I told them about the highways they had in Germany. It was the first time I had seen such good roads. So that’s what I told them. And that is what became the subject of the charges. Roads!
[My arrest] was like in the movies. They came at night, they searched the whole apartment. The didn’t know what they were looking for. In the morning they put me in a car. There were four of them who came for me. In the car they always offer a cigarette. As soon as the door shut, everything changed. First they took off all your hooks and buttons from the pants, so you had to hold your pants up.
After that I went to a cell; it was not a special prison. It was downtown Rostov-on-Don, in a district where there were meat warehouses. They turned the warehouses into prisons. The average-size room was about 20 square meters. I was arrested in May. It was very hot, almost hard to breathe. There were about 12 people in the room. Not too crowded. All different people, I don’t know why most of them were there, other than the fact that they were criminals in the eyes of Soviet power.
At the beginning of my interrogation I didn’t say anything. They didn’t torture us–no slivers under our fingers or that sort of thing. But this is what they did: they prevented us from sleeping. And every night they would ask you the same questions: tell us about your anti-Soviet activities! I would start to nod off and they would shake me and say, “Are you here to sleep, or what?” Eventually I “confessed” to praising German roads.
The prosecutor said, “Did you tell about the German roads?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Did you praise those roads?”
“I did.”
He said that was called “praising life abroad.” It was a crime. By praising life abroad you spread gossip about life in the Soviet Union. Why? Because we don’t have roads like this. We have bad roads! That was the logic. It was anti-logic.
It cost me six years in jail. It was 1947. I was arrested, and I was released several days before Stalin died in 1953.
