Gulag

Because of the high volume of arrests, special procedures had to be put in place. These did not always entail extra cruelty. On the contrary, the large numbers of prisoners sometimes meant that the NKVD reduced investigations to a minimum. The accused was hurriedly questioned, and then equally hurriedly sentenced, sometimes with an extremely brief court hearing. General Alexander Gorbatov, an admired military leader, remembered that his hearing took “four or five minutes,” and consisted of a confirmation of his personal details, and one question: “Why did you not admit to your crimes during the investigation?” Afterward, he received a fifteen-year sentence.⁵⁰

Still others had no trial at all: they were sentenced in absentia, either by an osoboe soveshchanie—a “special commission”—or by a troika of three officials, rather than by a court. Such was the experience of Thomas Sgovio, whose investigation was completely perfunctory. Born in Buffalo, New York, Sgovio had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1935 as a political émigré, the son of an Italian American communist who had been forcibly deported to the Soviet Union from the United States for his political activities. During the three years he lived in Moscow, Sgovio gradually became disillusioned, and decided to reclaim his American passport—he had relinquished it upon entering the USSR—in order to return home. On March 12, 1938, he was arrested walking out of the American Embassy.

The record of Sgovio’s subsequent investigation (which, decades later, he photocopied in a Moscow archive and donated to the Hoover Institution) is sparse, matching his own recollection of the same events. The evidence against him includes a list of what was found during his first body search: his trade union membership book, his telephone and address book, his library card, a sheet of paper (“with writing in a foreign language”), seven photographs, one penknife, and an envelope containing foreign postage stamps, among other things. There is a statement from Captain of State Security, Comrade Sorokin, testifying that the accused walked into the U.S. Embassy on March 12, 1938. There is a statement from a witness, testifying that the accused left the U.S. Embassy at 1:15 p.m. The file also includes the protocols of the initial investigation and the two brief interrogations, each page signed by both Sgovio and his interrogator. Sgovio’s initial statement reads as follows: “I wanted to regain my American citizenship. Three months ago I went to the American Embassy for the first time and applied to regain my citizenship. Today I returned . . . the clerk receptionist told me the American employee in charge of my case was out for lunch and for me to return in an hour or two.”⁵¹

During most of the subsequent interrogation, Sgovio was asked to repeat the details of his visit to the embassy over and over again. Only once was he asked, “Tell us all about your espionage activities!” When he replied, “You know I’m not a spy,” they appear not to have pushed him further, although the interrogator was fondling a rubber hose, of the sort normally used to beat prisoners, in a vaguely threatening manner.⁵²

Although the NKVD were not much interested in the case, they never seem to have doubted its outcome. Some years later, after Sgovio demanded a review of his case, the prosecutor’s office dutifully did so, summing up the facts as follows: “Sgovio does not deny that he did make an application at the American Embassy. Therefore I believe there is no reason to review Sgovio’s case.” Damned by the fact that he had confessed to entering the embassy—and had confessed to wanting to leave the USSR—Sgovio received a sentence from one of the “special commissions” of five years of forced labor, condemned as a “socially dangerous element.” His case had been treated as routine. In the crush of arrests at the time, the investigators had simply done the bare minimum required.⁵³

Others were convicted on even less evidence, after even more cursory investigations. Because falling under suspicion was in itself considered a sign of guilt, prisoners were rarely released without serving at least a partial sentence. Leonid Finkelstein, a Russian Jew arrested in the late 1940s, had the impression that although no one had managed to invent a particularly plausible case against him, he had been given a relatively short sentence of seven years, simply in order to prove that the arresting organs never made a mistake.⁵⁴ Another ex-prisoner, S. G. Durasova, even claims that he was specifically told, by one of his investigators, that “we never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren’t guilty, we can’t release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people.”⁵⁵