IN THE AUTUMN OF 1937 THE DAM BROKE AND A FLOOD OF REPRESSION burst over the country. Soviet prosecutors approved arrest warrants in bundles, often without bothering even to read the names on them. And that took place daily, even hourly. Freed from all considerations of reason, morality or the national interest, the G.P.U. concocted conspiracies, each more fantastic than the last. They invented illegal organizations. They prepared the overthrow of the Soviet regime in countless depositions and then, according to some system known only to themselves, they apportioned the leading roles in the armed insurrections they had allegedly nipped in the bud. By this time the arrested men hardly made any attempt to defend themselves or plead their innocence. They already knew better, and the psychological madness had seized on them too. Not only did they willingly confess what was expected of them but they embellished their confessions with fantastic details. The fact that the heroes of the revolution and the civil war were all in prison like themselves soothed their consciences and inspired their fantasy. “The worse it sounds the better it will be,” was their slogan. Once the thing had gone so far perhaps it was the best solution to invent incredible crimes and drag the best men in the Army, the economic system, the sciences, politics and industry into the general catastrophe and thus force the policy of the dictator and his secret police to the point of utter absurdity.
Prisoners no longer feared death when they confessed to having planned an attempt on the life of the dictator. There were too many of them. They no longer felt ashamed of confessing they were Hitler’s spies. After all, Hitler had millions of spies in the Soviet Union—at least in the cellars of the G.P.U. During the day the best brains in the country wrestled with the problems of catching up with capitalist countries, but after dark they made deep-laid plans to creep back and blow up their laboratories. It was only the G.P.U:’s watchfulness which prevented them.
The G.P.U. had an easy job but the laws of competition began to operate. Each G.P.U. examiner jealously observed the progress of his rival and sought to outdo him. Each department of the G.P.U. competed with all the others, and the G.P.U. in the provinces competed with the G.P.U. in Moscow. It was a question not merely of the number of arrests but also of the “quality” of the arrested men. The worse the criminals the better for the G.P.U. Examiners who wanted to advance their careers—or even merely to hold their ground—had to invent conspiracies and keep on inventing them. In this way they fabricated plots for dynamiting factories, burning down granaries, wrecking trains and poisoning whole battalions of the Red Army. Soon even that was not enough. They wanted more than mere plans. They wanted counterrevolutionary facts. But the accused could provide them only with words, intentions, conspiracies, and not with real insurrections. They could provide only terrorist attempts which had been planned, not any which had been carried out. They could talk vaguely about secret stores of arms, but they could not provide any real arms which could serve as exhibits at trials.
The reason for this awkward shortage lay irrevocably rooted in reality. There were plenty of people who hated the dictator, but there wasn’t a single illegal organization anywhere in the country. There were no insurrections, no secret stores of arms, and no attempts on the lives of Stalin and his leading henchmen. And the members of the Politburo were not prepared to let themselves be shot at merely to provide the G.P.U. with authentic material.
As it was impossible for the G.P.U. to reveal counterrevolutionary actions, it had to content itself with counterrevolutionary intentions, but it unmasked these on a fantastic scale. Every village had two or three separate terrorist groups all thirsting for the blood of the dictator. In every industrial concern there were desperate diversionists all planning to blow up the power station. Up and down the country railwaymen were only waiting for an opportunity to wreck troop trains. And scientists were in the van in the general nihilistic frenzy, particularly the bacteriologists, who were always working out new ways of poisoning the population or the troops. The surviving partisans from the days of the civil war met again in the woods with their arms. The politicians made preparations to cede Russian territory to Russia’s deadliest enemies. The national minorities made preparations to wrench their territories away from the Soviet Union and unite them to the fascist fatherlands—even when the latter, as was the case with the Volga Germans, was thousands of miles away. That was the Soviet Union toward the end of 1937 as reflected in the minds of G.P.U. men.
But not all the arrested men panicked. Some of the finest brains in the country—and the stoutest hearts—were now in the prison. They were the men in their fifties, the men who had carried the revolution through the civil war to victory. And now with bitterness and anxiety they watched the destruction of all they had labored for. They did not share the optimism of the younger men, who were convinced that the vast purge which thrashed its way across the country was the work of the G.P.U. apparatus and not the will of the Leader. And they did not share the illusion of many that the process of destruction would finally destroy the whole apparatus of destruction and that the purge would liquidate itself. It was against these men that the G.P.U. terror was chiefly directed. They collapsed under physical torture and many of them died, but they did not “confess.”
In October there was such a man in the brikhalovka. He was of herculean build. He had fought under Laso in the Far East against the Japs, and against the White Guardist generals, Kolchak and Ungern-Sternberg. Now he was expected to admit that all the time he had been a Japanese spy, and that he had betrayed his comrades to the enemy. They were unable to break him and his cold contempt drove them frantic. After a week of torture he was brought back to the brikhalovka unconscious. The doctor examined him and ordered his removal to hospital. A fellow prisoner told us later of his end. The doctor and other patients in the hospital asked him what they had done to him. At first he kept silent, and it was only when he knew that he was going to die that he spoke, and then he insisted that he had fallen down the stairs.
During this period the old isolation had broken down and we were well informed of what was going on outside. Every day hundreds of new prisoners were brought in. They came from the land of silence, where no one dared to open his mouth, but in the cells it was different. The danger of arrest was past. It was a fact, and now they almost all talked: they talked to each other and they talked to us old hands. They had been fearing and expecting their arrest often for many months, and now it had happened. The tension was released and they became voluble. After the strain of fearing and waiting it was a relief to talk at last.
They told us what would formerly have been unbelievable stories. Party secretaries were quite seriously questioning members as to how many enemies of the people they had denounced. And it was not enough for a man to reply that he hadn’t met any to denounce. “Do you mean to say there are no enemies of the people in your circle,” he would be asked, “or do you think Stalin’s slogan ‘Revolutionary watchfulness’ doesn’t apply to you? If you want to stay a member of the Party see that you denounce its enemies.” If a man refused to denounce the innocent he was expelled, and that was merely the first stage to his own arrest. Usually the G.P.U. arrived for him the day after his expulsion.
When the new prisoners had got their own troubles off their chests the great guessing game would start afresh: What did it all mean? Every new theory was soon refuted by subsequent happenings. Only one thing was quite obvious: whatever the secret political aim of the dictator might be, the technique of the G.P.U. was bringing about its contrary. Apparently an insane idea had become allied with an insane but horribly logical technique for its execution, and in consequence the very basis of human community seemed well on the way to destruction. We did not know the impelling idea, but we did know the technique. It was the brutal stupidity of what was known as “recruitment.”
The Shah of Persia, delighted with the new game of chess, invited its inventor to express a wish and promised that it would be fulfilled even if it cost him half his kingdom. The inventor seemed to be a modest man: “Put one grain of wheat on the first square of the board,” he said, “then two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on, and I shall be more than recompensed.” At first the Shah was quite indignant at such modesty and he ordered his servants to supply the wheat. Before long it became clear that the palace would not be big enough to hold it. Then he called in his wise men to calculate just how much wheat was required. And after a while they appeared with the result of their cogitations: the harvests of the whole country for a thousand years would not be sufficient. Stalin must have felt something like the Shah when after three years of his purge he realized what had happened. Then, and only then, did he call a halt. But it was already too late. To release the innocent in masses would have been dangerous. To leave them to rot in the prison camps of the Far North and elsewhere sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution.
The technique was the same in each case. Every new prisoner brought in was asked the same two fatal questions: “Who recruited you?” and “Whom did you recruit?” Within a very short time after his arrest the half a dozen innocents he had been forced to denounce would join him in the cells. And then the mechanism would start up again on a wider scale; each of these new prisoners denounced another half a dozen. And so on, and so on, and so on. After six months the successors of the first counter-revolution had swollen into an army of thousands, even allowing for the fact that many of the denunciations overlapped. In this way the purge mechanism became self-operating, and each wave of arrests was followed by a still bigger one.
When in my report a prisoner uses the term “recruited” then the reader must not suppose that any real recruitment is indicated. If someone says: “Lebedev has ‘recruited’ Kondratchenko,” it merely means that although both Lebedev and Kondratchenko are loyal Soviet citizens, Lebedev has broken down under torture and “confessed”: “I was a counterrevolutionary and I recruited Kondratchenko for my counterrevolutionary organization.” If Lebedev came first then in our jargon Lebedev was the “recruiter” and Kondratchenko the “recruited.”
In prison we could follow this process only in one direction, forward, and never, or only very rarely, back to the source. We could see the branches and watch them putting out twigs, but we could never see the trunk. All the prisoners had themselves been “recruited,” but who had started it all was lost in the mystery of first things. Somewhere there were the imaginary founders of our various organizations, and we always referred to these legendary forefathers as “the arch-recruiters.”
The mass arrests began in the late summer of 1937, but the arch-recruiters had already passed through the cells in 1936, and grass was growing on their graves. At first we had supposed that all our organizations were descended from the leaders of the opposition, the men who were physically exterminated in the big show trials, but later on a careful analysis of the stories of hundreds of my fellow unfortunates revealed that this was not so. Up to the spring of 1937, the G.P.U. arrested not only those who were directly or indirectly connected in some way with the great trials, but also everyone whose name was in its dossiers as in some way suspect or compromised from former days. These men also played the role of arch-recruiters and they became the forefathers of several generations of arrested. However, even they had to be “recruited” and they had to choose someone or other from among the big leaders of the opposition.
One question interested me and that was whether the G.P.U. arrested everyone who was denounced. It certainly did in the beginning, but later on some attempt was made to guide the “recruitment.” By the spring of 1938 a very large section of the population was registered in the dossiers of the G.P.U. as “compromised” or “suspect” in some way or other. At that period it must have been easy to reckon by simple multiplication when the whole Russian people would finally be “recruited.”
It was at this point that the G.P.U. began to become anxious, but it was not easy to call a halt. It was impossible not to arrest a man who had just been denounced as an agent of Hitler and a terrorist. The examiners knew, of course, that the whole thing was a grotesque invention, but they were unable to admit their knowledge, even to each other. A G.P.U. man who expressed the slightest doubt about the farce would himself have been arrested. The members of the G.P.U. knew that better than anyone, and so they strenuously “believed” in the guilt of their prisoners. However, they did begin to curb the “recruitment,” but in this they often met with the resistance of the accused. In the summer of 1938 there was a widespread feeling among the prisoners that the more people they dragged into it the better it would be for them and the sooner the wretched farce would be played out, so that whereas in the beginning prisoners denounced others with a bad conscience, they now began to denounce all and sundry, and in particular they took a great pleasure in denouncing all those they believed to be orthodox Stalinists. The examiners were often non-plused. The prisoners insisted on their own lists of accomplices and indignantly rejected the tentative attempts of the examiner to delete this or that name.
In the spring of 1938 the Secretary of the Kharkov Medical Council, himself a doctor, was arrested. As it happened he had an extraordinarily good memory and he knew every doctor in Kharkov by his Christian name as well as his surname. He was put into the brikhalovka with the rest and for a few days he silently observed the witches’ Sabbath going on around him and then he made his decision. Speaking to a fellow prisoner who was in my cell but who went to the brikhalovka daily at that time for interrogation, he declared:
“Well, if that’s the way they want it that’s the way they shall have it. I’ll give them something to chew that’ll take them a damned long time to swallow.”
And with these dark words he went off to his first interrogation. He pleaded guilty at once. Then came the two fatal questions which had worried us all so much. But they didn’t worry the doctor.
“There will be quite a lot,” he said.
“You will have to tell us all their names,” said the examiner innocently.
“Of course I will,” replied the doctor, “but I shall have to think hard. Give me pencil and paper and I’ll write out the list in my cell.”
The next day he was called out again and he arrived with the list. He had written out the names of all the several hundred doctors in Kharkov.
The examiner was beside himself.
“You’re mad,” he shouted angrily, “you can’t have recruited all the doctors in Kharkov.”
“Why not?” replied the doctor calmly. “I was instructed to do so by my organization and I worked at it day and night, and as Secretary of the Medical Council I was in a very favorable position, you know.”
“You’re not going to tell me that all the doctors in Kharkov are enemies of the people,” exclaimed the examiner.
“I am,” retorted the other imperturbably. “And why not? The doctors in Kharkov have always been vaguely anti-Soviet. Many of them come from social classes which opposed the revolution, and I suborned the rest with my propaganda.”
The examiner was in a quandary; he didn’t know what to do, so he sent the doctor away and went to his chief for advice. The next day the doctor was called out again.
“Very well,” he was told, “write down the most important leaders of your organization, say three or four.”
“Out of the question,” declared the doctor. “We were all of equal importance.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. If there’s an organization there must be leaders.”
“Yes, of course, but there was only one, and that was I. I shared the counterrevolutionary work out among the others so justly that no one was unduly prominent.”
The examiner tried to force him to write out a few names which he considered as of special importance, but the doctor refused. The examiner then drew up a deposition containing only a few names, but the doctor refused to sign it. He was a difficult case. There wasn’t much point in beating him up. He had admitted his guilt at once and he had answered all the questions put to him with alacrity. In the end the examiner called him an agent provocateur and sent him back to the brikhalovka to think it over.
The doctor, who still had a piece of paper and his pencil, then wrote a letter to the head of the Kharkov G.P.U. He pointed out that he had repented of his sins against the Soviet power and made a full confession, but that now the examiner, probably for counterrevolutionary reasons, was trying to shield the other members of his organization, and he demanded that the chief of the G.P.U. should immediately intervene.
The G.P.U. was in a quandary. It didn’t know what to do with the man. To arrest all the men he had denounced meant to deprive Kharkov of all its doctors, and even the G.P.U. jibbed at that.
When I first heard this story I felt inclined to doubt it. For one thing it sounded much too good to be true, and then I hadn’t come into contact with the man myself. But it was told to me by an old Social Revolutionary named Kushnarenko who had been with the man in the brikhalovka, and subsequently I had good cause to know that Kushnarenko was an unusually reliable man. In addition, his story was soon confirmed by many other prisoners. A man who was put into our cell a couple of weeks later had been in the same cell with the doctor from the beginning, and he described the preliminaries.
At first the doctor had been very silent. He had sat by himself in a corner and appeared to be brooding. Then one day he had joined in the general talk and told them a story about the days of witch burning in Germany in the Middle Ages. In either Bamberg or Würzburg—I can’t remember which was mentioned—the Inquisition had raged with particular severity and the population groaned under the flail. No one was safe any longer and one day a young theologian was arrested on the usual charge of intelligence with the devil. He pleaded guilty at once and named all the members of the Inquisition, including the Grand Inquisitor himself, as his accomplices. The Inquisition was in a quandary. It was unable to put the prisoner to the torture because he had confessed and answered all the questions put to him with alacrity. The cause was then taken to the Archbishop, who was perhaps not sorry to end the whole wretched business. The Inquisition was called off and the inhabitants breathed again.
The recollection of this incident in medieval Germany had obviously persuaded our doctor to adopt the same tactics. Unfortunately, the G.P.U. was more persistent than the Inquisition, and there was no enlightened Archbishop to put a stop to the insanity. The parallel resuscitated by the doctor was a very good one, for in many ways the Great Purge was very similar to the witch hunting of the Inquisition. In both cases the “confessions” extorted by torture and fear were complete inventions. In neither case did the examiners bother whether the “confessions” had any relation to reality or not, or when they did it was most exceptional.
There are many people who are prepared to admit that gross excesses were committed during the days of the Great Purge, but at the same time they excuse them by saying that Stalin and his G.P.U. had to crush a powerful “fifth column” which might otherwise have overthrown the Soviet power. “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs” is more or less their attitude. They will admit that millions were arrested, and then they ask innocently: “You’re not going to tell us that all these people were innocent? There must have been something in it. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, you know.”
When I come up against such people I usually ask: “Do you believe in witches?” They invariably laugh, of course. Then I point out that during the course of approximately three centuries hundreds of thousands of women “confessed” that they were witches and were promptly burned for their pains. Their “confessions” are still on record, and they can be consulted. Whoever does consult them will find that in principle they are not very different from the “confessions” extorted by the G.P.U. during the Great Purge. And yet there was no such thing as a witch, and of all the people accused of being in league with the devil none was, in fact. In the same way none of my fellow prisoners was guilty of the crimes of which he accused himself.
Every day brought us old hands new material for our investigations. We knew the mechanism of the examination process so well that we could soon accurately prophesy the probable development of each case. We knew the laws of growth which governed the advance of this grotesque avalanche. We heard daily of its ravages throughout the country. But one thing was still a mystery to us, and that was the motive, the impelling force behind it all. Again and again we asked ourselves and each other what the guiding idea could possibly be. What did Stalin really want? Whom was he really after? Was this whole business being secretly directed toward some to us invisible aim? Were the examiners intent on securing denunciations against people in certain definite social groups? Yes, there was no doubt that such tendencies were visible, but not until 1938. Up to then the G.P.U. had taken everything which came into its net. Who were the arch-recruiters who must have been arrested in 1936 and were now no longer in prison? Was at least the arrest of these forefathers of all the organizations which were later created by the G.P.U. a conscious and deliberate purge of the country from active enemies of the ruling powers?
In the autumn of 1937 the answers to all these questions were unknown to us. About a year later, when the wave of arrests lapped over the G.P.U. apparatus as well and many arrested G.P.U. men came into the cells, a certain amount of light was let into the impenetrable darkness. Throughout 1937 I made a systematic note of the happenings and drew up statistics. I reckoned which groups of the population, according to age, nationality and class, were most represented among the arrested, and I never lost an opportunity of discussing the various hypothetical explanations put forward by my fellow prisoners. It was not until the autumn of 1938 that a theory gradually began to take shape to fit the facts as we knew them.
As early as the spring of 1937 we began to calculate our numbers. There was one quite simple method of doing it. Every new prisoner who came in had some money with him and various objects which he was not allowed to have with him in the cells, for instance, his braces, a pocket knife, a metal comb and such things. When he was formally entered into the prison books, these things were taken away from him and he was given two receipts, one for the money and the other for the things. These receipts were all numbered so that when two prisoners came into our cell within a month of each other all we had to do was to compare the numbers on their receipts and we could tell approximately how many people had been arrested in that time. Now, the Kholodnaya Gora was the central prison for Kharkov and its surroundings, and this meant that all prisoners passed through it before they were sent off to the camps even if their interrogations had taken place in some other prison. It was in our prison that the camp transports were made up. In this way we were able to obtain the approximate number of prisoners and then we related it to the total population. By the time I left on February 20, 1939, we had arrived at the conclusion that within the past two years 5.5 per cent of the total population of Kharkov and its surroundings had been arrested.
This is a fairly large territory and we were therefore in a position to draw approximate conclusions from the numbers arrested there as to the numbers arrested throughout the country as a whole. However, we were not entirely satisfied with that. From the prisoners who came to us from other towns or were brought back from the camps for further interrogation, or perhaps confrontation, we learned that our methods of counting were in operation in all central prisons everywhere, and that our results were approximately the same as those obtained elsewhere. The results varied between 5.5 and 6 per cent of the total population. If we take the lower figure it gives us a grand total of about nine million arrests.
From this total we must deduct about two millions for men charged with criminal offenses and whose arrest had nothing to do with the purge. In the spring of 1938 the Commissar for the Interior, the notorious Yezhov, was able to announce smugly that he had found no difficulty in providing the forced-labor camps with millions of new workers. Appetite grows by what it feeds on, but at the same time it would have been dangerous to arrest further millions of politicals. The economic system was already creaking and to deprive it of still further skilled workers might have given it a coup de grâce. Yezhov therefore ordered the arrest of all criminals. Most of them were hardened offenders, but many of them were men who had come into conflict with the law, often many years before, and served their terms, and they were now, in fact, no longer criminals at all, but their names were still on the police lists. For instance, among these “criminals” I met a bookkeeper who had committed a minor offense in 1923, that is to say fifteen years previously, and had received a short sentence. Since then he had gone straight, but nevertheless he had to go off to the camps with the rest.
These men were not brought before the courts, because there were usually no charges against them. They were dealt with by a special commission on the basis of police lists and sent off in hundreds daily. They were always given either three or five years of “correctional labor,” but why some received three years and others five I was never able to discover.
The district police chiefs (militia commandants) had to provide fixed contingents of these criminals monthly. Moscow issued the “arrest plans” to the various provincial capitals and the authorities there distributed them among the various districts. Often the police chief of a particular district might be unable to provide his quota. The victims might be listed in the central register as belonging to his district, whereas in fact they had long ago left it. In such cases a police chief would make up the quota by arresting innocent people under various pretexts. I am perfectly well aware that for Western European minds this will sound incredible. Let me therefore tell of one case that came to my notice.
In the late summer of 1938 I was in a cell with a hundred and thirty other prisoners under conditions difficult to describe. Sufficient to say that as the result of living under them for a long time without proper food I had developed a sort of scurvy and the lower part of my body was covered with painful boils. At first I could get nothing whatever done about this and it was only after I had gone on hunger strike that I was removed to the prison hospital. The doctor examined me and prescribed an ointment to be rubbed into the affected parts. Then I was taken to a room the sight of which made me shudder, used to incredibly bad conditions as I was. The floor of the room was covered with filthy old sacks. On these sacks lay naked bodies all smeared with a gray fatty ointment, the same as had been prescribed for me. I refused to be put in the room and I demanded to see the doctor.
They fetched him. He was a well-meaning, friendly man and he was doing his best. He agreed with me at once that the place looked terrible, but he pointed out that it was not dangerous. The dirt I saw was really the gray ointment which had impregnated the sacks and it sterilized the whole room. I accepted his explanation—there was really nothing else I could do—undressed and lay down on the sacks.
At the window stood a gypsy with his son, and they were both weeping. By that time the windows of our cells had all been covered over, but here in the prison hospital we could see the sky. I went over to the window and looked out. There was a large leafy tree and the sight of it cheered me tremendously. I hadn’t seen a green leaf for about a year. In the meantime the gypsy and his son still wept and I turned to them.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“We’ve been here two months,” the man answered.
“I’ve been here twenty months,” I replied, “but I’m still not weeping.”
“Yes, but you’re used to being shut in. We’re used to freedom. We can live only in the open.”
It was a point of view, of course, but for me there was also a big difference between sleeping within four walls at home and sleeping in a prison cell with over a hundred others. However, I didn’t argue the matter; they were in no state to see my side of it. Instead, I began to question the man about their case. I was still zealously collecting all possible material.
It appeared that he and his fellows were wandering laborers. With their wives and children they traveled in horse-drawn caravans throughout the country following the seasons. When they came to somewhere where building work was going on they engaged themselves as laborers in a gang. The men would dig and the women would cart away the earth. Their groups consisted of perhaps twenty-five men and about fifty women and children. When the job was finished they took their wages and wandered on. In Soviet jargon they were “toiling gypsies.”
In the summer of 1938 they had finished off a job in the Crimea and were making their way north. One evening they camped in the Militopol district and asked permission to use the grazing land of the local collective farm for the night, and it was given. The horses nibbled away at the grass. The gypsies brought out their instruments and played and danced, and the young people from the farm came and danced with them. To amuse the peasants the gypsy women got out their cards and told fortunes as they always do. Finally the peasants went back to their huts and the gypsies settled down for the night.
The next morning they had harnessed the horses and were about to move off when a detachment of police, or militia, arrived and all the men were arrested.
“We couldn’t find out why we had been arrested,” said the gypsy. “The police in Militopol just wanted to know our names and where we were born. We told them, but that was wrong. Three of our men didn’t know where they had been born and so they let them go. I kept on asking why we had been arrested and in the end the police chief said: ‘It’s because you’re parasites. You’ve stolen social property.” ‘We haven’t,’ I said, ‘and we’re not parasites. We work just as well as people in towns and villages do. We go from place to place. That’s all. Is there anything wrong with that? You see, we can’t always get work in one place.’”
A week after their arrest these unfortunate gypsies were sent into Kharkov as the district capital and there they came before an administrative court. This gypsy, made wise by his experience in Militopol, refused to confirm the details of his identification until he had been told why they had all been arrested. In the end the chairman of the commission looked it up in the dossier and said:
“Because you stole social property. Your horses grazed on the grass of a collective farm.”
“But we asked the chairman for permission first,” the gypsy protested, “and he gave it. Wherever we go the peasants allow us to graze our horses in the evening. They’re decent people to us; not like you.
“You are hostile elements,” the chairman persisted, “and your wives pretended to tell the future from cards.”
‘Well, if it was the women who did it,” said my simple gypsy from the depth of his wisdom, “why did you arrest us and not them? Where does the law say that we’re responsible for what our womenfolk do?”
In these few simple words this gypsy had denounced a principle which is hostile to all human liberty and destroys all security before the law: the principle of collective responsibility established by the Soviet authorities.
In general Soviet law and the Soviet constitution make no provision for this hateful principle, and there is only one case in which it was formally introduced by law, and that was in 1938 when Soviet citizens fleeing abroad were declared guilty of an offense against Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code—treason. The only punishment provided by Soviet law for this enormity—the flight from paradise—is death. In this one case Soviet law makes the relatives of the renegade co-responsible for his crime, and by virtue—if that is the right word—of Article 58 1a they can be sentenced to between ten and twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp for his offense. However, in practice the principle of collective responsibility is part and parcel of Soviet life. It is not an invention of the Stalinist era and it operated during the civil war against the relatives of capitalists and landowners. The defeated aristocracy suffered the same harsh treatment during the French Revolution. However, it was Stalin who widened the field of its application and made the individual, whether worker, peasant or intellectual, personally responsible for what took place in his immediate circle, whether he was a member of the Party or not. The Party imposes an obligation of so-called “revolutionary watchfulness” on every Soviet citizen. Translated into the simple language of the Soviet man in the street it means that he is expected to denounce all “the enemies of the people” living in his circle—or else. Anyone who is suspected of harboring the slightest objection to anything the dictator does is ipso facto “an enemy of the people.” The circle for which a man was responsible was extended beyond his family to include his place of work and his circle of friends. If a number of engineers in any particular factory were arrested as enemies of the people their arrest would inevitably be followed by the dismissal of the director of the factory and the Secretary of the Party, and their arrest.
Unfortunately, we Communists had never condemned the principle of collective responsibility as such, and we had even defended it as necessary for the protection of the nascent revolution. The idea had become such a matter of course for us that even in the prisons of the G.P.U. I had not condemned it. It was the story of this unfortunate gypsy and the personal tragedy involved which first awoke me to the full horror of the thing and caused me to revise my views on the subject.
This gypsy received five years in a forced-labor camp, while his son, who was only sixteen years old, received three years. They were innocent victims of the “quota system” or the “arrests plan.” I have described their case in some detail to show that in the throes of the purge all respect for human rights went by the board even when no political motive whatever was involved.
Now, many of the criminals arrested en masse at Yezhov’s orders were persistent offenders. Some of them had already been in the camps in the Far North. In many cases they were picked up and sent back to the camps before they had had time to earn a new sentence. Perhaps that was a useful way of curbing persistent crime, like the preventive detention provisions in other countries, but nevertheless it violates my feelings for justice and fair play. In the Kholodnaya Gora we were in a position to register the percentage of criminals among the arrested; it varied between 15 and a maximum of 20 per cent.
The method of calculation I have described was not the only more or less reliable means of discovering the figures. We also knew how many prisoners were in the Kholodnaya Gora at any one time, thanks to the criminals who worked in the kitchen. From them we could discover how many bread rations were cut up. The prisoners who went back and forth to the brikhalovka pursued their investigations there to discover the strength of each cell and each block. We also knew the average period a prisoner stayed in the Kholodnaya Gora before he was sent away to a camp. From this we deduced the number of prisoners who passed through Kharkov every month on their way to the camps. We arrived at the same percentage.
The fact that this general method of calculation was used in various prisons all over the country and that it gave the same general result is very good reason to assume that it was on the whole reliable. In addition, our results were subsequently confirmed by the numerous G.P.U. men who came to join us in the cells in the summer of 1938.
The administration of the forced-labor camps was in the hands of a special department of the G.P.U.—the so-called GULAG. During the summer and autumn of 1938 many of its leading officials were arrested and found themselves in the cells with us. The prison transports from all over the country met in various centers such as Syzran and Kotlas, and there the prisoners were sorted out and sent to the various forced-labor camps according to requirements. These GULAG officials knew the arrest figures every month. In Kiev and subsequently in Moscow I met comrades who had been in the same cells with them. Their figures exceeded ours by between 10 and 15 per cent.
We arrived at a grand total of nine million arrests, and we deducted two millions for criminals, which left us seven million “politicals” for 1937 and 1938. We must now add about a million for those who were already in prison in 1936. I have no means of calculating even approximately the correct figures for 1935 and 1936 and I am relying here on what arrested members of the G.P.U. reported. After January 1, 1939, the arrests fell away practically to nothing, and, in fact, over a hundred thousand were actually released.
Our method of calculation must be slightly revised by taking the following circumstances into consideration: it sometimes happened that the same prisoner came to the Kholodnaya Gora twice and he therefore appeared twice in our statistics. There were also prisoners in the Kholodnaya Gora who were taken into the inner prison for the reopening of their examination and were sent back to the Kholodnaya Gora when the case was closed. There were further prisoners who had already been counted in other prisons by the same methods and who then came to the Kholodnaya Gora for some reason or other and were counted there again. Then there were even prisoners who were released after being arrested, but who were rearrested within a few weeks or months and were counted a second time. But the requisite adjustments to allow for these circumstances would not involve any material difference. And in fact they are more than made up for by the special prisons in Kharkov and other district capitals that sent their prisoners direct to the forced-labor camps. These were the prisons for railwaymen, who enjoyed—if that is the right word—a special status in the eyes of the G.P.U.
Taking all these things into consideration, I think I am justified in coming to a total of at least nine million political prisoners for the period of the Great Purge. My estimate is even regarded by others as too low. Before the Great Purge there was no “fifth column” in the Soviet Union. With a tremendous expenditure of energy over a period of almost three years the G.P.U. succeeded in laying a firm foundation for one over the whole country. Stalin’s policy had not succeeded in doing that previously—not even the enforced collectivization which had cost the lives of ten million peasants, nor even the insane policy of the Comintern, which had handed over the German working class to Hitler and plunged Europe into a Second World War. The masses of the people in the Soviet Union broke internally with the regime only under the impact of the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge.