Just as there is no classification in nature with rigid boundaries, it is impossible rigidly to separate psychological methods from physical ones. Where, for example, should we classify the following amusement?
10. Sound effects: The accused is made to stand twenty to twenty-five feet away and is then forced to speak more and more loudly and to repeat everything. This is not easy for someone already weakened to the point of exhaustion. Or two megaphones are constructed of rolled-up cardboard, and two interrogators, coming close to the prisoner, bellow in both ears: “Confess, you rat!” The prisoner is deafened; sometimes he actually loses his sense of hearing. But this method is uneconomical. The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking up new ideas.
11. Tickling: This is also a diversion. The prisoner’s arms and legs are bound or held down, and then the inside of his nose is tickled with a feather. The prisoner writhes; it feels as though someone were drilling into his brain.
12. A cigarette is put out on the accused’s skin (already mentioned above).
13. Light effects involve the use of an extremely bright electric light in the small, white-walled cell or “box” in which the accused is being held—a light which is never extinguished. (The electricity saved by the economies of schoolchildren and housewives! ) Your eyelids become inflamed, which is very painful. And then in the interrogation room searchlights are again directed into your eyes.
14. Here is another imaginative trick: On the eve of May 1, 1933, in the Khabarovsk GPU, for twelve hours—all night—Chebotaryev was not interrogated, no, but was simply kept in a continual state of being led to interrogation. “Hey, you—hands behind your back!” They led him out of the cell, up the stairs quickly, into the interrogator’s office. The guard left. But the interrogator, without asking one single question, and sometimes without even allowing Chebotaryev to sit down, would pick up the telephone: “Take away the prisoner from 107!” And so they came to get him and took him back to his cell. No sooner had he lain down on his board bunk than the lock rattled: “Chebotaryev! To interrogation. Hands behind your back!” And when he got there: “Take away the prisoner from 107!”
For that matter, the methods of bringing pressure to bear can begin a long time before the interrogator’s office.
15. Prison begins with the box, in other words, what amounts to a closet or packing case. The human being who has just been taken from freedom, still in a state of inner turmoil, ready to explain, to argue, to struggle, is, when he first sets foot in prison, clapped into a “box,” which sometimes has a lamp and a place where he can sit down, but which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours, or for half a day, or a day. During those hours he knows absolutely nothing! Will he perhaps be confined there all his life? He has never in his life encountered anything like this, and he cannot guess at the outcome. Those first hours are passing when everything inside him is still ablaze from the unstilled storm in his heart. Some become despondent—and that’s the time to subject them to their first interrogation. Others become angry—and that, too, is all to the good, for they may insult the interrogator right at the start or make a slip, and it will be all the easier to cook up their case.
16. When boxes were in short supply, they used to have another method. In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutin-skaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything, did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from it. Six days! Just try to sit that way for six hours!
Then again, as a variation, the prisoner can be forced to sit on a tall chair, of the kind used in laboratories, so that his feet do not reach the floor. They become very numb in this position. He is left sitting that way from eight to ten hours.
Or else, during the interrogation itself, when the prisoner is out in plain view, he can be forced to sit in this way: as far forward as possible on the front edge (“Move further forward! Further still!”) of the chair so that he is under painful pressure during the entire interrogation. He is not allowed to stir for several hours. Is that all? Yes, that’s all. Just try it yourself!
17. Depending on local conditions, a divisional pit can be substituted for the box, as was done in the Gorokhovets army camps during World War II. The prisoner was pushed into such a pit, ten feet in depth, six and a half feet in diameter; and beneath the open sky, rain or shine, this pit was for several days both his cell and his latrine. And ten and a half ounces of bread, and water, were lowered to him on a cord. Imagine yourself in this situation just after you’ve been arrested, when you’re all in a boil.
Either identical orders to all Special Branches of the Red Army or else the similarities of their situations in the field led to broad use of this method. Thus, in the 36th Motorized Infantry Division, a unit which took part in the battle of Khalkhin-Gol, and which was encamped in the Mongolian desert in 1941, a newly arrested prisoner was, without explanation, given a spade by Chief of the Special Branch Samulyev and ordered to dig a pit the exact dimensions of a grave. (Here is a hybridization of physical and psychological methods.) When the prisoner had dug deeper than his own waist, they ordered him to stop and sit down on the bottom: his head was no longer visible. One guard kept watch over several such pits and it was as though he were surrounded by empty space.[63] They kept the accused in this desert with no protection from the Mongolian sun and with no warm clothing against the cold of the night, but no tortures—why waste effort on tortures? The ration they gave was three and a half ounces of bread per day and one glass of water. Lieutenant Chulpenyev, a giant, a boxer, twenty-one years old, spent a month imprisoned this way. Within ten days he was swarming with lice. After fifteen days he was summoned to interrogation for the first time.
18. The accused could be compelled to stand on his knees—not in some figurative sense, but literally: on his knees, without sitting back on his heels, and with his back upright. People could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four or forty-eight hours. (The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in shifts.)[64] What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such treatment? One already broken, already inclined to surrender. It was also a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened? Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this. Which shows that the method also worked well on proud people….
19. Then there is the method of simply compelling a prisoner to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands only while being interrogated—because that, too, exhausts and breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way—so that the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything at all.
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13. This, evidently, is a Mongolian theme. In the magazine Niva (March 15, 1914, p. 218) there is a drawing of a Mongolian prison: each prisoner is shut in a separate trunk with a small opening for his head or for food. A jailer patrols between the trunks.
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14. That, after all, is how somebody’s career was launched—standing guard over a prisoner on his knees. And now, in all probability, that somebody has attained high rank and his children are already grown up.