The Great Terror

Whether as part of such a special operation, or in the ordinary course of routine arrests, it was usual to take action in the small hours. Two or three NKVD men, sometimes brutal, sometimes formally correct, would knock and enter. A search was made which might be brief but could take hours, especially when books and documents had to be examined. The victim, and his wife if he had one, sat under guard meanwhile, until finally he was taken off. A quick-witted wife might in the long run save his life by getting him some warm clothes. By dawn, he would usually have been through the formalities and be in his cell.

A general describes his arrest:

At two in the morning there was a knock on the door of my hotel room.

“Who’s there?” I called.

A woman’s voice answered: “A telegram for you.”

“Obviously from my wife,” I thought as I opened the door.

Three uniformed men came into my room and one of them told me point-blank that I was under arrest.⁵⁶

A poet writes of his, also at night:

“Go with you”

you ask, looking for your coat, Your arm fumbles for the sleeve.

You feel overcome by a sudden weakness—

In such a moment you tire as in a lifetime.…

It seems a ravine has opened under your feet,

And the ceiling seems to fall on you.

There is suddenly not enough air in the room—

You breathe

with an effort.⁵⁷

The New Constitution, indeed, had guarantees against unjustified arrest. Under its Article 127, no one might be “arrested” except by order of a court or with the consent of the Prosecutor. This was anyhow not of much value in the absence of an independent judiciary; and the judicature of the USSR was officially defined as “a means of strengthening the Socialist regime, guarding the rights of citizens and repressing the enemies of the people and the Trotskyite–Bukharinist agents of foreign espionage organizations.”⁵⁸

But in any case, a distinction was made between “arrest” and “detention.” A man might be “detained” without the sanction of the court or Prosecutor in “all cases where public order and security is threatened.” Moreover, Article 45 of the Corrective Labor Codex reads: “For reception into a place of deprivation of freedom it is obligatory to have a sentence or an order by organs legally empowered thereunto, or an open warrant.”

In fact, a prosecutor’s warrant seems generally to have been provided, though sometimes formalities were dispensed with. For example, a case is reported from the Ukraine in which the police arrested two chance visitors for whom they had no warrant together with the man they were after; each of the two accidentally arrested spent five months in jail before managing to get out.⁵⁹ Cases of mistaken identity, particularly of persons with common names like Ivanov, are also occasionally noted. Such prisoners were usually released after a few weeks or months, but cases are mentioned of their having confessed to espionage or other crimes before the mistake was discovered. Even then, they were sometimes released.⁶⁰

Releases were most exceptional in 1937 and 1938. One prisoner had incurred a five-year sentence for wondering why an old actress (Ekaterina KorchaginaAleksandrovskaya) had been nominated for the Supreme Soviet in the autumn of 1937, when a number of harmless “cultural” figures were so used to improve the governmental image. He was condemned for “speaking against a candidate of the Communist and non-Party bloc.” A friend, Lev Razgon, got him to tell his wife to approach the actress herself, who went to the NKVD and complained. They told her that the offender had been jailed as a spy for the British and Japanese, and showed her thick files supposedly containing the evidence and sentence. However, he was able to send his real sentence, still in his possession, to be shown to Korchagina. Three weeks later, he was released.⁶¹

There are many accounts of the NKVD insisting that anyone released (usually after 1938) should sign a guarantee not to reveal what had happened to him in jail. A Soviet newspaper recently quoted one such:

I, Sternin, N. V., pledge never and nowhere to speak of what became known to me between 11 June 1938 and 11 July 1939 about the work of the organs of the NKVD. It is known to me that on any breach of this I will be accountable under the strictest revolutionary laws, for divulging state secrets.⁶²