Gulag

By the late 1930s, most ordinary Soviet citizens had worked out the pattern, and wanted no foreign contacts at all. Karlo Stajner, a Croatian communist with a Russian wife, remembered that “Russians only rarely dared to have private dealings with foreigners . . . My wife’s relatives remained virtual strangers to me. None of them dared visit us. When her relatives learned of our plan to marry, Sonya was warned by all of them ...” ⁸ Even as late as the mid-1980s—when I first visited the Soviet Union—many Russians remained wary of foreigners, ignoring them or refusing to make eye contact with them on the street.

And yet—not every foreigner was picked up by the police, and not everyone accused of having foreign connections actually did have foreign connections. It also happened that people were picked up for far more idiosyncratic reasons.⁹ As a result, asking the question “What for?”—the question Anna Akhmatova so disliked—produces a truly astonishing range of ostensible explanations.

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s husband, Osip Mandelstam, for example, was arrested for his poetic attack on Stalin:

We live, not feeling the land beneath us

We speak, and ten steps away no one hears us

But where there’s even a whispered conversation

The Kremlin’s mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer will be mentioned.

His fat fingers, like grubs, are greasy

His words, like lead weights, are final

His cockroach moustache sneers

His boot rims shine

And all around him, a gaggle of spineless leaders,

Half-humans, serve as his toys

One whinnies, one purrs, one whines

Only he shouts and points

Throwing decrees like horseshoes

Hitting a groin, a head, an eye—

Every death sentence tastes sweet

For the broad-chested Ossete¹⁰

Although different reasons were officially stated, Tatyana Okunevsksaya, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved film actresses, was arrested, she believed, for refusing to sleep with Viktor Abakumov, the wartime head of Soviet counter-intelligence. To make sure she understood that this was the true reason, she was (she claims) shown an arrest warrant with his signature on it.¹¹ The four Starostin brothers, all of them outstanding soccer players, were arrested in 1942. They always believed it was because their team, Spartak, had the misfortune to defeat Lavrenty Beria’s favorite team, Dynamo, a touch too decisively. ¹²

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