The Great Terror

Doctors reluctant to interfere with the course of the interrogation would sometimes treat prisoners whose ribs had been broken under a different diagnosis, but giving them the right treatment.⁸⁴ Medical conduct in a provincial prison is reported as being in a different spirit, the examination being conducted quite openly with a view to seeing how much the prisoner could stand. A certificate issued was quite frank about the beatings and was evidently entered in the official records without a qualm. This was in early 1938.⁸⁵

The company, apart from a plague of stool pigeons, was usually good, especially in Moscow, and innumerable cases are given of kindness and selfsacrifice—as when (a Hungarian Communist reports) a prisoner, back from even worse conditions, was allowed a bed to himself for a whole day by the 275 men crammed into a 25-man cell, and was given extra sugar from their rations.⁸⁶

Lectures were given on a large variety of subjects, and much storytelling was also done. Herling mentions too that

every cell contains at least one statistician, a scientific investigator of prison life, engrossed day and night in assembling a complicated jig-saw of stories, scraps of conversation overheard in corridors, old newspapers found in the latrine, administrative orders, movement of vehicles in the courtyards, and even the sound of advancing and receding footsteps in front of the gate.⁸⁷

All prisoners report cases of Party officials who remained loyal, and held either that Stalin and the Politburo knew nothing of what was happening or, alternatively, that they themselves were not qualified to judge these decisions, and simply had the duty of obeying Party orders, including confession.

There were other types. In one of the cells of the Butyrka, there were the sons of five moderately important officials. Four of them were the typical brutalized product of the new privileged youth of Stalinism. They had freely denounced their parents and boasted of it, taking the view that there was no reason why they should harm their own prospects to look after relics of the past. Only the fifth, the son of General Gorbachev (the executed “daredevil”),⁸⁸

was a decent youth.⁸⁹

Smoking was permitted. All games were forbidden. Chess was, however, played illegally, with men made out of bread or other objects. In one of the women’s cells in the Butyrka, a fortune-telling game with matches was played. When a wardress saw people with matches, she would count them, and if there were exactly the number required for the game (forty-one) the owner was punished.⁹⁰

Books are reported as available in two Moscow prisons, the Lubyanka and the Butyrka (though at the height of Yezhov’s power, they seem to have been prohibited). These libraries were good, containing the classics, translations, histories, and scientific works—sounding much better than those of British prisons or, indeed, hospitals or cruise liners. The Butyrka’s was particularly fine. The reason was that it had been used for political prisoners in Tsarist times, and the big liberal publishing houses had always given free copies of their books to these jails.⁹¹

That of the Lubyanka was largely of books confiscated from prisoners.

After Yezhov’s appointment, new and harsher regulations came into force. All windows were blocked with shutters—still called “Yezhov muzzles”—which left only a small piece of sky visible. (They had, indeed, been in use in the Lubyanka, and the equivalent Shpalnery prison in Leningrad, for some years.)⁹² After the Bukharin Trial, as a “reprisal,” these panes were shut except for ten minutes a day. Bread became moldy, clothes damp, and walls green; joints ached “as though some creature were gnawing them.”⁹³ The penalty for the slightest offense, such as the possession of a needle, was the punishment cells with only from one-half to two-thirds of the already small prison ration, deprivation of outer clothing, and permission to lie down only at night, and then on the stone floor.⁹⁴

Punishment cells had, logically enough, to be even worse than ordinary ones. A Soviet writer mentions three grades of them in Yaroslavl in 1937. In one there was light, and the prisoner kept his or her clothes. The next was a moldy hole in the wall, totally dark and cold, with only a vest permitted and bread and water once a day. She was in it for five days for the offense (in any case not committed by her) of writing her name in the washroom. From the remaining “first” category, which she escaped, “people came out only to die.”⁹⁵

The trees and flowers which had grown in some prison yards were meanwhile cut down and the ground asphalted over. Zabolotsky, in his poem “The Ivanovs,” had spoken of trees “standing … behind railings, under lock and key.” He was himself to be deprived of the sight of even these.

At the same time, as far as possible, the more liberal warders were liquidated, and only the least popular guards were retained, after reindoctrination courses.⁹⁶