wives on the stairwell had become nervous pleasantries. It must have been with relief that Bibikov prepared for his summer trip to a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in July 1937.
I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather's NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina's Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.
The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of 'Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region' for suspected involvement in a 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity'. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor's resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin - or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting - was charged with finding Bibikov 'in the town of Chernigov'. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov's NKVD jail.
What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he'd said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn't his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will - though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union's jails to bursting point that summer. 'The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,' writes Solzhenitsyn. 'Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.'
Yevgeniya Ginzburg's harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge, Into the Whirlwind, describes the infamous NKVD 'conveyor'. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were
I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather's NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina's Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.
The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of 'Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region' for suspected involvement in a 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity'. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor's resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin - or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting - was charged with finding Bibikov 'in the town of Chernigov'. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov's NKVD jail.
What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he'd said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn't his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will - though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union's jails to bursting point that summer. 'The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,' writes Solzhenitsyn. 'Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.'
Yevgeniya Ginzburg's harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge, Into the Whirlwind, describes the infamous NKVD 'conveyor'. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were
Similar Books
