Releases were most exceptional in 1937 and 1938. One prisoner had incurred a five-year sentence for wondering why an old actress (Ekaterina KorchaginaAleksandrovskaya) had been nominated for the Supreme Soviet in the autumn of 1937, when a number of harmless “cultural” figures were so used to improve the governmental image. He was condemned for “speaking against a candidate of the Communist and non-Party bloc.” A friend, Lev Razgon, got him to tell his wife to approach the actress herself, who went to the NKVD and complained. They told her that the offender had been jailed as a spy for the British and Japanese, and showed her thick files supposedly containing the evidence and sentence. However, he was able to send his real sentence, still in his possession, to be shown to Korchagina. Three weeks later, he was released.61
There are many accounts of the NKVD insisting that anyone released (usually after 1938) should sign a guarantee not to reveal what had happened to him in jail. A Soviet newspaper recently quoted one such:
I, Sternin, N. V., pledge never and nowhere to speak of what became known to me between 11 June 1938 and 11 July 1939 about the work of the organs of the NKVD. It is known to me that on any breach of this I will be accountable under the strictest revolutionary laws, for divulging state secrets.62
Wives were not told where the arrested had been taken. The method of finding where they were was to go from prison to prison. In Moscow, wives would go to the “information center” opposite the Lubyanka, at 24 Kuznetsky Most; then to the Sokolnika; then to the Taganka; then to the office of the Butyrka, in its small courtyard; then to the Lefortovo military prison; and back again. When the head of the queue of hundreds of women was reached, an official was asked to accept the 50 rubles a month to which as-yet unconvicted prisoners were entitled. Sometimes a prison administration, perhaps through bureaucratic incompetence, would not admit that it held the man in question until the second or third time round. One Moscow wife found a girl aged about ten in front of her in the queue with a dirty little wad of ruble notes. She was paying it in her for father and mother, both arrested.63
Anna Akhmatova’s son, the young Orientalist Lev Gumilev, was in jail in Leningrad. “During the frightful years of the Yezhov terror,” the poet says in the foreword to Requiem,
I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone “recognized” me. A woman with blue lips standing behind me, who had of course never heard my name, suddenly woke out of the benumbed condition in which we all found ourselves at that time and whispered into my ear (there everyone spoke in a whisper):
—Could you describe even this?
And I said:
—I can.
Then something resembling a smile flickered over what once had been her face.
Akhmatova speaks of her own mouth as one “through which a hundred million people cry,” and asks that if a monument to her is ever put up, it should be at the prison gates in Leningrad where she stood for 300 hours. In 1940, she was allowed to see her son, and afterward wrote the poem which is number 9 in Requiem, feeling that she was going mad.
Young Gumilev was again, or still, in jail in 1956 when Fadeyev made an appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office, saying that “although he was only a child of nine when his father was no more, he, as the son of N. Gumilev and of A. Akhmatova, was at all times a convenient target for career-seeking and hostile elements who sought to make accusations against him.”64 This makes it clear that he was, like so many others, the victim of his relationships.
Women who actively tried to get their husbands released almost never succeeded. One typically describes being called to a local NKVD headquarters at midnight and simply being told, “I order you to stop running about like a lunatic trying to get your husband released! I order you to stop bothering us! That’s all! Get out!”65
After a husband had been sentenced, it was again difficult to trace him. One method was to write to the addresses of camps of whose existence a woman had heard from other wives. Sometimes, after a wife received a long series of printed forms saying that her husband was not at such-and-such a camp, he could be found66 and, in certain types of sentence, parcels accepted.
For the wives, indeed, life was very bad. General Gorbatov remarks, “I often thought of my wife. She was worse off than me. I was, after all, in the company of other outcasts, whereas she was among free people among whom there might be many who would shun her as the wife of an ‘enemy of the people.’”67 And all reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands’ fate, they faced a worsening future.68
TO THE CELLS
The arrested man first was taken to a reception point in one of the prisons, signed in, and submitted to a strict physical search and an examination of his clothes seam by seam. Bootlaces and metal attachments, including buttons, were removed. These searches were made at intervals during imprisonment. At the same time, thorough cell searches were carried out about once a fortnight.
In the cells, while there were variations around the country, the prisoner would find much the same routine—intense overcrowding, inadequate food, boredom, and squalor, between bouts of interrogation. Life in the Tsarist prisons is universally described as very considerably preferable to those now developed. In particular, there had not been the overcrowding.
A prisoner who had been in Moscow’s Butyrka Prison in 1933 says that while in that year there had already been 72 men in a 24-man cell, there were no fewer than 140 in November 1937.69 In a woman’s cell supposed to hold 25, 110 women were crowded. Planks covered the entire floor and the few beds, apart from a small part of the central gangway, a table and two large latrine buckets. It was impossible for the prisoners to lie on their backs, and when lying on their sides, if one wanted to turn over, it could only be done by negotiating with the prisoners on either side to do it all together.70 The cell in which Pugachev had been held alone before his execution was now occupied by sixty-five people.71
Most of our descriptions of prisons are those in Moscow, Leningrad, or the Ukrainian capital. The impression given is scarcely a favorable one: in the Shpalenv, a four-man cell held up to forty.72 But conditions seem to have been a good deal better there than in the provincial jails. Several accounts remark on prisoners from Chelyabinsk or Sverdlovsk, on arrival in the packed cells of the Butyrka, exclaiming that the place seemed a holiday camp compared with their previous experiences.73 A civilian official describes being shown around Pervouralsk jaiclass="underline" “the stench struck me like a physical blow.”74 Where the overflow was too great, as in some of the Siberian towns, vast pits were sometimes dug and roofed over, and the prisoners simply herded in. By the autumn of 1937, a Kharkov prison built for about 800 held about 12,000.75 In Novosibirsk, about 270 men were crammed into a forty-square-meter ce11.76
In the most crowded cells, conditions were literally lethal. In a letter in a recent issue of a Soviet newspaper, a survivor describes an 8-man cell in Zhitomir prison into which 160 men had been crowded. They had to stand up, pressed tightly against one another. “Five or six died every day”; the bodies “continued to stand up because there was no room to fall down.”77
Overcrowding was treated differently in Moscow than in the provinces. In Moscow, space was gained by having the prisoners sleep under the beds and on boards between the beds. By this means, it was possible to accommodate up to three men to the square yard. In provincial prisons, beds and boards were taken out to make room for more inmates. In some, as we have seen, people slept in rows, lying on their sides; but when cells were even more crowded, half the occupants had to stand while the other half slept, packed, on the floor.78