Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [94]
So widespread did the use of torture become during this period—and so frequently was it questioned—that in early 1939, Stalin himself sent out a memo to regional NKVD chiefs, confirming that “from 1937 on in NKVD practice the use of physical pressure [on prisoners] was permitted by the Central Committee.” He explained that it was permitted only with respect to such overt enemies of the people who take advantage of humane interrogation methods in order to shamelessly refuse to give away conspirators, who for months don’t testify and try to impede the unmasking of those conspirators who are still free.
He did, he continued, consider this to be a “totally correct and humane method,” although he conceded that it might have occasionally been applied to “accidentally arrested honest people.” What this notorious memo makes clear, of course, is that Stalin himself knew what sorts of methods had been used during interrogation, and had personally approved of them.66
Certainly it is true that during this period many, many prisoners record being beaten and kicked, their faces smashed in and their organs ruptured. Evgeny Gnedin describes being hit on the head simultaneously by two men, one on the left, one on the right, and then being beaten with a rubber club. This took place in Beria’s private office, in Beria’s presence, in the Sukhanovka prison.67 The NKVD also practiced methods of torture known to other secret police forces in other eras, such as hitting their victims in the stomach with sandbags, breaking their hands or feet, or tying their arms and legs behind their backs and hoisting them in the air.68 One of the most sickening accounts of physical torture was penned by the theater director Vsevelod Meyerhold, whose formal letter of complaint has been preserved in his file:
The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force . . . For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height . . .
One time my body was shaking so uncontrollably that the guard escorting me back from such an interrogation asked: “Have you got malaria?” When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after eighteen hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.69
Although this sort of beating was technically forbidden after 1939, the change of policy did not necessarily make the investigation process more humane. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, many hundreds of thousands of prisoners were tormented not with actual beatings or physical attacks, but with psychological torture of the sort Abakumov alludes to in his letter to Stalin. Those who remained stubborn and refused to confess could, for example, be slowly deprived of creature comforts, first walks, then packages or books, then food. They could be placed in a specially harsh punishment cell, very hot or very cold, as was the memoirist Hava Volovich, who was also being deprived of sleep by her interrogator at the