The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  For a while in 1941, before the beginning of the war, he was not employed in the government garage and, having no one to protect him, he was taken into military service. But because his health was poor, he was not sent to the front but to a labor bat- talion. First they went on foot to Inza, to dig trenches and build roads there. After his secure and prosperous life of the previous few years he found it painful to have his nose shoved in the dirt. He drank a full draft of grief and poverty there, and on every side he saw not only that people had not begun to live better before the war, but that they were deeply impoverished. Just barely surviving himself, and released from the service because of illness, he returned to Moscow and again managed to get him- self a job as chauffeur for Shcherbakov, and after that for Sedin, People's Commissar of Petroleum.

  [He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting be- cause of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.]

  But Sedin embezzled funds to the tune of 35 million and was quietly removed. And Belov was once again out of a job driving for the leaders. He became a chauffeur at an automobile depot, and in his spare time he used to moonlight with his car on the road to Krasnaya Pakhra.

  But his thoughts were already centered elsewhere. In 1943 he had been visiting his mother. She was doing the laundry and had gone out to the hydrant with her pails. The door opened and a portly stranger, an old man with a white beard, entered the house. He crossed himself at the ikon there, looked sternly at. Belov, and said to him: "Hail, Mikhail. God gives you his bless- ing!" Belov replied: "My name is Viktor." "But," the old man continued, "you are destined to become Mikhail, the Emperor of Holy Russia!" Just then Viktor's mother returned and half- collapsed in fright, spilling her pails. It was the very same old man who had come to her twenty-seven years before. He had turned white in the meantime, but it was he. "God bless you, Pelageya, you have preserved your son," said the old man. And he took the future Emperor aside, like a patriarch preparing to enthrone him, and announced to the astonished young man that in 1953 there would be a change in rule and that he would be- come Emperor of All Russia.

  [The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the chauffeur with his former employer.]

  (That is why the number of our cell, 53, shocked him so.) To this end, the old man told him, he was to begin to gather his forces in 1948. The old man didn't instruct him as to how to gather his forces. He departed, and Viktor Alekseyevich didn't get around to asking.

  All the peace and simplicity of his life were lost to him now. Perhaps some other individual would have recoiled from the ambitious program, but Viktor, as it happened, had rubbed shoulders with the highest of the high. He had seen all those Mikhailovs, Shcherbakovs, Sedins, and he had heard a lot from other chauffeurs, too, and he had gotten it clear in his own mind that nothing in the least unusual was required—in fact, just the reverse.

  The newly anointed Tsar, quiet, conscientious, sensitive, like Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the line of Ryurik, felt on his brow the heavy pressure of the crown of Monomakh. All around him were the people's poverty and grief, for which he had not until now borne any responsibility. Now all this lay upon his shoulders, and he was to blame for the fact that this misery still existed. It seemed strange to him to wait until 1948, and, therefore, in that very autumn of 1943, he wrote his first proclamation to the Russian people and read it to four of his fellow workers in the garage of the People's Commissariat of Petroleum.

  We had surrounded Viktor Alekseyevich from early morning, and he had meekly told us all this. We had still not fathomed his childish trustfulness—we were absorbed in his unusual story and —it was our fault—we forgot to warn him about the stoolie. In fact, we never even thought for one minute that there was any- thing in the naïve and simple story he had told us that the inter- rogator didn't already know.

  The instant the story ended, Kramarenko began demanding to be taken either to the "chief of the prison for tobacco" or else to the doctor. At any rate, they summoned him quickly. And as soon as he got there he put the finger on those four workers in the garage of the People's Commissariat of Petroleum—whose existence no one would ever have suspected. (The next day, re- turning from his interrogation, Belov was astonished that the interrogator knew about them. And that's when it hit us.) Those workers had heard the proclamation and approved it all, and no one had turned in the Emperor! But he himself felt that it was too early, and he burned it.

  A year passed. Viktor Alekseyevich was working as a mechanic in the garage of an automobile depot. In the fall of 1944, he again wrote a proclamation and gave it to ten people to read— chauffeurs and lathe operators. All of them approved it. And no one turned him in. (It was a surprising thing, indeed, that not one person in that group of ten had turned him in, in that period of ubiquitous stool pigeons! Fastenko had not been mistaken in his deductions about the "mood of the working class.") True, in this case the Emperor had used some innocent tricks. He had thrown out hints that a strong arm inside the government was on his side. And he had promised his supporters travel assignments to rally monarchic sentiment at the grass roots.

  Months went by. The Emperor entrusted his secret to two girls at the garage. But this time there was no misfire. These girls turned out to be ideologically sound! And Viktor Alekseye- vich's heart sank: he had a premonition of disaster. On the Sunday after the Annunciation he went to the market, carrying the proclamation with him. One of his sympathizers among the old workers saw him there and said: "Viktor, you ought to burn that piece of paper for the time being; how about it?" And Viktor felt clearly that he had written it too soon, and that he should burn it. "I'll burn it right now! You're right." And he started home to burn it. But right there in the market two pleasant young men called out to him: "Viktor Alekseyevich! Come along with us!" And they took him to the Lubyanka in a private car. When they got him there, they had been in such a hurry and were so excited that they didn't search him in the usual way, and there was a moment when the Emperor almost destroyed his proclama- tion in the toilet. But he decided that it would be the worse for him, that they would keep after him anyway to find out where it was. And they straightaway took him in an elevator up to a general and a colonel, and the general with his own hands grabbed the proclamation from Viktor's pocket.

  However, it took only one interrogation for the Big Lubyanka to quiet down again. It turned out to be not so dangerous. Ten arrests in the garage of the auto depot and four in the garage of the People's Commissariat of Petroleum. The interrogation was turned over to a lieutenant colonel, who had a good laugh as he went through the proclamation:

  "You write here, Your Majesty: 'In the first spring I will instruct my Minister of Agriculture to dissolve the collective farms.' But how are you going to divide up the tools and live- stock? You haven't got it worked out yet. And then you also write: 'I am going to increase housing construction and house each person next to the place he works, and I am going to raise all the workers' wages.' And where are you going to find the money, Your Majesty? Are you going to have to run the money off on printing presses? You are going to abolish the state loans. And then, too: 'I am going to wipe the Kremlin from the face of the earth.' But where are you going to put your own govern- ment? What about the building of the Big Lubyanka? Would you like to take a tour of inspection and look it over?"

  Many of the younger interrogators also stopped by to make fun of the Emperor of All Russia. They saw nothing except comedy in all this.

  And it was not always easy for us in the cell to keep a straight face. "We hope you aren't going to forget us here in Cell No. 53," said Z------v, winking at the rest of us.

  Everyone laughed at him.

  Viktor Alekseyevich, with his white eyebrows and innocent simplicity and his callused hands, would treat us
when he received boiled potatoes from his unfortunate mother, Pelageya, without ever dividing them into "yours" and mine": "Come on, com- rades, eat up, eat up!"

  He used to smile shyly. He understood perfectly well how uncontemporary and funny all this was—to be the Emperor of All Russia. But what could he do if God's choice had fallen on him?

  They soon removed him from our cell.

  [When they introduced me to Khrushchev in 1962, I wanted to say to him: "Nikita Sergeyevich! You and I have an acquaintance in common." But I told him something else, more urgent, on behalf of former prisoners.]

  Just before May 1 they took down the blackout shade on the window. The war was perceptibly coming to an end.

  That evening it was quieter than ever before in the Lubyanka. It was, I remember, almost like the second day of Easter, since May Day and Easter came one after the other that year. All the interrogators were out in Moscow celebrating. No one was taken to interrogation. In the silence we could hear someone across the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box. By listening, we could detect the location of all the doors. They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.

  On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a Euro- pean capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

  On the ninth of May they brought us our dinner at the same time as our lunch—which was done at the Lubyanka only on May 1 and November 7.

  And that is how we guessed that the war had ended.

  That evening they shot off another thirty-gun salute. We then knew that there were no more capitals to be captured. And later that same evening one more salute roared out—forty guns, I seem to remember. And that was the end of all the ends.

  Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow prisons, we, too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed by the beams of searchlights.

  Boris Gammerov, a young antitank man, already demobilized because of wounds, with an incurable wound in his lung, having been arrested with a group of students, was in prison that eve- ning in an overcrowded Butyrki cell, where half the inmates were former POW's and front-line soldiers. He described this last salute of the war in a terse eight-stanza poem, in the most ordinary lan- guage: how they were already lying down on their board bunks, covered with their overcoats; how they were awakened by the noise; how they raised their heads; squinted up at the muzzle— "Oh, it's just a salute"—and then lay down again:

  And once again covered themselves with their coats.

  With those same overcoats which had been in the clay of the trenches, and the ashes of bonfires, and been torn to tatters by German shell fragments.

  That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.

  Chapter 6

  That Spring

  Through the windows of the Butyrki Prison every morning and evening in June, 1945, we could hear the brassy notes of bands not far away—coming from either Lesnaya Street or Novoslo- bodskaya. They kept playing marches over and over.

  Behind the murky green "muzzles" of reinforced glass, we stood at the wide-open but impenetrable prison windows and listened. Were they military units that were marching? Or were they work- ers cheerfully devoting their free time to marching practice? We didn't know, but the rumor had already gotten through to us that preparations were under way for a big Victory Parade on Red Square on June 22—the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

  The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice. But even the honor of being part of the foundation was denied those whose doomed heads and ribs had borne the first blows of this war and thwarted the foreigners' victory, and who were now abandoned for no good reason.

  "Joyful sounds mean nought to the traitor."

  That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. They passed through the prisons of the Soviet Union in vast dense gray shoals like ocean herring. The first trace of those schools I glimpsed was Yuri Y. But I was soon entirely surrounded by their purposeful motion, which seemed to know its own fated design.

  Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too: émigrés from the Civil War; the "ostovtsy"-—-workers recruited as laborers by the Germans during World War II; Red Army officers who had been too astute and farsighted in their con- clusions, so that Stalin feared they might bring European free- dom back from their European crusade, like the Decembrists 120 years before. And yet it was the war prisoners who consti- tuted the bulk of the wave. And among the war prisoners of various ages, most were of my own age—not precisely my age, but the twins of October, those born along with the Revolution, who in 1937 had poured forth undismayed to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, and whose age group, at the beginning of the war, made up the standing army—which had been scattered in a matter of weeks.

  That tedious prison spring had, to the tune of the victory marches, become the spring of reckoning for my whole genera- tion.

  Over our cradles the rallying cry had resounded: "All power to the Soviets!" It was we who had reached out our suntanned childish hands to clutch the Pioneers' bugle, and who in response to the Pioneer challenge, "Be prepared," had saluted and an- swered: "We are always prepared!" It was we who had smuggled weapons into Buchenwald and joined the Communist Party there. And it was we who were now in disgrace, only because we had survived.

  [Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have sur- vived an annihilation camp? Something doesn't smell right!]

  Back when the Red Army had cut through East Prussia, I had seen downcast columns of returning war prisoners—the only people around who were grieving instead of celebrating. Even then their gloom had shocked me, though I didn't yet grasp the reason for it. I jumped down and went over to those voluntarily formed-up columns. (Why were they marching in columns? Why had they lined themselves up in ranks? After all, no one had compelled them to, and the war prisoners of all other nations went home as scattered individuals. But ours wanted to return as submissively as possible.) I was wearing a captain's shoulder boards, and they, plus the fact that I was moving forward, helped prevent my finding out why our POW's were so sad. But then fate turned me around and sent me in the wake of those prisoners along the same path they had taken. I had already marched with them from army counterintelligence headquarters to the head- quarters at the front, and when we got there I had heard their first stories, which I didn't yet understand; and then Yuri Y. told me the whole thing. And here beneath the domes of the brick-red Butyrki castle, I felt that the story of these several mil- lion Russian prisoners had got me in its grip once and for all, like a pin through a specimen beetle. My own story of landing in prison seemed insignificant. I stopped regretting my torn-off shoulder boards. It was mere chance that had kept me from end- ing up exactly where these contemporaries of mine had ended. I came to understand that it was my duty to take upon my shoulders a share of their common burden—and to bear it to the last man, until it crushed us. I now felt as if I, too, had fallen prisoner at the Solovyev crossing, in the Kharkov encirclement, in the quarries of Kerch, and, hands behind my back, had carried my Soviet pride behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps; that I, too, had stood for hours in the freezing cold for a ladle of cold Kawa (an ersatz coffee) and had been left on the ground for dead, without even reaching the kettle; that in Oflag 68 (Suwalki) I had used my hands and the lid of a mess tin to dig a bell-shaped (upturned, that is) foxhole, so as not to have to spend the winter on the open field; and that a maddened prisoner had crawled
up to me as I lay dying to gnaw on the still warm flesh beneath my arm; and with every new day of exacerbated, famished consciousness, lying in a barracks riddled with typhus, or at the barbed wire of the neighboring camp for English POW's, the clear thought had penetrated my dying brain: Soviet Russia has renounced her dying children. She had needed them, "proud sons of Russia," as long as they let the tanks roll over them and it was still possible to rouse them to attack. But to feed them once they were war prisoners? Extra mouths. And extra witnesses to humiliating defeats.

  Sometimes we try to lie but our tongue will not allow us to. These people were labeled traitors, but a remarkable slip of the tongue occurred—on the part of the judges, prosecutors, and interrogators. And the convicted prisoners, the entire nation, and the newspapers repeated and reinforced this mistake, involuntarily letting the truth out of the bag. They intended to declare them "traitors to the Motherland." But they were universally referred to, in speech and in writing, even in the court documents, as "traitors of the Motherland."

  You said it! They were not traitors to her. They were her traitors. It was not they, the unfortunates, who had betrayed the Motherland, but their calculating Motherland who had betrayed them, and not just once but thrice.

  The first time she betrayed them was on the battlefield, through ineptitude—when the government, so beloved by the Mother- land, did everything it could to lose the war: destroyed the lines of fortifications; set up the whole air force for annihilation; dis- mantled the tanks and artillery; removed the effective generals; and forbade the armies to resist.