After his arrest, Lev was ostracized and expelled from university for a year. He was allowed to begin his second year of study only in 1937, after Akhmatova went to the university rector and pleaded with him.
Certain that he would be arrested again, Lev became obsessed about his next interrogation, and when it would come. He was anxious not to break and to keep his honour. Gerstein remembers him lying on a bed in the art studio of a friend, looking up at the ceiling and saying: ‘I keep wondering what I’ll say to the interrogator.’21 He would soon find out. He was on course to finish his degree, when in 1938 a fit of temper ruined everything. During a lecture on Russian literature, he heard a professor belittle his father, saying that the late Gumilev ‘wrote about Abyssinia while he never got beyond Algiers’. Lev shouted: ‘He was in Abyssinia, not Algiers!’ – referring to a trip his father had taken in 1915. The professor, Pompyansky, not knowing who the interrupter was, responded: ‘Who is in a better position to know, you or me?’ To this Lev responded: ‘Me, of course.’
Several students on the course knew Lev’s identity and parents, and began to laugh uproariously. Pompyansky, humiliated, filed a complaint. In any other year, Lev would have been sternly rebuked by the head of the department, or faced some other punishment for a minor infraction. But this was the height of Stalin’s terror. Only months before, the rector of Leningrad University had been arrested and shot during interrogation. His body was thrown from a fourth-storey window of the NKVD building to make it appear like suicide. With nerves on edge, no one would speak on Lev’s behalf.
A few days later, on 10 March, he and two other LGU students – Teodor Shumovsky and Nikolay Erekhovich – were arrested and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and membership of a banned political party (the ‘Youth Wing of the Progressive Party’).22 Lev was always convinced that the reason for his arrest was his outburst. But what he did not know (and which is clear from his file) was that the NKVD had been steadily accumulating denunciations and gathering evidence against him since his last arrest.23 In the end, all that painstaking work proved a waste of time: they managed to extract a false confession from him under torture. But such was the culture of the Soviet Union: an intensely legalistic, if not legal, approach to work by government bureaucrats and police.
Five days later, the three students were interrogated separately by NKVD inspectors. It was clear that this was a great deal more serious than the previous two episodes. Lev wrote that the first NKVD detective inspector to interview him started the interrogation by beating him savagely and shouting: ‘You love your father, you bastard! Get up… against the wall!’ Lev was tortured and beaten for eight days. The interrogator beat him on the neck, near the brain stem. ‘You will remember me all your life!’ he warned. And sure enough, the drubbing left Lev with spasms down the right side of his body for the rest of his life.
Between interrogations, the prisoners lay in their cramped cell, asking each other about their ‘investigations’ and what they were charged with. ‘Almost everyone willingly shares the experience, looking for support in his own unequal struggle’, recalled Teodor Shumovsky, one of the students arrested along with Gumilev. ‘They give each other selfless advice on how to carry oneself with an investigator, how to behave.’24 Shumovsky was told by a fellow prisoner:
Your matter is sad, chap, but isn’t that bad. Here, in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, they produce spies, traitors, saboteurs, but you have nothing of that kind! Now look, you ‘bourgeois progressivist’, they will not pat you on the head for that, but still it’s not like you were a fascist! Consider yourself getting a lucky number.25
As Lev feared, the torture apparently broke them. According to Shumovsky, after seeing a prisoner brought back motionless from the torture chamber, they all thought very hard about further resistance: ‘It is immeasurably hard to take over the burden of non-existent guilt. But it is much harder to become a cripple and to deprive oneself of the opportunity to think and to create.’26 Separately, the three students signed ‘confessions’ that they had created a terrorist organization. Lev was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, while his two ‘accomplices’ received eight years apiece.27
After confessing, the three were transferred by truck to another building, an old brick house with bars on the windows.28 They were processed along with hundreds of other half-naked, unshaven prisoners housed in tight seven-square-metre cells. These at one time had been one-man cells, but they now housed 20 prisoners, locked up together with a bucket for their waste. ‘Three persons per square metre. Do not forget the unit of measurement: prisoners, it is possible to put as many as you wish of those into the cell.’29
In late September, they found themselves again in a cell together. Together they were marched into a basement room, where they sat before a military court. Each had broken and named the others in signed confessions. They could not readily meet one another’s gaze. But being reunited gave them renewed courage.
The judge, Bushmakov, was dressed in military uniform. He addressed each prisoner in turn, Lev first:
‘Admit your guilt.’
‘No.’
‘How so? You signed the confession.’
‘I was forced by inspectors Bakhudarin and that other one, he is indicated in the protocol. I was oppressed; unlawful methods were used….’
‘What are you talking about? We do everything according to the law. Trying to avoid the blame, you do yourself a disservice. It is written clearly here: I, Gumilev, was a member… carried out systematic… my objective was to… Now it is useless to deny. Sit down.’30
Their sentences were upheld.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GULAG
Lev and his two ‘accomplices’ were transferred to another holding jail, from where prisoners were sent to all corners of the Soviet Union, to the gulag. Possibly because the fate of the prisoners had already been decided, the rules were relaxed and the three were allowed to stay in the same cell, along with other students. There they played chess on the floor, using chess pieces made from bread, and waited for news. On 17 November came a ray of hope: following a protest by the defence lawyers, the sentence imposed by the military tribunal had been revoked and the case sent for reinvestigation. According to Shumovsky:
Suddenly the two of us who remained, Lyova and I were ordered to get ready for a big move… the prison was humming like an oriental bazaar. My heart beat faster… ‘Maybe they will take us to different camps’, Lyova says. ‘Listen and try to memorize…’ We get under the plank beds, far away from vanity, Lyova whispers his father’s poems to me….’1
On 2 December they were packed into ‘Stolypin wagons’ (train carriages with bars on the windows designed for carrying convicts) and sent north. First they travelled to Medvezhegorsk, on the northern lip of the massive Lake Onega. There they joined a forced labour brigade digging the White Sea Canal. It was one of the many massive engineering projects undertaken by work brigades under Stalin, and had an ambitious aim: as part of the preparations for war, Stalin wanted a canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea so that the Soviet navy could sail from one to the other swiftly, without being forced to go round Scandinavia. Completed at a heavy price in terms of human life, like many other such projects it was dramatically flawed: dug too shallow, it was almost never used.