The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953
From the foregoing we have already an idea of the general situation of the accused during the preliminary investigation. They are held incommunicado; they either know nothing of what is taking place in the outside world, or only what their jailers think it expedient to tell them; they see no one but the warders, the examiners, other officials concerned with the preparation of the case, and fellow-prisoners who have already been broken; and in these conditions they are interrogated for many hours at a stretch.
The knowledge we have so far gleaned, however, is insufficient. The use of moral and physical pressures against accused persons is not unknown to countries other than Russia and her satellites. In prewar Bulgaria, for example, torture is known to have been used for the purpose of extorting signed confessions from political opponents of the regime. But these crude methods — crude even for Bulgaria — deceived only the most credulous sections of the population. Moreover, with these methods there is always at least a fifty-fifty chance of exposure, as experience has shown. Persons subjected to such treatment cannot always be relied upon to keep their mouths shut afterwards; and in any case mere physical torture and threats of death do not account for the phenomenon of confessions made by batches of accused persons — showing no signs of ill-treatment — in a series of trials over many years. ‘Third Degree’ methods alone offer no satisfactory explanation. To find anything comparable to the phenomenon under discussion one has to go back to the witchcraft trials of the Middle Ages, in which accused persons admitted to flying around at night on broomsticks, passing through keyholes, casting their enemies under a spell, and so on. In both instances the confessions obtained were demonstrably false, not to say absurd; and in both instances the technique employed is essentially the same, although the modern Inquisition has ‘refined’ and improved it. We are therefore confronted with the problem of a new, highly developed technique that breaks down the human will and remoulds it to a desired pattern. But — as we shall observe — this technique is dependent for its effective application upon certain definite external conditions, the ‘atmosphere’ created by the political situation in the country concerned. It is not possible to reproduce this technique in, as it were, laboratory conditions in a democratic country: for to find the required laboratory one would have to change the entire political conditions. It is therefore necessary not only to understand the mechanics of the technique itself, but also the conditions without which its application would be impossible.
In spite of all efforts of the Soviet government to seal its frontiers and prevent those who have knowledge of these matters from reaching the outside world, the numbers involved have been so great that it has proved impossible to prevent information from seeping through. Out of the hundreds of thousands caught up in the machine of Soviet justice, a few have succeeded in escaping. In addition to the evidence of these people from Russia, there is that of men who have been put to the question in the satellite countries, where general circumstances — primarily the need for speedy action imposed upon an imperfectly trained examining personnel — have resulted in some gross errors of judgement.
One of the first to bring out of Russia important information on Soviet interrogation methods was Victor Serge, the French author (since deceased). Arrested first in 1928, the treatment he then received was not severe; but in 1933, when he was arrested a second time, he ‘spent eighty-five days in a cell in the inner GPU prison without reading or occupation of any sort, without news of my people’: ‘I spent seventy of these days in total solitude, without even taking the air in the grey courtyard reserved for the more tractable prisoners.’ (From Lenin to Stalin (Secker and Warburg, 1937), p 128) Testifying before the French committee set up under the auspices of the Dewey Commission, he said:
During those three months I was questioned about ten times. Except twice, when they took place during the day, the interrogations took place at night... The questioning, in the beginning, assumed the aspect of a psychological conversation much more than of a judicial examination; that is to say, not only did they not give any information about the accusations, but they tried to establish an atmosphere now of confidence, now of menace, not in order to establish such or such a fact, but in order to lead me into a very general discussion of my life and ideas. They would say: ‘Describe your life in such a way that it will be possible to establish the truth regarding you.’ Naturally, when I resisted such a procedure, they reached the point of trying to excite pity for the situation of those dear to me, or of threatening me. But I wish to emphasise that never, during these interviews, did I have counsel at my side; never did I see a clerk take down a verbatim report. There was no clerk — a fact which does not preclude the probability that either in an adjoining room or elsewhere someone took very precise notes, for on one occasion the judge was able to remind me in detail of a previous interrogation...
Once, after other functionaries, I had to do with Rudkovsky, who greeted me by saying without mincing words that I was lost, but that he wished nevertheless to save me and offer me a life preserver. The life preserver consisted of this: he began to read a pretended statement of my sister-in-law, Anita Russakova, in which she, in the most nonsensical fashion, had purportedly enumerated a whole series of persons with whom I was supposed to be in contact, although I did not know any of them... It was then, restraining myself no longer, that I allowed my indignation to burst forth in harsh terms, refusing to listen to any further reading of this pretended examination. On the contrary, I demanded to be confronted with my sister-in-law. Rudkovsky understood that there was nothing to be got from me, offered me a glass of water, and urged me to calm myself. The questioning ended. (Not Guilty (Secker and Warburg, 1938), pp 366-67)
Serge did not get to see his sister-in-law, who was first released, then rearrested and sentenced to five years’ exile in Verka. There has been no news of her since. As a result of a vigorous campaign conducted on his behalf in the West and because the Stalinists were then seeking the support of ‘all men of goodwill’ for the Popular Front against Fascism, Serge himself was freed and expelled from the country after a term of deportation in Orenburg (now Chkalov). Whilst in the hands of the Soviet police, in a Leningrad prison, he met another prisoner, who told him that ‘they always tried to make him confess by the same method; that is to say, by making him believe that friends of his had confessed, and that there was nothing he could do henceforth but ratify these confessions’ (ibid, p 367).
Thus Serge was ‘ripened’ by a long period of solitary confinement without occupation or exercise of any kind; he was threatened that in any case he faced a long period of imprisonment and that only confirmation of his sister-in-law’s deposition could ameliorate his lot; he was not informed of the charge against him; and his examination usually took place at night, in the beginning taking the form of a ‘psychological conversation’.
Dr Anton Ciliga, who spent five years in Soviet prisons and Siberian exile, has this to say: ‘It is the general rule of the GPU to call arrested persons for examination during the night; a sleepy man is less concentrated, less prepared to resist. Psychology is the favourite science of the policemen of the GPU.’ (La Révolution Prolétarienne (Paris, 1937)). The fact that these examinations usually take place at night is also confirmed from another source, favourable to the GPU. A German engineer, Peter Kleist, writing of his experiences under interrogation by the GPU, makes his examiner say: ‘My wife’s been scolding me for weeks. Night work! Night work! Never at home! Night work!’ (GPU Justice (Allen and Unwin, 1938), p 95) The fact that this book is a cleverly constructed specious plea for acceptance of the Moscow Trials and GPU ‘justice’ gives this particular admission all the more weight.
Regarding the ‘psychological approach’, Ciliga also states that the favourite opening questions of the examiners are: ‘You know why you have been arrested? No, you don’t know? Well, then, why, do you suppose?’ He points out that these were precisely the questions put to arrested persons by the examiners of the Inquisition.
Ciliga has also written of a meeting in prison with one of the engineers convicted in the Industrial Party Trial. This man told him:
They kept me for five months in isolation without newspapers, without anything to read, without mail, without any contact with the outside, without a visit from my family. I was hungry. I suffered from solitude. They insisted that I should confess to an act of sabotage that had never taken place. I refused to assume the guilt of crimes that had not even been committed. But I was told that if I was really for the Soviet power, as I said I was, I should confess to the charge, as the Soviet power needed my confession; I was assured that I should have no fear of the consequences. The Soviet power would take into consideration my open-hearted confession and give me the chance to work and repair my mistakes with work. As soon as I confessed, I'd have visits from my family, correspondence, walks, newspapers. But if I remained obstinate and persisted in saying nothing, I should have to bear pitiless repression. Not only I, but my wife and children... For months I resisted. But the situation became unbearable. Nothing, it seemed to me, could be worse. At any rate, I actually became indifferent to what people might say. I signed every statement offered me by the examining judge. (The Case of Leon Trotsky (Secker and Warburg, 1937), pp 136-37)
We have already noted, from the official report of the third Moscow Trial, that Bukharin spoke of his complete isolation from the outside world for more than a year. This officially confirms the evidence of Serge and Ciliga that one of the means employed is solitary confinement. It will further be made plain in the course of this book that invariably the main, virtually the only, plea of the defence in these cases is that the accused has freely confessed and for this reason deserves some mitigation of his sentence. There is abundant and overwhelming evidence in the official reports that this consideration plays a large part in the accused’s motives for confession. A further striking example of this may be given here. A counsel for the defence in the Metro-Vickers trial said in the course of his plea:
I must say that in my capacity as counsel for Lobanov, Lebedev and Zivert I was lucky, lucky for the simple reason that all these three accused chose a correct method of self-defence. All of them, at the first examination at the OGPU as well as at the subsequent examinations and also at the questioning by the investigating Judge on Important Cases, repented and confessed all they had on their minds. (Wrecking Activities at Power Stations in the Soviet Union (Modern Books Ltd, 1933), pp 690-91)
Let us now consider the evidence of the former Communist Margarete Buber-Neumann. She and her husband, Heinz Neumann — a top-ranking member of the German party and once high in the councils of the international Communist movement — took refuge in Russia after Hitler’s conquest of power. The great purge associated with the Moscow Trials led to the arrest of nearly all foreign Communists in Russia; among those arrested were the Neumanns. Heinz Neumann simply vanished; there can be little doubt that he was executed, but where and when remains a mystery to this day. His wife, however, after a period of imprisonment, was handed over to the Gestapo, in accordance with the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and finally freed from the horrors of a German concentration camp by the Allied victory. In her book, Under Two Dictators (Gollancz, 1949), she throws further light on the problem under discussion. She has the following to say about the interrogation of one of her cell-mates, Tasso Salpeter:
There was no window in the cell and nowhere to sit down except on the floor. She was held in constant darkness on nothing but bread and water. There was a round hole in the door — as she thought, for air — but one day a cinema projection apparatus was set up on the other side and a film was thrown on to the opposite wall. It was a film largely of Russian and Caucasian folk songs. Then came a picture of children playing — and then suddenly a picture of children’s corpses. At that the film was switched off and a voice sounded: ‘Tasso Salpeter, you are lying.’
A little while after she was taken out of the cell for questioning. The examining judge called upon her to confess... her husband was brought in. ‘He was in a terrible state’, said Tasso. ‘His face was pale and worn and his eyes looked everywhere but at me. There were marks round his wrists as though he had been constantly in handcuffs. “Well,” said my examiner with a grin, “will you confess now?"’ (pp 42-43)
Margarete Buber-Neumann speaks also of the physical maltreatment of other cell-mates during their interrogation:
Again she was away for an hour or so and then back in the cell for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. And so it went on through the night. Each time she flung herself down on the mattress and tried to sleep, and each time she was called out again. I knew from the stories of others that this was a favourite GPU method — chain questioning, designed to break a suspect’s spirit. (p 29)
This so-called ‘conveyor’ system of questioning is also referred to by a Swiss national, Elinor Lipper, who spent eleven years in Soviet prisons and concentration camps before she succeeded in escaping to the West. She testifies:
Most shocking is the cynicism of the investigator, who knows perfectly well that most are innocent. When he, after the first few words of the preliminary investigation, says: ‘Why not sign? Why waste time? You know you'll sign. Everybody signs eventually.’ — the investigator knows that it is a game, not a question of proving guilt, but of demonstrating the infallibility of the methods. Both the investigator and the accused know that it is a pretence, but the prosecutor too has no means of extricating himself from the web, otherwise he too will suffer...
Moral and physical torture are the normal investigation methods. Most frequently the kind of torture employed is that known to the prisoners as the ‘conveyor’ system: the prisoner is not allowed to sleep. The investigators change every four hours; their task is to prevent the accused from sleeping. Over and over again the sleep-drunk victim is urged to sign a confession of his crimes. He refuses. His legs and feet begin to swell, he can no longer stand up. ‘Don’t go to sleep! Stand up against the wall!’ The accused staggers, drops unconscious. The investigator presses a button, a doctor appears and gives the victim an injection. He comes to. ‘Sign!’ He shakes his head; his eyes close; they shake him. Again he stands up against the wall. Again he collapses. Finally he is led away to his cell.
He hardly touches the cold soup that his cell-mates have saved for him. He is asleep as soon as he touches the planks of wood... Ten, fifteen minutes pass. The door opens. Again he is called for interrogation. His comrades shake him, wake him, support him, encourage him. He neither hears nor understands. With red, swollen eyes, half-crazy from lack of sleep, he staggers through the door... ‘Sign and you can sleep. Why resist? You'll sign anyway. Everybody signs. Don’t go to sleep! Stand up!’ (Elf Jahre in Sowjetischen Gefaengnissen und Lagern (Oprecht, Zurich, 1950), pp 39 and following)
Deprivation of sleep is undoubtedly one of the most effective means of persuasion used during the preliminary investigation. Vyshinsky himself, in the course of one of the trials, acknowledged that there were other means of torture than the directly physical — such, he said, ‘as depriving a man of sleep’. He was asking one of the accused if any pressure had been brought to bear on him (in the circumstances one suspects that he was also reminding him of something). The accused replied that he had not been subjected to any pressure. However, this was the reply of a man still in the hands of his accusers and awaiting sentence. Let us see what another accused, who escaped, has to say on this matter.
This witness, Zbigniew Stypulkowski, is a former member of the Polish underground movement against Hitler. Under pretence of reaching a political agreement with this movement, the Soviet government induced fifteen of its leading members to go to Russia for negotiations. Once on Russian soil, however, they were all arrested and charged with sabotage in the rear of the Red Army. Of the fifteen arrested, only Stypulkowski pleaded not guilty, although the pleas of his co-accused did not amount to full confessions, and a study of the official English version of the trial report shows an important difference in the attitude of the defendants here and that of others in confession trials proper.
According to Stypulkowski the investigators weaken the victim’s resistance by depriving him of adequate sleep, by under-nourishment, and by cold. These means of undermining his physical powers are supplemented by an alternation of threats and promises. Stypulkowski was held incommunicado for some seventy days, during which time he was interrogated very many times for periods ranging from three to fifteen hours. For the first month he was in solitary confinement in a cell lit by a strong light, which was left burning all night. The cell temperature was not freezingly cold, but was still low enough to cause acute discomfort. The food given him was insufficient and left him continually suffering the pangs of hunger. After a month alone, during which he continued to maintain his innocence, he was placed in another cell in company with a German SS colonel and a Russian Red Army officer. The latter, a hero of the war and many times wounded, appeared to be completely broken in spirit and ceaselessly urged Stypulkowski to ‘confess’, as the only way out of an impossible situation.
In spite of all pressure Stypulkowski did not give way, and he pleaded not guilty at his trial. It should be remembered, when considering why the stage managers of this trial were not able to make it a full-blown confession trial, that the arrest of these fifteen men had evoked strong protests from the British and American governments, and that the Soviet government was not at that time prepared to reveal too much of its hand, and risk the breaking off of negotiations then proceeding on the question of Poland and the complete exposure of its ultimate aim of sovietising that country. The lively interest aroused in the fate of these men made it impossible not to produce Stypulkowski at the trial, especially since another of the accused, Antoni Pajdak, was ‘unable to appear in court due to illness’. Two such would have been one too many. At the same time the Stalinists in Poland were following their usual tactic of combining trickery with terror; the trial itself served as a severe warning to the unshakably recalcitrant, but also, in the mild sentences given some defendants, gave apparent substance to the claim that the Soviet government was not vindictive, and was prepared to allow even those who had hitherto opposed it to play their part in the rebuilding of Poland, provided that they acknowledged the errors of their past. Only much later was the velvet glove, now worn threadbare, discarded.
Like other witnesses we have cited, Stypulkowski affirms that his first examination took the form of a very general conversation, aimed at extracting every possible detail of his personal history, information regarding his family, and so forth. Having thus probed the character of the accused, discovered his likes and dislikes, the direction of his ambitions, the chinks in his armour — he is subjected to a verbal hammering in which the same series of questions and accusations are dinned into his brain for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, by relays of inquisitors. He is deprived of sleep, kept hungry, alternately threatened and cajoled, stormed at and reasoned with; he is confronted with fellow-prisoners who have confessed and implicated him, told that his only hope lies in ‘making a clean breast of things’, promised leniency. The prospect is put before him of rotting for years in some concentration camp in the freezing hell of the Siberian north. No one is interested in his fate; there is no one can save him; the decision rests with him — he has only to repent and throw himself on the mercy of the authorities. If he repents, he may even be given a responsible post to aid in the rebuilding of his war-shattered country... If not — he may even be shot... And so the inquisitors condition his mind to completely unresisting acceptance of guilt. Where is the man whose nerves they cannot break, given sufficient time? And usually they have plenty of time at their disposal.
The most detailed and minutely circumstantial account yet given by any victim of the Soviet inquisitors is to be found in Alex Weissberg’s Conspiracy of Silence (Hamilton, 1952). A scientific worker of Austrian origin, he was arrested in Russia in 1937. He ‘confessed’ after seven days and nights of continuous interrogation; withdrew his confession twenty-four hours later; confessed again after a further four days and nights of ceaseless questioning; again retracted. After further attempts to render him completely and permanently malleable the Soviet authorities came to the conclusion that he was not suitable material for a public trial. There was, however, no question of their freeing him; he was not released from Russian captivity until 1940, when, under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he was handed over to the Gestapo. To appreciate the full force of Weissberg’s evidence his account must be read as a whole. His book is not only fascinating, it is completely convincing and bears out all the evidence of other victims that has been here laid before the reader. However, in his concluding chapter he still imagines his readers asking: ‘Why did the members of the opposition make false confessions in the Moscow show trials?’
From all the evidence available it is clear that direct physical torture that would render an accused person unfit to appear in court is not used. It is only used when a prisoner is not required to figure in a public propaganda trial. In such cases it is simply a question of extorting a confession for the records. A signed statement of guilt covers the examiners in charge of the case, and the aim is merely to obtain this in the shortest possible time. But confessions extorted by direct physical torture may be, and are, used to exert pressure on those whom it is hoped to condition for public performance. This form of indirect pressure is referred to by another witness who escaped from the hands of the Russian inquisitors. This man, A Tarov, who escaped to Europe through Persia, submitted the following evidence to the Comité pour l'Enquête sur le Procès de Moscou (the Paris Committee assisting the work of the Dewey Commission in Mexico):
In the inner prison of Petropavlovsk, where the author of these lines remained for six months waiting for the sentence pronounced in contumacy in Moscow, the GPU shot the condemned in a special structure erected exactly in the centre of the courtyard where the prisoners took their daily walks. Generally when at night they dragged the victim along the corridors to the ‘slaughter house’ — as the prisoners called this place — they gave him the opportunity to cry out, howl, implore, beg for mercy, etc. This was done with the purpose of frightening the other prisoners. It was not until they reached the courtyard that they gagged the condemned man and the cries ceased.
The creation of an atmosphere of terror in this way naturally tends to weaken the resistance of all but the most firm. The knowledge that under Soviet law one’s fate may be decided administratively, without the necessity of normal court proceedings, gives considerable weight to any threats on the part of the examiners. Very telling admissions of the fear inspired by the GPU are to be found in the report of the third Moscow Trial. The accused, Dr Kazakov, a Kremlin physician, spoke of the former GPU chief, Yagoda (himself then on trial), in the following terms:
Yagoda went on to say: ‘I know how to appreciate people who submit to me. You cannot hide from me... Remember that if you make any attempt to disobey me, I shall find quick means of exterminating you.’ (Trial III, p 527)
Another accused, Dr Levin, testified:
He [Yagoda] said: ‘Have in mind that you cannot help obeying me, you cannot get away from me. Once I place confidence in you with regard to this thing... you must carry this out. You cannot tell anybody about it. Nobody will believe you. They will believe not you, but me.’ He reiterated that my refusal to carry this out would spell ruin for me and my family. I figured that I had no other way out, that I had to submit to him. Again, if you look at it retrospectively, if you look back at 1932 from today, when you consider how all-powerful Yagoda appeared to me, a non-party person, then, of course, it was very difficult to evade his threats, his orders. (Trial III, p 518)
This was the feeling of people not in prison, not under arrest but at liberty. What these two doctors say about the fear inspired by Yagoda rings true, but our argument is in no way affected even if they were lying on this as well as on every other point. The significance of their words lies in the very fact that they advanced such a plea — because they would do so only if they knew that everyone in the courtroom, and everyone in the country, would understand their fear, would know that it was possible. Levin and Kazakov were accused of poisoning the world-famous writer Gorky, and others, on Yagoda’s instructions. One has only to imagine a defendant in this country, accused of poisoning, saying that he murdered only because he was mortally afraid of what the head of the police forces would do to him and his family — one has only to imagine this, to appreciate the revealing nature of Levin’s and Kazakov’s words. Obviously neither of them thought that such an excuse would strike anyone as extraordinary. And neither did anyone else in Russia think it extraordinary.
As has been noted, the accused in the big show trials were not allowed to confess only their own misdeeds. They had also to implicate their ‘accomplices’. Thus all the accused are doubly isolated: morally as well as physically. They see their fellow-accused only when the trial opens — except the one or two they may have been confronted with during the preliminary examination. Before the trial they have not met for months, perhaps for years. In some cases an accused can say, as Bukharin said:
Yet I first learnt the name of Sharangovich from the indictment, and I first saw him here in court. It was here that I first learnt about the existence of Maximov, I have never been acquainted with Pletnev, I have never been acquainted with Kazakov... (Trial III, p 769)
(Here Bukharin makes nonsense of the prosecution’s case — ‘in order to be a gang the members ... must know each other and be in more or less close contact with each other’, he argues. It is an argument to which the prosecution finds no answer.) But to their physical isolation is superimposed the even heavier pressure of their moral isolation. Each of these men is alone, accused by all others, accusing all the others. And even before they appear in the dock a veritable hurricane of insult and abuse is hurled at their heads by the press, the radio, by means of ‘spontaneous’ resolutions from innumerable meetings of trade unions, factory meetings and so on. They are made aware of all this; it is impressed upon them that not a man, woman or child in the entire country but cries out for their blood. Their closest friends have joined in the general howl of execration; even their wives and children have been forced to spit on them. They do so in order to save their own skins — but they are rarely successful. And the few who have the moral courage to stand out against this colossal pressure of manufactured ‘public opinion’ are certainly doomed, beyond hope. The accused are all aware that there exists but one course open to them — to fling themselves on the mercy of their accusers. The very fact that they appear in court means that they have accepted this one chance of survival.
The propaganda trials staged in the satellite countries demonstrate that the police in all these states have benefited from the experience of the Moscow Trials. But there are some indications that they have not yet achieved a full mastery of the technique. In none of the confession trials in Russia has there been such a blunder as the one made by the Bulgarian Stalinists with their former idol Kostov. A certain lack of finesse — probably a hangover from the prewar methods of the Bulgarian police — has provided us with some interesting information. Thus there is the case of Peter Koev, Deputy of the Agrarian Party to the Bulgarian Parliament, who was detained at police headquarters for ninety days, put to the question, and then released. The well-known Agrarian leader Petkov, later hanged for treason (his trial is considered in the next chapter), read out in the Bulgarian parliament (3 December 1946) a declaration written by Koev on the subject of his treatment at the hands of the police. It is worth quoting from at length:
I shall first describe to you how the interrogation at the Militia Prison was carried out, so that you may have an idea of how ‘confessions’ are produced, and of how Communist charges are built up. You reach the stage of utter physical and moral collapse. You become completely indifferent towards your own life and fate, and you long only for an end, any end, which will bring reprieve from suffering. But the complete collapse comes only at the moment when you realise that you are defenceless, that there is no law and no authority to protect you, and that you are in the hands of your interrogators for ever. This is actually what they try to make you believe right from the very beginning.
The procedure is different from the one we have known so far. Now they first assert your guilt and then they ask confessions to prove it. The methods to obtain confessions are mainly three: physiological — hunger, thirst and lack of sleep; physical — torture; psychological — hints that your family have been arrested, will be tortured, etc.
But let me tell you exactly what happened to me. For two days after my arrest I was confined to a small dark cell and given no food whatever. On the third day I was taken to the office of the chief of the Department of State Security. There I met Ganev, the chief of Department ‘A’, and the militia inspector, Zeev. They told me that I had been found guilty of an act of sabotage... and that I had also taken part in the organisation of a planned coup d'état against the government by Generals Velchev and Stanchev... Then they read confessions written by several officers giving details of their own guilt as well as of my own ‘participation’ in the conspiracy.
Immediately after that I was sent back to my cell and was not bothered with any interrogations for twenty-one days. I was left to ‘ripen’. The first method used to achieve this was hunger — I was given only a little bread and water every day. On the twenty-second day, a Saturday, at eight o'clock in the morning, I was taken up to the fourth floor for the second interrogation. It lasted without a break until eleven o'clock of the following Thursday morning. The interrogation went on, day and night, for twenty-four hours round the clock, without a stop, the interrogators themselves being changed every three hours. During all this time I was left standing, without any sleep, without any bread and, what is worse, without any water... Every three hours the new interrogators asked the same identical questions, so that in the end I knew every question by heart.
No minister of the Bulgarian government denied the fact that Koev had been held incommunicado for ninety days, nor was any explanation given.
Koev was rearrested on 5 February of the following year. Before withdrawal of his parliamentary immunity was voted he made the following statement:
You now accuse me of having taken part in Fascist conspiracies. I, who fought for over twenty years against Fascism, now stand accused as a friend of the Fascists. And, of course, there are no proofs. There can be no proofs. The so-called ‘confessions’ of mine which I signed in the Militia Prison... were extracted in the way I have described in detail here in the Assembly. I now declare openly that the so-called ‘confessions’ which I am supposed to have given months ago in the Militia Prison were not freely given. As to the accusations of the officer Avramov, I can say only one thing: when he was brought to me in the Militia Prison he was in such a state that he couldn’t walk...
Of course when Koev eventually came up for trial he had once more ‘confessed’. But to which should one give credence: the declaration of innocence made when at liberty? — or the confession made in the question chamber when he was wholly at the mercy of his accusers? Let us now consider another case, that of Michael Shipkov, which provides further proof that the Bulgarian examiners, in seeking to acquire the Russian technique, have not entirely overcome a certain clumsiness inherited from their prewar confrères.
Michael Shipkov was a young Bulgarian employed in the American Legation. According to those who knew him well, he was a believer in gradualist Socialism and considered that state control of Bulgarian economy was inevitable and desirable. The fact that he worked in the American Legation, and had also formerly been employed in the British Section of the Allied Control Commission, inevitably brought him under suspicion. He was in due course arrested. The first question put to him at police headquarters was whether he knew where he was and why he was there. He replied that he did know, that he had been expecting it for a long time because he had refused to give up working for the US Legation. He was then informed that he had been arrested on the strength of undeniable proof and that he had now to complete their knowledge by a full confession and repentance of his guilt. He was ordered to describe his life history from 1930 on: his private life, friends, acquaintances, connections, hobbies, relaxations — in a word, everything about himself. The chief interrogator dwelt on the subject of his domestic affairs, ‘accepting the theory that I had nothing any more in common with my wife, that I had engaged in picking up mistresses here and there, and that I had not cared if my wife did the same — mentioning persons in the tennis club’.
There were in all seven functionaries concerned with his interrogation: four men working in relays of two, two higher rankers conducting the interrogation proper, and the chief examiner. They at first confined themselves to the usual gruelling questioning hour after hour, but eventually became impatient, and:
I was ordered to stand facing the wall upright at a distance which allowed me to touch the wall with two fingers of my outstretched arms. Then to step back some twelve inches, keep my heels touching the floor, and maintain balance only with the contact of one finger of each hand. And while standing so, the interrogation continued... This posture does not appear unduly painful, nor did it particularly impress me in the beginning. And yet, combined with the mental strain, with the continuous pressure to talk, with the utter hopelessness and the longing to go through the thing and be sent down into silence and peace — it is a very effective method of breaking down all resistance.
I recall that the muscles of my legs and shoulders began to get cramped and to tremble, that my two fingers began to bend down under the pressure, to get red all over and to ache, I remember that I was drenched with sweat and that I began to faint... And when the trembling increased up to the point when I collapsed, they made me sit and speak... After a time of this, I broke down. I told them I was willing and eager to tell them all they wanted...
After Shipkov had signed a confession to the effect that he had worked towards the ‘destruction of the regime through foreign intervention’, and after he had agreed to continue working at the legation as an informer, he was released. Whether the answers he gave to the questions put by the examiners were true or false did not appear to concern them, said Shipkov; they were satisfied by his apparent complete submission to their will.
The Bulgarian police made a mistake about Shipkov, however. He possessed more courage than they thought. On the day following his release he made a statement to Mr Heath, the US Minister, exposing the methods used to obtain his ‘confession’ and denying that he had at any time been instructed by anyone in the American Legation to engage in any subversive or espionage activity. This statement was eventually published in full by the US Information Service (March 1950) under the title Forced Confession.
Negotiations were then opened by the American Legation to obtain permission for Shipkov and his family to leave the country.
During the prolonged negotiations which Mr Heath conducted with the Foreign Office for the issuance of passports and exit visas... Mr Poptomov (then Foreign Minister, now also Vice-Premier and a member of the Politbureau) personally assured Mr Heath on 11 October 1949 that the maltreatment of Shipkov was altogether against the policy of his government. He went so far as to inform Mr Heath that he had personally recommended to the Interior Ministry that passports and visas be granted to the Shipkovs. (Forced Confession, pp 3-4)
Shipkov had taken refuge in the US Embassy, but after a time it was considered inexpedient for him to remain there, and so he made an attempt to leave the country and was picked up by the police. Although the US authorities were aware that a trial was in preparation, based on this ‘confession’ of Shipkov’s, no move was made to make his statement public. Even when it was known that he had been caught trying to get out of the country, it was still considered that publication of his statement would be prejudicial to his interests. On 20 February, the day before the Bulgarian authorities published the indictment in the forthcoming Shipkov trial, charging that the US Embassy was a ‘nest of spies’, the US broke off diplomatic relations. But it was not until 4 March, two days before the trial opened, that the US State Department released Shipkov’s exposure of the methods by which his confession had been obtained. The failure to give immediate publicity to his statement would now seem to have been an error of judgement. The Bulgarian authorities had obviously all along had no intention of granting a passport and visa so that he could leave the country legally, and since his statement was in any case eventually published, nothing appears to have been gained by the delay. One sympathises with those called upon to make a decision in such difficult circumstances, but the lesson to be learned from this affair is that reliance upon the good faith of Communist statesmen is useless, and adherence to the niceties of diplomatic conventions may be carried too far.
It came as a surprise to no one that at his subsequent trial Shipkov repented and denied that he had made any statement at all to the US authorities. There is another very informative piece of evidence regarding police methods in the satellite states. A trial of a number of people accused of currency offences, ‘uncovered in the course of the Mindszenty case’, took place in Hungary on 28 February 1949. One of the accused in this trial declared in court that he had been forced to ‘confess’ by physical ill-treatment, the marks of which, he alleged, could still be seen on his body. He retracted the confession he had made, stating that ‘no one could have been beaten up more’ and gave the name of the official responsible for this treatment. The presiding judge did not pull him up whilst he was making this charge, but the prosecutor subsequently emphasised that this stubborn denial of guilt must prejudice any plea in mitigation of his crimes. Another of the accused also alleged that after one month of solitary confinement he had furnished the names of four innocent friends as his accomplices, in order to comply with police wishes and bring his sufferings to an end. He did not, however, deny his own guilt, but insisted that he had involved innocent people because of his mental distress and confusion. Taking courage from these retractions, four others followed suit: one stating that after his sojourn at police headquarters he would have been prepared to say that he had murdered his own mother; and another stating that he had been promised by his interrogators that if he confessed he would only be interned for six months, and even this might be commuted on appeal to four.
Later in the trial, however, the man who had started all the trouble by making the first retraction — exercising his right of a ‘final plea for mercy’ — abjectly begged the court’s pardon for his attitude the previous day, saying that this had been due to two months of physical and mental strain. Following this, only one of the rest of the accused still maintained that his confession implicating others was false, although he did not deny his own guilt. This man received six years’ imprisonment, while the one who had reaffirmed his confession and fully withdrawn his charge of intimidation received only three years. The Hungarian press limited itself to the bare statement that some of the accused at this trial had complained of ill-treatment while in prison — complaints that were, of course, entirely without foundation. Since this trial was a minor affair no foreign correspondents were present, or at least none had gone to the trouble of obtaining official permission to attend, and it was therefore assumed that none had in fact attended. However, the news seeped out. It is information of this nature that the People’s Democracies are so anxious should not come to the notice of the West, and that the authorities therefore list under the general heading of ‘espionage information’. The New York Herald Tribune of 11 February 1949 reported a similar case. A defendant in a Czech trial by the name of Lubomír Pánek declared that:
... he was beaten over the head by police until his head was covered with blood. He asked that his cell-mate be called as a witness to the beating. The court refused the request and promptly granted a demand by the state prosecutor that Pánek be tried on the additional charge of ‘insulting the police’ as well as on other charges of plotting against the government.
The courageous stand of this young man touched off a series of similar charges by others among the twenty-nine accused. A guarded reference to the incident was made by Obrana Lidu, a Czech Army newspaper, which said that Mr Pánek had ‘falsely accused the security organs of abusing their official authority’, and would be therefore tried in a separate proceeding on the additional charge of ‘insulting the police’.
It is clear from all the foregoing evidence that the methods employed vary in accordance with the character and personal circumstances of each individual accused. But the basic condition requisite for the successful application of the technique is that the accused shall be completely at the mercy of the accusers, who must hold in their hands all the political, economic and social pressures that can possibly be applied to break his morale, and who can dispose of the accused’s person, and the persons of those near and dear to him, as they think fit. In other words, the technique can be effective only in the conditions of a totalitarian regime. On this essential basis the victim’s will to resist is broken down by a process of intense interrogation, more or less prolonged according to the physical and mental calibre of the person concerned. The examiners may rave, threaten, vilely abuse; or affect to be honestly concerned with the victim’s fate, reasoning with him, even pleading with him. There is in all this nothing personal; the accused is merely the object of a studied and highly developed technique. During these sessions of mental conditioning the accused may be compelled to stand or sit in such a position that what at first is mere discomfort becomes with the passing of hours acute torture. The victim’s powers of resistance are at the same time weakened by poor nourishment and lack of sleep.
There is, of course, nothing particularly mysterious or even new about the mere mechanics of this technique, which have been used elsewhere than in Russia and her satellites. But while the ‘Third Degree’ can sometimes successfully extort a confession and sometimes even ensure that the accused will maintain this confession in court, it is extremely limited in its application. Not only are there considerable risks attending the use of such methods in non-totalitarian countries, but there are numerous other factors preventing their widespread application, and certainly in no country with any semblance of democracy could even a single confession trial be successfully staged by such means. Only in certain peculiar circumstances can the elements of the ‘Third Degree’ be combined and quantitatively raised until a qualitative change is effected — resulting in what may be termed the ‘Fourth Degree’.
It may be argued that all the evidence here adduced on this question of the Soviet interrogation technique comes from witnesses necessarily hostile to those responsible for the confession trials. That is perfectly true. The only non-hostile testimony on Soviet interrogation methods given has been from the book produced under the auspices of Maurice Edelman (a work that is quite obviously less an account of experiences than a cleverly constructed defence of the Moscow Trials). The fact that this is so could, however, hardly be avoided; nor does it invalidate the evidence. But even if all of it be rejected as prejudiced, there still remain two considerations of overwhelming weight, entitling us to affirm that the confessions are not freely given and that undue influence is exerted to obtain them. First, the confessions have been proved false on points vital to the whole structure of the prosecution’s case. This was particularly so with the first two Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1937, which were, as we have already pointed out, minutely analysed by the commission that sat under the chairmanship of the American liberal and philosopher, John Dewey. The exposure of absurdities, inconsistencies, illogicalities and demonstrable falsehoods in the confessions made by the accused in these two trials has never been refuted. The second, and even more weighty, consideration, because it applies also to all subsequent trials, is the fact that the preliminary investigation is always surrounded by a veil of secrecy. We claim to have torn down that veil. The only way in which those interested to refute this claim can do so is to abolish this secrecy. So long as what takes place behind the scenes is a secret to be guarded with the utmost vigilance, so long as the prisoner can be held incommunicado until the trial opens, without the slightest possibility of discussing his defence with anyone independent of the authorities, so long we shall be entitled to maintain that the testimony we have cited above has not been, and cannot be, refuted.
It is therefore always with the above background in mind that one must consider the following record of the export of the confession trial to the territory of Europe.