any new prisoners for weeks.”

  “They keep them there until their examinations are closed and then they’re sent here, either to Wing IV or to the mass cells in Wing II.”

  The Kholodnaya Gora prison consisted of eight separate buildings. Our block was Wing II.

  “What are they charged with?”

  “Oh, the same old thing: espionage and so on, and in their case separatist agitation in favor of unification with their capitalist fatherlands.”

  “But how can Volga Germans be united with Nazi Germany?”

  “Search me! In any case, I didn’t meet any Volga Germans, but quite a lot of German colonists from Dniepropetrovsk. The G.P.U. waited until the harvest was in and then one Sunday they swooped down and arrested about
a quarter of the men. That went on every Sunday until no one was left. The women were sent to ‘voluntary colonization’ in Siberia and the children were taken to the Northern Caucasus, where they are given Russian names and brought up as Russians. Their parents will never see or hear of them again, and when the kids grow up they won’t even know they were once Germans.”

  About a year later I was put into a mass cell in which there were two hundred and sixty prisoners from twenty-two different nationalities, and I was able to see for myself that the Ukrainian had not been lying. The minority groups in the Russian towns had been ruthlessly liquidated.

  Somewhere in North Russia in the neighborhood of the Urals lived a small tribe that was ethnically related to the Finns. For the moment I cannot recall its name. Its language, too, belonged to the Finnish-Ugrian group. Only professional ethnologists know anything about that, of course, but somehow or other the G.P.U. must have discovered the sinister facts, and they thereupon arrested the unfortunate tribesmen and forced them to confess they had agitated for the separation of their villages from the Soviet Union and their unification with Finland. The fact that there was a six-hundred-mile stretch of Russia between the home of these wretched peasants and the Finnish frontier didn’t seem to matter.

  In the same cell I met Greeks from Taganrog who had allegedly conspired to unite their overseas home with capitalist Greece; and Bulgarian gardeners who had feloniously desired to join up part of the Ukraine with Bulgaria. The minorities in the Far East were similarly accused of wanting to unite their districts with Japan, China or Manchukuo. In the Caucasus it was with Persia or Turkey. In Central Asia it was Afghanistan, and so on. The G.P.U. needed separatist movements, and it created them without bothering much about the geographical situation or the history of the small peoples involved. It invented irredentism among primitive minorities which were quite unaware of their ethnic relationship to other peoples.