Prisoner: Lev Kopelev
“They called me over to the Party commission. The vote had gone against me. I had been expelled from the Party for ‘gross political errors, for showing pity for the Germans, for bourgeois humanism, and for harmful statements on questions of current policy.’ My card as candidate member of the Party was taken from me.
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.