2. In 1937 they were . . . the only ones arrested.
At the very beginning of our book we gave a conspectus of the waves pouring into the Archipelago during the two decades up to 1937. How long all that dragged on! And how many millions there were! But the future call-up of 1937 didn’t bat an eyelid and found it all normal. They remained calm while society was being imprisoned. Their “outraged reason boiled” when their own fellowship began to be imprisoned.
Of course, they did not remember how very recently they themselves had helped Stalin destroy the opposition, yes, and even themselves too. After all, Stalin gave his own weak-willed victims the opportunity of taking a chance and rebelling, for this game was not without its satisfactions for him. To arrest each member of the Central Committee required the sanction of all the others! That is something the playful tiger thought up. And while the sham plenums and conferences proceeded, a paper was passed along the rows which stated impersonally that materials had been received compromising a certain individual; and it was requested that consent be given (or refused!) to his expulsion from the Central Committee. (And someone else watched to see whether the person reading this paper held it for a long time.) And they all . . . signed their names. And that was how the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) shot itself. (Stalin had calculated and verified their weakness even earlier than that: once the top level of the Party had accepted as their due high wages, secret provisioning facilities, private sanatoriums, it was already in the trap and there was no way to backtrack.)
And they had forgotten even more (yes, and had never read it anyway) such ancient history as the message of the Patriarch Tikhon to the Council of People’s Commissars on October 26, 1918. Appealing for mercy and for the release of the innocent, the staunch Patriarch warned them: “That the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation.” (Luke 11:50.) And: “. . . for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” (Matthew 26:52.) But at that time it seemed absurd, impossible! How could they imagine at that time that History sometimes does know revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed justice, but chooses strange forms for it and unexpected executors of its will.
And though the curses of the women and children shot in the Crimean spring of 1921, as Voloshin has told us, were incapable of piercing the breast of Bela Kun, this was done by his own comrade in the Third International.
Here is their inevitable moral: I have been imprisoned for nothing and that means I am good, and that all these people around me are enemies and have been imprisoned for good cause.
And here is how their energy is spent: Six and twelve times a year they send off complaints, declarations, and petitions. And what do they write about? What do they scrawl in them? Of course, they swear loyalty to the Great Genius (and without that they won’t be released). Of course, they dissociate themselves from those already shot in their case. Of course, they beg to be forgiven and permitted to return to their old jobs at the top. And tomorrow they will gladly accept any Party assignment whatever—even to run this camp! (And the fact that all the complaints and petitions were met with just as thick a shoal of rejections—well, that was because they didn’t reach Stalin! He would have understood! He would have forgiven, the benefactor!) Fine “politicals” they were if they begged the government for . . . forgiveness.
Here was the level of their consciousness: V. P. Golitsyn, son of a district physician, a road engineer, was imprisoned for 140 (one hundred forty!) days in a death cell (plenty of time to think!). And then he got fifteen years, and after that external exile. “In my mind nothing changed. I was the same non-Party Bolshevik as before. My faith in the Party helped me, the fact that the evil was being done not by the Party and government but by the evil will of certain people [what an analysis!] who came and went [but somehow they never seemed to go . . .], but all the rest [!!] remained. . . .
However—why this whole chapter? Why this whole lengthy survey and analysis of the loyalists? Instead we shall just write in letters a yard high:
JANOS KADAR, WLADYSLAW GOMULKA, and GUSTAV HUSAK
All three of them underwent unjust arrest and interrogation with torture, and all three served time so-and-so many years.
And the whole world sees how much they learned. The whole world has learned what they are worth.
Chapter 12
Knock, Knock, Knock . . .
IN OUR TECHNOLOGICAL years cameras and photoelectric elements often work in place of eyes, and microphones, tape recorders, and laser listening devices often replace ears. But for the entire epoch covered by this book almost the only eyes and almost the only ears of the Cheka-GB were stool pigeons.
Without having the experience and without having thought the matter over sufficiently, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to which we are permeated and enveloped by stool-pigeoning. Just as, without a transistor in hand, we do not sense in a field, in a forest, or on a lake that multitudes of radio waves are constantly pouring through us.
It is difficult to school oneself to ask that constant question: Who is the stool pigeon among us? In our apartment, in our courtyard, in our watch-repair shop, in our school, in our editorial office, in our workshop, in our design bureau, and even in our police. It is difficult to school oneself, and it is repulsive to become schooled—but for safety one must. It is impossible to expel the stoolies or to fire them—they will recruit new ones. But you have to know them—sometimes in order to beware of them; sometimes to put on an act in their presence, to pretend to be something you aren’t; sometimes in order to quarrel openly with the informer and by this means devalue his testimony against you.
The poetry of recruitment of stool pigeons still awaits its artist. There is a visible life and there is an invisible life. The spiderwebs are stretched everywhere, and as we move we do not notice how they wind about us.
Selecting tools available for recruitment is like selecting master keys: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. No. 1: “Are you a Soviet person?” No. 2 is to promise that which the person being recruited has fruitlessly sought by lawful means for many years. No. 3 is to bring pressure to bear on some weak point, to threaten a person with what he fears most of all. No. 4 . . .
You see, it only takes a tiny bit of pressure. A certain A.G. is called in, and it is well known that he is a nincompoop. And so to start he is instructed: “Write down a list of the people you know who have anti-Soviet attitudes.” He is distressed and hesitates: “I’m not sure.” He didn’t jump up and didn’t thump the table: “How dare you!” (Who does in our country? Why deal in fantasies!) “Aha, so you are not sure? Then write a list of people you can guarantee are one hundred percent Soviet people! But you are guaranteeing, you understand? If you provide even one of them with false references, you yourself will go to prison immediately. So why aren’t you writing?” “Well, I . . . can’t guarantee.” “Aha, you can’t? That means you know they are anti-Soviet. So write down immediately the ones you know about!” And so the good and honest rabbit A.G. sweats and fidgets and worries. He has too soft a soul, formed before the Revolution. He has sincerely accepted this pressure which is bearing down on him: Write either that they are Soviet or that they are anti-Soviet. He sees no third way out.
A stone is not a human being, and even stones get crushed.
Though he was an enlightened and irreligious person, U. discovered that the only defense against the security officers was to hide behind Christ. This was not very honest, but it was a sure thing. He lied: “I must tell you frankly that I had a Christian upbringing, and therefore it is quite impossible for me to work with you!”
And that ended it! And all the lieutenant’s chatter, which had by then lasted many hours, simply stopped! The lieutenant understood he had drawn a bad number. “We need you like a dog needs five legs,” he exclaimed petulantly. “Give me a written refusal.” (Once again “written”!) “And write just that, explaining about your damned god!”
And does the impartial reader not find that they flee from Christ like devils from the sign of the cross, from the bells calling to matins?
And that is why our Soviet regime can never come to terms with Christianity!
Chapter 13
Hand Over Your Second Skin Too!
CAN YOU BEHEAD a man whose head has already been cut off? You can. Can you skin the hide off a man when he has already been skinned? You can!
This was all invented in our camps. This was all devised in the Archipelago! So let it not be said that the brigade was our only Soviet contribution to world penal science. Is not the second camp term a contribution too? The waves which surge into the Archipelago from outside do not die down there and do not subside freely, but are pumped through the pipes of the second interrogation.
Oh, blessed are those pitiless tyrannies, those despotisms, those savage countries, where a person once arrested cannot be arrested a second time! Where once in prison he cannot be reimprisoned. Where a person who has been tried cannot be tried again! Where a sentenced person cannot be sentenced again!
But in our country everything is permissible. When a man is flat on his back, irrevocably doomed and in the depths of despair, how convenient it is to poleax him again! The ethics of our prison chiefs are: “Beat the man who’s down.” And the ethics of our Security officers are: “Use corpses as steppingstones!”
We may take it that camp interrogations and camp court were born on Solovki, although what they did there was simply to push them into the bell-tower basement and finish them off. During the period of the Five-Year Plans and of the metastases, they began to employ the second camp term instead of the bullet.
For how otherwise, without second (or third or fourth) terms, could they secrete in the bosom of the Archipelago, and destroy, all those marked down for destruction?
The generation of new prison terms, like the growing of a snake’s rings, is a form of Archipelago life. As long as our camps thrived and our exile lasted, this black threat hovered over the heads of the convicted: to be given a new term before they had finished the first one. Second camp terms were handed out every year, but most intensively in 1937 and 1938 and during the war years. (In 1948–1949 the burden of second terms was transferred outside: they overlooked, they missed, prisoners who should have been resentenced in camp—and then had to haul them back into camp from outside. These were even called repeaters, whereas those resentenced inside didn’t get a special name.)
And it was a mercy—an automated mercy—when, in 1938, second camp terms were given out without any second arrest, without a camp interrogation, without a camp court, when the prisoners were simply called up in brigades to the Records and Classification Section and told to sign for their second terms. (For refusing to sign—you were simply put in punishment block, as for smoking where it wasn’t allowed.) And they also had it all explained to them in a very human way: “We aren’t telling you that you are guilty of anything, but just sign that you have been informed.” And it was useless to try to get out of it as if, in the dark infinity of the Archipelago, eight was in any way distinct from eighteen, or a tenner at the start from a tenner at the end of a sentence. The only important thing was that they did not claw and tear your body today.
Now we can understand: The epidemic of camp sentences in 1938 was the result of a directive from above. It was there at the top that they suddenly came to their senses and realized that they had been handing out too little, that they had to pile it on (and shoot some too)—and thus frighten the rest.
But the epidemic of camp cases during the war was stimulated by a happy spark from below too, by the features of popular initiative. In all likelihood there was an order from above that during the war the most colorful and notable individuals in each camp, who might become centers of rebellion, had to be suppressed and isolated. The bloody local boys immediately sensed the riches in this vein—their own deliverance from the front. This was evidently guessed in more than one camp and rapidly taken up as useful, ingenious, and a salvation. The camp Chekists also helped fill up the machine-gun embrasures—but with other people’s bodies.
Let the historian picture to himself the pulse of those years: The front was moving east, the Germans were around Leningrad, outside Moscow, in Voronezh, on the Volga, and in the foothills of the Caucasus. In the rear there were ever fewer men. Every healthy male figure aroused reproachful glances. Everything for the front! There was no price too big for the government to pay to stop Hitler. And only the camp officers (and their confreres in State Security) were well fed, white, soft-skinned, idle—all in their places in the rear. And the farther into Siberia and the North they were, the quieter things were. But we must soberly understand: theirs was a shaky prosperity. Due to end at the first outcry: Bring out those rosy-cheeked, smart camp fellows! No battle experience? So they had ideology. And they would be lucky to end up in the police, or in the behind-the-lines “obstacle” detachments, but it could happen otherwise; otherwise it was into officer battalions and be thrown into the Battle of Stalingrad! In the summer of 1942 they picked up whole officer-training schools and hurled them into the front, uncertified, their courses unfinished. All the young and healthy convoy guards had already been scraped up for the front. And the camps hadn’t fallen apart. It was all right. And they wouldn’t fall apart if the security officers were called up either! (There were already rumors.)
Draft deferment—that was life. Draft deferment—that was happiness. How could you keep your draft deferment? Easy—you simply had to prove your importance! You had to prove that if it were not for Chekist vigilance the camps would blow apart, that they were a caldron of seething tar! And then our whole glorious front would collapse! It was right here in the camps in the tundra and the taiga that the white-chested security chiefs were holding back the Fifth Column, holding back Hitler! This was their contribution to victory! Not sparing themselves, they conducted interrogation after interrogation, exposing plot after plot.
Until now only the unhappy, worn-out camp inmates, tearing the bread from each other’s mouths, had been fighting for their lives! But now the omnipotent Chekist security officers shamelessly entered the fray. “You croak today, me tomorrow.” Better you should perish and put off my death, you dirty animal.
And what was this? Plots were discovered in every camp! More plots! Still more! Ever larger in scale! And ever broader! Oh, those perfidious last-leggers! They were just feigning that they could be blown over by the wind—their paper-thin, pellagra-stricken hands were secretly reaching for the machine guns! Oh, thank you, Security Section! Oh, savior of the Motherland—the Third Section!
And—you? You thought that in camp at least you could unburden your soul? That here you could at least complain aloud: “My sentence is too long! They fed me badly! I have too much work!” Or you thought that here you could at least repeat what you got your term for? But if you say any of this aloud—you are done for! You are doomed to get a new “tenner.” (True, once a new camp tenner begins, at least the first is erased, so that as it works out you serve not twenty, but some thirteen or fifteen or the like. . . . Which will be more than you can survive.)
But you are sure you have been silent as a fish? And then you are grabbed anyway? Quite right! They couldn’t help grabbing you no matter how you behaved. After all, they don’t grab for something but because. It’s the same principle according to which they clip the wool off freedom too. When the Third Section gang goes hunting, it picks a list of the most noticeable people in the camp. And that is the list they then dictate to Babich. . . .
In camp, after all, it is even more difficult to hide, everything is out in the open. And there is only one salvation for a person: to be a zero
! A total zero. A zero from the very beginning.
To stick you with a charge presents no problem. When the “plots” came to an end after 1943 (the Germans began to retreat), a multitude of cases of “propaganda” appeared. (Those “godfathers” still didn’t want to go to the front!) In the Burepolom Camp, for example, the following selection was available:
Hostile activity against the policy of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet government (and what it was you can guess for yourself!)
Expression of defeatist fabrications
Expression of slanderous opinions about the material situation of the workers of the Soviet Union (Telling the truth was slander.)
Expression of a desire (!) for the restoration of the capitalist system
Expression of a grudge against the Soviet government (This was particularly impudent! Who are you, you bastard, to nurse grudges! So you got a “tenner” and you should have kept your mouth shut!)
A seventy-year-old former Tsarist diplomat was charged with making the following propaganda:
That the working class in the U.S.S.R. lives badly
That Gorky was a bad writer (!!)
To say that they had gone too far in bringing these charges against him is out of the question. They always handed out sentences for Gorky; that’s how he had set himself up. Skvortsov, for example, in Lokchimlag (near Ust-Vym), harvested fifteen years, and among the charges against him was the following:
He had unfavorably contrasted the proletarian poet Mayakovsky with a certain bourgeois poet.
That’s what it said in the formal charges against him, and it was enough to get him convicted. And from the minutes of the interrogation we can establish who that certain bourgeois poet was. It was Pushkin! To get a sentence for Pushkin—that, in truth, was a rarity!
After that, therefore, Martinson, who really did say in the tin shop that “the U.S.S.R. was one big camp,” ought to have sung praise to God that he got off with a “tenner.”
The Gulag Archipelago Page 30
