Gulag

Those who conducted such operations, often members of the convoy guards—soldiers who manned the deportation trains—rather than the NKVD itself, had far less training than the secret police who conducted “normal” arrests of “normal” criminals. Violence was probably not officially mandated, but, since these were Soviet soldiers arresting “capitalists” in the wealthier “West,” drunkenness, disorderliness, and even rape seem to have been condoned, as they were later on, during the Red Army’s march through Poland and Germany. ²⁷

Nevertheless, certain aspects of their behavior were stringently dictated from above. The Main Administration of the Convoy Guards in Moscow decided in November 1940, for example, that guards doing the arresting should tell their arrestees to bring enough warm clothes and personal goods to last three years, as the Soviet Union was currently experiencing a shortage of such supplies. They hoped the arrestees would sell their belongings. ²⁸ Earlier, soldiers had usually been instructed not to tell prisoners anything about where they were going, or for how long. The accepted formula was, “Why worry? Why bring anything at all? We’re only bringing you in for a short chat.” Sometimes they told deportees that they were only being moved to another area, farther from the borders, “for your own protection.”²⁹ The aim was to prevent arrestees from becoming frightened, from fighting back, or from running away. The result was to deprive people of the basic tools they would need to live in a harsh and unfamiliar climate.

Man Entering His First Prison Cell: a drawing by Thomas Sgovio, completed after his release

While Polish peasants encountering the Soviet regime for the first time might be excused their naïveté in believing such lies, the very same formulas worked equally well on Moscow and Leningrad intellectuals and Party apparatchiks, possessed, as they often were, by the certainty of their own innocence. Evgeniya Ginzburg, at the time a Party worker in Kazan, was told, when arrested, that she would be gone “forty minutes, perhaps an hour.” As a result, she did not take the opportunity to say goodbye to her children.³⁰ Yelena Sidorkina, an arrested Party member, walked down the street to prison with her arresting officer “chatting peacefully,” certain that she would be home soon.³¹

Sofia Aleksandrova, the ex-wife of the Chekist Gleb Boky, was discouraged from taking a summer coat with her when the NKVD came to take her away (“it’s warm tonight and we’ll be back within an hour, at most”), prompting her son-in-law, the writer Lev Razgon, to ponder the strange cruelty of the system: “What was the point of sending a middle-aged woman in not very good health to prison, without even the tiny bag of underclothes and washing things that an arrested person has always been allowed to take with him since the time of the Pharaohs?”³²

At least the wife of the actor Georgy Zhenov had the sense to begin packing his spare clothes. When told he would be returning home soon, she snapped: “Those who fall into your hands don’t return quickly.” ³³ Her view was close to the truth. Most of the time, when an arrestee walked through the heavy iron doors of a Soviet prison, it would be many years before he or she saw home again.

If the Soviet method of arrest seems to have been almost whimsical at times, the rituals that followed arrest were, by the 1940s, virtually immutable. However a prisoner had come to enter the gates of his local prison, once he arrived events followed a distinctly predictable course. As a rule, prisoners were registered, photographed, and fingerprinted well before they were told why they had been arrested or what their fate would be. For the first few hours, and sometimes the first few days, they encountered no one more senior than ordinary prison wardens, who were completely indifferent to their fate, had no idea of the nature of their alleged crimes, and answered all questions with an indifferent shrug.

Many former prisoners believe that their first few hours in captivity were deliberately designed to shock them, to render them incapable of coherent thought. Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, arrested for being the daughter of an enemy of the people, felt this happening to her after only a few hours in Lubyanka, Moscow’s central prison: