4. Psychological contrast was sometimes effective: sudden reversals of tone, for example. For a whole or part of the interrogation period, the interrogator would be extremely friendly, addressing the prisoner formally by first name and patronymic, and promising everything. Suddenly he would brandish a paperweight and shout: “Foo, you rat! I’ll put nine grams of lead in your skull!” And he would advance on the accused, clutching hands outstretched as if to grab him by the hair, fingernails like needles. (This worked very, very well with women prisoners.)
Or as a variation on this: two interrogators would take turns. One would shout and bully. The other would be friendly, almost gentle. Each time the accused entered the office he would tremble—which would it be? He wanted to do everything to please the gentle one because of his different manner, even to the point of signing and confessing to things that had never happened.
5. Preliminary humiliation was another approach. In the famous cellars of the Rostov-on-the-Don GPU (House 33), which were lit by lenslike insets of thick glass in the sidewalk above the former storage basement, prisoners awaiting interrogation were made to lie face down for several hours in the main corridor and forbidden to raise their heads or make a sound. They lay this way, like Moslems at prayer, until the guard touched a shoulder and took them off to interrogation.
Another case: At the Lubyanka, Aleksandra O-va refused to give the testimony demanded of her. She was transferred to Lefortovo. In the admitting office, a woman jailer ordered her to undress, allegedly for a medical examination, took away her clothes, and locked her in a “box” naked. At that point the men jailers began to peer through the peephole and to appraise her female attributes with loud laughs. If one were systematically to question former prisoners, many more such examples would certainly emerge. They all had but a single purpose: to dishearten and humiliate.
6. Any method of inducing extreme confusion in the accused might be employed. Here is how F.I.V. from Krasnogorsk, Moscow Province, was interrogated. (This was reported by I. A. P-ev.) During the interrogation, the interrogator, a woman, undressed in front of him by stages (a striptease!), all the time continuing the interrogation as if nothing were going on. She walked about the room and came close to him and tried to get him to give in. Perhaps this satisfied some personal quirk in her, but it may also have been cold-blooded calculation, an attempt to get the accused so muddled that he would sign. And she was in no danger. She had her pistol, and she had her alarm bell.
7. Intimidation was very widely used and very varied. It was often accompanied by enticement and by promises which were, of course, false. In 1924: “If you don’t confess, you’ll go to the Solovetsky Islands. Anybody who confesses is turned loose.” In 1944: “Which camp you’ll be sent to depends on us. Camps are different. We’ve got hard-labor camps now. If you confess, you’ll go to an easy camp. If you’re stubborn, you’ll get twenty-five years in handcuffs in the mines!” Another form of intimidation was threatening a prisoner with a prison worse than the one he was in. “If you keep on being stubborn, we’ll send you to Lefortovo” (if you are in the Lubyanka), “to Sukhanovka” (if you are at Lefortovo). “They’ll find another way to talk to you there.” You have already gotten used to things where you are; the regimen seems to be not so bad; and what kind of torments await you elsewhere? Yes, and you also have to be transported there…. Should you give in?
Intimidation worked beautifully on those who had not yet been arrested but had simply received an official summons to the Bolshoi Dom—the Big House. He (or she) still had a lot to lose. He (or she) was frightened of everything—that they wouldn’t let him (or her) out today, that they would confiscate his (or her) belongings or apartment. He would be ready to give all kinds of testimony and make all kinds of concessions in order to avoid these dangers. She, of course, would be ignorant of the Criminal Code, and, at the very least, at the start of the questioning they would push a sheet of paper in front of her with a fake citation from the Code: “I have been warned that for giving false testimony… five years of imprisonment.” (In actual fact, under Article 95, it is two years.) “For refusal to give testimony—five years…” (In actual fact, under Article 92, it is up to three months.) Here, then, one more of the interrogator’s basic methods has entered the picture and will continue to re-enter it.
8. The lie. We lambs were forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like. Those articles of the law did not apply to him. We had even lost the yardstick with which to gauge: what does he get for lying? He could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends—and it would be just a skillful interrogation technique.
Intimidation through enticement and lies was the fundamental method for bringing pressure on the relatives of the arrested person when they were called in to give testimony. “If you don’t tell us such and such” (whatever was being asked), “it’s going to be the worse for him…. You’ll be destroying him completely.” (How hard for a mother to hear that!)[61] “Signing this paper” (pushed in front of the relatives) “is the only way you can save him” (destroy him).
9. Playing on one’s affection for those one loved was a game that worked beautifully on the accused as well. It was the most effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved. (Oh, how foresighted was the saying: “A man’s family are his enemies.”) Remember the Tatar who bore his sufferings—his own and those of his wife—but could not endure his daughter’s! In 1930, Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: “We’ll arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics!” And that was a woman!
They would threaten to arrest everyone you loved. Sometimes this would be done with sound effects: Your wife has already been arrested, but her further fate depends on you. They are questioning her in the next room—just listen! And through the wall you can actually hear a woman weeping and screaming. (After all, they all sound alike; you’re hearing it through a wall; and you’re under terrific strain and not in a state to play the expert on voice identification. Sometimes they simply play a recording of the voice of a “typical wife”—soprano or contralto—a labor-saving device suggested by some inventive genius.) And then, without fakery, they actually show her to you through a glass door, as she walks along in silence, her head bent in grief. Yes! Your own wife in the corridors of State Security! You have destroyed her by your stubbornness! She has already been arrested! (In actual fact, she has simply been summoned in connection with some insignificant procedural question and sent into the corridor at just the right moment, after being told: “Don’t raise your head, or you’ll be kept here!”) Or they give you a letter to read, and the handwriting is exactly like hers: “I renounce you! After the filth they have told me about you, I don’t need you any more!” (And since such wives do exist in our country, and such letters as well, you are left to ponder in your heart: Is that the kind of wife she really is?)
The interrogator Goldman (in 1944) was trying to extort testimony against other people from V. A. Korneyeva with the threat: “We’ll confiscate your house and toss your old women into the street.” A woman of deep convictions, and firm in her faith, Korneyeva had no fear whatever for herself. She was prepared to suffer. But, given our laws, Goldman’s threats were all too real, and she was in torment over the fate of her loved ones. When, by morning, after a night of tearing up rejected depositions, Goldman began to write a fourth version accusing Korneyeva alone, she signed it happily and with a feeling of spiritual victory. We fail to hang on to the basic human instinct to prove our innocence when falsely accused. How can we there? We were even glad when we succeeded in taking all the guilt on our own shoulders.[62]
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11. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And, curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself considered evidence.
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12. Today she says: “After eleven years, during rehabilitation proceedings they let me reread those ‘depositions,’ and I was gripped by a feeling of spiritual nausea. What was there to be proud of?” I myself, during the rehabilitation period, felt the very same way on hearing excerpts from my earlier depositions. As the saying goes: They bent me into a bow, and I became someone else. I did not recognize myself—how could I have signed them and still think I had not gotten off too badly?