SUMMARY OF TESTIMONY BY AVRAHAM SHIFRIM BEFORE THE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNAL SECURITY, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1973

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75B00380R000100010007-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 12, 2001
• Sequence Number: 7
• Content Type: SUMMARY

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SUMMARY OF TESTIMONY BY AVRAHAM SHIFRIN BEFORE THE SENATE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNAL SECURITY, THURSDAY FEBRUARY 1, 1973
/The following statement will not be given by Mr. Shifrin,
who will testify extemporaneously. However, it does represent
an accurate summary of his testimony, with a few of the high-
lights spelled out in detail..?
Permit me to begin my testimony by saying how honored
I am to be given the privilege of speaking here about my
experiences during the 10 years of my imprisonment in Soviet
concentration camps and prisons, and about the information I
have received from many different sources inside the Soviet
Union - and even from inside the camps - concerning conditions
in the Soviet concentration camp empire today.
I am a proud Zionist, and, of course, I am very deeply
concerned with the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union,
but as a human being I feel it my duty to speak here on behalf
of all the prisoners, regardless of their nationality or
religion. All nationalities are represented in the Soviet
concentration camps. In fact, the camps are the only place
in the USSR where there is no discrimination.
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I also want to ask nay friends in Soviet captivity to
forgive me for not mentioning them all by name here in the
Senate of the United States. Hundreds of prisoners whom I
know personally are today on the other side of the barb-wire
fence. They occupy the same concrete bunks on which I used
to spend sleepless nights in the camp barracks. They eat
rotten cabb: e, &nd with bare hands they build industrial
and
plants /electric power station dams and fell timber in the
wild forests and In the Arctic.
T was amazed to discover when I left the Soviet Union
in 1970 that most people in the free world - even well-
informed people - appear to believe that the massive concen-
tration camp system which existed in Stalin's day has for all
practical purposes been abolished in the U.S.S.R. At the
height of the Stalin terror, according to Khrushchev's state-
ment of 1956, there were 15 million prisoners in the camps
of the U.S.S.R. It is true that after Khrushchev's denunci-
ation of Stalin in 1956 he did order the release of many
millions of political prisoners - and this unquestionably does
have a good deal to do with the confusion that exists in the
free world. I myself saw how the camps over a: period of a
few years were emptied of almost half of their population.
But I also saw in the period immediately following the suppres-
sion of the Hungarian revolution how the camps rapidly filled
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up again to capacity with soldiers, officers, workers, intel-
lectuals, but mostly with professors, students, and young
people.
Today the concentration camps house far fewer people
than they did during the peak years of Stalin's terror. But
the sad fact is -- and I shall document this in the course of
my testimony - that there are millions of prisoners
i.rr the concentration camps and prisons of the Soviet Union
tode.,y; that the camps, far from having disappeared, number
into the thousands; end that the conditions are just as bestial
as they were in the days of Stalin.
I want to make it clear that I am not speaking about 1953.
I am not even speaking about 1963, when I was released. I am
speaking about today.
That conditions in Soviet concentration camps have changed
little since the times of. Stalin is evidenced by numerous
letters received by Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the publica-
tion of his novel. One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denissovich.
Excerpts from these letters were released by Solzhenitsyn
and published in the collection of his works (v. 5, Possev,
"West Germany, 1969). In general, these letters said that
conditions were very much the same, or that they were even
worse than those described by Solzhenitsyn.
A group of prisoners of the Ust-era camp, for example,
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wrote: "Our conditions now are much worse (worse than those
described in your novel). We are not being beaten, but sold-
iers say that we should all be done away with. Where does
such hatred come from in boys 18-20 years old? They are
obviously being incited. ..In December 1962 /when the novel
was published7 out of a total of 300 prisoners in our zone,
190 of us were suffering from scurvey."
Here you see a map of the USSR. The red flags stand
for concentration camps. The blue flags indicate entire
complexes of camps. There may be a hundred camps or more
in a single complex, each camp housing 2,000 to 5,000 pri-
soners. There are millions of prisoners in Soviet punitive
institutions today. In Moscow alone, tourists could find
27 huge prisons, had they made an effort to see them instead
of the "Swan Lake" in the Bolshoi Theater Ballet. (See map)
I am unable to show you all the camps on this map.
There simply is no room to stick in the flags. Around each
big Soviet city you will find three to five concentration
camps. In Odessa, a city which the tourists love so much,
there is a huge concentration camp with towers and barbed-
wire fencing, right in the center of the town, on Cherno-
morskaya Doroga.
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Here, for example, is Orsha, a minor provincial city,
not even r:iarkkc? on the map. Yet, it is surrounded by six
concentration camps. Here are their addresses:
P. 0". Box ZJZh 1. ~ /6 - "B"
tr rt tt 1/12 - 1
15/12 - "Ell
rr n rr
15/12' - ttZhrt
This is a situation that should be of profound concern
to the cntir.e free world. It should be of concern, first,
on moral. and hulnLtni. tariar, grounds. But beyond this,
the cx:i.,tFnc of this massive concentration system poses a
sa=ri o!).; danger to the security of the Free World. To the
e.:t^rjt that the men in the Kremlin are able to repress all
dissident ,.)pinion and all restraining. voices, they are freer
to en. gage in subversion and blackmail and expansion abroad.
I feel- it to be my moral duty to tell you about the new
wave of arrests in the Soviet Union, about starvation in con-
centration camps and prisons, about the mortal danger to which
sick prisoners like Silva Zalmanson, Eduard Kuznetsov, and
Anatol..! Altman are exposed there. Remember the conditions
under which Yuri Galanskov died only a few weeks ago. His
friends had appealed to the free world time and again. They
warned how gravely ill Galanskov was, but nobody seemed to
have listened to them.
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My memories of the camps consist of a succession of
nightmares.
Today in Soviet concentration camps you can see hundreds
of thousands of women, including mothers with babies. They
are being held in special subdivisions. Once in Potma in 1961,
I saw some 200 or 250 women with babies in their hands, children
screaming, women crying, guards cursing, dogs barking. Revolted
and outraged we began to shout at the guards: "Fascists!"
"Murderers!" There were about three thousand of us, being
moved by cattle-car to a transit camp. The guards panicked
and began to shoot in the air. And suddenly in the midst of
this pandemonium we heard the metallic voice of the radio
announcer, amplified by the loudspeakers: "Citizens, rejoice.
The Soviet Union has scored another great victory: a rocket
with Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on board has been launched into space!"
Thousands and thousands of men and women languish in con-
centration camps because of their faith in God. The Communists
want to destroy all confessional groups, all religions.
The believers cannot pray, they are denied the opportunity
to observe religious holidays. The guards deride them, molest
them, and throw them into punitive cells whenever they catch
them praying. In the Tayshet Camp No. 10 in Siberia, I have
witnessed the following scene. One Sunday the guards decided
to break up a prayer meeting of Russian Orthodox nuns, so they
* I wish to remind you of such martyrs as Boris Talantov,
AnatolyA&woY'e~'eiats~DO+1/4~~CYA-R~R9~580R0100~10otir
nameles victims - Christians, Jews and Moslems.
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ordered them to ro to the shower-room to wash. The nuns asked
that they be permitted to take their baths on Monday, because
they did not wish to violate their Sabbath, but the guards
refused. They tore the clothes off the women, and dragged
them, naked, by their legs through the snow to the shower.
In the concentration camp-of Keriigirin/Kazakhs-tan 'about
500 V:romen were run over by tanks, when they formed a line in
order to protect the male prisoners whom the guards were trying
to punish for staging a riot. This incident took place after
the prisoners had stopped their work in the mines and gone on
a hunger strike to protest against the unbearable conditions
in the camp. And the conditions were such that some prisoners
in desperation opened their veins, J.nf2icted wounds on them-
selves, swallowed spoons and nails, drank their own blood and
ate their own flesh. Yes, understand me correctly, their own
flesh, driven to a state of delirium by hunger.
In the Potma Camp No. 10 I saw a prisoner, Nikola_i. Shcherbakov,
cut off his own ears and throw them into the face of the camp
officer. When I asked him later why he did it, he answered:
When I am free some day, I'll tell them of the horrors of our
life here, and they may not believe me. So I'll show them ray
earless head and the inscription tatooed on my forehead:
'Slave of Communism.' That should convince them!"
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The brutality and Sadism of the concentration camp guards
-- to which I will refer. -later in my testimony -- partly results
from the KGB instructions. But in part it is?due to the init-
iative of officers and soldiers who have been completely de-
humanized by their work. When you see a guard crushing the
skull of a dead prisoner or plunging a red-hot iron into a
corpse to ascertain that the. man is really dead, then he is
following instructions. But when -- as I have seen in the
wild forest near Lake Baykal -- the KGB soldiers tie a naked
prisoner to a tree and leave him there to be devoured by
swarms of poisonous gnats, they act on their own initiative,,
because the government encour yes them to be bruta.l,.,?~~
p
When the prisoners are Ynade to eat rotten cabbage, and
sleep on concrete bunks in cells covered by a thick layer of
frost - these are Moscow instructions. But when the guards
throw the corpses of dead prisoners out on the snow to be
devoured by wild beasts in the forest, then it is the guards'
initiative.
All these awful things you can see now, today, in the
thousands of concentration camps and prisons of the Soviet
Union. But the people in the Soviet Union resist, they struggle,
they are not broken. They refuse to permit the communists to
destroy God's image in their souls, to corrupt them and turn
them into beasts, or into robots.
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Numerous underground groups and movements are springing
up all over the Soviet Union. Many hundreds of freedom
fighters have been arrested, and sent to jails and concentra-
t.i.on camps for up to 15 years. We must remember the names of
these heroes:
The civil rights movement'in the Soviet Union goes back
to before the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Among the early
heroes of this resistance, I note particularly the names of
YiKro. JCl~ G is70V
Eduard Kouznetsov, Ilya Bokshtein, Igor Avdeev, and Yuri. osipov.
They began their resistance with the public readings of poetry
in Mayakowsky Square. First they read the poems of Mayakowsky.
Then they began to read some of their own poetry that contained
criticisms of the Soviet regime. Then Bekshtein one day climbed
up on the statute of Mayakowsky and delivered a passionate
oration against Soviet tyranny. A battle ensued with the
secret police, and scores of those who took part in the demon-
stration were arrested and imprisoned.
Since that time there have been many similar public pro-
.
tests_in the Soviet Union -- some of them inspired by the r
suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, some of them inspired
by the desire for more freedom and hatred of the regime of
oppression, some of them inspired at least in part by the
recurring food shortages. In every case the answer of the
regime has been more arrests and more repression. Over the
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the past 16 or 17 years in the Soviet Union there have been
riots and even major clashes in a whole series of Soviet
cities, including Ryazan, Taimyr Tau, Krasnodar, Vladivostok,
and Novocherkask. Only half a year ago there-was a major
riot in which many people were killed in the city of Dniepro-
dzherzinsk, on the river Dnieper.
Intellectuals like Galanskov and Gi.nzburg tried during
this period to publish an underground magazine. The Samizdat
movement became nationwide - thousands of people participating
in the laborious copying of documents of opposition. The
Chronicle of Current Events, chief of the Samizdat publica-
tions, began to come out on a regular basis -- and despite
frantic efforts on the part of the regime it continues to
come out until this day. A Jewish underground chronicle,
Exodus, also began to appear on a regular basis. Entire
books, like Marchenkots "My Testimony," were circulated in
Samizdat form.
There were many casualties- in this unrelenting battle
for freedom -- men and women whose names are justly honored
throughout the world. Among the best known of these martyrs
for freedom were Sinyavsky and Daniel, Pavl Litvinov, General
Gri.gorenko, Anatoli Marchenko, Victor Krasnov and Victor
Feinberg. All of these men are still in prison.
I would like to pay special tribute here to two young
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men who have paid an incredibly high price for their defiance
of the Soviet regime - Pyotr Yakir, the son of a Jewish
General who was executed by Stalin, and Yuri Shoukhevich,
the son of a Ukrainian insurgent General who was also executed
by Stalin. Both of these, remarkably enough, were first sent
to the concentration camps at the age of 14 as sons of the
"enemies of the people;" both were released after serving
20 years both resumed the battle for freedom immediately
on their release. And both are now back in prison.
I must also say a few words about Vladimir BUKOVSKY.
He was one of the initiators of the Russian democratic
opposition. out of 30 years of his life, 9 were spent in
psychiatric prisons and concentration camps. In January
1972 he was sentenced to a total of 12 years for having
sent to the West a collection of documents concerning the
confi nemennt of healthy dissenters to special psychiatric
institutions. These documents together with other materials
were released by this Subcommittee on December 4, 1972.
Igor OCrURT SOV, Mikhail SADO, Yevgeni VAGIN, and Boris
AVEROCHKIN, lead--rs of the All-Russian Social-Christian Union
for the Liberation of the People, and some sixty of their
.followers were arrested in Leningrad, Tomsk, Irkutsk,
Petrozavodsk, and other cities, because their patriotic
appeal for the revival of Russia's spiritual and religious
values did not fit into the pattern of the Communist-sponsored
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policy of "Russification."
Also arrested during '71 and '72 were
/Vyacheslav CHERNOVIL, Valentin MOROZ, Ivan DZYUBA,
Svyatoslav KARAVANSKY and scores and scores of other Ukrainian
nationalists who resisted the ruthless "Russification" campaign
unleashed by the Kremlin leaders who want to divide and rule.
When riots,broke out in Novocheskask and Dneprodzerzhinsk the
Communists suppressed it with the hands of the Uzbeks - but
in Tashkent they used Ukrainians to crush the rioting Uzbeks.
Victor KALNINSH, Juozas ZDEBKIS, Willi SAARTE and many
Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian patriots strove for the
independence of their nations. Rollan KADYEV, Reshat BAIRAMOV
and other Crimean Tartars who demanded the right for their
people to return to their native land. More than 500,000
Crimean Tartars were deported to Siberia at Stalin's orders
and are still denied the right to return home by the present
government.
Navy Captain Gennady GAVRILOV and scores of his friends
were arrested in Leningrad, Moscow, Tallin, Riga, Baku, Perm,
and Khabarovsk in connection with the conspiracy of the Baltic
Fleet officers. These are just a few examples.
It is with pride that I come now to the struggle of the
Jewish people. In November 1972, Grisha BERMAN went to the
draft board in Odessa and declared that he refused to serve
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13
in the Red Army because in his heart he felt himself a citizen
of Israel. He got a three year sentence. A three year
sentence was also imposed on Vladimir MARKMAN just for a
few telephone conversations with friends in Israel. But
all this does not intimidate the Soviet Jews. I wish to
mention here the names of such heroes as Eduard KUZNETSOV,
Silva ZALMANSON, Anatoli ALTMAN, and their friends who
tried to fly secretly to Israel because the government of
tyrants stubbornly refused to permit them to emigrate legally.
Today they languish in the Potma concentration camp No. 10
-- the most horrible of all in the Soviet Union -- locked up
for 15 years.
And now let me voice a note of warning. The cancer of
Communism has now spread over half of Europe, China, Cuba,
and parts of Africa. The Communists try to destroy your
society with the help of all those radical groups. They
deceive your youth with propaganda; they try to demoralize
you so that they can seize power in your country. And don't
think that I am spreading panic. Remember that there was a
time when there was no Communism in Eastern Europe or in Cuba,
and the red flags were not exposed so boldly in France and
Italy. In the Soviet Union, Communists try to eradicate all
dissidents, all democratic elements. They lock people up
only because they dare to think. All this spells danger to
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14
you: The more they consolidate their power Internally, the
greater is the threat to the free countries.
That is the reason why I am here today. I want to remind
you of our responsibility to those who are oppressed. They
need our help. How can we help them? We can help them in
two way: first, by exposing the facts; and second, by voicing
our indignation .
In helping them we shall also be helping ourselves.
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