The Great Terror

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: