Gulag

The whole process of the disintegration of personality took place before the eyes of everyone in the cell. A man could not hide himself here for an instant; even his bowels had to be moved on the open toilet, situated right in the room. He who wanted to weep, wept before everyone, and the feeling of shame increased his torment. He who wanted to kill himself—in the night, beneath the blanket, trying to cut the veins in his arm with his teeth—would be quickly discovered by one of the cell’s insomniacs, and prevented from finishing the job.¹⁷

Margarete Buber-Neumann also wrote that the overcrowding turned prisoners against one another. When prisoners were awoken, at half-past four in the morning, the effect on us was much as though an ant-heap had been turned over. Everyone grabbed her wash things in order to be first, if possible, because, of course, the washing accommodation was not remotely sufficient for all of us. In the room where we washed were five lavatories and ten water taps. I say “lavatories” but they were in reality five holes in the ground and nothing else. Queues immediately formed in front of all five holes and all ten taps. Imagine if you can going to the lavatory in the morning with at least a dozen pairs of eyes watching you, and being shouted at and urged on by others impatiently waiting for their turn . . .¹⁸

Perhaps because they were aware of the crowding, prison authorities went to great lengths to break any semblance of prisoner solidarity. Yagoda’s order of 1935 already forbade prisoners to talk, shout, sing, write on the walls of the cell, leave marks or signs anywhere in the prison, stand at the windows of the cell, or attempt to communicate with those in other cells in any way. Those breaking these rules could be punished by deprivation of exercise or letters, or even by being placed in a specially constructed punishment cell.¹⁹ Enforced silence is frequently mentioned by those imprisoned in the 1930s: “No one spoke out loud and some of them made themselves understood by signs,” wrote Buber-Neumann of Butyrka, where “the half-exposed bodies of most of the women were of a peculiar greyish-blue tinge from long confinement without light or air . . .”²⁰

In some prisons, the rule of silence remained absolute well into the next decade, in others less so: one ex-prisoner writes of the “complete silence” of Lubyanka in 1949, by comparison to which “cell number 106 at Butyrka seemed like visiting a bazaar after a small shop.”²¹ Another, in prison in the central Soviet city of Kazan, remembers that when prisoners began whispering, “the lid of the food hatch would open with a bang and someone would hiss, ‘Sssh!’” ²²

Many memoirists have also described how guards, when moving prisoners between cells or from a cell to interrogation, would jangle their keys, snap their fingers or make some other noise, to warn off those farther down the corridor. In the case of an encounter, one of the prisoners would be quickly turned down another passageway, or placed into a special closet. V. K. Yasnyi, formerly a translator of Spanish literature, was once placed in a half-meter-square closet in Lubyanka for two hours.²³ Such closets seem to have been in wide use: the basement of the former NKVD headquarters in Budapest, now a museum, contains one. The object was to prevent prisoners from encountering others who might be involved in their particular “case,” as well as to keep them away from siblings or other relatives who might be under arrest.

The enforced silence made even the walk to the interrogation rooms unnerving. Alexander Dolgun recalls walking down the carpeted hallways of Lubyanka: “The only sound as we moved along was the guard’s clucking of his tongue . . . all those metal doors were grey, battleship grey, and the effect of the gloom and the silence and the grey doors repeating themselves down the corridors until they merged with the shadows was oppressive and discouraging.”²⁴

To prevent prisoners in one cell from learning the names of those in other cells, prisoners were called out—for interrogation or for transfer— not by their names, but by a letter of the alphabet. The guard would shout “G,” for example, and all of the prisoners with surnames beginning with G would stand and give their first names and patronymics.²⁵