A Drop of History 117

Small crimes, great punishments in Byzantium
Adulteresses with cut noses and blinded grave-robbers

The issue of citizen safety is not thorny today alone. A cursory look in the corrective systems and penal law of any society in history is enough to verify that the problem has existed for a very long time. Citizens have always felt insecure and the state has always attempted to protect them, through agents of order and the punishment of criminals. The further back we go, the more cruel and direct such punishments were.

In Byzantine times, the position of night governor, that is, chief of police, was one of the most important ones in the empire. Arrested thieves were flogged and their heads shaved before they were imprisoned. If the thief relapsed, he had his hand cut off. Rustlers also got their hands cut off, even on their first arrest. If the thief was armed while committing the crime, they were sentenced to death. In ultra-religious Byzantium, if someone was caught robbing a church, they was summarily blinded. Grave-robbing was also considered a particularly heinous crime. The Byzantines were buried together with precious artifacts and ornaments, and consequently, grave-robbing flourished. Punishment was simple: both the grave-robber’s hands were cut off at the wrists.

Enchanters and diviners were a plague on the illiterate and superstitious Byzantine society. Naturally, the church persecuted them relentlessly. Historian Will Durant cites an incredible list of such charlatans, who deceived the gullible in return for hefty payments. They divined the future using virtually everything. There were aleuromancers, arithmomancers, astragalomancers, astromancers, coscinomancers, lecanomancers, libanomancers, necromancers, nephelomancers, oneiromancers, pharmacomancers, cartomancers, etc. On arrest, they were imprisoned; if they relapsed, they were exiled, blinded or executed. Occasionally, enchanters were burned publicly at the Hippodrome, while anyone caught using sorcery to get rid of their enemies was thrown to the beasts.

Adultery was a serious crime as well. Adulterers were whipped and imprisoned, while adulteresses were banished after having their noses cut off, so that their crime would be obvious to all until their death. If a lady committed adultery with a slave, she would lose her nose and he would be beheaded. The husband who discovered his wife’s adultery and did not turn her in was exiled; if he were in the military, he was dishonourably discharged and imprisoned. Banishment was also the punishment of “adultery enablers”, that is, those who facilitated adultery, mainly by offering their homes.

Imprisonment was the lot of those who played games of chance as well. The Byzantines were incurable gamblers and several historiographers mention the social scourge that was the people’s love for dice, backgammon and other such games.

Priests and monks, of whom there were thousands in the empire, were judged by the Synod. Blasphemy was a heavy sin for clergy, punished by xerophagy, abstinence from communion and three hundred genuflections a day for several months. Another common punishable practice was the custom of “interns”, maidens from rural areas that priests and monks took into their houses, ostensibly to protect them. The girls were forced into convents and the naughty clergymen were put on trial.

As for Byzantine prisons, they were like any other prison of the time: dehumanising. The accounts of contemporary historiographers are full of awful images. Darkness, filth, lice, hunger, thirst, and torture were the lot of the prisoners. Additionally, at first, men and women shared cells, but Constantine at least imposed segregation.

However, despite the cruelty of punishment, historians consider Byzantine society a very highly delinquent one. Damn those corrective systems. The stricter they become, the less effective they prove in putting down crime and deceit. As if the two sides were not enemies but secret collaborators.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 110

Siberia, the land of the dead
The horrible dissenter camps in the white wilderness

Anyone who has studied Russian literature, even superficially, can understand how deeply Siberia has marked this people, in every single phase of its history. A simple reading of Dostoevsky’s famous novel The House of the Dead is enough for the reader to realise why Russian society was so affected by the bugbear that was Siberia. The prison camps of forced labour during the time of the czars and the gulag during the communist regime have left an indelible mark on the Russian consciousness.

Prisoners in those camps were always linked to one another in groups, not with chains but with long iron bars fitted to their legs. In order to be easily identifiable, and thus unable to escape, they wore two-toned uniforms. One sleeve and trouser leg was grey, the other brown. Their haircuts were special as well. They had either the front of their hair shaved and the rest left to grow, or vice versa. Their basic fare was bread and cabbage soup. Since the rations were meagre, the prisoners supplemented their meals with various bugs, beetles and roaches, which they added to the soup in order to get some trace of protein.

Temperatures in Siberia are very low during the winter, but still the prisoners’ clothing was grossly inadequate and allowed to disintegrate into rags, despite their having to work in the open, according to the camp rosters, fourteen hours out of 24. They cut trees, put down rail tracks, repaired the barges that navigated the Siberian rivers, built bridges or worked in mines. The mortality rate was extremely high; in fact, only few of those who entered the camps lived to come out again. The rest left their bones on the permafrost.

The main characteristic of those camps, throughout their existence, was the coexistence of penal and political prisoners. Communists under the czars and royalists under the Party lived side by side with murderers, thieves, extortionists and pickpockets. That was their worst ordeal, since, under extreme survival conditions, intellectuals and activists were unable to stand up to ruthless killers and hardened crooks. They had their meagre food taken away, their money stolen, their few books burned for warmth, they were beaten and, not infrequently, raped. Any attempt at escape was doomed, not only because the prisoners were always bound to their iron bars, but also because the camps were situated in the middle of endless desolate wastes, practically impossible to cross without help. Additionally, the starvation rations turned the prisoners into weaklings, deprived of their natural endurance.

The commonest punishment for major infractions of the rules was execution by firing squad; for minor ones, there was the so-called “green way”. The prisoner was taken out into the open, naked from the waist up, left there for a while to chill, and then two rows of soldiers with long birch switches lined up and waited for him. The prisoner had to run between the lines, while the soldiers struck him squarely on his chilled back with their switches. Depending on the misstep, there could be up to 200 soldiers lined up, and the prisoner rarely managed to run to the end of the line without fainting under the blows.

The thousands of camp inmates were very frustrated by the lack of women, and penal prisoners would bribe the wardens to let in poor peasant girls who sold their bodies. The problem was that they had to have sex with them in their dormitories, with a couple hundred other prisoners all around. Often the enraged penals would overpower the unfortunate women and gang rape them until the wardens intervened, to the horror of the politicals, who were more sensitive. The letters from inmates that have been salvaged or published are full of such horrible details.

The camps closed down definitively in the ’90s, but not before extensive and important chapters of the history of the Russian people had been written within their miserable walls.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 99

Nikita Khrushchev’s report to the 20th Party Congress
When the heinous crimes of Stalinism were officially revealed

On 17 February 1956, 1,436 representatives of local chapters gathered in the Kremlin for the famous 20th Soviet Union Communist Party Congress, where the new administration broke away from Stalin’s model. “Little father” Stalin had died three years earlier, on 5 March 1953, and since then the superpower had been strangely silent. The new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, had made a few moves to stabilise political life, but nothing impressive. He had restored relations with General Tito of Yugoslavia; he had freed the Kremlin doctors, who had been accused of conspiracy; he had had Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s infamous associate and partner in crime, tried and executed, but in general the Stalinist system continued intact.

And suddenly, close to midnight on the 24th of February, during a closed session that did not include representatives of foreign communist parties, Khrushchev took the floor and read out a report on the crimes of the Stalinist age. Amidst dead silence, the Party Secretary revealed to the rest of the congressmen that the great, high and mighty Joseph Stalin, the victor in the great patriotic war and the idol of communists everywhere, had been nothing but a vile murderer, a maniacal and deeply frightened man, a dictator, a usurper of socialist ideas. According to Khrushchev’s report, “the mass arrests, the deportations, the executions without trial or investigation only created situations of insecurity, fear and despair. Hitler and all other fascist dictators put together have not exterminated as many communists as Stalin has, by himself.”

The figures listed were staggering. Out of the 139 members of the Central Committee who had been elected in the 17th Congress, in 1934, 70% had been arrested and executed. Of the 139, there remained only 41. Of the 1,966 representatives, there were only 858 left. The 1937 military clearances had severely undermined the fighting condition of the Soviet army, which allowed the Germans to make a walk in the park of their campaign during the first year of the war. 90% of generals and 80% of colonels had been executed within a single year. A literal slaughter. Khrushchev also mentioned mass deportations of entire nationalities, like the Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingushs. The Ukrainians avoided such a fate “only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them,” said Khrushchev.

The Secretary’s report dropped like a bomb in the Congress, and tensions rose to unbearable heights. At the end, Khrushchev burst into tears, about twenty congressmen had nervous breakdowns, and several others fainted on their benches. It was not just the official revelation of the crimes, but another reason too. The survival of all those congressmen during those horrible years as leaders of party chapters was proof that most of them had taken part in the clearances themselves. As Khrushchev said in his memoirs, which were published in 1970, he had met the highest-ranking agents beforehand, in order to brief them. They had all tried to change his mind, arguing that, if those facts saw the light, the blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union would be irreparable.

Old Marshal Voroshilov had grabbed Khrushchev’s lapels and shaken him, yelling: “Who demands we do such a thing? Are we not in charge?” Voroshilov had his reasons: he had been among those primarily responsible for the terrible 1937 military clearances. Khrushchev read out his report to the Congress, urging everyone to keep it secret for the sake of the country. The CIA had it in their hands within a week, after buying it for three hundred dollars. “Never has a document of such great significance been sold at such a contemptible price,” was Khrushchev’s acerbic comment.

One more event is often quoted as an indicator of the climate during that dramatic session. On finishing his speech, Khrushchev returned to his bench, where he found an anonymous note by some other congressman. It read: “When all those crimes were being committed, what were you doing, comrade?” Khrushchev stood immediately, read the note aloud in the microphone and asked, “Who wrote this?” No answer from below. The Secretary asked again, “Who wrote this note?” Still nobody raised a hand. Then Khrushchev trailed his gaze over the entire body of congressmen and said: “Then I will tell you what I was doing all those years, comrade. Exactly what you are doing right now.”

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved