In addition to those four possibilities—either impossible or unacceptable—there was a fifth: to wait for German recruiters, to see what they would summon you to.
Sometimes, fortunately, representatives came from German rural districts to select hired men for their farmers. Sometimes they came from corporations and picked out engineers and mechanics. According to the supreme Stalinist imperative you should have rejected that too. You should have concealed the fact that you were an engineer. You should have concealed the fact that you were a skilled worker. As an industrial designer or electrician, you could have preserved your patriotic purity only if you had stayed in the POW camp to dig in the earth, to rot, to pick through the garbage heap. In that case, for pure treason to the Motherland, you could count on getting, your head raised high in pride, ten years in prison and five more “muzzled.” Whereas for treason to the Motherland aggravated by working for the enemy, especially in one’s own profession, you got, with bowed head, the same ten years in prison and five more muzzled.
And that was the jeweler’s precision of a behemoth—Stalin’s trademark.
Now and then recruiters turned up who were of quite a different stripe—Russians, usually recent Communist political commissars. White Guards didn’t accept that type of employment. These recruiters scheduled a meeting in the camp, condemned the Soviet regime, and appealed to prisoners to enlist in spy schools or in Vlasov units.
People who have never starved as our war prisoners did, who have never gnawed on bats that happened to fly into the barracks, who have never had to boil the soles of old shoes, will never understand the irresistible material force exerted by any kind of appeal, any kind of argument whatever, if behind it, on the other side of the camp gates, smoke rises from a field kitchen, and if everyone who signs up is fed a bellyful of kasha right then and there—if only once! Just once more before I die!
And hovering over the steaming kasha and the inducements of the recruiter was the apparition of freedom and a real life—wherever it might call! To the Vlasov battalions. To the Cossack regiments of Krasnov. To the labor battalions—pouring cement in the future Atlantic Wall. To the fjords of Norway. To the sands of Libya. To the “Hiwi” units (“Hilfswillige”—volunteers in the German Wehrmacht—there being twelve “Hiwi” men in each German company). And then, finally, to the village Polizei, who pursued and caught partisans—many of whom the Motherland would also renounce. Wherever it might call, any place at all, at least anything so as not to stay there and die like abandoned cattle.
We ourselves released from every obligation, not merely to his Motherland but to all humanity, the human being whom we drove to gnawing on bats.
And those of our boys who agreed to become half-baked spies still had not drawn any drastic conclusions from their abandoned state; they were still, in fact, acting very patriotically. They saw this course as the least difficult means of getting out of POW camp. Almost to a man, they decided that as soon as the Germans sent them across to the Soviet side, they would turn themselves in to the authorities, turn in their equipment and instructions, and join their own benign command in laughing at the stupid Germans. They would then put on their Red Army uniforms and return to fight bravely in their units. And tell me, who, speaking in human terms, could have expected anything else? How could it have been any other way? These were straightforward, sincere men. I saw many of them. They had honest round faces and spoke with an attractive Vyatka or Vladimir accent. They boldly joined up as spies, even though they’d had only four or five grades of rural school and were not even competent to cope with map and compass.
It appears that they picked the only way out they could. And one would suppose that the whole thing was an expensive and stupid game on the part of the German Command. But no! Hitler played in rhythm and in tune with his brother dictator! Spy mania was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin’s insanity. It seemed to Stalin that the country was swarming with spies. All the Chinese who lived in the Soviet Far East were convicted as spies—Article 58-6—and were taken to the northern camps, where they perished. The same fate had awaited Chinese participants in the Soviet civil war—if they hadn’t cleared out in time. Several hundred thousand Koreans were exiled to Kazakhstan, all similarly accused of spying. All Soviet citizens who at one time or another had lived abroad, who at one time or another had hung around Intourist hotels, who at one time or another happened to be photographed next to a foreigner, or who had themselves photographed a city building (the Golden Gate in Vladimir) were accused of the same crime. Those who stared too long at railroad tracks, at a highway bridge, at a factory chimney were similarly charged. All the numerous foreign Communists stranded in the Soviet Union, all the big and little Comintern officials and employees, one after another, without any individual distinctions, were charged first of all with espionage.6 And the Latvian Riflemen—whose bayonets were the most reliable in the first years of the Revolution—were also accused of espionage when they were arrested to a man in 1937. Stalin seems somehow to have twisted around and maximized the famous declaration of that coquette Catherine the Great: he would rather that 999 innocent men should rot than miss one genuine spy. Given all this, how could one believe and trust Russian soldiers who had really been in the hands of the German intelligence service? And how it eased the burden for the MGB executioners when thousands of soldiers pouring in from Europe did not even try to conceal that they had voluntarily enlisted as spies. What an astonishing confirmation of the predictions of the Wisest of the Wise! Come on, keep coming, you silly fools! The article and the retribution have long since been waiting for you!
But it is appropriate to ask one thing more. There still were prisoners of war who did not accept recruiting offers, who never worked for the Germans at their profession or trade, and who were not camp police, who spent the whole war in POW camps, without sticking their noses outside, and who, in spite of everything, did not die, however unlikely this was. For example, they made cigarette lighters out of scrap metal, like the electrical engineers Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov and Fyodor Fyodorovich Karpov, and in that way managed to get enough to eat. And did the Motherland forgive them for surrendering?
No, it did not forgive them! I met both Semyonov and Karpov in the Butyrki after they had already received their lawful sentence. And what was it? The alert reader already knows: ten years of imprisonment and five muzzled. As brilliant engineers, they had rejected German offers to work at their profession. In 1941 Junior Lieutenant Semyonov had gone to the front as a volunteer. In 1942 he still didn’t have a revolver; instead, he had an empty holster—and the interrogator could not understand why he hadn’t shot himself with his holster! He had escaped from captivity three times. And in 1945, after he had been liberated from a concentration camp, seated atop a tank as a member of a penalty unit of tank-borne infantry, he took part in the capture of Berlin and received the Order of the Red Star. Yet, after all that, he was finally imprisoned and sentenced. All of this mirrored our Nemesis.
Very few of the war prisoners returned across the Soviet border as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident because of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on, even as late as 1946 or 1947. Some were arrested at assembly points in Germany. Others weren’t arrested openly right away but were transported from the border in freight cars, under convoy, to one of the numerous Identification and Screening Camps (PFL’s) scattered throughout the country. These camps differed in no way from the common run of Corrective Labor Camps (ITL’s) except that their prisoners had not yet been sentenced but would be sentenced there. All these PFL’s were also attached to some kind of factory, or mine, or construction project, and the former POW’s, looking out on the Motherland newly restored to them through the same barbed wire through which they had seen Germany, could begin work from their first day on a ten-hour work day. Those under suspicion were questioned during their rest periods, in the evenings, and at night, and there were large numbers of Security officers and interrogator
s in the PFL’s for this purpose. As always, the interrogation began with the hypothesis that you were obviously guilty. And you, without going outside the barbed wire, had to prove that you were not guilty. Your only available means to this end was to rely on witnesses who were exactly the same kind of POW’s as you. Obviously they might not have turned up in your own PFL; they might, in fact, be at the other end of the country; in that case, the Security officers of, say, Kemerovo would send off inquiries to the Security officers of Solikamsk, who would question the witnesses and send back their answers along with new inquiries, and you yourself would be questioned as a witness in some other case. True, it might take a year or two before your fate was resolved, but after all, the Motherland was losing nothing in the process. You were out mining coal every day. And if one of your witnesses gave the wrong sort of testimony about you, or if none of your witnesses was alive, you had only yourself to blame, and you were sure to be entered in the documents as a traitor of the Motherland. And the visiting military court would rubber-stamp your tenner. And if, despite all their twisting things about, it appeared that you really hadn’t worked for the Germans, and if—and this was the main point—you had not had the chance to see the Americans and English with your own eyes (to have been liberated from captivity by them instead of by us was a gravely aggravating circumstance), then the Security officers would decide the degree of isolation in which you were to be held. Certain people were ordered to change their place of residence—which always breaks a person’s ties with his environment and makes him more vulnerable. Others were valiantly offered the chance to go to work in the VOKhR, the Militarized Guard Service. In that situation, while nominally remaining free, a man lost all his personal freedom and was sent off to some isolated area. There was a third category: after a handshake, some were humanely permitted to return home, although, even without aggravating circumstances, they deserved to be shot for having surrendered. But people in this category celebrated prematurely! Even before the former prisoner arrived home, his case had reached his home district through the secret channels of State Security. These people remained eternally outsiders. And with the first mass arrests, like those of 1948–1949, they were immediately arrested for hostile propaganda or some other reason. I was imprisoned with people in that category too.
“Oh, if I had only known!” That was the refrain in the prison cells that spring. If I had only known that this was how I would be greeted! That they would deceive me so! That this would be my fate! Would I have really returned to my Motherland? Not for anything! I would have made my way to Switzerland, to France! I would have gone across the sea, across the ocean! Across three oceans!7
But the more thoughtful prisoners corrected them. They had made their mistake earlier! They were stupid to have dashed off to the front lines in 1941. It takes a fool to rush off to war! Right from the start, they should have gotten themselves set up in the rear. Somewhere quiet. Those who did are heroes now. And it would have been an even surer thing just to desert. Almost certainly, one’s skin would be whole. They didn’t get ten years either—but eight, or seven. And they weren’t excluded from any of the cushy jobs in camp. After all, a deserter was not regarded as an enemy or a traitor or a political prisoner. He was considered not a hostile factor but a friendly one, a nonpolitical offender, so to speak. That point of view aroused passionate argument and objections. The deserters had to spend all those years rotting in prison, and they would not be forgiven. But there would soon be an amnesty for everyone else; they would all be released. (At that time the principal advantage of being a deserter was still unknown.)
Those who had gotten in via 58-10, snatched from their apartments or from the Red Army, often envied the rest. What the hell! For the very same money, in other words for the same ten-year sentence, they could have seen so many interesting things, like those other fellows, who had been just about everywhere! And here we are, about to croak in camp, without ever having seen anything beyond our own stinking stairs. Incidentally, those who were in on Article 58-10 could hardly conceal their triumphant presentiment that they would be the first to be amnestied.
The only ones who did not sigh: “Oh, if I had only known”—because they knew very well what they were doing—and the only ones who did not expect any mercy and did not expect an amnesty—were the Vlasov men.
* * *
I had known about them and been perplexed about them long before our unexpected meeting on the board bunks of prison.
First there had been the leaflets, repeatedly soaked through, dried out, and lost in the high grass—uncut for the third year—of the front-line strip near Orel. In December, 1942, they had announced the creation in Smolensk of a “Russian Committee”—which apparently claimed to be some sort of Russian government and yet at the same time seemed not to be one. Evidently the Germans themselves had not yet made up their minds. For that reason, the communique seemed to be a hoax. There was a photograph of General Vlasov in the leaflets, and his biography was outlined. In the fuzzy photograph, his face looked well fed and successful, like all our generals of the new stripe. They told me later that this wasn’t so, that Vlasov’s face was more like that of a Western general—high, thin, with horn-rimmed glasses. His biography testified to a penchant for success. He had begun in a peasant family, and 1937 had not broken his skyrocketing career; nor was it ruined by his service as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. The first and only disaster of his earlier life had occurred when his Second Shock Army, after being encircled, was ineptly abandoned to die of starvation. But how much of that whole biography could be believed?8
From his photograph, it was impossible to believe that he was an outstanding man or that for long years he had suffered profoundly for Russia. As for the leaflets reporting the creation of the ROA, the “Russian Liberation Army,” not only were they written in bad Russian, but they were imbued with an alien spirit that was clearly German and, moreover, seemed little concerned with their presumed subject; besides, and on the other hand, they contained crude boasting about the plentiful chow available and the cheery mood of the soldiers. Somehow one couldn’t believe in that army, and, if it really did exist, what kind of cheery mood could it be in? Only a German could lie like that.9
We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an antitank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting.
They defended, for example, the unshakable Dnieper bridgehead south of Tursk. For two weeks we continued to fight there for a mere few hundred yards. The battles were fierce in December, 1943, and so was the cold. Through many long days both we and they went through the extreme trials of winter, fighting in winter camouflage cloaks that covered our overcoats and caps. Near Malye Kozlovichi, I was told, an interesting encounter took place. As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods—and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap . . . the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging th
em like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me.
In East Prussia, a trio of captured Vlasov men was being marched along the roadside a few steps away from me. At that moment a T-34 tank thundered down the highway. Suddenly one of the captives twisted around and dived underneath the tank. The tank veered, but the edge of its track crushed him nevertheless. The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.
They had no choice. There was no other way for them to fight. They had no chance to find a way out, to safeguard their lives, by some more cautious mode of fighting. If “pure” surrender was considered unforgivable treason to the Motherland, then what about those who had taken up enemy arms? Our propaganda, in all its crudity, explained their conduct as: (1) treason (was it biologically based? carried in the bloodstream?); or (2) cowardice—which it certainly was not! A coward tries to find a spot where things are easy, soft, safe. And men could be induced to enter the Wehrmacht’s Vlasov detachments only in the last extremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of inexhaustible hatred of the Soviet regime, only with total contempt for their own safety. For they knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy! When we captured them, we shot them as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths. In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.
In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.
I recall with shame an incident I observed during the liquidation—in other words, the plundering—of the Bobruisk encirclement, when I was walking along the highway among wrecked and overturned German automobiles, and a wealth of booty lay scattered everywhere. German cart horses wandered aimlessly in and out of a shallow depression where wagons and automobiles that had gotten stuck were buried in the mud, and bonfires of booty were smoking away. Then I heard a cry for help: “Mr. Captain! Mr. Captain!” A prisoner on foot in German britches was crying out to me in pure Russian. He was naked from the waist up, and his face, chest, shoulders, and back were all bloody, while a sergeant osobist, a Security man, seated on a horse, drove him forward with a whip, pushing him with his horse. He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising new crimson welts on his skin.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 29
