The following is a list of some of my favourite quotations form this most disturbing of books detailing the horrors of the soviet political / prison system.
"In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency and unnecessary softheartedness"-------
- Krylenko.If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
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"I wish you happiness, Captain!"
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Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.
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At the end of 1920, by decree of the Council of People's Commissars, permission was given to take Social Democrats hostages too.
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A particular difficulty - and also a particular advantage -in the organization of all these waves was the absence of a criminal code, or any system of criminal law whatsoever before 1922.
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You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.
- Tanya Khodkevich-------
They arrested members of the nobility for their social origin. They arrested members of their families. Finally, unable to draw even simple distinctions, they arrested members of the "individual nobility" i.e., anybody who had ever graduated from a university.
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In the metallurgy, defence, machinery, shipbuilding, chemical, mining, gold and platinum industries, in irrigation, everywhere there were pus-filled boils of wrecking! Enemies with slide rules were on all sides.
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Nikolai Ivanovich Ladyzhensky, chief engineer of defence plants in Izhevsk, was first arrested for "limitation theories" and "blind faith in safety factors"
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The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
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One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramifies, multiform, wide-sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.
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Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens, which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.
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Broadly interpreted: when our soldiers were sentenced to only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner (action injurious to Soviet military might), this was humanitarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist code, they should have been shot on their return home.
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The breadth of interpretation of Section 6 lay further in the fact that people were sentenced not only for actual espionage but also for:
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- PSh - Suspicion of Espionage-
- NSh - Unproven Espionage- for which they gave the whole works.
- And even SVPSh - Contacts Leading to (!) Suspicion of Espionage.
Section 11 was a special one, it had no independent content of its own, but provided for an aggravating factor in any of the preceding ones: if the action was undertaken by an organisation or if the criminal joined an organisation. In actual practice, the section was so broadened that no organisation whatever was required. I myself experienced the subtle application of this section. Two of us had secretly exchanged thoughts - in other words we were the beginnings of an organisation, in other words an organisation!
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It was only the interrogator who, after consulting his revolutionary sense of justice, could separate what was intentional from what was unintentional.
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In other words, by an extension, a thief's flight from camp was interpreted as subversion of the camp system rather than as a dash to freedom.
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Leningrad Estonians were all arrested on the strength of having Estonian family names and charged with being anti-Communist Estonian spies.
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Six geologists (the Kotovich group) were sentenced to ten years under 58-7 "for intentionally concealing reserves of tin ore in underground sites in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans." (In other words, they had failed to find the deposits.)
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In the Finish War we undertook our first experiment in convicting our war prisoners as traitors to the Motherland. The first such experiment in human history; and would you believe it? - We didn't notice!
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It was the personal edict of a monarch. In addition, this was his first experiment of the sort with an entire nationality, and he found it extremely interesting from a theoretical point of view.
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Muscovites who had not run away and had not been evacuated but had fearlessly remained in the threatened capital, which had been abandoned by the authorities, were by that very token under suspicion either of subverting governmental authority (58-10), or of staying on to await the Germans.
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Against the background of this enormous post-war displacement of millions, few paid much attention to such small waves as:
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- Foreigners' girl friends (in 1946-1947) - in other words, Soviet girls who went out with foreigners. They sentenced these girls under Article 7-35-SOE- Socially Dangerous Element.
The entire Soviet Union would be in a turmoil of rape alone, or murder alone, or samogon distilling alone, each in its turn - in sensitive reaction to the latest government decree. Each particular crime or violation seemed somehow to be playing into the hands of the latest decree so that it would disappear from the scene that much faster! At that precise moment, the particular crime which had just been foreseen, and for which wise new legislation had just provided stricter punishment, would explode simultaneously everywhere.
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At this point the Autocrat decided it wasn't enough to arrest just those who had survived since 1937! What about the children of his sworn enemies? They too, must be imprisoned!
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The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate and the interrogator could find them without leaving his office, "basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his moral forces" (in other words, the superiority of someone who has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up) "and on his character" (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty!).
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Oh how foresighted was the saying "A man's family are his enemies."
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"You prove to us that you are not Wrangel's agent."
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"Just give us a person - and we'll create the case!" That was what many of them said jokingly, and it was their slogan.
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Power is a poison well known for thousands of years.
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That's when interrogators spit in the open mouth of the accused! And shove his face into a full cuspidor! That's the state of mind in which they drag priests around by their long hair! Or urinate in a kneeling prisoner's face!
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If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
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Or is it that even blackness must, every so often, however rarely, partake of the heavens?
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The prison doctor was the interrogator's and the executioner's right-hand man. The beaten prisoner would come to on the floor only to hear the doctor's voice. "You can continue, the pulse is normal."
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Fifteen of them were imprisoned in various cells of the Moscow Lubyanka, one in each, and were charged under Article 58-2 with the criminal desire for national self-determination.
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"Are you from freedom?" we asked.
"No!" He shook his head in a painful sort of way.
"When were you arrested?"
"Yesterday morning."
We roared. He had a very gentle; innocent sort of face, and his eyebrows were nearly white.
"What for?"
(It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an answer.)
"Oh, I don't know.... Nothing much."
That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his own case always seemed especially nothing much.
"But anyway, what was it?"
"Well you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian people."
"Whaaat?"
(None of us had ever run into that sort of "nothing much.")
"Are they going to shoot me?" His face grew longer. He kept pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off.
"Well, no, probably not", we reassured him. "They don't shoot anyone nowadays. They give out tenners - every time the clock strikes."
"Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?" asked the Social Democrat, true to this class principles.
"A worker."
Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly proclaimed to me: "You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that's the mood of the working class!" He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was nowhere else to go from there and nothing else to listen to.
But he was wrong.
"What do you mean, a proclamation? Just like that? Without any reason? In whose name was it issued?"
"In my own."
"And who are you?"
The newcomer smiled with embarrassment: "The Emperor, Mikhail."-------
And how it eased the burden for the MGB executioners when thousands of soldiers pouring in from Europe did not even try to conceal that they had voluntarily enlisted as spies. What an astonishing confirmation of the predictions of the Wisest of the Wise! Come on, keep coming, you silly fools! The article and the retribution have long since been waiting for you!
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But...for mercy one must have wisdom. This has been a truth throughout our history and will remain one for a long time to come.
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There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffering: in war not victories are blessed but defeats.
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The ten-year sentence of Janos Rozsas, a Hungarian, was read to him in the corridor in Russian, without any translation. He signed it, not knowing it was his sentence, and he waited a long time afterward for his trial. Still later, when he was in camp, he recalled the incident very vaguely and realized what had happened.
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ASA - Anti-Soviet Agitation.
KRD - Counter-Revolutionary Activity.
KRTD - Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity (And that T made the life of a zek in camp much harder.)
PSh - Suspicion of Espionage (Espionage that went beyond the bounds of suspicion was handed over to a tribunal.)
SVPSh - Contacts leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage.
KRM - Counter-Revolutionary Thought.
VAS - Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments.
SOE - Socially Dangerous Element.
SVE - Socially Harmful Element.
PD - Criminal Activity (a favourite accusation against former camp inmates if there was nothing else to be used against them)
Chs - Member of a Family (of a person convicted under one of the foregoing "letter" categories)-------
The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan.
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Another big advantage the OSO had was speed. This speed was limited only by the technology of typewriting.
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They greeted prisoners with a roll call based on cases. "So-and-so! Article 58-1a, twenty five years." The chief of he convoy guard was curious: "What did you get it for?" "For nothing at all." "You're lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years."
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For several centuries we had a proverb: "don't fear the law, fear the judge."
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How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defence would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!
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In our revolutionary court we are guided not by articles of the law and not by the degree of extenuating circumstances; in the tribunal we must proceed on the basis of considerations of expediency. That was the way it was in those years: people lived and breathed and then suddenly found out that their existence was inexpedient.
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And it must be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant's burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future."
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It appears that Krylenko spared no effort in demanding mercilessly severe sentences, without reference to "the individual shadings of guilt."
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Revolutionary legality must give way to legalised revolutionality.
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"There existed and there continues to exist one additional social stratum, the social characteristics of which have long since been under consideration by the representatives of revolutionary socialism. [In other words: to be or not to be?] This stratum is the so-called 'intelligentsia'. In this trial, we shall be concerned with the judgement of history on the activity of the Russian intelligentsia and with the verdict of the Revolution on it."
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"A man doesn't want to be blind. He tries to find out everything he can about what's going on everywhere."
To find out everything about what's going on everywhere? He doesn't want to be blind? Well, all one can say is that the accuser correctly described their actions as treason, treason to Soviet power!-------
Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear. They are being sentenced to death - for inaction.
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"On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on strike.... In everything else, I-well, yes I am on strike." - Engineer Oldenborger.
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But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people's ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous!
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- If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the church.
- If they agree, we will clean out the churches.
- In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.
As Krylenko said: "We didn't come here just to crack jokes."
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And one other crime that called for execution by shooting: unauthorised return from abroad. (My how the socialists used to bob back and forth incessantly!)
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.... There was a big mix-up:
How could Krylenko get around that one?
- Everything the Socialist Revolutionary Party had been accused of related to 1918.
- Since then, on February 27 1919, an amnesty had been declared for SR's exclusively, which pardoned all their past belligerency against the Bolsheviks on the sole stipulation that they would not continue the struggle into the future.
- And they had not continued the struggle since that time.
- And it was now 1922!
Some thought had been given to this point. When the Socialist International asked the Soviet government to drop charges and not put its socialist brothers on trial, some thought had been given to it.Allegedly, when the amnesty of 1919 had been published, "none of the leaders of Soviet Justice had imagined" that the SR's had also planned to use terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state! (Well, indeed, who could possibly have imagined that! The SR's! And Terrorism, all of a sudden?)
What made Krylenko's task difficult was the fact that the use of terrorism against the Soviet government was discussed at the meeting of the SR Central Committee in 1918 and rejected. And now, years later, it was necessary to prove that the SR's had been engaged n self-deception.
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Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or upon the penalties imposed! For us, intent and action were identical!
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It was no sooner established that wrecking was what had to be tracked down - notwithstanding the non-existence of this concept in the entire history of mankind - than they began to discover it without any trouble in all branches of industry and in all individual enterprises.
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On the threshold of the classless society, we were at last capable of realising the conflictless trial - a reflection of the lack of inner conflict in our social structure - in which not only the judge and the prosecutor but also the defence lawyers and the defendants themselves would strive collectively to achieve their common purpose.
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The harmony of the trial was not at all disturbed by the defence, which agreed with all the prosecutor's proposals. The principal defence lawyer called the prosecutor's summation historic and described his own as narrow, admitting that in making it he had gone against the dictates of his heart, for "a Soviet defence lawyer is first of all a Soviet citizen" and "like all workers, he too is outraged" at the crimes of the defendants.
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They postponed considering new projects (i.e. they did not authorise them immediately)
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The actual warriors would, for the most part, be the following: 100,000 émigrés (true, they had long since scattered to the four winds, but it would take only a whistle to gather them all together again immediately); Poland - for which she would get half the Ukraine; Rumania (whose brilliant successes in World War I were famous - she was a formidable enemy).
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The interrogator smiled ironically: "Moisei Isayevich Teitelbaum begs you to take him into your anti-Soviet organisation. You can speak as freely as you please. I am going out for a while."
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"Well, so what? That's the kind of people they were; maybe there was something to it...."(That was the classic formula of the philistine in those years. "There was probably something to it...In our country they don't arrest people for nothing." And that was said in 1935 by the leading theoretician of the Party!)
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Bukharin (like the rest of them) did not have his own individual point of view. They didn't have their own genuine ideology of opposition, on the strength of which they could step aside, and on which they could take their stand.
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"Tomsky had will power. He understood it all back in August, and he ended his own life. While you and I, like fools, have gone on living."
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From cold to hot. That's how will power collapses. That's how to grow used to the role of a ruined hero.
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"After all, we and you are Communists! How could you have gotten off the track and come out against us? Repent! After all, you and we together - is us!"
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"Even though they proved Stavrov was not a Trotskyite, nonetheless I am sure he is a Trotskyite."
- Romanov-------
"On the Wrecking activities of Smirnov and Univer in the Consumers' Co-operatives"
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"As a Communist I cannot, in a public trial, describe the interrogation methods of the NKVD"
- Univer-------
Lenin justly ridiculed the idealism of his comrades. He, at any rate, knew that without capital punishment there would be no movement whatever in the direction of the new society.
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Thus the death penalty was rechristened the "Supreme Measure" - no longer a "punishment" but a means of social defence.
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Of course, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee would certainly have "completely abolished" the supreme measure, as promised, but unfortunately what happened was that in 1936 the Father and Teacher "completely abolished" the All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself.
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On the extension of the Supreme Measure....
In July 1961 - for violating the rules governing foreign currency transactions.-------
The agronomist of a District Agricultural Department got a death sentence for his mistaken analysis of collective farm grain!
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And fluid began to accumulate in Strakhovich's legs - dropsy. He told the jailer about it - and they sent him, believe it or not, a dentist.
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Or did humanitarianism dictate that the doctor should insist on execution as quickly as possible?
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To them the important figures were not an increase in the number of executions but an increase in the manpower sent out to the Archipelago.
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Finally, we learn that a death cell can be used as an element in interrogation, as a method of coercing a prisoner.
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He cried out for help, so they shoved a child's rubber ball into his mouth. (Now, looking at that child's ball, could one really guess all its possible uses? What a good example for a lecturer on the dialectical method!)
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Monastery architecture, liberated from monkish ideology, was very useful for us.
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And the worst thing was that endless waiting destroys the will to resist.
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Die one minute, and dance the next!
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It is strange, I was condemned for lack of faith in the victory of socialism in our country. But can even Kalinin himself believe in it if he thinks camps will still be needed in our country twenty years from now?"
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In 1902, because he refused to forward a protest of hers, she ripped the shoulder boards off his uniform. And the result was that a military investigator came and apologised profusely to Figner for the ignoramus superintendent!
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But the political prisoners of the twenties remembered something even more important: self-government for political prisoners: and hence even in a prison a sense of oneself as part of a whole, a member of a community.
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And yet human flesh crackled in the flames in exactly the same way.
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A collective hunger strike is always more difficult to carry out than an individual one; after all, the weakest rather than the strongest of the strikers can determine its outcome.
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Silence was already confidently shaping our history.
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But the hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is afraid of public opinion. Only in such circumstances can it be effective.
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Artificial feeding has much in common with rape, and that's what it really is: four big men hurl themselves on one weak being and deprive it of its one interdiction - they only need to do it once and what happens to it next is not important. The element of rape inheres in the violation of the victim's will: "It's not going to be the way you want it, but the way I want it; lie down and submit". They pry open the mouth with a flat disc; then broaden the crack between the jaws and insert a tube: "Swallow it." And if you don't swallow it, they shove it farther down anyway and then pour liquefied food right down the oesophagus. And then they massage the stomach to prevent the prisoner from resorting to vomiting. The sensation is one of being morally defiled, of sweetness in the mouth and a jubilant stomach gratified to the point of delight.
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But the hunger strike had not been entirely useless: the interrogator had come to understand that Rappoport had will power enough and no fear of death, and he eased up on the interrogation. "Well, now, it turns out you are quite a wolf," the interrogator said to him. "A wolf!" Rappoport affirmed. "And I'll certainly never be your dog."
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Even a strong man had no way left him to fight the prison machine, except perhaps suicide. But is suicide really resistance? Isn't it actually submission?
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And Smelov replied: "Justice is more precious to me than life."
This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor there told him: "We suspect you may be a schizophrenic."-------
For it was the Socialists, after all, whom Stalin saw as the most dangerous enemies of his socialism.
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They said: All our misfortunes are due to those Socialist rats! [A profound explanation, and so dialectical too!]
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But a Communist has no special individual views, so what, then, was the to be sentenced for if a self-denunciation wasn't forced out of him?
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The punishment cells were a scourge in the Special Purpose Prisons. One could get into a punishment cell for coughing. ("Cover your head with your blanket. Then you can cough!") Or for walking around the cell (Kozyrev: "It was considered to be rebellious");
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In the event of any display of unruliness in a punishment cell [?], the chief of the prison has the right to extend the term of incarceration there to twenty days.
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Well brothers, a prisoner transport! A prisoner transport! We're off to somewhere! Good Lord, bless us! Shall we gather up our bones?
Book 2: Perpetual Motion One might, however, conditionally accept as the upper limit [ on the number of prisoners to be placed in each train carraige ] the number of unremoved corpses which can be contained in the total volume of the compartment, given the possibility of packing them in at leisure.
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"The prisoners were simply in clover." He writes. But then in Irkutsk Prison the prices were higher. A pound of meat cost ten kopecks there and the "prisoners were simply famished!" One pound of meat per day per person - it's not half a herring is it?
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Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice - and they go to the toilet twice. So it's pure and simple common sense: just don't give them anything to drink.
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And in spite of that, you still couldn't make them happy. In spite of that, some old sandpiper or other would begin to cry half an hour later and ask to go to the toilet, and, of course, he wouldn't be allowed to go, and then he would soil himself right there in the compartment, and once again that meant trouble for the private first class: the prisoner had to be forced to pick it up in his hands and carry it away.
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I have heard of a few cases in which three seasoned, young, and healthy men stood up against the thieves - not to defend justice in general, but to protect, not those who were being plundered right next to them, but themselves only. In other words: armed neutrality.
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Your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief's. For him to have a knife was mere misbehaviour, tradition, he didn't know any better. But for you to have one was "terrorism."
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According to Makarenko, the origin of crime lay solely in the "counterrevolutionary underground." (Those were the ones who couldn't be reformed - engineers, priests, SR's, Mensheviks.)
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Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.
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The toilets right on top of one another, the wooden partitions rotten, and the ones above leaking down into the ones underneath.
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In 1937-1938, of course, not just the zeks but the very stones of the transit prisons were screaming in agony.
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"But those aren't thieves!" the connoisseurs among us explain. "Those are the bitches - the ones who work for the prison. They are the enemies of the honest thieves. And the honest thieves are the ones imprisoned in the cells.
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Nature had sculpted the front of the ringleader's head, in bipeds usually called a face, with nausea and hate.
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Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
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Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for - all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
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There were also eccentrics who sold their short terms for a kilo or two of fat bacon.
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Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
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This is how they exiled Leningrad from Leningrad.
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So they cut off the straps which held up the artificial limb of a one-legged man - and the cripple had to carry his artificial leg on his shoulder and hop with the help of those on either side of him.
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They urinated in glass jars which were passed from hand to hand and emptied through the porthole. And anything more substantial went right in their pants.
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If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.
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They used to deliver orders like this: "One step out of line and the convoy guard will shoot and slash!"
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And I urge you to note how here, too, as always, the interests of the individual and the interests of the state coincided completely.
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The bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet doesn't fill the cup to overflowing.
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I recognised his suitcase: it was camp work, "made in the Archipelago."
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And it was so pleasant to realise that unvarnished truth was, despite everything, pouring into someone's ears.
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How many there actually were in the Archipelago we cannot know for certain. We can assume that at any one time there were not more than twelve million in the camps.
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Professor Timofeyev-Ressovsky, President of the Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75.
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And even though they did not have any ideological guidance there, they nonetheless achieved great things in science.
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Epicurus spoke truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it.