Prisoner: Anna Andreeva
“Usually people write about being beaten and tortured. But it was not always the case. I was not beaten. I think I was not beaten because the interrogator soon realized that he could break me by totally different means with much better results. People who worked there were professionals…The interrogator called me by my first name and patronymic, and recited poems to me. He told me: “Alla Aleksandrovna, please, tell me how people like you and the others who are now under arrest, how you, Russian people, can grow such hatred toward our country’s regime and the way of life in our Motherland. We want to understand what our intelligentsia thinks…” I was a fool and told everything. For more than a year. I couldn’t forget that the man sitting before me interrogating me was Russian, like me. They used this sentiment as a trap… And so I openly and in detail explained to the detective what not only I but also others had against Soviet rule, Communism, everything that was done to Russia.”
An Enemy of the People
Those Left Behind
The parents, spouses, and children whom prisoners left behind faced a difficult life. In her poem "Requiem," Anna Akhmatova voiced the pain of those hoping for the slightest news about the fate of loved ones on the far side of the prison wall.
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad
And I pray not for myself alone
but for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall...
And if my country should ever assent
to casting in my name a monument,
I should be proud to have my memory graced,
but only if the monument be placed
not near the sea on which my eyes first opened—
my last link with the sea has long bee broken...
but here, where I endured three hundred hours
in line before the implacable iron bars...
And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets
may the melting show, like teardrops, slowly trickle...
Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Boston, 1973.