The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  “I am an anarchist, and I always have been, but I am not a counterrevolutionary, and I never have been. I have fought and worked for the revolution all my life. But I am an enemy of the state. I am an enemy of all states, including your state. The state and its repressive system are the cause of all social evil. When the state disappears the people will be able to breathe freely for the first time in history.”

  “Don’t be silly, Eisenberg. You can’t get on without a state. That’s logical. What would you do with criminals, for instance?”

  “Crime will disappear with the state.”

  They could do nothing with him. As I see things his outlook was wrong, but he clung to it as the most important thing in life. He was the only one among the twelve thousand of us who fought for an idea. The rest of us were just unfortunate victims of oppression. He was the one fighter against oppression.

  “Someday truth will triumph,” he would say again and again to his cellmates. “Our sufferings will not be in vain.”

  It was he who won the unequal struggle. He survived the record “conveyer” without confessing. After thirty-one days and nights of it he had them beaten. They broke off the examination and sent him to Moscow, it was said, to a lunatic asylum.

  During this period there was more and more talk about the coming change. It was not only our own intolerable conditions and the overcrowded state of the prisons which encouraged the idea, but also reports from outside. For the first time there were public protests. The wives of arrested railwaymen went to Kaganovitch on behalf of their husbands. Petitions swamped the Secretariat of the Party, the office of the Public Prosecutor and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Of course, no one accused the G.P.U. of arresting innocent men. The petitions always spoke of regrettable errors. But they came in on such a scale that they represented a veritable protest demonstration. Many factories had no engineers or other technicians left at all. Hopeless confusion reigned everywhere. The continuity of direction and leadership was broken. Almost all the highest officers of the Red Army were under arrest. Workers went to work with a sack of dried bread quite prepared to be arrested at any time. The spirit throughout the country had sunk to the lowest depths of depression, and some inkling of it must have reached our rulers. Even the highest officials had some unofficial relationships with the masses. The wives of Commissars had their servants and their hair-dressers. The Commissars had their chauffeurs. And then, even they were not immune. Important officials were constantly being arrested, and no one could be quite certain that his turn would not come sooner or later. Even the members of the Holy of Holies, the Politburo, were not immune, as witness the fate of Chubar, Postishev, Eikhe and Kossior. Tension rose steadily until even under the unexampled totalitarian dictatorship of the G.P.U. an explosion threatened. The economic system stagnated. No one dared take responsibility for anything. Everyone kept himself as far as possible to himself and avoided contact with others. In everything they did managers and engineers tried to protect themselves from the G.P.U. with stacks of forms and documents, spreading the responsibility around until finally no one knew who was responsible. Production was stifled in forms. New prisoners told us that the despairing wives of arrested men had often gathered in front of the prison gates in the provinces and before the offices of the local prosecutors. We all had the feeling that it could not go on much longer.

  Stalin himself must have felt the general mood through a dozen and one channels. He had ordered the Great Purge and Yezhov was his tool, but he could hardly have foreseen the lengths to which it would go. Yezhov had carried out his instructions with such zeal that he had brought the whole country to the verge of ruin. Stalin had once recognized unpalatable truth at the eleventh hour. The situation was just as critical now. When would he do so again?

  After two and a half months in our oven cell I was exhausted. When we were taken out to exercise I sat down on the ground and just breathed in the fresh air. The warder made no attempt to interfere with me. As the oldest inhabitant I was treated with a certain undefined consideration.

  One night at the beginning of September I was lying on the upper bed unable to sleep for the heat. With my handkerchief I tried to fan up some of the cooler—or not so hot—air from below in order to bring the motionless air under the cell vault into circulation, but the men below protested because it sent hotter air down to them. I had the privilege of a bed to myself on condition that I stood the extra heat, they said. It was fair enough and so I stopped my feeble efforts and turned my face to the wall in despair.

  Former inmates of the cell had scratched their names, the date of their arrival and the date on which they had left on the wall. All the dates were prior to 1936. Vaguely I wondered how they had managed to scratch in the dates of their departure. It usually came without warning. The warder came to fetch you and stood watching you while you packed your few miserable things together.

  It was midnight and I lay there thinking over the problem. I decided to immortalize myself, so I took a fragment of glass which I kept under the pillow and carefully scratched my name on the wall. Just as I finished, the hatch opened and the voice of the warder sounded.

  “Letter W.”

  My name began with W, but I took no notice. I had not been taken out for interrogation for over a year, and I felt quite certain they would not bother me again until the great change.

  The two other prisoners whose names began with W got up and went over to the hatch to see which of them was wanted, but the warder motioned them away and pointed to me.

  “Me!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “They want me for an examination?”

  “With your things,” he said.

  My heart gave a sudden lurch. “With things.” That meant camp—or freedom? No, it might just mean a change of cell. I got down and began to collect my few things.

  The others were all awake and watching me with interest. That I should be called was sensational. I said good-by to all of them. As cell starosta I had often had to settle their conflicts, and decide in favor of one rather than the other, but I had always tried to be just, and they knew it and they were all on good terms with me. In fact, during the past two months or so of this horrible stifling in the cell my authority had grown. Despite the intolerable conditions in the cell, I left it with mixed feelings; a prisoner fears all change.

  I followed the warder, who led me through a small iron gate into that part of the prison where the mass cells were situated. We went down four flights of steps to the ground floor and then he unlocked Cell No. 1. It was empty, and so large that it had five windows along the outside wall. Almost immediately I began to shiver with cold.

  At first I thought I had been put there just to await my further fate, but after about an hour two more prisoners were put in with me, so I took a place for myself in a corner and stretched myself out to rest. The wall was covered with bugs. I squashed a few dozen and then gave it up. There were too many of them.

  During the course of the night over a hundred other prisoners were put into the cell. A new phase of my imprisonment had begun.

  CHAPTER 13—G.P.U. Men in the Cells

  LIFE IN THE MASS CELLS DIFFERED FROM LIFE IN THE SMALLER CELLS as life in the capital differs from life’ in the provinces. All the news we obtained in the mass cells was firsthand. Any change in the examination methods was recorded there at once, because when a cell has two hundred and sixty occupants as Cell No. a next to us had, almost every examiner has at least one prisoner in it. The five months I spent in the mass cells in Kholodnaya Gora remain in my memory as by far the most tolerable and interesting phase of my three years of imprisonment.

  None of us in the cell knew what they intended to do with us and why we had been taken there. Every day about twenty or thirty prisoners went away “with things,” apparently off to the camps to serve their sentences, but our numbers were maintained by constant new arrivals.

  Most of the prisoners were men whose examination was completed. All of them believed that the c
ell was a reception center for men going off to the camps, and therefore each one reckoned that his turn was near. Thus life in the camps was a favorite topic of discussion and every item of information and every rumor was eagerly listened to. Most of them were wishful thinking, and therefore the general picture was not altogether unpleasant: everyone was employed in the camps according to his trade; the amount of work required of prisoners was not excessive; for the leisure hours there were lectures, theatricals and libraries, etc. For every day on which prisoners performed the amount of work expected of them a day’s sentence was remitted; if the amount was exceeded by 25 per cent or more then two days were remitted. In this way men who had been sentenced to ten years were often freed after two and a half years. The whole fantasy was nothing but the eternal tenacity of man’s hope, but I must confess that I was influenced by the general optimism. In part, the information was accurate, but only in part, and the most important point was that it was true only for criminals, and not for politicals. One thing, however, was quite certain: there was no deliberate sadism in the camps. But the climate and the conditions under which prisoners had to exist meant that men who were not tough went under very rapidly unless they were lucky enough to get some special work.

  I remained only a week in Cell No. 1, and then I was removed to Cell No. 4, on the first floor. It was the best cell in Kholodnaya Gora. It had wooden flooring and it was every bit as large as Cell No. 1. Our cell starosta decided that we should all have our own place and keep it. That was fortunate for me, because when he made his decision I had the best place in the cell.

  Although conditions were better than in my old cell, they were far from ideal. Our numbers increased to a hundred and sixty and we all had to lie on our sides on the floor in much the same way as I have already described. We were squashed together, but at least we could breathe and sufficient fresh air came through the five open windows. Every evening at about nine o’clock we settled down to sleep. It took us about a quarter of an hour and caused much squabbling. Everybody was talking excitedly to his neighbor and the result was that in that wing, in which there were twelve such mass cells, there arose a confused roar something like a waterfall. Now I realized the meaning of the dull noise we had always heard about this time in the smaller cells.

  Once I had settled down I began to take stock of my fellow inmates. One thing struck me at once: there were very few Russians or Ukrainians, but all the minorities in Kharkov were represented; twenty-two national groups in all, including Poles, Jews, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Letts, Lithuanians, Finns, Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks, Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Koreans, Hungarians, Tartars, Bashkirs and White Russians.

  The Armenian colony was the largest and numbered over forty. They formed a compact group, cared for nothing but their own interests and were quite prepared to slit anyone else’s throat. I was brought up in a spirit of enlightened internationalism and I hate any kind of national prejudice. I always tried to be just, but these Armenians made it very difficult. There were very decent individuals among them, and they were almost all amusing and shrewd. But most of them had strong antisocial characteristics. They were swindlers and they did not stop at violence: two characteristics which don’t usually go together. As a national minority they were extremely sensitive and they were firmly convinced that everyone else was trying to take advantage of them. Again and again they revolted against the decisions of our cell starosta and generally made life very difficult.

  In the smaller cells each man went up to the hatch and took his own plate of soup. If he found rather more potatoes than usual in his soup that was just his luck and no one could accuse the cell starosta of favoritism, but in a mass cell it was impossible for each prisoner to go to the hatch, take his plate and make his way back to his place safely. During the day we sat on the floor in four long lines, each two lines facing each other for the sake of sociability. At meal times two great boilers were brought in, each holding about seventy quarts. Two assistants of the cell starosta carried them between the lines, halting at convenient points, and doled out the food. The potatoes were at the bottom, so the cell starosta had to keep stirring up the soup with a long-handled ladle. It was hard work for a man weakened by long imprisonment. And it was the Armenians who always made trouble and accused him of unfairness. They insisted noisily that when the soup passed through their ranks the starosta always left the potatoes at the bottom. From time to time things got so bad that we had to elect another starosta. To settle the potato problem we suggested that the Armenians should disperse and sit among the rest of us, but this they refused to do. Whoever was cell starosta, it made no difference, the Armenians remained difficult.

  In my corner I organized a mathematics and physics class. The interested prisoners squeezed up together and the wall served as a blackboard, and in this way I was kept occupied from eleven o’clock to one every day. There were quite a number of well-educated men in the cell, including several engineers, and my example caught on. From six o’clock to eight every evening there were scientific lectures. Later someone or other told stories.

  Russians are very fond of good stories, and in the end the cell decided that those who told them should be rewarded with an extra ladle of soup for every hour they kept the cell amused.

  My knowledge of European literature served me in good stead.

  At first I was not among the storytellers, but then someone wanted to hear German stories. I tried my hand first at short stories: Grillparzer’s “Cloister of Sandomir,” Schnitzler’s “Play at Dawn” and so on. Later on I attempted whole novels. The first one was Kellermann’s The Tunnel. With a little experience I found it quite easy to reconstruct a whole novel in this way, and at the same time I learned something about the author’s job. In any novel there are not more than perhaps half a dozen salient facts to be remembered, and all I had to do was to fill up the gaps between the various climaxes. For the most part the gaps were there in order to increase the tension and lead up to the climax. Thus, if you can remember the main points of a novel you rewrite the novel in your mind as you go along. It didn’t matter very much whether my final version adhered closely to the original or not. I often wondered how far removed my versions were, and later on when I came across a volume of Schnitzler’s short stories in Poland, I dictated my version to a friend who took it down in shorthand. Then I compared the two. My versions were very different. Schnitzler must have turned over in his grave, but my friend, although admitting that they were certainly different, thought them beautiful all the same.

  We were never bored in the mass cells, and there were always a number of very interesting prisoners, talented artists, scientists, high officials and experienced engineers and industrialists. There were experts in almost every sphere. If anything went wrong we never had to wait for the services of a doctor; there were always several in the cell.

  We were all firmly convinced that the great change was not far away. The examiners no longer knocked their prisoners about as brutally as before, there were by no means so many newcomers, and a very important difference, prisoners were no longer called upon to denounce others. Something must already have happened in Moscow.

  We all firmly believed that Yezhov was responsible for the excesses of the Great Purge, though, of course, we knew that he was only Stalin’s tool. However, no one ever mentioned that knowledge officially. All the petitions to Stalin were “to open his eyes.” During the course of 1938, many millions of petitions must have poured into his secretariat. We all wrote them. Only six months before it would have been very difficult to obtain the paper and to make sure that a petition was forwarded once it was written, although a G.P.U. order was prominently exposed assuring us of our right to complain or otherwise get into touch with the Prosecutor and the highest organs of the Party and the Soviets. In those days the G.P.U. had quite deliberately sabotaged the prisoners’ rights. As late as October we had been compelled to fight persistently for permission to write. One prisoner had knocked on the cel
l door continuously, and every time the warder arrived he asked for paper. Finally the warder brought the commandant of the wing along. The prisoner repeated his request.

  “You must ask the examiner.”

  “But I haven’t been called out for interrogation for over three months, Citizen Commandant.”

  “Be patient. Your turn will come.”

  “But I want to write now. There’s nothing in the regulations which says I must first get the examiner’s permission. I have been falsely imprisoned. One day I shall be sent off to a camp, and then it will be too late to write. I want to complain to Comrade Stalin and to Comrade Vishinsky.”

  “I can’t give you any paper.”

  The prisoner managed to get hold of a very small piece of soiled and crumpled-up paper which he flattened out as best he could, and on it he wrote a petition to Stalin. When he had finished he gave it to the warder to forward. A few minutes later the commandant appeared again.

  “Are you mad? You want to send this dirty scrap of paper to Comrade Stalin! Where did you get the pencil from?”

  “I had a stump of pencil but I’ve lost it since in the yard.”

  The commandant ordered a general search of all the prisoners. It was a long job, but at last the stump of pencil was found. The warder destroyed the “petition.” But the prisoner refused to give in. He tore a piece off his shirt, took a small splinter of wood and scratched his arm, then with the blood he wrote another appeal to Stalin on the tail of his shirt and handed this to the warder. The angry commandant appeared again.

  “That’s an anti-Soviet demonstration,” he bellowed. “If I report that you can be shot for it.”

  “Please forward my letter to Stalin, Citizen Commandant. I’m quite prepared to be shot rather than surrender my constitutional rights.”