I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather’s NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina’s Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.
The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of ‘Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region’ for suspected involvement in a ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity’. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor’s resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin – or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting – was charged with finding Bibikov ‘in the town of Chernigov’. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov’s NKVD jail.
What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he’d said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn’t his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will – though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union’s jails to bursting point that summer. ‘The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.’
Yevgeniya Ginzburg’s harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge, Into the Whirlwind, describes the infamous NKVD ‘conveyor’. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were confronted with those more resilient, in order to break their solidarity. They were told that resistance was useless; once one made a confession the rest could be shot on that basis alone. Their wives and children were threatened. Perversely, committed Communists could be persuaded to sign for the sake of the Revolution – your Party demands it! Are you defying your Party? Stool pigeons urged fellow prisoners to confess – it’s the only way to save your life, your family’s lives! Solzhenitsyn recounts how convinced Communists would whisper to their fellows, ‘It’s our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too softhearted; now look at the rot which has multiplied. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies.’
Lied to, tortured, living in a world of pain and confusion, Bibikov the Party man for once refused to obey the Party’s orders and clung on to his innocence for as long as he could bear. But, like almost all of them, he broke in the end.
Nineteen days after his arrest he signed his first confession. It was a surprisingly long time to have held out. But nevertheless Bibikov confessed abjectly, in writing, to crimes against the Soviet Union. To the sabotage of the factory he helped to build. To the recruitment of Trotskyite agents. To propaganda against the state. He admitted that he had betrayed the Party to which he had devoted his life. His closest colleagues implicated him, and he, in turn, implicated them. None of the twenty-five supposed members of his circle refused to confess.
The first confession is dated 14 August 1937. It is the first time Bibikov speaks in the file – the first hint of a human voice among the dry officialese. The crimes to which he confesses are so bizarre, so startlingly improbable, that I felt physically nauseous at the lurch from banal legalisms into the grotesque language of nightmare.
‘Transcript of Interrogation. Accused Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, born 1903. Former Party member. Question: In the statement you have made today in your own hand you admit your participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. By whom, when and under what circumstances were you inducted into this organization?
‘Answer: I was recruited into the counter-revolutionary terrorist organization by the former second Party Secretary of Kharkov, ILYIN, in February 1934… We met often in the course of our Party work. During our meetings in 1934 I expressed my doubts about the correctness of Party policy towards agriculture, workers’ pay and so on. In February 1934, after a committee meeting, ILYIN invited me into his study and said he wanted to talk frankly. That is when he proposed that I become a member of the Trotskyite organization.’
The transcript was typed, and Bibikov signed at the bottom. The writing holds no clue as to what was going through his mind as he scribbled his signature.
But one simple confession was not enough. The bureaucracy demanded more detail, more names to fulfil the quota of enemies of the people to be found in every district and region in the country. Like scriptwriters concocting a soap opera of grotesque complexity, the investigators required their vast cast to corroborate each others’ stories, to add new layers to the plot. Bibikov’s first confession brought no respite. The interrogations continued. But at some point something within him must have rebelled at the perversity and the horror, and he tried to claw his way back into the world of the sane. Those moments of defiance ring through the thin, laconic pages of the file like a silent shout.
‘Question to Fedayev,’ reads the stark text of the transcript of his first ‘confrontation’ with a fellow ‘conspirator’, the former head of the Kharkov Regional Committee. ‘Tell us what you know about Bibikov.’
‘Fedayev’s reply: “…In the course of two conversations with Bibikov I confirmed that he was ready to take part in the organization of Trotskyite work. In our last conversation we agreed to set up a Trotskyite group at the KhTZ… “
‘Question to Bibikov: “Do you confirm the suspect Fedayev’s statement?”
‘Bibikov’s reply: “No. That is a lie. We never had such a conversation.’
‘This statement has been read to us and is accurate. (Signed) Fedayev. The accused Bibikov refused to sign.’