The Great Terror

Wives were not told where the arrested had been taken. The method of finding where they were was to go from prison to prison. In Moscow, wives would go to the “information center” opposite the Lubyanka, at 24 Kuznetsky Most; then to the Sokolnika; then to the Taganka; then to the office of the Butyrka, in its small courtyard; then to the Lefortovo military prison; and back again. When the head of the queue of hundreds of women was reached, an official was asked to accept the 50 rubles a month to which as-yet unconvicted prisoners were entitled. Sometimes a prison administration, perhaps through bureaucratic incompetence, would not admit that it held the man in question until the second or third time round. One Moscow wife found a girl aged about ten in front of her in the queue with a dirty little wad of ruble notes. She was paying it in her for father and mother, both arrested.⁶³

Anna Akhmatova’s son, the young Orientalist Lev Gumilev, was in jail in Leningrad. “During the frightful years of the Yezhov terror,” the poet says in the foreword to Requiem,

I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone “recognized” me. A woman with blue lips standing behind me, who had of course never heard my name, suddenly woke out of the benumbed condition in which we all found ourselves at that time and whispered into my ear (there everyone spoke in a whisper):

—Could you describe even this?

And I said:

—I can.

Then something resembling a smile flickered over what once had been her face.

Akhmatova speaks of her own mouth as one “through which a hundred million people cry,” and asks that if a monument to her is ever put up, it should be at the prison gates in Leningrad where she stood for 300 hours. In 1940, she was allowed to see her son, and afterward wrote the poem which is number 9 in Requiem, feeling that she was going mad.

Young Gumilev was again, or still, in jail in 1956 when Fadeyev made an appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office, saying that “although he was only a child of nine when his father was no more, he, as the son of N. Gumilev and of A. Akhmatova, was at all times a convenient target for career-seeking and hostile elements who sought to make accusations against him.”⁶⁴

This makes it clear that he was, like so many others, the victim of his relationships.

Women who actively tried to get their husbands released almost never succeeded. One typically describes being called to a local NKVD headquarters at midnight and simply being told, “I order you to stop running about like a lunatic trying to get your husband released! I order you to stop bothering us! That’s all! Get out!”⁶⁵

After a husband had been sentenced, it was again difficult to trace him. One method was to write to the addresses of camps of whose existence a woman had heard from other wives. Sometimes, after a wife received a long series of printed forms saying that her husband was not at such-and-such a camp, he could be found⁶⁶ and, in certain types of sentence, parcels accepted.

For the wives, indeed, life was very bad. General Gorbatov remarks, “I often thought of my wife. She was worse off than me. I was, after all, in the company of other outcasts, whereas she was among free people among whom there might be many who would shun her as the wife of an ‘enemy of the people.’”⁶⁷

And all reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands’ fate, they faced a worsening future.⁶⁸

TO THE CELLS

The arrested man first was taken to a reception point in one of the prisons, signed in, and submitted to a strict physical search and an examination of his clothes seam by seam. Bootlaces and metal attachments, including buttons, were removed. These searches were made at intervals during imprisonment. At the same time, thorough cell searches were carried out about once a fortnight.

In the cells, while there were variations around the country, the prisoner would find much the same routine—intense overcrowding, inadequate food, boredom, and squalor, between bouts of interrogation. Life in the Tsarist prisons is universally described as very considerably preferable to those now developed. In particular, there had not been the overcrowding.