Committees for the Poor
The pages of Russian history written in ’37 and ’38 contain lyrical as well as tragic lines, and the handwriting of those lines is rather unusual. Butyr Prison is an enormous edifice whose numerous basements, towers and wings are filled to overflowing with prisoners under investigation. It is a devil’s dance of arrests, shipments of prisoners who know neither what they are accused of nor the length of their sentences, of cells packed with prisoners who have not yet perished. In this complicated life a curious tradition has grown up, a tradition that has survived for decades.
The disease of ‘vigilance’, whose seeds were widely sown, had grown into a spy mania and laid hold of the entire country. In the investigators’ offices a sinister, secret meaning was attached to every trifling remark, every slip of the tongue.
The prison authorities’ contribution consisted of forbidding prisoners under investigation to receive any clothing or food packages. Sages of jurisprudence maintained that two French rolls, five apples and a pair of old pants were enough to transmit any text into the prison – even a fragment of Anna Karenina.
Such ‘messages from the free world’ – an invention of the inflamed minds of diligent bureaucrats – were effectively prevented. A regulation was issued that only money could be sent, and it had to be in round figures of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty rubles; thus, numbers could not be used to work out a new ‘alphabet’ of messages.
It would have been simpler and more reliable to forbid anything at all to be sent into the prisons, but this measure was reserved for the investigators. They could, ‘in the interest of the investigation’, forbid anything to be sent to a particular prisoner. There was also a commercial side to the question: Butyr Prison’s commissary or ‘shop’ increased its sales many times over after clothing and food packages were forbidden.
For some reason, the administration could not make up its mind to reject all assistance from relatives and acquaintances, even though they were certain that such an action would cause no protest either within the prison or without.
Russians do not like to bear witness in court about infringements of the ephemeral rights of prisoners under investigation. The witness in a Russian trial is, by tradition, only barely distinguishable from the defendant, and his ‘involvement’ in the matter may serve as a black mark against him in the future. The situation of prisoners under investigation is still worse. They will all eventually serve sentences, for ‘Caesar’s wife is perfect,’ and the Ministry of Internal Affairs does not make mistakes. No one is arrested without due cause, and sentencing is an inevitable sequel to arrest. Whether the prisoner under investigation receives a heavy or a light sentence depends partly on ‘luck’ and partly on a tangled web of factors which include the bedbugs that tormented the investigator on the night before the trial and the voting in the American Congress.
In essence, there is only one way out of those prisons where preliminary investigations are conducted – via the ‘black raven’, the prison bus that takes convicted prisoners to the train station. At the station, prisoners are loaded into freight cars that have been adapted to carry people. From there the innumerable prison cars begin their slow journey, en route to the thousands of ‘labor’ camps.
This doom-laden atmosphere puts its stamp on the conduct of prisoners under investigation. Cheerfulness and bravado are replaced by gloomy pessimism and a weakening of morale. At the interrogations the prisoner struggles with a ghost, a ghost possessing the strength of a giant. The prisoner is accustomed to dealing with reality, but now he must battle with a shadow. But this shadow is a ‘fire that burns, a spear that draws blood’. Everything is terrifyingly real, except the ‘case’ itself. His nerves strained to the breaking-point, the prisoner is crushed in his struggle with fantastic phantoms of incredible stature, and he loses the will to resist. He signs everything the investigator has invented and from that moment himself becomes a figure in the unreal world with which he earlier struggled. He is transformed into a pawn in a terrible, dark, bloody game played out in the investigators’ offices.
‘Where did they take him?’
‘To Lefortovo Prison. To sign.’
Prisoners under investigation know they are doomed. The camps always had more than their share of prisoners under investigation; sentencing in no way exempted the prisoner from all the other articles of the criminal code. They remained ‘in effect’, just as they had outside the prison walls – except that here all the accusations, punishments, and interrogations were still more brazen, still more fantastic in their crudeness.
When clothing and food packages were forbidden in the capital, the ‘outlying districts’ – the camps – introduced a special ration for prisoners under investigation: a mug of water and 300 grams of bread (two-thirds of a pound). These were punishment-cell conditions, and they quickly edged prisoners under investigation closer to their graves. This ‘investigatory ration’ was used to obtain the ‘best evidence of all’ – the accused’s personal confession.
In 1957, Butyr Prison permitted prisoners to receive up to fifty old-style rubles (about five dollars) a month. Anyone with money credited to his account could use it to buy food at the prison ‘shop’. ‘Shop days’ were held once a week, and up to thirteen rubles could be spent on each occasion. If the prisoner possessed more money on his person when he was arrested, it was credited to his account, but he could not spend more than fifty rubles a month. Of course, receipts were issued instead of cash, and the amount remaining was noted by the shop assistant on the back of these receipts in red ink.
Contact with prison authorities and comradely discipline had been maintained from time immemorial by a system of cell leaders elected by the prisoners themselves. Before each ‘shop day’ the prison administration would issue the cell leader a slate tablet and a piece of chalk. The cell leader used the tablet to list all purchases which the inmates of the cell wished to make. Usually the front of the tablet listed all the separate items and the quantity desired by each individual. The total quantities ordered were indicated on the reverse side.
This activity usually took a whole day, since prison life is filled to overflowing with all sorts of events, and in the eyes of the prisoners the scale by which these events are evaluated is one of high seriousness. On the following morning the cell leader would take one or two inmates with him and go to the commissary to collect the purchases. The remainder of the day would pass in sorting out the different food items, weighing and dividing them according to ‘individual orders’.
The prison store boasted a large selection of food: butter, sausage, cheeses, white rolls, cigarettes, cheap tobacco…
Once established, the prison rations never changed. If a prisoner forgot the day of the week, he could recognize it by the smell of the lunch-time soup or the taste of the only dish served for supper. Pea soup was always served for lunch on Mondays, and supper was wheat kasha. On Tuesdays it was millet soup for lunch and pearl-barley kasha for supper. In six months each prison dish was served exactly twenty-five times. The food of Butyr Prison was famed for its variety.
Anyone who had money could spend at least thirteen rubles four times a month to supplement the watery prison soup and pearl barley (referred to as ‘shrapnel’) with something more tasty, more nutritious, more useful.
Prisoners who didn’t have money could not, of course, make any purchases at all. There were always people in the cell – and not just one or two – who did not have a single kopeck. There might be someone from another city who had been arrested on the street and whose arrest was classified as ‘top secret’. His wife would rush from one prison to another, from one police station to another in a vain attempt to learn her husband’s address. She would take a package from one prison to another; if they accepted it, that meant her husband was alive. If they did not accept it, anxious nights awaited her.
Or the man arrested without money might be the head of a family. Immediately after the arrest they would force his wife, children, and relatives to denounce him. By tormenting him with constant interrogations from the moment of arrest, the investigator would attempt to force a ‘confession’ of an act that the man had never committed. As an additional means of intimidation, aside from threats and beatings, the prisoner might be denied money.
Relatives and acquaintances were justifiably afraid to go to the prison with packages. Anyone who insisted on having his package accepted or on a search for the missing person would raise suspicion. Undesirable consequences at work or even arrest could result. Such things happened.
There was yet another type of convict without money. Lyonka was in cell 68. He was seventeen years old and came from the Tumsk region of the Moscow Oblast – in the thirties a very rural area. Lyonka was chubby, had a white face and unhealthy skin that had not known fresh air for a long time. Lyonka felt great in prison. He was fed there as he had never been fed in his entire life. Almost everyone treated him to something from the prison store. Instead of home-grown tobacco, he learned to smoke papirosy – cigarettes attached to a short cardboard mouthpiece. He was delighted by everything – at how interesting it was here and how nice the people were! This illiterate teenager from the Tumsk Region had discovered an entire world. He considered his case to be some sort of game, a kind of craziness, and he couldn’t have cared less about it. His only worry was how to extend for ever his investigation and his life in this prison where there was so much food and everything was so clean and warm.
His case was an amazing one. It was an exact repetition of a Chekhov story titled ‘Evil-Doers’. Lyonka had been unscrewing nuts from railroad ties, had been caught on the spot, and was arrested as a spy under Point 7 of Article 58. Lyonka had never heard of Chekhov’s story but tried to prove to the investigator, just as Chekhov’s protagonist had done, that he didn’t unscrew two nuts in a row, that he ‘understood…’
The investigator was using the Tumsk lad’s testimony to build a case involving some unusual ‘concepts’, the most innocent of which carried the death penalty. But the investigator hadn’t managed to link Lyonka with anyone else, and Lyonka was now spending a second year waiting for the investigator to establish such a link.
Persons who had no money in their personal account at the prison were supposed to be limited to the official ration without any supplementary nourishment. Prison rations are far from stimulating. Even a small amount of variety in the food brightens the prisoner’s life and somehow raises his spirits.
In all probability the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates of the prison ration (as opposed to the ration in camp) were arrived at on the basis of certain theoretical calculations and experimental data. These calculations were probably derived from some ‘scientific’ studies; scientists like to be involved in that sort of work. It is just as probable that in the Moscow Investigatory Prison the quality of food preparation guarantees the living consumer a sufficient number of calories. It is also quite likely that the official sampling of the food by a doctor is not a complete mockery or a formality as it is in the camps. Some old prison doctor might even ask the cook for a second helping of lentils, the dish highest in calories, before searching out the line in the official form where he is to place his signature to approve the menu. The doctor might even joke that the prisoners have no reason to complain about the food – on the grounds that he himself had just finished a bowl with relish. But then, the doctors are given plates of today’s lentils.
No one ever complained about the food in Butyr Prison. It wasn’t that it was particularly good, but that the prisoners had other things to worry about. The most disliked prison dish was boiled beans. Somehow it was prepared in such a singularly unappetizing fashion that it was termed ‘a dish to choke on’. Nevertheless, no one complained even about the beans.
Sausage, butter, sugar, cheese, and fresh rolls from the commissary were sheer delight. Everyone enjoyed eating them with tea – not the raspberry-flavored boiling water issued by the prison, but real tea steeped in a mug and poured from an enormous bucket-sized teapot of red copper, a teapot left over from czarist days, a teapot from which Russian revolutionaries of the nineteenth century might have drunk.
Naturally, ‘shop day’ was a joyous event in the life of the cell. Denial of ‘shop privileges’ was a severe punishment that always led to quarrels; prisoners feel such deprivations very keenly. Any accidental noise heard by the guard in the corridor or a disagreement with the commandant on duty was looked on as an act of insubordination, the punishment for which was denial of shop privileges. The dreams of eighty persons quartered in twenty different places went up in smoke. It was a severe punishment.
One might think that those prisoners who had no money would be indifferent to the withdrawal of shop privileges, but that was not the case.
Once the food was brought in, evening tea would commence. Everyone bought whatever it was he wanted. Those who had no money felt out of place at the general holiday. They were the only ones not to experience the nervous energy characteristic of ‘shop day’.
Of course, everyone would treat them. A prisoner could drink a mug of tea with someone else’s sugar and eat a white roll; he could smoke someone else’s cigarette – even two – but he didn’t feel comfortable, and it was not the same as if he had bought it with his own money. The prisoner who had no money was so sensitive that he was afraid to eat an extra piece.
The adroit collective brain of the prison found a way out, a way of ending the discomfiture of those who had no money, a way of protecting their self-respect and providing even the most impoverished prisoners with the official right to make use of the commissary. They could spend their own money independently and buy whatever they chose.
Where did this money come from?
A famous phrase from the days of military communism, from the first years of the revolution, was reborn: ‘Committees for the Poor’. Some unknown person mentioned it in one of the prison cells, and the phrase caught on in an uncanny fashion and migrated from cell to cell – by tapping on the walls, by notes hidden under a bench in the bathhouse, and, easiest of all, by transfers from one prison to another.
Butyr Prison is famed for its smooth functioning. The twelve thousand convicts in this enormous prison are in constant round-the-clock movement; every day, regularly scheduled buses take prisoners to Lubyanka Prison, bring prisoners from Lubyanka Prison for interrogation, for meetings with witnesses, for trial. Other buses transfer prisoners to other prisons…
In instances of cell-rule violations, the internal prison administration transfers prisoners under investigation to the Police Tower, Pugachov’s Tower, North Tower, or South Tower, all of which have special ‘punishment’ cells. There is even a wing with cells so small that one cannot lie down but must sleep sitting up.
One-fifth of the population of the cells is moved every day – either to ‘photography’, where profile and full-face pictures are taken and a number is attached to a curtain next to which the prisoner sits, or to ‘piano lessons’ – that is, fingerprinting (a process that for some reason was never considered offensive). Or they might be taken along the endless corridors of the gigantic prison to the interrogation wing. As they walk down the corridor, the guard taps the key against his own brass belt buckle to warn of the approach of a ‘secret prisoner’. And until the guard hears hands clap in response, he will not let the prisoner proceed. (At the Lubyanka Prison the snapping of fingers is used instead of the jingling of keys. As in Butyr, the response is a hand clap.)
Movement is perpetual, and the entrance gates never close for long. Nevertheless, there has never been an instance when co-defendants ended up in the same cell.
If a prisoner’s trip is canceled and he has crossed the threshold of the prison even for a second, he cannot return without having all his things disinfected. That’s the way things are done; it is known as the Sanitation Code. The clothes of those who are frequently taken to Lubyanka Prison for interrogation are quickly reduced to rags. Even without these special trips, clothing wears out much more quickly in prison than in civilian life. Prisoners sleep in their clothes, tossing on the boards that cover the berths. This and the frequent and energetic steam treatments intended to kill lice quickly destroy the clothing of every prisoner brought in for investigation.
No matter how strict the control, however, the words of the author of The Charterhouse of Parma ring true: ‘The jailor thinks less of his keys than the prisoner does of escape.’
‘Committees for the Poor’ came into being spontaneously, as a comradely form of mutual aid. Someone happened to remember the original Committees for the Poor. Who can say, perhaps the author who injected new meaning into the old term had himself once participated in real committees for the poor in the Russian countryside just after the revolution?
These committees were set up in a very simple way so that any prisoner could give aid to his fellows. When sending his order to the ‘shop’, each prisoner donated ten percent to the committee. The total sum received in this fashion was divided among all those in the cell who were ‘moneyless’. Each of them had the right independently to order food from the ‘shop’.
In a cell with seventy or eighty persons, there were always seven or eight who had no money. More often than not, money eventually arrived, and the ‘debtor’ attempted to pay back his cellmates, but he was not obliged to. In turn, he simply deducted his own ten percent whenever he could.
Each ‘beneficiary’ received ten or twelve rubles per ‘shop day’ and was able to spend a sum roughly equal to what the others spent. No thanks were expressed for such help, since the custom was so rigidly observed that it was considered the prisoner’s inalienable right.
For a long time, perhaps even for years, the prison administration had no inkling of this ‘organization’. Or perhaps they ignored the information of loyal cell informers and secret agents. It is hard to believe the authorities were not aware of these committees. Probably the administration of Butyr Prison had no desire to repeat its sad experience in unsuccessfully attempting to put an end to the notorious game of ‘matches’.
All games are forbidden in prison. Chess pieces molded from bread chewed up by the ‘entire cell’ were confiscated and destroyed as soon as they were noticed by the watchful eye of the guard peering through the peephole in the door. The very expression, ‘watchful eye’, acquired in prison a literal rather than figurative meaning: the attentive eye of the guard framed by the peep-hole.
Dominoes and checkers were strictly forbidden in the investigatory prison. Books were not forbidden, and the prison library was a rich one, but the prisoner under investigation derived no benefit from reading other than that of taking his mind off his own important and tormenting thoughts. It is impossible to concentrate on a book in a common cell. Books serve as amusement and distraction, taking the place of dominoes and checkers.
Cards are customary in cells that contain criminals, but there are no cards in Butyr Prison. Indeed, there are no games there other than ‘matches’.
Matches is a game for two. There are fifty matches to a box. Thirty are left in the lid, which is placed on end. The lid is then shaken and raised, and the matches fall out on to the floor.
Players use one match as a lever to pick from the pile any matches that can be removed without disturbing the remainder. When one player commits an error, the other takes his turn.
Matches is the well-known child’s game of pick-up sticks, adapted by the agile prison mind for the prison cell.
The entire prison played matches from breakfast to dinner, and from dinner to supper. People became very wrapped up in the game. Match champions appeared, and there were matches of a special quality – those that had grown shiny from constant use. Such matches were never used to light a cigarette.
This game soothed the prisoners’ nerves and introduced a certain calm into their troubled souls.
The administration was powerless to destroy or forbid this game. After all, matches were permitted. They were issued (individually) and were sold in the commissary.
Wing commandants tried destroying the boxes, but the game could go on without them.
The administration reaped only shame in this struggle against pick-up sticks; none of its efforts made any difference. The entire prison continued to play matches.
For this same reason – out of fear of being shamed – the administration ignored the Committees for the Poor. They were loath to become involved in this far from glorious struggle.
But rumors of the committees spread to higher and higher levels and ultimately reached a certain Institution which issued a stern order to liquidate the committees. Their very name seemed to indicate a challenge, an appeal to the conscience of the revolution.
How many cells were checked and admonished! How many criminal slips of paper with encoded calculations of orders and expenditures were seized in the cells during sudden searches! How many cell leaders spent time in the punishment cells of the Police Tower or Pugachov’s Tower! It was all in vain; the committees continued to exist in spite of all the warnings and sanctions.
It was indeed extremely difficult to control the situation. The wing commandant and the overseer who worked for years in the prison had, moreover, a somewhat different view of the prisoner than did their high-placed superiors. On occasion they might even take the prisoner’s side against the superior. It wasn’t that they abetted the prisoner, but when it was possible they simply ignored violations and did not go out of their way to find fault. This was particularly the case if the guard was not a young man. From the point of view of the prisoner, the best superior is an older man of low rank. A combination of these two conditions more or less guarantees an almost decent person. It’s even better if he drinks. Such a person is not trying to build a career. The career of a prison guard – and especially of a camp guard – must be lubricated with the blood of the prisoners.
But the Institution demanded that the committees be eliminated, and the prison administration vainly attempted to achieve that result.
An attempt was made to blow up the committees from within. This was, of course, the most clever of solutions. The committees were illegal organizations, and any prisoner could refuse to make contributions that were forced on him. Anyone not desiring to pay these taxes and support the committees could protest, and his refusal would be supported wholeheartedly by the prison administration. It would have been ludicrous to think otherwise, for the prisoners’ organization was not a state that could levy taxes. That meant that the committees were extortion, a racket, robbery…
Of course, any prisoner could refuse to make contributions simply by claiming he didn’t want to, and that would have been that. It was his money, and no one had any right to make any claims, etc., etc. Once such a statement was made, nothing would be deducted and everything ordered would be delivered.
But who would risk making such a statement? Who would risk placing himself in opposition to the entire group, to people who are with you twenty-four hours a day, where only sleep can save you from the hostile glare of your fellow inmates? In prison everyone involuntarily turns to his neighbor for spiritual support, and it is unthinkable to subject oneself to ostracism. Even though no attempts are made to exert any physical influence, rejection by one’s fellows is more terrible than the threats of the investigator.
Prison ostracism is a weapon in the war of nerves. And God help the man who has had to endure the demonstrated contempt of his fellow inmates.
But if some antisocial citizen is too thick-skinned and stubborn, the cell leader has another, still more humiliating and effective weapon at his disposal.
No one can deprive a prisoner of his ration (except the investigator, when this is necessary for the ‘case’), and the stubborn one will receive his bowl of soup, his portion of kasha, his bread. Food is distributed by a person appointed by the cell leader; this is one of his prerogatives.
Bunks line the walls of the cell and are separated into two rows by the passageway leading from the door to the window. The cell has four corners, and food is served from each of them in turn. One day it is served from one corner, and the next day from another. This alternation is necessary to avoid upsetting the already hypernervous prisoners with some trifle, such as which part of the thin prison soup they will receive, and to guarantee that each has an equal chance of getting thicker soup, at the right temperature… Nothing is trivial in prison.
The cell leader declares that the soup can be served and adds: ‘And serve the one who doesn’t care about the committees last.’
This humiliating, unbearable insult can be repeated four times a Butyr day, since there is tea for morning and evening, soup for dinner, and kasha for supper.
A fifth opportunity presents itself when bread is distributed.
It is risky to appeal to the wing commandant in such matters, since the entire cell will testify against the stubborn one. Everyone lies – to a man – and the commandant will never learn the truth.
But the selfish person is no weakling. Moreover, he believes that he alone has been unjustly arrested and that all his cellmates are criminals. His skin is thick enough, and he doesn’t lack stubbornness. He easily bears the brunt of his cellmates’ ostracism; those eggheads and their trick will never make him cave in. He might have been swayed by the ancient device of physical threat of violence, but there are no physical crimes in Butyr Prison. Thus, the selfish one is about to celebrate his victory – the sanction has proved futile.
The inmates of the cell and their leader, however, have at their disposal one more weapon. The cells are checked each evening when the guard is changed. The new guard is required to ask if they wish to make any ‘statements’.
The cell leader steps forward and demands that the ostracized man be transferred to a different cell. It is not necessary to explain the request; it simply has to be stated. No later than the next day, and perhaps even earlier, the transfer is sure to be carried out, since the public statement relieves the cell leader of any responsibility for discipline in the cell.
If he were not transferred, the recalcitrant man might be beaten or killed, and such events involve repeated explanations by the guard to the commandant and to still higher prison officials.
If an investigation of a prison murder is conducted, the fact that the guard was warned is discovered immediately. Thus, it is judged best to accede to the demand and not resist making the transfer.
To be transferred to another cell, not brought in from the ‘free world’, is not a very pleasant experience. This always puts one’s new cellmates on their guard and causes them to suspect that the transferred person is an informer. ‘I hope he’s been transferred to our cell only for refusing to participate in the committee,’ is the first thought of the cell leader. ‘What if it’s something worse?’ The cell leader will attempt to learn the reason for the transfer – perhaps through a note left in the bottom of the waste-basket in the toilet or by tapping on the wall, using the system worked out by the Decembrist, Bestuzhev, or by Morse Code.
The newcomer will receive no sympathy or confidence from his new comrades until an answer is received. Many days pass, the reason for the transfer is clarified, passions have quieted down, but the new cell has its own committee and its own deductions.
Everything begins again – if it begins at all, since the newcomer has learned a bitter lesson in his former cell. His resistance is crushed.
There were no Committees for the Poor in Butyr Prison until clothing and food packages were forbidden and commissary privileges became practically unlimited.
The committees came into being in the second half of the thirties as a curious expression of the ‘personal life’ of prisoners under investigation, a way for those who had been deprived of all rights to make a statement as to their own continuing humanity. Unlike the ‘free’ world ‘outside’ or the camps, society in prison is always united. In the committees this society found a way to make a positive statement as to the right of every man to live his own life. Such spiritual forces run contrary to all prison regulations and investigatory rules, but they always win out in the end.