If truth be told, I'm not an archive guy. Moreover, I wasn't an archival historian—meaning that, while I have a degree in history, I never had that borderline religious or even academic notion of archives as the ultimate source of knowledge or the feeling that I am inadequate as a professional without them. But it so happened that while doing a project for Memorial, I found myself in Russia's State Archive, which holds the case files of all defendants in Soviet-era political cases—a collection spanning over 100,000 cases. It did more than leave a lasting impression; it completely overhauled my ideas of how I should approach my personal Soviet past, our collective Soviet past, and life in general. I have been thinking about it in various modes ever since.

The majority of such case files are kept in Federal Security Service archives in different regions of Russia, and access to them is limited. You have to either prove your relation to the person whose file you want to access, or submit a special request, but you cannot copy case materials unless you are a relative. Your time with the documents is also limited, so you may not be able to do everything you need.

Meanwhile, Russia's State Archive is a treasure trove. It is one of the very few Russian-language institutions that offer access to such cases in the first place. I should emphasize that I have seen tens of thousands of these cases. And here is what I think I could share...

As an aside, I feel it's important to make another general remark about the external framework. I believe the first thing that struck me was the very fact that these case files are still being stored—the files of people charged with political crimes, mostly under Article 58 of the Soviet penal code. Those materials were marked for “indefinite retention.” The defendants are ordinary, unremarkable individuals. The only knowledge we have of them is limited to a file that was put together to charge them with a crime.

Many do not even belong to the written culture. They would not have been able to write anything about themselves; they even signed their statements with a cross. My first human, literary, spontaneous response was to see a vast, sprawling Soviet conspiracy theory. The conspiracy was indeed immense: a giant number of supposed enemies that had spun their webs around every domain to do as much harm as they could. A cloakroom attendant from a village club was accused of putting her hair on the coats of Communist Party members in order to give them lice. Her file features an envelope with a lock of her hair and the lice test results. The cases range from hers to that of a guy who somehow managed to escape the interrogation chamber (an incredibly rare incident) and attempt suicide by jumping out of the window. He survived. And the investigation went on, with the photograph of the broken window added to the case file.

People's fates intertwine with one another because the general logic of an investigator is not to chase after individual wrongdoers but to “bust” an entire ring. This is how the trade works; it's more efficient and better for your career. As a result, one defendant should ideally bring three, five, a dozen more. And if you read the files in chronological order, you can see how these nets are cast and who is connected to whom. Thirdly, I couldn't shake off the feeling of going in circles, locked in an endless cycle of repetition of the topic of guilt: that we're all guilty of something, and that immense guilt is a heavy burden on our shoulders. We are all defendants in these cases. And we have to keep repenting or, on the contrary, defending ourselves from accusations of always falling short.

Put together, these three motifs can provide at least some insight into the kind of past we share and the elements of the past that made it into the present. This serves as the general framework for any story I could share with you today.

This is the story of a woman called Nina Gnevkovskaya. A colleague from Memorial asked me to check in the Russian State Archive Catalog if her file was in the collection I was working on. Some dissidents mentioned her in their memoirs as an investigator who attended searches and behaved in a peculiar manner. As they wrote, she was not like the others. So I found her case file. Since the file was labeled with her name, it could only mean one thing: she was a defendant in this case, not an investigator. As it turned out, in the late 1940s, Gnevkovskaya, still a young girl, mingled with the Soviet “gilded youth.” They had either been born into privileged families or somehow made their way into circles that had access to trophy goods: early American jazz, fancy clothes, restaurants in hotels in downtown Moscow.

Political prisoners' case files are a phenomenal source of information about the epoch, from mundane details to the fabric of life. A case file could contain something that was never supposed to be there in the first place—something that could not have been preserved by any other means. It's what they call a time capsule. Someone buries it, and you dig it out 50 years later and look inside.

From that moment on, all that matters is your perspective and your approach. Personally, I can say that I learned and understood a great deal about the daily lives of Soviet people from these files.

After all, they make for a very particular type of source as they document political—that is, nearly spiritual—crimes. Even the very description of a criminal act can suggest a great deal of tiny, quirky details.

As we analyze and narrate cases, we use a questionnaire for factual description, developed precisely because we quickly realized that charges brought against the defendant were only a starting point. Moreover, charges were often based on a template, and the investigation could also follow the same template. Meanwhile, the file could be telling a completely different story, and to hear it, you need to ask the right questions—or at least notice that something is off. As a result, you understand that the story you're looking at is not what it seems.

Say there is a tram conductor who comes to the cafeteria and doesn't like the soup there. He says,

This is a very rare case and a different criminal code article: number 154a.  In the public domain, such cases are few and far between, especially if the convict was subsequently exonerated on these charges.

So we started from a completely unrelated plot and ended up with an entry about a cook who doesn't think much of Komsomol members, keeps flashing his partisan ID, engages in sodomy, and is very mediocre at his craft. End of story.

This case demonstrates the overlap between different realities and narratives, both political and unrelated to politics, in the same circumstances.

With very few exceptions, all of these people are completely unknown to the public. The main challenge, however, is that we initially see them exclusively as the perpetrators of a crime; they are defendants in a criminal case. From that point on, our job and our motivation is to pull at the thread and see the true story. On the one hand, we could simply approach them all as victims of Soviet terror. There is a common narrative, a general understanding that these victims matter, that they were not guilty of any crimes and that we must make their voices heard. But the next step is to try—since we have the chance to explore 100 pages of materials, sometimes rather “exquisite” in nature, about a completely unfamiliar individual—to try and see something the investigators did not mean for us to see. Something we can extract from the file by asking all sorts of questions.

And this is probably the part I enjoy the most. That is, my focus is not Soviet terror—it's the people. Their stories fascinate me a lot more than the repression apparatus. Its functioning has already been described reasonably well; Memorial has done an excellent job of it.

As for the ways it is applied to specific individuals, it's an immense problem because no two people are alike. While some cases are nearly identical, each person is unique.

There are files on the kind of people who often end up beyond the framework of any narrative because they could not write and did not leave any memoirs or testimonies.

There is the case of a peasant, filed at the beginning of the second Five-Year Plan in a village near Moscow. The starting point of the case is a dog running around in the village carrying a sign: “At the end of the Five-Year Plan, you'll eat me as well, kids.” Evidently, it is a reference to famine. The village has been tasked with meeting targets but struggles with extreme poverty.

So a Communist Party commission from the nearby town arrives in the village to inspect the crops, and local peasants are to report on the targets they met—or, preferably, exceeded. The incident that follows is the substance of the case.

Afterward, when it becomes known (news travels fast), his escapade—the fact that he fed them with dog meat — is interpreted as an anti-Soviet act, a crime.

The most fascinating thing about his case is the political interpretation of the act. According to the reports, the delegation members were discredited, and village children followed them around and imitated barking. They were dubbed “dog eaters,” as though they were disgraced by being offered dog meat.

The peasant, in turn, most likely wanted to show them, “Look how poor we are; we cannot offer you anything other than this dog.”

What captivated me was the very nature of the act. There is a background to this story, of course. And there are plenty of details: at first, the party delegation did not understand what they were eating. They kept asking the peasant, “What kind of meat are we eating?” “I'll tell you later. Eat first, and then you'll find out.” The file also includes the conclusion of a veterinarian, who studied the bones left after the meal and established that they were dog bones.

At that point, we enter the space of interpretations: what the peasant saw or may have seen in his act, how the delegation members took it, and the village kids... The most relatable motive is probably the desire to mock and belittle the authorities. It is an act of bullying: feeding them with dog meat to humiliate them in the eyes of the villagers.

ТThe emerging meanings and the way they are described in the file, as well as the factual side of the case and the prosecution's theory, present us with a greatly generalized issue of understanding,

Of course, I immediately thought there had to be a cultural background. It was all the more fascinating that the act had been committed by someone completely ignorant. I do not want to overstate the degree of his illiteracy: He may have had a few years of school, but he was certainly not a reader of ancient literature who knows stories of someone being offered particular foods. He was not sophisticated enough to understand the semantics of his actions.

Since I often use Varlam Shalamov's works as reference points, I could not but recall his short story “A Day Off.” The protagonist, an imprisoned priest, attempts to say a prayer on a Sunday at the camp. Afterward, his fellow inmates, real criminals, invite him to eat with them. As they say, they came by a chunk of veal. Once he's eaten, they tell him that they killed the puppy this priest had fed to keep it alive. They killed a creature he treated as a friend. Learning that, he feels sick and vomits.

It's a brilliant short story, and Elena Mikhaylik offers a very profound semantic analysis of this work, focusing mostly on the interpretation of this scene as a Black Mass: You are being told you are eating lamb, but it was in fact substituted with dog meat. This case also includes an element of the Danse Macabre, so to speak.

I attempted to approach its manifestations from several perspectives. There are several possible explanations for why feeding dog meat to a delegation of party members is a political act.

At the end of the day, the peasant was sentenced to five years or so in a labor camp.

There was a case of a young woman, 19 or 20 years old, who was arrested for discrediting the Soviet Army—a “crime” that has gained popularity again in modern-day Russia. She was a nurse and served at a military unit in the summer of 1942 before being sent to the rear. In the company of her peers in Moscow or the Moscow Region, she started sharing what she'd seen: that everyone was retreating, that there were no weapons, and that entire villages surrendered. And that by and large, the Germans weren't that horrible. She even made her way across an occupied area without getting in trouble.

All of her stories were used as evidence against her. She denied everything, saying she was wrongfully accused by a soldier who was in the room and that she said nothing of the sort— that, on the contrary, she extolled the Soviet army for doing all it could to protect everyone.

The investigator tries to catch her in a lie. He says, look, here is what we have in your profile... As an aside, it is very important to first look at the defendant through their profile—a typical Soviet two-page question form: surname, name, patronymic, place of birth, family background, parents' occupation, Communist Party membership status. At that stage, one can already identify many of the constants. The nurse's profile states that she was an orphan and that she was raised in an orphanage.

So the investigator says, “You told us you're an orphan. But you are deceiving the investigation because we found your letters to your father and his replies. See, I caught you lying, so we cannot believe anything else you say.”

The next interrogation begins with the investigator returning to that story and insisting that she lied because they had found a photograph of the girl's father in her belongings. She says, “This isn't my father. I worked as a cleaner in an office and they had a filing cabinet with photographs. At some point, I needed to imagine the face of the man on whose behalf I was writing letters to myself. So I took this photograph and pretended he was my father.” The photograph in question is in the file; I even have it at home because I want to give it some thought.

She goes on to explain that she lived in a dorm and that, at some point, she developed a routine of sorts... Essentially, she was immersed in an imaginary world and even read letters from her fictitious father to her roommates.

Those were very nice letters. They are in her file, too, and they are not easy to read. They got me thinking about this lack of love. Interestingly, the letters mention her mother, but there is no correspondence with her. The “father” keeps writing that her mother is sick, and so on.

But as a source studies expert, I struggle to give a definitive answer. The father—and his letters—may indeed have been real. I toyed with the idea of conducting a graphological examination at some point... The handwriting is visibly different from hers, but she may have been able to change it at will or asked someone else to write the letters down. Overall, her father's letters look somewhat suspicious. They resemble clean copies and look more like essays on a particular topic, penned in a notebook.

Where are lies and where is the truth? The investigators tried to catch her lying about the army. This brought me back to her being horribly lonely and miserable, yearning for support, yearning for human connection, a dialog with someone.

The reason why she talked so much about her frontline experience in the first place becomes apparent. It stems from the understanding of her personality as someone who covets public attention. When she came back and started telling all those stories, she found herself in the spotlight.

Emotions play a role in many cases, of course.

Why did the lack of love—or rather, the state of no longer being loved—come to the forefront of my mind? The Russian word (the concept can be described with a single word in Russian) comes from Varlam Shalamov's “Kolyma Tales.” This collection of short stories includes a story titled “A Child's Drawings,” which stands out from Shalamov's other works with its almost complete lack of action. The narrator finds a child's notebook in a heap of garbage outside the labor camp where he is serving his sentence. His first thought is to make use of the paper for smoking or some other purpose. But as he leafs through the drawings in the notebook, he remembers how he drew as a child and reflects on what kind of a world the young artist depicted—the world they all live in.

At that point, Shalamov's narrator recalls the old northern legend of how God created the taiga. That world was fresh and vivid, just two or three colors, but not much to look at. Soon God realized it was too simple, too primitive. He grew bored with that world and abandoned it, moving south to create something more sophisticated.

And that discarded, forgotten world still exists—a cold, glum place with only two or three colors, a place where people are not supposed to live at all. It was to that godforsaken world—a place no one needs or loves anymore—that political prisoners were exiled. It was as though we stopped loving or needing them all.

In fact, this is an apt metaphor for what happened to people in the case files. Basically, they were told, “You're not like us anymore. You're no longer our comrades—you're our enemies. You're not our brothers; we disown you.”

“No, I'm not the enemy. I'm the same as you are. I want to stay with you, Comrade Investigator, in our common Soviet world.”

“No, you're no longer one of us. We deprive you of your right to be our equal. And now that it's done, we can do whatever we want to you—even torture.”

We are examining the issue of evidence of torture during investigations very closely. Historian and human rights activist Arseny Roginsky suggested a formula: As he pointed out, interrogation reports leave out the most important things. There is very little information about torture in case files because torture was never documented. One can only find circumstantial evidence or make suggestions.

Say, if an interrogation began at nine in the evening and continued until seven in the morning and the report is only a page and a half long, the question is, what happened in those ten hours? No one knows.

We realized that we should pay attention to such details; additionally, there are accounts of torture in exoneration files from the 1950s and sometimes in case review appeals submitted from labor camps.

When convicts write why they were compelled to say what they said, there are some mind-boggling stories. Anything you can suggest or imagine would probably be too cinematographic; reality exceeds any fiction.

One man describes torture as being interrogated for eternity—a never-ending marathon of interviews. Between the interviews, he was not sent back to his cell but locked in a cabinet in the interrogation chamber, where he was forced to listen to other inmates being tortured. And being kept in that room for so long was what eventually broke him.

All accounts of torture have one common trait...

You are in a room with someone who treats you as though you are not a human being. “You are no longer loved; you are not the same as I; I can do whatever I want to you. No one's coming to help.”

Such examples abound; they make themselves seen in the very language. On the one hand, the defendants feel sorry for themselves; on the other hand, they wonder, “What on earth happened? What kind of anti-Soviet people are these investigators? How come they have deprived us of the right to be with you all? How is that even allowed?”

The most impressive example we have seen is a text penned by a 1930s lawyer, who knows the law to the letter. He says, “This is outrageous. You must do something about it.” He writes to the NKVD reception: “I can see how the very foundations of the Soviet order are crumbling.”

This phenomenon first attracted my attention as I read Jean Amery's “At the Mind's Limits,” in which he looks back on his experience of surviving Nazi death camps. Torture is at the center of his account.

Amery says that torture is something you can never truly leave behind. The author is convinced that once you experience torture, you cannot process and overcome it as a trauma. He reflects on what could be done instead: What could make him feel better, what could set him free? And he concludes: He would feel liberated if he could go back to the past with his executioner and if his executioner commiserated with him. If the executioner recognized him as human at the moment of torture and said, “I am tremendously sorry for what I'm doing.”

He writes that he feels partial relief knowing that some of his torturers were subsequently tried and executed by a firing squad: “I think—I hope—that at the very last moment, they thought, ‘Well, I wish I hadn't done it. I probably shouldn't have done all the things I did.’”

It's not the same thing, but it's something. The goal is to return to the world of humans, to the world of those who cannot be treated like that.

For me, this also has to do with acceptance, with overcoming the feeling that you are no longer loved.

We studied several cases of investigators dated 1939 filed against those who actively enforced the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. By 1939, they had themselves become defendants: a classic Soviet twist. Why were they prosecuted? Naturally, the policy was ostensibly not the problem—no one was in a hurry to admit that the Great Terror had been a mistake; the blame was placed on irregularities and enemies within the system. And so it was time to eliminate those enemies. As could be expected, investigators who had been working in the field and were therefore responsible for the “irregularities” were the most obvious scapegoats.

Many of those investigators reacted very dramatically, realizing what was in store for them. There are accounts of suicide attempts. When you realize what they are about to do to you and know that you will not survive this, there appears to be no way out.

I'm not sure what that meant: possibly that he snapped off fragments of coils and swallowed them. He survived—a Soviet investigator who ate his own metal bed and lived to be exonerated in the 1950s.

When investigators found themselves at the other side of the interrogation table, they joined other defendants in the same coordinate system, but they already knew their way around it. The investigators whose files I read cited specific regulations: “There was a directive to that effect, and I was told I was supposed to do this.”

Their cases are fascinating because they describe the reality of their earlier work. A quote: “I was interrogating that man, beating him up, and then I went to my phone and they called me and said: ‘Break him.’” This was real; this was how the system worked.

And, “I'm sorry, of course, but I only did what I had to—those were the rules.” There is also a response to the prospect of facing the same fate as their defendants: “There has been a mistake, don't do this to me, I did nothing to deserve this.”

One investigator attracted my particular attention. He worked several exceptional cases, and one could tell he was keen to use them to propel his career. His last name was Pavlovsky. He had a fairly impressive career up until his arrest in the early 1950s, related to an anti-Jewish case inside the Ministry of State Security, the predecessor of the KGB.

and was sent to the infamous Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital, where many political prisoners were kept, including Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Petro Hryhorenko, and Valeriya Novodvorskaya. During his time at the high-security hospital, he lost the ability to move a part of his torso and his hand—overall, he must have experienced a major mental shift regarding what had happened to him.

It is also fascinating to read about his earlier work as an investigator because a few of the defendants in his cases were eventually certified insane. In some of the cases, the defendant's behavior was later interpreted as a sign of mental illness. Pavlovsky's approach seemed very expressive, almost theatrical, and the majority of cases he worked had to do with the art scene. Subsequently, rumors began to spread among his former defendants that he, a fairly well-known investigator in the final years of his career, lost his mind and died in the Kazan Psychiatric Hospital.

The latter was not true, because we found Pavlovsky's urn at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow. I don't think I have paperwork to prove it, but as far as I can remember, he was indeed sent to the Kazan hospital but was released after a while. He died five or six, maybe even seven years later.

Another distinctive trait of the epoch: a lot of people whom Pavlovsky investigated are also buried at the Donskoye Cemetery, and there he is, right next to them, cozily tucked into a niche. After death, they all form a new hierarchy of sorts.

The so-called case of the Sokolniki Psychiatric Hospital is a total box-office hit. The story unfolds in the first half of the 1930s.

The plot revolves around a mental health facility—something between a health resort and a psych ward—in Moscow's Sokolniki. Situated in the forest, the facility attracted patients from among high-ranking Communist Party officials: nervous breakdowns, alcohol addiction, frustration at the failure of the global revolution.

The case was brought against the doctors of the hospital. As it turned out, they had been using terms of the Party apparatus as names for hospital wards: the ward for violent patients was jokingly called Politburo, other wards, Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) and VTsIK (the All-Russian Central Executive Committee). The doctors distributed patients across this hierarchy. They would say,

An absolute, incredible danse macabre.

When we wrote this story down, I used Dmitry Likhachev's works on the Old Russian laughing culture, of course, and his concept of the antiworld. There is a world that looks exactly like ours, except everything is upside down. In that psychiatric hospital, senior Party members were reshuffled to form a different kind of hierarchy—a carnival kind based on the degree of madness and insanity.

The case was partially overseen by the investigator Pavlovsky (you can read more about him in the story “Investigator Pavlovsky”). The defendant, Nina Chebarina, was a practicing doctor at the hospital, an ordinary medical professional without any special credentials. At first, charges were also brought against the chief physician, Dr. Kirillov, but he turned out to be too high profile: He was friends with Ulyanov, the elder brother of Vladimir Lenin himself. Although there were testimonies against him, all of the charges were instantly dropped: Apparently, he was important to the authorities, and it kept him safe. As for his subordinate, who admitted that she'd heard her colleagues say something of the kind, that she'd never stopped them and even sometimes joined in, the case against her continued.

The very description of the hospital is incredibly powerful, shedding light on the practice of political insanity. One of my favorite characters is Sergey Konstantinovich Minin. This man stood alongside Stalin during the Battle of Tsaritsyn in the Russian Civil War, fighting for the city that would later be known as Stalingrad. Minin played such a prominent role in the Communist Party that two options were on the table for Tsaritsyn's renaming: Stalingrad (the winning option) and Miningrad, proposed by the man himself.

From then on, we trace her path and see her end up in Moscow's hospitals, which aren't very numerous, with her former colleagues as treating doctors. We also learn that she was later transferred to special labor colonies for mental health patients, where she eventually began practicing medicine again. The latest record of her is an entry from the 1950s, when she had her rights fully reinstated and resumed work at a psychiatric hospital. In other words, she had gone full circle, from doctor to patient and then back to doctor.

Later, when we learn that investigator Pavlovsky was himself adjudicated mentally incompetent, it makes the picture even more complete. Again, this explains why I assign such great importance to this case. It puts to test the entire system: the conspiracy, the guilt. It brings us to the very edge, where we can see that the entire world had partially gone mad, that the system in place was in fact a system of insanity. Essentially, this could be a possible, valid explanation of what Stalin's Terror was. There is a common trope that we simply misunderstand what happened. It was like a case of mass insanity. Why so many arrests all of a sudden? Where did all those innumerable charges come from? What kind of a world is that? In this regard, a political investigation set in a psychiatric hospital is almost a case study. We should keep in mind, though, that this case, dated 1933 or 1934, belongs to the early period of Stalin’s Terror.