Resistance in the Gulag Archipelago

by Donald G Boudreau

  Kostoglotov is one of those extraordinary persons who actually-learn from experience—that his, his reflections on his own history are original with him, and not derived from the recent opinions that constitute the body of social superstition at any time. He knows that his life of exile is a terrible injustice, that the Soviet state is a tyranny-the more shameful for its claim to incarnate a lofty ideal of political decency. Without for a moment hankering after the other social systems of which we have examples, he is shrewd enough to guess at the forms that injustice must assume in other states that claim to represent the popular will and the interests of the common man, he longs with an exile’s yearning for a community of fair dealing, of love and truth.

  Kostoglotov is neither a saint nor a lay-figure representing an ideal of primitive Christianity that is appealing in proportion as it is obviously inadequate to deal with the problem of evil. He is a man, with a man’s faults, and a man’s aspirations to do better than he does. The problem of evil is indeed, in many forms, the deepest concern of Kostoglotov, and the particular preoccupation of his author. By instinct, both Solzhenitsyn and Kostoglotov confront the question without reticence. As we witnessed in the opening pages of this thesis, Solzhenitsyn typifies Stalin to an “evil prince” in his earlier cited short story, “Lake Segden” (1972) as encountered in Solzhenitsyn’s Stories And Prose Poems, at 198-9.

  In the novel Cancer Ward this imagery is promoted in two other noteworthy incidents worth recounting here. Oleg Kostoglotov receives a letter from two close friends relaying to him that their dog “Beetle” has been killed. A senseless act, that was committed with the sanction of the “village council”:

  Dear Oleg,

  We are in great distress. Beetle has been killed. The village council hired two hunters to roam the streets and shoot dogs-They were walking down the streets, shooting. We hid Tobik (another pet dog), but Beetle broke loose, went out and barked at them. He’s always been frightened even when you pointed a camera lens at him, he had a premonition. They shot him in the eye. He fell down beside an irrigation ditch, his head dangling over the edge. When we came up to him he was still twitching-such a big body, and it was twitching. It was terrifying to watch. You know, the house seemed empty now…… So now they had killed the dog as well. Why?[33]

  Under Kostoglotov’s release from the cancer wing, he enters a department store in a nearby metropolitan area. He is overcome by the tedious vacuum created by excessive materialism. His conclusion is inescapable.

  What was this? There were men rotting in trenches, men being thrown into mass graves, into shallow pits in the perma frost, men being taken into the camps for the first, second and third times, men being jolted from station to station in prison trucks, wearing themselves out with picks, slaving away to be able to buy a patched-up quilt jacket-and here was this neat little man who could remember the size not only of his shirt but of his collar too!… If you remember your collar size, doesn’t it mean your bound to forget something else, something more important? (Kostoglotov).[34]

  Kostoglotov proceeds on in visiting a zoo, and what do you know, the monkeys there are found to be bearing a strong resemblance to many of his former inmates; no doubt many of whom, were still behind bars (like monkeys).

  They reminded him of many of his former acquaintances. In fact, he could even recognize individuals who must still be in prison somewhere.[35]

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn continues exploring through the character of Kostoglotov, the fragility of the human (animal) condition and its relation to rational freedom in the world. The analogy created here is, in the writer’s view, an act of unabashed genius.

  The most confusing thing about the imprisoned animals was that even supposing Oleg took their side and had the power, he would still not want to break into the cages and liberate them. This was because, deprived of their home surroundings, they had lost the idea of rational freedom. It would only make things harder for them, suddenly to set them free.[36]

  It would be incomplete if the “evil prince” and “the hunters” who murdered Beetle were not present as the novel climaxes. Their presence is, as subtle here, as the consequences of Stalinism themselves.

  He went there. The cage was empty but it had the usual notice reading “Macaque Rhesus.” He had hurriedly scrawled and nailed to the plywood. It said: “The little monkey that used to live here was blinded because of the senseless security of one of the visitors. An evil man threw tobacco into the Macaque Rhesus’ eyes. Oleg was struck dumb. Up to then he had been strolling along, smiling with known condescension, but now he felt like yelling and roaring across the whole zoo, as though the tobacco had been thrown into his own eyes, “Why?” “Thrown just like that! Why! It’s senseless! Why?” What went straight to his heart was the childish simplicity with which it was written. This unknown man, who had already made a safe getaway, was not described as “anti-humanist” or “an agent of American imperialism”; all it said was that he was evil. This was what was so striking: how could this man simply be “evil”? Children, do not grow up to be evil! Children, do not destroy defenseless creatures![37]

  Kostoglotov does not linger long after the zoo. He now begins the long process of acclimating himself to rational freedom once again. He had survived whereby the others had not.

  He hadn’t even died of cancer. And now his exile was cracking like an eggshell. He remembered the komendant advising him to get married. They’d all be giving him advice like that soon. It was good to lie down. Good. The trains shuddered and moved forward. It was that only in his heart, or his soul, somewhere in his chest, in the deepest seat of his emotion, he was seized with anguish. He twisted his body and lay face down on his greatcoat, shut his eyes and thrust his face into the duffel bag, spiky with loaves. The train went on and Kostoglotov’s boots dangled over the corridor like a dead man’s. An evil man threw tobacco in the Macaque Rhesus’s eyes. Just like that.[38]

  With the question of evil and good fathomed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, how can Russian men and women rectify the horrendous predicament? What does he offer up to us as a possible remedy?

  (Schulubin): We have to show the world a society in which all relationships, fundamental principles and laws flow directly from ethics, and from them alone. Ethical demands must determine all considerations: how to bring up children, what to train them for, to what end the work of grownups should be directed, and how their leisure should be occupied. As for scientific research, it should only be conducted where it doesn’t damage morality, in the first instance where

  It doesn’t change the researchers themselves. The same should apply to foreign policy. Whenever the question of frontiers arises, we should think of not of how much richer or stronger this or that course of action will make us or how it will raise our prestige. We should consider one criterion only: how far is it ethical? “Yes, but that’s hardly possible, is it-not for another two hundred years?” Kostoglotov frowned.[39]

  In consideration of the fact that torture has now (1974) become a state institution in more than thirty countries (including, in the Soviet Union), my prescriptive analysis here lacks Utopian theory.[40] We now have in these countries a rule of pain that is being carried out by technicians, scientists, parliamentary officials, judges and cabinet ministers. The only distant hope envisioned here is the international enforcement of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, this has not been made manifest to date (1974, at the time of this writing).

  In summary, I would like to reiterate that the focus of this paper has been on resistance in the Gulag archipelago, as opposed to a blanket condemnation of Stalinism. The noted Soviet historian, Roy A. Medvedev (1972) synthesizes the weight of the evidence.

  The people became more educated and cultured, Leninist ideas penetrated everywhere. Proletarian influences reached the petty bourgeois masses; the authority of the Communist Party increased markedly. But at the same time the masses were educated in another, unproleterian spirit of blind
subjection to the authority of the chiefs, above all Stalin.[41]

  Conclusively, the Soviet Union is not so much to be reproached for taking authoritarian measures considering the mitigating circumstances. Almost all systems of law contain martial law for such occurrences. Yet, Stalinism was an extreme phenomenon in that despite its rhetoric to the contrary, martial law went undistinguished. This is unforgiving and invites reproachment. And, in The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich (1970) the Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, eloquently brings the relevant issues to light. He finally concludes that

  [T]he responsibility for this failure falls heavily on the working masses of people themselves. Unless they learn to rid themselves of authoritarian forms of government. No one can help them; they and they alone are responsible. This and this alone is true and affords hope. The Soviet government cannot be reproached for reverting to authoritarian and moralistic methods of control; it had no other choice if it did not want to endanger everything. It is to be reproached for neglecting self-government, for blocking its future development, and for not creating its preconditions. The Soviet government is to be reproached for forgetting that the state has to wither away. IT is to be reproached for neglecting to make the failure of self-government and self-regulation of the masses the point of departure for new and greater efforts; for trying to make the world believe that, despite everything, this self-regulation was developing and that “complete socialism” and “genuine democracy” prevailed.[42]

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN RE THE TRADITION OF FREEDOM VS. TRADITION OF SOCIETY

  The basic principle of a free society is that no single individual can come to know absolute truth. Thus, it is believed that the interchange of different ideas will serve to facilitate the maximum attainment of relative, approximate truth. This position is untenable to the Soviet Union with its long tradition of associating freedom with total chaos. The operative ideals of our root orientation in the West are diametrically opposed to those made manifest throughout Stalinism.

  The evidence at hand dictates a failure to falsify the hypothesis. In the Gulag archipelago, there existed no channels representing the equities and grievances of the population at large, through which injured parties would have been permitted to seek recourse without threat of governmental retaliation. There existed neither any governmental implementation nor public support of a criminal justice system acting in the interests of Russian citizens. Thus, dissent was blatantly suffocated by Joseph Stalin’s draconic measures.

  Dissent was weakened, in that when it did sporadically arise, there was tragically no one in a governmental position who was receptive and willing to act. Let us recognize the genius of our Founding Fathers in the United States, who by adopting the separation of powers — rejected Draconian dictatorships that would serve to jettison the free marketplace of goods, services, and ideas.

  Hunger strikes proved ineffective as the government went about implementing coercive counteracting tactics (i.e., patience and deception on behalf of the prison administration, coercive feeding, directives telling the prisoners to go ahead and starve themselves to death-government assuming no responsibility therefore). As D.M. Sturley (1964) (16) observed, many of the peasantry class did resist Forced Collectivization. Rather than hand over their livestock to the state, peasants slaughtered and ate them and also refused to till the fields. Unfortunately, we are discussing a predominantly peasant culture faced with mass illiteracy and famine on an extensive scale. Peasants were ultimately forced into forced labor at the point of the machine-gun.

  I concur wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn’s conviction that war crime criminals of the Stalinist era must be brought to justice through the Soviet criminal justice system. As he illustrates in The Gulag Archipelago, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals have been convicted on such charges in West Germany (p. 175). In the past quarter century, not one of Stalin’s accomplices has been brought to trial. These statistics, do not at all balance, with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous secret 1956 denunciation of Stalin. Unless the Soviet system recognizes and facilitates legal action with reference to these crimes against humanity, the process of extirpating the Stalinist ethos from the soil of “Holy Russia” will be drastically prolonged.

  The right to life as a basic tenet of liberalism is desirable to all. Individual fulfillment is inextricably interwoven with the freedom of expression. The bell of the Gulag will continue tolling throughout the course of history.

  Donald G. Boudreau

  Montclair State College

  Upper Montclair, New Jersey

  Fall 1974

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BOOKS

  Amalrik, Andrei. Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1970.

  Camus, Albert. An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1969.

  Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion and Death. Translated from the French and with an introduction by Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Pub., 1961.

  Gasset, Jose Ortega y. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1957.

  Goldston, Robert. The Russian Revolution. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966.

  Grazzini, Giovanni. Solzhenitsyn: a biography. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.

  Hook, Sidney. Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1965.

  Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1969.

  Medvedev, Roy A. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

  Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Publishers, 1970.

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Parts I-II. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander I. Cancer Ward. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The First Circle. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Stories and Prose Poems. Translated by Michael Glenny. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

  Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.

  Sturley, D.M. A Short History of Russia. New York: Harper & row Publishers, 1964.

  Toynbee, Arnold J. Civilization on Trial. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

  PERIODICALS

  The New Republic — A Journal of Politics and the Arts

  The New York Times

  Time Magazine

  Esquire Magazine

  SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: ADDITIONAL, MORE CONTEMPORARY READINGS, ISSUED SUBSEQUENT TO THE 1974 WRITING OF THE INSTANT SUBJECT PAPER

  Applebaum, Anne. “Stronger Than The Gulag,” [Solzhenitsyn’s writings], The Washington Post, August 5, 2008, p. A19, col. 3.

  Aron, Leon. “Death and the Dictator,” Soviet History, [Reviews of Stalin a Biography by Robert Service, Belknap/Harvard University and Stalin And His Hangmen, The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield, Random House], Book World, The Washington Post, Sunday April 17, 2005, p. 3.

  Beichman, Arnold. “Crimes without just punishment,” The Washington Times, January 9, 1990, p. F1, col. 5.

  Bozell III, L. Brent. “ ‘Circle’ of Stalinist Terror,” [Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s film, “The Inner Circle”] The Washington Times, February 15, 1992, p. C3, col. 4.

  Cohen, Stephen F. “An Anti-Stalinist Tide Is Flowing Again,” International Herald Tribune, Opinion, February 3, 1987, p. 4.

  Cohen, Stephen F. “Straining Mightily to Uproot Stalinism,” International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1987, p. 4.

  Dobbs, Michael. “Inside Stalin’s ‘Marble Gulag’, Soviets Allow rare Visit to Siberian Camp for Uranium Miners,” The Washington Post, Final, October 1, 1989, p. 1, col. 2.

  Dreher, Rod. “The Writer, The Pope, Tragedy
Of The Half-heeded, Their words like silent Raindrops fell…’” The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va., Opinion, [ethical and ideological similarities between John Paul II and Alexander Solzhenitsyn], August 16, 2008, p. A6, col. 1.

  Finn, Peter. “Mourners Pay respects to Solzhenitsyn, Though Thousands View Writer’s Body, National Grief Isn’t Apparent in Russia,” The Washington Post, the World, August 6, 2008, p. A12, col. 1.

  Finn, Peter. “Russia’s Heroic Literary Curmudgeon, Onetime Dissident Acclaimed Even by Those Who Disagreed With Him,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2008, p. A6.

  Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasant’s, Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Gertz, Bill. “U.S. POWs sent to die in gulags,” [A Russian government search of Soviet secret police files has revealed that American prisoners of war were sent to die in gulag labor camps after World War II.] Washington Times, February 17, 1992, p. A1, col. 1.

  Glasser, Susan B. “Gulag Survivor Wages Battle Against Oblivion,” The Washington Post, September 14, 2003, p.A20, col. 1.

  Heintz, Jim. “Author Solzhenitsyn buried in Moscow,” The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va., August 7, 2008, p. C2, col. 1.

  Hiatt, Fred. Russians Seek Rosier Past, Even Revising Stalin Image,” [“Russians are romanticizing their prerevolutionary era and have even begun to question whether Joseph Stalin and his gulag were as monstrous as perestroika-era revelations suggested.”], The Washington Post, October 30, 1994, p. A31, col. 1.

  Hochschild, Adam. “A Toast to Stalin’s Ghost, Why Russians Still Mourn the Bloody Yesterday,” The Washington Post, May 5, 1995, p. C1, col. 4.

  Hockstader, Lee. “While Solzhenitsyn Thunders, Russian lawmakers Barely Clap, Returned Exile Issues Stern Warning On Poverty and the Abuse of Power,” the Washington Post, October 29, 1994, p. A23, col. 1,2.