And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.
So that they should not have died in vain!
And I, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at these at least:
Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky—shot in Moscow in 1918.
Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student—shot in Petrograd in 1918.
Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov—shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.
Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General Staff—shot in 1935.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist—shot in Orel in 1938.
Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova—shot in a camp on the Yenisei in 1942.
How does all that happen? What is it like for people to wait there? What do they feel? What do they think about? And what decisions do they come to? And what is it like when they are taken away? And what do they feel in their last moments? And how, actually, do they… well… do they… ?
The morbid desire to pierce that curtain is natural. (Even though it is, of course, never going to happen to any of us.) And it is natural that those who have survived cannot tell us about the very end—because, after all, they were pardoned.
What happens next is something the executioners know about. But the executioners are not about to talk. (Take, for instance, that famous Uncle Lyosha in the Kresty Prison in Leningrad, who twisted the prisoner’s hands behind his back and put handcuffs on him, and then, if the prisoner shouted down the nighttime corridor, “Farewell, brothers!” crammed a rolled-up rag into his mouth—just why should he tell you about it? He is probably still walking around Leningrad, well dressed. But if you happen to run into him in a beer parlor on the islands or at a soccer game, ask him!)
However, even the executioner doesn’t know about everything right to the very end. While a motor roars its accompaniment, he fires his pistol bullets, unheard, into the back of a head, and he is himself stupidly condemned not to understand what he has done. He doesn’t know about the very end! Only those who have been killed know it all to the very end—and that means no one.
It’s true, however, that the artist, however obliquely and un-clearly, nevertheless knows some part of what happens right up to the actual bullet, the actual noose.
So we are going to construct—from artists and from those who were pardoned—an approximate picture of the death cell. We know, for example, that they do not sleep at night but lie there waiting. That they calm down again only in the morning.
Narokov (Marchenko) in his novel, Imaginary Values,[264] a work much spoiled by the author’s self-assigned task of describing everything as though he were Dostoyevsky, of tearing at the reader’s heartstrings and trying to move him even more than Dostoyevsky, nevertheless in my opinion described the death cell and the scene of the execution itself very well. One cannot verify it, of course, but somehow one believes it.
The interpretations of earlier artists, for example, Leonid Andreyev, seem today somehow to belong willy-nilly to Krylov’s time, a century and a half ago. And for that matter, what fantasist could have imagined the death cells of 1937? Of necessity, he would have woven his psychological threads: what it was like to wait, how the condemned man kept listening, and the like. But who could have foreseen and described such unexpected sensations on the part of prisoners condemned to death as:
1. Prisoners awaiting execution suffered from the cold. They had to sleep on the cement floor under the windows, where it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. (Strakhovich.) You could freeze to death while you were waiting to be shot.
2. They suffered from being in stuffy, overcrowded cells. Into a cell intended for solitary confinement they would shove seven (never fewer), sometimes ten, fifteen, even twenty-eight prisoners awaiting execution. (Strakhovich in Leningrad, 1942.) And they remained packed in this way for weeks or even months! What kind of nightmare was your seven to be hanged? People in these circumstances don’t think about execution, and it’s not being shot they worry about, but how to move their legs, how to turn over, how to get a gulp of air.
In 1937, when up to forty thousand prisoners were being held at one time in the prisons of Ivanovo—the internal prison of the NKVD, No. 1, No. 2, and the cells for preliminary detention—although they were just barely designed to hold three to four thousand, Prison No. 2 held a mixture of prisoners under interrogation, prisoners condemned to camp, prisoners sentenced to be executed, prisoners whose death sentences had been commuted, and ordinary thieves—and all of them stood for several days so jammed in against each other in one big cell that it was impossible either to raise or lower an arm and those who were shoved up against the bunks could easily break their legs on the edges. It was winter, but in order not to be suffocated the prisoners broke the glass in the windows. (It was in this cell that the old Bolshevik Alalykin, with his snow-white head of hair—he had joined the Party in 1898 and had quit the Party in 1917 after the April Theses—waited for his death sentence to be carried out.)
3. Prisoners sentenced to death also suffered from hunger. They waited such a long time after the death sentence had been imposed that their principal sensation was no longer the fear of being shot but the pangs of hunger: where could they get something to eat? In 1941 Aleksandr Babich spent seventy-five days in a death cell in the Krasnoyarsk Prison. He had already reconciled himself to death and awaited execution as the only possible end to his unsuccessful life. But he began to swell up from starvation. At that point, they commuted his death sentence to ten years, and that was when he began his camp career. And what was the record stay in a death cell? Who knows? Vsevolod Petrovich Golitsyn, the elder of a death cell, so to speak, spent 140 days in it in 1938. But was that a record? The glory of Russian science, famed geneticist N. I. Vavilov, waited several months for his execution—yes, maybe even a whole year. As a prisoner still under death sentence he was evacuated to the Saratov Prison, where he was kept in a basement cell that had no window. When his death sentence was commuted in the summer of 1942, he was transferred to a general cell, and he could not even walk. Other prisoners carried him to the daily outdoor walk, supporting him under the arms.
4. Prisoners sentenced to death were given no medical attention. Okhrimenko was kept in a death cell for a long time in 1938, and he became very ill. Not only did they refuse to put him in the hospital, but the doctor took forever to come to see him. When she finally did come, she didn’t go into the cell; instead, without examining him or even asking him any questions, she handed him some powders through the bars. And fluid began to accumulate in Strakhovich’s legs—dropsy. He told the jailer about it—and they sent him, believe it or not, a dentist.
And when a doctor did enter the picture, was it right for him to cure the prisoner under sentence of death—in other words, to prolong his expectation of death? Or did humanitarianism dictate that the doctor should insist on execution as quickly as possible? Here is another little scene from Strakhovich: The doctor entered and, talking with the duty jailer, he pointed a finger at the prisoners awaiting execution: “He’s a dead man! He’s a dead man! He’s a dead man!” (He was pointing out to the jailer the victims of malnutrition and insisting that it was wrong to torment people so, that it was time to shoot them.)
264
8. N. Narokov,