Sometimes the cells have no lavatories at all, only a bucket. Sometimes there is just a hole in the floor without any separation from the sewage system: all the stench from the sewage system thus comes back inside the cells, which have no proper ventilation system.
In punishment cells the conditions are worse. You are kept in solitary confinement in a room which is about 24½ sq.m. The only light is from a small bulb in a deep niche in the ceiling.
At night you sleep on wooden boards raised a few inches off the ground without any mattress or blankets or pillow. You are not allowed to have any warm clothing. Often there is no healing at all in winter. It is so cold that you cannot sleep, you have to keep warm by jumping up and running around your cell to keep warm.
At 6:00 o’clock in the morning your wooden bed is removed and there is nothing for you to do for the rest of the day, no newspaper to read, no books, no pen or pencil or paper-nothing.
According to the regulations a prisoner can only be put in solitary confinement for fifteen days, but quite often when one fifteen-day period ends prisoners are put back in for another fifteen days. I was lucky, because although I was in solitary confinement several times, I only had fifteen days at a time. Others were not so fortunate. It is quite customary for people to spend forty-five days in solitary.
In solitary confinement prisoners get a specially reduced diet. This is part of the punishment which I received in Vladimir prison in 1976 after Mr. Brezhnev had signed the Helsinki Declaration. On alternate days I had nothing to eat or drink except a small piece of coarse black bread and some hot water. On the other days I had two meals—in the middle of the day—some watery soup with a few cabbage leaves, some grains of barley, sometimes two or three potatoes. Most of the potatoes were black and bad. In the evening I had gruel made from oatmeal or some other cereal, a piece of bread and several little fish called kilka, which were rotten. However hungry I was, I could not eat them. That was all.
The shortage of food, the poor quality of the food you are given, and the appalling living conditions mean that almost everyone who has endured imprisonment suffers from stomach ulcers, enteritis or diseases of the liver, kidneys, heart, and blood vessels.
When I was first arrested I was very healthy, but after I had been in prison I too began to suffer from stomach ulcers and cholecystitis. This did not make any difference to the way I was treated. I was still put in the punishment cell on a reduced diet.
I was in the same cell with Yakov Suslensky, who suffers from a heart condition. He had a severe heart attack in an isolation cell, but was not taken out of isolation. He was moved, but only to another isolation cell. After he came out of isolation he had a stroke. This was in March 1976.
I was also in Vladimir prison with Alexander Sergienko who had tuberculosis. Notwithstanding this he was put in solitary confinement on a reduced diet.
I was also in prison with Mikhail Dyak, who suffers from Hodgkin’s disease. He was released early, but not until three years after confirmation of his diagnosis. I knew many other people who were not released even though they had cancer and other serious illnesses.
In prison you are allowed to send out one letter a month, but the authorities can deprive you of that. If prisoners try to describe their state of health or the lack of medical help in prison, their letters are confiscated.
In prison hospitals essential medicines are often not available. I remember in 1973 a man named Kurkis who had an ulcer which perforated. There was no blood available to give him a transfusion. He lay bleeding for 24 hours and then he died.
Next, we might take the experiences of Andrei Amalrik, who described what life is like in a labor camp.
The strict regime camp of Kolyma is 300 kilometres north of Magadan, where the winter lasts eight months and is very harsh: the temperature varies between 20 and 60 degrees Centigrade below zero.
The camp is surrounded by several rows of wire. Inside the wire are two wooden fences, and dogs patrol the space between them. The camp is divided into a living compound and a work compound. In the living compound are four barrack huts accommodating eight hundred prisoners.
All the prisoners have to wear uniforms made of thin grey cloth and very thin boots. Everyone has their name and number sewn on their clothes. You march everywhere in columns.
Prisoners are fed three times a day. Breakfast is a sort of thin porridge, dinner is soup. Those who have fulfilled their work norm get extra porridge. The soup is very poor and has very few vitamins. That is why most of the prisoners are ill.
Prisoners work in the machine and furniture factories where the dust fills your lungs, or outside cutting wood and in the construction brigades.
It is difficult enough to work outside when the temperature is less than minus 20 degrees Centigrade; at minus 50 or 60 degrees the conditions are almost unimaginable. When it is as cold as that there is a sort of dry fog, which means that if you extend your arm, you cannot see your hand. Yet every day you have to go out and work (with the exception of only one day when I was in camp). It is so cold that many prisoners suffer inflammation of the ear, which can lead to loss of hearing. You are allowed to wear extra clothing or a fur cap. I made a band to go over my ears out of some socks, but the guards believed that I must be wearing this so I could listen to the BBC, which of course was nonsense.
I was put in a punishment cell on two occasions. Once in prison and once in camp. I was in a cell by myself. The cell was 1.5 m. wide and 2.5 m. long. The bed in the cell was made of wood. It was attached by hinges to the wall. In the daytime it was raised up and locked against the wall. The only thing to sit on was the concrete block on which the bed rested.
When I was put in the punishment cell my usual clothes were taken away and I was made to wear specially thin clothes. There were no books. You were allowed to smoke. I was given warm food only every other day and then it was of very poor quality. On the other days I just had bread and water.
In the punishment cell the heating was very low and there was a window, but it had no glass in it, so that the intense cold came right into the cell. It was impossible to sleep. You had to keep moving about all night in order to keep warm.
I was lucky. I only spent five days in the punishment cells. The usual period was fifteen days. Frequently people spent fifteen days in the punishment cells, were let out for one day and then put back for a further fifteen days. Repeated solitary confinement means the slow destruction of the human body. Your personality is slowly destroyed.
Medicines are very poor and very few. In the camp where I was, there was one doctor who was not well qualified, one male nurse and one female nurse, whose objective was to see that people went to work.
And remember that these cases occurred in a comparatively relaxed period, in peacetime. You may expect worse, expecially, in the first flush of mass terror. Indeed, we are almost ashamed to have described conditions that appear idyllic compared with those likely to prevail, as they always have done in similar circumstances, when America is subjected to full-scale terror.
Apart from prison and labor camps, there is a third, although more unlikely, possiblity. After ten or fifteen years, assuming things are calmer, the authorities may begin to want some genuine-sounding excuse for the arrest and maltreatment of suspects; in this case a few of you may find yourselves subjected to the latest Soviet refinement: the pseudopsychiatric hospital. In these, as evidence from former inmates and former staff alike make clear, people whose only madness is to dislike communism are declared schizophrenic and injected with chemicals such as haloperidol and sulphazine, without the supplementary drugs necessary to prevent the extremely painful side effects—all under the supervision of the secret police. This would be a very nasty experience but not usually a fatal one, although some who have been released say they have never properly recovered. However, the numbers subjected to this particular horror would be comparatively few.
What lessons might you, as a prospective Soviet convict, derive from what we ha
ve told you?
Obviously there is no guaranteed method of survival in a Communist camp, prison or “mental hospital.” The odds are against you. Nor will you be helped by the fact that the widespread dislocation that is bound to attend the first few years of Soviet rule in the United States will inevitably result in food and other shortages in the camps and prisons. They will be desperately overcrowded.
How are you to give yourself the best possible chance?
To begin with, try to be prepared psychologically. From the moment that your Government signs the instrument of surrender, always assume that the worst will happen to you. That way, you will not be betrayed by optimism and will not go into a state of shock or apathy at the moment that you are arrested.
Next, when you are in prison or in the camp, it is vital not to miss any opportunity to eat. This will not be easy since the experience of being thrown into jail will be enough to take away your appetite, and you have seen that even Vladimir Bukovsky could not wolf down, ravenous as he was, those stinking kilka. But you must try to force yourself to eat whatever swill is handed to you, especially in those first few days or weeks, otherwise you are quickly going to lose the physical reserves without which you cannot possibly survive. Be ready to eat anything. In the end, you will discover that you will have no choice, anyway, so the earlier you get used to the idea and swallow down your nauseating slop, the better.
Again, when it comes to the backbreaking labor that you will be assigned, remember that surviving will once again depend on your physical reserves. Some camps will probably be death camps, designed to use up a man’s strength in anywhere between six weeks and six months, and in that case, there will be very little you can do since you will be fed a restricted diet. Even there, however, you will probably want to try to save your energy at all costs. Do everything as slowly as you can possibly get away with—such is the advice of all the survivors of the Soviet camps. Practice extreme slow motion. When you are lumbering, you might adopt the traditional trick of managing to get the same log counted by the guard several times by the expedient of sawing off the check number after each inspection. In most camps it has usually been possible, at least for a time, for separate labor gangs to cooperate in methods to claim a higher productivity than is really achieved. Remember that with every swing of your ax you are chopping an hour off your own life.
In one respect, strangely enough, you may after all be luckier than prisoners in the Soviet Union itself. You may find that in your camp the criminal element, with which every camp will be deliberately seeded, will not have the violence and customary solidarity of the Russian urka or criminal class. So you may discover that, although the American criminals in your camp have been encouraged by the prison authorities to take control and knock you about from the earliest moment of your arrival, it seems at least feasible that a determined and immediate lead by a group of your most vigorous “politicals” may result in the collapse of this form of exploitation. Even within the USSR itself, such a development has occasionally been noted as when a group of tough ex-soldiers, or really stubborn Ukrainian nationalists, have decided to stand up and assert themselves.
Although such a course presents certain dangers, and each situation must be judged on its merits, and there will be ugly scuffles and murders, we would urge you to assume instant readiness for such an opportunity. Otherwise, the acceptance of criminal supremacy will mean robbery gang rape, and a general reign of terror; besides leaving the cooking, control, and distribution of food in the hands of crooks, who will grab the biggest share of your already inadequate rations. Such a lack of boldness at the outset will therefore result in your death from dystrophy a few weeks later.
We seriously urge you, while you still can, to go to your local library and check out whatever books it contains on life in the camps. The works of Solzhenitsyn, and such books as Evgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind and General Gorbatov’s Years Off My Life could prove useful guides. Do not read them as literature, or as accounts of alien experiences, but in the light of practical blueprints of a not-improbable future.
3. ESCAPE ABROAD?
THE OPTION TO escape will not be open to many, but if you are in any of the categories doomed to virtually certain death, you are advised to take it if the opportunity should arise.
It is possible, even probable, that some non-Communist countries will remain unoccupied.
The conquest of the United States will of course make the USSR the world’s dominant power, and there will no longer be much question of its ability to take over the world. But there will be good arguments against seeking to achieve this immediately. The Soviets will have strained their military resources to the limit and will be spread thin holding down their vast new empire. There will no longer be any great hurry in dealing with the remnants of “capitalism.” While it is probable that Africa and the Middle East will now be under Soviet control and that the Russians will be involved in a general move forward in South America, they will have several motives for leaving other countries under threat and pressure, without yet moving to take them over.
They may even leave Western Europe, or part of it, uninvaded, as now impotent to harm and politically bypassed to wither on the vine. There would be good economic reasons for this in that the powerful capitalist productivity of these countries will be needed to make up for the old inefficiencies and the new dislocations of the Soviet-occupied world, providing products beyond the skill of the Soviets—just as, today, Finland has been left un-Sovietized, as a valuable trading partner.
It is also wholly possible that China will not yet have been reduced, since that will in any case involve a further enormous military effort, to say nothing of the probability of the Soviet army getting bogged down in a partisan war that would make America’s recent problems in Vietnam small in comparison.
However, you will probably not wish to go to China (unless, perhaps, you go to Hong Kong or Taiwan). Japan would be a better bet, as would the Philippines, Australia, or New Zealand. We recommend the Southern Hemisphere, in any case, as less liable to fallout in a Soviet-Chinese nuclear war.
At any rate, there may be a possibility for you to escape to less oppressive climes while you can. The Soviets may demand the return of certain people as “war criminals,” but lesser figures, especially if they can get false names and papers, may manage.
In your new home, there will inevitably be occasional friction, and you will feel yourself a second-class citizen. Eventually, Communist agents may approach you, pointing to declarations from Soviet Washington promising complete amnesties to émigrés who return. You may be tempted if things are not going well for you. Resist this temptation; except in a few showcases, such promises have always been broken once the returnee is back in Communist hands.
Even after the occupation of America, but especially when five or ten years have passed, you will find your hosts in your new country becoming extraordinarily oblivious to the Soviet threat.
Many will believe Communist propaganda stories about the happy new life in the United States. Others, not quite so naive, will still think there is something in it and feel that you are exaggerating when you tell the true story. Still others (such is the tendency to self-deception found in these circumstances) will believe that it was all or partly America’s fault; and that anyhow it cannot be helped. And there will be powerful voices, even among those conducting or discussing foreign policy at a high level, saying that the Soviets are basically reasonable and, if treated with friendship, pose no further threat.
You may say to yourself that they have one excuse: There were people in America who spoke the same way before the disaster.
You will feel it your duty to do what you can to warn your hosts of their own imminent danger. It will not only be a duty, but in your own interest, as the eventual arrival of Soviet troops in your new homeland will be a disaster facing you with no choice but to fight it out to the end, unless you can conceal your origins.
Even so, you will have ga
ined a few years respite—like millions of others throughout the world today. And—who knows?—the interval might just possibly be long enough for the beginning of the inevitable eventual breakup of the Soviet empire to take place first.
When you arrive as a refugee, do not expect too much. However friendly your new host country, it may have no place for your trade or profession not already taken up by one of its present citizens. Be prepared to start again at a low level and work your way up as best you can.
You may even find yourself having to live, as so many millions have in our time, in squalid refugee camps with your whole family in a tent or under a couple of sheets of corrugated iron. Even here, count your blessings; you are a thousand times better off than you would be in the Athabasca labor camps. After the Russian revolution many émigrés came to Paris. Princes who had lived amidst great privilege became waiters and were glad of the chance. But in any case, this escape will be open to few.
4. AT HOME
WE THOUGHT IT best to begin with some advice in coping with the more immediate dangers. However, harder problems will in some ways eventually await those who have not been arrested, or whose arrest is still in the future.
Most people will find that they have to pick themselves up and somehow carry on with their lives. A few, mainly unattached young men, will be able to escape or join the partisan bands, but a family man or a working mother is likely to find that there is no alternative to simply staying put and getting on with their job or with whatever new job they may have been able to get. Fitting into the new order without encountering disaster is going to be a hazardous and wearing experience.
First of all, let us consider the problems that will face you, the ordinary citizen, in your everyday existence. What sort of scene might you expect to see around you as you strive to pick up the after the catastrophe?
What to Do When the Russians Come Page 4
