Artificial feeding has much in common with rape. And that’s what it really is: four big men hurl themselves on one weak being and deprive it of its one interdiction—they only need to do it once and what happens to it next is not important. The element of rape inheres in the violation of the victim’s will: “It’s not going to be the way you want it, but the way I want it; lie down and submit.” They pry open the mouth with a flat disc, then broaden the crack between the jaws and insert a tube: “Swallow it.” And if you don’t swallow it, they shove it farther down anyway and then pour liquefied food right down the esophagus. And then they massage the stomach to prevent the prisoner from resorting to vomiting. The sensation is one of being morally defiled, of sweetness in the mouth, and a jubilant stomach gratified to the point of delight.
Science did not stand still, and other methods were developed for artificial feeding: an enema through the anus, drops through the nose.
4. A new view of the hunger strike: that hunger strikes are a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and must be punished with a new prison term. This aspect promised to give rise to a very rich new category in the practices of the New Type Prison, but it remained essentially in the realm of threats. And it was not, of course, any sense of humor that cut it short, but most likely simple laziness: why bother with all that when patience will take care of it? Patience and more patience—the patience of a well-fed person vis-a-vis one who is starving.
Approximately in the middle of 1937, a new directive came: From now on the prison administration will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes! The last vestige of personal responsibility on the part of the jailers had disappeared! (In these circumstances, the prosecutor of the province would not have come to visit Chebotaryev!) Furthermore, so that the interrogator shouldn’t get disturbed, it was also announced that days spent on hunger strike by a prisoner under interrogation should be crossed off the official interrogation period. In other words, it should not only be considered that the hunger strike had not taken place, but the prisoner should be regarded as not having been in prison at all during the period of the strike. Thus the interrogator would not be to blame for being behind schedule. Let the only perceptible result of the hunger strike be the prisoner’s exhaustion!
And that meant: If you want to kick the bucket, go ahead!
Arnold Rappoport had the misfortune to declare a hunger strike in the Archangel NKVD Internal Prison at the very moment when this directive arrived. It was a particularly severe form of hunger strike, and that ought, it would seem, to have given it more impact. His was a “dry” strike—without fluids—and he kept it up for thirteen days. (Compare the five-day “dry” strike of Dzerzhinsky, who probably wasn’t isolated in a separate cell. And who in the end won total victory.) And during those thirteen days in solitary, to which Rappoport had been moved, only a medical assistant looked in now and then. No doctor came. And no one from the administration took the slightest interest in what he was demanding with his hunger strike. They never even asked him. The only attention the administration paid him was to search his cell carefully, and they managed to dig out some hidden makhorka and several matches. What Rappoport wanted was to put an end to the interrogator’s humiliation of him. He had prepared for his hunger strike in a thoroughly scientific way. He had received a food parcel earlier, and so he ate only butter and ring-shaped rolls, baranki, and he quit eating black bread a week before his strike. He starved until he could see the light through his hands. He recalls experiencing a sensation of lightheadedness and clarity of thought. At a certain moment, a kindly, compassionate woman jailer named Marusya came to his cell and whispered to him: “Stop your hunger strike; it isn’t going to help; you’ll just die! You should have done it a week earlier.” He listened to her and called off his hunger strike without having gotten anywhere at all. Nevertheless, they gave him hot red wine and a roll, and afterward the jailers took him back to the common cell in a hand-carry. A few days later, his interrogation began again. But the hunger strike had not been entirely useless: the interrogator had come to understand that Rappoport had will power enough and no fear of death, and he eased up on the interrogation. “Well, now, it turns out you are quite a wolf,” the interrogator said to him. “A wolf!” Rappoport affirmed. “And I’ll certainly never be your dog.”
Rappoport declared another hunger strike later on, at the Kotlas Transit Prison, but it turned out somewhat comically. He announced that he was demanding a new interrogation, and that he would not board the prisoner transport. They came to him on the third day: “Get ready for the prisoner transport.” “You don’t have the right. I’m on a hunger strike!” At that point four young toughs picked him up, carried him off, and tossed him into the bath. After the bath, they carried him to the guardhouse. With nothing else left to do, Rappoport stood up and went to join the column of prisoners boarding the prisoner transport—after all, there were dogs and bayonets at his back.
And that is how the New Type Prison defeated bourgeois hunger strikes.
Even a strong man had no way left him to fight the prison machine, except perhaps suicide. But is suicide really resistance? Isn’t it actually submission?
The SR Yekaterina Olitskaya thinks that the Trotskyites, and, subsequently, the Communists who followed them into prison, did a great deal to weaken the hunger strike as a weapon for fighting back: they declared hunger strikes too easily and lifted them too easily. She says that even the Trotskyite leader I. N. Smirnov, after going on a hunger strike four days before their Moscow trial, quickly surrendered and lifted it. They say that up to 1936 the Trotskyites rejected any hunger strike against the Soviet government on principle, and never supported SR’s and Social Democrats who were on hunger strikes.13
Let history say how true or untrue that reproach is. However, no one paid for hunger strikes so much and so grievously as the Trotskyites. (We will come to their hunger strikes and their strikes in camps in Part III.)
Excessive haste in declaring and lifting hunger strikes was probably characteristic of impetuous temperaments which reveal their feelings too quickly. But there were, after all, such natures, such characters, among the old Russian revolutionaries, too, and there were similar temperaments in Italy and France, but no where, either in prerevolutionary Russia, in Italy, or in France, were the authorities so successful in discouraging hunger strikes as in the Soviet Union. There was probably no less physical sacrifice and no less spiritual determination in the hunger strikes in the second quarter of our century than there had been in the first. But there was no public opinion in the Soviet Union. And on that basis the New Type Prison waxed and grew strong. And instead of easy victories, the prisoners suffered hard-earned defeats.
Decades passed and time produced its own results. The hunger strike—the first and most natural weapon of the prisoner—in the end became alien and incomprehensible to the prisoners themselves. Fewer and fewer desired to undertake them. And to prison administrations the whole thing began to seem either plain stupidity or else a malicious violation.
When, in 1960, Gennady Smelov, a nonpolitical offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad prison, the prosecutor went to his cell for some reason (perhaps he was making his regular rounds) and asked him: “Why are you torturing yourself?”
And Smelov replied: “Justice is more precious to me than life.”
This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor there told him:
“We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.”
* * *
Along the rings of the horn, where it began to narrow to its point, the former central prisons arose, rechristened, by the beginning of 1937, the “special isolators.” The last little weaknesses were now being squeezed out of the system, the last vestiges of light and air. And the hunger strike of the tired socialists, their numbers sp
arse by now, in the Yaroslavl Penalty Isolator at the beginning of 1937 was one of their last, desperate efforts.
They were still demanding that everything should be restored to what it once had been. They were demanding both the election of spokesmen and free communication between cells, but it is unlikely that even they had hopes of this any longer. By a fifteen-day hunger strike, even though it ended with their being force-fed through a tube, they had apparently succeeded in defending some portions of their regimen: a one-hour period outdoors, access to the provincial newspaper, notebooks for their writing. These they kept. But the authorities promptly took away their personal belongings and threw at them the common prison clothing of the special isolator. And a little while later, they cut half an hour off their time outdoors. And then they reduced it by another fifteen minutes.
These were the same people who were being dragged through a sequence of prisons and exiles according to the rules of the Big Solitaire. Some hadn’t lived an ordinary, decent human life for ten years; some for fifteen; all they had was this meager prison life, with hunger strikes to boot. A few who had gotten used to winning out over the prison administrations before the Revolution were still alive. However, before the Revolution they were marching in step with Time against a weakening enemy. And now Time was against them and allied with an enemy growing steadily stronger. Among them were young people too (how strange that seems to us nowadays)—those who considered themselves SR’s, Social Democrats, or Anarchists even after the parties themselves had been battered out of existence—and the only future these new recruits had to look forward to was life in prison.
The loneliness surrounding the entire prison struggle of the socialists, which became more hopeless with every year that passed, grew more and more acute, approaching a vacuum in the end. That was not how it had been under the Tsar: Throw open the prison doors and the public greeted them with flowers. Now they leafed through the newspapers and saw that they were being drenched in vituperation, with slops even. (For it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin saw as the most dangerous enemies of his socialism.) And the people were silent. And what could give them any reason to dare suppose that the people had any kindly feelings left toward those they had not long before elected to the Constituent Assembly? And finally the newspapers stopped showering profanity on them because Russian socialists had by that time come to seem so unimportant and so impotent and even nonexistent. By this time these socialists were remembered outside in freedom only as something belonging to the past—the distant past. And young people hadn’t the slightest idea that SR’s and Mensheviks were still alive somewhere. And in the sequence of Chimkent and Cherdyn exile, and the Verkhne-Uralsk and Vladimir isolators—how could they not tremble in their dark solitary-confinement cells, cells with “muzzles” by this time, and feel that perhaps their program and their leaders had been mistaken, that perhaps their tactics and actions had been mistaken too? And all their actions began to seem nothing but inaction—and their lives, devoted only to suffering, a fatal delusion.
Their lonely prison struggle had been essentially undertaken for all of us, for all future prisoners (even though they themselves might not think so, nor understand this), for how we would exist in imprisonment and how we would be kept there. And if they had won out, then probably nothing of what happened to us would have happened, nothing of what this book is about, all seven of its parts.
But they were beaten. They failed to protect either themselves or us.
In part, too, the canopy of loneliness spread over them because, in the very first postrevolutionary years, having naturally accepted from the GPU the well-merited identification of politicals, they naturally agreed with the GPU that all who were “to the right”14 of them, beginning with the Cadets, were not politicals but KR’s—Counter-Revolutionaries—the manure of history. And they also regarded as KR’s those who suffered for their faith in Christ. And whoever didn’t know what “right” or “left” meant—and that, in the future, would be all of us—they considered to be KR’s also. And thus it was that, in part voluntarily, in part involuntarily, keeping themselves aloof and shunning others, they gave their blessing to the future “Fifty-eight” into whose maw they themselves would disappear.
Objects and actions change their aspect quite decisively depending on the position of the observer. In this chapter we have been describing the prison stand of the socialists from their point of view. And, as you see, it is illuminated by a pure and tragic light. But those KR’s whom the politicals treated so contemptuously on Solovki, those KR’s recall the politicals in their own way! “The politicals? What a nasty crowd they were: they looked down their noses at everyone else; they stuck to their own group; they demanded their own special rations all the time and their own special privileges. And they kept quarreling among themselves incessantly.” And how can one but feel that there is truth here too? All those fruitless and endless arguments which by now are merely comical. And those demands for additional rations for themselves in comparison with the masses of the hungry and impoverished? In the Soviet period, the honorable appellation of politicals turned out to be a poisoned gift. And then another reproach followed immediately: Why was it that the socialists, who used to escape so easily under the Tsar, had become so soft in Soviet prisons? Where are their escapes? In general there were quite a few escapes, but who can remember any socialists among them?
And, in turn, those prisoners “to the left” of the socialists—the Trotskyites and the Communists—shunned the socialists, considering them exactly the same kind of KR’s as the rest, and they closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring.
The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to walk in the same prison courtyards. Yekaterina Olitskaya recalls that in 1937, at the transit prison on Vanino Bay, when the socialists called to each other across the fence between the men’s and women’s compounds, looking for fellow socialists and reporting news, the Communists Liza Kotik and Mariya Krutikova were indignant because they might bring down punishment on them all by such irresponsible behavior. They said: “All our misfortunes are due to those socialist rats! [A profound explanation, and so dialectical too!] They should be choked!” And those two girls in the Lubyanka in 1925, whom I have already mentioned, sang about spring and lilacs only because one of them was an SR and the second a member of the Communist opposition, and they had no political song in common, and in fact the Communist-deviationist girl shouldn’t really have joined the SR girl in her protest at all.
And if in a Tsarist prison the different parties often joined forces in a common struggle (let us recall in this connection the escape from the Sevastopol Central Prison), in Soviet prisons each political group tried to ensure its own purity by steering clear of the others. The Trotskyites struggled on their own, apart from the socialists and Communists; the Communists didn’t struggle at all, for how could one allow oneself to struggle against one’s own government and one’s own prison?
It turned out in consequence that the Communists in isolators and in prisons for long-termers were restricted earlier and more cruelly than others. In 1928, in the Yaroslavl Central Prison, the Communist Nadezhda Surovtseva went outdoors for fresh air in a single-file column that was forbidden to engage in conversation, while the socialists were still chattering in their own groups. She was not permitted to tend the flowers in the courtyard—because they had been left by previous prisoners who had struggled for their rights. And they deprived her of newspapers too. (However, the Secret Political Department of the GPU permitted her to have complete sets of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Hegel in her cell.) Her mother’s visit to her took place virtually in the dark, and her downcast mother died soon afterward. (What must she have thought of her daughter’s circumstances in prison?)
The difference between the tre
atment of socialist prisoners and that of the Communists persisted many years, went far beyond this, and extended to a difference in rewards: in 1937–1938 the socialists were imprisoned like the rest and they all got their tenners too. But, as a rule, they were not forced to denounce themselves: they had, after all, never hidden their own, special, individual views—which were quite enough to get them sentenced. But a Communist had no special, individual views, so what, then, was he to be sentenced for if a self-denunciation wasn’t forced out of him?
* * *
Even though the enormous Archipelago was already spreading across the land, the prisons for long-termers didn’t fall into decay. The old jail tradition was being zealously carried on. Everything new and invaluable which the Archipelago had contributed to the indoctrination of the masses was still not enough in itself. The deficiency was provided for by the complementary existence of the TON’s—the Special Purpose Prisons—and prisons for long-termers in general.
Not everyone swallowed up by the Great Machine was allowed to mingle with the natives of the Archipelago. Well-known foreigners, individuals who were too famous or who were being held secretly, purged gaybisty, could not by any means be seen openly in camps; their hauling a barrow did not compensate for the disclosure and the consequent moral-political15 damage. In the same way, the socialists, who were engaged in a continuous struggle for their prison rights, could not conceivably be permitted to mingle with the masses but had to be kept separately and, in fact, suffocated separately—in view of their special privileges and rights. Much later on, in the fifties, as we shall learn later in this work, the Special Purpose Prisons were also needed to isolate camp rebels. And in the last years of his life, disappointed in the possibilities of “reforming” thieves, Stalin gave orders that various ringleaders of the thieves should also get tyurzak rather than camp. And then, to be sure, it was necessary for the state to support free of charge in prison those prisoners who because of their feebleness would have immediately died off in camp and would thus have shirked their duty to serve out their terms. And others who couldn’t possibly be used in camp work—like the blind Kopeikin, a man of seventy who used to sit all day long in the market in Yuryevets on the Volga. His songs and facetious comments won him ten years for KRD—Counter-Revolutionary Activity—but in his case they had to substitute prison for camp.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 54
