What to Do When the Russians Come Read online

Sometimes, particularly in the early days, it will be usual for children to go to relatives should both their parents be arrested. If you have been unable to make such an arrangement in advance or no such relatives are available, the probability is that they will survive as members of gangs of urchins living on their wits, subject to arrest and incarceration in adult jails as soon as they are in their teens.

  Later, State orphan homes, often barely distinguishable from reformatories, will be set up for such children. There they will be indoctrinated in Communist beliefs and, later, if suitable, sent to serve in the police and other units.

  You should seriously consider how you can best equip your children for both spiritual and physical survival should they become lost or orphans. First, like yourselves, the rule is to be fit, not fat. When things start to look menacing, your relations with them must be particularly warm and trusting for they will only have you to turn to in a world that is becoming filled with suspicion and hatred and where nobody can be expected to talk freely and honestly. You will have to balance the necessity of never saying anything that they might innocently blurt out in front of unreliable acquaintances or known agents of the regime, against the need to ensure that their basic attitudes towards their country, their religion, and their parents remain as firm as is possible. It will be difficult for you and equally difficult for your children. But remember that experience shows that, on the whole, children remain loyal to their parents’ teaching and example long years after the parents themselves have vanished. They will adapt very quickly to the new conditions and learn how to keep their real attitudes concealed while conforming outwardly to the official cult. With younger children, on the other hand, it may be that they will forget their parents completely. Even so, when they grow and find out for themselves what the real nature of the regime is, any seed you may have planted of a positive kind may still be there, ready for events to help it flower. In Soviet-occupied countries, it has been the young who have formed the core of mass resistance whenever that has become feasible.

  You can only do your best, and hope and pray for their future. If you are lucky, and survive, it may even be possible for you to trace your lost ones and, against all the odds, be united with them in fifteen or twenty years’ time.

  The first wave of arrests and deportations will be inflicted not on the ordinary citizen but on outstanding and major figures, who will be seized as “war criminals.” They will include political leaders and military men with a record of urging or heading resistance to communism in the international sphere.

  The next wave, more gradual and broader, will extend to community leaders of every sort, particularly those who may have had any kind of international connections through travel, correspondence, or in the course of business. We might quote the official Soviet list of people subject to what was officially termed “repression” in the Baltic states when they were Sovietized. Among the various categories were the following:

  • All former officials of the State, the army, and the judiciary

  • All former registered members of the non-Communist political parties

  • All active members of student organizations

  • Members of the National Guard

  • Refugees (from the USSR)

  • Representatives of foreign firms

  • Employees and former employees of foreign legations, firms, and companies

  • Clergy

  • People in contact with foreign countries, including philatelists and Esperantists

  • Aristocrats, landowners, merchants, bankers, businesspeople, owners of hotels and restaurants, and shopkeepers

  • Former Red Cross officials.

  Since the danger of arrest is therefore substantial, whether you are “innocent” or not, we would advise you to be prepared for it at all times.

  If arrested, you will probably be allowed to take a small package or a small suitcase with you, although all portable goods will eventually, with the connivance of the transport guards or camp guards, be stolen from you. (If you are merely being deported into exile and forced to reside in distant parts, you may even be permitted to take up to fifty pounds of baggage, although this too will be liable to theft.) However, it is always sensible to have bags packed and ready, so that you are not taken by surprise. At least compile a list, in order not to omit some essential item in the confusion of arrest. And, summer or winter, always keep a couple of pairs of good solid shoes and several pairs of socks handy. A quick-witted wife has often saved her husband’s or son’s life in Communist countries by keeping shoes, socks, gloves, scarf, and a warm overcoat handy. Remember that, if you can manage to hang on to them, minor articles of clothing can also be exchanged later for a loaf of bread in case of extreme need in prison or camp or on the journey there.

  What pattern can you expect your arrest to follow?

  We quote a typical official instruction from the Baltic states, although this applies to the arrest and deportation of whole families:

  Operations shall begin at daybreak. Upon entering the home of the person to be deported, the senior member of the operative group shall assemble the entire family of the deportee into one room. It is also essential, in view of the fact that large numbers of deportees must be arrested and distributed in special camps or sent to distant regions, that the operation of removing both the head of the household and the other members of his family shall be carried out simultaneously, without notifying them of the separation confronting them.

  If you refuse to answer the door or to open it, it will be broken down. The operatives may or may not be provided with “search” and “arrest” warrants, but if they are, these are likely to be of a perfunctory and reusable variety. If the intention is to subject the arrestee to a propaganda show trial, as is occasionally the case, “evidence” will be planted on him or on the premises (like the one thousand German marks and one hundred American dollars planted in a cupboard of Ginzburg’s apartment when he was arrested in January 1977).

  What will happen to you when you have been taken to prison in a car, van, or truck?

  First, you will be taken, after being briefly booked, straight to a prison cell. This could be in an improvised building, since the local prisons may be full to overflowing. You must not expect to enjoy the amenities of everyday American prison existence, where only a handful of men are placed in a single cell.

  In the first great waves of mass terror, the crowding in prisons will be terrific. In the Soviet Union, it is common to read of from 70 to 110 people in cells designed barely to hold 25. When the overflow gets too great, it is likely, as in Soviet provincial towns, that vast pits will be dug and roofed over and prisoners simply herded in.

  Washing will be a problem. For example, 110 women in one cell were allowed forty minutes with five toilets and ten water taps. The diet and general conditions will be unhealthy; prisoners will show a peculiar grayish blue tinge from confinement without light and air. Dysentery, scurvy, scabies, pneumonia, and heart attacks will be common and gingivitis universal.

  Traditionally, on first arriving, you will find yourself occupying the spot next to the sinkhole or slop pail, but in the course of time, as the previous prisoners are taken out, you can expect to move up to a superior location.

  At this stage of your incarceration, your wife, if she is able to find out where you are, will be allowed to come to the prison (though not to visit you there) in order to pay over small sums to the prison authorities with which, if they reach you, you may be able to buy such items as cigarettes and sugar. She may also be allowed to hand in packages of food and clothing.

  You must do your best to adjust to the chaotic conditions and to accustom yourself to the fact that your prospects of release are almost nonexistent. You will have been considered guilty from the very fact of your arrest. Resign yourself to being held for an average length of time of from one to three months in your present situation.

  Interrogation

  You will be required to make a conf
ession to one or more crimes against the State.

  The Soviet secret police use three main methods to obtain confessions. If you are, as is unlikely, important enough to be marked down for a show trial, the long-term system of breaking your personality, which has become known as “brainwashing,” will be applied. This involves a minimum of about three months with every possible physical and psychological pressure, especially inadequate food, inadequate sleep, inadequate warmth, and constant interrogation. Evzen Loebl, one of the Czech prisoners who confessed in the notorious Slansky trial and had the luck not to be hanged, describes having to be on his feet eighteen hours a day, of which sixteen were under interrogation, and during the six-hour sleep period having to get up and report every ten minutes when the warden banged on the door. After two or three weeks, he ached all over, and even washing became a torture. Finally, he confessed and was allowed food and rest, but by this time, as he put it, “I was quite a normal person—only I was no longer a person.”

  The chances are, however, that you will be made to confess by more time-saving methods. These are (often in combination) beating and the “conveyor” (that is, continuous interrogation without sleep for periods up to five or six days).

  These methods are not infallible, and there have always been a few prisoners whom they did not break (and many more who, although confessing under these pressures, repudiated the confession when they recovered.)

  As for the effects of beating and torture, we recommend the accounts by American prisoners of war in Hanoi, who were regularly tortured to betray the means of communication set up between them. There is a limit to almost anyone and no need to be ashamed if you give in.

  Advice is difficult. Nevertheless, your chances of saving your life will be improved if you firmly decide not to confess to a capital offense. Interrogation machinery will be severely stretched, and it may be that your interrogator, to save time, will accept a confession of some lesser crime like “anti-Communist propaganda,” which will only earn you five to eight years in a labor camp if you hold out long enough. Never, under any circumstance, believe promises that if you confess to capital crimes, you will be reprieved.

  Your other problem—this time one of conscience—will be that you will be asked to name “accomplices.” Try to use names of people you know are dead or have escaped the country or otherwise disappeared. In addition, you may be able to involve Communists or other Quislings.

  You will eventually be sentenced, though not necessarily in your own presence—the judgment may merely be a smudged form handed you by a warden. Then, assuming you have avoided execution, you will be packed off to a labor camp.

  Labor Camps

  The trip, in tightly sealed cattle trucks, may last some weeks; and since the labor camp system will at first be more or less unorganized, you are likely to find that you and your companions are simply dumped, in the heat of the summer or the cold of winter, in a wooded area, where you will forthwith be set to work to build your own camp. Meanwhile you will live in a pit dug in the ground and covered with a canvas sheet.

  One of the most likely sites for a great concentration of labor camps is in the uranium-bearing area of the Canadian Northwest Territories. There, as in similar projects in the USSR, climatic and other conditions are so hostile that it is hard to attract free labor except by the payment of astronomical wages. In America, too, the Soviet authorities will be able to draw upon an inexhaustible supply of forced laborers. Forced labor will also be employed in other areas of difficult exploitation or where massive unskilled labor is advantageous (for example, in working the oil-bearing shale beds of the American West). We can also expect forced-labor battalions to be put to work in Greenland and, in particular, in exploiting the coal and other deposits of Antarctica, where Soviet rule is likely to have been established by default. If, as is often stated, these deposits prove to be immensely rich, we may expect hundreds of thousands of American prisoners to be sent to work them, with the added advantage that the prisoners’ whereabouts will be quite unknown at home. Conditions there may be expected to be extremely adverse, the work exhausting, and the prospects of survival negligible. Northern Canada, where the death rate will be high by all normal standards, would be a Utopia in comparison.

  Uranium mining, however unpleasant, is at least rational. Many of you will find yourselves wasting your lives on projects whose only justification is the grandiose self-importance of political leaders or planners. For here, as everywhere else in the Soviet-type “planned economy,” there will be enormous and idiotic waste. In the Soviet Union, a quite unnecessary and uneconomic Arctic railway to the town of Igarka was labored at for four years in temperatures down to −55° Centigrade in winter, by scores of thousands of prisoners in more than eighty labor camps, at intervals of 15 kilometers along the 1300-kilometer stretch. In the end, only 850 kilometers of rail and of telegraph poles had been built, and then the line and signals, the locomotives, and everything else were abandoned to rust in the snow. In Romania, hundreds of thousands of prisoners’ lives were lost in the Dobruja marshes, building a grandiose “Danube-Black Sea Canal” that was similarly abandoned. And there are many lesser tales of wasteful and useless projects dreamed up by stupid careerists trying to make a name. It will be little consolation to you to know that, when such a project fails, its originator may not be able to escape the search for scapegoats and end up in a camp himself or even be shot for “sabotage.”

  Wherever you are sent, you will find yourself working up to sixteen hours a day, from the 5 a.m. reveille, ill clad and undernourished. Even today, in the peacetime USSR, labor-camp ration scales are well below those issued by the Japanese in the notorious prisoners-of-war camps on the River Kwai (which averaged 3,400 calories a day against the Soviet 2,400).

  How are you to prepare yourself for this?

  If you at present perform a desk job or follow some other sedentary occupation, it is vital that you make yourself fit and ready for hard manual labor. In all the Communist countries, it has always been found that professors, lawyers, administrators, and officials are among the first people to succumb in the labor camps, where they are suddenly faced with intense physical exertion on inadequate rations.

  You might also begin to practice a few skills that might possibly save you, once you are in the camps, from the most burdensome and debilitating work. For example, you might be able to stay alive if you were to take a first-aid course since you could then become a camp medical orderly or nurse. Doctors, subject to the limitations that will be noted later, would enjoy an automatic advantage. A few other professions might prove similarly beneficial. If you are an artist, for instance, the staff of the forced-labor camp will possibly employ you for such tasks as painting the numbers on prisoners’ jackets, and so on, while senior camp officials have often been known to award painters a higher ration in return for paintings to decorate their quarters.

  There is one problem that we ought to mention that will concern the relatives of the people who have been arrested. It is this. They are likely to find themselves approached by the secret police with the proposition that they will gain better treatment for the arrested member or members of their family, or perhaps even save them from execution, if they will become police informers and report on the work and private life of their friends.

  When this happens, it will present you with a nasty moral dilemma. All the same, it might help you to bear in mind that such promises to ease the lot of arrested relatives have never, in Communist countries, been honored. In any case, the local branch of the secret police will have no control over what goes on in a labor camp hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. Once in the camps, your relatives are in a different world, almost on another planet, and beyond your ken.

  Allied to this will be a further ordeal, affecting all rather than merely the closest relatives of the arrested person. Once your husband (for example) has been found guilty and sentenced as an enemy of the people, you, as his wife, together with your children, wi
ll be required to repudiate and denounce him. At school, your children will be required to go up and stand beside the teacher’s desk and make a public condemnation and repudiation of their father. This is standard practice everywhere in Communist countries.

  In the early phases, when the grip of the occupiers is being tightened to the limit, or after rebellions or other crises, the maximum Soviet terrorist methods will be used. At other times, there may be comparative relaxation. Perhaps we should give you some examples from the present situation in the Soviet Union, when the country is at peace and wishes to avoid making a bad impression in the Western world.

  In June 1977, a group of former Soviet prisoners who had managed by one means or another to reach safety in the West gave evidence at a hearing that was conducted at the Institute of Physics at Belgrave Square in London. The hearing was trying to accumulate evidence that might eventually assist in the case of Professor Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist who had been arrested in February 1977 on unspecified charges and was being held without trial. Extracts from the hearing were later published in the journal Index (November-December 1977).

  Among those who testified were former inmates of (1) a Soviet prison, and (2) a Soviet labor camp.

  Let us allow Vladimir Bukovsky, who underwent his most recent spell of incarceration in the Vladimir prison, to speak first.

  I am 34 years old. I have been arrested four times because I expressed opinions which were not acceptable to the Soviet authorities. In all I have spent more than eleven years in prison, camps and psychiatric hospitals.

  I spent a long time in Vladimir prison. The normal cells there have iron screens on the windows so that no ray of light can penetrate. The walls of the cells are made of rough concrete so they cannot be written on. They are damp. There is a heating system, but part of the punishment is to keep it deliberately low even in wintertime. The guards shove food through a trap door.