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When there was time, the basic NKVD method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the “conveyor”—continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? No absolutely precise answer could be given.

But at any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was “as painful as any torture.”⁶⁶ In fact, we are told, though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough. One week is reported as enough to break almost anybody.⁶⁷ A description by a Soviet woman writer who experienced it speaks of seven days without sleep or food, the seventh standing up—ending in physical collapse. This was followed by a five-day interrogation of a milder type, in which she was allowed three hours’ rest in her cell, though sleep was still forbidden.⁶⁸

The conveyor and torture were not, of course, mutually exclusive. Recent Soviet accounts describe the actions of V. Boyarsky, still alive and in a post in a scientific commission. In the late 1930s, he served as interrogator in Northern Ossetia, where he “falsified accusations against 103 people, of whom 51 were shot and the remainder sent to camps, where most of them died.” On one occasion, he interrogated a woman schoolteacher, Fatimat Agnayeva, for eight days—and then had her hung by her hair to a bracket on the wall, where she died.⁶⁹

There is nothing new about the conveyor method. It was used on witches in Scotland. The philosopher Campanella, who withstood all other tortures during his interrogation in the sixteenth century, succumbed to lack of sleep. Hallucinations occur. Flies buzz about. Smoke seems to rise before the prisoner’s eyes, and so on.

Beck and Godin report a case in which interrogation lasted without any break for eleven days, during the last four of which the prisoner had to stand. Towards the end of even lesser periods, prisoners collapsed about every twenty minutes and had to be brought round with cold water or slaps.⁷⁰ Sitting on a stool for fourteen hours is, according to one victim, more painful than standing against a wall, where you can at least shift your weight from one foot to the other. The groin swells, and violent pains set in.

In Weissberg’s account of his interrogation, he mentions that on one occasion he was questioned for eighteen hours, and then left locked in the washroom, where the floor was under water.⁷¹ He was, however, able to lie down on a foot-rack. After fourteen hours, he was called out for a brief interrogation and sent back to find that the rack had been removed, so that he had to stand in an inch or so of water for forty hours, until the next interrogation. Later, he was beaten up, under the new practice, but was then returned to the conveyor. A “technical improvement” had been made in that the seat had been taken out of the chair, and it was extremely painful, even briefly.⁷²

There are very few accounts of successful resistance to the conveyor. One is of a fifty-five-year-old anarchist, Eisenberg, who on being called a counter-revolutionary refused to answer any more questions. Beating up had no effect on him, and he survived a conveyor lasting for thirty-one days—an extraordinary record. Examination by a doctor showed that though he was physically very sound, there was something abnormal about his imperviousness to pain. He is supposed to have been sent to a lunatic asylum.⁷³ Weissberg himself held out for seven days, helped by a brief interruption, but finally confessed. After a day’s rest, he withdrew the confession. Interrogation started again. This time he gave way on the fourth day, having already told the examiners that every confession he made he would withdraw when he recovered. The third conveyor session ended on the fifth day without his signing a fresh confession, though by now the interrogators had two “documents.”

And here we have the defect of the “conveyor.” Although it was almost always successful, and usually in two to three days, it has no essential advantage over torture proper (with which it was often combined), since the confessions it produced could be withdrawn.

THE LONG INTERROGATION