There was a hard knock at the door in the middle of the night. I saw three men in military uniforms. One of them, the KGB major, handed me a warrant for my arrest.
It was Moscow, the Soviet Union, May of 1944, and I was twenty-one years old.
They put me in a black passenger car, and after a short ride we arrived at the large iron gates at Lubyanka Street. The gate slid open, the car drove inside the prison yard, and I heard the rattle of the gate closing behind me.
Just a few yards from the street, and I found myself in a completely different world. Growing up in the Soviet Union, I knew that parallel to our world there was another mysterious and dreadful world where people were disappearing from our life, and among them my father.
Both my parents had been arrested seven years earlier. My mom came back after a year and a half in a KGB jail. My father was sent far north above the polar circle to a labor camp.
Many years later I learned that this camp had killed him with cold, hunger, and overwork.
So, sitting in the backseat of the car, I was thinking, Well, it’s my turn.
They put me in a tiny cell with no windows. They called it a box. The box was a meter by a meter and a half. I don’t know how long they kept me there. All sense of time was lost. Hours, maybe days.
I had a feeling that they had buried me in this box, this grave, for the rest of my life.
But then a prison guard led me to a large room. A huge portrait of Stalin hung on the wall, and sitting under the portrait was a puny man in a KGB uniform with a pale, ratlike face.
He announced to me, “You have been arrested as a participant in an anti-Soviet terrorist group.”
“Terrorist?”
I didn’t understand what he’s talking about. I was confused.
“What does it mean, terrorist?” I asked.
He said, “It means that you nasty little snakes were planning to kill Comrade Stalin.”
A chill ran through my body. It was the Soviet Union. I knew that they could arrest me for any reason they wanted, but planning to kill Stalin was absurd.
It was scary. It meant big trouble—the death penalty.
I understood that the “nasty little snakes” he was referring to were my friends and myself. Several friends had been arrested recently. Some of them were my buddies from elementary school. We grew up together; we were very close. It was a company of really bright kids. There was no TV—we read a lot and discussed books.
In spite of the censorship in the Soviet Union, books by authors like Jack London, Hemingway, and Steinbeck were published in translation, because the KGB considered the authors critics of the capitalist reality.
We read these books and saw a very attractive picture of the Western world.
Freedom.
Writers were free to criticize. People were free to speak, to travel, to do whatever they wanted—to change their profession, go to Spain and watch bullfights.
Not like in our country.
The officer started asking questions:
“What kind of anti-Soviet conversation was taking place in your company?”
“Who participated in the anti-Soviet conversation?”
“Who expressed his anti-Soviet views in your presence?”
“Did you express your anti-Soviet views?”
“Did you have anti-Soviet views?”
There was nothing like this going on, and I denied everything. But the questioning continued the whole night.
In the morning I was brought back to my box. Sleeping in the daytime in the prison was strictly prohibited. The guard watched me through the peephole in the door and kept me awake.
The next night I was back to questioning. One interrogator, then two. They showed me testimonies of my friends who had already confessed and implicated me. They turned on a powerful, very bright lamp and directed it at me.
They cursed me.
They humiliated me.
They threatened me.
The officer would put his finger up to the back of my head. “Here our KGB bullet will enter your damn enemy skull. Here it will come out. We will grind you into the dust. We will erase you.”
This went on night after night, with sleepless days in the box.
My feet were swollen, my eyes were irritated.
I was so exhausted from the sleeplessness that from time to time my head would dive forward and down, and the officer would kick me with the toe of his boot to keep me awake.
Finally I stopped thinking clearly. I couldn’t concentrate. Everything was in a fog. And on the sixth sleepless night, that was it. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I didn’t care. I just wanted this torture to end.
And when my interrogator said, “Have you participated in this anti-Soviet conversation?”
I said, “Yes, I did.”
“Do you accept being a member of this anti-Soviet group?”
And I said, “Yes, I do.”
But the interrogation didn’t stop. Now they wanted me to confess in planning to kill Stalin. And here, I don’t know how, but I found the strength to resist. Maybe in my subconscious the idea stuck that this confession would bring my death.
They transferred me to a regular prison cell, and the interrogation continued for nine months. But I never confessed to planning to kill Stalin.
Then one day I was sentenced. It was not like an American court with a big chamber and a judge and a jury.
I was led to a small room without a window.
The KGB manager was sitting at a small desk. He handed me a piece of paper. It was my verdict—the Resolution of the Special Board of the KGB. I was convicted as a member of an anti-Soviet group and for anti-Soviet agitation.
I was sentenced to a labor camp for five years.
As you can see, I survived the five years.
As soon as my term ended, I was sent to Siberia in exile for life. Then, four years later, friendly cosmic forces intervened in my life.
Stalin croaked.
He died, and my exile ended.
I came back to Moscow, completed my education, married Dora, the girl I fell in love with. Our son, Matvey, was born. Little by little we built a decent life by Soviet Union standards.
But as soon as the door for immigration opened slightly, we applied and emigrated to the United States. I was fifty-seven years old at the time. My wife was fifty-four. Not the best time to start a new life in a new country! But I always remembered the years behind barbed wire and the humiliation I suffered under the KGB interrogation.
I knew we had to go.
Many years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed and in Russia the KGB files became open for victims, I finally found the reason I was arrested.
It happened to be that this company of independently thinking young people was under suspicion and surveillance, so my friend’s apartment was bugged. Using the recordings of our conversations, the KGB fabricated this plot about Stalin’s assassination.
Why? To prove the importance of the KGB. To prove that the watchful eye of the KGB never sleeps. Thirteen young people were arrested so dear Comrade Stalin could sleep peacefully. They made seven confess to this nonsense about killing Stalin. They didn’t have any proof, but it didn’t matter. They had the confessions, and it was enough for sentencing.
Three young and healthy gifted guys didn’t come back from the camps—the camps killed them. The camps took long years of life from others who survived.
I am ninety-four now, and I am the only survivor of those boys, who in faraway Moscow were reading Hemingway and Steinbeck, dreaming about freedom, and paid a heavy price for daring to think.
I live in the United States now, and I have come to realize that this life is the life we all dreamed about.
Life in freedom.
VICTOR LEVENSTEIN was born in the Soviet Union in 1922. At the age of twenty-one, he was arrested on the trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity and conspiring in a terror plot against Stalin, and he spent nine years in prisons, labor camps, and exile until Stalin’s death. He emigrated with his family to the United States in 1980 and at the age of fifty-eight started a successful career in the new country. He worked at Jeffrey Dresser in Columbus, Ohio, from 1980 until 2003, designing underground mining machinery and receiving three American patents. After retiring from the engineering job, Victor wrote and published two books in Russian. His book in English, Thirteen Nasty Little Snakes: The Case of Stalin’s “Assassins,” was published recently. He lives in Columbus with his wife of sixty-three years, Dora. His son, Matvey Levenstein, and daughter-in-law, Lisa Yuskavage, are both artists living in New York City.
This story was told on October 6, 2016, at Massey Hall in Toronto. The theme of the evening was Learning Curves. Director: Meg Bowles.
