What, in fact, was the reason for holding them so long? Weren’t there enough executioners? One must point out that the prison authorities often suggested to and even asked many of the condemned prisoners to sign appeals for commutation; and when prisoners objected strongly and refused, not wanting any more “deals,” they signed appeals in the prisoners’ names. And at the very least it took months for the papers to move through the twists and turns of the machine.
A clash between two different institutions was probably involved. The interrogatory and judicial apparatus—as we learned from the members of the Military Collegium, they were one and the same—anxious to expose nightmarish and appalling cases, could not impose anything less than a deserved penalty on the criminals—death. But as soon as the sentences had been pronounced and entered into the official record of interrogation and trial, the scarecrows now called condemned men no longer interested them. And, in actual fact, there hadn’t been any sedition involved, nor would the life of the state be affected in any way if these condemned men remained alive. So they were left entirely to the prison administration. And that administration, which was closely associated with Gulag, looked at prisoners from the economic point of view. To them the important figures were not an increase in the number of executions but an increase in the manpower sent out to the Archipelago.
And that is exactly the light in which Sokolov, the chief of the internal prison of the Big House in Leningrad, viewed Strakhovich, who finally became bored in the death cell and asked for paper and pencil for his scientific work. In a notebook he first composed “On the Interaction of a Liquid and a Solid Moving in It,” and then “Calculations for Ballistas, Springs and Shock Absorbers,” and then “Bases of the Theory of Stability.” They had already allotted him an individual “scientific” cell and fed him better, and questions began to come to him from the Leningrad Front. He worked out for them “Volumetric Weapons’ Fire Against Aircraft.” And it all ended with Zhdanov’s commuting his death sentence to fifteen years. (The mail from the mainland was slow, but soon his regular commutation order came from Moscow, and it was more generous than Zhdanov’s: merely a tenner.)[265]
And N.P., a mathematician with the rank of assistant professor, was exploited by the interrogator Kruzhkov (yes, yes, that same thief) for his personal ends. Kruzhkov was taking correspondence courses. And so he summoned P. from the death cell and gave him problems to solve in the theory of functions of a complex variable for Kruzhkov’s assignments (and probably they weren’t even his either).
So what did world literature understand about pre-execution suffering?
Finally, we learn from a story of Ch v that a death cell can be used as an element in interrogation, as a method of coercing a prisoner. Two prisoners in Krasnoyarsk who had refused to confess were suddenly summoned to a “trial,” “sentenced” to the death penalty, and taken to the death cell.
(Ch-v said: “They were subjected to a staged trial.” But in a context in which every trial is staged, what word can we use to distinguish this sort of pseudo trial from the rest? A stage on a stage, or a play within a play, perhaps?) They let them get a good swallow of that deathlike life. And then they put in stoolies who were allegedly sentenced to die also and who suddenly began to repent having been so stubborn during interrogation and begged the jailer to tell the interrogator that they were now ready to sign everything. They were given their confessions to sign and then taken out of the cell during the day—in other words, not to be shot.
And what about the genuine prisoners in that cell who had served as the raw material for the interrogators’ game? They no doubt experienced reactions of their own when people in there “repented” and were pardoned? Well, of course, but those are the producer’s costs, so to speak.
They say that Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future marshal, was twice taken into the forest at night for a supposed execution. The firing squad leveled its rifles at him, and then they dropped them, and he was taken back to prison. And this was also making use of “the supreme measure” as an interrogator’s trick. But it was all right; nothing happened; and he is alive and healthy and doesn’t even cherish a grudge about it.
And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be killed. Why is it that the death penalty has such a hypnotic effect? Those pardoned recall hardly anyone in their cell who offered any resistance. But there were such cases. In the Leningrad Kresty Prison in 1932, the prisoners sentenced to execution took the jailers’ revolvers away and opened fire. Following this, a different approach was adopted: After peering through the peephole to locate the person they wanted to take, they swarmed into the cell—five armed jailers at a time—and rushed to grab their man. There were eight prisoners under sentence of death in the cell, but every one of them, after all, had sent a petition to Kalinin and every one expected a commutation, and therefore: “You today, me tomorrow.” They moved away and looked on indifferently while the condemned man was tied up, while he cried out for help, while they shoved a child’s rubber ball into his mouth. (Now, looking at that child’s ball, could one really guess all its possible uses? What a good example for a lecturer on the dialectical method!)
Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man? If the condemned men in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they came in and choked them, wouldn’t this have ended the executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?
But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest? Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.
Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov remembers that night after he’d been sentenced when he was being taken through dark Kady, and four pistols were brandished on four sides of him. His main thought was: “What if they shoot right now, as a provocation, claiming I was trying to escape?” Obviously he didn’t yet believe in his sentence. He still hoped to live.
They confined him in the police room. He was allowed to lie down on the desk to sleep, and two or three policemen kept continuous guard by the light of a kerosene lamp. They talked among themselves: “I kept listening and listening for four days, and I never could understand what they were being condemned for.” “It’s not for us to understand.”
Vlasov lived in this room for five days: they were waiting for an official confirmation of the verdict in order to execute them right there in Kady; it was not easy to convoy the condemned men to some other point. Someone sent a telegram for Vlasov requesting pardon: “I do not admit my guilt, and I request that my life be spared.” There was no reply. During these days Vlasov’s hands shook so that he could not lift his spoon to his mouth and, instead, picked up his bowl and drank directly from it. Klyugin visited him to jeer. (Soon after the Kady case, he was transferred from Ivanovo to Moscow. That year saw swift ascendancies and swift declines among those crimson stars of the Gulag heaven. The time was approaching when they, too, would be hurled into that same pit, but they didn’t know it.)
Neither confirmation nor commutation of the sentence arrived, so they had to take the four condemned men to Kineshma. They took them in four one-and-a-half-ton trucks, with one condemned man guarded by seven policemen in each truck.
In Kineshma they were put in the crypt of a monastery. (Monastery architecture, liberated from monkish ideology, was very useful for us.) At this point some other condemned prisoners were added to their group, and they were all taken in a prisoners’ railroad car to Ivanovo.
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9. Strakhovich has all his prison notebooks even now. And his “scientific career” outside the bars only began with them. He was destined later on to head up one of the first projects in the U.S.S.R. for a turbojet engine.