The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  But that is no way to write history. Now, a quarter of a cen- tury later, when most of them have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy.

  [This, in fact, is the number of Soviet citizens who were in the Wehr- macht—in pre-Vlasov and Vlasov formations, and in the Cossack, Moslem, Baltic, and Ukrainian units and detachments.]

  Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland? One cannot explain this treason biologically. It has to have had a social cause.

  Because, as the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don't ram- page.

  Then picture to yourself a field in which starved, neglected, crazed horses are rampaging back and forth.

  That same spring many Russian émigrés were also in those cells.

  It was very like a dream: the resurrection of buried history. The weighty tomes on the Civil War had long since been com- pleted and their covers shut tight. The causes for which people fought in it had been decided. The chronology of its events had been set down in textbooks. The leaders of the White movement were, it appeared, no longer our contemporaries on earth but mere ghosts of a past that had melted away. The Russian émigrés had been more cruelly dispersed than the tribes of Israel. And, in our Soviet imagination, if they were still dragging out their lives somewhere, it was as pianists in stinking little restaurants, as lackeys, laundresses, beggars, morphine and cocaine addicts, and virtual corpses. Right up to 1941, when the war came, it would have been impossible to find out from any hints in our newspapers, our lofty literature, our criticism of the arts (nor did our own well-fed masters of art and literature help us find out) that Russia Abroad was a great spiritual world, that in it Russian philosophy was living and developing; that out there were philosophers like Bulgakov, Berdyayev, and Lossky; that Russian art had enchanted the world; that Rachmaninoff, Chal- iapin, Benois, Diaghilev, Pavlova, and the Don Cossack Chorus of Jaroff were out there; that profound studies of Dostoyevsky were being undertaken (at a time when he was anathema in the Soviet Union) ; that the incredible writer Nabokov-Sirin also existed out there; that Bunin himself was still alive and had been writing for all these twenty years; that journals of the arts were being published; that theatrical works were being produced; that Russians from the same areas of Russia came together in groups where their mother tongue could be heard; and that émigré men had not given up marrying émigré women, who in turn presented them with children, which meant young people our own age.

  The picture of emigration presented in our country was so falsified that if one had conducted a mass survey to ask which side the Russian émigrés were on in the Spanish Civil War, or else, perhaps, what side they were on in the Second World War, with one voice everyone would have replied: For Franco! For Hitler! Even now people in our country do not know that many more White émigrés fought on the Republican side in Spain. That both the Vlasov divisions and the Cossack corps of von Pannwitz (the "Krasnov" corps) were made up of Soviet citizens and not of émigrés. The émigrés did not support Hitler. They ostracized Merezhkovsky and Gippius, who took Hitler's part, leaving them to alienated loneliness. There was a joke—except it wasn't a joke—to the effect that Denikin wanted to fight for the Soviet Union against Hitler, and that at one time Stalin planned to arrange his return to the Motherland, not for military reasons, obviously, but as a symbol of national unity. During the German occupation of France, a horde of Russian émigrés, young and old, joined the Resistance. And after the liberation of Paris they swarmed to the Soviet Embassy to apply for per- mission to return to the Motherland. No matter what kind of Russia it was—it was still Russia! That was their slogan, and that is how they proved they had not been lying previously about their love for her. (Imprisoned in 1945 and 1946, they were almost happy that these prison bars and these jailers were their own, Russian. And they observed with surprise the Soviet boys scratching their heads and saying: "Why the hell did we come back? Wasn't there room enough for us in Europe?")

  But, given that Stalinist logic which said that every Soviet person who had lived abroad had to be imprisoned in camp, how could the émigrés possibly escape the same lot? In the Balkans, Central Europe, Harbin, they were arrested as soon as the Soviet armies arrived. They were arrested in their apartments and on the street, just like Soviet citizens. For a while State Security arrested only men, and not all of them, only those who had in one or another way revealed a political bias. Later on, their families were transported to exile in Russia, but some were left where they were in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In France they were welcomed into Soviet citizenship with honors and flowers and sent back to the Motherland in comfort; and only when they got to the U.S.S.R. were they raked in. Things dragged out longer for the Shanghai émigrés. In 1945 Russian hands didn't reach that far. But a plenipotentiary from the Soviet government went to Shanghai and announced a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet extending forgiveness to all émigrés. Well, now, how could one refuse to believe that? The government cer- tainly couldn't lie! Whether or not there actually was such a decree, it did not, in any case, tie the hands of the Organs. The Shanghai Russians expressed their delight. They were told they could take with them as many possessions as they wanted and whatever they wanted. They went home with automobiles—the country could put them to good use. They were told they could settle wherever they wanted to in the Soviet Union and, of course, work at any profession or trade. They were transported from Shanghai in steamships. The fate of the passengers varied. On some of the ships, for some reason, they were given no food at all. They also suffered various fates after reaching the port of Nakhodka (which was, incidentally, one of the main transit centers of Gulag). Almost all of them were loaded into freight cars, like prisoners, except that they had, as yet, no strict convoy, and there were no police dogs. Some of them were actually de- livered to inhabited places, to cities, and allowed to live there for two or three years. Others were delivered in trainloads straight to their camps and were dumped out somewhere off a high embankment into the forest beyond the Volga, together with their white pianos and their jardinieres. In 1948-1949, the former Far Eastern émigrés who had until then managed to stay out of camps were scraped up to the last man.

  As a nine-year-old boy I had read the small dark-blue books of V. V. Shulgin with more interest than I had read Jules Verne. At that time they were sold openly in our book stalls. His was a voice from a world that had disappeared with such finality that not even the most extravagant fantasy could have projected that invisible point in the soundless corridors of the Big Lub- yanka where his steps would intersect my own before twenty years had passed. True, I would not meet the man himself until an- other twenty years had gone by. But I had time to study attentively many émigrés, old and young, in the spring of 1945.

  I underwent a medical examination with Captain Borshch and Colonel Mariyushkin. And the pitiful sight of their naked, wrinkled, dark-yellow bodies, not bodies any longer but mum- mies, has always remained before my eyes. They were arrested five minutes this side of the grave, so to speak, and brought to Moscow from several thousand miles away, and there in Mos- cow, in 1945, an interrogation was proceeding in the most serious way on ... their struggle against Soviet power in 1919!

  We have become so used to the piling up of injustices during interrogation and trial that we have ceased drawing any dis- tinctions of degree between them. This captain and this colonel were veteran officers of the Tsar's Russian Army. They had both been over forty, and they had both served in the army for twenty years, when the telegraph brought them news that the Tsar had been overthrown in Petrograd. For twenty years they had served the Tsar according to their oath. And now, against their wills—for all we know, possibly m
uttering "Beat it! Scram!" to themselves—they swore loyalty to the Provisional Govern- ment. After that, no one asked them to swear any more oaths because the whole army fell apart. They didn't like the new scheme of things, wherein soldiers tore shoulder boards off offi- cers and killed them, and it was natural for them to join other officers to fight against it. And it was natural for the Red Army to fight against them and push them into the sea. But in a coun- try in which at least the rudiments of jurisprudence exist, what basis was there for putting them on trial, and a quarter of a cen- tury later at that? (They had lived as private persons all that time . . . Mariyushkin up to the very moment of his arrest. Borshch, to be sure, had turned up in a Cossack wagon train in Austria, but in a transport, with the old men and women, not in an armed unit.)

  However, in 1945, in the very center of Soviet jurisdiction, they were charged with: actions directed toward the overthrow of the government of the workers' and peasants' soviets; armed incursion into Soviet territory, in other words, not having im- mediately left Russia when Petrograd was declared Soviet; aiding the international bourgeoisie (which they had never seen even in their dreams) ; serving counterrevolutionary governments (i.e., their own generals, to whom they had been subordinate all their lives). And all these sections—Nos. 1, 2, 4, 13—of Article 58 were included in a Criminal Code adopted in 1926, that is, six to seven years after the end of the Civil War. This was a classic and unconscionable example of the ex post facto application of a law! In addition, Article 2 of the Code specified that it applied only to citizens taken into custody on the territory of the Russian Republic. But State Security's strong right arm had grabbed people who were in no wise Soviet citizens from all the countries of Europe and Asia.

  [On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will pro- mulgate precisely such laws—just give them the chance to reach out that far.]

  And we won't even bring up the question of statutes of limitations. This question was provided for very flexibly—no statutes of limitations applied to Article 58. ("Why stir up the past indeed?") Such statutes are invoked only in the case of our home-grown executioners, who have destroyed many, many more of their compatriots than did the whole Civil War.

  Mariyushkin, at least, remembered everything clearly. He told us the details of being evacuated from Novorossisk. But Borshch had already descended into second childhood and prattled on and on about celebrating Easter in the Lubyanka: he had eaten only half his bread ration during Palm Sunday week and Holy Week and had set the rest of it aside, gradually replacing the stale pieces with fresh ones. Thus he had accumulated seven full rations when it came time to break the Lenten fast—and he had "feasted" for the three days of Easter.

  I do not know what kind of White Guards they were in the Civil War, either of them, whether they were among the ex- ceptional few who hung every tenth worker without trial and whipped the peasants, or whether they were the other kind, the soldierly majority. The fact that they were being interrogated and sentenced in Moscow was no proof of anything nor a matter of any consequence. But if, from that time on, they had lived for a quarter of a century, not as retired officers, on pensions and with honor, but as homeless exiles, then how could anyone point to any moral basis for trying them? That is the kind of dialectic Anatole France mastered, but which we cannot seem to grasp. According to Anatole France, by the time it's today, yesterday's martyr is already in the wrong—in fact, from the first minute the red shirt covered his body. And vice versa. But our version is: If they rode me for one short year, when I had just outgrown being a foal, then I am called a riding horse all my life, even though I have long since been used only as a cab horse.

  Colonel Konstantin Konstantinovich Yasevich was very dif- ferent from these helpless émigré mummies. For him, clearly, the end of the Civil War had not ended the struggle against Bolshevism. As to how he continued to struggle—where and with what—he did not enlighten me. But the sense that he was still in the service remained with him in the cell itself. In the midst of all the chaotic concepts, the blurred and broken lines of vision, in most of our heads, he had, evidently, a clear and exact view of everything around him; as a result of this reasoned point of view on life, his body, too, exhibited a steady strength, re- siliency, and activity. He was certainly not less than sixty. His head was totally bald, without a single hair. He had already survived his interrogation and was awaiting his sentence, like the rest of us. He could expect no help from anywhere, of course. But he kept his young, even rosy skin. Among all of us in the cell, he alone did exercises every morning and washed himself at the faucet. The rest of us were trying not to squander the calories in our prison ration. He put his time to use, and whenever an aisle opened up between the rows of board bunks, he paced those fifteen to twenty feet with a precise stride and a precise profile, crossing his arms over his chest and staring through the walls with clear young eyes.

  And the difference between us and him was that we were all astonished at what was happening to us, while nothing around him contradicted his expectations, and precisely for that reason he was absolutely alone in the cell.

  A year later, I was able to appraise his conduct in prison. Once again I was in the Butyrki, and in one of those seventy cells I met some young codefendants of Yasevich who had al- ready been sentenced to ten and fifteen years. The sentences given everyone in their group were typed out on cigarette paper, and for some reason they had it in their possession. Yasevich was first on the list, and his sentence was : to be shot. So that was what he saw—what he foresaw-—through the wall with his still- young eyes as he paced back and forth from the table to the door! But his unimpaired consciousness of the correctness of his path in life lent him extraordinary strength.

  Among the émigrés was one my own age, Igor Tronko. We became friends. Both of us were weak, dried out; our skin was grayish-yellow on our bones. (Why had we collapsed to such an extent? I think the main cause was spiritual confusion.) Both of us were thin and on the tall side, and we were shaken by the gusts of summer wind in the Butyrki courtyards. We always walked side by side, with the careful steps of old men, and dis- cussed the parallels in our lives. He had been born in South Russia the same year as I. We were still nursing babes when fate stuck her hand into her well-worn purse and drew out a short straw for me and a long one for him. So it was that he rolled off across the sea, even though his White Guard father was just a rank-and-file, unpropertied telegrapher.

  I found it interesting in the extreme to picture through his life all those compatriots of my generation who had landed outside Russia. They had grown up under good family supervision and in very modest, even meager, circumstances. They were all very well brought up and, within the range of existing possibilities, well educated. They grew up without knowing fear or repression, though the White organizations maintained a certain yoke of authority over them until they themselves grew strong. They grew up in such a way that the sins to which all European youth was subject in that period—a high crime rate, a frivolous atti- tude toward life, thoughtlessness, dissipation—did not touch them. That was because they grew up, so to speak, in the shadow of the indelible misfortune which had befallen their families. Whatever country they grew up in, they looked on Russia alone as their Motherland. Their spiritual upbringing was based on Russian literature, all the more beloved because to them it was the beginning and end of their Motherland, because for them their Motherland did not exist as a primary geographi- cal and physical fact. The contemporary printed word was much more generally accessible to them than to us, but they received Soviet books in conspicuously small quantities. And they felt this lack all the more keenly; it seemed to them chiefly respon- sible for their inability to understand what was most important, highest, and most beautiful in Soviet Russia; and that the books they did receive presented a distortion, a lie; were incomplete.

/>   The picture they had of our real life was very, very faint, but their longing for their Motherland was such that if we had called on them in 1941 they would all have joined the Red Army, and it would have been even sweeter for them to die than to survive. These young people from twenty-five to twenty-seven already represented and firmly defended several points of view, in defi- nite conflict with the opinions of the old generals and political leaders. Thus Igor's group was called the "nepredreshentsy"— the "non-prejudgers": they declared that anyone who had not shared with the Motherland the whole, complex burden of the past decades had no right to decide anything about the future of Russia, nor even to presuppose anything, but should simply go and lend his strength to whatever the people might decide.

  We would often lie beside one another on the wooden bunks. I tried to understand his world as best I could, and our encounter revealed to me a concept confirmed by later encounters—that the outflow from Russia of a significant part of her spiritual forces, which occurred in the Civil War, had deprived us of a great and important stream of Russian culture. Everyone who really loves that culture will strive for the reunion of both streams, the one at home and the tributary abroad. Only then will our culture attain wholeness. Only then will it reveal its capacity for benign development.

  And I dream of living until that day.

  A human being is weak, weak. In the end, that spring, even the most stubborn of us wanted forgiveness and were ready to give up a lot for just a little bit more life. An anecdote was current among us: "What is your last word, accused?" "I beg you to send me wherever you please, just as long as it is under the Soviet government and the sun is there!" No one was threatening to deprive us of the Soviet government, of course: just of the sun. No one wanted to be sent beyond the Arctic Circle, to scurvy and malnutrition. For some reason, a legend about the Altai region in particular flourished in the cells. Those rare persons who had been there at one time or another, but especially those who had never been there, wove melodious dreams about the wonderful country of the Altai for their cellmates! It had the vast expanses of Siberia and a mild climate. Rivers of honey flowing between banks of wheat. The steppe and mountains. Herds of sheep, flocks of wildfowl, shoals of fish. Populous, rich villages.