THE LONG INTERROGATION
The interrogation system which broke down many prisoners to the extent of maintaining their confessions at public trial was conceived on rather different lines. It aimed at a more gradual, but more complete, destruction of the will to resist. With intellectuals and politicians, the process often lasted a long time—some (with interruptions) up to two and a half years. The average is thought to have been about four or five months.74
Throughout the period the prisoner was kept with inadequate sleep, in cells either too hot or (most usually) too cold, on insufficient though attractively prepared food. The Spanish Communist general El Campesino speaks of three and a half ounces of black bread and some soup “served beautifully and tastily” twice a day,75 with results such as scurvy, which must be taken as planned. Physical exhaustion produces increased liability to psychological disorders, a well-established phenomenon noted in the Second World War in, for example, boats’ crews who had drifted for a long time; even persons whose stability was such that they were not likely to break down under the most difficult situations frequently then succumbed.
Interrogation usually took place at night and with the accused just roused—often only fifteen minutes after going to sleep. The glaring lights at the interrogation had a disorientating effect. There was a continual emphasis on the absolute powerlessness of the victim. The interrogators—or so it usually seemed—could go on indefinitely. Thus the struggle seemed a losing one. The continual repetition of a series of questions is also invariably reported to disorient both semantically and as regards the recollection or interpretation of facts. And there was a total lack of privacy.
A Pole, Z. Stypulkowski, who experienced the whole process in 1945 describes it:
… Cold, hunger, the bright light and especially sleeplessness. The cold is not terrific. But when the victim is weakened by hunger and by sleeplessness, then the six or seven degrees above freezing point make him tremble all the time. During the night I had only one blanket.
… After two or three weeks, I was in a semi-conscious state. After fifty or sixty interrogations with cold and hunger and almost no sleep, a man becomes like an automaton—his eyes are bright, his legs swollen, his hands trembling. In this state he is often convinced he is guilty.76
He estimated that most of his fellow accused had reached this condition between the fortieth and seventieth interrogations. International considerations made it necessary to bring the Polish underground leaders to trial before Stypulkowski (alone among the accused) was ready to confess. We have also had the evidence of men who made a full confession: Artur London77 and, more revealingly, Evzen Loebl, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Czechoslovak Slansky Trial in 1952.
Loebl mentions other prisoners being beaten, having their genitals crushed, being put into ice-cold water, and having their heads wrapped in wet cold cloth, which, when it dried, shrank and caused “unbearable pain.” But (unlike London) he was not tortured himself and confirms that torture was inadequate for the preparation of the victim of a set-piece trial, when “the whole of the person had to be ‘broken.’ “He describes having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, sixteen of which were devoted to interrogation. During the six-hour sleep period, the warder pounded on the door every ten minutes, upon which he had to jump to attention and report, “Detainee No. 1473 reports: strength one detainee, everything in order.” He was, that is, “awakened thirty or forty times a night.” If the banging did not wake him, a kick from the warder would. After two or three weeks, his feet were swollen and every inch of his body ached at the slightest touch; even washing became a torture. He says that the worst pain came in his legs when he lay down. He was taken six or seven times to what he was led to believe would be his execution; he did not mind it at the time, but the reaction afterwards affected him badly. Like others in various Eastern European trials, he is convinced that he was given drugs. But if so, this was a late refinement and does not appear in reports of prewar interrogations in Russia. (Loebl notes, incidentally, that the doctor’s brutality was even greater than that of the interrogators.) He finally reached the stage where it did not occur to him to repudiate his confession. Having confessed, he was allowed books, adequate food, and rest, but he had (as he puts it) been deprived of his ego: “I was quite a normal person—only I was no longer a person.”78
A manual for NKVD workers was written on orders from Yezhov by three of the most notorious inquisitors—Vlodzimirsky, Ushakov, and Shvartsman—and approved by Beria after Yezhov’s fall. It contained no overt call for torture; but a few quotations from it, given recently in the Soviet press, are worth recording:
… investigations at the NKVD are carried out according to the Code of Criminal Procedure. But the grounds for initiating a criminal case are somewhat broader.
… the accused must not be allowed to get the better of you…. During the investigation the accused must be kept strictly in line.
… Failure to confirm the evidence [already obtained] is indicative of poor work by the interrogators.79
There is no doubt that not only nonpolitical defendants, but even strong political opponents can be broken by the “Yezhov method.” In this connection the statements of the Bulgarian Protestant pastors in their February 1949 Trial are the most relevant, since no one could possibly argue that loyalty to Party or creed induced them. In their confessions, they all remarked that they now saw Communist rule of their country “in a new light.” In their final pleas, Pastor Naumov thanked the police for their “kindness and consideration” and said, “I have sinned against my people and against the whole world. This is my resurrection”; Pastor Diapkov was in tears as he admitted his guilt and said, “Do not make of me a useless martyr by giving me the death sentence. Help me to become a useful citizen and a hero of the Fatherland Front”; Pastor Bezlov, who had earlier stated that he had read 12,000 pages of Marxist literature while in prison and that this had entirely changed his outlook, declared, “I have now an intellectual appreciation of what the new life means and I want to play my part in it.”fn2
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 26 October 1953, Dr. Mayo drew attention to the parallel between the similar treatment of the American prisoners of war in Korea to obtain confessions of “germ warfare” and the work of Pavlov in establishing conditioned reflexes in dogs. Soviet psychologists and physiologists always treated Pavlov as the basis of their work, and his method of associating stimuli to provide an automatic response accords with the reduction of prisoners to the point at which they associate survival with the single response of accepting what their captors tell them. In a human being, this involves considerable degradation. An animal’s response—at least to situations which it recognizes (the only ones it can cope with)—is in principle unconditional and without discrimination. Man’s higher status consists precisely in his ability to distinguish and discriminate. To put it another way, among men it is only the psychotic who gives an unconditional reaction to a stimulus.
But a man, even in this state, is not an animal. He needs at least the appearance of rational motives. In the case of Communists, as we have seen, this was ready to hand in their Party principles: a survivor of the 1949 purges in Hungary describes how Laszlo Rajk, after severe torture, regarded service to the Party as a “Golden Bridge” back to his self-respect.80 There were other pressures.