Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [93]
Why the Soviet secret police were so obsessed with confession remains a matter for debate, and a wide variety of explanations have been proferred in the past. Some believe the policy came from the top. Roman Brackman, author of an unorthodox biography of Stalin, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin , believes the Soviet leader had a neurotic obsession with making others confess to crimes which he himself had committed: because he himself had been an agent of the Czarist secret police before the Revolution, he had a particular need to see people confess to having been traitors. Robert Conquest also believes that Stalin was interested in forcing at least those he knew personally to confess. “Stalin wanted not merely to kill his old opponents, but to destroy them morally and politically,” although this, of course, applied only to a few out of the millions arrested.
But confession would also have been important to the NKVD agents carrying out the interrogations. Perhaps obtaining confessions helped them feel confident of the legitimacy of their actions: it made the madness of mass, arbitrary arrest seem more humane, or at least legal. As in the case of the “Polish spies,” confession also provided the evidence necessary to arrest others. The Soviet political and economic system was also obsessed with results—fulfilling the plan, completing the norm—and confessions were concrete “proof” of a successful interrogation. As Conquest writes, “the principle had become established that a confession was the best result obtainable. Those who could obtain it were to be considered successful operatives, and a poor NKVD operative had a short life expectancy.”62
Whatever the source of the NKVD’s fixation on confessions, police interrogators usually pursued them without either the deadly singlemindedness shown in the case of the “Polish spies,” or the indifference applied to Thomas Sgovio. Instead, prisoners generally experienced a mixture of the two. On the one hand, the NKVD demanded that they confess and incriminate themselves and others. On the other hand, the NKVD seemed to feel a slovenly lack of interest in the outcome altogether.
This somewhat surreal system was already in place by the 1920s, in the years before the Great Terror, and it remained in place long after the Great Terror had subsided. As early as 1931, the officer investigating Vladimir Tchernavin, a scientist accused of “wrecking” and sabotage, threatened him with death if he refused to confess. At another point, he told him he would get a more “lenient” camp sentence if he confessed. Eventually, he actually begged Tchernavin to give a false confession. “We, the examining officers, are also often forced to lie, we also say things which cannot be entered into the record and to which we would never sign our names,” his interrogator told him, pleadingly.63
When the outcome mattered more to them, torture was deployed. Actual physical beatings seem to have been forbidden in the period before 1937. One former Gulag employee confirms that they were certainly illegal in the first half of the 1930s.64 But as the pressure to get leading Party