prison life in ussr (1930-31)

Prison Life in USSR (1930-31)Author(s): V. ChernavinSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 12, No. 34 (Jul., 1933), pp. 63-78Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202857 .

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PRISON LIFE IN USSR (I930-3I)

"Even in such extremities the Russian Government is scrupulously con- siderate."-BERNARD SHAW in Nash's Magazine, February 1932.

[The author of this most interesting article, Professor Vladimir Vyache- slavovich Chernavin, is a distinguished scientist in the field of ichthyology, who was arrested with no more reason than innumerable other Russian Professors. He was able to escape from the concentration camp of Solovyetsh with his wife and child who had come to visit him there, and, after a long and painful march through the forests and marshes of the North, succeeded in reaching Finland. ED.]

THE conditions of prison life in the USSR which I am describing here, relate to I930 and I93i and to the special prisons of the Ogpu for those under investigation, namely, the Shpalernaya and Kresty,l in which I was confined as under examination from 23 October, I930, to 27 April, I93I. These prisons in the USSR are called " houses of preliminary imprisonment " or, in short, "DPZ." In Leningrad there are two other prisons of the Ogpu for those under investigation, the Nizhegorodskaya and the Inner Prison in the Ogpu building on the Gorokhovaya. The prison on the Nizhegorodskaya is a little different from those in which I was myself, and I shall not speak of it. Nor shall I speak here of that on the Gorokhovaya.

The conditions of prison life which I observed in I930 and I93I may be taken as typical from I929 up till now. In I932, when I was in the concentration camp at Solovetsk, many new prisoners arrived there from these prisons and, according to their accounts, the general picture of prison life had remained the same. One may suppose that these conditions exist at the present time, as, to judge by the Soviet press, trials for counter-revolution and for wrecking are not stopping.

The conditions in the Leningrad prisons are typical for other prisons of the large towns in the USSR, although in each town and in each prison there are special peculiarities. What I was told about this by prisoners who came to the concentration camp at Solovetsk from other parts of the USSR, in general coincided with what I had passed through myself in the Leningrad prisons.

A special prison is the Moscow " Inner Prison of the Ogpu." It contains cells in which individual prisoners are kept in excep-

1 Both these prisons are in Leningrad. The Shpalermaya is in a corner of the Neva in the neighbourhood of the old Imperial Duma. The Kresty, a famous prison in old days, is on the northern bank of the Neva.-ED.

63



64 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

tionally favourable conditions-cleanliness, light, polished wooden floors, excellent food, wine, etc.-while in the specially bad cells there is complete darkness, very low or very high temperature, food which is hardly enough to keep one from dying of starvation, and so on. In these cells are kept prisoners to whom special attention is being given and who are set apart for special objects.

There are also " special " cells in the prison on the Shpalernaya; but the conditions of prison life which form the subject of this article are general for the whole mass of politicals under examination, mostly accused of " counter-revolution," chiefly under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which is extremely widely interpreted in the USSR.

Why are there so many political prisoners in the USSR? Their number has become really enormous since I929-30 and is due to the general conditions of life in the country.

The Five Year Plan in the USSR began to be drawn up in I925 but, as the tendencies prevailing in actual life were quite different from what had been designed in the Plan, each year there was issued an order to draft the Plan anew and to count the given year as the first of the Five Year Plan. So things went on till the autumn of I928, when was announced the Five Year Plan of I928-33, which has made such a stir. As a matter of fact, it was the fourth of the Plans which had been announced, but as it took the significance in the main rather of a political motto than of an economic plan, it was distinguished from the foregoing plans by extremely extended tasks, which prescribed an unheard-of growth of all industry and agriculture. Quite special hopes were placed in it, and it was advertised widely beyond the frontiers of the USSR. With the announcement of this Five Year Plan, the Government finally renounced the NEP and again passed into the experiment of constructing pure Communism, which was well known in Russia by the experiments of Lenin and Trotsky in I9I8-2I. In the course of these five years, it was intended to bring about not only a complete reconstruction of industry, but a founding of socialist agriculture and in general a transformation of the whole social picture of the USSR. The Five Year Plan was to lay the foundation of socialism and to make a beginning for a classless community.

However grandiose the growth of industry as defined by the Plan, it soon ceased to satisfy the Government, and the Plan in individual branches began to be arbitrarily increased by directions



PRISON LIFE IN USSR. 65

from the centre which led to very great difficulties on the spot and made it entirely incapable of execution. Thus in the department in which I was working-ocean fisheries-in I928 there were 23 trawlers. The Five Year Plan, as confirmed, reckoned on increasing the number to 70 with a catch of I75,000 tons (8,800,ooo English cwt.) a year. In I929 the task was increased by the Government to 500 trawlers and the figure for the catch in the Barents Straits was raised to I,500,000 tons, that is, 86,200,000 English cwt. After representations, insistent and very dangerous for those who had the courage to make them, as to the complete impossibility of carrying out such a plan, it was decreased to 300 trawlers and a catch of 50,800,000 cwt. This task was as incapable of execution as the first. As a matter of fact, towards the end of the Five Year Plan the number of trawlers had been increased only to 53 with a catch of less than I00,000 tons, or 5,o80,ooo English cwts. It was the same in other branches of industry. The enormous expenditure of means, materials and labour power which were spent unproductively on extending plans which even without that were inexecutable, soon led the country to a sharp goods famine, striking poverty and an extreme insufficiency of food. One of the peculiarities of the Soviet Government is that it never confesses itself responsible for the failures which befall the country in consequence of its own experiments, but seeks for culprits among its own subjects to whom, under its regulations of service, it falls to carry out these experiments. The more complete the failure, the larger the number of culprits accused. The more special the institution in which the failure of the Plan has been shown up, the greater the number of scientific specialists, professors and other trained workers who are shown up as " wreckers," although these very persons beforehand had with all their strength pointed out the impossibility of executing the plan prescribed by the Government.

The Five Year Plan was drawn up on a gigantic scale, and its failure proved most alarming and was signalised by an enormous number of trials which have not ceased to the present time. These trials, in the overwhelming majority of cases, were conducted outside the law courts, in the recesses of the Ogpu, without any kind of announcement in the papers. The best known of those which in part passed through the law courts were the following: the Shakhta trial, the trial of the Prompartia (Industrial Party), that of the Mensheviks, and finally that of the British engineers. Apart from that, there were trials which were announced in the papers

E




but which were carried through outside the courts; the case of Palchinsky (where all the accused were shot); the case of Kondratyev and Groman (of which the results are unknown); the trial of " the 48 " (48 very distinguished specialists were killed in one day, which was announced in the papers, and many were killed later without any announcement); and, in I933, the trial of Narkomzem (the Ministry of Agriculture), where 35 persons were shot. Most of these trials over all the USSR passed without any kind of report in the press: among these were the cases of " wreckers " of all kinds in the rubber, electric, textile, timber building, chemical, glass and other industries, at the Putilov factory, in the Co-operative movement, and at the military-technical academy.

These trials embraced thousands of persons exclusively among the intelligentsia, for the most part the higher technical and more highly specialised section of it. Some of them were shot; the rest were sent to concentration camps (forced labour) or to exile. Apparently, this corresponded to the political tasks of the moment, the liquidation of classes in the USSR, as the Soviet Government regards the intelligentsia as a special class. It may be thought that the same object explains the mass arrests among the intelligentsia not engaged in industry. For this section of the intelligentsia the Ogpu has also carried out trials. The best known in Leningrad were the following: the Academy of Sciences, the teachers of natural science, the Russian Technical Society, the Society of Regional Study, the religious-philosophic group, and many others. Of the Moscow trials, which were still more numerous, I do not know.

Apart from that, there were everywhere arrests among the clergy and church servants, among the former military and former traders and persons who were reckoned as belonging to the " free " professions, such as doctors, lawyers, writers, even translators, and so on.

These persons were accused of taking part in counter- revolutionary organisations; many of them were shot, the rest were sent to forced labour or exile.

It is difficult to say for certain what precisely were the objects aimed at by the Communists in destroying the intelligentsia, which was not at all counter-revolutionary; but apparently these objects were twofold: (i) the destruction of a " class," just as they proceeded with the destruction of all the best workers among the peasants




in the country, and (ii) the finding of " culprits," victims who were to answer for the failures of the experiment of the Five Year Plan.

Thus the intelligentsia forms the chief contingent of the Leningrad and Moscow prisons. The second persecuted class is the peasantry, but it is only by chance that they reach the central prisons. The great mass of them pass through the numerous provincial prisons, or are shot on the spot, or are sent into exile without preliminary procedure of investigation or even without the sentence being announced to them. Such persons are simply loaded on trucks and sent to the concentration camps. With a mass of such peasants who formed the chief contingent (of many thousands) in the concentration camps scattered from Karelia to the Sea of Okhotsk, I came to be closely acquainted at the time when I was in a concentration camp.

Of the number of imprisoned intelligentsia one may judge by the fact that from I930 all the prisons in the chief towns of the USSR have been uninterruptedly crammed with a mass of persons under investigation by the Ogpu. The crowding of these prisons is enormous. In the Moscow prison of the Butyrki there were at one and the same time twelve to fifteen thousand prisoners. In the Leningrad prison on the Shpalernaya there were more than 3,000. In Kresty, in the block of the Ogpu, there were four to five thousand. The contents of the prison change two or three times a year. Hardly anyone is set free from prison. That is the rarest exception, in any case less than i per cent. As some indication may also serve the number of those who were seized in different trials. In the trial of Prompartia, eight accused appeared before the court, but the Soviet papers announced that the number of those arrested in this case was more than 2,000 specialists; they were judged without trial. In the Process of the 48, 48 were killed according to the published list, many others were shot, and the number of those exiled was enormous. In the case of the Academy, at the time when I was in prison there were no less than i5o prisoners on the Shpalernaya, and many others in Kresty and on the Nizhegorodskaya. In the case of the teachers of the Military-Technical Academy, of the total of 44 professors and lecturers, 42 were in prison.

I do not know, in Moscow or Leningrad, a single family of the intelligentsia where no one has been arrested or exiled; I know some families where all the members were imprisoned, sometimes including children who were only I5 or i6 years old, and grand- fathers and grandmothers older than 70.

The reason why these persons should be impnrsoned is, I F? 1




think, clear, if only a citizen of a free and civilised country can picture the conditions of life in a country which is losing the last traces of culture and is governed by a dictatorship resting on such an institution as the Ogpu. None of them is personally guilty. Superiority in education and culture, even if accompanied by the most heroic service to the country, is in itself an unforgiveable sin.

Prison. The chief significance in the imprisonment of those under

investigation by the Ogpu is not the stopping of attempts to conceal the traces of one's crime or to avoid examination, but the compulsion of confessions by those under investigations. On this depends the whole prison regime. The conditions of each prisoner under investigation are fixed not by the prison administration, but by the investigator who is conducting his case.

In the prisons which I have named there are three categories of prison regime. Prisoners in the third category are imprisoned in common; they have 20 minutes' recreation in the prison court- yard; they are sometimes allowed to receive newspapers and books from the prison library. The second category is a cell for two, with io minutes' recreation, reading, and permission to receive things from outside. The first category is a separate cell, no recreation, no reading, nothing from outside. The settlement of the tategory depends exclusively on the investigator. He can, as he pleases, combine the prohibitions of recreation, reading, or reception from outside. The investigator can also send a prisoner for days on end to the dark cell, which is lit by a faint lamp in the ceiling, or to cell No. i6, where are kept about 40 prisoners con- sisting only of professional thieves and hooligans. This cell is kept in the Ogpu prison exclusively for acting on those who consistently refuse to confess. Lastly, the investigator can send a prisoner to a cell for two persons in company with a syphilitic, a madman, a melancholic, one who is chronically addicted to trying. to commit suicide, or what is called a podsadka, that is, a provocator or spy.

The General Cells. These cells, with a floor space of about 70 square metres, are

reckoned to hold 20 persons; or they are half as large, and reckoned to hold I0. When I was in prison, the bigger ones usually held Ioo to 200 persons, and the smaller 6o to 70.




There was a considerably larger cell in the prison church, but I was not there.

As the free floor space-allowing for the lavatory which is in the room, a cupboard for the crockery, and the necessary passages to the lavatory-is not more than 56 square metres, it is quite impossible to find room for more than IOO persons to sleep. So at night-time wooden boards are brought into the room and are put up, resting on the benches which in the day serve for seats; and these boards, standing about 40 centimetres above the floor, form a kind of second storey. Some of the prisoners sleep on the floor under the boards and most of the rest on them. There are only beds for 2o. Sometimes a board had also to be fixed above the entrance to the lavatory, where three persons would try to sleep. Sleep in such close quarters was extremely difficult, especially for those who found themselves beneath the boards; they were literally stifled for want of air. Apart from the shortage of room and the bad air, sleep was troubled by parasites. Although the walls were plastered and painted, the common rooms were infested with bugs. To lie beneath the board in the dark and not be able even to raise one's head as it almost touched the board, and to feel how these disgusting insects were crawling over one's face and all one's body was intolerable. The absence of any normal sleep, which is the prisoner's only relief, was an enormous privation. There is no doubt that this very considerably eased the task of the investigators in obtaining the necessary " confessions."

By day the boards are removed; but the closeness remains oppressive. It is almost impossible to walk about the room. Between the tables in the middle of the chamber and the benches moved to the wall there is so little room that it is only possible for 30 persons to circulate in one direction. The ceaseless noise in the room from the crush of IOO people is so tiring that towards the end of the day one feels oneself completely broken. At night, too, there is no rest. After the interrogations, which generally last IO or I2 hours, and sometimes for days on end, there is nowhere to rest and a man gets completely worn out.

In these close quarters, where one cannot for a second rest and concentrate oneself and get away from the crush and the noise of tired and hopeless conversations, every minute is oppressive. Nowhere to sleep, nowhere to eat because only 2o persons out of the IOO can find room at the table, and, what is especially humiliating and disgusting, it is impossible for hours on end to attend to the natural needs: around the lavatory day and night people are




standing waiting, as it is the only one for I00 or more peros. The uninterrupted noise of the water and the disgusting smell poison existence still more.

The second scourge, besides the bugs, is the lice, which there is no getting away from, as many had no change of clothing. Neither bed linen nor body linen are served out in prison, and those who may not receive from outside or who have no kinsfolk remain for months, and sometimes for years, in their wom-out rags. Anyone who has been arrested in the summer often has no overcoat to cover him or put under his head. I know one Austrian workman, Stein, who lived in Common-room No. 22 for three years, receiving nothing from outside and unable to change his linen. He was at last sent home in November, I930, and I should be very glad if I could restore contact with him through this article. The steam bath, too,2 cannot save one from lice. Thirty minutes are allowed for the bath, but the checkings before and afterwards, the undressing and dressing, take about I5 minutes. In the steam bath, to which thirty go at a time, there is no room, no tubs, no taps for getting water, so that only the strong or clever can get a wash. The old and sick can only just sprinkle themselves with water. A bath of this kind is allowed twice a month. There is only one tap with cold water to wash at in the chamber itself, in front of which people are always standing waiting. No soap is given out in prison. One might almost think that the bugs and lice are deliberately kept up by the Ogpu authorities. When in the winter of I930-3I spotted typhus broke out in the Shpalernaya prison and infection threatened to pass to the officials of Ogpu and to the town, the authorities prescribed two baths running where time was given to wash; government linen was supplied and the chambers were disinfected. The lice vanished and the epidemic was stopped. In a short time the linen was taken back and the lice established themselves again in the chamber. It is a common threat of the investigator: " I'll drive you to the bug room. You will feed the lice for years if you do not confess. Get back to your lousy room! " Of course, it is not in the interests of Ogpu to deprive its investigators of such means of examination: dirty, ragged and covered with lice, a man begins to despise himself, and it is doubtless easier to break his will.

The separate cells. An enormous number of the prisoners are not in the common

rooms but in the so-called separate cells for one, with a floor space 2 In a separate room.-ED.




on an average of I .75 by 3.5 metres (6 steps long), in which 4 or 5 persons are placed, and sometimes as many as io. The prisoners are then completely deprived of recreation.

Such cells compose the whole of the enormous prison of Kresty; on the Shpalernaya there are several hundreds. In Kresty, besides that, there is no water supply in the cells and no lavatories; a parasha or bucket with no lid on it is put in the room, which may only be taken out in the morning and evening.3 The bucket does not hold enough for three men in the room, and the prisoners are compelled to satisfy their natural needs by system, or deliberately to diminish what they eat and drink. Washing at the tap which is to be found in the common lavatory is allowed once a day, and each is allowed one minute for washing.

Confinement in these cells does not fall to all, and generally at the beginning of the investigation, but those on whom it falls are often kept long, sometimes more than a year. To put a man in one of these cells is also a method of pressure which the investigators do not conceal.

However oppressive the common room may be, still there is always moral support to be found there, and the possibility of learning from those who are more experienced. In each such chamber there are always persons who have had long experience of the examinations and are glad to instruct novices in the principles of prison wisdom. " Do not believe the investigator ever or in anything. Remember that if he threatens to shoot you, that means that he has not material against you or any other way of acting on you." In the common room one can learn the experience of a mass of others and get an idea as to what one is to expect. One can see that often precisely those who have been put in the dilemma of " confessing " or of being shot and have honourably sustained this ordeal have remained alive, and persons who have signed anything and implicated many others perish without the last consolation of dying as honourable men and not as traitors. Lastly, in the common room one can learn about the various " technical " methods of examination, the showing of " forged confessions" and " evi- dence" of men implicated in the same case, by which the man under examination is, in a way, implicated, the showing of forged compromising documents and so on. For those imprisoned in the common room the methods of the Ogpu are no secret; so it is much

3 Kresty was an old prison under the Tsars for political prisoners, and the parasha is mentioned in their records. The monstrous overcrowding, however, is a special feature of the present regime.-ED.




harder to frighten them, deceive them or catch them out on a word. The moral condition of the man in the single cell is often distressing, as in his most anxious moments he has no one to support him. The constant thought of near and violent death which the investigator maintains in him often leads either to a state of acute despair or apathy, when a man himself seeks death. There have been more than a few instances when, after long confinement in a single cell, the prisoner has deliberately compromised himself in order to be shot.

Diseases and medical service. Those under examination often fall ill. The commonest ail-

ments are scurvy and boils on the body. I saw how a well-known publisher in Leningrad, an old man, lost eight of his front teeth and the others were so shaky that he could not eat bread. And there were many such. From the dirt and the parasites there often came various forms of eczema and eruptions. Through not being able to walk, by long sitting, some got piles. Nervous ailments are frequent, especially among those confined in the single cells. After six months imprisonment in such a cell prisoners often have hallucinations. Some go out of their minds; the most common form is furious mania. At night one often hears heart-breaking cries. The prisoners in the other cells cannot stand it and begin to knock and call out to the warder: " What are all those cries ? Are they torturing someone ? " The inspector, if he is a good fellow, quiets them: " No, that is not inside. That is not with the investigator. It is simply a prisoner gone out of his mind. They will take him away soon."

In the common rooms there is a great liability to acute chills, because the air is so stifling that it is impossible to shut the window. I preferred to sleep under the window, but often in winter the snow fell through it on to me. Apart from that, there are in the prisons many suffering from chronic diseases, some with cancer, or abscesses, or tuberculosis, etc. These ailments make progress before one's eyes. Death in the prison is also not rare. Among those whom I knew there died in I93I in Kresty Dr. S. 0. Vyatoshinsky. Professor Pavlov-Sylvansky was let out a few days before his death. He had tuberculosis. The same with a young priest of Tsarskoe Selo whose name I do not remember. Twice I saw corpses carried out of the chambers into the prison corridor. Suicide was also a common event, although they take every measure against it. In the single cells such people usually hang




themselves, but there are other methods of suicide. In Kresty in March, I93I, a former officer inflicted several serious wounds on his chest with a knife which he had somehow made himself. In the same prison one man threw himself from the gallery of the fourth storey. Professor Kovraisky, the astronomer, tried to commit suicide by wounding himself with glass in the neck.

But if measures are taken to prevent suicide, it is not in the interests of the investigators to prevent illness. There is no doubt that scurvy and boils are provoked by a special diet. The Govern- ment menu consists of 400 grammes of black bread, soup which is brewed from bones (the meat of which is served separately at the prison buffet for investigators), and porridge with a minute quantity of margarine. This food is steamed in pans under high pressure. Prisoners may not receive from outside vegetables, fruit (including lemons) or milk-foods. Such food is of course without vitamins and provokes scurvy with even the strongest and healthiest person. The absence of fats and of sugar provokes boils.

Persons thus weakened, failing and apathetic, crushed in spirit, more easily yield to threats and may sign any kind of confession which is prepared by the investigator. It is not for nothing that one of the favourite threats of investigators is this: " You won't sign ? We are in no hurry. I will send you to your cell and call for you again in six months. By that time there will only be a shadow left of you, and then you will sign anything I want." And this is not an empty threat. Cases were not rare of a man not being summoned for interrogation for four or six months or even a year. To give an instance, my wife, who was arrested in order to exert pressure on me, was not called up for investigation for more that four months.

Corresponding with the significance which may be attached to intentional weakening of the organism, medical service in prison has merely a formal character. Felshers4 go round the chambers and give only two medicines for all illnesses: a yellowish unguent with which they treat all boils, eczema, and so on, and a white powder for all internal ailments. These felshers are not bad fellows, but with the mass of prisoners, the lack of drugs and their weak medical knowledge, they cannot do anything. Some of them tell the patients openly: " You have got scurvy. You need air, milk, fresh vegetables, fruits. All that is not allowed in prison. To apply to us for help is quite useless."'

' A felsher is a partially trained medical assistant, something like the non-commissioned assistant of an army medical officer.-ED.




During my stay on the Shpalernaya (three months of common room) the doctor came only once to the chamber. A sick man had a high temperature and at times lost consciousness. We insisted with difficulty on the doctor being called. He came in furious, and angrily scolded the felsher: " Another time don't bring me here for trifles. You are not to forget that I only come here to the dead and the paralytics. Take this man to hospital." We learned from the prison warders that the chief duty of the prison doctor is to certify death in documents recording the shootings. Perhaps that was what he was alluding to.

In the prisons of Ogpu there is one other specific illness: inflation of the whole body, especially the legs, from standing while under interrogation. In the autumn of I930 from Common- room 22 was summoned to interrogation a well-known Leningrad silver engraver, P., a man of 40. They brought him back from the interrogation after seven days; he had been standing for six and a half days without eating, drinking or sleeping. His condition was recognised as threatening to life even by the prison doctor. The artisan B., who had had a leg amputated above the knee and replaced by a false leg, had stood for four and a half days. The chemical engineer C. stood for four days on end, and the poor old man gave in and signed a false " confession." The ship's carpenter T. had to stand for three days on end. These are only cases taken from the chamber where I was confined, and besides them I knew of many others who had gone through the ordeal of " standing," including standing on a chair where it was impossible to lean against the wall. There is no doubt that such standing, after which a man had sometimes to lie in hospital for months, left its traces for the rest of his life.

The only accessible means of protest against such prison treatment is a hunger-strike. It is never practised except in the single cells, as the declaration of a collective hunger-strike is regarded as " mob action," that is mutiny, and is punished with shooting. The individual hunger-striker is left to starve for nine days and then taken to a single cell, and forcible feeding is employed; he is tied up in case of resistance.

Once I happened to see the end of such a hunger-strike. The young writer B., arrested because in a play which he submitted to the censor and which was not yet printed, there was found a suspected allusion directed against the Soviet Government, declared a hunger-strike. He was a man of Soviet views and supposed that the investigator who was interrogating him with the use of the




usual methods of Ogpu was acting illegally. He wrote a protest to the Prokuror (government counsel) demanding a normal examination and public trial. There was no answer. He started hunger-striking. He was no longer summoned to examination, and on the tenth day of his strike was pronounced a sentence of IO years of concentration camp, and he was sent off the same day.

Connections with outside. As to connections with outside, persons under investigation

can be allowed to write, to receive things from outside and to see their friends. The permission depends on the investigator. These privileges, it would seem, should relieve the existence of the prisoner, but they are often a moral ordeal and a useful instrument for- obtaining " confessions."

Letters in such cases are allowed twice a month, but they hardly ever reach their destination. To show the investigator, through whose hands all correspondence must pass, what persons dear and near to the prisoner are still at liberty is to give him a dangerous weapon. He uses the information drawn from the correspondence and starts threatening to arrest the kinsfolk. Letters from outside hardly ever reach the prisoner but are affixed to the dossier.

The reception of things from outside, that is, the sending of linen and strictly defined and limited products, has enormous importance, as otherwise the prisoner is doomed to scurvy or boils. The list of things which may be supplied, being written out by hand, shows that the kinsman is alive and free. This is the only link with him; but the circumstance that the permission or prohibition of receiving such things depends only on the investigator gives him the means of making wide use of this for pressure on the prisoner.

Seeing relations while under examination is rarely allowed, sometimes by way of special favour in the cabinet of the investigator and in his presence. But this favour costs dear. Weak people, for the momentary pleasure of seeing one who is dear to them perhaps for the last time in life, sign what it had not been possible to extract from them by threats of death and direct pressure.

Sometimes such meetings are arranged unexpectedly for the prisoner. I know of such a case. The prisoner B. was pressed by the investigator with particular brutality for a confession; they announced a death sentence to him, they put him in the condemned cell, where he was kept for two days, they took him out to be shot




in the cellar under the prison, and straight from that to be questioned. None of this worked. He was put alone with a furious maniac who hit him about and tried to strangle him, and then, half mangled, in torn clothes, with blood stains on his face and neck, he was taken to the cabinet of the investigator where, as if unexpectedly, his wife was waiting; she also had not expected to see him and had been summoned from home to be examined. Seeing the terrible agitation of both, the investigator turned to B. with a pathetic appeal: " Spare your wife ! save yourself ! Do what I have been asking you to do all this time, sign a sincere repentance and confession. I propose this to you for the last time. Otherwise you will be shot." B. had the courage even after this not to give a false confession. As a result, he was sent to a concentration camp for five years. Probably, if he had signed what he was asked for, he would have been shot.

The great majority are allowed to see their friends after sentence has been pronounced before they are sent off to forced labour; those condemned to death are not allowed to see their friends. I got leave once on the eve of being sent to Solovetsk. I could only see my I2-year-old son; my wife was in prison. She was not allowed to see her son once during the five and more months of her imprisonment.

Our meeting took place in the usual room, fenced off with two wire gratings. In the middle was a passage, a yard broad, where stood the warders watching the meeting. On both sides of this passage, up against the gratings, were on one side those who had come to see their relations and on the other the prisoners. At this meeting there were at the same time not less than ioo prisoners, for next day 500 were being sent to the camp. For one who has not been present at the scene of such prison meetings it is difficult to picture them. Against both gratings, in unimaginable crowding, people pressed with their faces and bodies, clutching nervously at the gratings with their fingers, with faces strained with anxiety and pain. They are seeing their near ones for the last time. Those who come from outside have difficulty in recognising their fathers, sons or husbands: it is hard to see in these pale, sunken, hairy faces those who had been taken from home vigorous, young and healthy. The prisoners see the poor clothing, drawn faces and general condition of distress to which have come those who had been left to the will of fate. In one minute is revealed to these people all the horror of the sufferings they have endured, their fear for the future, the vision of its hopelessness.




I had lived half a year in prison in an extreme tension of will; my thoughts were dry and hard; I had never allowed myself to weaken my will by any memories. To weep in prison seemed to me not exactly unworthy, but simply something that must not be done. But when I saw the little child face of my son, from whose eyes, one after another, dropped big tears which he did not notice or feel as they trickled over his anxious and burning cheeks, when I saw his tender child-like mouth strained with suffering, I felt to my surprise that my voice was breaking out in spite of me, and that my hairy face was wet with tears. But in those minutes my attention was given to something else: I had to hear the last joyless words from home, to say my own last words, and that was almost physically impossible. A hundred persons on one side and more than a hundred on the other who know that in ten minutes they will part, perhaps for ever, all wanting to call out their last words. In the crush and noise and agitation all were calling out; the hoarse voices of men, high agitated voices of women breaking with stifling sobs, loud children's voices-all seem to join into one inexpressible cry of deathly anguish, of a last good-bye.

Conclusion. I end my short and by no means full sketch of the conditions

of prison life in USSR with the words of one of the most popular Russian scholars, with whom I was at the same time in prison. This was a man of great and calm endurance, who had been able to keep his capacity for objective and clear judgment in spite of all that he had to go through in more than a year of prison. In his student days he had taken part in the revolutionary movement and belonged to the Bolshevist Social-Democratic Party; he had been imprisoned in various places and had been in exile. Later he had given up revolutionary work and devoted himself entirely to learning.

He summed up the difference between investigation and imprisonment before the Revolution and under the Bolsheviks as follows: "I was an opponent of the Tsarist regime and fought all my life against it, but I have to recognise that then we were imprisoned for offences which we had committed against the existing laws. All the efforts of the investigating authorities were directed, not to discover them, but to prove these offences. In the great majority of cases they did not succeed in doing this fully, and in consequence the sentence was also less than would have been demanded by the law for all that we had done. We were punished only for what




they had succeeded in discovering and proving. It was a fight between us and the examining officials: the investigator tried to prove our offence with the help of documents and facts discovered. We did everything we could to hamper the investigation and to conceal all that was possible. We were enemies of the order of state, and this we did not conceal.

" Now it is quite different. Those under investigation have committed no crime, and very many of them are not only not enemies of the Communist system but sincerely sympathise with it and are doing everything they can to help its realisation. The investigator does not try to find proofs of offences which have not been committed, as he very well knows. In the most favourable instance, which happens rarely, he demands from the prisoner that he should prove that he has not committed the offence. But in most cases he demands that the prisoner should declare himself guilty of a most grave offence against the State, which has never been committed. As it is extremely difficult to get this out of a healthy, normal man, the investigator is given unlimited power over the prisoner, and the whole prison regime is directed to bringing him into such a state in which he will sign whatever is wished and will confess anything that is wished, as to all human strength there is a limit."

V. CHERNAVIN.



prison life in ussr (1930-31)

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