In Leningrad, there was a similar system. The Shpalerny prison, described as comparatively clean and orderly, fulfilled the role of the Lubyanka in Moscow with about 300 cells. The larger Nizhnegorodsky, too, had a number of one-man cells for important prisoners. The Kresti, equivalent to the Butyrka, with about 30,000 prisoners,112 was more squalid altogether, with sixteen men sharing what had been a one-man cell in Tsarist times.113 A special Transfer Prison held those already sentenced to camps. (And outside, tourists were being shown as a horror of the past the cells of the old Peter Paul Fortress, where a handful of politicals had been held in considerably better circumstances before the Revolution.)
Whether in one of these or in prisons of various degrees of rigor, malnutrition, and overcrowding, the arrested citizen awaited the authorities’ next move. As a general thing, physical conditions were usually far worse in the provincial jails in Minsk, Gomel, Vyatka, or Vologda, but regulations were less tightly enforced; there was more off hand brutality, but also more chance of a comparatively sympathetic warder, who might even warn against informers.114 As an experienced prisoner puts it, “The dirtier the prison, the worse the food, the rougher and more undisciplined the guard, the less danger there was to life.”115
CRIMINAL TYPES
In his cell in this new community, the arrested man might be interrogated at once, or he might wait for some time. Meanwhile, he would discover in discussion with his cell mates what his crime was likely to be. At the beginnings of the purge, those arrested often thought that the other people in the prisons were actually guilty of something, and that only their own case was a mistake. By 1937, the outside public had come to realize that the accused were innocent, and people brought in took it for granted that their cell mates were in the same boat as themselves. The chances of anyone there being actually guilty of anything whatever were very small. One sometimes hears the view still expressed in the West that the Great Purge, though unforgivably striking at many innocent men, at least destroyed, in passing, the genuine spy networks of hostile powers. Such was not the view of Gomulka, who remarks that the Terror “only facilitated the work of the intelligence services of the imperialist states.”116
In fact, from the purely intelligence point of view, the Japanese, Polish, and Latvian services at least seem to have gained all the information they required. And apart from direct operations, the mere fact of (for example) the defection, owing to fear for his life, of the Far East NKVD chief, Lyushkov, to the Japanese in 1938 must have put them in possession of a veritable treasure house of information—and this defection was a direct result of the Terror!
There is one important earlier case generally recognized as that of a genuine spy—Konar, who became Assistant People’s Commissar of Agriculture until accidentally exposed. He was a Polish agent who had been given the papers of a dead Red Army soldier in 1920, and in ten years had thus risen high in the hierarchy, until exposed by someone who chanced to have seen the real Konar. As to minor agents, a number of books mention, as an extreme rarity, “real” spies or men who at least might possibly have been guilty.117 There is one such, the “Moldavian,” in Solzhenitsyn’s camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a Kiev prison in 1939, there was much pride and astonishment on all sides that one of the prisoners was a genuine Polish spy. Once he had admitted his own guilt, he was badly beaten to get him to implicate Party officials in Kiev.118
Prisoners recognized, in most cases of arrest, that there was an “objective characteristic” basic to their cases. This might be social origins, past or present posts, relationships or friendships with someone, nationality or connection with a foreign country, or activity in specific Soviet organizations. This probable “real” cause of arrest was at once plain to cell mates, though it was never mentioned by the interrogators.119
For although there were many categories, membership in which was liable to bring arrest—such as foreign connections, high military rank, and so forth—these were not the crimes officially charged. Nor did they automatically lead to arrest. “We can even quote cases of German Communists who were not arrested, although they were political refugees.”120 Arrest depended on a variety of secondary factors.
One peasant in Kharkov jail accounted for his arrest by the fact that he had been arrested on a false charge four years previously, and released with apologies. This, he thought, must make the NKVD think that he had reason to dislike it. This was apparently not an unusual case. “Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested during the Purge for no other reason than at some time in the past the Soviet authorities had done them an injustice.”121
To have had anything to do with foreigners was one almost certain road to arrest. People who had actually been abroad—for example, footballers like the three Starostin brothers, stars of the prewar period—were almost all in camps by the 1940s.122 In general, sport was thoroughly purged: “loathsome counter-revolutionary work” at the Institute of Physical Culture led to the denunciation and arrest of the “human degenerates” concerned, who included I. I. Kharchenko, Head of the All-Union Committee on Physical Culture and Sports Affairs.123 Philatelists were arrested en bloc, as were Esperantists, for their international connections.124 Professor Kalmanson, Assistant Director of the Moscow Zoo, had been educated abroad, so was assumed to be a “spy” by his cell mates. After his first interrogation, he triumphantly told them that he was only a “wrecker”—16 percent of his monkeys having died of tuberculosis (a lower figure, he pointed out, than the London Zoo’s). But they were vindicated by his second interrogation, which reached “the main question”—espionage for Germany.125 Everyone connected with the organizations for contact with “Friends of the Soviet Union” abroad was automatically suspect. These organizations sponsored pen-pal exchanges. One young science student is mentioned as being sentenced as a German spy because he had, on this basis, been writing to a Communist in Manchester, though his letters had consisted almost entirely of Soviet propaganda.126
All direct contact with foreign consulates was likely to prove fatal. Doctors who had treated German Consuls; a veterinarian who had dealt with consular dogs; even more indirect connections, such as the veterinarian’s son, were arrested in the Ukraine; and another man, an old caretaker, always explained in prison that he was there as “the brother of the woman who supplied the German Consul’s milk.”127 Another had copied and given to the Polish Consul the weather forecast pinned up in the public park.128
An opera singer who had danced longer than permitted with the Japanese Ambassador at an official ball is reported in camp. A cook had applied for a job advertised in Vechernaya Moskva, the evening paper. It turned out to be at the Japanese Embassy. She got the job but was arrested for espionage before she had time to start it.129 Another typical case is of two engineers and their families, arrested in the winter of 1937/1938 because of a gift parcel one of them had received from an uncle in Poland, consisting of two pairs of shoes, some crayons, and a couple of dolls. The engineer who had not received the parcel, but was a friend of the one who had, got ten years.130