The Accused

by Alexander Weissberg

  I thought the matter over. It was quite true. It was astonishing how few intermediate links there were between the masses and the center of all power.

  “Yes, I see what you mean, but what has it got to do with our problem: was there an order to start beating up prisoners or was there not?”

  “Must I say everything to you in words of not more than two syllables, Alexander Semyonovitch? Can’t you think things out for yourself?”

  “I don’t want to form theories; I want to know.”

  “How long have you been in Russia?”

  “Eight years, but I’ve never had anything to do with such matters.”

  “So much the worse for you. You might very well have been arrested much earlier. We don’t talk about such things openly in Russia. You drop hints and say things in a roundabout fashion, and the other fellow draws his own conclusions. That was the way certain instructions were passed on to us.”

  “Explain it all to me clearly from beginning to end. Please.”

  “Right. Now, at least once a week I saw the head of the Kharkov N.K.V.D. and he went to Moscow at least once every two months to see Yezhov. The heads of all the districts meet in Moscow to receive instructions from the Commissar, namely Yezhov. They were also in touch with him on a direct line if they wanted to speak to him about anything in between their meetings. Yezhov, of course, was in constant touch with Stalin. Now you see what I mean when I say that there were only two men between me and Stalin? If an idea of his came to me along this channel then I had to carry it out.”

  “Exactly how did it come about with the beatings?”

  “That I can’t exactly tell you. I wasn’t there when Stalin and Yezhov discussed it, but I can imagine how it happened. So can you without forcing me to enter into a highly dangerous discussion. What are you, by the way?”

  “I’m a physicist.”

  “I don’t mean what your profession is. I want to know what organization you belong to here.”

  “I don’t belong to any organization.”

  “Well, yes, I know there aren’t any organizations, but what are you accused of?”

  “I’m supposed to be a Bukharinist.”

  “All right, now imagine that one day Stalin calls Yezhov and suggests that inquiries ought to be instituted to discover whether any connections exist between the former followers of Bukharin and the German Gestapo. Yezhov immediately summons all the district chiefs and says: ‘We must uncover the connections between the Bukharinists and the German Gestapo.’ Not quite what Stalin said; just a little alteration. But you can see what a lot it means. In all probability Stalin reckoned in the first place that Yezhov would hot up his instructions before passing them on. Right, now all the district chiefs go back and call us together. There’s no written order, but the instructions sound something like this: ‘We must take the most energetic measures possible to uncover the connections between the Bukharinists and the German Gestapo.’ It is left to us to imagine what he means by ‘the most energetic measures.’ Now, not one of you would be prepared to admit that he was an agent of the Gestapo until he was beaten black and blue first. One of the examiners finds he’s not making any progress in his efforts ‘to uncover the connections between the Bukharinists and the German Gestapo’ and so he begins to get rough. And that’s how it started. Whether the first one to start had direct instructions from his chief, I don’t know. I certainly didn’t receive any, but I and the others saw that when the beatings started the head didn’t protest and say it was against the law, and as we couldn’t get our confessions any other way we all joined in. As long as we didn’t beat anyone to death it was all right. It all started in the second half of August. Naturally, you and other outsiders think there must have been a written order from above, but there wasn’t. All the beatings will have ceased within a couple of months from now at the outside. And there won’t be any order, because that would be admitting that the N.K.V.D. beats up its prisoners, and that would never do.”

  “Whom did you first start arresting as Bukharinists?”

  ‘We had lists of the former members of the opposition. With the Trotskyists it was easy; they came into the open in 1926 and 1927, and so, of course, they were on our lists. We arrested them all in 1936 and put pressure on them to make them tell us the names of others. It was more difficult with the Bukharinists. They had been more careful but quite a lot of people protested against the Party policy at the time of the collectivization, particularly when the famine started. Everything they said was noted down, and they all counted as Bukharinists for us. We arrested them all, and what happened after that you can imagine. They capitulated and named everyone who sympathized with them. Every new man we arrest gives us other men to be arrested, and so it goes on, the snowball system. But it will stop soon.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Why are you so positive?”

  “Well, there have been many reasons for at least six months, but recently things have happened which I had been expecting for a long time, and that for me were a sign that the end must be near.”

  “What, for example?”

  “They’ve started to arrest us. Things have already gone so far that half the urban populations are down in our lists for something or other. They can’t all be arrested, and there’s no particular reason to take one rather than the other. Formerly people belonged to this, that or the other category of persons to be liquidated; for example, national minority groups, former members of the opposition, Old Bolsheviki and former Red partisans. They’ve all been attended to for a year or more now. And if we started to arrest all the people who’ve been denounced by those we’ve already arrested, the towns would be depopulated. They realize that up above, and now they’re beginning to arrest us. We’re the last apparatus to catch it. I’ve known all along that it would come, and now it has come. It’s the beginning of the end.”

  It had not been easy to get him to speak so freely, and I listened with intense interest. He was a strange man. He felt not the slightest remorse for what he had done. For him everything that had happened was something automatic. As he said, the wheels can’t refuse to turn when the motor starts up. In his opinion the cause of all the trouble lay back fifteen years, when he was still a youngster. “If certain people had been arrested in 1924 after the death of Lenin, none of us need be here now. And there weren’t more than half a dozen then. Now nine million people have been arrested on account of that omission.” For himself he was fatalistic; he was perfectly certain that he would be shot. But what he said raised my hopes very high indeed and filled me with a feeling of jubilation. Things would soon improve, and freedom seemed very close at hand.

  Everything that happened after this I interpreted in the light of what he had said. For instance, one day we were all photographed and had our fingerprints taken. Aha! I said, they are going to make out passes for us before we are released. On another occasion we all had to go to the dentist. Up to then no one had bothered about the condition of our teeth. Now because we were soon going to be released they were to be put in order. And then there were minor alleviations of the prison regime which all seemed to point in the same direction.

  The life in our cell was intellectually interesting but physically very cramped. If someone wanted to go to the “Parasha” at night he had to pick his way carefully over twenty recumbent men. We had to lie on our sides so close together that no one could have put a hand between us. The man who had to attend to his natural needs had to crawl on all fours. And when it got cold in December and we were all covered up the journey was a dreadful business. One was constantly treading on sleeping men, and they would wake up irritably and curse him. Sometimes this led to fights which woke up the whole cell. Finally things got so bad that something or other had to be done about it. We decided to ask the night warder to wake the whole cell every two hours. Those who wanted to use the “Parasha” could then do so, and at the order of our starosta we all turned over and lay
with our faces in the opposite direction. In this way we settled two problems at once, because it was impossible to lie on one’s side on the hard floor for more than about two hours at a time without developing aches and pains.

  About this time I fell ill. My teeth became loose and very painful abscesses began to form on my lower body. I could no longer lie on my side and the starosta arranged for me to have a little more room so that I could lie on my back. Our starosta was a young Greek, a captain in the Red Army, and he looked after our interests with great conscientiousness. He spoke to the doctor, but apparently the sick bay was full. My condition worsened so I went on hunger strike, and immediately room was found for me. It reminded me of our hunger strike which had failed six months before. This time six hours had been enough to win a victory.

  In the sick bay there were a lot of criminal prisoners, including some who had come back from the camps. Through talking to them I learned something about the life there. There were also a number of men who belonged to a queer sect called “The Nameless” or “The Slaves of God.” They came from somewhere in the west, from near Shepetovka, I believe. Their religious views made them unwilling to take family names. In Tsarist days and in the first years of the revolution they had been left in peace as harmless. However, in 1933 the system of domestic passports was introduced, and for a passport you need a family name, so the Soviet authorities demanded that they should adopt names. They refused. For them all evil began with naming. The Devil had a name. God had no name. All they used was a Christian name preceded by the general appellation “Slave of God.” There were two of these sectarians in the sick bay while I was there: “Slave of God Ivan” and “Slave of God Yosip.” They were mildmannered men of benevolent character, but like all their fellows they categorically refused to adopt family names. In the end the local district Soviet had issued each of them with a passport made out in a name chosen by the authorities. The obstinate “Slaves of God” replied by destroying the passports. When the Great Purge came they were all arrested. Some of them had already fled to the towns, to Kharkov and Kiev, but as they still refused to adopt family names there it was very easy for the G.P.U. to find them. In prison they refused to take any notice of orders given to them in the names the authorities had invented for them, and the warders had to call them “Slave of God Ivan” or “Slave of God Yosip” and so on, if they hoped for any attention.

  There were also quite a number of so-called bezprizhornye in the sick bay. These were children who had been orphaned and become waifs and strays. The G.P.U. picked them up on the streets. Some of them were sent to rehabilitation and educational training centers, but most of them landed in prison and in the prison camps. A new law had been promulgated on April 7, 1935, permitting the execution of children over the age of twelve, and it was often used by the G.P.U. against these bezprizhornye. There was a nine-year-old boy in my ward, but he really looked very much younger, though not in his face, which was that of a wrinkled old man. He had specialized in stealing bicycles. How he was ever able to reach the pedals with his short legs is a mystery to me. He sang grossly indecent songs with gusto, and he defended what he considered to be his rights with great vigor. It was even dangerous to fall out with him.

  During my stay in the sick bay I learned how to get along with criminals. To stand on your rights is quite hopeless, and it is absolutely impossible to prevent theft—unless you make common cause with them against the politicals. However, they have their own code of honor and once they have been bought off, the stealing stops. In prison they were not a danger, because they enjoyed no special privileges. Apart from their presence in the sick bay they were usually kept strictly isolated from the politicals. They were the only ones who were allowed to take part in the administration of the prison, and they worked in the kitchen and in the baths.

  Most of the criminals who had been in the camps looked quite well, and according to them it was much better there than in prison. For one thing, the food was better, and for another you could earn money and buy food to supplement the rations. In some of the camps, it appeared, there really were movies and theaters, and prisoners were even employed at their own jobs. On the whole we obtained a reasonably favorable picture of our future lives in the big camps. Perhaps that was the intention of the G.P.U. when it permitted contact between these men and the politicals. When, about a year later, I came into contact with German politicals who had been in the camps their version was very much less rosy.

  On his rounds the prison doctor really treated me with care and attention and gave me quite a lot of his time. That was another thing which would have been impossible six months earlier. It was another indication that things had changed to some extent.

  While I was in the sick bay a sad piece of news reached me. A man whom I had greatly liked and respected, Vladimir Josipovitch Dubrovsky, the Director of the Communal Bank in Kharkov, had suffered a heart attack at his first interrogation and died. I had had a great deal to do with him outside. The credits granted us for the building of one research plant had come through his bank. The control of bank credits was very strict. It was the duty of the bank not merely to hold the funds for us but to see that they were subsequently usefully expended and that the amount granted was not exceeded. If the banks had worked strictly according to rule all building operations would have come to a standstill. Dubrovsky was not only a Communist but also a highly intelligent man, and the intentions of the law meant more to him than the letter. He always found a way out of our difficulties.

  The following incident was typical. Our pumping station, on which the punctual starting up of the whole station depended, was finished except that the pumps needed caulking material, which cost a mere nothing—a few hundred rubles. It was easy enough to obtain on the free market, but the law forbade us to buy anything from that source. We had to wait until the People’s Commissariat granted our quota. If the factories in question fulfilled their production plans, and if we were lucky, we should then be able to buy the material at State-fixed “hard” prices. On the free market the prices were several times higher.

  In the autumn of 1936 when we wanted to start up the pumping station, our quota of caulking material was promised only for the second quarter of 1937. That six months’ delay meant a tremendous loss for the State, but the bank was not prepared to let us have the few hundred rubles we needed to buy the stuff on the free market, where all transactions were in cash. The bank provided me with cash only for two purposes: for paying wages and for meeting the expenses of representatives who had to go to Moscow, etc. All other expenses were met by transfer. The amount in question was ridiculously small and my budget ran into millions, but the bank official steadfastly refused to let me have the four hundred rubles I required. I asked to see the Director.

  Dubrovsky received me in a very friendly, almost a fatherly fashion. He was anything but a bureaucrat, and I explained the difficulty.

  “Alexander Semyonovitch,” he then began, “I’ve always told you that you’ll end up in prison if you have anything to do with building in our country. Everyone who has anything to do with building ends up there ultimately. Either they break the law or the building work has to stop. It’s difficult for them to find the golden mean: a little law-breaking and a lot of building. Most of them do the contrary: a lot of law-breaking and very little building.”

  “But what am I to do, Comrade Dubrovsky? If I can’t get hold of the four hundred rubles I need, the pumps can’t start up. The losses in that case stand in no relation to the few hundred rubles.”

  “Well, I can’t give you any cash, but I can give you a tip. Have you got a good Snabshenez?{13} And has he earned a premium?”

  “I’ve got several,” I replied. “Now there’s Frumkin in particular. He’s a good man and he’s never had a premium. I was thinking of giving him one.”

  “How much were you going to give him?”

  “Six hundred rubles, a month’s wages.”

  “Give him nine hundred rubles. The b
alance you’ll get from me. I can’t let you have any cash for purchases on the free market, but if the material bought that way costs more than in the State price lists I’ll close my eyes to it. I know it costs more that way, but I don’t want to know. You understand? You bring me the bill made out at State prices,’ and your Snabshenez will pay the balance out of the surplus on his premium. We’ll both be breaking the law, but only half each.”

  I thanked him and he patted me on the shoulder:

  “Alexander Semyonovitch, it won’t help you in the least: you’ll end up in prison just the same. But at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve carried a good job through to the end. You must invite me to the opening of the station. I’d like to see what we’re getting for all that money.”

  I promised to do so, but I was unable to keep my promise. Shortly before the opening I was arrested—not for having exceeded my budget and not for bad work on the job, but for “having plotted to kill Stalin and Voroshilov” with the object of “restoring capitalism.”

  Dubrovsky’s turn came too. He was already an old man and he had often been honored. During the civil war, when he was in his forties, he had led a group of Red Partisans. He went to prison with all the other Red Partisans. Despite everything that had gone before he was not morally prepared for what happened to him. When the examiner denounced him as an agent of the Gestapo at his first interrogation the indignant old man, who was no longer in very good health, collapsed and died of heart failure.