Robert Conquest - What to Do When the Russians Come

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the cells have no lavatories at all, only a bucket. Sometimes there is just a hole in the floor without any separation from the sewage system: all the stench from the sewage system thus comes back inside the cells, which have no proper ventilation system.

In punishment cells the conditions are worse. You are kept in solitary confinement in a room which is about 24½ sq.m. The only light is from a small bulb in a deep niche in the ceiling.

At night you sleep on wooden boards raised a few inches off the ground without any mattress or blankets or pillow. You are not allowed to have any warm clothing. Often there is no healing at all in winter. It is so cold that you cannot sleep, you have to keep warm by jumping up and running around your cell to keep warm.

At 6:00 o’clock in the morning your wooden bed is removed and there is nothing for you to do for the rest of the day, no newspaper to read, no books, no pen or pencil or paper-nothing.

According to the regulations a prisoner can only be put in solitary confinement for fifteen days, but quite often when one fifteen-day period ends prisoners are put back in for another fifteen days. I was lucky, because although I was in solitary confinement several times, I only had fifteen days at a time. Others were not so fortunate. It is quite customary for people to spend forty-five days in solitary.

In solitary confinement prisoners get a specially reduced diet. This is part of the punishment which I received in Vladimir prison in 1976 after Mr. Brezhnev had signed the Helsinki Declaration. On alternate days I had nothing to eat or drink except a small piece of coarse black bread and some hot water. On the other days I had two meals—in the middle of the day—some watery soup with a few cabbage leaves, some grains of barley, sometimes two or three potatoes. Most of the potatoes were black and bad. In the evening I had gruel made from oatmeal or some other cereal, a piece of bread and several little fish called kilka, which were rotten. However hungry I was, I could not eat them. That was all.

The shortage of food, the poor quality of the food you are given, and the appalling living conditions mean that almost everyone who has endured imprisonment suffers from stomach ulcers, enteritis or diseases of the liver, kidneys, heart, and blood vessels.

When I was first arrested I was very healthy, but after I had been in prison I too began to suffer from stomach ulcers and cholecystitis. This did not make any difference to the way I was treated. I was still put in the punishment cell on a reduced diet.

I was in the same cell with Yakov Suslensky, who suffers from a heart condition. He had a severe heart attack in an isolation cell, but was not taken out of isolation. He was moved, but only to another isolation cell. After he came out of isolation he had a stroke. This was in March 1976.

I was also in Vladimir prison with Alexander Sergienko who had tuberculosis. Notwithstanding this he was put in solitary confinement on a reduced diet.

I was also in prison with Mikhail Dyak, who suffers from Hodgkin’s disease. He was released early, but not until three years after confirmation of his diagnosis. I knew many other people who were not released even though they had cancer and other serious illnesses.

In prison you are allowed to send out one letter a month, but the authorities can deprive you of that. If prisoners try to describe their state of health or the lack of medical help in prison, their letters are confiscated.

In prison hospitals essential medicines are often not available. I remember in 1973 a man named Kurkis who had an ulcer which perforated. There was no blood available to give him a transfusion. He lay bleeding for 24 hours and then he died.

Next, we might take the experiences of Andrei Amalrik, who described what life is like in a labor camp.

The strict regime camp of Kolyma is 300 kilometres north of Magadan, where the winter lasts eight months and is very harsh: the temperature varies between 20 and 60 degrees Centigrade below zero.

The camp is surrounded by several rows of wire. Inside the wire are two wooden fences, and dogs patrol the space between them. The camp is divided into a living compound and a work compound. In the living compound are four barrack huts accommodating eight hundred prisoners.

All the prisoners have to wear uniforms made of thin grey cloth and very thin boots. Everyone has their name and number sewn on their clothes. You march everywhere in columns.

Prisoners are fed three times a day. Breakfast is a sort of thin porridge, dinner is soup. Those who have fulfilled their work norm get extra porridge. The soup is very poor and has very few vitamins. That is why most of the prisoners are ill.

Prisoners work in the machine and furniture factories where the dust fills your lungs, or outside cutting wood and in the construction brigades.

It is difficult enough to work outside when the temperature is less than minus 20 degrees Centigrade; at minus 50 or 60 degrees the conditions are almost unimaginable. When it is as cold as that there is a sort of dry fog, which means that if you extend your arm, you cannot see your hand. Yet every day you have to go out and work (with the exception of only one day when I was in camp). It is so cold that many prisoners suffer inflammation of the ear, which can lead to loss of hearing. You are allowed to wear extra clothing or a fur cap. I made a band to go over my ears out of some socks, but the guards believed that I must be wearing this so I could listen to the BBC, which of course was nonsense.

I was put in a punishment cell on two occasions. Once in prison and once in camp. I was in a cell by myself. The cell was 1.5 m. wide and 2.5 m. long. The bed in the cell was made of wood. It was attached by hinges to the wall. In the daytime it was raised up and locked against the wall. The only thing to sit on was the concrete block on which the bed rested.

When I was put in the punishment cell my usual clothes were taken away and I was made to wear specially thin clothes. There were no books. You were allowed to smoke. I was given warm food only every other day and then it was of very poor quality. On the other days I just had bread and water.

In the punishment cell the heating was very low and there was a window, but it had no glass in it, so that the intense cold came right into the cell. It was impossible to sleep. You had to keep moving about all night in order to keep warm.

I was lucky. I only spent five days in the punishment cells. The usual period was fifteen days. Frequently people spent fifteen days in the punishment cells, were let out for one day and then put back for a further fifteen days. Repeated solitary confinement means the slow destruction of the human body. Your personality is slowly destroyed.

Medicines are very poor and very few. In the camp where I was, there was one doctor who was not well qualified, one male nurse and one female nurse, whose objective was to see that people went to work.