Gulag

Dolgun did not confess for many months, a fact that provided him with something to be proud of throughout the rest of his imprisonment. Yet when, many months later, he was called back to Moscow from his camp in Dzhezkazgan and beaten up again, he did sign a confession, thinking “What the hell. They’ve got me anyway. Why didn’t I do it a long time ago, and avoid all that pain?”⁷⁴

Why not indeed? It was a question many others asked themselves, with varying answers. Some—a particularly high percentage of memoir writers, it would seem—held out either on principle, or in the mistaken belief that they would thereby avoid being sentenced. “I’d rather die than defame myself,” General Gorbatov told his interrogator, even as he was being tortured (he does not specify how). Many also believed—as Solzhenitsyn, Gorbatov, and others point out—that a ridiculously lengthy confession would create an atmosphere of absurdity which even the NKVD could not fail to notice. Gorbatov wrote with horror of his prison comrades:

They impressed me as being cultured and serious-minded people. I was all the more horrified to hear that during their interrogations every single one of them had written the most unmitigated rubbish, confessing to imaginary crimes and incriminating other people . . . Some even held the strange theory that the more people were jailed the sooner it would be realized that all this was nonsense and harmful to the Party.⁷⁵

Yet not everyone agreed that such people were to be blamed. Lev Razgon, in his own memoirs, replied to Gorbatov, whom he called “arrogant and immoral”:

It is wrong to shift the blame from the torturers to their victims. Gorbatov was lucky, that’s all. Either his interrogator was lazy, or he had not been given a firm instruction to “put pressure” on his charge. Doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists have not done enough research to say whether an individual can be tortured into giving false testimony against himself. But this century has provided a vast amount of evidence on the subject. Of course it can be done.⁷⁶

There are also mixed views, in retrospect, about whether holding out actually mattered. Susanna Pechora, who was interrogated for more than a year in the early 1950s—she was a member of a tiny youth group which was founded, quixotically, to resist Stalin—said, looking back, that “holding out” had not been worth it. Resisting confession simply prolonged the interrogation, she believes. Most were sentenced anyway, in the end. ⁷⁷

Nevertheless, the contents of Sgovio’s file clearly illustrate that subsequent decisions—about early release, amnesty, and so on—were indeed taken on the basis of what was in a prisoner’s file, including confession. If you had managed to hold out, in other words, you did stand a very, very slim chance of having your sentence reversed. Right up through the 1950s, all of these judicial procedures, however surreal, were taken seriously.

In the end, the interrogation’s greatest importance was the psychological mark it left on prisoners. Even before they were subjected to the long transports east, even before they arrived in their first camps, they had been at some level “prepared” for their new lives as slave laborers. They already knew that they had no ordinary human rights, no right to a fair trial or even a fair hearing. They already knew that the NKVD’s power was absolute, and that the state could dispose of them as it wished. If they had confessed to a crime they had not committed, they already thought less of themselves. But even if they had not, they had been robbed of all semblance of hope, of any belief that the mistake of their arrest would soon be reversed.

Chapter 8

PRISON

A Gypsy read the cards—a distant road,

A distant road—and a prison house.

Maybe the old central prison,

It waits for me, a young man, once again . . .

—Traditional Russian prisoners’ song