Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [85]
But it was not even necessary to be extraordinary. Lyudmila Khachatryan was arrested for marrying a foreigner, a Yugoslav soldier. Lev Razgon recounted the story of a peasant, Seryogin, who, on being told that someone had killed Kirov, replied, “Damned if I care.” Seryogin had never heard of Kirov, and assumed he was someone who had died in a fight in the neighboring village. For that mistake, he received a ten-year sentence.13 By 1939, telling a joke, or hearing one, about Stalin; being late for work; having the misfortune to be named by a terrified friend or a jealous neighbor as a “co-conspirator” in a nonexistent plot; owning four cows in a village where most people owned one; stealing a pair of shoes; being a cousin of Stalin’s wife; stealing a pen and some paper from one’s office in order to give them to a schoolchild who had none; all of these could, under the right circumstances, lead to a sentence in a Soviet concentration camp. Relatives of a person who had illegally tried to cross the Soviet border were liable to arrest, according to a 1940 law, whether or not they had known about the attempted escape.14 Wartime laws—on being late to work and forbidding job changes—would add more “criminals” to the camps as well, as we shall see.
If the reasons for arrest were many and varied, so too were the methods. Some prisoners had ample warning. For several weeks prior to his arrest in the mid-1930s, an OGPU agent repeatedly called Alexander Weissberg in for questioning, asking him over and over again how he had come to be a “spy”: Who recruited you? Whom did you recruit? What foreign organization are you working for? “He put exactly the same questions over and over again, and I always gave him the same answers.” 15
At about the same time, Galina Serebryakova, the author of The Young Marx and the wife of a high functionary, was also “invited” every evening to Lubyanka, kept waiting until two or three o’clock in the morning, interrogated, released at five in the morning, and returned to her apartment. Agents surrounded her building and a black car followed her when she went outside. So convinced was she of her coming arrest that she tried to kill herself. Nevertheless, she endured several months of this sort of harassment before actually being arrested.16
During heavy waves of mass arrest—of kulaks in 1929 and 1930, of Party activists in 1937 and 1938, of former prisoners in 1948—many knew their turn was coming simply because all those around them were being arrested. Elinor Lipper, a Dutch communist who had come to Moscow in the 1930s, was living in 1937 in the Hotel Lux, a special hotel for foreign revolutionaries: “every night a few more persons vanished from the hotel . . . in the morning, there would be large red seals pasted on the doors of a few more rooms.” 17
In times of real terror, some even experienced the arrest itself as a sort of relief. Nikolai Starostin, one of the unlucky soccer stars, was trailed by agents for several weeks, and became so annoyed that he finally went up to one of them and demanded an explanation: “If you want something from me, call me into your office.” As a result, at the moment of arrest he felt not “shock and fear” but “curiosity.” 18
Still others were taken completely by surprise. The Polish writer Alexander Wat, then living in occupied Lvov, was asked to a party at a restaurant with a group of other writers. He asked the host what the occasion was. “You’ll see,” he was told. A brawl was staged, and he was arrested there and then.19 Alexander Dolgun, the American Embassy clerk, was hailed on the street by a man who turned out to be a secret policeman. When the man called out his name, Dolgun recalled, “I was completely mystified. I wondered if it was some nut . . .”20 Okunevskaya, the actress, was in bed with a bad case of flu at the time of her arrest, and demanded that the police return another day. They showed her the arrest warrant (the one with Abakumov’s signature