A Hidden World

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A Hidden World

My Nine Years in the Soviet Gulag

RAPHAEL RUPERT

Edited by Anthony Rhodes

Introduction by Edward Crankshaw

A Hidden World was originally published in 1963 by The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio, as A Hidden World: Nine Years of Confinement in Communist Prisons and Concentration Camps.

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 4

About the Author 5

Introduction 6

Acknowledgments 11

I. EASTWARD — 1947-1949 12

1. Arrest — JUNE 1947 12

2. Russian Interrogation — JULY 1947 16

3. Prisons on Wheels — DECEMBER 1948 22

II. RUSSIA — 1949-1954 28

4. Quarantine — MARCH 1949 28

5. The World of Prison Camps — APRIL 1949 32

6. The Bandits 40

7. Kaleidoscope of Nations 43

8. Women’s Camps 51

9. Self-Made Doctors 55

10. Forestry and a Punishment Brigade — DECEMBER 1949 63

11. In a Factory 70

12. On the Land 74

13. The Saints 77

14. The Cynics 80

15. The Death of Stalin — MARCH 1953 84

16. The Sky Darkens Again: Camp No. 5 — JULY 1953 88

17. Summoned to Moscow — JANUARY 1954 93

18. The Lubianka Prison — FEBRUARY 1954 96

III. WESTWARD — 1954-1956 105

19. The Long Road Home — MAY 1954 105

20. A Prisoner in my Own Country — NOVEMBER 1955 111

21. I Gain Freedom and Lose my Family — OCTOBER 1956 114

APPENDIX — The Death Sentence in Russia 118

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 119

About the Author

Raphael Rupert, son of Hungarian Kossuth party Chairman Dr. Rudolph Rupert, was an opposition leader to Horthy’s pro-Nazi regime until the German occupation in 1944. At age eighteen, he began his law studies at Budapest University. Prior to the Second World War, Rupert joined the legal department of the Pester Commonwealth Commercial Bank and also served as a Reserve Cavalry officer. During the German occupation of Hungary, he joined the Underground and worked with the Western allies in saving many Jews, allied airmen, and Dutch people by helping conceal them from the Nazis. At the time of his arrest in 1947, Rupert was working out of the British Embassy in Budapest. His trial, based on a presumed confession, ended in his summary sentence to Camp 10 inside Russia, containing some of the country’s worst political offenders and numbering some 2,000 inmates of 28 nationalities. Following his release in 1956, Rupert was able to emigrate to Great Britain and settled with his second wife Anne in the mid-west of Ireland. Rupert was confined to a wheelchair after having lost both legs. In 1990, he was able to revisit Hungary and reunite with his family.

Introduction

By Edward Crankshaw

The first thing to be said is that this is a true story. I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Rupert when he finally escaped from Hungary in the autumn of 1956 and was still too dazed to talk much about his Russian experiences. But it was then at once clear that he was a man of exceptional honesty and that anything he cared later to say about his life in Soviet labor camps would be of especial value because of this. And so, I think, it turns out to be.

In writing of what he lived through in the hands of the Soviet political police he has not been tempted, as a more imaginative, more self-conscious individual would have been tempted, to strive for effect or to generalize from his personal experience, or even by meditating aloud on causes and effects to blur the particular image of what happened to him. Although he had already had glimpses of Soviet reality under Stalin he had no clear picture of what he would have to suffer and when he was finally sentenced to twenty-five years’ forced labor, on a trumped-up charge of espionage for the British, he went off on that appalling prison train as on a voyage of discovery. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of his story is the Man-from-Mars view of the dark side of a continent.

It should not be thought that Mr. Rupert had no standpoint of his own. On the contrary, his standpoint was so firm that he took it completely for granted. It was that of the convinced, instinctive liberal individualist.

His father was a distinguished Liberal politician, and he himself had hoped to follow the family tradition. But the war came and, in lieu of politics, Mr. Rupert turned his hand to helping allied airmen and Jews to escape from the Germans. This seemed to him the most natural thing in the world. It was the liberal thing. Thus, when he told his Russian captors that he was a Liberal, and suffered terribly for it, what he really meant by Liberalism was simply the principle of freedom to be oneself. It is plain that even now he has not realized the massiveness of the forces working against this simple principle, and not only in Communist countries.

But even if I had never met Mr. Rupert I should have recognized at once the truth of his story. I should have had no doubt at all that everything happened to Mr. Rupert precisely as he has set it down, and it seemed to me that the value of the picture he builds up is all the greater because of the matter of fact limitations of his approach. It is this which gives a particular value too to Mr. Rupert’s account of the last phase of his imprisonment and his final release some time after Stalin’s death. We are here taken into the world of prison camps in the process of breaking up and receive remarkable insights into the Soviet way of doing things when good, not evil, is the aim. More than this, in the extraordinary, interesting record of Mr. Rupert’s final interrogations in the Lubianka prison (now no longer as an accused, but as a witness for the prosecution of Beria’s accomplices) we are given a glimpse from behind the scenes, which I think is unique, of the agonized process of deStalinization as it affected the apparatus of police terror.

For the rest, Mr. Rupert has simply told from day to day over a period of eight years what happened when an ordinary, unassuming Central European found himself caught up in the insane ferocity of ideological warfare.

It began when he was arrested in Budapest in 1947, and the reader will note with interest that he received more malignant personal violence at the hands of his fellow-countrymen, acting as Rakosi’s policemen, than during all his enforced stay in Russia. It continued when he was removed to Baden, the enchanting Habsburg spa in the wooded hills just outside Vienna, which the Russians chose as their Austrian Potsdam. And for me his descriptions of what went on during his imprisonment and interrogation, which ended in a false confession and a twenty-five years’ sentence in this cozy little holiday town, almost within visual signaling distance of the Allied occupation forces in Vienna itself, a morsel of the old Europe if ever there was one, has a special fascination which is not surpassed by any of the experiences, horrifying and macabre, which were to follow on the long train journey to Russia and in the labor camps themselves. No doubt this is because I knew more about the labor camps than I knew about the interior of Marshal Malinovski’s idyllic Austrian headquarters!

Others will, I expect, be more interested by the insights offered by Mr. Rupert into aspects of the Soviet way of life.

It is these that I can vouch for. I have never been inside a Soviet labor camp, but a number of my friends, chiefly Russian, have shared the sort of life described by Mr. Rupert and some have lived to talk about it. Further, at one time and another, I myself have had close-up views of forced labor in action. There was a time, during and soon after the war, when life was at such a low ebb throughout the Soviet Union that in the remote areas—and in some areas not so remote—it was often impossible to tell a free citizen from a prisoner. Certain northern landscapes seemed to be nothing but a Paul Nash nightmare of geometrically arranged fences of barbed wire—fences punctuated by watch-towers on stilts, with machine-guns and searchlights, the guards heavily, stiffly cocooned in goatskin shubas nearly down to the ground so that they looked like wigwams; there were the prisoners, being marched about, or doing fatigues, or man-handling heavy timber, or trying to break up frozen soil and sub-soil to sink foundations. And next to them came free laborers, with nothing in their appearance or the work they were doing to show the difference. Nobody cared: they were all half dead of hunger anyway. I have seen—I have told this elsewhere—gangs of prisoners from a camp in North Russia laying strategic railways, building new wharves, breaking up the ice laboriously with broken tools at forty degrees below zero centigrade—and alongside them there have been gangs of free citizens, volunteers, doing the same work, and marching back at the end of their shift to communal barracks. Many of these were girls. I have seen the sort of swift public copulations described by Mr. Rupert. And I have had fall dead at my feet a prisoner shot by a guard for falling out of line to pick up a crust of bread thrown from the galley of an iced-up merchant ship—and seen how the corpse was left lying like a dead cat in a slum street, until after a few days there was nothing to be seen but a faint hummock under sifted snow.

This sort of action was not cruelty, but the outcome of total callousness and stupidity, itself produced by the policies of Stalin, coming on top of Lenin and centuries of Tsarist brutality. You cannot, agreed, make an omelette without breaking eggs, as Lenin with his ineffable brightness once remarked. But it took Lenin to produce a situation in which, with manic hopefulness, men break eggs by the bucketful—and then find that there is no frying-pan, no match to light the fire and nobody around who knows how to make an omelette...

This is the kind of mood which has to be realized before Mr. Rupert’s story can be understood. Then think back. Think back to Dostoievsky’s House of the Dead, to Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, to Gogol’s Dead Souls. All the violence, venality, squalor, degradation and sheer waste of human resources exist in these books from before the revolution. The privileged murderers and thieves who terrorized the camps under Stalin, Mr. Rupert’s bandits, were at it in Dostoievsky’s time, encouraged by Authority, which regarded political offenders as being far more wicked and dangerous than the most brutal criminals. The mindless brutality of the professional camp guards, the corruption and sycophancy of the camp authorities—all these go back to long before 1917. So, even, do the prison vans which made up Mr. Rupert’s terrible trainloads of deportees: they were the proud invention of a Tsarist prime minister, Stolypin, who was himself assassinated while attending a gala performance opera in Kiev. Although Mr. Rupert did not know this, the vans are still called after him.

Having dwelt on the worst, let us look at the other side of the picture. One of the few encouraging developments at an extremely discouraging moment of history has been the improvement during the past few years of living conditions, material and moral, in the Soviet Union. This has been in certain ways so marked that there are already many people who think that we should forget the past and dwell only on the present and the future. I do not refer here to Communists and fellow-travellers who refused to recognize the evils of Stalinism until they were instructed to do so by Stalin’s successor. These are past salvation. I refer, rather, to all sorts of well-meaning men and women who, while freely admitting that evil once reigned throughout that vast, unhappy land, nevertheless persuade themselves that no purpose is served by raking up past iniquities upon which the present leadership has turned its back.

This attitude will not do. In the first place it is treacherous: a betrayal of the memories of millions of fellow human beings who died and suffered inconceivably, unknown and unoffending—in order that Stalin could build up the power to dominate half Europe and to construct the material base from which Khrushchev could launch his sputniks. They must not be forgotten nor must those who made them suffer. Khrushchev has gone a long way towards apologizing for the iniquity from which his improved model Soviet Union is arising, and he has gone still further in his efforts to ensure that such iniquity is not repeated. But in his denunciation of Stalin for his wholesale liquidation of faithful Communists and for his purges of the army command, he has not gone far enough. The great mass of the millions in Stalin’s labor camps and prisons were not Communists at all: they were ordinary Soviet citizens needed for forced labor to open up the resources of the least habitable parts of the land; they were peasants who resisted the collectivization; they were innocents denounced by informers and arrested by the political police as part of a regime of terror; they were the citizens of many lands overrun by the Soviet army and taken away to serve long terms in the interior, partly because they were needed for the vast slave labor enterprises of the MVD, partly again as an aspect of terror—Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Austrians, and Hungarians like Mr. Rupert himself. Khrushchev has had nothing to say about these nameless, faceless millions, who had nothing to do with Communism, or with the domestic and foreign policies which produced victimization on such a calamitous scale. Until books like Mr. Rupert’s can be translated into Russian and published in Moscow it is our duty to remember what Khrushchev prefers to forget.

Further, how except by raking up the past can we hope to understand the present, which, everywhere—and not only in the Soviet Union—is the prisoner of the past? For the past is in the present, and from both the future springs.

Finally, it seems to me that the people who ask us to forgive and forget can never have understood the full enormity of what we are requested to forgive and forget. Mr. Rupert can show them something of this; and that is why I warmly commend his book.

Not that his story comes as a revelation. There have, over the years, been a very considerable number of reliable and highly instructive writings about life in Soviet prison camps, including at least two classics: Elinor Lipper’s Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps and Gustav Herling’s Worlds Apart. Indeed, there has long been no excuse for ignorance of what went on all over the Soviet Union until a very few years ago. But Mr. Rupert’s book, as I have already said, seems to me to have a special value because of its extraordinary simplicity and unassumingness. Gustav Herling, Elinor Lipper and others in a lesser degree took their raw material as they found it and were above all concerned with exploring in their very different ways the problem of physical and spiritual survival in a wholly destructive world. They wanted to tell us something new about the human spirit, and they succeeded. But the trouble with classics is that by turning life into art, action into causes and consequences, and the particular into the universal, they offer a sort of catharsis, so that the impact of the everyday concrete is muffled. Instead of registering that such and such unspeakable events took place day after day, month after month, decade after decade, a jet flight away, just round the curvature of the earth, under our own familiar sun and moon and stars, and to human beings like us, we find ourselves wrapt in contemplation of the mysterious ways of the Almighty, seen in a grand historical perspective. Meanwhile individuals go on being hurt—and for no other reason but that some unspeakable dictator finds himself too inefficient to govern properly, and hits out savagely to cover up.

To try to appreciate and understand the Soviet Union of today without first contemplating the Russia of Mr. Rupert, so different from the Russia of, for example, Sir Charles Snow, is frivolous and vain. The thing to remember about the narrative which follows is that it is almost contemporary. It begins in 1947 and it ends in 1955. Six years ago Mr. Rupert, with millions of others, was still in a Soviet labor camp. Most of the camps are now closed; but, such is life in the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands who were once