A Soviet general describes his fate under this system:
I accidentally found out that my fiend of an interrogator’s name was Stolbunsky. I don’t know where he is now. If he is still alive I hope he will read these lines and feel my contempt for him, not only now but when I was in his hands. But I think he knew this well enough. Apart from him, two brawny torturers took part in the interrogation. Even now my ears ring with the sound of Stolbunsky’s evil voice hissing “You’ll sign, you’ll sign!” as I was carried out, weak and covered in blood. I withstood the torture during the second bout of interrogation, but when the third started, how I longed to be able to die!59
He adds that every one of his cell mates had confessed to imaginary crimes: “Some had done this after physical coercion and others after having been terrified by accounts of the tortures used.” Another report, by an Old Bolshevik, says that only 4 of the 400-odd cell mates he met in prison had failed to confess; and the critic Ivanov-Razumnik similarly writes that in his years in jail in Moscow and Leningrad only 12 of his 1,000-odd cell mates had held out.60 In most cases, the threat of further torture was enough to prevent retraction.
Various forms of humiliation were often especially effective on men weakened by torture. An army officer who withstood beating finally broke when the interrogator pushed his head into a spittoon brimful of spittle. Another gave way when an interrogator urinated on his head—an interrogation practice which according to reports became traditional.61
Moreover, when it came to those tried in open court, “the defendants were warned that the tortures would be continued after the trial if they did not give the necessary testimony.”62 The presence of their interrogators, who sat in front of them in court, would reinforce this.63
And, of course, confessions obtained by torture were useful in bringing pressure to bear on other victims. When Bukharin’s first wife, Nadezhda Lukina, was interrogated, her brother Mikhail was among the members of the family who were tortured to give evidence against the others and her. A recent Soviet article gives a horrifying account of his withdrawing his evidence, and then, after further interrogation, confirming it again. The article quotes another former prisoner, a woman who, asking “How could a brother give evidence against a sister?” answered that a Comintern worker in her cell came back from interrogation one day, complaining bitterly that a close comrade had incriminated her; the examiners had shown her the testimony in his own handwriting. Soon afterward, she returned from a further session. This time she cried, “How could I? How could I? Today I had a confrontation with him and I saw not a man, but live raw meat.”64
Yet in spite of Khrushchev’s comment, torture is not a complete explanation when it comes to the public confessions of the oppositionists. We should record its extent, and its overwhelmingly powerful effects throughout the period. But critics were right in saying that torture alone could probably not have produced the public self-humiliation of a whole series of Stalin’s enemies, when returned to health and given a platform.
We shall see, in fact, that some accused withdrew in closed court confessions obtained by torture. Others “insisted even in the preliminary investigation or in court that their statements charging violations of socialist legality be entered in the examination record.”65
THE “CONVEYOR”
When there was time, the basic NKVD method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the “conveyor”—continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? No absolutely precise answer could be given.
But at any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was “as painful as any torture.”66 In fact, we are told, though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough. One week is reported as enough to break almost anybody.67 A description by a Soviet woman writer who experienced it speaks of seven days without sleep or food, the seventh standing up—ending in physical collapse. This was followed by a five-day interrogation of a milder type, in which she was allowed three hours’ rest in her cell, though sleep was still forbidden.68
The conveyor and torture were not, of course, mutually exclusive. Recent Soviet accounts describe the actions of V. Boyarsky, still alive and in a post in a scientific commission. In the late 1930s, he served as interrogator in Northern Ossetia, where he “falsified accusations against 103 people, of whom 51 were shot and the remainder sent to camps, where most of them died.” On one occasion, he interrogated a woman schoolteacher, Fatimat Agnayeva, for eight days—and then had her hung by her hair to a bracket on the wall, where she died.69
There is nothing new about the conveyor method. It was used on witches in Scotland. The philosopher Campanella, who withstood all other tortures during his interrogation in the sixteenth century, succumbed to lack of sleep. Hallucinations occur. Flies buzz about. Smoke seems to rise before the prisoner’s eyes, and so on.
Beck and Godin report a case in which interrogation lasted without any break for eleven days, during the last four of which the prisoner had to stand. Towards the end of even lesser periods, prisoners collapsed about every twenty minutes and had to be brought round with cold water or slaps.70 Sitting on a stool for fourteen hours is, according to one victim, more painful than standing against a wall, where you can at least shift your weight from one foot to the other. The groin swells, and violent pains set in.
In Weissberg’s account of his interrogation, he mentions that on one occasion he was questioned for eighteen hours, and then left locked in the washroom, where the floor was under water.71 He was, however, able to lie down on a foot-rack. After fourteen hours, he was called out for a brief interrogation and sent back to find that the rack had been removed, so that he had to stand in an inch or so of water for forty hours, until the next interrogation. Later, he was beaten up, under the new practice, but was then returned to the conveyor. A “technical improvement” had been made in that the seat had been taken out of the chair, and it was extremely painful, even briefly.72
There are very few accounts of successful resistance to the conveyor. One is of a fifty-five-year-old anarchist, Eisenberg, who on being called a counter-revolutionary refused to answer any more questions. Beating up had no effect on him, and he survived a conveyor lasting for thirty-one days—an extraordinary record. Examination by a doctor showed that though he was physically very sound, there was something abnormal about his imperviousness to pain. He is supposed to have been sent to a lunatic asylum.73 Weissberg himself held out for seven days, helped by a brief interruption, but finally confessed. After a day’s rest, he withdrew the confession. Interrogation started again. This time he gave way on the fourth day, having already told the examiners that every confession he made he would withdraw when he recovered. The third conveyor session ended on the fifth day without his signing a fresh confession, though by now the interrogators had two “documents.”
And here we have the defect of the “conveyor.” Although it was almost always successful, and usually in two to three days, it has no essential advantage over torture proper (with which it was often combined), since the confessions it produced could be withdrawn.