Gulag

At about the same time, Galina Serebryakova, the author of The Young Marx and the wife of a high functionary, was also “invited” every evening to Lubyanka, kept waiting until two or three o’clock in the morning, interrogated, released at five in the morning, and returned to her apartment. Agents surrounded her building and a black car followed her when she went outside. So convinced was she of her coming arrest that she tried to kill herself. Nevertheless, she endured several months of this sort of harassment before actually being arrested.¹⁶

During heavy waves of mass arrest—of kulaks in 1929 and 1930, of Party activists in 1937 and 1938, of former prisoners in 1948—many knew their turn was coming simply because all those around them were being arrested. Elinor Lipper, a Dutch communist who had come to Moscow in the 1930s, was living in 1937 in the Hotel Lux, a special hotel for foreign revolutionaries: “every night a few more persons vanished from the hotel . . . in the morning, there would be large red seals pasted on the doors of a few more rooms.” ¹⁷

In times of real terror, some even experienced the arrest itself as a sort of relief. Nikolai Starostin, one of the unlucky soccer stars, was trailed by agents for several weeks, and became so annoyed that he finally went up to one of them and demanded an explanation: “If you want something from me, call me into your office.” As a result, at the moment of arrest he felt not “shock and fear” but “curiosity.” ¹⁸

Still others were taken completely by surprise. The Polish writer Alexander Wat, then living in occupied Lvov, was asked to a party at a restaurant with a group of other writers. He asked the host what the occasion was. “You’ll see,” he was told. A brawl was staged, and he was arrested there and then.¹⁹ Alexander Dolgun, the American Embassy clerk, was hailed on the street by a man who turned out to be a secret policeman. When the man called out his name, Dolgun recalled, “I was completely mystified. I wondered if it was some nut . . .”²⁰ Okunevskaya, the actress, was in bed with a bad case of flu at the time of her arrest, and demanded that the police return another day. They showed her the arrest warrant (the one with Abakumov’s signature on it) and dragged her down the stairs. ²¹ Solzhenitsyn repeats the possibly apocryphal tale of a woman taken out to the Bolshoi Theater by her boyfriend, a professional interrogator, who took her straight from the theater to Lubyanka.²² The survivor and memoirist Nina Gagen-Torn recounts the tale of a woman who had been arrested while taking linen down from a clothesline in a Leningrad courtyard; she was dressed in a bathrobe, and had left her baby alone in her apartment, assuming she would be back in a few minutes. She pleaded to be allowed to get him, to no avail.²³

In fact, it seems as if the authorities deliberately varied their tactics, picking up some people at home and some at work, some on the street and some on trains. One memo to Stalin from Viktor Abakumov, dated July 17, 1947, confirms this suspicion, noting that prisoners were routinely “surprised” by police in order to prevent escape, to prevent resistance, to prevent the suspect from warning others in his counter-revolutionary “conspiracy.” In certain cases, the document continued, “a secret arrest in the street is carried out.”²⁴

The most common arrest, however, was one that took place at a person’s home, in the middle of the night. In times of mass arrest, fear of the midnight “knock on the door” became widespread. There is a very old Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came—and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire. A Soviet proverb also has it that “Thieves, prostitutes and the NKVD work mostly at night.” ²⁵ Usually, these nighttime arrests were accompanied by a search, although search tactics varied over time too. Osip Mandelstam was arrested twice, once in 1934 and then again in 1938, and his wife has described the differences between the two procedures: