Chapter 3 of the KGB of the USSR. HEAD OF SPECIAL DEPARTMENT Although the goal of counterintelligence is defense, its strategy is offensive. The ideal of counter-espionage is to reveal enemy reconnaissance plans at an early stage, before they begin to cause damage. Allen Dulles. CIA versus KGB.

Mikhail Pavlovich Schrader

NKVD from the inside. Chekist's notes

Introduction

From the publisher

The author of the memoirs - M.P.Shreider - worked in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD system for about twenty years: from the Civil War to 1938 inclusive. He held various positions in the central office of the OGPU-NKVD, served in some regional departments, and in 1938 was appointed to the post of Deputy Minister of the NKVD of the Kazakh SSR. In the same year he was arrested on the direct orders of Yezhov.

According to his official position, for many years the author was associated with a huge number of people whose activities directly influenced the life of the country as a whole. Describing his life in detail, the author gives the reader a rare opportunity to see the Stalinist punitive machine from the inside through the eyes of a person who himself was an integral part of this machine and viewed it from top to bottom: literally - from the execution cellars to Beria's office. Moving after the author within the repressive system, the reader has the opportunity to see the work of the "organs" not just in some particular period, but in the historical dynamics of many pre-war years. Specifically, this means that you can observe how the punitive machine was programmed, debugged, improved, how it was tested on "trial" launches before it was launched at full speed, how it displaced from within and replaced the Soviet, party and economic structures, taking all the functions of state control and management, and, finally, how, having become absolutely closed and virtually uncontrollable - "a state within a state" - began to work for itself and went haywire ...

There is no exaggeration in all of the above.

Before us is a unique testimony, one of a kind. It is also unique because there should not have been such a "leak" of information: the system destroyed witnesses of this rank - "our own" - with special care. People who, like M.P. Schrader held fairly high positions in the central apparatus of the NKVD and in the regions (at the level of the heads of regional departments and their deputies), usually without trial they were shot in the basements of the prisons where the investigation was carried out. The author survived thanks to an incredible coincidence.

Many years ago, several books were published in the West, written by former KGB deserters. But in those days, evidence of this kind could not have a significant resonance: German fascism, much more open in all its manifestations, in the pre-war years attracted much more attention than the secretly tortured Soviet people. And there was not in the stories of the fugitives that professional completeness of information possessed by M.P. Schneider, thrown into the millstones of the Stalinist-Yezhov mill.

Today's reader is already armed with a certain historical completeness of the view of the thirties. Today, the testimony of M. P. Schneider helps to understand not only the peculiarities of the Stalinist punitive machine, but also the overall structural nature of totalitarianism, when the very concepts of "state" and "repressive system" become essentially identical. Suffice it to say that after Yezhov appeared in the NKVD leadership, not a single regional committee secretary, not a single regional executive committee chairman, not a single republican leader was appointed to a position without the prior consent of the head of the regional (or republican) NKVD directorate (which, of course, did not guarantee personal safety to the head from the same repressive bodies).

The thoughtful reader will undoubtedly pay attention to the fact that the number of "enemies of the people" was already planned in advance in the center in 1936, after which the "exposure" program was spread over the republics, territories and regions and became mandatory. There were (under Yezhov) predetermined limits on executions without trial or investigation. This meant that the head of the regional department of the NKVD, at his discretion, had the right to shoot hundreds of people without trial. Overfulfillment was actively encouraged (cash bonuses, orders, promotions). What in the eyes of an innocent person appeared as pure absurdity (and this in many arrested people inspired the hope that the absurdity would quickly come to light and the innocent person would be released), then inside the punitive machine turned into a logically complete and well-thought-out system of incentives and rewards. As a result, all the incentives were reduced to one thing: destruction for the sake of destruction ... The reader will surely remember the fact that gas-powered gas chambers, which in our post-war literature were written about as one of the most inhuman inventions of fascism, were used by domestic executioners (in the same Ivanov, for example) long before the war with the Nazis.

However, let us not get ahead of the events. Let us only note that the author was a man of his time. Like millions of his peers, whose worldview was formed during the years of his revolutionary youth, he was unable to understand all the utopianism and historical futility of Bolshevik ideas and everything that he saw and wrote about was perceived as a distortion of these ideas. Subconsciously, he took the position of "revolutionary legal consciousness", the measure of which - in the absence of an elementary legal basis in the state - he considered "honest professionalism". In other words, he did not recognize "phony" cases and people who fabricated such cases before his eyes. He does not deal with "enemies of the people" and does not "drive the linden". He is engaged in his direct business: the fight against criminal crime, which grew by leaps and bounds during the years of mass repressions. But the police, which in those years were part of the Ministry of State Security, did not play an independent role. For moral and professional reasons, the author forbade his subordinates to engage in an unusual business at his official level, and this contradicted the program, but with which the punitive machine was already working.

However, this aspect, which is extremely important for the author, today we (giving the author his due), of course, perceive it as subjective. The objective value, as was noted at the beginning, lies elsewhere: in the stunning completeness of information that even today, sixty years after the events described, researchers are getting bit by bit from the most secret and seemingly eternally hidden from society archives ...

In conclusion, a few words about the future fate of the author.

In the fortieth year, he was transported to the camp. When the war with Nazi Germany began, he wrote dozens of letters with a request to send him to the front. In the end, as a private, he found himself at the forefront.

M.P.Shreider died in the seventies, leaving a very voluminous manuscript about his life. The Return found it expedient first of all to publish that part of the memoirs, which describes the events of the thirties.

The letter from the artist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from the Mordovian colony about the unbearable conditions of detention of Russian women in prisons and colonies caused a shock among the public: it turns out that the damned Gulag Archipelago has not gone anywhere, it turns out that the NKVD's methods of using prisoners' slave labor are still in force. And this is not just an exaggeration. Today "Historical Truth" publishes the memoirs of several prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag, collected in the archives of the Center A.D. Sakharov. It seems that many of these stories were recorded just yesterday.

Valentina Yasnopolskaya: "The girl, she decided to fight the GPU!"

Valentina Yasnopolskaya. Born in 1904. Worked in Leningrad as an economist at the Main Telegraph Directorate. Arrested in 1930 in the case of the "anti-Soviet monarchist center of the True Orthodox Church." The verdict of the board of the OGPU: 3 years in the camps.

... I was taken to Kresty, but it turned out that this was only a men's prison and there were no women's cells in it. Again - the "black raven" and the internal prison at the GPU on Shpalernaya Street. There I was received by a seemingly very angry and noisy warden, nicknamed "grandmother". When she was on duty, her cry was heard in all the corridors. The usual thorough search followed at the reception, during which they strip naked. “Take off the cross,” she commanded. I prayed: "Leave me the cross." “Take pictures, don't talk,” she screamed angrily. Having finished the notes, my grandmother led me as if forgetting about the cross, and I entered the prison gate, rejoicing that the cross remained on me.

They took me to a common cell, designed for 15-17 people, in which there were 45 prisoners. The cell had its own headman, and a strict sequence was observed when placing people. The newcomers laid down in a small free area near the toilet and then, as the seats were cleared, they moved on; the old-timers were reaching for the bed. I got to the bed, or rather, the board, laid on the ledges between the two beds, two and a half months later, before transferring alone. But that was not scary. The grief and suffering of innocent people, mothers who left their babies at home, people who were guilty only of being born to unsuitable parents, were terrible. There were criminals in the cell, but they were in the minority, and mostly the Petrograd intelligentsia languished there, people of great culture of spirit, in whose presence, despite their usual restraint and unpretentiousness, criminals and low-culture inhabitants did not dare either swear or be rude, feeling them spiritual superiority and unwittingly submitting to it.

After being transferred to this cell, interrogations began always at night. I had no fear of the investigators, only the bitterness caused by the suffering of innocent people. I thought that one day I would be taken to execution, but I would not die in silence, but I would say everything I think about the executioners. “You were like a young animal,” the investigator told me later.

The first investigator was Makarov. He charged me under Article 58, paragraphs 10 and 11, which meant "counter-revolutionary organization and agitation." "Where did I campaign?" I asked. “Well, they could have been in trams,” he replied in a businesslike manner. After each of my answers to subsequent similar questions, he buried his nose in his papers and muttered: "Yes, you are well grounded." He was soon replaced by a second investigator, Medvedev. This one made it clear that Makarov is a promoted worker, and he has a higher education. But he had no more intelligence. They were talking about some large counter-revolutionary organization in which, according to the investigator, I played a prominent role, and I was required to tell about it in detail and name all the participants. From Medvedev's statements I remember the statement that in 10-15 years we will have no believers left and everyone will forget about religion.

On one of the following nights I was taken to a huge office number 16, on the door of which there was a sign "Head of the special department of the Leningrad GPU." I was met by a tall, intelligent-looking man, Rudkovsky, who immediately started yelling at me: “Girl, and she decided to fight the GPU. We will take us by storm. " Subsequently, he told me that two previous investigators refused to work with me, "and I took on you, because I have too strong a reputation." (Apparently, this should have been understood in such a way that a possible failure in "working" with me would not shake his reputation.)

On November 9, 1931, late in the evening, we, surrounded by a dense convoy ring, were taken to Finland Station. It was raining and mud was squelching under our feet. When they approached the Neva, one of the prisoners broke free and threw himself into the river. We were commanded: "Lie down with your face to the ground." We fell into mud and water. They said that this unfortunate man was hacked to death in the river with sabers. Panic began again at the station. One prisoner was missing. And suddenly it turned out that it was about me. Amid the noise and screams, I heard my last name, which has no generic ending, and only with difficulty in this panic did I manage to prove that it was me, a woman, and not a man. Finally they put us in the so-called Stolypin cars. These are compartment cars, but only the doors from the compartment to the corridor are barred, as are the windows in the corridor. Light still passes through the dense window lattice, but it is impossible to see what is happening outside the window. In the compartment, the windows are in the form of small slots.

In the first compartment they put me and two other elderly women - members of the church twenty. The rest were led by men. There were so many of them that, probably, they had to sit in turns. These were persons of clergy. All in priestly robes. It was the Petrograd Church. Probably none of them returned. At least from those whom I knew, no one returned.

When the train started, they sang the Great Doxology. But they were quickly silenced.

In the morning, one of the guards moved the bars and opened a window into the corridor opposite my compartment, and I saw Pines (I am deliberately writing with a capital letter). After spending nearly a year in prison, I became very yearning for nature. Several more times I asked to open the window and enjoyed the view of the forest: apparently, I blew, and I got sick. “That's all I was looking at the pines,” I heard the conversation of the guards. Their compartment was next to mine. The Russian soul is very versatile. These guards were also executioners, and when I asked them how they could shoot at defenseless people, they answered: "Since they were sentenced, then they deserve it." And at the same time, these same people showed so much care and even tenderness towards me, especially when I got sick. "And what is she for?" - all asked my neighbors.

I was getting worse. Heat. Coughing. There was obvious pneumonia. Of course, there was no question of any bed or blanket. The guards raised the alarm and reported to their superiors. In the nearest town, it seems Vologda, a doctor was called to see if I could follow. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia and said: “Of course, in such conditions you cannot be followed, but if you are removed, you will end up in a transit prison, where all the sick, including typhoid ones, are lying on the floor in straw, and there the faithful death, and here your young organism, perhaps, will withstand. I will report to your superiors as you wish. " And I asked him to say that I can follow on. Exactly the same conversation happened with the doctor in the next big city.

One of the hardships of the stage was the lack of water. They gave out a herring on the road, which, after the annoying prison cabbage soup, everyone pounced on. I, no matter how great the temptation was, fortunately, refused it. People were tormented by thirst, drank all the water in the toilets, in search of water they came to us from other cars ... And on the table at the guards stood a decanter of water, but they did not drink it themselves and answered all requests: “No, then water for our doves ".

At intermediate stations, it was forbidden to take raw water and promised boiled water only in Perm. Finally, through a crack from my compartment, I see the bridge over the Kama and the station of the big city. The escorts run with buckets, but soon return without water. “Now it’s not Perm, then the station Reyam,” I hear. Through my crack I saw that the name of the station was written in Latin letters - “PERM” (then Perm was the capital of the Zyryansk Republic). I quickly called the guards and explained to them that this is Perm. “And we dyvymsya, for some reason,“ I ”had a leg in the wrong direction,” and ran to fetch water.

(...) The Usolsk camp was created to provide labor for the construction of a number of factories in the Urals, primarily a large soda plant (this was the “building of socialism,” as my investigator used to say). Our stage got there at a favorable moment, shortly after the audit, as a result of which the terribly cruel camp chief Stukolov was removed. He ordered to hang up prisoners who did not please him right at the entrance to the barracks, and the corpses of the unfortunate people hung around the door for many days. His other favorite pastime was the perch. The unfortunate in winter, in a thirty-degree frost, was seated undressed on a pole fixed between the walls in a cold barn for the whole night. The guards made sure that he did not jump or fall. The man, of course, was dying. So, everyone still remembered the death of an intelligent Muscovite, punished for the fact that during a performance in the camp theater, as a prompter, she sat down so badly that a piece of her white kerchief could be seen from the prompter's booth. Much more was said about Stukolov's cruelty. In the end, a commission was appointed to investigate and he was dismissed.

Upon arrival at the camp, all things for disinfection were immediately taken away from us, and we were sent to the bathhouse. Instead of our clothes, they gave out some kind of shirts and skirts in the form of bags, which had to be held with our hands so that they would not fall off.

Do not forget the mournful face of the priest who recognized me and approached me from Bobruisk, where my parents lived then, Fr. Simeon Biryukovich. He longingly pointed to the swap of his shaved face and head. I never saw him again. I immediately went to the hospital, and he, apparently, with other prisoners went to the Vishersky camp: in winter, in severe frost, he had to walk 60 kilometers. There he died.

The women, my companions in the carriage, later said that these few days before the stage was sent, he asked everything about me, but they avoided him, since communication between men and women is prohibited in the camps.

After the bath I was pushed into some room where there was a table and a stool in front of it. I sat on it, put my head on the table and immediately fell asleep. When I woke up, I found a scarf on my head; over it several women scratched their heads, and insects rained down on me. My head was under the lamp, and that's why they chose it. I screamed in horror: "What are you doing?" They calmly replied: "Don't worry, they won't come to you, they know their own." And indeed, I did not find a single alien later. Then I found myself in a barrack, where there were two-story bunks on both sides of the passage. I was shown a place in the front corner at the very top.

A new stage in my life was beginning. Even earlier, I firmly decided to go all the way of a Russian convict without any discount on age and health. Although I felt very sick, I fell asleep after all the troubles I had gone through. At 4 o'clock in the morning there was a wake-up call. I got up, ready to start my hard labor way, observing from the height of the bunk what was happening in the barracks. Amid the noise and din, Brigadier Katya tried to distribute the inhabitants of the barrack to the brigades in order to send them to work for the construction of a plant located a few kilometers from the camp.

“Ah, new one,” Katya cried out, seeing me, “get up to work,” and went to my bunk. "What's on your neck?" She asked. “Cross,” I replied. Show. I showed. Katya didn’t say anything, but I began to descend from the bunk to go to work. Katya took out decent felt boots from somewhere and handed them to me, but they were immediately intercepted - I did not even have time to touch them. Katya shook her head, but without a word, she brought me others, old and large. I went down from the bunk and immediately coughed violently. “You're sick,” said Katya. - No, I won't hire you. Go to the doctor". The doctor, also one of the prisoners, was somewhere nearby, he confirmed pneumonia, and I was sent to the hospital.

Two elderly dwellers of the barracks told me later: “You are so stupid, took and showed the cross at once. I should have hidden it. " I was probably stupid then, but if I hid it, I would still have it ripped off at night or pulled out, and so those around me, as it were, recognized my right to wear the cross. Subsequently, when, out of pity, they wanted to arrange me for an easier, “cultural and educational” job, as a “literate” one, there was always someone who said: “But what about, she’s with a cross?” But no one ever demanded to take it off. Only an elderly, intelligent-looking Moscow poetess performed during the New Year's concert with the poem "The Economist with the Cross". But the poem did not make much of an impression. Later, some trouble happened to this poetess, I helped her, and we became friends, but we did not remember the poem.

A hospital consisting of two wards - male and female - was also housed in a separate barrack. The medical staff consisted of a medical center and two nannies. Lekpom, as it turned out later, had no medical education; just living at the hospital was easier than going to physical work every day. He was able to do something: for example, put cans and even do intravenous injections, and most importantly, he tried to help the sick, and when they brought frostbite, he himself arranged hot baths for them and provided other feasible help. He offered me an intravenous infusion of Salvarsan84, saying that it would help me a lot right away. I had no idea what it was then and agreed.

A girl lying next to me asked me: "Are you taking a course here?" I replied no, that I have pneumonia. "Yes, but are you taking a course here?" - she did not appease. I told her everything that I had a term of three years, that I was from Leningrad, but she kept repeating about some course. Finally she could not resist and exclaimed: "What a stupid one!" - and named a certain disease, the course of treatment for which they all were taking here. I didn’t know then that the main body of prisoners in the women's barracks were prostitutes. Not so long ago, the cities were cleaned, and they were all expelled from there. Among them there were many patients with occupational disease. Another challenge was the nanny - a simple nun. She came up to me, began to peer at me intently and suddenly threw up her hands: "Why, you are a royal family!" I again began to prove that I was from Leningrad, that I was a prisoner, that I had a term of three years. She didn’t want to hear anything and kept repeating: “Don't tell me, everyone who looks at you will immediately say that you are a royal family.” In the Urals, where the camp was located, the memory of the death of the royal family was still alive, and the people could not come to terms with the death of innocent children. There were many legends about their salvation.

A thin wall separated the women's ward from the men's, from which at times wild screams rushed. Lekpom explained that it was a prisoner screaming with a very serious neurological disease causing severe pain. He, suffering from pneumonia, was forced to play in another performance at a temperature of 40 degrees, and as a result he received a new complication. At that time, another, very weak, voice rang out: “I hear intelligent speech. Tell my family in Moscow how I died here. " Unfortunately, I did not remember his last name. But I myself had no hopes of getting to Moscow. I thought my life was over.

* * *
Irina Piotrovskaya - Yankovskaya: “The investigator took the bottle and hit me on the head:“ Here's the truth! ”

Irina Piotrovskaya - Yankovskaya. She was born in 1924 in the city of Saratov. In 1941, she was arrested on a denunciation by a classmate for reading Yesenin's "counter-revolutionary" poem ("Return to the Homeland").

The investigation lasted a very long time, seven months. They beat us, beat us, they punched my head, I still have a scar here, my teeth were knocked out. I could not resist and say: "Lord, but there is some truth ?!" And the investigator had such a big bottle, like a bottle of champagne, with Borjom, wrapped in the newspaper Pravda. This was the last thing I heard. Lost consciousness. After that, I was not summoned for interrogation for several days. I was in prison, where there were a lot of all sorts of so-called "Trotskyists" who had been in prison since the age of 37 (all Moscow prisons were evacuated to Saratov during the war), and they prepared me very much. They advised me how to behave: I don’t know, I didn’t hear, I didn’t see, I won’t sign anything, I cannot “work” with this investigator. I did just that. I come in so important, all bruised, I am silent. "Why are you silent?" "I won't work with you and I need a prosecutor." The investigator invited the prosecutor. Comes: "Did you call me?" "Yes! Look at me, what did my investigator turn me into ?! You see that he beats me! " "Beats?" "Yes. He smashed his head, put stitches. " The prosecutor says: "Give!" and extends his hand to the investigator. He gives an act, signed by the guards, which says that I fell down the stairs. Then I realized that everything was useless. The investigator comes up to me and says: "Well, don't you like the Soviet regime?" I say: "Yes, you go to hell with your power!" Oh, he was so happy! I wrote it down right away, I signed that I said it. This was included as a red line in my accusation.

We were tried by a military tribunal, a terrible thing! Divided us into groups. Four or five boys and me: this was our "terrorist group". At the trial, they brought charges: an attempt on the life of one of the leaders of the state (that is, on Stalin). Tole Grigoriev was given the highest measure, he was shot. The boys were all given 10 years, I was given five.

We were building some kind of Stalingrad railway, carrying stones. We were not fed at all. They gave some kind of gruel and we were all "goners". People fell and died from impotence. Then we were no longer taken out of the zone. And after another fall, they gave me light work.

In the zone, the dead naked bodies of the Germans were piled up. The corpses of German soldiers had to be loaded onto a cart (cart) drawn by two oxen, taken to the dug trench and thrown there. The norm was set - three trips a day.

And so, when I was unloading these light, completely dried up corpses (I tried very carefully to remove them from the cart and push them with a plank into the trench), a Budenovka fell into the trench. I could not get it out of the trench, I was scared to climb there, and they wrote me a "slip": the loss of government uniform.

In the camp we were divided into brigades according to article criteria. I ended up in a brigade of intellectuals. All were very weak, there was no strength to carry out work, even of moderate severity. But doing nothing is impossible, and we were forced to carry out aimless work that cannot be explained by common sense.

We had tied food pots at our belts. We were forced to collect pebbles in these bowlers throughout the whole day in the zone and pile them into a heap. The next day, these stones were scattered around the zone, and we were again forced to collect and pile them up in a heap, and then transfer them to another heap, which was a few meters from the first ...

A stream ran through the territory of the zone. He was fenced off with a board and forced to scoop water with pots on one side, transfer and pour on the other side. And they put marks: here to take water, and here, after passing through the plate, pour it out.

My health deteriorated every day, I had unbearable headaches again, and the scar on my head, which I received during the interrogation, began to fester. I was sent to the camp hospital where prisoner Elena Vladimirovna Bonch-Bruevich was a physician-therapist. She treated me and treated me very well, and even wrote a letter to my mother that she had brought up well and that, having fallen into such horror, I remained a well-bred girl, as I was before. She fed me, and I began to get better. In addition, she taught me to understand medicine, she wanted to make me something like a nurse, a lekpom! I was still listed as a patient, but I helped her, and was already on duty as an evening nurse.

One summer, passing by the morgue, which was closed for the night, I heard a knock from the morgue. We went with the orderly to the morgue, I was afraid alone. We open the door, and there is completely naked, but for some reason, in glasses and with a tag already tied on his leg, there is a Leningrader - Koshkadamov ... He rushes to us and shouts: "Again they took me off my rations again, they didn't leave me a ration!" It is not the first time that he has come to life in the morgue, and he is already completely indifferent that he is among the dead. He had only one thought - they took him off the allowance, and this is worse than death.

How did the survivors end up in the morgue? For the most part, we were all "Pellagrika" Pellagra - a malnutrition disease. The depletion of the body was such that the pulse was completely inaudible, and in such a situation, the order of the orderly was enough: ah-ah! ... drag, drag ...

* * *
Nina Gagen-Thorn: "It's easier for the weak to keep alive"


Nina Hagen-Thorn. She was born in St. Petersburg in 1901. Graduated from St. Petersburg University, worked at the Academy of Sciences (ethnographer). Arrested in 1936 in the "case of the Academy of Sciences." Sentence: 10 years in the camps.

Arrived by stage. They were released for divorce. The fat contractor came out with a list. They began to call out the names: "Get your things together!"

Stage?! Where? .. They ran around the camp: they pulled off the linen from the ropes, looked for their saucepans, emptied out the bags and beds. The gray-haired Valeria Rudolfovna, in her white socks and a neat blouse, was hastily tying the parcel together, Nadya Lobova helped her. They called our entire stage and many more previous ones.

There was a queue at the storehouse, the beds were rented out. Everything in the barracks is torn apart. Hit the gate rail: collection!

Outside the gates there are arrows with shepherd dogs on a leash. They began to call out surnames: “Name, patronymic? Year of birth? Term? Article?"

We were taken to the bathhouse along a wide, tree-lined road. It is not heated, there is no hot water, but it’s not winter! We are glad to water - to wash away the dust, we are glad to sit on the damp wood of the benches, to dip our rubbed feet into the water. Someone is already laughing, happily splashing water. We wash ourselves.

- Come on out! Sanitary inspection! Become a formation in the dressing room!

- And where are the things, and the clothes?

- Examine, then get dressed. Brought from the roast ... Build!

A hundred naked female bodies are lining up. Those who have not guessed to take towels with them are wet.

The commission is in progress. A gray-haired major with sunken cheeks in a casually thrown white coat. A fat woman, also in a white coat. Without dressing gowns: the chief of the regime, a contractor with a folder of papers.

Women have confusion:

- Let me get dressed! How are we naked!

- I told you, medical examination ... Doctors.

- But there aren't doctors here!

- No one will jinx you ... Registration is required ... Get started!

Bodies: young - girlish, women - with long, sagging pouches of breasts from thinness, old women, yellowing wrinkles. Long-haired people try to cover their breasts with their hair, the girls' cheeks glow. Old women are indifferently submissive.

The major walks along the line, quickly examining the bodies. Selects the goods - for production, in the sewing room! To agricultural! In the zone! In hospital! The dressier writes down the names.

We didn’t know then why we needed young and healthy people to go to sewing. Then they realized that the conditions were such that in a year or two even healthy people fell ill with tuberculosis.

It is easier for the weak to save life in the camps: they use less bad goods - they turn to the watchmen or orderlies. You look, a person has adapted - he will survive. A strong, healthy workforce entered the production meat grinder, it was grinded.

After the first round, I was a mediocre product, almost not worth attention. (...)

There are 12 barracks in the zone. Canteen, bathhouse, hospital, storehouse, bosses' office. At the end of the zone there is a separate part: a garment factory. It has a special checkpoint with a watchman. They are allowed in and out of there only in the formation of a production woman. They sit for 10 hours, stitching parts along a conveyor belt. They go out in formation for lunch, dinner, and after supper - to their barracks. Their barracks are located right next to the factory. They are considered the best, "living conditions have been created" there: the bunks are not so crowded, there is a bedside table for every two people. The table in the middle of the hut is covered with a white tablecloth, and gauze curtains are on the windows. Only there is no one, except the day room, to sit at this table: after returning from work, having washed in the washroom, the girls fall on the bunks from fatigue.

We, the camp attendants, cleaned the territory at the production site. It was a subbotnik - to clear the land of debris, dig up the beds, plant flowers along the three buildings of the garment factory.

I went into the buildings: the same, no different from the residential, wooden barrack. Long tables in two rows. There are sewing machines on the tables. The machines are set in a row with a density that allows you to twist the handle and fold back a stitched detail to a neighbor: sleeve, pocket, collar.

Bright lamps dazzle the eyes under the low ceiling. Cars rumble. The air is full of dust, small fibers from quilted jackets. It's hard to breathe. There is no time to breathe, the conveyor is moving, it demands a rate, a rate, a rate. If it is not completed in 10 hours, they leave it for another hour, for two. In case of systematic failure - a penalty ration: reduce the ration of bread, remove the second course. For overfulfillment, they promise to give a day off at the end of the month, to arrange "dances with the boys" - to bring under escort those who also exceeded the norm at a furniture factory from the men's camp.

And how tempting to many this opportunity. Meet the prisoners of another zone! Find out the news, maybe see a brother, a groom, the trail of which has been lost. Maybe just forget, dancing to the accordion. No man can survive without a moment of joy, just as he cannot survive without food and drink. Minutes of laughter are physiologically necessary. The camp authorities understand this: in order for the girls to work well, they allow evenings of amateur performances - this can squeeze the overfulfillment of the plan.

Two hundred girls are being ground by a meat grinder for 10 - 12 hours of hard work. They are compressed into a mass controlled by someone else's will. Deprived of relatives, movement, freedom, thrown into terrible loneliness and melancholy. If they are completely deprived of their entertainment, they will become sluggish at work, the factory plan will fail. The bosses announce: at the end of the month, if the plan is overfulfilled, there will be a day off.

The girls work until they faint, urging each other on - overfulfilling. Sometimes they are deceived, they are not given a day off, sometimes they are given.

Men come stomping with heavy boots, in formation, under escort. There is a scene in the camp canteen. The curtain made of acted blankets is decorated with appliques by artists who have taken part in amateur performances.

Tables are being pushed aside, benches are placed in rows. On one side of the passage, the convoy orders the men to sit, on the other side - the women: as in the church once. Both of them speak in turn. The male choir sings. Low male voices sound hollow and strange, hitting the dark ceiling of the dining room. We have lost the habit of hearing male speech, seeing the faces of men. They are looking at us. They have tenderness in their eyes. “Poor girls, it's hard for them,” someone whispers. And the girls' heart hurts: patched quilted jackets, shaved heads, washed pants: "You lads, lads!"

A female choir is ringing with tears, singing Ukrainian songs. Male faces frown with pity. There is a silent conversation.

Sometimes the mercy of the authorities follows - dancing. This is not a silent communication: you can talk, send notes, there is a camp post office, which carries news for hundreds of kilometers.

- Get in line!

The accordion breaks off. The gray-black figures of men form a formation, stomping along the road through the watch, into their zone.

- Goodbye!

Such meetings took place in the first half of our stay in the 6th camp department. Then the construction of a male camp and a furniture factory was just beginning. They had not yet had time to build a dining room, and the men were led in formation to ours, after the women had dined.

(...) Women, who could not be used at work, but who could move around on their own, filled a huge barrack, as we called it - the barrack of "youngsters" (from 60 to 80 years old). There they swarmed. Sitting on a bunk next to each other, sometimes they did not notice each other - a person was not noticeable in the crowd. Sometimes they started quarrels: shouts and curses arose because of a thrown shoe, a lost rag, a broken spoon. Screams fell, they talked peacefully again. Someone was crying softly. They consoled, sighed, shook their heads. Another fell ill. Neighbors hobbled after the doctor. They whispered: the heart completely stops.

Somewhere an angry one grumbled:

- Stops? Fooling around! Everything hurts me too, I am silent.

- What are you, what are you! .. It is a sin to say so! If we don't pity each other, who will pity us?

Will ring the bell for lunch at their barracks (after work). Will stretch from the barracks to the dining room: old women, old women, old women. Three hundred: shaking their heads, watery eyes, wrinkles stirring; hooking, moving with crutches and sticks. Almost blind are being led under the arms.

Scary procession from Goya's fantasies?

No, living reality: a system of "enemies of the people" serving a sentence.

Here are the enemies: the 80-year-old abbess of the monastery is sitting on a stool. She almost does not recognize anyone, does not remember. Silently slumbers. (...)

Here's a former ballerina:

“I studied with Kshesinskaya, I got better marks in school,” she says, wiping her black watery eyes; her arms and legs are trembling, but, remembering, she grins coquettishly.

And a strong 70-year-old woman in a good-quality cloth shawl says: - They brought me to court: “I am guilty of anti-Soviet activity”. They were given 25 years. I bowed to the judges and said: “Thank you! As long as I live, I’ll sit, the rest will be left to you, my son ”. They didn’t want to: they changed the sentence by ten.

* * *
Anna Larina: "I know what it is like to be the wife of a popularly accursed husband ..."


Anna Larina. She was born in 1914. N.I.'s wife Bukharin. She was arrested in 1937 as the ChSIR - "a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland." Sentence: 8 years in the camps.

On the second day after my arrival at the camp, they gathered the "ordinary" ChSIRs in a circle in front of the barracks, put me and Yakir's wife in the center of the circle, and the chief, who had arrived from the GULAG (General Administration of the camps), shouted at the top of his voice: “You see these women, these are wives the worst enemies of the people; they helped the enemies of the people in their treacherous activities, but here, you see, they still snort, they don't like everything, everything is not like that. " Yes, we didn't even have time to snort, although no one could like it there. We were even relatively happy that, after a long painful stage and transfer prisons, we finally (as we thought) got to our destination.

With fury, the healthy, red-cheeked, smug chief, who shouted these terrible words, went to the gates of the Tomsk prison. The prisoners dispersed in horror. There were those who began to avoid us, but most were indignant. Shocked, we could not budge - it felt like they had let us through the formation. So we stood in a daze in the forty-degree frost, until someone took us to the barrack, to our cold corner by the window, overgrown with thick terry of snow. The two-story bunks were packed with women. The night is sheer anguish: few people managed to get comfortable, almost everyone lay on their side, and when they wanted to change their position, they had to wake up their neighbor in order to roll over at the same time, and a chain reaction of general awakening began.

On this day, the barrack was like a tousled hive. Everyone excitedly discussed what had happened. Others were spiteful: "Look, these Bukharins and Yakirs have done something, and our husbands and we suffer because of them." The rest scolded the chief from the GULAG, and many advised to write a complaint to Moscow, but we understood that it was useless.

In the morning, Sarah Lazarevna and I left the musty hut and into the zone to distract ourselves from our thoughts, to get some air. In the frosty haze, the crimson-bloody Siberian sun shone (such a sun for war, the women said) and the snow slightly blushed, which at the very fence, where no man's foot had gone (it was forbidden to go there), retained its virgin purity. At the corners of the fence, hastily knocked together from the slab, there were towers, from where the guards on duty (they were also called shooters) watched us, and if you come a little closer to the fence, immediately a shout was heard: “Stop! Who goes?" The road leading from the squalid barracks to the kitchen was the only route and was always full of women. The faces of many were stamped with bewilderment, fear and suffering. Jokingly, we called this road "Nevsky Prospekt" (there were many Leningraders among us) or "the main street in a frenzied panic." In order not to freeze, crowds of unfortunates ran along it. Most are in torn quilted jackets and cold boots. Those who were arrested in the summer covered themselves with camp cloth blankets, which replaced skirts or headscarves. (...)

Anna Bukharina-Larina in the 70s.

In the camp, women languished both from the terrible conditions and from idleness. There was no work. Books and newspapers were not given. Later, many were sent in parcels of thread for knitting and embroidery. Ukrainian women were especially distinguished, their handicrafts were worthy of art exhibitions.

The most lively place was the area near the kitchen. Work was in full swing there: they took out barrels of gruel and porridge, sawed and chopped wood, a saw buzzed and an ax knocked. The lively, sharp-eyed Tanya Izvekova, the ex-wife of Lazar Shatskin, the organizer of the Komsomol, the beloved, authoritative, intellectual leader of the Komsomol of the first years of the Revolution, was especially dexterous. In the frost, logs fell from under the ax with a clang. People always gathered around the workers to help. Optimists brought joyful "bugs" (rumors - in the camp jargon): by the New Year there will be amnesty, by May 1 - amnesty, and certainly by Stalin's birthday.

Dean's kitchen worker has always remained in my memory. She was an exception among us. A double injustice was committed against her. Dina not only was not the wife of the "traitor to the Motherland", but by the time of her arrest she was not married at all. A woman of strong constitution, a former Odessa porter. Dina separated from her husband many years before her arrest. He was also a worker at the port then. Only during the investigation did Dina find out that her ex-husband later held a high post in some city. He never told her about himself. Dina was a proud woman, she did not look for her husband and raised children without receiving a penny from her father. She also did not bother about divorce. This circumstance drove Dina into a trap. No explanations during the investigation helped.

In Tomsk, Dina was used as a draft force - she replaced a horse. We received food from the Tomsk prison. Dina's duties included loading food onto a cart and delivering them to the kitchen. She brought up potatoes, cabbage, cereals and meat carcasses - so skinny, as if this unfortunate cattle was raised especially for us.

Our kitchen manager L.K. Shaposhnikova felt either hot or cold: she did not know how to feed all of us with such products - the cabbage and potatoes were frozen. But her organizational skills showed up here as well. One day she came to our barrack and said:

- Girls! - so she called all women, regardless of age. - I came up with this: nothing good will come of this meat anyway, there will be a gruel with frozen potatoes without any broth. Let’s, while the frosts are freezing, collect these carcasses in a week and by Sunday we’ll prepare a real meat soup, and maybe even a cutlet will come out. Do you agree?

- Agree, agree! - shouted all in unison. They did the same in other barracks, I think there were eight of them. On Sunday we really got a good soup and a small cutlet each. But preparing such a dinner, as it turned out, was very difficult, and, despite the huge number of free hands, the work turned out to be difficult: the kitchen could not accommodate so many “cooks”. And the experiment was no longer repeated, at least with me.

The Sverdlovsk shipment differed from others in that the prisoners were no longer placed in cells either on bunks, nor under bunks, nor between bunks - so we were settled in the corridor. The corridor is not wide, light, since there were no muzzles on the windows, and it was very cold. Sarah Lazarevna Yakir and I settled down on the floor, spreading Nikolai Ivanovich's fleece blanket, and covered ourselves with a warmer, woolen, Yakir blanket. A crazy Leningrad woman was lying next to me. She would sit down and silently tore her black winter coat, tearing it into small ribbons, pluck out the batting, then suddenly suddenly raised a cry all over the corridor: “They killed Sergei Mironovich, killed, everyone killed, that's all we’re sitting!” ... By nightfall, she calmed down, at night she had another occupation: she pulled lice out of her head, which was no problem for her - she had such a huge number of them. He puts his hand in the head - and the catch is guaranteed. She sprinkled lice on my head, saying: "All equally, all equally, we are going to communism."

In the corridor of the Sverdlovsk transfer, an ancient old woman caught my attention. She sat quietly, examining everyone attentively from the height of her old wisdom. Wrinkled like a baked apple, tiny, dry, incomprehensibly clean for prison conditions, in a snow-white lace cap that neatly sat on her head, she took up the least space. I heard her voice for the first time when she turned to a legpom (a nurse - usually from household workers who settled in a "warm" place, who did not understand anything in medicine, but provided minor medical care; criminals often called him "molding" for ease of pronunciation, not understanding meaning of the word).

- Son, you would give me something from the lower back, - asked the old woman.

- And what will I give you, when you are one hundred and ten years old, what will help you!

Everyone gasped: is it really one hundred and ten?

- So why did you, grandma, go to jail?

- For what - I do not know. The investigator said that I had read the Gospel, but there it was badly written about Lenin.

- Well, you confused something, granny, it can't be.

- I did not confuse it, he confused it.

Grandmother for Lenin in the Gospel received five years in the camps.

The Sverdlovsk shipment was also remembered for the fact that the gruel was always there with cockroaches. A couple were sure to come across in a bowl. These two circumstances - the cockroach gruel and the crazy Leningrad woman - laid the foundation for my acquaintance and friendship with Victoria Rudina. The wife of a military man, she taught Russian language and literature at school before her arrest. I saw her for the first time when she, making her way through the closely lying bodies in the corridor, went to the locked door and energetically began to knock on her, demanding that the warden come. Finally he appeared. She looked down on him and, as it seemed to me, having looked him up and down with disgust, said in such a tone as if he was subordinate to her:

- First, remove the madwoman, she needs to be treated, but here she does not allow sleep and infects lice. Secondly, stop cooking cockroach gruel, since the usefulness of these insects for the human body has not yet been proven. Got it?

The warden listened in silence and left. In the evening the madwoman was taken away. At lunchtime, there were fewer cockroaches, they swam in bowls not at all - probably they were caught in a cauldron. (...)

There were sixty women in the Tomsk camp who were arrested with newborn children. Only one Yura was two years old. I often came to him. He lived with his mother in the “mother’s” barrack and reminded me of my Yura - by that time, by the spring of 1938, he was the same age and even outwardly resembled him in some way.

The children were growing up, and it was necessary to dress them. Lyudmila Kuzminichna made sure they gave us bikes, and we sewed clothes for children. We called the mothers by the name of the children: Lyubochkin's mother, Vaska's mother, Vank's mother. Vankina also went up to Victoria to take her soul away.

“Victoria, think,” she says, “Telmansha (senior warden Telman) comes up to me and says:“ You see how the Soviet government takes care of children. You are in prison, and they have sewn what kind of a suit for your Vanka ”. And what do you think I answered her? "And for me, they would give me a mat, I would wrap my Vanka and I would go home, and I don't need any of your suit."

Nekrasov wrote about the cruel customs of serf Russia: “And on the sides, all the bones are Russian ... how many there are! Vanechka, do you know? " But how many of those bones are compared to ours. They could be folded into the countless pyramids of those who died from executions, hunger and cold. What are those tears in comparison with the tears of our women in the camp, cut off from their children and husbands - humiliated and innocently destroyed. "Russian women"? Princesses Trubetskoy, Volkonskaya, who left the luxurious life of St. Petersburg and went to their husbands-Decembrists in Siberia? There are no words - a feat! A theme for a poet! But how did they go? On six horses, in fur coats, in a wonderfully well-coordinated carriage, "the count himself straightened the pillows, pushed a bear cavity into his legs." Yes, and went to their husbands! Our women - Russian and non-Russian - Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Jewish, Polish, German from the Volga region and communists who fled from Nazi Germany - employees of the Comintern and others (Stalin is an "internationalist"!) - were delivered in a stage, in teplushka or "Stolypin" , well, and then from the station to the camp for kilometers on foot, under an escort with dogs, shepherds, exhausted, barely dragging their pitiful belongings - suitcases or bundles - under the shouts of the convoy: "Step to the side - I shoot without warning!" or "Sit down!" - even in the snow, even in the mud, sit down anyway! And they didn't go to their husbands! Although there were such dreamers among us who naively hoped that in that camp other world they would be united with their husbands - those who had ten years without the right to correspond, which means they were shot.

Nekrasov wrote about "Orina - the soldier's mother." Her son, in a long and difficult soldiery, died of consumption. And indeed: "Few words, but a river of grief!" In the harsh years of the war, our sons also perished at the front, and the grief of the mothers was immeasurable. But the son died like a hero, defending the Motherland, and not innocently damned. Homeland, you! What to say about the one whose son was taken away at night in a "black raven" ?! But even this sufferer could be envied by that mother, whose son was known not only to acquaintances, colleagues and neighbors, but yesterday was the pride of the whole people, and now is exposed to general shame. And we have not yet read a poem about this eternal mental anguish, immeasurable depression and the eternal question in our eyes: "Is it true and how could this have happened?" And many got it, at least for a short time - they did not survive, to bear this heavy cross for the disgraced and destroyed son.

Fate brought me to my mother, whose son the whole country was proud. But the country cursed him in unison. I knew what it was, although I was not the mother of such a son, but the wife of a popularly damned husband. A nationwide curse, nationwide mockery - what could be worse than this? Only death is salvation from such torment!

The one I met was not "Orina, the soldier's mother," but Mavra, the marshal's mother, also a simple peasant woman. I met the Tukhachevsky family in the most tragic days for her, on the Moscow-Astrakhan train, on June 11, 1937, on my way to exile. I was taken by car to the station and put in a carriage (free of charge, but free) by an NKVD officer, who deliberately politely said goodbye to me and, as if in mockery, wished me all the best. On the way at the stations, passengers got out of the cars and grabbed newspapers with sensational news. They reported that "the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court considered at a closed court session ..." that "all the accused pleaded guilty" and "the sentence was carried out." On that day, the largest military leaders died - Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Eideman, Feldman, Putna, Primakov. Head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army Ya.B. Gamarnik committed suicide on May 31, 1937.

It was a warm June day, I was looking out the window and quietly wiping away my tears. And suddenly, at the opposite window, I noticed an old woman and a woman of about thirty-five, and with them a teenage girl. They attentively, like me, listened to those who read the newspaper, to the reactions of those around them. The features of the old woman's features reminded me of someone. I was drawn to them like a magnet. I jumped up and asked the passenger sitting opposite them to swap with me. He agreed. It only remained to explain. I understood that in such an environment they would not identify themselves before I explained to them who I was. But how do you say? I could be wrong in my assumptions that they are their own - now more than relatives. I came close to the young woman and said very quietly:

"I am the wife of Nikolai Ivanovich." At first I decided not to give my surnames; Bukharin's name and patronymic were as popular as the surname. Well, if she doesn't understand who I am, I decided to give my name. But the answer came instantly: "And I am Mikhail Nikolaevich."

So I met the Tukhachevsky family: his mother Mavra Petrovna, wife Nina Evgenievna and daughter Svetlana.

Passengers vigorously expressed their hatred of the "traitors":

- Yes, unless they are wrongly condemned!

- Yes, no reason, just damage!

And right there, among the angry people, sat the mother of Marshal Tukhachevsky, petrified with grief and horror. How generous nature was to him, how ruthless fate was! Extraordinary talent, rare leadership skills, spiritual beauty were combined with amazing external data. (...)

Mavra Petrovna could not express her grief. Who would sympathize with her? It burned her from the inside. Indeed, on the day when we were brought together by the tragic events of 1937, she received a funeral for her son - the most terrible that could have been.

But I saw Mavra Petrovna crying. She came to me already in Astrakhan, after the arrest of Tukhachevsky's wife, Nina Evgenievna. For some reason, I and Yakir's wife were arrested two weeks later. Mavra Petrovna wanted to make a transfer to Nina Evgenievna in the Astrakhan prison. She said, "I write badly," and asked me to write what she was transmitting. “Write:“ Ninochka. I give you an onion, a herring and a loaf of bread. " I wrote. Suddenly Mavra Petrovna burst into tears and, putting her head on my shoulder, began repeating: “Mishenka! Misha! Misha, son! You are no more, you are no more! "

Then she did not know yet, and perhaps she never knew, that two more sons - Alexander and Nikolai - were also shot only because the same Mavra gave birth to them as Mikhail. Then she did not know yet that her daughters were arrested and sentenced to eight years in the camps. With two, Olga Nikolaevna and Maria Nikolaevna, I was in the Tomsk camp. The third sister of Mikhail Nikolaevich, Sofya Nikolaevna, was also repressed, expelled from Moscow and disappeared without a trace. And the fourth sister, Elizaveta Nikolaevna, had to go through no less. Mavra Petrovna died in exile.

(…) In those days, I especially attracted the attention of those around me. They treated me differently. This depended mainly on political development, intellectual level, on how they perceived Bukharin before the trial, how closely they knew Nikolai Ivanovich and his co-processors. Therefore, I felt on myself the malicious glances of those who took the confessions of the accused at face value. Unfortunately, there were many of them. But I saw the painful eyes of those who understood everything, and the suffering of many who knew Bukharin, and not only him.

The wife of a Ukrainian party worker came up to me and said: “Why hang your nose! History will justify Bukharin, but no one will ever know about our husbands. "