I remained in the sick bay for two weeks. When I returned to the cell the general conviction that the great change was very near had become a certainty. All interrogations had ceased and the whole cell was waiting in feverish excitement for what was to come next.
CHAPTER 14—The Great Change
ON DECEMBER 12, 1938, ANOTHER PRISONER AND I WERE ALLOWED TO go to the lavatory out of the usual turn. A warder had just used it before us and my companion noticed a piece of newspaper which had not been flushed away. He carefully fished it up and spread it out. At first we were disappointed to discover that it was á piece torn out of a newspaper for children, but we read it all closely and came to a short item which put us in a state of tremendous excitement. It read:
“The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet has granted the request of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Nikolai Ivanovitch Yezhov, to be allowed to resign his office. He will take over the People’s Commissariat for Inland Water Transport.”
My friend carefully folded up the precious scrap of paper. We looked at each other significantly. We were too impressed for words; the great change had come at last.
We decided not to tell the whole cell at once for fear the excitement would bring down the warders on us and provoke investigations as to the source of the news, so at first we told the starosta and one or two of the more important members of the cell. Of course, it was impossible to keep the secret for long and during the course of the next few hours the whole cell knew, but at least we had attained our object; there was no mass outburst, though the cell was humming with the news.
“Do you think Yezhov will last long as Commissar for Inland Water Transport?” I asked Braude.
“Not a chance,” he replied. “In a couple of months. Now it will all be over. Yezhov has resigned compulsorily. The next step will be leaving his new Commissariat; then he will leave the Politburo; then the Central Committee, and finally this world. He’s done his job and done it far too well. Stalin’s got no further use for him. Not many people will mourn for him, and we certainly shan’t.”
“What do you think will happen to us?”
“Some of us will be released just to make it clear that there has been a change; the remainder will go off to the camps to serve their sentences just the same.”
“What will be their criterion?”
“Chance. People are always trying to explain things by fixed laws. When you’ve looked behind the scenes as I have you know that blind chance rules a man’s life in this country of ours.”
Braude was less excited than anyone at the news. He had expected it for a long time and its coming gave him no particular pleasure. He felt it would make no difference to him.
In the next few days a number of prisoners were brought up to us from the death cells in the basement. Such prisoners enjoyed certain privileges: they received a cigarette ration and rather better food. Every day at midnight a few of them would be taken away, and they were never heard of again. When the greater number of those who were in the death cells were brought up to the ordinary cells again in December, 1938, many of the prisoners recognized friends whom they had given up for dead. It was interesting to observe what types had been singled out for death. Our starosta had put one of them next to me.
He was an old worker of proletarian stock and not one of the newer-type workers from the villages. His kind were already rare. His father before him had been a metal turner. For fifteen years he had worked in a locomotive factory. One day something had gone wrong with a machine. Just exactly what it was I can no longer remember. Sufficient to say that he was arrested and charged with having carried out a diversionary act.
He belonged to the old school, and he had grown up in patriarchal days. He reminded you of peasants and monks such as appear in the pages of Dostoevsky. By old tradition it was quite impossible for him to contradict “his betters,” and the examiner was one of “his betters” now. The particular examiner must have been an unusual brute who exploited the gentleness and defenselessness of the old worker ruthlessly and persuaded him to sign a deposition which led to the death sentence. He came before a tribunal and he made no attempt to recant his false confessions. In fact, he did nothing but what he was told to do. But for a short interruption during the revolution, he had done the same work practically all his life. Any personal initiative was quite beyond him. Slowly and brokenly he told me his story. They had hardly beaten him at all, but just exploited his childlike faith in “the authorities,” who, he was quite sure, would do everything properly. Yezhov’s “resignation” saved his life, though he did not seem to realize that anything had changed. He was still humbly resigned to his fate and he could not believe that any struggle or any effort could possibly make any difference to it.
We now had five or six G.P.U. officers in the cell, but I was unable to get anything of importance out of any of them. Eingorn still considered himself under the obligation of discipline. Lisovsky, who was a highly educated man, would speak only about science and art. He was horribly nervous and feared all the time he might say something he would later have cause to regret. As I made mistakes in written Russian I once asked him to write a petition for me. He refused at first, but then he said he would dictate it. He was afraid that something in his handwriting might come into my dossier.
Our cell now lived its own life completely cut off from the rest of the world. We played chess and we held interminable discussions. In the morning there were scientific lectures and in the evening there were stories. Before we settled down for the night a well-known singer sang us folk songs. He sang softly, because it was forbidden to sing, but he sang very beautifully. Many of the men would join in, often with tears in their eyes.
To our surprise interrogations began again toward the end of December. We waited in great excitement for the first men to come back from the brikhalovka.
“Is Yezhov’s picture still up?” we wanted to know.
“Just as it was before.”
But the atmosphere at the interrogations was different. There were no blows, and some of the accused plucked up courage enough to withdraw their confessions. The examiners recorded their recantations without objection and asked them why they had formerly confessed. Many of the prisoners were afraid to give the real reason. They did not dare to accuse the G.P.U. of having broken the law by beating prisoners. But in the end they all came out with it. The examiners showed no indignation and just wrote down “physical pressure” as the reason without going into details. Almost all the remaining prisoners now demanded pen and paper in order to write retractions. After that the first question put to a prisoner returning from the brikhalovka was not “Have you confessed yet?” but “Have you recanted yet?”
Some of the prisoners were still cautious. They were not at all sure that everything was in order and they preferred to wait a little and see what happened.
At the end of December another exciting item of news reached us, this time through a prisoner who had come from Kiev. It was the first report of the sensational trial of the G.P.U. chief of the Moldavian Republic and four of his examiners for having forced innocent men to confess. They, too, had confessed, of course, and it appeared that they had acted as they had done in the interests of a counterrevolutionary organization to stir up the masses against the Government.{14}
Why were these four in particular shot? They had done no more than every other examiner from Arkhangelsk to Odessa and from the Pacific to the Polish frontier had been doing. Why did they not tell their judges who had instigated their actions? Why didn’t they tell their judges what Braude had told me?
We did not think a great deal about this riddle at the time. After all, it was only a variant of the attitude of the accused in the big Moscow show trials. And for us the Tiraspol trial was a signal: Stalin announced through the judges at the trial that the Great Purge was now at an end. Six years previously he had announced the end of his suicidal agrarian policy almost as demonstratively. Eleven million peasants had already starved by then
. Now eight million innocents were in the Arctic camps. They would never return.
Once again we began to discuss the meaning of it all. Some still thought it was the need for labor power in the Far North. Others thought that the leaders of the opposition had committed some great offense and the people had to suffer for it as usual. But very few were stupid enough to believe in the guilt of the accused at the big show trials, though quite a lot pretended to; they were still afraid of G.P.U. spies in the cell.
Our new starosta—the young Greek officer had already gone off to a camp to serve his sentence—a fair-haired Russian in the early thirties, put the matter very simply.
“They have arrested a vast number of people quite indiscriminately and without any political motive, and now they don’t even know what to do with them.”
Many of the prisoners were still racking their brains over the confessions they had been compelled to make. As one said:
“If they really thought we were politically dangerous they could have just sent us off to Siberia, and that would have been the end of it. But why did they want us to make idiotic confessions which not a soul, including themselves, takes seriously? If it’s labor power they need then all they had to do was just to send us there. Why all these trimmings? Think of what a hundred thousand examiners cost and all the guards and warders doing nothing but keep good workers away from their jobs for months.”
Those of us who analyzed the happenings carefully soon recognized the iron logic of the process. If the G.P.U. wished to eliminate eight million people then it had no other way of doing it than the way it had chosen. The technique of the process of elimination forced the G.P.U. to extort fictitious confessions in order to obtain further candidates for arrest. The chain could not be permitted to break. Of course, Stalin need never have adopted the Great Purge at all. The country would then have been healthier and happier. The Red Army would have retained its officers and on the outbreak of war it would have marched direct to Berlin instead of taking the detour via Stalingrad. But Stalin is a master of the detour. On the way to the reconstruction of Soviet agriculture lay the bodies of eleven million peasants. On the way to the overthrow of German fascism lay the bodies of those done to death in Russian concentration camps.
Many prisoners came to us from prisons in the provinces, and they told us that some of their fellow prisoners had been released in January. The beatings had also ceased there. Many of them believed hopefully that the G.P.U. was now preparing for mass releases, but unfortunately toward the end of January one of the biggest batches ever to leave the Kholodnaya Gora was sent off to the camps.
I also had a feeling that my period of hibernation would soon come to an end. Like many nonreligious people, I am rather superstitious, and there is nothing like a spell in prison to make a man more so. Most prisoners are. Six months previously I had worked out by means of a dice game that I should be called out for examination again on February 15, 1939. I told my friends the result of my consultation of the oracle, and of course they laughed. The last time I had been called out was on October 4, 1937, nearly eighteen months previously, and they were quite sure I should never be called out again.
The place on my right was now occupied by a young man named Klix. Although, as his name indicated, he was of German descent, he couldn’t speak a word of German. During the civil war he had lost both his parents and drifted into a band of bezprizhornye, and with them he had wandered all over the Soviet Union. In the winter they went to the southern Caucasus, where it was not so cold, and in summer they returned to Moscow and Leningrad. It was very interesting that such a life had not corrupted him. He was a fundamentally decent youngster. In the end his longing to learn had caused him to give himself up. He had been put into a home for orphaned children, and then trained as an architect. His one longing now was to see the Renaissance buildings of Italy. Having seen them myself, I was able to talk to him about them and he would listen with rapt attention for as long as I could still find something more to say about them. He proved a very apt and grateful pupil and at the same time a useful friend. He was a big, strong lad, and his friendship made the Armenians much less ready to pick quarrels with me.
At the end of February he was called out for interrogation, and when he returned he told me that the examiner had promised to release him soon. I gave him a message for Lena instructing her to let him have all my books. I don’t know what happened to him and whether he ever got them.
My neighbor on the left was Baron Ungern, a former Tsarist colonel. He was a military engineer, and it was said that he had planned the defenses of Port Arthur. He was an unusually well-educated and cultured man, and he had traveled all over the world and been received at the courts of Indian princes. Although he was of the old school, he had accepted the Soviet regime and been perfectly loyal to it. After the civil war he had remained attached to the Military Academy. He was one of those very rare prisoners who belonged to the old ruling class. Generally speaking, the Great Purge affected only Soviet supporters; the Russian monarchists were spared. In those days former aristocrats were no longer persecuted. In all my long and wide experience of prisoners I never came across one who had been a White.
On February 15, 1939—to the very day—the warder opened the hatch and shouted:
“Weissberg! Interrogation!”
The whole cell fell silent in awe. It was for me. My prophecy had come true. As a fundamentally skeptical man I was quite as deeply impressed as the others. I think the explanation is that my examiner heard of my repeated prophecy from a spy in the cell and thought he’d have a little joke with us all. I was taken into the inner prison. Things had changed there too. The old basement cells of the brikhalovka in which prisoners waiting for interrogation had been kept were no longer in use. Now there was a large waiting room on each floor for prisoners awaiting examination. I wondered whether Houtermanns might still be on the same floor, and in the lavatory I scratched his nickname “Fisel,” in an inconspicuous place. It was highly improbable that the G.P.U. was acquainted with it. But I had forgotten that this was not the Kholodnaya Gora with its sociability, but the much stricter inner prison of the G.P.U. A warder carefully examined the lavatory after we had left and found the inscription. He came to us angrily.
“Who scratched a word on the wall?” he demanded.
No one answered.
“Very well,” he declared, “no bread ration for any of you until the culprit owns up.”
I was still considering what to do when a prisoner gave me away. I was startled. Such a thing would have been impossible in the Kholodnaya Gora. It was no use denying what I had done and I meekly followed the warder, who took me off to the commandant. On the way I cudgeled my brains to think of some harmless explanation.
“Who is Fisel?” the commandant barked.
“It’s not anyone really.”
“Don’t tell lies. Unless you tell me at once who Fisel is I shall report you to the examiner and you’ll get ten days in the punishment cell along with our rats.”
“Citizen Commandant, you won’t find any such name in your lists. There’s no such person. It isn’t a name at all.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“Well, you see, in prison I’ve become a very superstitious man. I’ve got five lucky letters: f, i, s, e, and 1, and whenever I come to a new place I always write them down somewhere as a charm against the evil eye.”
The explanation was not so incredible for Russians as it may sound to Western ears, but the commandant was still suspicious and he went through his lists just in case. Finally I managed to convince him, but he was still angry.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he declared in a tone of moral indignation. “A man like you with a scientific training, and you believe in rubbish of that sort.”
I got off scot free.
The subsequent examination was of no significance at all. None of the examiners who had formerly dealt with my case were there. Most of them had been arrested. I
was brought before a man whose name I had never even heard. He inquired calmly whether I had changed my attitude in the meantime and would now like to confess. When I told him that I hadn’t and wouldn’t he was not in the least disturbed, and he just made a note of it. After that he paid no further attention to me. He even went out of the room and left me alone, something that would formerly have been impossible. It struck me that with all this new atmosphere I might be able to get some of my money.
“Citizen Examiner,” I began, “I have had no money in my prison account now for several months, and I’m hungry all the time because I can’t buy anything on lavochka day. But I have ten thousand rubles to my credit in the Kharkov Savings Bank. I wonder if you could arrange to have a few hundred rubles transferred.”
“I’ll have to think it over.”
That evening Klix came into our temporary cell. In the night after he had been interrogated he woke me up.
“Alexander Semyonovitch, I think I’m going to be released in the morning. The examiner said as much. Is there anything you’d like to say to me?”
“Only to wish you all the best of luck. Give Lena my greetings.” “Is that all?”
“Well, you can ask her to send me some money.”
“Supposing she hasn’t got any to send? She can’t get money out of your account without your signature.”
“A friend of mine has power of attorney over it.”
“Supposing he’s not there anymore. I’ll tell you what, as soon as I can earn some money I’ll send you some.”
And the lad kept his word. When I was in Kiev prison fifty rubles was paid into my prison account by an unknown benefactor. Lena lived in very straitened circumstances and had to keep her child. She hadn’t fifty rubles to spare.
I was sent back from the brikhalovka to the Kholodnaya Gora as wise as when I went there. I waited a few days wondering what was going to happen, and then I was called out “with things.” Down below I was locked into a kind of elongated rabbit hutch. This form of isolation for prisoners who had to be kept waiting had become very popular. I had to stand in this cupboard-like affair for four hours. When I was finally let out I was taken through a different door, across a small courtyard and into the prison offices. We went through two rooms and I was left alone in a third sitting at a desk and wondering what was going to happen to me. Was I going to be released? I didn’t want to think about that much in order not to suffer the shock of disappointment, but it looked like it. If the long-awaited day had come at last I really wasn’t very excited about it. Where should I go if they did release me? Leipunsky was in prison, and Houtermanns as well. I wondered whether Martin Ruhemann was still in the Soviet Union. Could I work in the Institute again after all that had happened?
The Accused Page 55