Next day we saw from our windows a group of officers making their way from hut to hut. A detail of warders opened the door, went along the corridors, looked into the rooms, and called us (not in the old way, as though we were cattle, but gently): “Foremen! You’re wanted at the entrance!”
A debate began among us. It was the teams, not their foremen, who had to decide. Men went from room to room to talk it over.
A decision was reached at last in some invisible quarter. We foremen, six or seven of us, went out to the entrance, where the officers were patiently awaiting us. We lowered our eyes because not one of us could now look at our bosses sycophantically, and rebellious looks would have been foolish.
From both corridors, however, a crowd of zeks pressed into the entranceway, and hiding behind those in front, the back rows could speak freely, call out our demands and our answers.
Officially, the officers with blue-edged epaulets (some we knew, others we had never seen before) saw and addressed only the foremen. Their manner was restrained. They did not try to intimidate us, but their tone was still intended to remind us that we were inferior. It would, so they said, be in our own interest to end the strike and the hunger strike. If we did, we would receive not only today’s rations but—something unheard of in Gulag!—yesterday’s, too. (They were so used to the idea that hungry men can always be bought!)
There were shouts from the corridor:
“Whoever’s to blame for the shooting must be brought to justice!”
“Take the locks off the doors!”
“Off with the numbers!”
The bosses left, and the hut was locked up again.
Although hunger had begun to get many of us down—our heads were heavy and our thoughts lacked clarity—in our hut not a single voice was raised in favor of surrender.
For the second night, the third morning, and the third day hunger clawed at our guts.
But when on the third morning the Chekists, in still greater force, again summoned the foremen to the entrance, and once again we stood there—sullen, unreachable, hangdog—our general resolve was not to give way! We were carried along by inertial force.
The bosses only gave us new strength. The newly arrived brass hat had this to say:
“The administration of the Peschany camp requests the prisoners to take their food. The administration will receive any complaints. It will examine them and eliminate the causes of conflict between the administration and the prisoners.”
Had our ears deceived us? They were requesting us to take food! And not so much as a word about work. We had stormed the camp jail, broken windows and lamps, chased warders with knives, and it now turned out that far from being a mutiny, this was a conflict between (!) . . . between equals . . . between the administration and the prisoners!
It had taken only two days and two nights of united action—and look how our serfmasters had changed their tone! Never in our lives, not only as prisoners, but as free men, as members of trade unions, had we heard our bosses speak with such unction!
Nonetheless, we started silently dispersing—no one could take a decision there. Nor could anyone there promise a decision.
The hut was locked again.
From outside it looked to the bosses as dumb and unyielding as ever. But inside, the sections were the scene of stormy debate. The temptation was too great! Soft speech had affected the undemanding zeks more than any threat would. Voices were heard urging surrender. What more, indeed, could we hope to achieve! . . .
We were tired! We were hungry! The mysterious force which had fused our emotions and borne us aloft was losing height and with tremulous wings bringing us down to earth again.
Yet mouths clamped tight for decades, mouths which had been silent for a lifetime, were now opened.
Give way now? That would mean accepting someone’s word of honor. Whose word exactly? That of our jailers, the camp dog pack. In all the time that prisons had existed, in all the time the camps had been there—had they ever once kept their word?
The sediment of ancient sufferings and wrongs and insults was stirred up anew. For the first time ever we had taken the right road—were we to give in so soon? For the first time we had felt what it was like to be human—only to give in so quickly? A keen, a bracing breeze of mischief blew around us. We would go on! We would go on! They’d sing a different tune before we finished! They would give way!
Once more the emotions of two hundred men were fused in a single passion; the wings of the eagle beat the air—he sailed aloft!
We lay down to conserve our strength, trying to move as little as possible and not to talk unnecessarily. Our thoughts were quite enough to occupy us.
Suddenly, in the late afternoon of the third day, when the western sky was clearing and the setting sun could be seen, our observers shouted in anger and dismay:
“Hut nine!. . . Nine has surrendered!. . . Nine’s going to the mess hall!”
We all jumped up. Prisoners from the other side of the corridor ran into our room. Through the bars, from the upper and lower bed platforms, some of us on all fours, some looking over other people’s shoulders, we watched, transfixed, that sad procession.
Two hundred and fifty pathetic little figures, darker than ever against the sunset, cowed and crestfallen, were trailing slantwise across the camp. On they went, each of them glimpsed briefly in the rays of the setting sun, a dawdling, endless chain, as though those behind regretted that the foremost had set out, and were loath to follow. Some, feebler than the rest, were led by the arm or the hand, and so uncertain were their steps that they looked like blind men with their guides. Many, too, held mess tins or mugs in their hands, and this mean prisonware, carried in expectation of a supper too copious to gulp down onto constricted stomachs, these tins and cups held out like begging bowls, were more degrading and slavish and pitiable than anything else about them.
I felt myself weeping. I glanced at my companions as I wiped away my tears, and saw theirs.
Hut No. 9 had spoken, and decided for us all. It was there that the dead had been lying around for four days, since Tuesday evening.
They went into the mess hall, and it was as though they had decided to forgive the murderers in return for their bread ration and some mush.
We went away from the windows without a word.
It was then that I learned the meaning of Polish pride, and understood their recklessly brave rebellions. The Polish engineer Jerzy Wegierski, whom I have mentioned before, was now in our team. He was serving his ninth and last year. Even when he was a work assigner no one had ever heard him raise his voice. He was always quiet, polite, and gentle.
But now—his face was distorted with rage, scorn, and suffering, as he tore his eyes away from that procession of beggars, and cried in an angry, steely voice:
“Foreman! Don’t wake me for supper! I shan’t be going!”
He clambered up onto the top bunk, turned his face to the wall—and didn’t get up again. That night we went to eat—but he wouldn’t get up! He never received parcels, he was quite alone, he was always short of food—but he wouldn’t get up. In his mind’s eye the steam from a bowl of mush could not veil the ideal of freedom.
If we had all been so proud and so strong, what tyrant could have held out against us?
But what had happened had not gone for nothing, and our comrades had not fallen in vain. The atmosphere in the camp would never be as oppressive as before. Meanness was back on its throne, but very precariously. Politics were freely discussed in the huts. No work assigner or foreman would dare kick a zek or take a swing at him. Because everybody knew now how easy it is to make knives and how easily they sink home between the ribs.
Our little island had experienced an earthquake—and ceased to belong to the Archipelago.
This was how Ekibastuz felt. It is doubtful whether Karaganda felt the same. And certain that Moscow did not. The Special Camp system was beginning to collapse in one place after another, but our Father and Teacher
had no inkling of it—it was not, of course, reported to him.
Meanwhile the germ of freedom was spreading. Like a legend in chains, our movement entered still servile Kengir, to awaken it, too.
There were other disturbances besides ours, besides those in the Special Camps, but the whole bloody past has been so carefully cleaned up and painted and polished that it is impossible for me now to establish even a bare list of disorders in the camps.
Evidently, the Stalinist camp system, particularly in the Special Camps, was nearing a crisis at the beginning of the fifties. Even in the Almighty One’s lifetime the natives were beginning to tear at their chains.
There is no knowing how things would have gone if he had lived. As it was—for reasons which had nothing to do with the laws of economics or society—the sluggish and impure blood suddenly stopped flowing in the senile veins of that undersized and pockmarked individual.
However, the tyrant did not die in vain. Something hidden from view slipped and shifted—and suddenly, with a tinny clatter like an empty bucket falling, yet another individual came tumbling headlong from the very top of the ladder into the muckiest of bogs.
And now everyone—the vanguard, the rear, even the most wretched natives of Gulag—realized that a new age had arrived.
To us on the Archipelago, Beria’s fall was like a thunderclap: he was the Supreme Patron, the Viceroy of the Archipelago! MVD officers were perplexed, embarrassed, dismayed.
“It’s all over now,” Colonel Chechev said with quivering lips. (But he was mistaken.)
Chapter 12
The Forty Days of Kengir
FOR THE SPECIAL Camps there was another side to Beria’s fall: by raising their hopes it confused, distracted, and disarmed the katorzhane. Hopes of speedy change burgeoned. Their anger cooled.
In that fateful year, 1953, the fall of Beria made it urgent for the security ministry to prove its devotion and its usefulness in some signal way. But how?
The mutinies which the security men had hitherto considered a menace now shone like a beacon of salvation. Let’s have more disturbances and disorders, so that measures will have to be taken. Then staffs, and salaries, will not be reduced.
In less than a year the guards at Kengir opened fire several times on innocent men; and it cannot have been unintentional.
They shot Lida, the young girl from the mortar-mixing gang who hung her stockings out to dry near the boundary fence.
They winged the old Chinaman—nobody in Kengir remembered his name, and he spoke hardly any Russian, but everybody knew the waddling figure with a pipe between his teeth and the face of an elderly goblin. A guard called him to a watchtower, tossed a packet of makhorka near the boundary fence, and when the Chinaman reached for it, shot and wounded him.
Then there was the famous case of the column returning to camp from the ore-dressing plant and being fired on with dumdum bullets, which wounded sixteen men.
This the zeks did not take quietly—it was the Ekibastuz story over again. Kengir Camp Division No. 3 did not turn out for work three days running (but did take food), demanding punishment of the culprits.
A commission arrived and persuaded them that the culprits would be prosecuted. They went back to work.
But in February, 1954, another prisoner was shot at the woodworking plant—“the Evangelist,” as all Kengir remembered him (Aleksandr Sisoyev, I think his name was). This man had served nine years and nine months of his tenner. His job was fluxing arc-welding rods and he did this work in a little shed which stood near the boundary fence. He went out to relieve himself near the shed—and while he was at it was shot from a watchtower. Guards quickly ran over from the guardhouse and started dragging the dead man into the boundary zone, to make it look as though he had trespassed on it. This was too much for the zeks, who grabbed picks and shovels and drove the murderers away from the murdered man.
The woodworking plant was in an uproar. The prisoners said that they would carry the dead man into camp on their shoulders. The camp officers would not permit it. “Why did you kill him?” shouted the prisoners. The bosses had their explanation ready: the dead man himself was to blame—he had started it by throwing stones at the tower. (Can they have had time to read his identity card; did they know that he had three months more to go and was an Evangelical Christian? . . .)
In the evening after supper, what they did was this. The light would suddenly go out in a section, and someone invisible said from the doorway: “Brothers! How long shall we go on building and taking our wages in bullets? Nobody goes to work tomorrow!” The same thing happened in section after section, hut after hut.
A note was thrown over the wall to the Second Camp Division. In this division, which was multinational, the majority had tenners and many were coming to the end of their time—but they joined in just the same.
In the morning the men’s Camp Divisions, 2 and 3, did not report for work.
This bad habit—striking without refusing the state’s bread and slops—was becoming more and more popular with prisoners.
They held out like this for two days. But the strike was mastered. . . .
For the second time in Kengir, a ripening abscess was lanced before it could burst.
But then the bosses went too far. They reached for the biggest stick they could use on the 58s—for the thieves!
The bosses now renounced the whole principle of the Special Camps, acknowledged that if they segregated political prisoners they had no means of making themselves understood, and brought into the mutinous No. 3 Camp Division 650 men, most of them thieves, some of them petty offenders (including many minors). “A healthy batch is joining us!” the bosses spitefully warned the 58s. “Now you won’t dare breathe.”
The bosses understood well enough how the restorers of order would begin: by stealing, by preying on others, and so setting every man against his fellows.
But here again we see how unpredictable is the course of human emotions and of social movements! Injecting in Kengir No. 3 a mammoth dose of tested ptomaine, the bosses obtained not a pacified camp but the biggest mutiny in the history of the Gulag Archipelago.
Events followed their inevitable course. It was impossible for the politicals not to offer the thieves a choice between war and alliance. It was impossible for the thieves to refuse an alliance. And it was impossible for the alliance, once concluded, to remain inactive.
The obvious first objective was to capture the service yard, in which all the camp’s food stores were also situated. They began the operation in the afternoon of a nonworking day (Sunday, May 16, 1954). . . .
All these quite undisguised operations took a certain time, during which the warders managed to get themselves organized and obtain instructions. . . .
The service yard was now firmly held by the punitive forces, and machine-gunners were posted there. But the Second Camp Division erected a barricade facing the service yard gate. The Second and Third Camp Divisions had been joined together by a hole in the wall, and there were no longer any warders, any MVD authority, in them.
How can we say what feelings wrung the hearts of those eight thousand men, who for so long and until yesterday had been slaves with no sense of fellowship, and now had united and freed themselves, not fully perhaps, but at least within the rectangle of those walls, and under the gaze of those quadrupled guards? So long suppressed, the brotherhood of man had broken through at last!
Proclamations appeared in the mess hall: “Arm yourselves as best you can, and attack the soldiers first!” The most passionate among them hastily scrawled their slogans on scraps of newspaper: “Bash the Chekists, boys!” “Death to the stoolies, the Cheka’s stooges!” Here, there, everywhere you turned there were meetings and orators. Everybody had suggestions of his own. What demands shall we put forward? What is it we want? Put the murderers on trial!—goes without saying. What else? . . . No locking huts; take the numbers off! But beyond that? . . . Beyond that came the most frightening thing—the real reason
why they had started it all, what they really wanted. We want freedom, of course, just freedom—but who can give it to us? The judges who condemned us in Moscow. As long as our complaints are against Steplag or Karaganda, they will go on talking to us. But if we start complaining against Moscow . . . we’ll all be buried in this steppe.
Well, then—what do we want? To break holes in the walls? To run off into the wilderness? . . .
Those hours of freedom! Immense chains had fallen from our arms and shoulders! No; whatever happened, there could be no regrets! That one day made it all worthwhile!
Late on Monday, a delegation from command HQ arrived in the seething camp. The delegation was quite well disposed. Our side learned that generals had flown in from Moscow. They found the prisoners’ demands fully justified! (We simply gasped: justified? We aren’t rebels, then? No, no, they’re quite justified!) “Those responsible for the shooting will be made to answer for it!” “But why did they beat up women?” “Beat up women?” The delegation was shocked. “That can’t be true.” Anya Mikhalevich brought in a succession of battered women for them to see. The commission was deeply moved: “We’ll look into it, never fear!” “Beasts!” Lyuba Bershadskaya shouts at the general. There were other shouts: “No locks on huts!” “We won’t lock them any more.” “Take the numbers off!” “Certainly we’ll take them off.” “The holes in the wall between camp areas must remain!” They were getting bolder. “We must be allowed to mix with each other.” “All right, mix as much as you like.” “Let the holes remain.” Right, brothers, what else do we want? We’ve won, we’ve won! We raised hell for just one day, enjoyed ourselves, let off steam—and we won! Although some among us shake their heads and say, “It’s a trick, it’s all a trick,’ we believe it!
The Gulag Archipelago Page 47
