Tag #148639 - Interview #95166 (Semyon Vilenskiy)

Once, when my father was away on business and my sister and I were at home, the door bell gave a demanding ring. I asked my sister to open the door. Few men swiftly proceeded into the room pushing her aside. ‘Don’t move. Do you have weapons?’ They took me with them and there was a search at home that lasted till next morning. They found letters, poems, notebooks, everything they could find. They found gunpowder on the entresol. My neighbor’s friend was a forester, perhaps, this was his gunpowder, but they added it to the evidence. There was a ready case: a poem against Stalin, wanted to kill him, prepared gunpowder, etc. I was taken to the Lubianka prison. They took away my boot laces, my belt, badges, everything made of metal. He first thing a man feels there is that he has to hold his trousers. They replaced metal nails in the boot soles with wooden ones and locked me in a box cell. Next morning I was taken to another cell with 6 other men in it.  There were spacious cells with parquet floors in the prison. Every detail was taken into consideration to exhaust, scare and humiliate a person. For meals we had cooked buckwheat, but with peas. We were allowed to go to the toilet twice in 24 hours. There was a toilet in the cell, but we could not use it in front of everybody else. My fellow prisoners told me that Zuskin, the leading actor of the Mikhoels’ Theater, and his friend were in this cell. There was a tale about him. One day, when he was escorted to his cell from another interrogation,  Zuskin dashed forward and hit his head against the window sill hoping to kill himself, but it didn’t happen and he was taken to the sanitary cell. Later he was executed. I was taken to interrogation on the first day. My fellow prisoners managed to explain that on the first interrogation officers imitate the particular seriousness of charges.  There were few interrogation officers waiting for me in the interrogation office as if the whole Moscow only discussed my arrest. There were phone calls, and some men came in and out with weapons. Though I was warned about it, I was still stupefied by these activities. They were not rude during interrogation, but they spoke with an anti-Semitic hint, as if they meant that Christian people would not dare to speak so deprecatingly about the people of power, whom one owns everything in the world. They asked questions about my friends and provoked me to report on my acquaintances. The Lubianka officers were the most mature anti-Semites I ever faced. There is no surprise that in 1952, when Jewish doctors were arrested, [24] those anti-Semites  arrested and brutally beat their chief prosecutor Doron, a Jewish man. There was an investigation and he was to be killed, when Stalin died and he was released. It should be mentioned that Stalin and the KGB office dealing with the so-called anti-Soviet elements, looked at Jews as oppositionists since there were many Jews in the Trotskiy [25] opposition. For some time I was called to interrogations at night. They decided to behave correctly with me at first. They said that my relative Zinoviy Vilenskiy was here. He cooperated with the power and was only sentenced to 5 years. This was my cousin brother imprisoned for refusal to report on others. Later it turned out he didn’t cooperate with them. They had no evidence against him. After 5 years in prison he returned without his teeth. My interrogation officers demanded that I signed the paper confirming that I told jokes. I didn’t sign anything and refused to admit that I was the author of these lines about Stalin. I thought that if they identified that I was the author they would shoot me, but they had no written proof of it. They didn’t beat me. This was a short period, when they did not beat prisoners. So they could not handle this situation, when they intended to undo an anti-Soviet organization, of which I was sort of a member, but I never said a word about anyone and never mentioned one name. One day they told me to pack and follow them. There was a truck with the ‘meat’ inscription on it in the yard. Inside it was divided into cages with other people in them, but we could not see each other.  At first I heard the noises of streets in Moscow, but then it became quiet. We were moving out of town for about half an hour. The truck stopped. There were birds singing and I heard the breechblocks clicking. I thought they were going to shoot us. It was scary, but the truck moved on. It stopped by Sukhanovskaya prison, right where the nuns had their cells.  This was a nunnery before 1935. They forced residents of few nearby villages to move out, chased away some nuns and killed the others and converted the nunnery into a prison. On 18 August 1948 I was taken to Sukhanovskaya prison. I was just 20 years of age. I got to know that this was the Sukhanovskaya prison only after 1953. I was taken to a small cell with cement floor. The stool and the table were fixed to the floor, and the berth was fixed to the wall. There was a transom window with blurred glass and wire bars and a narrow window sill. It hardly let any light in. I stumbled all the time and had bruises on my knees – I called it ‘a nose walk’. I knew, when the warden opened the peep hole to look in, and then I jumped onto the sill to breathe in some air.  They never took me out for walks. In 100 days I was outside only once, when they took me to a mental hospital for examination. Some prisoners lost their sanity in this prison. They screamed and howled at night, particularly women. I was not called for interrogation. I demanded a prosecutor. They sent me an investigation officer. I didn’t need him since he only demanded that I signed the paper that I wanted to kill Stalin. The warden didn’t allow me to sleep during a day. The cell was damp and cold. I was covered with furuncles. There were so worn out sheets and blankets in the Sukhanovskaya prison that it was impossible to tie them together to hang oneself on them. The cells were kept damp and cold on purpose. The meals consisted of 2 lumps of sugar and about 400 grams of bread ration. I cannot tell whether it was good or bad. It was damp. There was also undercooked pearl barley in the morning. I was young and hungry and ate this ration of cereal and then I suffered from terrible stomach pains. 100% gastritis for the rest of your life. Terrible condition. You can do nothing, you cannot talk to anybody, you are not allowed to read or write. My poems saved me. In these 100 days I wrote the biggest number of poems. I had to repeat them to learn them by heart. I worked with inspiration. I worked as hard as I worked never after. I remember all of these poems.