19 "Inside
tion? Later on, in Voronezh, he talked to me a great deal about it, trying to distinguish between his hallucinations and the facts. During the whole time his acute powers of observation never deserted him. This I saw when at our meeting he at once asked me about my coat and drew the right conclusion when I told him it was my mother's: "So you haven't been arrested." But he was ill, and not all his observations and conclusions proved well founded. Together we carefully sifted out the grains of fact, but it was not an easy
task.
We had one fairly good way of judging whether something he remembered was true. During our meeting the interrogator touched on a great number of points. His obvious purpose was to impress on me his view of the case as a whole and various aspects of his inquiry into it. I was, as it were, being given authoritative guidance on how the whole thing should be seen. There were many women, such as Adalis, who gratefully accepted such guidance—most of them out of an instinct of self-preservation, but some quite sincerely. During the interview, then, I served as a kind of phonograph disc on which the interrogator recorded his version of events for me to make known to the world outside. He was deliberately trying to frighten me and, through me, those I would talk to about it. But he miscalculated, like other functionaries of our times, to whom it never occurs that their victims may dare to apply their own, rather than official, criteria to what they are told. Terror and depotism are always short-sighted.
Because of his acute sensitivity M. was no doubt easy game for his jailers and they were not, therefore, particularly subtle in their treatment of him. They kept him in a cell for two persons. The interrogator said that solitary confinement was "forbidden for reasons of humanity." I knew this was a lie. If it had ever been forbidden, it was only on paper. At every period we met people who had been kept in cells all alone. But whenever there was a shortage of prison space these tiny cells were filled to bursting point. Generally, however, the second place in a cell for two was used in a way of which in 1934, before M.'s arrest, we had never heard: M.'s cellmate tried to frighten him with the thought of his trial, assuring him that all his family and friends had been arrested and would appear in the dock together with him. He went through all the articles of the criminal code under which M. might be accused, as though giving him "legal advice," but in fact trying to alarm him at the prospect of being charged with terrorism, conspiracy and the like. M. would return from his nighttime interrogation to the clutches of his "fellow prisoner," who gave him no respite. But the man's approach was very crude, and M. once cut him short by asking: "Why are your nails so clean?" He had stupidly claimed to be a "veteran" of several months' standing, but his nails were neatly manicured. Early one morning he returned to the cell, supposedly from an interrogation, a little later than M., who noticed that he smelled of onion—and told him so.
The interrogator, countering M.'s remark at our interview that he was being held in a cell by himself, mentioned the humane ban on solitary confinement and added that M. had been with another prisoner whom it had been necessary to transfer because of M.'s "rudeness" to him. "How considerate!" M. managed to get in by way of the last word in this exchange.
At the very first interrogation M. had admitted to being the author of the poem on Stalin, so the stool pigeon's task could not have been merely to find out something that M. was hiding. Part of the function of these people was to unnerve and wear down prisoners under interrogation, to make their lives a misery. Until 1937 our secret police made much of their psychological methods, but afterward these gave way to physical torture, with beatings of the most primitive kind. After 1937 I never again heard of anyone being held in solitary-confinement cells, with or without stool pigeons. Perhaps people picked out for such treatment after 1937 did not leave the Lubianka alive.
M. was put through the physical ordeal which had always been applied. It consisted mainly of not being allowed to sleep. He was called out every night and kept for hours on end. Most of the time was spent not in actual questioning, but in waiting under guard outside the interrogator's door. Once, when there was no interrogation, he was wakened all the same and taken to see a woman who kept him waiting at the door of her office for many hours, only to ask him at the end of it whether he had any complaints. Everybody knew how meaningless it was to make complaints to the prosecutor, and M. did not avail himself of this right. He had probably been called to her office simply as a formality, and also to keep him awake even on a night when the interrogator was catching up on his own sleep. These night birds lived a preposterous life, but all the same they managed to get some sleep, although not at the times when ordinary mortals did. The ordeal by deprivation of sleep and a bright light shining right in the eyes are known to everybody who has gone through such interrogations.
At the interview I had noticed how sore M.'s eyelids looked and asked what the reason was. The interrogator hastened to reply that it was through too much reading, but it later came out that M. was not allowed to have books in his cell. His eyelids never got better and he had trouble with them for the rest of his life. He told me that the inflammation was caused not only by bright lights but also by a stinging liquid which he believed was squirted through the spy-hole in the door whenever he went near it—since any anxiety made him very restless, he naturally paced his cell when he was left alone there. I have been told that the spy-hole is protected on both sides by thick glass so that no liquid could possibly be sprayed through it. This is perhaps one of the things that M. imagined, but one cannot help wondering whether a strong light was enough to bring about such a chronic infection of the eyelids.
M. was given salty food, but nothing to drink—a common practice in the Lubianka. When he went up to the spy-hole and demanded water from the guard outside, he was dragged off to a punishment cell and put in a strait-jacket. He had never before seen a strait-jacket, and as a check, he wrote down what it was like and we went to the hospital to look at one. His description fitted exactly.
At the interview I saw that M. had bandages on both wrists. When I asked him what was wrong with them, he just waved his hand, but the interrogator delivered himself of an angry speech about how M. had brought forbidden objects into his cell—an offense punishable under such-and-such an article. It turned out that M. had slashed his veins with a razor blade. He had been told by Kuzin, who in 1933, after two months in jail, had been released on the intervention of a Chekist friend with a passion for entomology, that the thing you want most in prison is a knife or at least a razor blade. He had even thought of a way of providing for an emergency by hiding one in the sole of his shoe. Hearing this, M. persuaded a cobbler he knew to secrete a few blades in this way for him. Forethought of this kind was second nature to us. In the mid-twenties Lozinski had shown us the bag which he kept packed in readiness for his arrest. This was something commonly done by engineers and members of other "exposed" professions, and the remarkable thing was not the fact itself, but the way in which everybody thought it was the most natural thing in the world. Such things were just part of our daily life, and with the blade he had so opportunely hidden in his shoe M. was able to slash his wrists. Bleeding to death is not the worst way of getting out of this life of ours. . . .
The work of undermining a person's sanity was carried on quite systematically in the Lubianka, and since our secret police is a bureaucratic institution like any other, all the procedures involved were probably governed by precise instructions. Even though the personnel were specifically selected for the job, one cannot ascribe what went on to their wicked nature, since the same people could overnight have become kindness itself—if so instructed. There were rumors among us that Yagoda had set up secret laboratories and staffed them with specialists who were carrying out all kinds of experiments with drugs, hypnosis, phonograph records and so forth. It was impossible to check such stories, and they may have been a product of our morbid imaginations, or tales deliberately put about to keep us all on tenterhooks.