Anyway, all the prosecutors of any rank at all held their positions with the approval of that very same State Security which… they were supposed to check up on.
His own wilted state, his lack of combativeness, and his fatigue from all those endless stupid cases were somehow transmitted to me. So I didn’t raise questions of truth with him. I requested only that one too obvious stupidity be corrected: two of us had been indicted in the same case, but our interrogations were conducted in different places—mine in Moscow and my friend’s at the front. Therefore I was processed singly, yet charged under Section 11—in other words, as a group, an organization. As persuasively as possible, I requested him to cancel this additional charge under Section 11.
He leafed through the case for another five minutes, sighed, spread out his hands, and said:
“What’s there to say? One person is a person and two persons are… people.”
But one person and a half—is that an organization?
And he pushed the button for them to come and take me away.
Soon after that, late one evening in late May, in that same office with a sculptured bronze clock on the marble mantel, my interrogator summoned me for a “206” procedure. This was, in accordance with the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the defendant’s review of the case before his final signature. Not doubting for one moment that I would sign, the interrogator was already seated, writing the conclusion of the indictment.
I opened the cover of the thick file, and there, on the inside of the cover in printed text, I read an astonishing statement. It turned out that during the interrogation I had had the right to make written complaints against anything improper in its conduct, and that the interrogator was obliged to staple these complaints into my record! During the interrogation! Not at its end.
Alas, not one of the thousands with whom I was later imprisoned had been aware of this right.
I turned more pages. I saw photocopies of my own letters and a totally distorted interpretation of their meaning by unknown commentators (like Captain Libin). I saw the hyperbolized lie in which Captain Yezepov had wrapped up my careful testimony. And, last but not least, I saw the idiocy whereby I, one individual, was accused as a “group”!
“I won’t sign,” I said, without much firmness. “You conducted the interrogation improperly.”
“AH right then, let’s begin it all over again!” Maliciously he compressed his lips. “We’ll send you off to the place where we keep the Polizei.”
He even stretched out his hand as though to take the file away from me. (At that point I held onto it.)
Somewhere outside the fifth-floor windows of the Lubyanka, the golden sunset sun glowed. Somewhere it was May. The office windows, like all the windows facing outward, were tightly closed and had not yet been unsealed after the winter—so that fresh air and the fragrance of things in bloom should not creep into those hidden rooms. The bronze clock on the mantel, from which the last rays of the sun had disappeared, quietly chimed.
Begin all over again? It seemed to me it would be easier to die than to begin all over again. Ahead of me loomed at least some kind of life. (If I had only known what kind!) And then what about that place where they kept the Polizei? And, in general, it was a bad idea to make him angry. It would influence the tone in which he phrased the conclusion of the indictment.
And so I signed. I signed it complete with Section II, the significance of which I did not then know. They told me only that it would not add to my prison term. But because of that Section III was later put into a hard-labor camp. Because of that Section 111 was sent, even after “liberation,” and without any additional sentence, into eternal exile.
Maybe it was all for the best. Without both those experiences, I would not have written this book.
My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleeplessness, lies, and threats—all completely legal. Therefore, in the course of the “206” procedure, he didn’t have to shove at me—as did interrogators who had made a mess of things and wanted to play safe—a document on nondisclosure for me to sign: that I, the undersigned, under pain of criminal penalty, swore never to tell anyone about the methods used in conducting my interrogation. (No one knows, incidentally, what article of the Code this comes under.)
In several of the provincial administrations of the NKVD this measure was carried out in sequence: the typed statement on nondisclosure was shoved at a prisoner along with the verdict of the OSO. And later a similar document was shoved at prisoners being released from camp, whereby they guaranteed never to disclose to anyone the state of affairs in camp.
And so? Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) backbone, did not suffer us either to reject this gangster method of burying loose ends or even to be enraged by it.
We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic people. On and on and on they go, taking from us those endless pledges of nondisclosure—everyone not too lazy to ask for them.
By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.
Chapter 4
The Bluecaps
Throughout the grinding of our souls in the gears of the great Nighttime Institution, when our souls are pulverized and our flesh hangs down in tatters like a beggar’s rags, we suffer too much and are too immersed in our own pain to rivet with penetrating and far-seeing gaze those pale night executioners who torture us. A surfeit of inner grief floods our eyes. Otherwise what historians of our torturers we would be! For it is certain they will never describe themselves as they actually are. But alas! Every former prisoner remembers his own interrogation in detail, how they squeezed him, and what foulness they squeezed out of him—but often he does not even remember their names, let alone think about them as human beings. So it is with me. I can recall much more—and much more that’s interesting—about any one of my cellmates than I can about Captain of State Security Yezepov, with whom I spent no little time face to face, the two of us alone in his office.
There is one thing, however, which remains with us all as an accurate, generalized recollection: foul rot—a space totally infected with putrefaction. And even when, decades later, we are long past fits of anger or outrage, in our own quieted hearts we retain this firm impression of low, malicious, impious, and, possibly, muddled people.
There is an interesting story about Alexander II, the Tsar surrounded by revolutionaries, who were to make seven attempts on his life. He once visited the House of Preliminary Detention on Shpalernaya—the uncle of the Big House—where he ordered them to lock him up in solitary-confinement cell No. 227. He stayed in it for more than an hour, attempting thereby to sense the state of mind of those he had imprisoned there.
One cannot but admit that for a monarch this was evidence of moral aspiration, to feel the need and make the effort to take a spiritual view of the matter.
But it is impossible to picture any of our interrogators, right up to Abakumov and Beria, wanting to slip into a prisoner’s skin even for one hour, or feeling compelled to sit and meditate in solitary confinement.
Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views—and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically—and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering—and that is what they do and what they are. We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of that legion, which is stripped bare of universal human ideals.