The Great Terror

Some prisoners, particularly those under interrogation in especially important cases, were kept in “inner prisons.” So were certain men already serving sentences. The regime in these “inner prisons” was quite different from the bullying squalor of the main buildings. Unlike the mass cells, with fetid air and prisoners pressed close together on bare boards, which nevertheless had a certain social life, of discussion and even occasional scientific and literary lectures from specialists, the inner prisons were “living graves.”⁹⁷ The cells were clean, without overcrowding; each prisoner had his own bed and even linen; and clothes were actually washed once a month. But no noise, not even loud speech, was permitted. The spyhole in the cell door opened every few minutes. The prisoner had to be in bed from 11:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. During the day, he could sit down but not lean on anything. There was nothing whatever to do—on inadequate diet. Isolation was complete; Weissberg, in isolator cells in the Ukraine and then in Moscow, only learned about the outbreak of war at the end of October 1939. There were only a few hundred prisoners in an “inner prison” at a time when thousands and tens of thousands might be in the outer one.

Such a prisoner had to undress in such a way that his hands could be seen and, when sleeping, to keep his arms outside the covers. Weissberg says that this was because a prisoner had once plaited a length of string under the cover and hanged himself with it; in any case, it would have been the only opportunity for making any illegal object.⁹⁸

If a warder saw a prisoner’s hands hidden, he would enter the cell and wake the prisoner each time he detected him.

In the “inner prisons” proper, communication by tapping was almost impossible, and was seldom replied to as being probably the work of a provocateur.⁹⁹ Elsewhere there was a certain amount of it.¹⁰⁰

The method is that described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon—the so-called Dekabrist alphabet, dating from the prisoners of the 1820s.fn1

In the isolation cells, the psychological problem was intense. A former actor from the Bolshoi Theater who had served five years gave the following “lesson”:

First, you must detach yourself from reality—stop thinking of yourself as a prisoner. Make believe that you are a tourist who temporarily finds himself in an unfamiliar environment. Don’t admit to yourself that conditions here are very bad, because they may get even worse, and you should be prepared for that. Don’t become too involved in the everyday life of the isolator. Try not to hear its sounds, especially at night, or to smell its smells. Try not to be aware of the guards, don’t look at them, ignore the expression on their faces. Stop making-believe about the possibility of your being released soon from the isolator. Do not attempt to regain your freedom by means of a hunger strike, or by admitting your guilt, or by appealing for mercy to the authorities. Stop pining for the friends you have left behind in the free world.¹⁰¹

A special category of prison consisted of the half-dozen “political isolators,” notably those at Suzdal, Verkhne-Uralsk, Yaroslavl, and Aleksandrovsk. These dated from earlier days of the regime, when they had been thought of as a comparatively humane method of removing factious Communists and other left-wing “politicals” from public life. Even in the early 1930s, treatment in these prisons was comparatively humane. During the purge, they sank to the normal level. A Soviet commentator says of the food in the Yaroslavl isolator in 1937 that it “contained no vitamins whatever. For breakfast we got bread, hot water, and two lumps of sugar, for dinner—soup and gruel cooked without any fat, and for supper—a kind of broth reeking of fish oil.”¹⁰²

But the isolators still preserved some special characteristics. They mostly held no more than 400 to 500 prisoners. Typically at Verkhne-Uralsk, there were cells holding either 10 to 25 or 3 to 8 prisoners, with in addition a number of solitary cells. It was usual for important prisoners serving sentences, but not expendable—in that further trials were planned for them—to be held in these.

THE GREAT PRISONS

Of the five main prisons in Moscow, three—the Lubyanka, the Lefortovo, and the Butyrka—were for “politicals” only, though they were also held in the other places of detention with nonpoliticals. The Lefortovo was the great torture center, though torture was also practiced on a lesser scale in the Lubyanka and in the “special section” of the Butyrka.