Gulag

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, my cross-examiner became extremely flirtatious. He got up from behind his desk, and came and sat beside me on the sofa. I stood up and went to drink some water. He followed me and stood behind me. I neatly evaded him and returned to the sofa. Down he sat himself again beside me. And once again I got up and went to drink water. Maneuvers like these lasted for a couple of hours. I felt humiliated and helpless . . .⁷²

There were also forms of physical torture less crude than beatings, and these were used regularly from the 1920s on. Tchernavin was early on given “the standing test”—prisoners were told to stand, facing the wall, without moving—albeit briefly. Some of his other cell mates suffered worse:

One, Engraver P., over fifty years of age and heavily built, had stood for six and a half days. He was not given food or drink and was not allowed to sleep; he was taken to the toilet only once a day. But he did not “confess.” After this ordeal he could not walk back to the cell and the guard had to drag him up the stairs . . . Another, Artisan B., about thirty-five years old, who had one leg amputated above the knee and replaced by an artificial one, had stood for four days and had not “confessed.” ⁷³

Most commonly, however, prisoners were simply deprived of sleep: this deceptively simple form of torture—which seemed to require no special advance approval—was known to prisoners as being put “on the conveyor,” and it could last for many days, or even weeks. The method was simple: prisoners were interrogated all night, and afterward forbidden to sleep during the day. They were constantly awoken by guards, and threatened with punishment cells or worse if they failed to stay awake. One of the best accounts of the conveyor, and of its physical effects, is that given by the American Gulag inmate Alexander Dolgun. During his first month in Lefortovo, he was virtually deprived of any sleep at all, allowed an hour a day or less: “Looking back it seems that an hour is too much, it may have been no more than a few minutes some nights.” As a result, his brain began to play tricks on him:

There would be periods when I suddenly knew that I had no recollection of what had happened in the last few minutes. Drop-outs in my mind. Total erasures . . .

Then, of course, later on, I began to experiment with sleeping upright, to see if my body could learn to hold itself erect. I thought if that would work I might escape detection in the cells for a few minutes at a time, because the guard at the peep-hole would not think I was asleep if I was sitting upright.

And so it would go, snatching ten minutes here, half an hour there, occasionally a little longer if Sidorov called it quits before six in the morning and the guards left me alone till the wake-up call. But it was too little. Too late. I could feel myself slipping, getting looser and less disciplined every day. I dreaded going crazy almost worse—no, really worse—than dying . . .