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Chapter II, Reading 4 Psychological Torment Some of the most effective torture is psychological, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attests in The Gulag Archipelago, his classic 1974 treatise on Soviet forced labor camps. He himself had been imprisoned from 1945 to 1953. Let us begin with psychological methods. [...] 1. First ofall: night. Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night?[...] Because at night, the prisoner torn from sleep, even though he has not yet been tortured by sleeplessness, lacks his normal daytime ,equanimity and common sense. He is more vulnerable. [...] 5. Preliminary humiliation was another approach. [...] At the Lubyanka,12 Aleksandra O-va refused to give the testimony demanded of her. She was transferred to Lefortovo.13 In the admitting office, a woman jailer ordered her to undress, allegedly for a medical examination , took away her clothes, and locked her in a ''box" naked. At that point the men jailers began to peer through the peephole and to appraise her female attributes with loud laughs. Ifone were systematically to question former prisoners, many more such examples would certainly emerge. They all had but a single purpose: to dishearten and humiliate. [...] 8. The lie. We lambs were forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like. [...] Intimidation through enticement and lies was the fundamental method for bringing pressure on the relatives of the arrested person when they were called in to give testimony. "If you don't tell us such and such" (whatever was being asked), "it's going to be the worst for him . .. You'll be destroying him completely." (How hard for a mother to hear that!) "Signing this paper" (pushed in front of the relatives) "is the only way you can save him" (destroy him). 9. Playing on one's affection for those loved was a game that worked beautifully on the accused as well. It was the most effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved. (Oh, how foresighted was the saying: "A man's family are his enemies.") Remember the Tatar who bore his sufferingshis own and those of his wife-but could not endure his daughter's! In 1930,-Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: ''We'll arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics!" [...] They would threaten to arrest everyone you loved. Sometimes this would be done with sound effects: Your wife has already been arrested, but her further fate depends on you. They are questioning her in the next room- 64 Chapter II just listen! And through the wall you can actually hear a woman weeping and screaming. (Mter all, they all sound alike; you're hearing it through a wall; and you're under terrific strain and not in a state to play the expert on voice identification. Sometimes they simply play a recording of the voice of a "typical wife"-soprano or contralto-a labor-saving device suggested by some inventive genius.) And then, without fakery, they actually show her to you through a glass door, as she walks along in silence, her head bent in grief. Yes! Your own wife in the corridors of State Security ! You have destroyed her by your stubbornness! She has already been arrested! (In actual fact, she has simply been summoned in connection with some insignificant procedural question and sent into the corridor atjust the right moment, after being told: "Don't raise your head, or you'll be kept here!") Or they give you a letter to read, and the handwriting is exactly like hers: "I renounce you! Mter the filth they have told me about you, I don't need you any more!" (And since such wives do exist in our country, and such letters as well, you are left to ponder in your heart: Is that the kind of wife she really is?) The interrogator Goldman (in 1944) was trying to extort testimony against other people from V. A. Korneyeva with the threat: 'We'll confiscate your house and toss your old women into the street." A woman of deep convictions, and firm in her faith, Korneyeva had no fear whatever for herself. She was prepared to suffer. But, given our laws, Goldman's threats were all too real, and she was in torment over the fate of her loved ones. When, by morning, after a night of tearing up rejected depositions, Goldman...

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