SOVIET METHODS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 136, 24 May 1933, Page 5

SOVIET METHODS

PRISONER’S EXPERIENCE SENTENCED WITHOUT TRIAL BARBARIC O.G.P.U. TORTURES. Critics of ’ the action of the British Government in connection with the arrest of the Vickers engineers in Russia recently are always loud in declaring that reports describing Soviet methods are contrary to fact. Any doubts on this point will be quickly dispehed if note is taken of what was said by an escaped Russian prisoner in a letter he wrote recently to the London “Times.”

The writer of this letter is Vladiailr Vyacheslavoviteh Tchernavin, who was from 1918 to 1923 senior assistant, to the Professors of Biology and Zoology in tire Petrograd Agronomical Institute, and from 1921 to 1923 was Professor of Ichthyology there. He took part in many scientific expeditions, and after 1923 devoted himself entirely to research work. From 1926 to 1930 ho was in charge of the biological and technological laboratories of the Northern Fisheries Trust at Murmansk. He was arrested in October, 1930; but in August, 1932, he escaped to Finland, together with his wife and son, who came to visit him at Solovetsky Concentration Camp. There can be no reason for doubting the truth of Professor Tchernavin’s statements, which show that there was ample justification for the fears that the pickers engineers were unlikely to be treated in accordance with the rules of justice as they arc generally known. The text of the letter is as follows:— TORTURE DURIN:' INQUIRY “In the ‘lzvestia” of March 24, 1933, the Chief Prosecutor of U.S.S.K., Vyshinsky, said, apropos the arrest in Moscow of the Englishmen employed by the Metropolitan-Vickers Company, that in U.5.3.R. the accused arc not put to torture during the inquiry. I was in the G.P.U. prison in Petersburg in 1930-31, accused of being a ‘wrecker.’ I affirm that the G.P.U. inquiry consisted solely in trying to obtain from the prisoners by means of moral and physical torture a confession of crimes they had not committed. “In a cell measuring 75 square yards more than a hundred of the accused were kept. The cell was infested with bugs and lice. Food was insufficient, and the diet was such that almost all the prisoners were ill with scurvy. They were kept in these conditions from six months to two or more years awaiting their sentence.

“The investigating officer wanted me to sign a statement that ‘I plead guilty to being a wrecker.’ As I refused to do so, I was threatened, by way of ‘bringing pressure to bear’ upon me: (1) That I should be shot; (2) that my wife would be arrested, and my son, a boy of 12„ -would be sent to an institution for vagrant children; (3) that my wife would be kept in prison during the whole of the inquiry into my case; (4) that my wife would be sent to penal servitude; (5) that unless I signed the statement within three days I should be shot on the fourth day; (6) finally I was taken in the night as though to be shot. “In spite of this I did not sign the false statement. Then they did not cross-examine me any more, and sent me without trial to five years’ penal servitude at the Solovetsky Concentration Camp, from where I escaped in August, 1932. OTHER MEASURES APPLIED. “Prisoners who were in the same eell with me had the following measures applied to them in order to wring ‘confession’ from them:— (1) ‘Standing’— the prisoner was made to stand without food or drink or sleep for as long as six days and nights; (2) ‘the cold punishment cell,’ where the windows were kept open in winter and the prisoner was undressed; (3) ‘the wet punishment cell,’ where the floor was covered with water to a depth of 6in. to loin., where there were no sanitary arrangements whatsoever and no bed — only a narrow bench to sit on; (4) the ‘crowded cell,’ —as many as 300 people, men and women, were so crowded together that they had to stand closely pressed against one another; the room was kept very hot and they were forbidden to sit or lie down. Few could endure more than six days of this; (5) ‘conveyer,—the accused were made to run, 40 people at a time, in procession from storey to story, from room to room, until they signed what was required of them or fell down senseless. Cases of death, suicide, and madness among prisoners awaiting trial are very frequent. “These tortures were inflicted in Leningrad prisons chiefly upon educated people, including many well-known scholars and scientists. AH the convicts I met at the Solovetsky Camp told mo that the same methods were used by the G.P.U. in other parts of U.S.S.R. as well. I am prepared to supply all the details on the subject that are known to me.” I.L.P. INCONSISTENCY. Yet, in the face of such facts as presented in Professor Tchernavin’s letter, the British Independent Labour Party declares “to the workers of Russia that if any conflict develops between the British Government and Soviet Russia our stand will be with them and not with the capitalist and imperialistic Government of this country.” The I.L.P. denounces as “hypocrisy the pretence of the British Government that it is concerned in the principles of justice in its attitude towards the trial in Moscow.” The I.L.P.’s preference for Soviet rather than British justice will not be shared by people who are prepared to acknowledge the facts, as so indisputably presented in the letter quoted above.

The inconsistency of the I.L.P. was mentioned by Lord Seibourne in a letter to the “Times.” He refers to the fact that a Labour demonstration in

Albert Hall last month condemned “the policy of repression and cruelty pursued since the accession to pow r er of the Hitler Government in Germany,” declaring such a policy to bo “a Serious menace to political and civil liberty and good understanding between nations,” and protesting against the “arbitrary arrest, ill-treatment, torture, or murder of political opponents.” Lord Selbourne then asks: “What about Russia and the happenings under the Lenin and Stalin Governments? So far as I know the Labour Party and the T.C.U. have never held an official meeting at Albert Hall or anywhere else to protest against, happenings in Russia. Why not? Was there ever such a case of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel?” What the Labourites condone in Russia they condemn in Germany, while, as another correspondent points out. somewhat similar merciless treatment of political opponents and their property in Spain and Mexico passes unnoticed.