They took us to the Butyrki station—a very well-chosen nickname for that reception and dispatch point, especially because its main hall was really like a good railroad station. They pushed us into a large, spacious box. It was half-dark inside and the air was clean and fresh, since its one and only little window was very high up and had no “muzzle.” And it opened on that same sunny little park, and through the transom the birds’ twitter deafened us, and in the opening a little bright-green twig hung, promising us all freedom and home. (We had never been imprisoned in such a good box—and that couldn’t be a matter of chance!)
And we were all cases for the OSO’s—the Special Boards attached to the GPU-NKVD. And it turned out that each of us had been imprisoned for nothing much.
No one touched us for three hours. No one opened the doors. We paced up and down the box and, finally, tired out, we sat down on the slab benches. And the little twig kept bobbing and bobbing outside the opening, and the sparrows screamed as if they were possessed.
Suddenly the door crashed open, and one of us was summoned, a quiet bookkeeper, thirty-five years old. He went out. The door was locked. We started running about our box even more agitatedly than before. We were on hot coals.
Once more the crash of the door. They called another one out and readmitted the first. We rushed to him. But he was not the same man! The life had gone out of his face. His wide-open eyes were unseeing. His movements were uncertain as he stumbled across the smooth floor of the box. Was he in a state of shock? Had they swatted him with an ironing board?
“Well? Well?” we asked him, with sinking hearts. (If he had not in fact just gotten up from the electric chair, he must at the very least have been given a death sentence.) And in the voice of one reporting the end of the universe, the bookkeeper managed to blurt out:
“Five . . . years!”
And once more the door crashed. That was how quickly they returned, as if they were only being taken to the toilet to urinate. The second man returned, all aglow. Evidently he was being released.
“Well, well, come on?” We swarmed around him, our hopes rising again. He waved his hand, choking with laughter.
“Fifteen years!”
It was just too absurd to be believed.
Chapter 7
In the Engine Room
The box adjacent to the so-called Butyrki “station” was the famous frisking box, where new arrivals were searched. It had space enough for five or six jailers to process up to twenty zeks in one batch. Now, however, it was empty and the rough-hewn search tables had nothing on them. Over at one side of the room, seated behind a small nondescript table beneath a small lamp, was a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Patient boredom was what his face chiefly revealed. The intervals during which the zeks were brought in and led out one by one were a waste of his time. Their signatures could have been collected much, much faster.
He indicated that I was to sit down on the stool opposite him, on the other side of his table. He asked my name. To the right and left of the inkwell lay two piles of white papers the size of a halfsheet of typewriter paper, all looking much the same. In format they were just like the fuel requisitions handed out in apartment-house management offices, or warrants in official institutions for purchase of office supplies. Leafing through the pile on the right, the major found the paper which referred to me. He pulled it out and read it aloud to me in a bored patter. (I understood I had been sentenced to eight years.) Immediately, he began to write a statement on the back of it, with a fountain pen, to the effect that the text had been read to me on the particular date.
My heart didn’t give an extra half-beat—it was all so everyday and routine. Could this really be my sentence—the turning point in my life? I would have liked to feel nervous, to experience this moment to the full, but I just couldn’t. And the major had already pushed the sheet over to me, the blank side facing up. And a schoolchild’s seven-kopeck pen, with a bad point that had lint on it from the inkwell, lay there in front of me.
“No, I have to read it myself.”
“Do you really think I would deceive you?” the major objected lazily. “Well, go ahead, read it.”
Unwillingly, he let the paper out of his hand. I turned it over and began to look through it with deliberate slowness, not just word by word but letter by letter. It had been typed, but what I had in front of me was not the original but a carbon:
EXTRACT
from a decree of the OSO of the NKVD of the U.S.S.R. of July 7, 1945,1 No.——.
All of this was underscored with a dotted line and the sheet was vertically divided with a dotted line:
Case heard:
Decreed:
Accusation of so-and-so (name, year of birth, place of birth)
To designate for so-and-so (name) for anti-Soviet propaganda, and for an attempt to create an anti-Soviet organization, 8 (eight) years in corrective labor camps.
Copy verified. Secretary______________
Was I really just supposed to sign and leave in silence? I looked at the major—to see whether he intended to say something to me, whether he might not provide some clarification. No, he had no such intention. He had already nodded to the jailer at the door to get the next prisoner ready.
To give the moment at least a little importance, I asked him, with a tragic expression: “But, really, this is terrible! Eight years! What for?”
And I could hear how false my own words sounded. Neither he nor I detected anything terrible.
“Right there.” The major showed me once again where to sign.
I signed. I could simply not think of anything else to do.
“In that case, allow me to write an appeal right here. After all, the sentence is unjust.”
“As provided by regulations,” the major assented with a nod, placing my sheet of paper on the left-hand pile.
“Let’s move along,” commanded the jailer.
And I moved along.
(I had not really shown much initiative. Georgi Tenno, who, to be sure, had been handed a paper worth twenty-five years, answered: “After all, this is a life sentence. In olden times they used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was given a life sentence. And here it’s like being on a list for a soap ration—twenty-five years and run along!”
Arnold Rappoport took the pen and wrote on the back of the verdict: “I protest categorically this terroristic, illegal sentence and demand immediate release.” The officer who had handed it to him had at first waited patiently, but when he read what Rappoport had written, he was enraged and tore up the paper with the note on it. So what! The term remained in force anyway. This was just a copy.
Vera Korneyeva was expecting fifteen years and she saw with delight that there was a typo on the official sheet—it read only five. She laughed her luminous laugh and hurried to sign before they took it back. The officer looked at her dubiously: “Do you really understand what I read to you?” “Yes, yes, thank you very much. Five years in corrective-labor camps.”
The ten-year sentence of Janos Rozsas, a Hungarian, was read to him in the corridor in Russian, without any translation. He signed it, not knowing it was his sentence, and he waited a long time afterward for his trial. Still later, when he was in camp, he recalled the incident very vaguely and realized what had happened.)
I returned to the box with a smile. It was strange. Each minute I became jollier and more relieved. Everyone was returning with “ten-ruble bills,” including Valentin. The lightest term in our group that day had been given the bookkeeper who had gone out of his mind. He was still, in fact, beside himself. And the lightest term after his was mine.
In the splashes of sun and the July breeze, the little twig outside the window continued to bob up and down as gaily as before. We chattered boisterously. Here and there, more and more frequently, laughter resounded in the box. We were laughing because everything had gone off so smoothly. We were laughing at the shocked bookkeeper. We were laughing at our morning hopes and at the w
ay our cellmates had seen us off and arranged secret signals with us to be transmitted via food parcels—four potatoes or two bagels!
“Well, anyway, there is going to be an amnesty!” several affirmed. “All this is just for form’s sake and it doesn’t mean anything. They want to give us a good scare so we’ll keep in line. Stalin told an American correspondent—”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t remember his name.”
So they ordered us to take our things, formed us up by twos, and led us once again through that same marvelous little park filled with summer. And where did they take us? Once again to the baths.
And, oh, what a peal of laughter that got! My God, what silly nincompoops! Still roaring, we undressed, hung our duds on the same trolley hooks and rolled them into the same roaster they’d already been rolled into that very morning. Roaring, each of us took a small sliver of repulsive soap and went into the spacious, resonant shower room to wash off our girlish gaiety. We splashed about in there, pouring hot clean water on ourselves, and we got to romping about as if we were school kids who had come to the baths after their last exam. This cleansing, relieving laughter was, I think, not really sick but a living defense for the salvation of the organism.
As we dried ourselves off, Valentin said to me, reassuringly, intimately: “Well, all right. We are still young. We are going to live a long time yet. The main thing is not to make a misstep now. We are going to a camp—and we’ll not say one word to anyone, so they won’t plaster new terms on us. We will work honestly—and keep our mouths shut”
And he really believed in his program, that naive little kernel of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones! He really had his hopes set on it. One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had lived through.
But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?
* * *
One cannot really say that the OSO had been conceived after the Revolution. Catherine the Great had sentenced the journalist Novikov, whom she disliked, to fifteen years on, one might say, an OSO basis, since she didn’t turn him over to a court. And all the Tsars once in a while, in a fatherly way, exiled without any trial those who had incurred their displeasure. In the 1860’s, a basic court reform took place. It seemed as if rulers and subjects had both begun to develop something like a juridical view of society. And yet in the seventies and eighties Korolenko tracked down cases where administrative repression had usurped the role of judicial judgment. In 1872, he himself and two other students were exiled without trial, on the orders of the Deputy Minister of State Properties—a typical case of an OSO. Another time, he and his brother were exiled without trial to Glazov. Korolenko has also given us the name of one Fyodor Bogdan, an emissary from the peasants—a khodok—who got right up to the Tsar himself and was then exiled. And of Pyankov, too, who was acquitted by a court and yet exiled by order of the Tsar. And there were several others as well. And Vera Zasulich explained in a letter sent after she emigrated that she had not run away from the court and a trial but from nonjudicial administrative repression.
Thus the tradition of the “dotted line”—the administratively issued sentence—dragged on. But it was too lax; it was suitable for a drowsy Asiatic country, but not for a country that was rapidly advancing. . . . Moreover, it lacked any definite identity: who was the OSO? Sometimes it was the Tsar, sometimes the governor, sometimes the deputy minister. And if it was still possible to enumerate names and cases, this was not, begging your pardon, real scope.
Real scope entered the picture with the twenties, when permanently operating Troikas—panels of three, operating behind closed doors—were created to bypass the courts permanently. In the beginning they even flaunted it proudly—the Troika of the GPU. Not only did they not conceal the names of the members; they publicized them. Who on the Solovetsky Islands did not know the names of the famous Moscow Troika—Gleb Boky, Vul, and Vasilyev? Yes, and what a word it was, in fact—troika! It bore a slight hint of sleigh bells on the shaft bow; the celebration of Shrovetide; and, interwoven with all this, a mystery. Why “troika”? What did it mean? After all, a court wasn’t a quartet either! And a Troika wasn’t a court! And the biggest mystery of all lay in the fact that it was kept out of sight. We hadn’t been there. We hadn’t seen it. All we got was a piece of paper. Sign here! The Troika was even more frightening than a Revolutionary Tribunal. It set itself even farther apart, muffled itself up, locked itself in a separate room, and—soon—concealed the names of its members. Thus we grew used to the idea that the Troika members didn’t eat or drink or move about among ordinary people. Once they had isolated themselves in order to go into session, they were shut off for good, and all we knew of them were the sentences handed out through typists. (And they had to be returned too. Such documents couldn’t be left in the hands of individuals!)
These Troikas (we use the plural just in case, because—as with a deity—we never know where or in what form it exists) satisfied a persistent need that had arisen: never to allow those arrested to return to freedom (This was like an OTK—a Department for Quality Control in industry—but in this case it was attached to the GPU—to prevent any spoiled goods.) If it turned out that someone was innocent and could therefore not be tried at all, then let him have his “minus 32” via the Troika—which meant he couldn’t live in any of the provincial capitals—or let him spend two or three years in exile, after which he would have a convict’s clipped ear, would always be a marked man, and, from then on, a recidivist.
(Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism—this concept of “guilt,” and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly. But lacking legal training, we can be forgiven, for the 1926 Code, according to which, my good fellow, we lived for twenty-five years and more, was itself criticized for an “impermissible bourgeois approach,” for an “insufficiently class-conscious approach,” and for some kind of “bourgeois weighing of punishments in relation to the gravity of what had been committed.”)2
Alas, it is not for us to write the absorbing history of this particular Organ: how the Troikas turned into OSO’s; or when they got renamed; or whether there were OSO’s in provincial centers, or just one of them in the Great Palace; or which of our great and proud leaders were members; or how often they met and how long their sessions lasted; whether or not they were served tea while they worked, and if they were, what was served with the tea; and how the work itself proceeded—did they converse while it was going on or not? We are not the ones who will write this history—because we don’t know. All that we have heard is that the essence of the OSO was triune. And even though it is still impossible to name its industrious members, yet we do know the three organs permanently represented there: one member represented the Central Committee of the Party, one the MVD, and one the Chief Prosecutor’s office. However, it would not be a miracle if we should learn someday that there were never any sessions, and that there was only a staff of experienced typists composing extracts from nonexistent records of proceedings, and one general administrator who directed the typists. As for typists, there were certainly typists. That we can guarantee.
Up to 1924, the authority of the Troika was limited to sentences of three years, maximum. From 1924 on, they moved up to five years of camp; from 1937 on, the OSO could turn out “ten-ruble bills”; after 1948, they could rivet a “quarter”—twenty-five years—on you. And there are people—Chavdarov, for example—who know that during the war years the OSO even sentenced prisoners to execution by shooting. Nothing unusual about this.
The OSO was nowhere mentioned in either the Constitution or the Code. However, it turned out to be the most convenient ki
nd of hamburger machine—easy to operate, undemanding, and requiring no legal lubrication. The Code existed on its own, and the OSO existed on its own, and it kept on deftly grinding without all the Code’s 205 articles, neither invoking them nor even mentioning them.
As they used to joke in camp: “There is no court for nothing—for that there is an OSO.”
Of course, the OSO itself also needed for convenience some kind of operational shorthand, but for that purpose it worked out on its own a dozen “letter” articles which made operations very much simpler. It wasn’t necessary, when they were used, to cudgel your brains trying to make things fit the formulations of the Code. And they were few enough to be easily remembered by a child. Some of them we have already described:
ASA—Anti-Soviet Agitation
KRD—Counter-Revolutionary Activity
KRTD—Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity (And that “T” made the life of a zek in camp much harder.)
PSh—Suspicion of Espionage (Espionage that went beyond the bounds of suspicion was handed over to a tribunal.)
SVPSh—Contacts Leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage
KRM—Counter-Revolutionary Thought
VAS—Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments
SOE—Socially Dangerous Element
SVE—Socially Harmful Element
PD—Criminal Activity (a favorite accusation against former camp inmates if there was nothing else to be used against them)
And then, finally, there was the very expansive category:
ChS—Member of a Family (of a person convicted under one of the foregoing “letter” categories)
It has to be remembered that these categories were not applied uniformly and equally among different groups and in different years. But, as with the articles of the Code and the sections in special decrees, they broke out in sudden epidemics.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 32
