The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  All this was trivial detail, but it was certainly food for thought. I myself had needed very badly to get into this main Soviet political prison, and I was grateful that I had been sent here: I thought about Bukharin a great deal and I wanted to picture the whole thing as it had actually been. However, I had the impres- sion that we were by now merely the remnants, and that in this respect we might just as well have been in any provincial "internal" prison.

  [One attached to a State Security headquarters.]

  Still, there was a good deal of status in being here.

  And there was no reason to be bored with my companions in my new cell. They were people to listen to and people with whom to compare notes.

  The old fellow with the lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell—both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole.

  Right there in our cell we read Fastenko's name in a book about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to be one.

  He had been sentenced to his first prison term in 1904 while still a young man, but he had been freed outright under the "manifesto" proclaimed on October 17, 1905.

  [Who among us has not learned by heart from our school history courses, as well as from the Short Course in the history of the Soviet Communist Party, that this "provocative and foul manifesto" was a mockery of freedom, that the Tsar had proclaimed: "Freedom for the dead, and prison for the living"? But the epigram was bogus. The manifesto declared that all political parties were to be tolerated and that a State Duma was to be convened, and it provided for an amnesty which was honest and extremely extensive. (The fact that it had been issued under duress was something else again.) Indeed, under its terms none other than all political prisoners without exception were to be released without reference to the term and type of punishment they had been sentenced to. Only criminals remained imprisoned. The Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945— true, it was not issued under duress—was exactly the opposite. All the political prisoners remained imprisoned.]

  His story about that amnesty was interesting. In those years, of course, there were no muzzles on the prison windows, and from the cells of the Belaya Tserkov Prison in which Fastenko was being held the prisoners could easily observe the prison courtyard and the street, and all arrivals and departures, and they could shout back and forth as they pleased to ordinary citizens outside. During the day of October 17, these outsiders, having learned of the amnesty by telegraph, announced the news to the prisoners. In their happiness the political prisoners went wild with joy. They smashed windowpanes, broke down doors, and demanded that the prison warden release them immediately. And were any of them kicked right in the snout with jackboots? Or put in punishment cells? Or was anyone deprived of library and commissary privileges? Of course not! In his distress, the warden ran from cell to cell and implored them: "Gentlemen! I beg of you, please be reasonable! I don't have the authority to release you on the basis of a telegraphed report. I must have direct orders from my superiors in Kiev. Please, I beg of you. You will have to spend the night here." And in actual fact they were most barbarously kept there for one more day.

  [After Stalin's amnesty, as I will recount later, those amnestied were held in prison for another two or three months and were forced to slog away just as before. And no one considered this illegal.]

  On getting back their freedom, Fastenko and his comrades immediately rushed to join the revolution. In 1906 he was sentenced to eight years at hard labor, which meant four years in irons and four in exile. He served the first four years in the Sevastopol Central Prison, where, incidentally, during his stay, a mass escape was organized from outside by a coalition of revolutionary parties: the SR's, the Anarchists, and the Social Democrats. A bomb blew a hole in the prison wall big enough for a horse and rider to go through, and two dozen prisoners— not everyone who wanted to escape, but those who had been chosen ahead of time by their parties and, right inside the prison, had been equipped with pistols by the jailers—fled through the hole and escaped. All but one: Anatoly Fastenko was selected by the Russian Social Democratic Party not to escape but to cause a disturbance in order to distract the attention of the guards.

  On the other hand, when he reached exile in the Yenisei area, he did not stay there long. Comparing his stories (and later those of others who had survived) with the well-known fact that under the Tsar our revolutionaries escaped from exile by the hundreds and hundreds, and more and more of them went abroad, one comes to the conclusion that the only prisoners who did not escape from Tsarist exile were the lazy ones—-because it was so easy. Fastenko "escaped," which is to say, he simply left his place of exile without a passport. He went to Vladivostok, ex- pecting to get aboard a steamer through an acquaintance there. Somehow it did not work out. So then, still without a passport, he calmly crossed the whole of Mother Russia on a train and went to the Ukraine, where he had been a member of the Bolshevik underground and where he had first been arrested. There he was given a false passport, and he left to cross the Austrian border. That particular step was so routine, and Fastenko felt himself so safe from pursuit, that he was guilty of an astonishing piece of carelessness. Having arrived at the border, and having turned in his passport to the official there, he suddenly discovered he could not remember his new name. What was he to do? There were forty passengers altogether and the official had already begun to call off their names. Fastenko thought up a solution. He pretended to be asleep. He listened as the passports were handed back to their owners, and he noted that the name Makarov was called several times without anyone responding. But even at this point he was not absolutely certain it was his name. Finally, the dragon of the imperial regime bent down to the underground revolutionary and politely tapped him on the shoulder: "Mr. Makarov! Mr. Makarov! Please, here is your passport!"

  Fastenko headed for Paris. There he got to know Lenin and Lunacharsky and carried out some administrative duties at the Party school at Longjumeau. At the same time he studied French, looked around him, and decided that he wanted to travel farther and see the world. Before the war he went to Canada, where he worked for a while, and he spent some time in the United States as well. He was astonished by the free and easy, yet solidly established life in these countries, and he concluded that they would never have a proletarian revolution and even that they hardly needed one.

  Then, in Russia, the long-awaited revolution came, sooner than expected, and everyone went back to Russia, and then there was one more Revolution. Fastenko no longer felt his former passion for these revolutions. But he returned, compelled by the same need that urges birds to their annual migrations.

  [Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Pot
emkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.]

  There was much about Fastenko I could not yet understand. In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic alone, without using his given name—in other words simply "Ilyich," asking: "Ilyich, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?"—I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin's patronymic in the same sentence as "latrine bucket," but even to call anyone on earth "Ilyich" except that one man, Lenin. ) For this reason, no doubt, there was much that Fastenko would have liked to explain to me that he still could not bring himself to.

  Nonetheless, he did say to me, in the clearest Russian: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image!" But I failed to understand him!

  Observing my enthusiasm, he more than once said to me insistently: "You're a mathematician; it's a mistake for you to forget that maxim of Descartes: 'Question everything!' Ques- tion everything!" What did this mean—"everything"? Certainly not everything! It seemed to me that I had questioned enough things as it was, and that was enough of that!

  Or he said: "Hardly any of the old hard-labor political pris- oners of Tsarist times are left. I am one of the last. All the hard- labor politicals have been destroyed, and they even dissolved our society in the thirties." "Why?" I asked. "So we would not get together and discuss things." And although these simple words, spoken in a calm tone, should have been shouted to the heavens, should have shattered windowpanes, I understood them only as indicating one more of Stalin's evil deeds. It was a trouble- some fact, but without roots.

  One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness. Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost. And even though I clearly re- member Fastenko's many stories, I recall his opinions but vaguely. He gave me the names of various books which he strongly advised me to read whenever I got back to freedom. In view of his age and his health, he evidently did not count on getting out of prison alive, and he got some satisfaction from hoping that I would someday understand his ideas. I couldn't write down the list of books he suggested, and even as it was there was a great deal of prison life for me to remember, but I at least remembered those titles which were closest to my taste then: Untimely Thoughts by Gorky (whom I regarded very highly at that time, since he had, after all, outdone all the other classical Russian writers in being proletarian) and Plekhanov's A Year in the Motherland.

  Today, when I read what Plekhanov wrote on October 28, 1917, I can clearly reconstruct what Fastenko himself thought:

  ... I am disappointed by the events of the last days not because I do not desire the triumph of the working class in Russia but precisely because I pray for it with all the strength of my soul. . . . [We must] remember Engels' remark that there could be no greater historical tragedy for the working class than to seize political power when it is not ready for it. [Such a seizure of power] would compel it to retreat far back from the positions which were won in February and March of the present year.

  [G. V. Plekhanov, "An Open Letter to the Workers of Petrograd," in the newspaper Yedinstvo, October 28, 1917.]

  When Fastenko returned to Russia, pressure was put on him, out of respect for his old underground exploits, to accept an important position. But he did not want to; instead, he accepted a modest post on the newspaper Pravda and then a still more modest one, and eventually he moved over to the Moscow City Planning office, where he worked in an inconspicuous job.

  I was surprised. Why had he chosen such a cul-de-sac? He ex- plained in terms I found incomprehensible. "You can't teach an old dog to live on a chain."

  Realizing that there was nothing he could accomplish, Fastenko quite simply wanted, in a very human way, to stay alive. He had already gotten used to living on a very small pension—not one of the "personal" pensions especially assigned by the government, because to have accepted that sort of thing would have called attention to his close ties to many who had been shot. And he might have managed to survive in this way until 1953. But, to his misfortune, they arrested another tenant in his apartment, a debauched, perpetually drunken writer, L. S------v, who had bragged somewhere while he was drunk about owning a pistol. Owning a pistol meant an obligatory conviction for terrorism, and Fastenko, with his ancient Social Democratic past, was naturally the very picture of a terrorist. Therefore, the interroga- tor immediately proceeded to nail him for terrorism and, simul- taneously, of course, for service in the French and Canadian intelligence services and thus for service in the Tsarist Okhrana as well.

  [This was one of Stalin's pet themes—to ascribe to every arrested Bol- shevik, and in general to every arrested revolutionary, service in the Tsarist Okhrana. Was this merely his intolerant suspiciousness? Or was it intuition? Or, perhaps, analogy? . . .]

  And in 1945, to earn his fat pay, the fat interrogator was quite seriously leafing through the archives of the Tsarist provincial gendarmerie administrations, and composing entirely serious interrogation depositions about conspiratorial nicknames, passwords, and secret rendezvous and meetings in 1903.

  On the tenth day, which was as soon as was permitted, his old wife (they had no children) delivered to Anatoly Ilyich such parcels as she could manage to put together: a piece of black bread weighing about ten and a half ounces (after all, it had been bought in the open market, where bread cost 50 rubles a pound), and a dozen peeled boiled potatoes which had been pierced by an awl when the parcel was being inspected. And the sight of those wretched—and truly sacred—parcels tore at one's heartstrings.

  That was what this human being had earned for sixty-three years of honesty and doubts.

  The four cots in our cell left an aisle in the middle, where the table stood. But several days after my arrival, they put a fifth per- son in with us and inserted a cot crosswise.

  They brought in the newcomer an hour before rising time— that brief, sweetly cerebral last hour, and three of us did not lift our heads. Only Kramarenko jumped up, to sponge some to- bacco, and maybe, with it, some material for the interrogator. They began to converse in a whisper, and we tried not to listen. But it was quite impossible not to overhear the newcomer's whisper. It was so loud, so disquieting, so tense, and so close to a sob, that we realized it was no ordinary grief that had entered our cell. The newcomer was asking whether many were shot. Nonetheless, without turning my head, I called them down, asking them to talk more quietly.

  When, on the signal to rise, we all instantly jumped up (lying abed earned you the punishment cell), we saw a general, no less! True, he wasn't wearing any insignia of rank, not even tabs—nor could one see where his insignia had been torn off or unscrewed, but his expensive tunic, his soft overcoat, indeed his entire figure and face, told us that he was unquestionably a general, in fact a typical general, and most certainly a full general, and not one of your run-of-the-mill major generals. He was short, stocky, very broad of shoulder and body, and notably fat in the face, but this fat, which had been acquired by eating well, endowed him, not with an appearance of good-natured accessibility, but with an air of weighty importance, of affiliation with the highest ranks. The crowning part of his face was, to be sure, not the upper portion, but the lower, which resembled a bulldog's jaw. It was there that his energy was concentrated, along with his will and authoritativeness, which were what had enabled him to attain such rank by early middle age.

  We introduced ourselves, and it turned out that L. V. Z------v was even younger than he appeared. He would be thirty-six that year—"If they don't shoot me." Even more surprisingly, it de- veloped that he was not a general at all, not even a colonel, and not even a militar
y man—but an engineer!

  An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.

  From the beginning of the thirties I had lost contact with that milieu. Then came the war. And here before me stood—an engineer, one of those who had replaced those destroyed.

  No one could deny him one point of superiority. He was much stronger, more visceral, than those others had been. His shoulders and hands retained their strength even though they had not needed it for a long time. Freed from the restraints of courtesy, he stared sternly and spoke impersonally, as if he didn't even consider the possibility of a dissenting view. He had grown up differently from those others too, and he worked differently.

  His father had plowed the earth in the most literal sense. Lenya Z------v had been one of those disheveled, unenlightened peasant boys whose wasted talents so distressed Belinsky and Tolstoi. He was certainly no Lomonosov, and he could never have gotten to the Academy on his own, but he was talented. If there had been no revolution, he would have plowed the land, and he would have become well-to-do because he was energetic and active, and he might have raised himself into the merchant class.

  It being the Soviet period, however, he entered the Komsomol, and his work in the Komsomol, overshadowing his other talents, lifted him out of anonymity, out of his lowly state, out of the countryside, and shot him like a rocket through the Workers' School right into the Industrial Academy. He arrived there in 1929—at the very moment when those other engineers were being driven in whole herds into Gulag. It was urgently necessary for those in power to produce their own engineers—politically- conscious, loyal, one-hundred percenters, who were to become bigwigs of production, Soviet businessmen, in fact, rather than people who did things themselves. That was the moment when the famous commanding heights overlooking the as-yet-uncreated industries were empty. And it was the fate of Z------v's class in the Industrial Academy to occupy them.