Gulag

Why the Soviet secret police were so obsessed with confession remains a matter for debate, and a wide variety of explanations have been proferred in the past. Some believe the policy came from the top. Roman Brackman, author of an unorthodox biography of Stalin, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin , believes the Soviet leader had a neurotic obsession with making others confess to crimes which he himself had committed: because he himself had been an agent of the Czarist secret police before the Revolution, he had a particular need to see people confess to having been traitors. Robert Conquest also believes that Stalin was interested in forcing at least those he knew personally to confess. “Stalin wanted not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically,” although this, of course, applied only to a few out of the millions arrested.

But confession would also have been important to the NKVD agents carrying out the interrogations. Perhaps obtaining confessions helped them feel confident of the legitimacy of their actions: it made the madness of mass, arbitrary arrest seem more humane, or at least legal. As in the case of the “Polish spies,” confession also provided the evidence necessary to arrest others. The Soviet political and economic system was also obsessed with results—fulfilling the plan, completing the norm—and confessions were concrete “proof” of a successful interrogation. As Conquest writes, “the principle had become established that a confession was the best result obtainable. Those who could obtain it were to be considered successful operatives, and a poor NKVD operative had a short life expectancy.”⁶²

Whatever the source of the NKVD’s fixation on confessions, police interrogators usually pursued them without either the deadly singlemindedness shown in the case of the “Polish spies,” or the indifference applied to Thomas Sgovio. Instead, prisoners generally experienced a mixture of the two. On the one hand, the NKVD demanded that they confess and incriminate themselves and others. On the other hand, the NKVD seemed to feel a slovenly lack of interest in the outcome altogether.

This somewhat surreal system was already in place by the 1920s, in the years before the Great Terror, and it remained in place long after the Great Terror had subsided. As early as 1931, the officer investigating Vladimir Tchernavin, a scientist accused of “wrecking” and sabotage, threatened him with death if he refused to confess. At another point, he told him he would get a more “lenient” camp sentence if he confessed. Eventually, he actually begged Tchernavin to give a false confession. “We, the examining officers, are also often forced to lie, we also say things which cannot be entered into the record and to which we would never sign our names,” his interrogator told him, pleadingly.⁶³

When the outcome mattered more to them, torture was deployed. Actual physical beatings seem to have been forbidden in the period before 1937. One former Gulag employee confirms that they were certainly illegal in the first half of the 1930s.⁶⁴ But as the pressure to get leading Party members to confess increased, physical torture came into use, probably in 1937, although it ended again in 1939. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly admitted this in 1956: “How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way—because of applications of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, depriving him of his judgment, taking away his human dignity. In this manner were ‘confessions’ acquired.”⁶⁵

So widespread did the use of torture become during this period—and so frequently was it questioned—that in early 1939, Stalin himself sent out a memo to regional NKVD chiefs, confirming that “from 1937 on in NKVD practice the use of physical pressure [on prisoners] was permitted by the Central Committee.” He explained that it was permitted only with respect to such overt enemies of the people who take advantage of humane interrogation methods in order to shamelessly refuse to give away conspirators, who for months don’t testify and try to impede the unmasking of those conspirators who are still free.

He did, he continued, consider this to be a “totally correct and humane method,” although he conceded that it might have occasionally been applied to “accidentally arrested honest people.” What this notorious memo makes clear, of course, is that Stalin himself knew what sorts of methods had been used during interrogation, and had personally approved of them.⁶⁶