The shock of such searches could be worse for women. One remembered that the jailer performing the search “took our brassieres, corset-belts which held our suspenders, and some other parts of our underwear essential to women. There followed a brief, disgusting, gynecological examination. I kept silent, but felt as if I had been deprived of all human dignity.” 38
While enduring a twelve-month stay in Aleksandrovsky Tsentral prison in 1941, the memoirist T. P. Milyutina was searched repeatedly. The women of her cells would be taken onto an unheated staircase, five at a time. They were then told to undress completely, put their clothes on the floor and their hands up. Hands were put “in our hair, in our ears, under our tongues; also between our legs,” both while standing up and sitting down. After the first such search, wrote Milyutina, “many burst into tears, many were hysterical . . .”39
Following the search, some prisoners were isolated. “The first hours of imprisonment,” continues Solzhenitsyn, “are designed to break the prisoner down by isolating him from contact with other inmates, so that there is no one to keep his spirits up, so that the full force of the whole, vast, ramified apparatus is felt to be bearing down on him and him alone . . .”40 The cell of Evgeny Gnedin, a Soviet diplomat and son of revolutionaries, contained only a small table, attached to the floor, and two stools, also attached to the floor. The folding bed, on which prisoners slept at night, was attached by a bolt to the wall. Everything, including the walls, stools, bed, and ceiling, was painted light blue. “It gave you the feeling of being inside the peculiar cabin of a ship,” Gnedin wrote in his memoirs.41
It was also quite common to be put, as was Alexander Dolgun, in a
Yet to the newcomer, a crowded prison cell could be an even more horrifying place than a solitary one. Olga Adamova-Sliozberg’s description of her first cell reads like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch:
Another memoirist also tried to recapture his feeling of shock: “It was such an awful sight, men with long hair, bearded, the smell of sweat, and nowhere even to sit down or rest. You must use your imagination to try to grasp the sort of place I was in.”46
Aino Kuusinen, the Finnish wife of Otto Kuusinen, the leader of the Comintern, believed that on her first night she had been deliberately placed within earshot of prisoners under interrogation: