Such a prisoner had to undress in such a way that his hands could be seen and, when sleeping, to keep his arms outside the covers. Weissberg says that this was because a prisoner had once plaited a length of string under the cover and hanged himself with it; in any case, it would have been the only opportunity for making any illegal object.98 If a warder saw a prisoner’s hands hidden, he would enter the cell and wake the prisoner each time he detected him.
In the “inner prisons” proper, communication by tapping was almost impossible, and was seldom replied to as being probably the work of a provocateur.99 Elsewhere there was a certain amount of it.100 The method is that described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon—the so-called Dekabrist alphabet, dating from the prisoners of the 1820s.fn1
In the isolation cells, the psychological problem was intense. A former actor from the Bolshoi Theater who had served five years gave the following “lesson”:
First, you must detach yourself from reality—stop thinking of yourself as a prisoner. Make believe that you are a tourist who temporarily finds himself in an unfamiliar environment. Don’t admit to yourself that conditions here are very bad, because they may get even worse, and you should be prepared for that. Don’t become too involved in the everyday life of the isolator. Try not to hear its sounds, especially at night, or to smell its smells. Try not to be aware of the guards, don’t look at them, ignore the expression on their faces. Stop making-believe about the possibility of your being released soon from the isolator. Do not attempt to regain your freedom by means of a hunger strike, or by admitting your guilt, or by appealing for mercy to the authorities. Stop pining for the friends you have left behind in the free world.101
A special category of prison consisted of the half-dozen “political isolators,” notably those at Suzdal, Verkhne-Uralsk, Yaroslavl, and Aleksandrovsk. These dated from earlier days of the regime, when they had been thought of as a comparatively humane method of removing factious Communists and other left-wing “politicals” from public life. Even in the early 1930s, treatment in these prisons was comparatively humane. During the purge, they sank to the normal level. A Soviet commentator says of the food in the Yaroslavl isolator in 1937 that it “contained no vitamins whatever. For breakfast we got bread, hot water, and two lumps of sugar, for dinner—soup and gruel cooked without any fat, and for supper—a kind of broth reeking of fish oil.”102 But the isolators still preserved some special characteristics. They mostly held no more than 400 to 500 prisoners. Typically at Verkhne-Uralsk, there were cells holding either 10 to 25 or 3 to 8 prisoners, with in addition a number of solitary cells. It was usual for important prisoners serving sentences, but not expendable—in that further trials were planned for them—to be held in these.
THE GREAT PRISONS
Of the five main prisons in Moscow, three—the Lubyanka, the Lefortovo, and the Butyrka—were for “politicals” only, though they were also held in the other places of detention with nonpoliticals. The Lefortovo was the great torture center, though torture was also practiced on a lesser scale in the Lubyanka and in the “special section” of the Butyrka.
The Lubyanka was free of bugs, and the same is reported of some of the Kiev prisons, though bugs usually abounded. (In spite of the far cleaner and more sanitary conditions in the German concentration camps compared with the Soviet labor camps, the same does not seem to have been true of the prisons. The Berlin Central Prison on the Alexanderplatz is described as being more lice-ridden than prisons in Moscow.)103
The corridors of the Lubyanka were clean, smelling of carbolic and disinfectant. It is the best known of the NKVD prisons, since it lies within the headquarters of the Police Ministry, and has been the scene of the most famous imprisonments, interrogations, and executions. But though its great wedge looming over Dzerzhinsky Square is only a few minutes’ walk from the Kremlin and the general tourist area, it is seldom pointed out to visitors even now.
It was originally the headquarters of an insurance company. The Cheka took over the old building, and over the years built over the entire block. The original building is pre-Revolutionary Gothic; the rest of the block was rebuilt in two bursts: one in 1930-functional, and the other in postwar wedding-cake style. The People’s Commissariat consisted of the whole outer section. Inside is a courtyard, and within the courtyard is the nine-story prison section. This was originally a hotel or boarding house run by the insurance company, and though considerably adapted has not been rebuilt. As a result, the rooms used as cells are less unpleasant than the cells in the other prisons. The windows—though largely blocked by shutters—are of good size.
The Lubyanka had about 110 cells, which were fairly small. It seems improbable that more than a few hundred prisoners were held there at a time.
Prisoners who were unsatisfactory in the preliminary interrogations at the Lubyanka were often transferred to the 160-cell Lefortovo—in particular, the military. No clear account of the atrocities practiced in the Lefortovo is available. We are told that prisoners who had been there and were transferred to the Butyrka regarded the beating up in the latter prison as child’s play compared with their previous sufferings.104 The Lefortovo was built just before the First World War in a more or less star shape, with blocks radiating from the center. It had the advantage that there were water closets actually in the cells.
The Butyrka, started in the eighteenth century to house the captured rebels of the Pugachev insurrection, is by far the largest prison. It consists of a number of vast barrack-like blocks, centered on the old section, “the Pugachev Tower,” in which the great rebel had been held before his execution. In the Purge, it held about 30,000 prisoners.105
Gorbatov, who was tortured in the Lefortovo, says that the Butyrka was an immense improvement. Prisoners got half an hour’s exercise a day instead of ten minutes every other day. It had large exercise yards, unlike the cramped squares of the Lefortovo.106 Exercise was taken, walking in pairs, with hands behind backs and eyes to the ground. Any swinging of arms or raising of heads was immediately stopped.107
Women with newborn babies are reported in the Butyrka.108 On the other hand, others were brought in who had had to leave children, and nursing babies, unattended at home. They had their breasts bandaged to stop the milk.109
The Taganka, and other prisons holding politicals and others, were like the Butyrka, but dirtier and less efficient.110
A special small prison some ten or twenty miles out of Moscow, the Sukhanovka, deserves mention. It had a particularly fearful reputation among prisoners, who knew it as “the dacha.”111 It was a single-story building, consisting of a set of isolators; and torture was the normal method of procedure. It is said to have been built specially for the Rudzutak–Postyshev intake. It was the one place were the regulations were observed so strictly that the warders literally never spoke at all to the prisoners.