The UOO also discovered new ‘plots’. The purported plot of teachers at the Frunze Military Academy (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com) was the most bizarre. Eight teachers (seven generals and a colonel) were arrested in November and December 1941 in the city of Tashkent, to which the Academy was evacuated from Moscow in October. As Abakumov reported to Stalin in 1945, they ‘were arrested as active participants in an anti-Soviet group whose goal was to establish contacts with the Germans and to overthrow the Soviet government. During their hostile activity the participants… intended to create conditions favorable for the Germans to enter Moscow’.4
It is hard to believe that Abakumov seriously considered it possible that these teachers had contacts with the Germans and tried to help them to conquer Moscow. It was discovered in the late 1950s, during the rehabilitation process, that this nonsense was based on the secret reports of a female informer named Bondarenko who worked at the Political Department of the Frunze Academy.5 Interestingly, despite the rhetoric, the ‘plotters’ were charged with paragraph 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda), and not accused of treason and plotting (which would be paragraphs 58-1b and 58-11, respectively). The teachers were brought to Moscow and kept in NKGB investigation prisons (the UOO/SMERSH did not have its own prisons), where the investigation was conducted.
As usual, under torture the arrestees were forced to ‘confess’, and the investigator Mikhail Likhachev, who will be mentioned in this book more than once, was especially successful in extracting these ‘confessions’. However, the fates of the teachers, as well as of the other 29 generals kept in NKGB prisons, were decided only after the war, when Abakumov presented Stalin with a list of generals arrested by the UOO/SMERSH and kept in Moscow prisons without trial.
Put on Ice
The generals arrested in 1941 and brought back to Moscow, like the Frunze Academy teachers, or after Moscow prisons were evacuated in October 1941, Konstantin Samoilov and others, as well as those arrested in 1942 (Vladimir Golushkevich, Fyodor Romanov, Aleksandr Turzhansky; Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com) were held in solitary confinement or, in the prison’s jargon, ‘conserved’ or ‘put on ice’, in the most horrifying prison of all, Sukhanovo (or Sukhanovka). In official documents, this facility was called ‘Special Object No. 110’.6 In 1938, under Beria’s supervision, this small seventeenth-century monastery in the Moscow suburbs was converted into an especially harsh investigation prison, equipped with tools for torture.7 Beria had a personal office on the second floor, connected by an elevator with the torture chambers on the first floor. Beria’s elevator also reached the basement where the punishment cells, kartsery, were located. Later Abakumov used the same office.
Approximately 150–160 prisoners under investigation were kept in this prison. Most of the cells were extremely small—1.56 by 2.09 meters (61.4 by 82.3 inches)—especially for two prisoners.8 For one prisoner, there was room only for a stool made of iron pipes and a table one meter long and 15.24 centimeters wide, both attached to the floor, and a narrow, but very heavy wooden folding bed (in fact, a board) attached to the wall. In the early morning the prisoner was ordered to lift the bed up and a guard locked it to the wall. In the evening, a guard unlocked the bed, and the prisoner was ordered to let it down. At night, the stool supported the bed. In the cells for two prisoners, there were two folding beds. Frequently an interrogated prisoner was kept with a stool pigeon as a cell mate.
During the day, the bed was up, and a prisoner had no choice but to sit on the iron stool and stare at the iron door of the cell; the door was equipped with a peephole through which a guard watched the prisoner from the corridor. Yevgenii Gnedin, a prisoner at Sukhanovo, recalled:
There was one guard for every three cells. The shade of the peephole was moved up almost every minute. If a prisoner made an incautious movement, the door’s lock was immediately opened and a guard stepped in and inspected the prisoner and the cell.9
There was a window in the cell furnished with specially made glass that was corrugated, and almost opaque. The same type of glass covered a bulb attached to the ceiling. The window was fortified with bars and mesh. The guard opened a small panel above it for a few minutes every morning.
The walls were painted a depressing light-blue color. A bucket was used as a toilet, and every morning the prisoner was ordered to take the bucket out to a lavatory in the corridor to empty it. Alexander Dolgun, an American prisoner, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The toilet was one of eight doors in the short corridor, four on each side [on every floor].’10
In Lubyanka and Lefortovo, two guards accompanied a prisoner on the way from his cell to an investigator’s office. But in Sukhanovo, two guards held the prisoner’s arms and the third pushed the prisoner from behind.11 According to memoirs, investigators used 52 methods of torture in this prison, such as forcing an interrogated prisoner to sit on a stool upturned so that the stool’s leg penetrated the prisoner’s rectum; putting an interrogated prisoner in a cell full of cold water up to the knees for a day and a night.12 These were typical additions to the standard severe beatings. For extra punishment, there were cold kartsery without a heating device and hot kartsery with overheating, dark kartsery without light, and kartsers so small that a prisoner could only stand.
Some prisoners (both male and female) were brought from Lubyanka and Lefortovo to Sukhanovo for a short time, to give them a psychological shock, to frighten them, or to briefly torture them. If a prisoner was not interrogated for a long time, his investigator called him once every three months to make sure that he had not gone insane.13 Some prisoners did end up going insane, but usually they were not sent to a prison mental hospital right away, and terrified their prison neighbors with wild screams. Sometimes a prisoner managed to commit suicide despite the tight surveillance.
During the war, the ‘conserved’ generals were kept without interrogation. It is hard to imagine how the ‘iced’ prisoners managed to survive for years in the horrific conditions of Sukhanovo. They were tried only in 1951–52. At the time three of them had already died in Sukhanovo and in Butyrka Prison Hospital (the only hospital in investigation prisons in Moscow). One more general, Fedot Burlachko, died in 1949 in the MVD Kazan Psychiatric Prison Hospital, which was notorious for its inhumane treatment of prisoners.14
After Stalin’s death Sukhanovka was not used as a prison any more, but it continued to belong to the MVD.15 In the 1960s–70s, there was a special MVD school, then a training center for MVD troops. Although from 1992 onwards, buildings of the former prison were given step by step to the Orthodox Church, part of the MVD School existed in the monastery until 1995. The church officials completely destroyed Beria–Abakumov’s office and torture chambers below it that were intact until the mid-1990s. No research of the buildings by historians, no descriptions by architects, and even no photos were made. Currently, it is a working monastery consisting of newly constructed shining buildings without any reminder of the terrifying past and tortured victims. The FSB Central Archive keeps a register of the prisoners held in Sukhanovo during Stalin’s time as one of its main secrets.