The Great Terror

9

NATIONS IN TORMENT

Of all the treasures a State can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

Stalin

It is very hard for the Western reader to envision the sufferings of the Soviet people as a whole during the 1930s. And in considering the Terror, it is precisely this moral and intellectual effort which must be made. To demonstrate the facts is to provide the bare framework of evidence. It is not the province of the investigator to do more. Yet it cannot but be that these facts are offered for moral judgment. And however coolly we consider them, we should think in terms of Pasternak, breaking off his Sketch for an Autobiography before the Terror with the words “To continue it would be immeasurably difficult…. One would have to talk in a manner which would grip the heart and make the hair stand on end.”

Thus far we have dealt with the Purge as it struck the Party. Information about this side of it, especially from Soviet sources, is much richer than for the larger but less dramatic fate of the ordinary Soviet citizen. Yet for every Party member who suffered—and many of them were scarcely political in any real sense—six or seven others went to the cells.

The figures we have so far been covering were consciously involved to a greater or lesser degree in a political struggle whose rules they understood. They had themselves in many cases been responsible for the imprisonment or death of peasants and others by the million in the course of collectivization. Our pity for their own sufferings should doubtless not be withheld, but it can at least be qualified by a sense of their having a lesser claim to sympathy than the ordinary citizen of the country. If Krylenko was to go to the execution cellars, he had sent to their deaths, on false charges, hundreds of others. If Trotsky was to be assassinated in exile, he had ordered the shooting of thousands of the rank and file, and gloried in it. Pushkin once described an earlier generation of Russian revolutionaries as “positively heartless men who care little for their own skins, and still less for those of others.” We may accept this about such people as Rosengolts. But it plainly does not apply to his wife. In her, we can already see the fate and the feelings of an ordinary non-Communist, caught up in the frightful tensions and agonies of the Great Purge.

The oppressive feeling that hung over everything is well illustrated by a comparison made by Dudorov, in Doctor Zhivago:

It isn’t only in comparison with your life as a convict, but compared to everything in the thirties, even to my favorable conditions at the university, in the midst of books and money and comfort; even to me there, the war came as a breath of fresh air, an omen of deliverance, a purifying storm…. And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death, were a blessing compared to the inhuman power of the lie….

It is difficult for those of us who have lived in fairly stable societies to make the imaginative effort of realizing that the heads of a great State can be men who in the ordinary course of events would be thought of as criminals. It is almost equally hard to get the feeling of life under the Great Terror. It is easy to speak of the constant fear of the 4:00 A.M. knock on the door, of the hunger, fatigue, and hopelessness of the great labor camps. But to feel how this was worse than a particularly frightful war is not so simple.

Russia had undergone Terror before. Lenin had spoken of it frankly as an instrument of policy. During the Civil War period, executions simply of “class enemies” were carried out on a large scale. But the circumstances were different in many ways. In those days, it was, as it were, a hot Terror. Injustices and brutalities were perpetrated throughout the country, but they were seldom part of a big planned operation from above. And they were openly described in their true colors. Those were indeed terrible days, when the Cheka squads were shooting class hostages in scores and hundreds. Those who went through them might have though that nothing could be worse.

But Lenin’s Terror was the product of the years of war and violence, of the collapse of society and administration, of the desperate acts of rulers precariously riding the flood, and fighting for control and survival.

Stalin, on the contrary, attained complete control at a time when general conditions were calm. By the end of the 1920s, the country had, however reluctantly, accepted the existence and stability of the Soviet Government. And that Government had, in turn, made slight economic and other concessions which had led to comparative prosperity. It was in cold blood, quite deliberately and unprovokedly, that Stalin started a new cycle of suffering. First had come the Party’s war on the peasantry. When this had done its worst and things were settling down again in the mid-1930s, the Great Terror was again launched cold-bloodedly at a helpless population. And the cold-bloodedness was compounded by the other distinguishing quality of the Stalin purge—the total falsehood of all the reasons given for it and accusations made during it.

There was another factor. In the First World War, as Robert Graves notes in Goodbye to All That, a soldier could stand the squalor and danger of the trenches only for a certain time. After that, the wear and tear became too great. After the first month, under the tensions of trench life, an officer began to deteriorate a little. “At six months, he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months … he became a drag on the other officers. After a year or fifteen months, he was often worse than useless.” Graves notes that over the age of about thirty-three, and particularly over forty, men had less resistance. Officers who had done two years or more often became dipsomaniacs. Men went about their tasks “in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance.” It had taken Graves himself, he says, some ten years to recover. He adds that none of this was due simply to physical conditions; in a good battalion, physical illness was rare.

What is so hard to convey about the feeling of Soviet citizens in 1936–1938 is the similar long-drawn-out sweat of fear, night after night, that the moment of arrest might arrive before the next dawn. The comparison is reasonable even as to the casualty figures. The risk was a big enough one to be constantly present. And again, while under other dictatorships arrests have been selective, falling on genuinely suspected enemies of the regime, in the Yezhov era, just as in the mudholes of Verdun and Ypres, anyone at all could feel that he might be the next victim.

The whole people were the victim, including those who were not directly affected by the repressions. Even those who had not had a family member, relative, or friend suffer (true, there were not all that many of them): even they experienced the fear and all sorts of burdens and, in general, to put it mildly, had by no means an easy time of things—the exceptions to this general rule were relatively insignificant in number.¹

And the public trials, as another Soviet periodical points out, everywhere “created an atmosphere of total suspicion and fear.”²

Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen.

DENUNCIATION

For Stalin required not only submission, but also complicity. The moral crisis arose in a form well described by Pasternak. In 1937 (he later told Dr. Nilsson),

on one occasion they came to me … with something they wanted me to sign. It was to the effect that I approved of the Party’s execution of the Generals. In a sense this was a proof of their confidence in me. They didn’t go to those who were on the list for liquidation. My wife was pregnant. She cried and begged me to sign, but I couldn’t. That day I examined the pros and cons of my own survival. I was convinced that I would be arrested—my turn had now come! I was prepared for it. I abhorred all this blood. I couldn’t stand things any longer. But nothing happened. It was, I was told later, my colleagues who saved me indirectly. No one dared to report to the hierarchy that I hadn’t signed.³

But few could match the moral grandeur of the great poet. Everyone was isolated. The individual, silently objecting, was faced with vast meetings calling for the death “like dogs” of the opposition leaders, or approving the slaughter of the generals. How could he know if they were not genuine, or largely so? There was no sign of opposition or even neutrality; enthusiasm was the only visible phenomenon. Even the children and relatives of the arrested got up to denounce their parents.

The disintegration of family loyalty was a conscious Stalinist aim. When, in November 1938, Stalin destroyed the leadership of the Komsomol, headed by Kosarev, his complaint was that the organization was not devoting itself to vigilance activities, but sticking to its statutory obligation as a political training ground for young Communists. Stalin’s idea of a good young Communist demanded not this sort of political training, but the qualities of an enthusiastic young nark.

Many denunciations were made out of fear. If someone heard an incautious word, and failed to report it, it might be he who would suffer. There are many accounts of Party members, unable to think of any enemies of the people among their acquaintances, being severely censured by their own branch secretaries as “lacking in revolutionary vigilance.” There are many stories of conversations between old acquaintances which became too frank and ended with each of them denouncing the other. Any conversation that strayed even slightly from the orthodox could only be conducted between old and trusted friends, and with great circumspection. Ilya Ehrenburg’s daughter had an old shaggy poodle which had learned the trick of closing the dining-room door as soon as the guests began to talk in a guarded way. As it was given a slice of sausage for its vigilance, it became expert at guessing the type of conversation.⁴

Not every responsible citizen did his duty as a delator. One director gave a lift to the mother of an enemy of the people, an old woman, and was told by his chauffeur:

Comrade Director, I may be a son of a bitch who must report everything he sees and hears. Believe me or not, but I swear by my own mother that I will not report this time. My own mother is just a plain woman, not a fine lady like this one. But I love her and, anyhow, thank you, Victor Andreyevich, as one Russian to another.

And in fact this incident was never brought up against the director, though many less serious “crimes” were to be alleged against him.⁵

Nevertheless, just as Nazism provided an institutionalized outlet for the sadist, so Stalinist totalitarianism on the whole automatically encouraged the mean and malicious. The carriers of personal or office feuds, the poison-pen letter writers, who are a minor nuisance in any society, flourished and increased.

“I have seen,” says Ehrenburg, “how in a progressive society people allegedly dedicated to moral ideas committed dishonorable acts for personal advantage, betrayed comrades and friends, how wives disavowed their husbands and resourceful sons heaped abuse upon hapless fathers.”⁶ A Soviet story of the Khrushchev period tells, as reasonably typical, of a geology student who denounced another because he heard him, at a dance, telling his girl friend that his father had been executed—a fact that he had failed to disclose at the Institute.⁷ After the first student reported it, his colleague disappeared, to serve fifteen years in a labor camp.

Individual denouncers operated on an extraordinary scale. In one district in Kiev, 69 persons were denounced by one man;⁸ in another, over 100.⁹ In Odessa, a single Communist denounced 230 people.¹⁰ In Poltava, a Party member denounced his entire organization.¹¹

At the XVIIIth Party Congress, when the “excesses” of the Purge period were being belatedly and peripherally criticized, one was now made to confess his methods, which had involved removing fifteen local Party Secretaries. Another well-known slanderer, in Kiev, applied for a free pass to a resort on the grounds that he had worn out his strength in “the struggle with the enemy,” a remark which caused loud laughter at the Congress.¹²

Extraordinary results came from purely lunatic denunciations. Many poison-pen letters were mere malignant fantasy. There were odder cases yet, such as the Red Army deserter Sylakov, who gave himself up in Kiev with a dramatic tale of an anti-Soviet plot in which he played the leading part. His original story was of planning an armed raid on a post office to provide funds for a terrorist organization, but of having decided instead to throw himself on the mercy of Soviet justice. This was not much use to the NKVD. After Sylakov had been badly kicked and beaten, a quite different version was worked out, involving not him and a few vague friends, but his military unit. The leader of the plot was now not Sylakov, but his commanding officer. They had planned terroristic attacks on Government leaders. Almost the whole unit, from the C.O. to the drivers, were arrested, with many of their wives. Sylakov’s two sisters, both working girls, his old and crippled mother, and his father were all pulled in too. So was an uncle who had only met his nephew once and who, having served as a corporal in the old Army, was transmuted into a “Tsarist general.”

This absurd case proliferated fantastically until “there was not a single cell in Kiev prison which did not contain someone involved in the Sylakov plot.”¹³ When Yezhov and his latest representative in Kiev, Uspensky, fell late in 1938, Sylakov and his fellow accused were reinterrogated with a view to getting them to withdraw their confessions. Some of them, fearing a trick, refused, and had to be given tough treatment once again—to force them to withdraw false confessions involving them in crimes carrying the death penalty! Sylakov himself was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for denunciation only.

But the NKVD did not, of course, leave denunciation on an amateur and voluntary basis. Everywhere it organized a special network—the seksots, recruited from among the general population.

Seksots were divided into two types: the voluntary, malicious degenerates out to injure their neighbors, together with “idealists” who were convinced that they were working for the cause; and the involuntary, who were drawn into it out of fear, or (very often) promises of the alleviation of the fate of an arrested member of the prospective seksot’s family. These last hoped that if they kept strictly to the truth and reported nothing disadvantageous about their friends, no harm would be done. But once started, they were trapped; the pressure became greater and greater. The seksot who failed to produce information was himself automatically suspect. As the population became more and more careful in its talk, more and more harmless acts and words had to be reported, misinterpreted, and finally invented to slake the NKVD’s insatiable appetite for plots.¹⁴

One Ukrainian seksot is described as having become a genuine convert to Communism, though unable to join the Party owing to former White Army connections, and therefore wishing to serve the cause in the one way which appeared to be open to him. At first, he abused no confidences and reported impartially. “He was only doing his duty, and doing one’s duty is always pleasurable. When he had occasionally to overcome his own scruples or likes and dislikes in carrying it out, he felt a positive hero.”¹⁵ But naturally, simple hints of feelings hostile to the Government were not in themselves sufficient, for the NKVD of course knew that such could be found in a large section of the population. He put up a struggle, but was himself threatened as having concealed evidence. Gradually going to pieces, he started first to “interpret” remarks, until slowly the distinction between truth and falsehood faded out in his mind. Even so, he failed to give satisfaction because he retained a sense of the plausible, and his inventions were too limited for his superiors, so he was himself arrested.

The Soviet press had recently published material from the archives about informers—for example, a letter from one who was by now himself a prisoner, claiming clemency because of his earlier services in denouncing Vareikis and a number of others, including writers and actors, and after his own arrest, numerous fellow prisoners.¹⁶

In some areas, bounties were paid for denunciation. In one Byelorussian village depicted in a recent Soviet article, 15 rubles a head was paid, and a group of regular denouncers used to carouse on the proceeds, even singing a song they had composed to celebrate their deeds.¹⁷

Every account of life in a Soviet office or institution, even before the Great Purge, is replete with intrigues. Such, doubtless, would be true of most other countries. But the resources available to a keen intriguer in Soviet conditions made it a far greater menace, since the normal method of getting on was to “compromise” and have expelled from the Party, and as often as not arrested, either one’s rival or, if his position was for the time being too strong, one of his subordinates—through whom he could eventually be undermined. One rough estimate was that every fifth person in the average office was in one way or another an NKVD stool pigeon.¹⁸

Weissberg speaks of the foundry industry, with which he had connections through experiments to improve blast furnaces. Following Gvakharia, Ordzhonikidze’s nephew and one of the geniuses of the industrialization drive, all the directors of the big foundries in the Ukraine were arrested:

A few months later their successors were arrested too. It was only the third or fourth batch who managed to keep their seats. In this way the direction of the foundry industry came into the hands of young and inexperienced men. They had not even the normal advantages of youth in their favour, for the choosing had been a very negative one. They were the men who had denounced others on innumerable occasions. They had bowed the knee whenever they had come up against higher authority. They were morally and intellectually crippled.¹⁹

And, of course, this applied not only to industry, but to the whole of the new ruling cadre. As a Soviet periodical complained in 1988, it was “the conscious result of negative selection, of the horrible social selection which went on in this country for decades.”²⁰

Right through the Purge, Stalin’s blows were struck at every form of solidarity and comradeship outside of that provided by personal allegiance to himself. In general, the Terror destroyed personal confidence between private citizens everywhere. The heaviest impact of all was, of course, on the institutional and communal loyalties which still existed in the country after eighteen years of one-party rule. The most powerful and important organization drawing loyalty to itself and its ideas rather than to the General Secretary himself was the Party—or rather its pre-Stalinist membership. Then came the Army. Then the intellectual class, rightly seen as the potential bearer of heretical attitudes. These special allegiances attracted particularly violent attention. But in proceeding to attack the entire people on the same basis, Stalin was being perfectly logical. The atomization of society, the destruction of all trust and loyalty except to him and his agents, could only be carried out by such methods.

In fact, the stage was reached which the writer Isaak Babel summed up, “Today a man only talks freely with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”²¹ Only the very closest of friends could hint to one another of their disbelief of official views (and often not even then). The ordinary citizen had no means of discovering how far the official lies were accepted. He might be one of a scattered and helpless minority, and Stalin might have won his battle to destroy the idea of the truth in the Soviet mind. “Millions led double lives,” as the grandson of the executed Army Commander Yakir was to write later.²² Every man became in one sense what Donne says he is not—“an island.”

Not that everyone blamed Stalin. His skill in remaining in the background deceived even minds like Pasternak and Meyerhold.²³ If men—albeit nonpolitical—of this caliber could feel so, it is clear that the idea must have been widespread. The fear and hatred of the population was concentrated on Yezhov, who was thus unconsciously making himself ready to be the scapegoat, the eponym of the “Yezhovshchina.”

MASS TERROR

As “the number of arrests based on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes grew tenfold between 1936 and 1937,”²⁴ the purge extended itself outward from the Party victims to include all their contacts, however slight. For example, in 1932 the Party Secretary of the Urals, Kabakov, had visited some workers’ quarters and chanced to look in at an apartment where he found only the mother at home. She told him that her son had gone on a rest cure after being overworked, but had to do it at his own expense. Kabakov ordered the management of the trust employing the worker to pay the expenses. Five years later, when Kabakov was arrested (see here) someone informed the NKVD that he had visited this worker and given him protection. The worker was himself at once pulled in, and accused of “bootlicking” Kabakov.²⁵

Thirteen accomplices had been found for Nikolayev, who had really acted alone. This became a general principle. “Vigilance” was made the test of a good citizen or employee, as well as of a good Party member. The NKVD everywhere, and all public organizations and economic institutions, were under continual pressure to show their worth in uprooting the enemy. Every man arrested was pressed to denounce accomplices, and in any case all his acquaintances automatically became suspects.

In the show trials themselves, some of the confessions automatically implicated not just individual or groups of political associates, but also wide circles completely outside the Party struggle. For example, in his evidence in the Bukharin Tria1,²⁶ Zelensky pleaded guilty to the fact that 15 percent of the staff of the Central Cooperative Union “consisted of former Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, Trotskyites, etc. In certain regions the number of alien elements, former members of other parties, Kolchak officers and so on … was considerably higher.” These elements were, he said, assembled to “act as a center of attraction for all kinds of anti-Soviet elements.” The way this would snowball almost automatically, and throughout the country, is obvious.

Yet it was not only this process of association that gave the Purge its increasingly mass character. In the 1930s, there were still hundreds of thousands who had been members of non-Bolshevik parties, the masses who had served in White armies, professional men who had been abroad, nationalist elements in the local intelligentsias, and so on. The increasingly virulent campaign for vigilance against the hidden enemy blanketed the whole country, not merely the Party, in a press and radio campaign. And while the destruction of hostile elements in the Party was going forward, it must have seemed natural to use the occasion to break all remaining elements suspected of not being reconciled to the regime.

For this sizable part of the population was already listed in the files of the NKVD and its local branches under various headings, such as

AS

anti-Soviet element

Ts

active member of the Church

S

member of a religious sect

P

rebel—anyone who in the past was in any way involved in anti-Soviet uprisings

SI

anyone with contacts abroad

Such categories were not in themselves legal grounds for prosecution, but they automatically made those listed natural suspects and almost automatic victims when an NKVD branch was called upon to show its merits by mass arrests.

We have a more detailed division of these suspect categories in the lists of dangerous elements issued on the annexation of Lithuania by the USSR in 1940.²⁷ Since even by January 1941, after half a year’s occupation, there were admittedly only 2,500 Communists in the country,²⁸ few of the worst suspects—real Trotskyites—could be found. And no threat to Stalin’s position as a whole could come from so small a territory. But in the selection of those whose elimination was required to turn the country into a more or less reliable fief, we can see some of the way of thinking which had been applied to Russia itself. The lists itemized all former officials of the State, Army, and judiciary; all former members of non-Communist parties; all active members of student corporations; members of the National Guard; anyone who fought against the Soviets (that is, in 1918 to 1920); refugees; representatives of foreign firms; employees and former employees of foreign legations, firms, and companies; people in contact with foreign countries, including philatelists and Esperantists; all clergy, former noblemen, landlords, merchants, bankers, businessmen, owners of hotels and restaurants, and shopkeepers; and former Red Cross officials. It is estimated that these people covered about 23 percent of the population.²⁹

In the Soviet Union, many in these categories had already died or emigrated. But many were left. And around each was a widening circle of colleagues and acquaintances who automatically entered the field of suspicion by “association with alien elements.” Anyone in a job worked under a State official who might turn out to be a Trotskyite. Anyone, anywhere, might find that he bought his groceries from a former kulak or was neighbor to an Armenian bourgeois nationalist.

Thus in Nikopol, when the Party Secretary fell, the NKVD arrested his

assistants, his friends, the men and women whom he had put into jobs anywhere in

Nikopol. The Commandant of the Nikopol garrison went into the hunters’ bag, then the local Prosecutor and all his legal staff, finally the Chairman of the Nikopol Soviet … he local bank, the newspaper, all commercial institutions were “cleansed” … the manager of the Communal Administration, the Chief of the Fire Brigades, the head of the Savings Institution…. Crowds of women and children swarmed around the NKVD building in Nikopol at all hours, in spite of the bitter cold.³⁰

A recent Soviet comment on the purges is that as against the argument, sometimes met, that the purges were largely confined to party officials, “they hit everyone—doctors, intellectuals, peasants, atheists, priests, industrial managers, diplomats, former private businessmen.”³¹ In the Butyrka, Eugenia Ginzburg’s cell mates were, as she puts it, “a much broader section of the population” than in the “special block” in Kazan: “There were many peasants, factory workers, shop girls, office clerks.”³² Roy Medvedev, again, mentions about 1,000 arrested in a single factory.³³ In fact, as the Soviet trade-union organ Trud recently put it, it is “a myth that the working class was not touched by the repressions,” for statistics show that “millions of all sections of the population suffered.”³⁴

In Moldavia “an absolute majority of the repressed were workers and peasants often semiliterate or illiterate, with no interest in politics.”³⁵ Figures given in the Soviet press for Kursk province imply that about 20 percent of the arrests were in the countryside—that is (for the USSR as a whole), about 1.5 million.³⁶ A recent Soviet article describes how in the writer’s home village of 100 households, one day in April 1937, two policemen arrived, stopped the farm work, and arrested all the men between twenty and fifty years old, on charges of having started the sowing too late for sabotage reasons. Numbering sixty-five in all, they were taken off in lorries, the writer’s father among them. (In 1956, the writer learned that his father had not survived.)³⁷

Thus while officialdom, the intelligentsia, and the officer corps were prime victims, by mid-1937 practically the entire population was potential Purge fodder. Few can have failed to wonder if their turn had come. Pasternak, in the bitterly matter-of-fact passage with which he ends the main body of Doctor Zhivago, gives the expectations of the time:

One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested on the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

Russians who had been abroad and came back toward the autumn of 1937, like Ilya Ehrenburg, were deeply shocked by the change. Even on his way through from Spain, when he rang his daughter from Paris, he could get nothing out of her except conversation about the weather. In Moscow itself, he found that writer after writer and journalist after journalist had disappeared. In the lzvestiya office, they had given up putting nameplates outside the doors of department heads; as the messenger girl explained, “Here today and gone tomorrow.” In the ministries and the offices, it was everywhere the same—empty seats, haggard faces, and an extreme unwillingness to talk.³⁸ An American journalist living in a block of about 160 apartments in the summer of 1937 notes that the Secret Police had made arrests in more than half of them, “and our house was no exception.”³⁹

There were various methods of avoiding arrest. A well-known scholar avoided the first wave of the Purge by pretending to be a drunkard. Another, taking the same line a little further, got drunk and created a disturbance in a public park, thus getting six months for a minor criminal offense and avoiding political trouble.⁴⁰ By a curious irony, some genuine enemies of the regime—perhaps more prescient than most—escaped by simply fading into the background. For example, Nicholas Stasiuk, who had actually been Minister of Supply in the anti-Communist Rada Government in the Ukraine in 1918, survived in Mariupol working as a park attendant until the German occupation during the Second World War, when he became a leading figure in the nationalist movement in the area.⁴¹’

There was sometimes a period between disgrace and arrest which a lucky individual might make use of by leaving the main centers. S. G. Poplawski (who was to be installed by Stalin as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army after the war) was at the Frunze Military Academy in 1937. Expelled from the Party and the Academy, he at once left Moscow to avoid the next step. “A year or a year and a half later”—that is, presumably after the fall of Yezhov—he reappeared and was then rehabilitated and readmitted to the course.⁴²

Again,

the editor of the Kazan newspaper, Kuznetsov, who was to figure in my charge sheet as belonging to the same “underground group,” disappeared into the wilds of Kazakhstan and was never arrested because they lost track of him and eventually stopped looking. Later he even had his translations of Kazakh odes to “Stalin the Great” and “Father Yezhov” published in Pravda.⁴³

In general, moving frequently was a certain protection, since it usually took “at least six months or a year” before the local NKVD paid much attention or accumulated enough evidence against a figure whom there was no exceptional reason to persecute. It also took a great deal of time before his personal documents from the NKVD of his previous place of residence were forwarded, “particularly as all such documents were dispatched by special NKVD express messenger and not through the ordinary post.” Sometimes they never arrived at all.⁴⁴ Siberia, in particular, was a good place to go. Comparatively speaking, the local authorities were glad to have settlers, hardly distinguishing between people in forced exile and those freely arriving. The NKVD in a province in European Russia would have little interest in providing suspects for its Siberian opposite number, and though it could have a man under “suspicion” brought back, this was troublesome and hardly worth going through, except in important cases.

But moving was an option open to few, and was often no more than temporary protection. The arrests came, eventually, in millions.

Vyshinsky’s assistant, Roginsky, who got a fifteen-year sentence, continued to argue in camp that the regime was justified in isolating from the community large numbers of people who might cause trouble and in continuing to exploit to the maximum, regardless of any guilt or innocence, the labor of those who were economically “old and useless.”⁴⁵ More sophisticated NKVD and Party members would defend the Purges on subtler grounds. Even if mild jokes or criticism of the Government was all that had taken place, this was a potential for future active opposition, and the NKVD, by excising such people, was carrying out a justified preventive operation.

In the factories, public denunciation meetings of the established type spread to the workers as a whole. A Soviet novel of the Khrushchev period typically describes such a works scene in 1937:

A short man in a lambskin cap angrily announced, “My foreman Sereda failed to issue me with cement. I thought at the time this was suspicious. Yesterday I learned that Sereda was concealing his relationship with one of Makhno’s followers who married his cousin!”

“The fitter Tsvirkun when taking up employment concealed the fact that his old man was an elder of the church!” announced a second speaker.

A third speaker proceeded to expose his former comrade whose parents had been deprived of electoral rights for sabotage during the period of collectivization…⁴⁶

The extension of the Purge throughout the country was not, as sometimes suggested, just the result of too much eagerness on the part of local NKVD officials who let things get out of control. On the contrary, it was insisted on from the center. For example, on 29 November 1936 Vyshinsky was already ordering that within a month all “criminal cases of major conflagrations, accidents, and output of poor-quality products be reviewed and studied with the aim of exposing a counter-revolutionary and saboteur background in them.” In certain areas, where few prosecutions on charges of counter-revolutionary activity had been brought, severe censure was issued from the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow. In 1937, only eight cases in this category were brought to court through a large part of Siberia, and Moscow blamed this on “a weak and inadequate struggle to stamp out the nests of saboteurs.”⁴⁷

Arrest quotas were imposed from above. An NKVD local officer who had been in charge of the small Ukrainian district of Chrystyneska is reported in jail as telling of an order sent to him to arrest 3,800 people; even arresting all former prisoners, all those reported by seksots and others would not have fulfilled the quota, so he had to ask village soviets to nominate lists, himself being arrested for this.⁴⁸ At a higher level, the 1938 Head of the Byelorussian NKVD was reproached for not matching the Ukrainian bag of Polish spies, and managed to pull in 12,000, many of them Jewish shopkeepers.⁴⁹

In general, occasional highly organized mass trials and much more frequent mass arrests marked the period. In May 1937, the Far Eastern press announced fifty-five death sentences in such trials;⁵⁰ in June, another ninety-one; in July, another eighty-three; and so on through the year. In Byelorussia from June onward, hardly a week went by without wrecking and espionage being discovered in various industrial enterprises, the Academy of Sciences, the Polish theater, the physical culture groups, the banks, the cement industry, the veterinary services, the bread-supply organization, and the railways. (The local railway authorities were denounced on 8 October 1937 and charged with being not only Polish but also Japanese spies, in accordance with railway tradition.) In Central Asia, it was the same: 25 executions were announced in Kazakhstan⁵¹ and 18 in Uzbekistan⁵² in November. In January 1938 came 26 in Kirghizia⁵³ and another 134 in Uzbekistan .⁵⁴

On 28 July 1937 E. G. Evdokimov assembled the Party leadership of the North Caucasus Territory and gave instructions for a long-planned superpurge in the area. On 31 July, the local phase of this “general operation” was launched in the Chechen-Ingush Republic in the North Caucasus: 5,000 prisoners were crammed into the NKVD prisons in Grozny, 5,000 in the main garage of the Grozny Oil Trust, and thousands of others in various requisitioned buildings. In the Republic as a whole, about 14,000 were arrested, amounting to about 3 percent of the population. Shkiryatov in person oversaw a further mass operation in October.⁵⁵

The cold-blooded administrative organization of such mass arrest and deportation comes out very clearly in Serov’s Order No. 001233 for the Baltic States:

Operations shall be begun at daybreak. Upon entering the home of the person to be deported, the senior member of the operative group shall assemble the entire family of the deportee in one room…. In view of the fact that a large number of deportees must be arrested and distributed in special camps and that their families must proceed to special settlements in distant regions, it is essential that the operations of removal of both the members of the deportee’s family and its head shall be carried out simultaneously, without notifying them of the separation confronting them. ARREST

Whether as part of such a special operation, or in the ordinary course of routine arrests, it was usual to take action in the small hours. Two or three NKVD men, sometimes brutal, sometimes formally correct, would knock and enter. A search was made which might be brief but could take hours, especially when books and documents had to be examined. The victim, and his wife if he had one, sat under guard meanwhile, until finally he was taken off. A quick-witted wife might in the long run save his life by getting him some warm clothes. By dawn, he would usually have been through the formalities and be in his cell.

A general describes his arrest:

At two in the morning there was a knock on the door of my hotel room.

“Who’s there?” I called.

A woman’s voice answered: “A telegram for you.”

“Obviously from my wife,” I thought as I opened the door.

Three uniformed men came into my room and one of them told me point-blank that I was under arrest.⁵⁶

A poet writes of his, also at night:

“Go with you”

you ask, looking for your coat, Your arm fumbles for the sleeve.

You feel overcome by a sudden weakness—

In such a moment you tire as in a lifetime.…

It seems a ravine has opened under your feet,

And the ceiling seems to fall on you.

There is suddenly not enough air in the room—

You breathe

with an effort.⁵⁷

The New Constitution, indeed, had guarantees against unjustified arrest. Under its Article 127, no one might be “arrested” except by order of a court or with the consent of the Prosecutor. This was anyhow not of much value in the absence of an independent judiciary; and the judicature of the USSR was officially defined as “a means of strengthening the Socialist regime, guarding the rights of citizens and repressing the enemies of the people and the Trotskyite–Bukharinist agents of foreign espionage organizations.”⁵⁸ But in any case, a distinction was made between “arrest” and “detention.” A man might be “detained” without the sanction of the court or Prosecutor in “all cases where public order and security is threatened.” Moreover, Article 45 of the Corrective Labor Codex reads: “For reception into a place of deprivation of freedom it is obligatory to have a sentence or an order by organs legally empowered thereunto, or an open warrant.”

In fact, a prosecutor’s warrant seems generally to have been provided, though sometimes formalities were dispensed with. For example, a case is reported from the Ukraine in which the police arrested two chance visitors for whom they had no warrant together with the man they were after; each of the two accidentally arrested spent five months in jail before managing to get out.⁵⁹ Cases of mistaken identity, particularly of persons with common names like Ivanov, are also occasionally noted. Such prisoners were usually released after a few weeks or months, but cases are mentioned of their having confessed to espionage or other crimes before the mistake was discovered. Even then, they were sometimes released.⁶⁰

Releases were most exceptional in 1937 and 1938. One prisoner had incurred a five-year sentence for wondering why an old actress (Ekaterina KorchaginaAleksandrovskaya) had been nominated for the Supreme Soviet in the autumn of 1937, when a number of harmless “cultural” figures were so used to improve the governmental image. He was condemned for “speaking against a candidate of the Communist and non-Party bloc.” A friend, Lev Razgon, got him to tell his wife to approach the actress herself, who went to the NKVD and complained. They told her that the offender had been jailed as a spy for the British and Japanese, and showed her thick files supposedly containing the evidence and sentence. However, he was able to send his real sentence, still in his possession, to be shown to Korchagina. Three weeks later, he was released.⁶¹

There are many accounts of the NKVD insisting that anyone released (usually after 1938) should sign a guarantee not to reveal what had happened to him in jail. A Soviet newspaper recently quoted one such:

I, Sternin, N. V., pledge never and nowhere to speak of what became known to me between 11 June 1938 and 11 July 1939 about the work of the organs of the NKVD. It is known to me that on any breach of this I will be accountable under the strictest revolutionary laws, for divulging state secrets.⁶²

Wives were not told where the arrested had been taken. The method of finding where they were was to go from prison to prison. In Moscow, wives would go to the “information center” opposite the Lubyanka, at 24 Kuznetsky Most; then to the Sokolnika; then to the Taganka; then to the office of the Butyrka, in its small courtyard; then to the Lefortovo military prison; and back again. When the head of the queue of hundreds of women was reached, an official was asked to accept the 50 rubles a month to which as-yet unconvicted prisoners were entitled. Sometimes a prison administration, perhaps through bureaucratic incompetence, would not admit that it held the man in question until the second or third time round. One Moscow wife found a girl aged about ten in front of her in the queue with a dirty little wad of ruble notes. She was paying it in her for father and mother, both arrested.⁶³

Anna Akhmatova’s son, the young Orientalist Lev Gumilev, was in jail in Leningrad. “During the frightful years of the Yezhov terror,” the poet says in the foreword to Requiem,

I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone “recognized” me. A woman with blue lips standing behind me, who had of course never heard my name, suddenly woke out of the benumbed condition in which we all found ourselves at that time and whispered into my ear (there everyone spoke in a whisper):

—Could you describe even this?

And I said:

—I can.

Then something resembling a smile flickered over what once had been her face.

Akhmatova speaks of her own mouth as one “through which a hundred million people cry,” and asks that if a monument to her is ever put up, it should be at the prison gates in Leningrad where she stood for 300 hours. In 1940, she was allowed to see her son, and afterward wrote the poem which is number 9 in Requiem, feeling that she was going mad.

Young Gumilev was again, or still, in jail in 1956 when Fadeyev made an appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office, saying that “although he was only a child of nine when his father was no more, he, as the son of N. Gumilev and of A. Akhmatova, was at all times a convenient target for career-seeking and hostile elements who sought to make accusations against him.”⁶⁴ This makes it clear that he was, like so many others, the victim of his relationships.

Women who actively tried to get their husbands released almost never succeeded. One typically describes being called to a local NKVD headquarters at midnight and simply being told, “I order you to stop running about like a lunatic trying to get your husband released! I order you to stop bothering us! That’s all! Get out!”⁶⁵

After a husband had been sentenced, it was again difficult to trace him. One method was to write to the addresses of camps of whose existence a woman had heard from other wives. Sometimes, after a wife received a long series of printed forms saying that her husband was not at such-and-such a camp, he could be found⁶⁶ and, in certain types of sentence, parcels accepted.

For the wives, indeed, life was very bad. General Gorbatov remarks, “I often thought of my wife. She was worse off than me. I was, after all, in the company of other outcasts, whereas she was among free people among whom there might be many who would shun her as the wife of an ‘enemy of the people.’”⁶⁷ And all reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands’ fate, they faced a worsening future.⁶⁸

TO THE CELLS

The arrested man first was taken to a reception point in one of the prisons, signed in, and submitted to a strict physical search and an examination of his clothes seam by seam. Bootlaces and metal attachments, including buttons, were removed. These searches were made at intervals during imprisonment. At the same time, thorough cell searches were carried out about once a fortnight.

In the cells, while there were variations around the country, the prisoner would find much the same routine—intense overcrowding, inadequate food, boredom, and squalor, between bouts of interrogation. Life in the Tsarist prisons is universally described as very considerably preferable to those now developed. In particular, there had not been the overcrowding.

A prisoner who had been in Moscow’s Butyrka Prison in 1933 says that while in that year there had already been 72 men in a 24-man cell, there were no fewer than 140 in November 1937.⁶⁹ In a woman’s cell supposed to hold 25, 110 women were crowded. Planks covered the entire floor and the few beds, apart from a small part of the central gangway, a table and two large latrine buckets. It was impossible for the prisoners to lie on their backs, and when lying on their sides, if one wanted to turn over, it could only be done by negotiating with the prisoners on either side to do it all together.⁷⁰ The cell in which Pugachev had been held alone before his execution was now occupied by sixty-five people.⁷¹

Most of our descriptions of prisons are those in Moscow, Leningrad, or the Ukrainian capital. The impression given is scarcely a favorable one: in the Shpalenv, a four-man cell held up to forty.⁷² But conditions seem to have been a good deal better there than in the provincial jails. Several accounts remark on prisoners from Chelyabinsk or Sverdlovsk, on arrival in the packed cells of the Butyrka, exclaiming that the place seemed a holiday camp compared with their previous experiences.⁷³ A civilian official describes being shown around Pervouralsk jail: “the stench struck me like a physical blow.”⁷⁴ Where the overflow was too great, as in some of the Siberian towns, vast pits were sometimes dug and roofed over, and the prisoners simply herded in. By the autumn of 1937, a Kharkov prison built for about 800 held about 12,000.⁷⁵ In Novosibirsk, about 270 men were crammed into a forty-square-meter ce11.⁷⁶

In the most crowded cells, conditions were literally lethal. In a letter in a recent issue of a Soviet newspaper, a survivor describes an 8-man cell in Zhitomir prison into which 160 men had been crowded. They had to stand up, pressed tightly against one another. “Five or six died every day”; the bodies “continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down.”⁷⁷

Overcrowding was treated differently in Moscow than in the provinces. In Moscow, space was gained by having the prisoners sleep under the beds and on boards between the beds. By this means, it was possible to accommodate up to three men to the square yard. In provincial prisons, beds and boards were taken out to make room for more inmates. In some, as we have seen, people slept in rows, lying on their sides; but when cells were even more crowded, half the occupants had to stand while the other half slept, packed, on the floor.⁷⁸

Each cell elected its starosta, or cell leader, who was responsible for keeping order, allocating sleeping places, and so forth. The new prisoner was put next to the reeking slop bucket, or parasha, getting better places as his seniority increased.

In the morning, a short time was given for ablution and excretion. For example, 110 women in one cell were allowed forty minutes with five lavatories and ten water taps.⁷⁹

In prisons in the big cities, at least before they became too crowded, prisoners were taken to the baths every ten days. Sufficient soap was issued. Clothing was regularly disinfected. In most of the provincial prisons, however, conditions were already filthy.

During the “Yezhovshchina,” the usual daily ration was 500 to 600 grams of black bread, 20 grams of sugar, and thin cabbage soup twice a day. In some prisons, there was also a tablespoonful of groats and hot water three times a day.

In the Butyrka, alternate days saw cabbage soup and fish soup, about a pound of black bread, and a meal of lentils, barley, or groats in the evening. This is described by a woman prisoner as being worse than what she was managing on in town after losing her husband and her son, but, even so, good in comparison with what she was to get in the camps.⁸⁰ These rations were usually delivered regularly and fully. Prison diet seems to have been calculated to be just enough to keep a more or less motionless prisoner alive.

It was unhealthy fare. But the general conditions were more unhealthy. Prisoners showed a peculiar grayish blue tinge from long confinement without light or air.⁸¹ The main diseases resulting were dysentery, scurvy, scabies, pneumonia, and heart attack. Gingivitis was universal.⁸²

But the prison administration was held strictly responsible for the actual life of every prisoner. This was taken to such paradoxical lengths that “in the same cell you would find prisoners suffering severely from the effects of interrogation about which nobody bothered, while every conceivable medicine for the prevention and cure of colds, coughs and headaches were regularly distributed.”⁸³ And great precautions were taken against suicide.

Doctors reluctant to interfere with the course of the interrogation would sometimes treat prisoners whose ribs had been broken under a different diagnosis, but giving them the right treatment.⁸⁴ Medical conduct in a provincial prison is reported as being in a different spirit, the examination being conducted quite openly with a view to seeing how much the prisoner could stand. A certificate issued was quite frank about the beatings and was evidently entered in the official records without a qualm. This was in early 1938.⁸⁵

The company, apart from a plague of stool pigeons, was usually good, especially in Moscow, and innumerable cases are given of kindness and selfsacrifice—as when (a Hungarian Communist reports) a prisoner, back from even worse conditions, was allowed a bed to himself for a whole day by the 275 men crammed into a 25-man cell, and was given extra sugar from their rations.⁸⁶ Lectures were given on a large variety of subjects, and much storytelling was also done. Herling mentions too that

every cell contains at least one statistician, a scientific investigator of prison life, engrossed day and night in assembling a complicated jig-saw of stories, scraps of conversation overheard in corridors, old newspapers found in the latrine, administrative orders, movement of vehicles in the courtyards, and even the sound of advancing and receding footsteps in front of the gate.⁸⁷

All prisoners report cases of Party officials who remained loyal, and held either that Stalin and the Politburo knew nothing of what was happening or, alternatively, that they themselves were not qualified to judge these decisions, and simply had the duty of obeying Party orders, including confession.

There were other types. In one of the cells of the Butyrka, there were the sons of five moderately important officials. Four of them were the typical brutalized product of the new privileged youth of Stalinism. They had freely denounced their parents and boasted of it, taking the view that there was no reason why they should harm their own prospects to look after relics of the past. Only the fifth, the son of General Gorbachev (the executed “daredevil”),⁸⁸ was a decent youth.⁸⁹

Smoking was permitted. All games were forbidden. Chess was, however, played illegally, with men made out of bread or other objects. In one of the women’s cells in the Butyrka, a fortune-telling game with matches was played. When a wardress saw people with matches, she would count them, and if there were exactly the number required for the game (forty-one) the owner was punished.⁹⁰

Books are reported as available in two Moscow prisons, the Lubyanka and the Butyrka (though at the height of Yezhov’s power, they seem to have been prohibited). These libraries were good, containing the classics, translations, histories, and scientific works—sounding much better than those of British prisons or, indeed, hospitals or cruise liners. The Butyrka’s was particularly fine. The reason was that it had been used for political prisoners in Tsarist times, and the big liberal publishing houses had always given free copies of their books to these jails.⁹¹ That of the Lubyanka was largely of books confiscated from prisoners.

After Yezhov’s appointment, new and harsher regulations came into force. All windows were blocked with shutters—still called “Yezhov muzzles”—which left only a small piece of sky visible. (They had, indeed, been in use in the Lubyanka, and the equivalent Shpalnery prison in Leningrad, for some years.)⁹² After the Bukharin Trial, as a “reprisal,” these panes were shut except for ten minutes a day. Bread became moldy, clothes damp, and walls green; joints ached “as though some creature were gnawing them.”⁹³ The penalty for the slightest offense, such as the possession of a needle, was the punishment cells with only from one-half to two-thirds of the already small prison ration, deprivation of outer clothing, and permission to lie down only at night, and then on the stone floor.⁹⁴ Punishment cells had, logically enough, to be even worse than ordinary ones. A Soviet writer mentions three grades of them in Yaroslavl in 1937. In one there was light, and the prisoner kept his or her clothes. The next was a moldy hole in the wall, totally dark and cold, with only a vest permitted and bread and water once a day. She was in it for five days for the offense (in any case not committed by her) of writing her name in the washroom. From the remaining “first” category, which she escaped, “people came out only to die.”⁹⁵

The trees and flowers which had grown in some prison yards were meanwhile cut down and the ground asphalted over. Zabolotsky, in his poem “The Ivanovs,” had spoken of trees “standing … behind railings, under lock and key.” He was himself to be deprived of the sight of even these.

At the same time, as far as possible, the more liberal warders were liquidated, and only the least popular guards were retained, after reindoctrination courses.⁹⁶

Some prisoners, particularly those under interrogation in especially important cases, were kept in “inner prisons.” So were certain men already serving sentences. The regime in these “inner prisons” was quite different from the bullying squalor of the main buildings. Unlike the mass cells, with fetid air and prisoners pressed close together on bare boards, which nevertheless had a certain social life, of discussion and even occasional scientific and literary lectures from specialists, the inner prisons were “living graves.”⁹⁷ The cells were clean, without overcrowding; each prisoner had his own bed and even linen; and clothes were actually washed once a month. But no noise, not even loud speech, was permitted. The spyhole in the cell door opened every few minutes. The prisoner had to be in bed from 11:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. During the day, he could sit down but not lean on anything. There was nothing whatever to do—on inadequate diet. Isolation was complete; Weissberg, in isolator cells in the Ukraine and then in Moscow, only learned about the outbreak of war at the end of October 1939. There were only a few hundred prisoners in an “inner prison” at a time when thousands and tens of thousands might be in the outer one.

Such a prisoner had to undress in such a way that his hands could be seen and, when sleeping, to keep his arms outside the covers. Weissberg says that this was because a prisoner had once plaited a length of string under the cover and hanged himself with it; in any case, it would have been the only opportunity for making any illegal object.⁹⁸ If a warder saw a prisoner’s hands hidden, he would enter the cell and wake the prisoner each time he detected him.

In the “inner prisons” proper, communication by tapping was almost impossible, and was seldom replied to as being probably the work of a provocateur.⁹⁹ Elsewhere there was a certain amount of it.¹⁰⁰ The method is that described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon—the so-called Dekabrist alphabet, dating from the prisoners of the 1820s.fn1

In the isolation cells, the psychological problem was intense. A former actor from the Bolshoi Theater who had served five years gave the following “lesson”:

First, you must detach yourself from reality—stop thinking of yourself as a prisoner. Make believe that you are a tourist who temporarily finds himself in an unfamiliar environment. Don’t admit to yourself that conditions here are very bad, because they may get even worse, and you should be prepared for that. Don’t become too involved in the everyday life of the isolator. Try not to hear its sounds, especially at night, or to smell its smells. Try not to be aware of the guards, don’t look at them, ignore the expression on their faces. Stop making-believe about the possibility of your being released soon from the isolator. Do not attempt to regain your freedom by means of a hunger strike, or by admitting your guilt, or by appealing for mercy to the authorities. Stop pining for the friends you have left behind in the free world.¹⁰¹

A special category of prison consisted of the half-dozen “political isolators,” notably those at Suzdal, Verkhne-Uralsk, Yaroslavl, and Aleksandrovsk. These dated from earlier days of the regime, when they had been thought of as a comparatively humane method of removing factious Communists and other left-wing “politicals” from public life. Even in the early 1930s, treatment in these prisons was comparatively humane. During the purge, they sank to the normal level. A Soviet commentator says of the food in the Yaroslavl isolator in 1937 that it “contained no vitamins whatever. For breakfast we got bread, hot water, and two lumps of sugar, for dinner—soup and gruel cooked without any fat, and for supper—a kind of broth reeking of fish oil.”¹⁰² But the isolators still preserved some special characteristics. They mostly held no more than 400 to 500 prisoners. Typically at Verkhne-Uralsk, there were cells holding either 10 to 25 or 3 to 8 prisoners, with in addition a number of solitary cells. It was usual for important prisoners serving sentences, but not expendable—in that further trials were planned for them—to be held in these.

THE GREAT PRISONS

Of the five main prisons in Moscow, three—the Lubyanka, the Lefortovo, and the Butyrka—were for “politicals” only, though they were also held in the other places of detention with nonpoliticals. The Lefortovo was the great torture center, though torture was also practiced on a lesser scale in the Lubyanka and in the “special section” of the Butyrka.

The Lubyanka was free of bugs, and the same is reported of some of the Kiev prisons, though bugs usually abounded. (In spite of the far cleaner and more sanitary conditions in the German concentration camps compared with the Soviet labor camps, the same does not seem to have been true of the prisons. The Berlin Central Prison on the Alexanderplatz is described as being more lice-ridden than prisons in Moscow.)¹⁰³

The corridors of the Lubyanka were clean, smelling of carbolic and disinfectant. It is the best known of the NKVD prisons, since it lies within the headquarters of the Police Ministry, and has been the scene of the most famous imprisonments, interrogations, and executions. But though its great wedge looming over Dzerzhinsky Square is only a few minutes’ walk from the Kremlin and the general tourist area, it is seldom pointed out to visitors even now.

It was originally the headquarters of an insurance company. The Cheka took over the old building, and over the years built over the entire block. The original building is pre-Revolutionary Gothic; the rest of the block was rebuilt in two bursts: one in 1930-functional, and the other in postwar wedding-cake style. The People’s Commissariat consisted of the whole outer section. Inside is a courtyard, and within the courtyard is the nine-story prison section. This was originally a hotel or boarding house run by the insurance company, and though considerably adapted has not been rebuilt. As a result, the rooms used as cells are less unpleasant than the cells in the other prisons. The windows—though largely blocked by shutters—are of good size.

The Lubyanka had about 110 cells, which were fairly small. It seems improbable that more than a few hundred prisoners were held there at a time.

Prisoners who were unsatisfactory in the preliminary interrogations at the Lubyanka were often transferred to the 160-cell Lefortovo—in particular, the military. No clear account of the atrocities practiced in the Lefortovo is available. We are told that prisoners who had been there and were transferred to the Butyrka regarded the beating up in the latter prison as child’s play compared with their previous sufferings.¹⁰⁴ The Lefortovo was built just before the First World War in a more or less star shape, with blocks radiating from the center. It had the advantage that there were water closets actually in the cells.

The Butyrka, started in the eighteenth century to house the captured rebels of the Pugachev insurrection, is by far the largest prison. It consists of a number of vast barrack-like blocks, centered on the old section, “the Pugachev Tower,” in which the great rebel had been held before his execution. In the Purge, it held about 30,000 prisoners.¹⁰⁵

Gorbatov, who was tortured in the Lefortovo, says that the Butyrka was an immense improvement. Prisoners got half an hour’s exercise a day instead of ten minutes every other day. It had large exercise yards, unlike the cramped squares of the Lefortovo.¹⁰⁶ Exercise was taken, walking in pairs, with hands behind backs and eyes to the ground. Any swinging of arms or raising of heads was immediately stopped.¹⁰⁷

Women with newborn babies are reported in the Butyrka.¹⁰⁸ On the other hand, others were brought in who had had to leave children, and nursing babies, unattended at home. They had their breasts bandaged to stop the milk.¹⁰⁹

The Taganka, and other prisons holding politicals and others, were like the Butyrka, but dirtier and less efficient.¹¹⁰

A special small prison some ten or twenty miles out of Moscow, the Sukhanovka, deserves mention. It had a particularly fearful reputation among prisoners, who knew it as “the dacha.”¹¹¹ It was a single-story building, consisting of a set of isolators; and torture was the normal method of procedure. It is said to have been built specially for the Rudzutak–Postyshev intake. It was the one place were the regulations were observed so strictly that the warders literally never spoke at all to the prisoners.

In Leningrad, there was a similar system. The Shpalerny prison, described as comparatively clean and orderly, fulfilled the role of the Lubyanka in Moscow with about 300 cells. The larger Nizhnegorodsky, too, had a number of one-man cells for important prisoners. The Kresti, equivalent to the Butyrka, with about 30,000 prisoners,¹¹² was more squalid altogether, with sixteen men sharing what had been a one-man cell in Tsarist times.¹¹³ A special Transfer Prison held those already sentenced to camps. (And outside, tourists were being shown as a horror of the past the cells of the old Peter Paul Fortress, where a handful of politicals had been held in considerably better circumstances before the Revolution.)

Whether in one of these or in prisons of various degrees of rigor, malnutrition, and overcrowding, the arrested citizen awaited the authorities’ next move. As a general thing, physical conditions were usually far worse in the provincial jails in Minsk, Gomel, Vyatka, or Vologda, but regulations were less tightly enforced; there was more off hand brutality, but also more chance of a comparatively sympathetic warder, who might even warn against informers.¹¹⁴ As an experienced prisoner puts it, “The dirtier the prison, the worse the food, the rougher and more undisciplined the guard, the less danger there was to life.”¹¹⁵

CRIMINAL TYPES

In his cell in this new community, the arrested man might be interrogated at once, or he might wait for some time. Meanwhile, he would discover in discussion with his cell mates what his crime was likely to be. At the beginnings of the purge, those arrested often thought that the other people in the prisons were actually guilty of something, and that only their own case was a mistake. By 1937, the outside public had come to realize that the accused were innocent, and people brought in took it for granted that their cell mates were in the same boat as themselves. The chances of anyone there being actually guilty of anything whatever were very small. One sometimes hears the view still expressed in the West that the Great Purge, though unforgivably striking at many innocent men, at least destroyed, in passing, the genuine spy networks of hostile powers. Such was not the view of Gomulka, who remarks that the Terror “only facilitated the work of the intelligence services of the imperialist states.”¹¹⁶

In fact, from the purely intelligence point of view, the Japanese, Polish, and Latvian services at least seem to have gained all the information they required. And apart from direct operations, the mere fact of (for example) the defection, owing to fear for his life, of the Far East NKVD chief, Lyushkov, to the Japanese in 1938 must have put them in possession of a veritable treasure house of information—and this defection was a direct result of the Terror!

There is one important earlier case generally recognized as that of a genuine spy—Konar, who became Assistant People’s Commissar of Agriculture until accidentally exposed. He was a Polish agent who had been given the papers of a dead Red Army soldier in 1920, and in ten years had thus risen high in the hierarchy, until exposed by someone who chanced to have seen the real Konar. As to minor agents, a number of books mention, as an extreme rarity, “real” spies or men who at least might possibly have been guilty.¹¹⁷ There is one such, the “Moldavian,” in Solzhenitsyn’s camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a Kiev prison in 1939, there was much pride and astonishment on all sides that one of the prisoners was a genuine Polish spy. Once he had admitted his own guilt, he was badly beaten to get him to implicate Party officials in Kiev.¹¹⁸

Prisoners recognized, in most cases of arrest, that there was an “objective characteristic” basic to their cases. This might be social origins, past or present posts, relationships or friendships with someone, nationality or connection with a foreign country, or activity in specific Soviet organizations. This probable “real” cause of arrest was at once plain to cell mates, though it was never mentioned by the interrogators.¹¹⁹

For although there were many categories, membership in which was liable to bring arrest—such as foreign connections, high military rank, and so forth—these were not the crimes officially charged. Nor did they automatically lead to arrest. “We can even quote cases of German Communists who were not arrested, although they were political refugees.”¹²⁰ Arrest depended on a variety of secondary factors.

One peasant in Kharkov jail accounted for his arrest by the fact that he had been arrested on a false charge four years previously, and released with apologies. This, he thought, must make the NKVD think that he had reason to dislike it. This was apparently not an unusual case. “Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested during the Purge for no other reason than at some time in the past the Soviet authorities had done them an injustice.”¹²¹

To have had anything to do with foreigners was one almost certain road to arrest. People who had actually been abroad—for example, footballers like the three Starostin brothers, stars of the prewar period—were almost all in camps by the 1940s.¹²² In general, sport was thoroughly purged: “loathsome counter-revolutionary work” at the Institute of Physical Culture led to the denunciation and arrest of the “human degenerates” concerned, who included I. I. Kharchenko, Head of the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports Affairs.¹²³ Philatelists were arrested en bloc, as were Esperantists, for their international connections.¹²⁴ Professor Kalmanson, Assistant Director of the Moscow Zoo, had been educated abroad, so was assumed to be a “spy” by his cell mates. After his first interrogation, he triumphantly told them that he was only a “wrecker”—16 percent of his monkeys having died of tuberculosis (a lower figure, he pointed out, than the London Zoo’s). But they were vindicated by his second interrogation, which reached “the main question”—espionage for Germany.¹²⁵ Everyone connected with the organizations for contact with “Friends of the Soviet Union” abroad was automatically suspect. These organizations sponsored pen-pal exchanges. One young science student is mentioned as being sentenced as a German spy because he had, on this basis, been writing to a Communist in Manchester, though his letters had consisted almost entirely of Soviet propaganda.¹²⁶

All direct contact with foreign consulates was likely to prove fatal. Doctors who had treated German Consuls; a veterinarian who had dealt with consular dogs; even more indirect connections, such as the veterinarian’s son, were arrested in the Ukraine; and another man, an old caretaker, always explained in prison that he was there as “the brother of the woman who supplied the German Consul’s milk.”¹²⁷ Another had copied and given to the Polish Consul the weather forecast pinned up in the public park.¹²⁸

An opera singer who had danced longer than permitted with the Japanese Ambassador at an official ball is reported in camp. A cook had applied for a job advertised in Vechernaya Moskva, the evening paper. It turned out to be at the Japanese Embassy. She got the job but was arrested for espionage before she had time to start it.¹²⁹ Another typical case is of two engineers and their families, arrested in the winter of 1937/1938 because of a gift parcel one of them had received from an uncle in Poland, consisting of two pairs of shoes, some crayons, and a couple of dolls. The engineer who had not received the parcel, but was a friend of the one who had, got ten years.¹³⁰

A Greek doctor was charged with espionage on the grounds that he had written to relatives in Salonika describing the characteristics of some fish being bred with a view to the extermination of malarial mosquitoes.¹³¹ In December 1937, Greeks were arrested everywhere. Later, the Greek-inhabited area of Mariupol, on the Black Sea, was thoroughly purged in connection with a special Greek nationalist plot which was to create a Greater Greek Republic over a large part of the Ukraine. Its “Minister of Education” was in fact a Russian, but he had been Professor of Ancient Greek at Kharkov University and had spent a year in Athens. The “Prime Minister” had been an adviser on minority questions to the Ukrainian Central Committee.¹³²

Chinese were also arrested en bloc. One is reported as having been charged with taking a job as a tram driver in Kharkov, with the aim of crashing it into any car on the tracks in front of him which contained members of the Soviet Government.¹³³ The national minorities in Russian towns were virtually eliminated. In September 1937, the Armenians in the Ukraine were rounded up. There were 600 of them in Kharkov.¹³⁴ The Latvians were arrested the same month. An alleged Latvian secret organization had worked for a Greater Latvia stretching over a large part of Russia, including Moscow.¹³⁵

Members of the smaller national minorities were in as “bourgeois–nationalist” plotters. So were, in most cases, members of larger groups like the Ukrainians. One commented:

I was bound in any event to be regarded as a Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist. True, I had never had anything to do with Ukrainian nationalism, and had never had any sympathy with it, but I had a typically Ukrainian surname, and I had several sympathizers with Ukrainian nationalism among my acquaintances.¹³⁶

It is an interesting fact that there were almost no accusations through the Great Purge of allegiance to any genuinely reactionary idea. Those accused were almost always linked with the Mensheviks, the Armenian progressive nationalist “Dashnaks,” the Socialist Revolutionaries, or Communist deviationist groups—practically never with Monarchists, Kadets, and the like.

The Jewish Social-Democratic Bund was a particularly fatal association, and many Jews qualified for accusation as either Bundists or Zionists. A case is quoted of an elderly Jew who had worked as a defense lawyer in earlier trials in the Donets Basin and had conducted himself in a way that antagonized the NKVD—by asking it for documents which might be helpful to the defense and so forth. He had learned enough not to defend himself, and on his arrest signed everything that was put before him without reading it. He later found that he had installed himself as a leader of a Bund group, in touch with other counter-revolutionary organizations, including one headed by the Provincial Party Secretary, Sarkissov (a candidate member of the Central Committee). On one occasion, he was told that he was going to be “confronted” by an important accomplice called Abramsohn, of whom he had never heard. When this man was brought in, the investigator said, “Stop looking at each other as if you’d never met before,” so he immediately remarked, “Hello, Abramsohn.” “Hello, er … er … ,” the other started, having to be prompted with his chief’s name. Then they both signed the records of their confessions about each other without looking at them.¹³⁷

Genuine Bundists, on the contrary, are always reported as being the most refractory in interrogation, being better educated in Marxism than their interrogators, and toughened by a harder underground life in Tsarist times than that of the Bolsheviks.

All former Socialist Revolutionaries were arrested. Weissberg tells¹³⁸ of a man in Kharkov jail who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, but who in 1905 had distributed among the Tsar’s soldiers leaflets provided by the Socialist Revolutionaries. He had then been a young student and, far from being a member of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, did not even realize that there was any difference between it and the Bolsheviks.

Almost all ex-Mensheviks were also arrested. We are told that “in 1937– 1941 ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of Russian socialists were physically annihilated.”¹³⁹

But everybody with unorthodox ideas of any sort was liable to end up in the camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses were automatic victims. But there were also too-enthusiastic members of legal religions, such as the Baptist mentioned by Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoyans are widely reported, including an aged Tolstoyan woman whose twelve-year-old granddaughter had fought the NKVD officers to try to prevent her arrest.¹⁴⁰

Priests had always had a difficult time under the Soviet regime. Now they became almost automatically suspect of capital crimes. Trials of priests were announced throughout the Union. One in Orel in the summer of 1937, involving a bishop, twelve priests, and others, had as one of the accusations “publishing prayers in Old Slavonic.”¹⁴¹ Other accusations were less credible. Three bishops sentenced in February 1938 had “agitated for the opening of previously closed churches,” but their further crimes included sabotage.¹⁴² The main Soviet authority of the time mentions that Buddhists were commonly agents of Japan, engaged in sabotaging bridges and farms.¹⁴³ It was also true that “the activity of the counter-revolutionary Muslim priesthood in the U.S.S.R. is directed by the Japanese Secret Service.”¹⁴⁴ Many were accused of railway sabotage.¹⁴⁵ One Tatar Imam who had been allowed to visit Mecca was naturally suspect and was soon arrested as a German spy. A “meeting” of about forty leading mullahs, in fact all under arrest, but acting as if it were a normal assembly, accepted the charges against him, and he was shot.¹⁴⁶ The authorities also “destroyed not a few nests of spies directed by ‘holy’ Catholic priests” who had been responsible for the sabotage of factories, bridges, and railways as well as espionage.¹⁴⁷

If it was neither nationality nor past nor ideas that brought a prisoner in, it might be relationship: the purge within the Party, the Government, and the Army automatically spread in that way. Each of the accused had relatives, and acquaintances who also had relatives. We have already noted (here) the four categories sent by Yezhov to Stalin of people to be shot, of which List 4 is the simple “Wives of enemies of the people.”¹⁴⁸ We have seen the liquidation or imprisonment of the generals’ relatives. The military men had, it is true, been shot in comparative haste without public trial. Confessions in the longer-drawn-out affairs were in part obtained by promises not to kill the surviving dependents. Stalin’s promises were sometimes kept. A woman prisoner met in labor camps twelve wives, two daughters, two sisters, and a daughter-in-law of prominent purgees.¹⁴⁹ Eight years was the usual sentence.

Typical of purgees of the second rank was Zalpeter, a commander of Stalin’s bodyguard, a Lett, who was arrested, together with his wife. She refused to confess, but was finally confronted with her husband in a very bad state, who mumbled that she had said she would get rid of a picture of Stalin that hung in their new flat (formerly Yagoda’s). For this, she got eight years.¹⁵⁰

The wives of the Soviet elite adjusted most slowly of all to their situation in the cells. Their position was an especially difficult one. They had nothing to confess and were unable even to deny the charge, since it was simply of being “wives of enemies of the people.”¹⁵¹ In many cases they had not, as their husbands had, understood the dangerous possibilities before them. On arriving in the cells, some of them were priggish and intolerant of women who had been under arrest for a long time—believing that these earlier cases must have been guilty of some genuine offense.¹⁵²

Even when not arrested, families suffered terribly. An attempted mass suicide is reported by a group of four thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children of executed NKVD officers, found badly wounded in the Prozorovsky Forest near Moscow.¹⁵³ The daughter of an Assistant Chief of Red Army Intelligence, Aleksandr Karin (who was arrested and shot, with his wife), was thirteen in the spring of 1937. The Karin apartment was taken by one of Yezhov’s men, who turned her out into the street. She went to her father’s best friend, Shpigelglas, Assistant Head of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, who put her up for the night, but was virtually ordered the next day, by Yezhov’s secretary, to throw her out. Shpigelglas remembered she had relatives at Saratov and sent her there. Two months later she came back: “She was pale, thin, her eyes filled with bitterness. Nothing childish remained in her.” She had meanwhile been made to speak at a meeting of the Pioneers, approving the execution of her father and mother and saying that they had been spies.¹⁵⁴

When Weissberg was in the sick bay of the Kharkov prison, there were a number of children there, including a boy who was nine years old.¹⁵⁵ When, early in 1939, the Soviet press started to report the arrest of various NKVD officers for extorting false confessions, one case at Leninsk-Kuznetsk in the Kemerovo province concerned children as young as ten years old.¹⁵⁶ Four officers in the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s Office received five- to ten-year sentences. In all, 160 children, mainly between twelve and fourteen, had been arrested and subjected to severe interrogation, and had confessed to espionage, terror, treason, and links with the Gestapo. These confessions were obtained with comparative ease. A ten-year-old broke down after a single night-long interrogation, and admitted to membership in a fascist organization from the age of seven. Similar mass trials of children took place in various other cities.¹⁵⁷ (There is, indeed, one report of a genuine children’s organization which planned to avenge arrested parents by killing the NKVD officers they held responsible.)¹⁵⁸ But, in general, as a Soviet speaker has pointed out, “not only the workers themselves were victims of repression, but also their families, down to the absolutely innocent children, whose lives were thus broken from the beginning.”¹⁵⁹

Another “category” was composed of automatic suspects—anyone connected with production, and in particular engineers. In their case, no guesses were needed. They were saboteurs to a man. It did not matter if their record was generally good. Stalin himself had said:

No wrecker will go on wrecking all the time, if he does not wish to be exposed very rapidly. On the contrary, the real wrecker will show success in his work from time to time, for this is the only means of staying on the job, of worming himself into confidence, and continuing his wrecking activity.¹⁶⁰

In the economy, the security mania of the NKVD seems to have been genuine. For quite apart from the persecution of actual people, it imposed by about the end of 1935 a system through which guards and watchmen multiplied enormously in the factories, research institutes, and so forth throughout the country. This was in part supposed to be for the prevention of theft, but also against the penetration of “secrets,” many of which were not secret even by Soviet standards and almost none of which would have been regarded as secret in any ordinary community. Moreover, there already existed in every Soviet institution a “secret department,” covering both the political reliability of personnel and the technical secrets; and into its safes anything remotely confidential had to be put each night. It is now stated that in 1939 there were, in a labor force of 78,811,000, no fewer than 2,126,000 guards and watchmen—not counting NKVD militia—and only 589,000 miners and 939,000 railwaymen.¹⁶¹

In this atmosphere, any failure, or any accident, in the economic sphere automatically became sabotage. In the absence of genuine opposition acts, any breakdown had to be made to serve, just as Molotov’s accident at Prokopyevsk had had to be inflated into an assassination attempt in the absence of any genuine one. And already at the Pyatakov Trial, railway accidents had been put to the account of the accused, with Vyshinsky graphically recounting the sufferings of the murdered passengers. In the Bukharin Trial, livestock deaths were attributed to the conscious activities of the plotters. Sharangovich said in evidence, “In 1932 we took measures to spread plague among pigs”; and later, speaking of horses, “In 1936 we caused a wide outbreak of anemia.” Sharangovich also mentions a number of particular plants—a cement works, a flax mill, a pipe foundry, a power station—in Byelorussia (where he was First Secretary) as having been sabotaged under his instructions. Failures in the grossly overextended first Five-Year Plan were very widespread indeed. But even if the local First Secretary was usually responsible, in every case subordinates were involved.

On the economic side, Soviet statistical and planning methods led to an endless strain on skilled management. The planning figures were always unrealistic. To admit failure meant instant arrest, so the directors concealed it as best they could. This led to a vicious circle with doubly erroneous figures in the ensuing period. When the gap grew so large that it could not be concealed, a scapegoat had to be found, and “then there is a crisis and the Chief Director and a number of officials are sent to camps, but those who take their place have to employ the same methods all over again; the system as it stands leaves them no option.¹⁶²

The directors who organized the new works faced appalling tasks. Lykhachev, of the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow, had to try to direct 25,000 men, with crises about administration, raw material, or simple negligence arising almost hourly. At the Gorky Works in Gorky, an even larger factory wore out the director, Diakonov, even before his arrest. The head of the automobile industry, Dybets, and his assistant were arrested in 1938. In the same year, in the metallurgical factury in Sverdlovsk, the Old Bolshevik director, Semion Magrilov, shot himself in his office, leaving a long letter attacking the Terror. All those suspected of having read it were arrested and disappeared.¹⁶³ By the beginning of 1940, this factory had 2 engineers and 31 technicians with the right qualifications, and 270 without. Magnitogorsk had 8 engineers and 16 technicians with diplomas, and 364 without. In general, as a Soviet legal journal tells us, “hundreds of thousands with no qualifications” now took over the engineering and technical work, with disastrous results.¹⁶⁴ Production, stagnant in 1937 and 1938, actually went down in 1939.¹⁶⁵

The railways were subjected to particularly Draconian laws. The Criminal Codex of the RSFSR, in its Article 59, covered “crimes against the system of government,” including various offenses on the railways which “lead, or might lead, to the breakdown of State transport plans” and of which some examples given are the accumulation of empty trucks and the dispatch of trains off schedule. The prescribed punishment was up to ten years or, if done with malicious intent, the death sentence.

Kaganovich also devised the so-called theory of counter-revolutionary limit-setting on output, with the help of which he organized the mass destruction of engineering and technical cadres. “In a short period of time most of the directors of railroads and of the railroads’ political departments and many executive officials of the central apparatus and lines were dismissed from their jobs and later arrested.”¹⁶⁶

As to “sabotage” itself, on the Soviet railways at this time there was an accident of some sort every five minutes. As we have seen in dealing with the Pyatakov Trial, this led to the slaughter of the railway cadres. Kaganovich had made a tour of the railways of the Far East early in 1936. Following this, the Military Collegium went on tour and handed down five death sentences and ten long jail terms in Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk in March, for wrecking for “foreign intelligence services.” This was only a beginning:

In his speech at a meeting of railway activists on 10 March 1937, Kaganovich said: “I cannot name a single road or a single system where there has not been Trotyskyite—Japanese sabotage. Not only that, there is not a single branch of railway transport in which these saboteurs have not turned up….” Under Kaganovich arrests of railway officials were made by lists. His deputies, nearly all road chiefs and political section chiefs, and other executive officials in transport were arrested without any grounds whatever.¹⁶⁷

On 10 August 1937 Kaganovich wrote to the NKVD demanding the arrest of ten responsible officials in the People’s Commissariat of Transport. The only grounds were that he thought their behavior suspicious. They were arrested as spies and saboteurs and were shot. He wrote, in all, thirty-two personal letters to Yezhov, demanding the arrest of eighty-three transport executives.¹⁶⁸

The North Donets railway was the only line not involved in these sweeping arrests of early 1937. In August, the heads of the line were called to Moscow and instructed to find saboteurs. An estimate by the Director of Locomotive Service of the line is that about 1,700 of the 45,000 employees were arrested within months. In mid-November, he himself was called to the NKVD and asked how he proposed to end sabotage. As he was unable to think of any cases of sabotage—the line being an exceptionally efficient one—he was bitterly harangued and during the next wave of arrests was pulled in, on 2 December 1937, without a warrant or charge. His wife and six-year-old son were thrown out of his house two days after his arrest, and he was subjected to severe interrogation, with beatings, together with a number of other prisoners, including several station masters and the deputy head of the line.¹⁶⁹

Special railwaymen’s prisons were set up, in small towns like Poltava. Arrested railwaymen were kept in coaches in unused sidings. Special military courts traveled around the country dealing with them.¹⁷⁰ They were almost invariably Japanese spies. The reason for this was that the Soviet Union had in 1935 handed over the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese. The Russian railwaymen who had operated it and who now returned to the Soviet Union were almost the only nondiplomatic Soviet personnel who had been living abroad, and on their return they were automatically high-grade suspects. (With their families, they are said to have numbered about 40,000.) And they had meanwhile worked on all the railway systems and recruited their colleagues.

INTERROGATION

Whether soldier or intellectual, Ukrainian or engineer, the arrested man might thus deduce or learn from his acquaintances what the exact charge would be. And this was important. For when he went to interrogation, it was NKVD practice not to tell him what he was in for, but to let him frame his own confession—unless he proved “obstinate” after a few interrogations, when he might be enlightened.

Article 128 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR laid down that the charge against a person under investigation must be presented not later than forty-eight hours after his arrest. This procedure was not observed. In fact, it contradicted the basic NKVD method. In many cases, charges were not presented until months or years afterward; and in some cases, not at all.

Sometimes there were special preliminaries. The Hungarian Communist writer Jozsef Lengyel describes being taken from the ordinary cell in which 275 men lived “on, between and under twenty-five iron bedsteads” to a much worse one for a fortnight’s softening up prior to interrogation. In this “hermetically closed space” in the moist heat from human beings and radiators, bread fresh in the morning was white with mold by midday. Some of his cell mates had strokes, and some went insane. Although Lengyel only got jaundice and open sores on arms and legs, his former cell mates did not recognize him when he was returned to the ordinary prison.¹⁷¹

A woman teacher held in solitary confinement in darkness for forty days to confess her espionage motive in approaching the British Consulate for a visa also returned to her cell quite unrecognizable.¹⁷² Worse was the “kennel” at the Lubyanka, described by the critic Ivanov-Razumnik—a true Black Hole with sixty men packed into a heated basement cell about fifteen feet square, with no ventilation but the slit under the door, for a week or even more. Eczema, nausea, and palpitations were universal.¹⁷³ This was a variation on the old “steam room” technique used by the OGPU in the 1920s. A Soviet writer describes also the “standing cell,” where, in darkness, a prisoner had room only to stand with his hands at his side, virtually immured. A Secretary of the Tatar Provincial Committee was held thus for two days and taken out unconscious.¹⁷⁴

Interrogation took place mainly at night. A warder would enter a mass cell and murmur the initial letter of a man’s name, upon which those this fitted would give their names until the right man answered. He would then be taken out.¹⁷⁵

All accounts of experiences in the great prisons mention that when escorting prisoners along corridors to interrogation or for other purposes, the warders continually made a clicking sound with their tongues or with their belt buckles, so that others on similar errands would know in advance. The purpose of this, evidently a definite regulation, was to stop anyone from recognizing prisoners from other cells. If two prisoners were about to meet in a corridor, one had his face to the wall while the other went by. In the Butyrka yard, which sometimes had to be crossed, were little sentry-box-style sheds, into which one or the other of two passing prisoners could be shunted.

Eventually, down the stairs ringed with antisuicide nets, the prisoner would arrive at the office of the interrogator, where he might, for the moment, be fairly politely received. The routine questions started: “Do you know where you are? … You are in the heart of Soviet Intelligence … Why do you think you are here? …” A confession was now required. In the case of the ordinary prisoner, preparation for public trial did not arise, and the confession was merely a horrible formality required under NKVD custom to justify a sentence which was usually ready for issue. That is, as far as the accused himself was concerned. For interrogation had one further purpose—the implication of hitherto unnamed accomplices.

The interrogation technique almost invariably started, not with an accusation, but with the question “Will you tell me what hypothesis you have formed of the reason for your arrest?” This is said to have been based on a questionnaire used by the Holy Inquisition.¹⁷⁶

The “Yezhov method,” as NKVD officers called it, threw the task of building the case against him on the arrested man. If the accused simply gave an innocent account of everything he had done, tougher methods were used, but it still remained up to the victim to find the right line of confession. Prisoners, with the more or less obvious connivance of the authorities, became expert in helping the newly arrested to devise suitable and satisfactory confessions, thus saving everybody trouble, on both sides.¹⁷⁷

There were various tricks of interrogation. The interrogator might be polite and speak rather in sorrow, and then change to abuse. The obscene cursing of the interrogated was routine. In some cases, it had its effect. In others, not: Weissberg recounts that he found it quite interesting.¹⁷⁸

Many NKVD interrogators were often aware of the complete falsehood of the charges, and some of them would even admit it. Most, however, even though not crediting the full details, “professed to believe that they contained a grain of truth, and this sufficed to justify their actions in their own eyes.”¹⁷⁹ This applied particularly to the earlier generation of NKVD men. After they themselves were liquidated, the newer intake were much simpler Stalinists, who often seem to have believed to a great extent in the accused’s guilt.

For the police machine, too, was ruthlessly purged. We are told that “the staff of the Lefortovo Prison was wiped out entirely four times.”¹⁸⁰ In all, as we have seen, 20,000 NKVD men perished.¹⁸¹

The turnover of interrogators, as the NKVD itself was purged, was good for the morale of resisting prisoners. Two mention that “each of the present writers outlasted more than ten of his examining magistrates; one of them outlasted more than a dozen. In both instances this included the magistrate who ordered the arrest.”¹⁸² In Chelyabinsk, one prisoner was saved from execution when the Head of the Provincial NKVD angrily exclaimed, “The investigation was conducted by enemies of the people. Now we’ve got to start all over again.”¹⁸³ NKVD officers under arrest were usually interrogated more severely than others. They were more pessimistic about the outcome, and “were extremely stubborn and reluctant to confess for they knew what lay ahead of them.”¹⁸⁴ They n are reported as highly nervous, expecting to be taken out and executed at any moment.

We have already dealt with the basic techniques of interrogation. In run-of-the-mill cases, the “conveyor” remained at first the main system, punctuated by physical assault. A typical case is that of the young secretary of a factory director arrested as one of a Trotskyite sabotage ring. She was kept standing for two days with short interruptions and then half-throttled by the examiner until she signed a confession which enabled the NKVD to arrest her chief and the thirty-odd other members of the factory’s sabotage group.¹⁸⁵

The conveyor would break down almost anyone in four to six days, and most people in two. Its single disadvantage was that it consumed time and energy. There came a point when the arrests outpaced the interrogative capacity of the NKVD, and the simpler method of beating became routine, under the rubric “simplified interrogation procedures.”¹⁸⁶ We can date this change precisely. It was on 17–18 August 1937. In Moscow, Kharkov, and elsewhere, it suddenly came into force. At the Kholodnaya Gora Prison interrogation section, a prisoner describes having to stuff his ears with bread to get any sleep that night on account of the shrieking of women being beaten.¹⁸⁷ In Kazan jail, the first victim was the wife of the Premier of the Tatar ASSR.¹⁸⁸ In the Butyrka that summer, one floor of a whole wing of one of the prison buildings was set aside for night interrogation. From 11:00 P.M. until 3:00 A.M., the inmates of nearby women’s cells were kept awake: “over the screams of the tortured we could hear the shouts and curses of the torturers.” A woman would go half-mad thinking that she recognized her husband’s screams.¹⁸⁹

The appearance of mere local initiative was preserved. The weapons were almost always boots, fists, and table legs. But Stalin and Yezhov no longer needed to heed any complaints from within the Party, and the rather half-hearted cover to a widely known reality seems more a matter of preserving conventions than anything else. Stalin seems, in fact, to have issued official instructions on torture proper as early as the beginning of 1937, though they remained confidential even from Provincial Party Secretaries until he confirmed the orders, both retrospectively and prospectively, in the secret telegram to them on 20 January 1939 when, after the fall of Yezhov, one or two objectors had begun to make themselves heard¹⁹⁰ (see here).

Several victims note that the NKVD respected certain formalities. Of course, their methods of interrogation were a clear breach of the law. But declarations signed by prisoners were very rarely suppressed. They had to be copied and filed in the dossier.’¹⁹¹ So when Beria took over, he found that some prosecutors were still attaching the complaints made by the accused about “illegal methods of investigation” to the examination record. He took this up with Vyshinsky, who gave instructions that it was not to occur again, though in some cases the prisoners’ statements could be preserved on file, not attached to the records of the case.¹⁹²

Whichever interrogation method was applied to a given victim, the required confession followed the same routines. As early as 1931, the foundations had been fully established. A surgeon had confessed his intention to poison the Dnieper River. A lawyer had confessed first to blowing up a bridge, then to planning terrorism, and finally to being a Japanese spy. An electrical engineer was to have commanded a battery of artillery to bombard the workingmen’s quarter of Dniepropetrovsk. Another accused confessed to having met former President Poincaré¹⁹³

There is a report of a former senior official in the Ukrainian timber industry who at the beginning of the 1930s had made a confession in connection with the Industrial Party Trial, that he had had too little timber felled in order to spare the woods for their former owners, whose rights he aimed to restore. He had been sentenced to ten years but released after a year and—like many members of this particular conspiracy—restored to high position. On his re-arrest, he was required to confess that he had had too much timber felled in order to ruin the forests. Another forester had had to confess that he had special tracks cut in the forests to open the way for Polish or German tanks.¹⁹⁴

One typical style of charge was that against Mrs. Weissberg, arrested in April 1936. She was a ceramicist, and it was alleged that she had surreptitiously inserted swastikas into the patterns of teacups she had designed, and had hidden two pistols under her bed with a view to killing Stalin.¹⁹⁵ A Jewish engineer was accused of having designed a large scientific institute in the form of half a swastika, for reasons of Nazi ideology.¹⁹⁶ A woman potter had designed an ashtray which resembled, or could be made to resemble, a Zionist Star of David. She was arrested, and the stock destroyed.¹⁹⁷ Koestler mentions a German Communist doctor who was charged with injecting patients with a venereal disease, spreading rumors that venereal disease was incurable, and being a German spy.¹⁹⁸ Professor Byelin, of Kiev University, was charged with espionage for mentioning in a textbook the depth of the Dnieper at various points. Another professor—a Jewish refugee from Germany—had given German agents details about the navigability of the Siberian River Ob. A third had forwarded to the Japanese reports about the political attitude of Jewish children.¹⁹⁹ One Kiev workman confessed to having tried to blow up a kilometer-long bridge over the Dnieper with a few kilograms of arsenic, but having had to abandon the attempt owing to rainy weather.²⁰⁰ Speaking of a middle-aged washerwoman type, accused of consorting with foreigners in expensive restaurants and seducing Soviet diplomats to worm secrets out of them, a Soviet writer bitterly comments, “This was July 1937, when no one cared any longer whether charges bore the slightest semblance of probability or not.”²⁰¹

There is a Soviet account published in Khrushchev’s time of an Old Bolshevik serving a fifteen-year sentence for “terrorism,” in that he had murdered himself. The NKVD maintained that he had stolen the dead man’s papers and passed himself off in his place. When he had NKVD officers call a witness who had known him since childhood, and identified him at once, they threw her out and sentenced him notwithstanding.²⁰²

When a big case was afoot, local interrogators sometimes tried to gain credit by finding accomplices for it, on their own initiative, among their prisoners. After the Tukhachevsky Case, a junior interrogator attempted to involve Weissberg in a connection with the Reichswehr, to build up a new military conspiracy. His superior, on the other hand, meant to produce Weissberg as a witness in the Bukharin Trial, a role to which he was better suited, since he had at least met Bukharin.²⁰³

There is an account of a case in the Ukraine in which fifty students were charged with forming an organization to assassinate Kossior, who had been named as one of the senior intended victims in the great Moscow Trials. A year’s work on this case, which was a structure of great intricacy, had been performed by the interrogators. In 1938, however, it became known that Kossior himself had been arrested as a Trotskyite. Everyone thought that the students would be released. But a new interrogation immediately started, and they were beaten up for having lied to the NKVD. After a few days, the stool pigeons in the cells let them know what they were supposed to confess this time. It was to change their deposition, putting in the name of Kaganovich for that of Kossior. The NKVD could not face the trouble of constructing a completely new fabrication. Finally everything was in order, and the students were sent off to labor camps.²⁰⁴

The demand for denunciation was a difficult matter of conscience with many. One Armenian priest with a good memory confessed to recruiting all his countrymen he had buried in the past three years. A newly arrested prisoner would sometimes find a list of unused dead men made available by his cell mates.²⁰⁵ The denunciation of people already arrested and sentenced was not regarded as discreditable.

But, of course, such tactics only seldom satisfied the examiners, and most people gave way enough to implicate outside contacts whose names were presented to them as already suspect by the very fact of acquaintance.

On the whole, the NKVD officers showed a niggling, self-righteous, and bureaucratic brutality, treating the prisoners like cattle about whom any question of sympathy simply did not arise. But there are many reports of odd exceptions, showing that even in these circumstances the Russian style of humanism sporadically persisted. Two ex-prisoners note,

There were many officials of all grades, from simple warder to prison governor, who again and again defied regulations and risked their own freedom by finding opportunities of making prisoners’ lives easier by secretly giving them food or cigarettes, or even merely speaking a cheering and comforting word to them,²⁰⁶

Jozsef Lengyel, however, recounts that though he remembers “humane guards” and “decent commandants,” the investigators were without exception despicable.²⁰⁷ (This minor divergence certainly reflects the increasing brutalization of the NKVD: Koestler’s “Gletkin,” even, is a figure of the Yagoda rather than the Yezhov period.)

An NKVD sentry was returning a prisoner to his cell, after an interrogation in the Butyrka. They stopped at a tap for the prisoner to wash the blood off himself. As he did this, he was shaken with sobs. The sentry said:

Don’t take it too hard, Comrade! Life’s hard on us all, one just has to bear it. Maybe he did beat you for no good reason, but think nothing of it. Probably his black heart aches more than your white body. You can wash the blood off just like that, but what about him? Where’s the water that can clean his black heart … ?

The prisoner, an Army officer named Vasilev, returned to his cell much cheered, and spoke of the special humanity of the Russian people.²⁰⁸

A woman prisoner, a German Communist, reports a guard on the deportation train as saying to her, when she was in tears, “Don’t cry. It won’t be as bad as all that. You’ll live through it and get home again.” (She was later, when handed over to the Nazis, to note in the same way the occasional kind and thoughtful Gestapo man.)²⁰⁹ Eugenia Ginzburg tells a similar story.

In 1937 (though this is a somewhat different point), some of the old NKVD officers continued to show sympathy for obviously innocent and nonoppositionist Old Bolsheviks. A Soviet account by Antonina Levkovich, who was arrested as “the wife of an enemy of the people” in 1937 following an appeal for her already arrested husband, quotes several instances of kindness. They often turned out badly for all concerned. After a month spent in bad conditions on the way from Moscow to Kirghizia, she and her companions found an NKVD officer who tried to save them from starvation. He was charged with “intolerable pity for wives of enemies of the people” and had to shoot himself to avoid arrest.²¹⁰

Such things are worth recording. But at the best of times, they were most exceptional. The norm was callous brutality, or at best cloddish indifference to death and suffering. A Soviet writer remarks of the interrogators, “They were all sadists of course. And only a handful found the courage to commit suicide. Pace by pace, as they followed one routine directive after another, they climbed down the steps from the human condition to that of beasts…. But this happened only gradually.”²¹¹ The few humane officers and guards did not anyhow survive Yezhov’s purge of the NKVD. His new intake of NKVD troopers were well-trained, well-fed, heartless young thugs. Any display of human sympathy, they had firmly implanted in them, was a concession to bourgeois feeling and a form of treachery in the class struggle. As the Purge broadened, it also got worse.

“TRIAL.”

With interrogation completed, the cases were transferred to the judicial and quasi-judicial bodies for sentence. Since 1934, the competent court in political cases was the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. It had a large staff and was able to mount many cases simultaneously. It took mere minutes even for leading officials (see here) or generals (see here). A lesser figure, Eugenia Ginzburg, describes her seven-minute trial before the Collegium in 1937. The Court returned in two minutes with a “verdict” which she estimates must have taken twenty minutes to type.²¹² Thus the Collegium got through tens of thousands of cases over the years of the Terror. From 1 October 1936 to 30 September 1938, it passed 36,157 sentences—30,514 of death and 5,643 of imprisonment.²¹³ But these constituted a very small proportion of those condemned.

Those who came before a court were judged according to the Criminal Code, whose long Article 58 covered all forms of remotely political crime. This article was broad enough, or so it might have been thought, to encompass anyone the NKVD wished to “repress.” And it had long been Draconically interpreted. A Supreme Court ruling of 2 January 1928 had laid down that counter-revolutionary offenses were committed “when the person who committed them, although not directly pursuing a counter-revolutionary aim, wittingly entertained the possibility of this arising or should have foreseen the socially dangerous character of the consequences of his actions.”²¹⁴ The definition of terrorism was gradually extended to violent acts against a wide range of people. Not only all Party officials, but also members of grain-procurement commissions (in 1930), shock workers (in 1931), and “pioneers” (in 1934) were covered.²¹⁵

A law of 7 August 1932 introduced the death penalty for a wide range of offenses against State property, and the courts seem to have been invited to extend it still further in practical action.²¹⁶ Again, to take an example from the field of sabotage,²¹⁷ a law of August 1935 established as such the gleaning of wheat by peasant women, who had hitherto been able to save a certain amount in this way. Peasant women were commonly given ten years for this offense.²¹⁸

Vyshinsky strengthened such tendencies by a simple interpretive method:

He proposed that the deliberate burning of State or public property be adjudicated, regardless of motive and intent, under Article 58, paragraph 9, of the Russian Republic Criminal Codex (Sabotage). Consequently, acts committed without counterrevolutionary intent (for instance, arson for reasons of personal enmity, revenge, etc.) had to be adjudicated under the articles on State crimes. Vyshinsky declared that there are no ordinary criminal offenses, that these offenses now became crimes of a political order. He recommended that ordinary criminal cases be reviewed for the purpose of imparting a political character to them.²¹⁹

To take a specific crime:

Vyshinsky demanded that counter-revolutionary intent must mandatorily be sought in all criminal cases linked with shortcomings connected with the harvesting campaign. In his view shortcomings in the harvesting campaign were in many cases caused by the activity of saboteurs, who had to be “rendered harmless.” For example, during the harvesting campaign of 1937 it was revealed that a number of crops had become infested with ticks. This infection was ascribed to the activity of hostile counterrevolutionary elements, and in connection with this a great number of criminal cases were instituted. Many of the indictments linked with tick infection in grain crops were completely unfounded. Yet Vyshinsky demanded that the prosecutors insist on severe punishment in all criminal cases instituted in connection with crops infested with ticks.²²⁰

When it came to the actual trial, “he repeatedly maintained that in a criminal trial probability of guilt was perfectly adequate. Instructing prosecutors in the ‘art of identifying saboteurs,’ Vyshinsky maintained that this is achieved not by comprehensive, full and objective evaluation of the evidence gathered in a criminal case, but by so-called ‘political flair.²²¹

And the legal processes were eased by his ruling that “it is pointless to repeat without particular need what has already been established in the preliminary investigation.”²²²

As a result, we get such extraordinary results as a woman who got ten years under Article 58, Section 10, for saying, after his arrest, that Tukhachevsky was handsome,²²³ or an artist getting five years for adding to the slogan “Life has become better, life has become more joyful: Stalin” the letter u, changing the meaning of “Life has become better … for Stalin.”²²⁴ Failure to inform, treated as complicity, was severely dealt with. In a minor case, only producing a six-year sentence even for the principal, the noninformer got three years under Article 58 (xii).²²⁵ Under the same Article, a man was sentenced to three years for “smiling in sympathy” while some drunken dockers at another table in Odessa were telling one another anti-Soviet anecdotes.²²⁶ A Tatar woman, originally listed as a Trotskyite, was reallocated as a bourgeois nationalist by the NKVD official concerned, on the grounds that “they’d exceeded the quota for Trotskyites, but were short on nationalists, even though they’d taken all the Tatar writers they could think of.”²²⁷ A twenty-year-old mathematician, with no political interests, was sentenced simply because his mother, an old Socialist Revolutionary, was rounded up in 1937. He had actually been born in a Tsarist jail.²²⁸

Court procedures were at best formalities. Still, the Supreme Court and its Military Collegium at least required the presence of the accused, though as a leading Bulgarian Communist victim notes of a session of the Collegium which sentenced him, “No prosecutor. No witnesses. No co-accused. No defender.^„229

But comparatively few cases were dealt with by a court. Article 8 of the Corrective Labor Codex states, “Persons are directed to corrective labor who have been sentenced thereto by (a) sentence in a court of law; (b) decree of an administrative organ.” This latter was usually the NKVD “Special Board,” as set up by laws of 10 July and 5 November 1934 (replacing the Judicial Collegium of the OGPU).

The Special Board consisted of the Deputy Head of the NKVD, the Plenipotentiary of the NKVD of the RSFSR, the Head of the Main Administration of Militia, and the Head of the Union Republic NKVD where the case had arisen. The Prosecutor-General of the USSR or his deputy was also to participate.²³⁰

The Special Board’s sentences were originally limited to five years, but this was either abolished or ignored fairly soon; terms of eight and ten years are soon mentioned. But in any case, while a man who served out a term imposed by a court was often released, one sentenced by the Board was simply resentenced to a further period when his sentence expired. The formalities were completed in Moscow, and the new sentence was announced to the accused in camp by a local representative of the NKVD.

The Special Board was usually given “cases for which the evidence was not sufficient for turning the defendant over to a court.”²³² The defendant had no right to defense, and cases were tried in absentia, which—as a Soviet law journal has remarked—“created the preconditions for deliberately passing unjustified, harsh sentences.”²³³

And if the Criminal Code was interpreted with great elasticity by the courts, even that was found too restrictive for most cases before the Special Board. Article 58 was generally cited as a basis, but the accused were liable under the following heads:

K.R.T.D.

Counter-revolutionary Trotskyite Activity

Usual sentence five to ten years

K.R.D.

Counter-revolutionary Activity

Usual sentence five years or more

K. R. A .

Counter-revolutionary Agitation

Usual sentence five years or more

Ch.S.I.R.

Member of the Family of a Traitor to the Fatherland

Usual sentence five to eight years

P.Sh.

Suspicion of Espionage

Usual sentence eight years

The last an offense perhaps unique in the world’s legal history.

In addition, those in the following categories could be simply labeled by the Prosecutor and sent to camp without even the Special Board routine:

S.O.E.

Socially Dangerous Element

Usual sentence five years

S.V.E.

Socially Harmful Element (that is, common criminals)

Usual sentence five years

²³⁴

This power to inflict punishment when there was admittedly no crime was provided for in Article 22 of the “Principles of Criminal Jurisdiction,” given in the Basic Criminal Code, which reads as follows:

Punishment in the form of exile can be applied by a sentence of the State Prosecutor against persons recognized as being socially dangerous, without any criminal proceedings being taken against these persons on charges of committing a specific crime or of a specific offense and, also, even in those cases where these persons are acquitted by a court of the accusation of committing a specific crime.

In early 1937, sentences were still on the light side. A typical K.R.T.D. case is of an electrician arrested at that time, who had formerly known some Trotskyites and in whose room there was found, on his arrest, a copy of the first edition of The History of the Civil War (which, of course, gave many of the facts of Trotsky’s role in the period covered). For this, he got three years.²³⁵ Another man, a former Trotskyite, was sentenced to a longer term because he had traveled from Moscow to Leningrad on 1 December 1934.²³⁶ Another got three years for possession of a K.R.A. rhyme about Feuchtwanger and Gide.²³⁷ For copying Lenin’s Testament, the usual sentence was ten years, under Article 58, Section 10, for anti-Soviet agitation, though sometimes death was imposed.²³⁸ A professor of astronomy got five years (K.R.A.) for having objected to his daughter marrying an NKVD man.²³⁹ A typical P.Sh. case was of a professor who had been a prisoner of war in Austria in 1915—his sole offense.²⁴⁰ The decree of 14 September 1937²⁴¹ established what amounted to completely extrajudicial procedures for counter-revolutionary crimes, and sentences grew greater. Moreover, those arrested in 1933 or 1935 were now retried, and the comparatively mild sentences of three or five years of those earlier days were “translated … into the language of 1937.”²⁴²

After a Special Board “trial” (in his absence), the accused eventually received the sentence, on some convenient occasion. One prisoner mentions simply being handed a grubby typewritten sheet in his cell by a woman trusty, an ex-prostitute, to the effect that the Special Board of the NKVD had condemned him to five years in camp.²⁴³

In spite of the vast amount of paperwork, loose ends proliferated. It is said that in the Butyrka a whole block was occupied by prisoners who could not be sent to camps because not only were there no warrants against them, but no papers of any sort existed in connection with them. They had been condemned as groups, and the judges had not been able to compile dossiers, while the labor camps would only accept prisoners with papers.²⁴⁴

The Special Board continued to have this legal position throughout the Stalin period. But while the Board in its official form went on handing out prison sentences (though longer ones than in the previous period), a new and illegal body emerged from it. As early as 27 March 1935, a mere order of the NKVD gave the powers of the Special Board to committees of three NKVD officers, though a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office was to be present at their proceedings, and they were only empowered to inflict the same sentences as the Special Board proper. On 30 July 1937, though this was never announced, new and deadly “Troikas” were set up on Stalin’s instructions (though “on Kaganovich’s initiative” and formally established by a “special instruction” from Vyshinsky), with the power to impose the death penalty.²⁴⁵ Recalling, no doubt consciously and with a view to suggesting revolutionary urgency, the so-named emergency tribunals of the Civil War, they now in fact often—as “Dvoikas”—consisted merely of two members. At the center, as we have seen, Yezhov and Vyshinsky fulfilled this role.

Troikas were established in all the provinces and Republics; their composition varied a little, but seems usually to have consisted of the NKVD chief as Chairman, the Provincial or Republican First Secretary, and the Chairman of the local Executive Committee (or a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office). A recent Soviet article tells us that in practice, the NKVD chief initialed the sentence and it was then carried out, the other two adding their initials ex post facto. As with the Special Board, the defendant was not present at the proceedings of the Troikas. They inflicted the death penalty in absentia on a vast scale. In Uzbekistan, the Soviet press lately noted, the Republic’s Troika ordered 40,000 executions in 1937 to 1938, which would mean over 1 million for the USSR as a whole. (And this, of course, over and above the sentences by the Supreme Courts of the Union and Autonomous Republics, the Military Tribunals, and similar bodies. Moreover, executions could be carried out without even the pretense of a trial, by “special order,” as with G. E. Prokofiev and his subordinates in 1937 and M. S. Kedrov and others in 1941.²⁴⁶

Orders for further executions came from Moscow. Yezhov telegraphed the NKVD chief in Frunze, capital of Kirgizia: “You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.” The form of reply was, “In reply to yours of … the following enemies of the people have been shot,” followed by a numbered list. An order to the Sverdlovsk NKVD called for 15,000 executions. Another, to a small town near Novosibirsk, ordered 500, far above normal capacity, so that the NKVD had to shoot priests and their relatives, all those who had spoken critically of conditions, amnestied former members of White Armies, and so on, who would ordinarily have got five years or less.²⁴⁷ In February 1938, a recent Soviet account tells us, Yezhov himself went down to Kiev to call a special NKVD conference to order 30,000 more executions in the Ukraine.²⁴⁸

For all the various forms of trial, official death sentences are estimated at not over 10 percent.²⁴⁹ However, this is based only on the information given to relatives, and there was falsification on a large scale, with the sentence of “ten years without the right of correspondence” in fact meaning execution; all the identified bodies in the mass graves at Vinnitsa and Kuropaty were of people who had had such sentences.

A Soviet authority of the Khrushchev period remarked that “many were exterminated without trial or investigation.”²⁵⁰ Vyshinsky himself favored the extralegal method. He several times said, “When it is a question of annihilating the enemy, we can do it just as well without a trial.”²⁵¹ There seem, in fact, to have been few executions without “trial,” apart from the liquidation of oppositionists already in camps, until 1937. The first blow seems to have been against foreigners resident in Russia, including naturalized Soviet citizens. With no important defenders in the Party and susceptible to the charge of contact with foreign espionage, they began to go to the execution cellars in large numbers late in 1936.

It was usually obvious when an execution was to take place in a central prison. Several warders and an NKVD officer would appear at the cell door, which otherwise seldom happened. There was sometimes time to say goodbye and hand over any remaining property, such as clothes, to one’s cell mates.

The cellars of the Lubyanka were really a sort of basement divided into a number of rooms off corridors. Later on, in ordinary routine, the condemned handed in their clothes in one of these rooms and changed into white underclothes only. They were then taken to the death cell and shot in the back of the neck with a TI eight-shot automatic. A doctor then signed the death certificate, the last document to be put in their files, and the tarpaulin on the floor was taken away to be cleaned by a woman specially employed for that purpose.²⁵² (Execution with a small-bore pistol is not, as might seem, very humane. Of the 9,432 corpses exhumed at Vinnitsa, 6,360 had needed a second shot; 78, a third shot; and 2, a fourth shot, while many others had been struck over the head with some blunt object to finish them off. Again, we are told in a recent Soviet article that in the mass graves at Kuropaty the sand thrown above a new batch of those executed could still be seen moving some time later.)²⁵³

At the Lefortovo, the corpses were cremated, and other crematoria seem also to have been used: a tombstone to “ashes of unknown persons” recently noted at the Danilovskii Monastery is believed to cover some who were executed and never identified.²⁵⁴ Elsewhere in Moscow, at the Kalivnikovskoye Cemetery in the heart of the city, there was what has now been described in the Soviet press as “Moscow’s Babi Yar,” where “naked bodies were brought in carts in the middle of the night during the thirties, with rags stopping the two bullet holes in their heads.”²⁵⁵

The final documents in a case were a note to the sanitary-burial services of the NKVD: “please take six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses, date, signature,” and on the other side, “six, twelve, or some such a number of corpses cremated, date and signature of the director of the crematorium.” This refers to important cases, not to those merely shot and buried in mass graves.²⁵⁶

And so it was elsewhere. In Gorky, for example, during the height of the Purge, one estimate is that from fifty to seventy executed corpses were taken out daily from the NKVD headquarters on Vorobievka Street. One prisoner was employed to whitewash the walls of the cells of executed prisoners immediately after they were taken to the NKVD headquarters for execution. This was to cover the names that they had scratched on the walls.²⁵⁷

As I write, mass execution sites are known in several places: the one in Vinnitsa, discovered by the Germans in 1943, where over 9,000 corpses were exhumed, even though part of the area remained uninvestigated; one between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, where some 50,000 seem to have been executed in 1937 and 1938; one at Gorno-Altaisk; one at Bykovnya, near Kiev; one, with over 46,000 bodies, near Leningrad; one near Tomsk; one close to the well-known Polish grave site at Katyn; near Chelyabinsk; near Poltava; in Donetsk; near Voronezh; and, above all, the mass grave at Kuropaty, near Minsk, of which much was written in the Soviet press in 1988 and 1989, which became the eponym of the later discoveries and where no fewer than 50,000 victims lie buried, while considerably higher estimates have been given in the Soviet press.²⁵⁸ These included many from newly annexed western Byelorussia in 1939 to 1941 (five of the eight mass graves actually dug up were of western Byelorussians, and three were from 1937 and 1938, though this may not be representative). The total in any case is unexpectedly large, especially when five more sites are reported waiting investigation in or near Minsk alone, with others in the Byelorussian provincial capitals. And Byelorussia had in 1937–1938 about one-thirtieth, or 3.4 percent, of the Soviet population, and even in 1939–1941 only about one-eighteenth, or 5.6 percent. The great majority of the dead were peasants and workers.²⁵⁹

So the Purge had gone on, striking further and further into every layer of the population until finally it reached the mass of the peasantry and the ordinary workers (often accessories in sabotage cases). Although many at this level were shot, most escaped

with a simple confession that, for purposes of counter-revolutionary agitation, they had alleged that there was a shortage of certain foods or of petrol that shoes manufactured in Soviet factories were of inferior quality, or something of the kind. This was sufficient for a sentence of from three to seven years’ forced labor under Article 58 .²⁶⁰

Many accounts by former prisoners contain stories like the following: in September 1937, several hundred peasants were suddenly brought in to Kharkov prison. None of the officials in the prison knew what they had been arrested for, so they were beaten up to produce some sort of confession. But the peasants did not know either. Finally, a case was put together:

The charges against them were relatively light. Most of them were merely asked to confess that they had carried on counter-revolutionary agitation and sabotage. They had planned to poison wells and burn down barns, and they had put a spell on Stalin and agitated against grain collections. All mere bagatelles. But about twenty of them were in more serious trouble. They were accused of a plot to steal horses, ride into the nearest town and proclaim an insurrection. The church bells were to ring out and at that sign the countryside was to rise. Nothing of all this had actually happened: the wells had not been poisoned, the cattle had not been harmed, the barns had not been burned down, the horses had not been stolen, the bells had not rung out, and the countryside had not risen. The whole thing was a complete invention.²⁶¹

For the remainder of the Yezhov period, they dominated the prison. They came in groups almost identically composed. First the chairman of the collective farm was arrested. He would give the names of his committee as accomplices, and they would name their foremen, who would involve the ordinary peasants. Peasants usually confessed as soon as they found out what was required of them. The NKVD at this stage let them know what was needed informally through its own stool pigeons. They went off to the camps in the far north in batches twice a week²⁶²

Even out on the far Soviet periphery, a British observer, then in Lenkoran, Azerbaijan, saw lorry following lorry at intervals throughout the day, filled with Turkic peasants under NKVD escort. Ships, including passenger boats taken off their ordinary routes for the purpose, were waiting to take them across the Caspian.²⁶³

Already in the summer of 1937, a later Soviet writer notes “the tremendous scale of the operation”: “All the agencies were inhumanly overworked. People were run off their feet; transport was insufficient; cells were crowded to bursting; courts sat twenty-four hours a day!”²⁶⁴

An NKVD officer arrested in November 1938 said that for six months it had become clear to the NKVD that the Purge could not go on in its present form.²⁶⁵ The NKVD by now had files proving that almost every leading official everywhere was a spy. Many of them were never arrested. An example is Professor Bogomolets, at the time of his death President of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; at least ten statements from arrested scientists were on the record involving him as a fascist spy.²⁶⁶

The snowball system had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists. They could not all be arrested, and there was no particular reason to take one rather than another. All the old “categories” had been largely liquidated: former partisans, Old Bolsheviks, oppositionists, and so on. The new arrests in the NKVD itself were a sign that this was understood. The feeling also got around that a vast number of people had been arrested quite indiscriminately, and now “they don’t even know what to do with them.”²⁶⁷

Not less than 5 percent of the population had been arrested by the time of Yezhov’s fall—that is, already at least one in twenty. One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail. The proportions were far higher among the educated classes.

In 1938, even from Stalin’s point of view, the whole thing had become impossible. The first substantial question an interrogator asked was, “Who are your accomplices?” So from each arrest, several other arrests more or less automatically followed. But if this had gone on for a few more months, and each new victim named only two or three accomplices, the next wave would have struck at 10 to 15 percent of the population, and soon after that at 30 to 45 percent. There are many theories of Stalin’s motives throughout the whole horrible business, and the question of why he stopped the mass Terror at this stage has puzzled many commentators. But we can see that the extreme limits had been reached. To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed.