Gulag

Even today, after thirty years, I can hardly describe the horror of that first night at Lefortovo. In my cell I could hear every noise from outside. Near by, as I later discovered, was the “interrogation department,” a separate structure which was in fact a torture chamber. All night long I heard inhuman screams and the repeated sound of the lash. A desperate and tormented animal could hardly have uttered such dreadful cries as the victims who were assaulted for hour on end with threats, blows and curses.⁴⁷

But wherever they found themselves on their first night under arrest, whether in an old Czarist prison, a railway station lockup, a converted church or monastery, all prisoners faced an urgent, immediate task: to recover from shock, to adjust to the peculiar rules of prison life—and to cope with interrogation. The speed with which they managed to do this would then help determine how well, or how badly, they emerged from the system and, ultimately, how they would fare in the camps.

Of all the stages that prisoners passed through on their road to the Gulag, the interrogation is perhaps the one that is most familiar to Westerners. Interrogations have been described not only in history books, but also in Western literature—Arthur Koestler’s classic Darkness at Noon, for example —in war movies, and in other forms of high and low culture. The Gestapo were infamous interrogators, as were the agents of the Spanish Inquisition. The tactics of both are the stuff of popular legend. “We have ways of making you talk . . .” is a phrase children still use when playing war games.

Interrogations of prisoners also take place, of course, in democratic, law-abiding societies, sometimes in accordance with the law, sometimes not. Psychological pressure, even torture, during interrogation is hardly unique to the USSR. The “good cop, bad cop” technique—the nice, polite man asking questions, alternating with the angry inquisitor—has made its way not only as an idiom into other languages, but also into (now outdated) American police manuals as a recommended tactic. Prisoners have been pressured under questioning in many if not most countries at one time or another; indeed, it was evidence of such pressure that led the American Supreme Court to rule, in the Miranda v. Arizona case of 1966, that criminal suspects must be informed, among other things, of their right to remain silent, and of their right to contact a lawyer.⁴⁸

Still, the “investigations” conducted by the Soviet secret police were unique, if not in their methods, then in their mass character. In some eras, “cases” routinely included hundreds of people, who were arrested all over the Soviet Union. Typical of its time was one report filed by the Orenburg regional department of the NKVD on “Operational measures for the liquidation of clandestine groups of Trotskyites and Bukharinites, as well as other counter-revolutionary groups, carried out from 1 April to 18 September 1937.” According to the report, the Orenburg NKVD had arrested 420 members of a “Trotskyite” conspiracy and 120 “right-wingers”— as well as more than 2,000 members of a “right-wing military Japanese cossack organization,” more than 1,500 Czarist officers and civil servants exiled from St. Petersburg in 1935, some 250 Poles indicted as part of the case against “Polish spies,” 95 people who had worked on the Harbin railway in China and were considered to be Japanese spies, 3,290 former kulaks, and 1,399 “criminal elements.”

In all, the Orenburg NKVD arrested more than 7,500 people in a fivemonth period, which did not allow much time for careful examination of evidence. This hardly mattered, as the investigations into each one of these counter-revolutionary conspiracies had in fact been launched in Moscow. The local NKVD were merely doing their duty, filling in the numerical quotas that had been dictated from above.⁴⁹