Gulag

Here in Lubyanka, you are already not a person. And around you there are no people. They lead you down the corridor, photograph you, undress you, search you mechanically. Everything is done completely impersonally. You look for a human glance—I don’t speak of a human voice, just a human glance—but you don’t find it. You stand disheveled in front of the photographer, try to somehow fix your clothes, and you are shown with a finger where to sit, an empty voice says “face front” and “profile.” They don’t see you as a human being! You have become an object ...³⁴

If they were being taken into one of the main city prisons for interrogation (and not put, as exiles were, immediately onto trains), arrestees were thoroughly searched, in several stages. A 1937 document instructed prison wardens specifically not to forget that “the enemy doesn’t halt his struggle after his arrest,” and might commit suicide in order to hide his criminal activity. As a result prisoners were deprived of buttons, belts, braces, shoelaces, garters, underwear elastic, whatever they could conceivably use to kill themselves.³⁵ Many felt humiliated by this edict. Nadezhda Joffe, daughter of a leading Bolshevik, was deprived of her belt, garters, shoelaces, and hairpins:

I remember how I was struck by the degradation and absurdity of all this. What could a person do with hairpins? Even if the absurd idea popped into someone’s head to hang himself by his shoelaces, then how could this actually be done? They simply had to place a person in a revolting and humiliating position, where one’s skirt would fall down, stockings would slip and shoes would shuffle.³⁶

The body search that followed was worse. In his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the arrest of Innokenty, a Soviet diplomat. Within hours of arrival at Lubyanka, a warder was examining every orifice of Innokenty’s body:

Like a horse-dealer, his unwashed fingers prodding inside Innokenty’s mouth, stretching one cheek, then the other, pulling down the lower eyelids, the warder convinced himself that there was nothing hidden in the eyes or mouth and tipped back the head so that the nostrils were lit up; then he checked both ears, pulling them back, told Innokenty to spread out his hands to show there was nothing between the fingers, and to swing his arms to show there was nothing under his armpits. In the same flat, irrefutable tone, he ordered:

“Take your penis in your hands. Turn back the foreskin. More. Right, that’s enough. Move your penis up and right, up and left. Right, you can drop it. Turn your back to me. Straddle your legs. Wider. Bend down and touch the floor. Legs wider. Stretch your buttocks with your hands. Right. Now squat. Quickly! Once more!”