Gulag

THEIR ARRESTS AND INTERROGATIONS wore prisoners down, shocked them into submission, confused them, and disoriented them. But the Soviet prison system itself, where inmates were kept before, during, and often for a very long time after their interrogations, had an enormous influence on their state of mind as well.

When looked at in an international context, there was nothing unusually cruel about Soviet prisons or the Soviet prison regime. Soviet prisons were certainly harsher than most Western prisons, and harsher than Czarist prisons had been too. On the other hand, prisons in China, or in other parts of the Third World in the mid-twentieth century, were extremely unpleasant as well. Nevertheless, elements of Soviet prison life remained peculiar to the Soviet Union. Some aspects of the daily prison regime, like the interrogation process itself, even seem to have been deliberately designed to prepare prisoners for their new life in the Gulag.

Certainly official attitudes to prisons reflect changes in the priorities of those running the camps. Genrikh Yagoda issued an order in August 1935, for example, just as arrests of political prisoners were beginning to pick up pace, making it clear that the most important “point” of an arrest (if these arrests can be said to have had a “point” in any normal sense of the word) was to feed the ever-more frenzied demand for confessions. Yagoda’s order put not only the prisoners’ “privileges” but also their most basic living conditions directly into the hands of the NKVD officers investigating their cases. Provided a prisoner was cooperating—which usually meant confessing—he would be allowed letters, food parcels, newspapers and books, monthly meetings with relatives, and an hour of exercise daily. If not, he could be deprived of all these things, and lose his food ration as well.¹

By contrast, in 1942—after Lavrenty Beria had arrived, vowing to turn the Gulag into an efficient economic machine—Moscow’s priorities had shifted. The camps were becoming an important factor in wartime production, and camp commanders had begun complaining about the large numbers of prisoners arriving at camp workplaces totally unfit to work. Starving, filthy, and deprived of exercise, they simply could not dig coal or cut trees at the pace required. Beria therefore issued new interrogation orders in May of that year, demanding that prison bosses observe “elementary health conditions,” and limiting investigators’ control over prisoners’ daily life.

According to Beria’s new order, prisoners were to have a daily walk of “not less than one hour” (with the notable exception of those awaiting the death sentence, whose quality of health hardly mattered to the NKVD’s production figures). Prison administrators also had to ensure that their prisons contained a yard specially built for the purpose: “Not a single prisoner must stay in the cell during these walks . . . weak and aged prisoners must be helped by their cell mates.” Prison warders were told to ensure that inmates (except for those directly under interrogation) have eight hours of sleep, that those with diarrhea receive extra vitamins and better food, and that the parashi, the buckets that served as prison toilets, be repaired if leaking. The last point was thought to be so crucial that the order even specified the ideal size of a parasha. In men’s cells, they had to be 55 to 60 centimeters high, in women’s cells 30 to 35 centimeters high—and they had to contain .75 liters of depth per person in the cell.²

Despite these ludicrously specific regulations, prisons continued to differ enormously. In part, they differed according to location. As a rule, provincial prisons were filthier and more lax, Moscow prisons cleaner and more deadly. But even the three main Moscow prisons had slightly different characters. The infamous Lubyanka, which still dominates a large square in central Moscow (and still serves as the headquarters for the FSB, the NKVD’s and KGB’s successor), was used for the reception and interrogation of the most serious political criminals. There were relatively few cells—a 1956 document speaks of 118—and 94 were very small, for one to four prisoners.³ Once the offices of an insurance company, some of the cells of the Lubyanka building had parquet floors, which the prisoners had to wash every day. A. M. Garaseva, an Anarchist who later served as Solzhenitsyn’s secretary, was imprisoned in Lubyanka in 1926, and remembered that food was still served by waitresses wearing uniforms.⁴