The Great Terror

Whether in one of these or in prisons of various degrees of rigor, malnutrition, and overcrowding, the arrested citizen awaited the authorities’ next move. As a general thing, physical conditions were usually far worse in the provincial jails in Minsk, Gomel, Vyatka, or Vologda, but regulations were less tightly enforced; there was more off hand brutality, but also more chance of a comparatively sympathetic warder, who might even warn against informers.¹¹⁴ As an experienced prisoner puts it, “The dirtier the prison, the worse the food, the rougher and more undisciplined the guard, the less danger there was to life.”¹¹⁵

CRIMINAL TYPES

In his cell in this new community, the arrested man might be interrogated at once, or he might wait for some time. Meanwhile, he would discover in discussion with his cell mates what his crime was likely to be. At the beginnings of the purge, those arrested often thought that the other people in the prisons were actually guilty of something, and that only their own case was a mistake. By 1937, the outside public had come to realize that the accused were innocent, and people brought in took it for granted that their cell mates were in the same boat as themselves. The chances of anyone there being actually guilty of anything whatever were very small. One sometimes hears the view still expressed in the West that the Great Purge, though unforgivably striking at many innocent men, at least destroyed, in passing, the genuine spy networks of hostile powers. Such was not the view of Gomulka, who remarks that the Terror “only facilitated the work of the intelligence services of the imperialist states.”¹¹⁶

In fact, from the purely intelligence point of view, the Japanese, Polish, and Latvian services at least seem to have gained all the information they required. And apart from direct operations, the mere fact of (for example) the defection, owing to fear for his life, of the Far East NKVD chief, Lyushkov, to the Japanese in 1938 must have put them in possession of a veritable treasure house of information—and this defection was a direct result of the Terror!

There is one important earlier case generally recognized as that of a genuine spy—Konar, who became Assistant People’s Commissar of Agriculture until accidentally exposed. He was a Polish agent who had been given the papers of a dead Red Army soldier in 1920, and in ten years had thus risen high in the hierarchy, until exposed by someone who chanced to have seen the real Konar. As to minor agents, a number of books mention, as an extreme rarity, “real” spies or men who at least might possibly have been guilty.¹¹⁷ There is one such, the “Moldavian,” in Solzhenitsyn’s camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a Kiev prison in 1939, there was much pride and astonishment on all sides that one of the prisoners was a genuine Polish spy. Once he had admitted his own guilt, he was badly beaten to get him to implicate Party officials in Kiev.

¹¹⁸

Prisoners recognized, in most cases of arrest, that there was an “objective characteristic” basic to their cases. This might be social origins, past or present posts, relationships or friendships with someone, nationality or connection with a foreign country, or activity in specific Soviet organizations. This probable “real” cause of arrest was at once plain to cell mates, though it was never mentioned by the interrogators.¹¹⁹

For although there were many categories, membership in which was liable to bring arrest—such as foreign connections, high military rank, and so forth—these were not the crimes officially charged. Nor did they automatically

lead to arrest. “We can even quote cases of German Communists who were not arrested, although they were political refugees.”¹²⁰ Arrest depended on a variety of secondary factors.

One peasant in Kharkov jail accounted for his arrest by the fact that he had been arrested on a false charge four years previously, and released with apologies. This, he thought, must make the NKVD think that he had reason to dislike it. This was apparently not an unusual case. “Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested during the Purge for no other reason than at some time in the past the Soviet authorities had done them an injustice.”¹²¹