Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [86]
In fact, it seems as if the authorities deliberately varied their tactics, picking up some people at home and some at work, some on the street and some on trains. One memo to Stalin from Viktor Abakumov, dated July 17, 1947, confirms this suspicion, noting that prisoners were routinely “surprised” by police in order to prevent escape, to prevent resistance, to prevent the suspect from warning others in his counter-revolutionary “conspiracy.” In certain cases, the document continued, “a secret arrest in the street is carried out.”24
The most common arrest, however, was one that took place at a person’s home, in the middle of the night. In times of mass arrest, fear of the midnight “knock on the door” became widespread. There is a very old Soviet joke about the terrible anxiety Ivan and his wife Masha experienced when the knock on the door came—and their relief when they learned it was only the neighbor come to tell them that the building was on fire. A Soviet proverb also has it that “Thieves, prostitutes and the NKVD work mostly at night.” 25 Usually, these nighttime arrests were accompanied by a search, although search tactics varied over time too. Osip Mandelstam was arrested twice, once in 1934 and then again in 1938, and his wife has described the differences between the two procedures:
In 1938 they wasted no time looking for papers and examining them—indeed, the police agents didn’t even seem to know the occupation of the man they had come to arrest . . . they simply turned over all the mattresses, swept his papers into a sack, poked around for a while and then disappeared, taking M. [Mandelstam] with them. The whole operation lasted no more than twenty minutes. But in 1934 they stayed all night until the early hours.
During the earlier raid, secret police, who clearly knew what they were looking for, had carefully gone through all of Mandelstam’s papers, discarding old manuscripts, looking for new poetry. The first time around they also ensured that civilian “witnesses” were present, as well as—in their case—a “friend” in police pay, a literary critic known to the Mandelstams, presumably told to be there in order to ensure that the Mandelstams did not secretly start burning papers once they heard the knock at the door.26 Later, they did not bother with such details.
Mass arrests of particular nationalities, such as those that took place in what had been eastern Poland and the Baltic States, the territories occupied by the Red Army from 1939 to 1941, usually had an even more haphazard character. Janusz Bardach, a Jewish teenager in the Polish town of Wlodzimierz-Wolynski, was forced to act as a civilian “witness” during one such mass arrest. He accompanied a group of drunken NKVD thugs who went from house to house on the night of December 5, 1939, rounding up people who were to be either arrested or deported. Sometimes they attacked the wealthier and better-connected citizens, whose names were marked on a list; sometimes they simply hauled in “refugees”—usually Jews who had escaped to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland from Nazi-occupied western Poland—without bothering to write down their names at all. In one house, a group of refugees tried to defend themselves by pointing out that they had been members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement. Nevertheless, upon hearing that they came from Lublin, at that time on the other side of the border, Gennady, the leader of the NKVD patrol, began to shout:
“You filthy refugees! Nazi spies!” The children