The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  [Does not the prisoner's dream of the Altai simply continue the old peasant dream about it? The so-called lands of His Majesty's Cabinet were in the Altai, and because of this the area was closed to colonization much longer than the rest of Siberia. But it was there that the peasants wanted most of all to settle—and where they actually settled. Is it not from this that the enduring legend has arisen?]

  Oh, if only we could find a hiding place in that quiet! If only we could listen to the pure resounding of the cock crow in the unpolluted air! Or stroke the good, serious face of a horse! Curses on you, all you great problems! Let someone else beat his head against you, someone more stupid. Oh, just to rest there from the interrogator's mother oaths and the monotonous un- winding of your whole life, from the crash of the prison locks, from the suffocating stuffiness of the cell. Only one life is allotted us, one small, short life! And we had been criminal enough to push ours in front of somebody's machine guns, or drag it with us, still unsullied, into the dirty rubbish heap of politics. There, in the Altai, it appeared, one could live in the lowest, darkest hut on the edge of the village, next to the forest. And one could go into the woods, not for brushwood and not for mushrooms, but just to go, for no reason, and hug two tree trunks: Dear ones, you're all I need.

  And the spring itself sounded a summons to mercy. It was the spring that marked the ending of such an enormous war! We saw that millions of us prisoners were flowing past and knew that millions more would greet us in the camps. It just couldn't be that so many people were to remain in prison after the greatest victory in the world! It was just to frighten us that they were holding us for the time being: so that we might remember and take heed. Of course, there would soon be a total amnesty and all of us would be released. Someone even swore that he had read in a newspaper that Stalin, replying to some American correspondent (whose name I cannot remember), said that after the war there would be an amnesty the like of which the world had never seen. And one of the interrogators had actually said to someone else that there would soon be a general amnesty. (These rumors were a help to the interrogators because they weakened the prisoners' will: The hell with him, let's sign—it isn't going to be for long anyway.)

  But... for mercy one must have wisdom. This has been a truth throughout our history and will remain one for a long time to come.

  We did not heed the few sober minds among us who croaked out that never, in a whole quarter-century, had there been an amnesty for political prisoners—and that there never would be one. Some cell expert among the stool pigeons leaped up with an answer: "Yes, there was! In 1927. For the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. All the prisons were emptied, and white flags were flown on all of them." This astonishing vision of white flags on the prisons—why white?—was particularly striking.

  [Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam, p. 396, presents the figures. In the 1927 amnesty, 7.3 percent of the prisoners were amnestied. This is a credible figure. Pretty poor for a tenth anniversary. Among the political prisoners, women with children were freed and those who had only a few months left to serve. In the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison Isolator, for example, twelve out of the two hundred prisoners there were released. But, in the middle of it, they regretted even this wretched amnesty and began to block it: they delayed some releases, and some people who were freed were given a "minus" restriction instead of full freedom to go where they pleased.]

  We brushed aside those wise individuals among us who explained that millions of us were imprisoned precisely because the war had ended. We were no longer needed at the front. We were danger- ous in the rear. And, were it not for us, not one brick would ever get laid at the remote construction projects. We were too self- absorbed even to grasp Stalin's simple economic calculations— let alone his malice. Just who this year, after being demobilized, would want to leave his family and home and go off to the Kolyma, to Vorkuta, to Siberia, where there were neither roads nor houses? It was virtually the job of the State Planning Com- mission to assign to the MVD the number of workers required for plan fulfillment and thus the number to be arrested. An amnesty, a broad and generous amnesty, was what we waited for and thirsted for! Somebody said that in England prisoners were amnestied on the anniversary of the coronation, in other words, every year. Many politicals had been amnestied on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs, in 1912. Could it really be possible that now, after we had won a victory which would resound throughout our entire era and even longer, the Stalin government would be petty and vengeful and would hang onto its resentment of every stumble and slip of each of its minuscule subjects?

  There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffer- ing: in war not victories are blessed but defeats. Governments need victories and the people need defeats. Victory gives rise to the desire for more victories. But after a defeat it is freedom that men desire—and usually attain. A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.

  The Poltava victory was a great misfortune for Russia: it resulted in two centuries of great strain and stress, ruin, the ab- sence of freedom—and war and war again. The Poltava victory spelled salvation for the Swedes. Having lost the appetite for war, the Swedes became the most prosperous and the freest people in Europe.

  [Perhaps, only in the twentieth century, if one is to believe the stories one hears, has their stagnating well-being led to moral indigestion.]

  We are so used to taking pride in our victory over Napoleon that we leave out of account the fact that because of it the eman- cipation of the serfs did not take place a half-century sooner. Because of it, the strengthened monarchy destroyed the Decem- brists. (The French occupation was never a reality for Russia.) But the Crimean War, and the Japanese War, and our war with Germany in the First World War—all those defeats brought us freedom and revolution.

  We believed in amnesty that spring, we weren't being at all original in this. Talking with old prisoners, one gradually dis- covers that this thirst for mercy and this faith in mercy is never absent within gray prison walls. For decades and decades, wave after wave of prisoners has thirsted for and believed in either an amnesty, or a new Code, or a general review of cases. And the rumors about these things have always been supported by the Organs with skilled caution. The prisoner's imagination sees the ardently awaited arrival of the angel of liberation in just about anything: the next anniversary of the October Revolution, Len- in's anniversaries, Victory Day, Red Army Day, Paris Commune Day, every new session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee—the VTsIK—the end of every Five-Year Plan, every Plenary Session of the Supreme Court! And the wilder the arrests, the more Homeric and mind-boggling the scale of the waves of prisoners, the more they inspired not sober-mindedness but faith in amnesty!

  All sources of light can to some degree be compared with the Sun. And the Sun cannot be compared with anything. So it is that all the expectations in the world can be compared with the expectation of amnesty, but the expectation of amnesty cannot be compared with anything else.

  In the spring of 1945, every newcomer to the cell was asked first of all what he had heard about an amnesty. And if two or three prisoners were taken from their cells with their things, the cell experts immediately compared cases and drew the conclusion that theirs were the least serious cases and they had clearly been taken out to be released. It had begun! In the toilet and in the baths—the prisoners' post offices—our "activists" looked every- where for signs and graffiti about the amnesty. And one day at the beginning of July, in the famous lavender vestibule of the Butyrki baths, we read the enormous prophecy written in soap on a glazed lavender slab far higher than a man's head—which meant that one man had stood on another's shoulders in order to write it in a place where it would take longer to erase:

  "Hurrah!! Amnesty on July 17!"

  [Indeed, the bastards were wrong by only one digit! For more details on the great Stalin amnesty of July 7,
1945, see Part III, Chapter 6.]

  What a celebration went on! ("After all, if they hadn't known for sure, they wouldn't have written it!") Everything that beat, pulsed, circulated in the body came to a stop beneath the wave of happiness, the expectation that the doors were about to swing open.

  But . . . for mercy one must have wisdom.

  In the middle of July, the corridor jailer sent one old man from our cell to wash down the toilet, and while they were there eye to eye—for he wouldn't have dared in the presence of witnesses— he looked sympathetically at the prisoner's gray head and asked: "What's your article, father?" "Fifty-eight!" The old man lit up. At home three generations were mourning his arrest. "You're not included," sighed the jailer. Nonsense, we decided in the cell: just an illiterate jailer.

  There was also a young man from Kiev in the cell, Valentin. I can't remember his family name. He had big eyes that were beautiful in a feminine way, and he was terrified by the interroga- tion. There is no doubt that he had the gift of precognition—per- haps only in his then current state of excitement. More than once, he went around the cell in the morning and pointed: Today they are going to come for you and you. I saw it in my dream. And they came and got them ... the very individuals he had pointed out. One might add that a prisoner's heart is so inclined toward mysticism that he accepts precognition almost without surprise.

  On July 27 Valentin came up to me: "Aleksandr! Today it is our turn." And he told me a dream that had all the characteristics of prison dreams: a bridge across a muddy stream, a cross. I began to get my things together. And it was not for nothing either. He and I were summoned after morning tea. Our cellmates saw us off with noisy good wishes, and many of them assured us we were going off to freedom. They had figured it out by compar- ing our less serious cases.

  Perhaps you honestly don't believe it. Perhaps you won't allow yourself to believe. You can try to brush it aside with jokes. But flaming pincers, hotter than anything else on earth, suddenly close around your heart. They just do. Suppose it's true?

  They assembled twenty of us from various cells and took us to the baths first. Before every big change in his life, the prisoner has first of all to take a bath. We had time enough there, an hour and a half, to exchange our hunches and ideas. At that point, all steamed up, our skins tender, we were taken through the little emerald park in the Butyrki's interior courtyard, where the birds sang deafeningly, although they were probably only sparrows, and the green of the trees seemed unbearably bright to eyes no longer used to it. Never had my eyes seen the green of the leaves with such intensity as they did that spring! And never in my life had I seen anything closer to God's paradise than that little Butyrki park, which never took more than thirty seconds to cross on the asphalt path.

  [Many years later, this time as a tourist, I saw another, similar park, except that it was even smaller, in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad. The other tourists exclaimed over the darkness of the corridors and cells, but I kept thinking to myself that with such a park to walk in, the prisoners of the Trubetskoi bastion were not lost men. We were taken out to walk only in deathly cell-like stone enclosures.]

  They took us to the Butyrki station—a very well-chosen nick- name for that reception and dispatch point, especially because its main hall was really like a good railroad station. They pushed us into a large, spacious box. It was half-dark inside and the air was clean and fresh, since its one and only little window was very high up and had no "muzzle." And it opened on that same sunny little park, and through the transom the birds' twitter deafened us, and in the opening a little bright-green twig hung, promising us all freedom and home. (We had never been imprisoned in such a good box—and that couldn't be a matter of chance! )

  And we were all cases for the OSO's—the Special Boards at- tached to the GPU-NKVD. And it turned out that each of us had been imprisoned for nothing much.

  No one touched us for three hours. No one opened the doors. We paced up and down the box and, finally, tired out, we sat down on the slab benches. And the little twig kept bobbing and bobbing outside the opening, and the sparrows screamed as if they were possessed.

  Suddenly the door crashed open, and one of us was summoned, a quiet bookkeeper, thirty-five years old. He went out. The door was locked. We started running about our box even more agi- tatedly than before. We were on hot coals.

  Once more the crash of the door. They called another one out and readmitted the first. We rushed to him. But he was not the same man! The life had gone out of his face. His wide-open eyes were unseeing. His movements were uncertain as he stum- bled across the smooth floor of the box. Was he in a state of shock? Had they swatted him with an ironing board?

  "Well? Well?" we asked him, with sinking hearts. (If he had not in fact just gotten up from the electric chair, he must at the very least have been given a death sentence. ) And in the voice of one reporting the end of the universe, the bookkeeper managed to blurt out:

  "Five . . . years!"

  And once more the door crashed. That was how quickly they returned, as if they were only being taken to the toilet to urinate. The second man returned, all aglow. Evidently he was being re- leased.

  "Well, well, come on?" We swarmed around him, our hopes rising again. He waved his hand, choking with laughter.

  "Fifteen years!"

  It was just too absurd to be believed.

  Chapter 7

  In the Engine Room

  The box adjacent to the so-called Butyrki "station" was the famous frisking box, where new arrivals were searched. It had space enough for five or six jailers to process up to twenty zeks in one batch. Now, however, it was empty and the rough-hewn search tables had nothing on them. Over at one side of the room, seated behind a small nondescript table beneath a small lamp, was a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Patient boredom was what his face chiefly revealed. The intervals during which the zeks were brought in and led out one by one were a waste of his time. Their signatures could have been collected much, much faster.

  He indicated that I was to sit down on the stool opposite him, on the other side of his table. He asked my name. To the right and left of the inkwell lay two piles of white papers the size of a half-sheet of typewriter paper, all looking much the same. In format they were just like the fuel requisitions handed out in apartment-house management offices, or warrants in official institutions for purchase of office supplies. Leafing through the pile on the right, the major found the paper which referred to me. He pulled it out and read it aloud to me in a bored patter. (I understood I had been sentenced to eight years.) Immediately, he began to write a statement on the back of it, with a fountain pen, to the effect that the text had been read to me on the particular date.

  My heart didn't give an extra half-beat—it was all so everyday and routine. Could this really be my sentence—the turning point in my life? I would have liked to feel nervous, to experience this moment to the full, but I just couldn't. And the major had already pushed the sheet over to me, the blank side facing up. And a schoolchild's seven-kopeck pen, with a bad point that had lint on it from the inkwell, lay there in front of me.

  "No, I have to read it myself."

  "Do you really think I would deceive you?" the major objected lazily. "Well, go ahead, read it."

  Unwillingly, he let the paper out of his hand. I turned it over and began to look through it with deliberate slowness, not just word by word but letter by letter. It had been typed, but what I had in front of me was not the original but a carbon:

  EXTRACT

  from a decree of the OSO of the NKVD of the U.S.S.R.

  of July 7, 1945, No.------.

  [ They had met to sentence me on the very day of the amnesty. The work must go on. . . .]

  All of this was underscored with a dotted line and the sheet was vertically divided with a dotted line:

  Case heard:

  Accusation of so-and-so

  (name, year of birth,

  place of
birth)

  . Decreed:

  .

  . To designate for so-and-so (name)

  . for anti-Soviet propaganda, and for

  . an attempt to create an anti-Soviet

  . organization, 8 (eight) years in

  . corrective labor camps.

  .

  Copy verified. Secretary_____________

  Was I really just supposed to sign and leave in silence? I looked at the major—to see whether he intended to say something to me, whether he might not provide some clarification. No, he had no such intention. He had already nodded to the jailer at the door to get the next prisoner ready.

  To give the moment at least a little importance, I asked him, with a tragic expression: "But, really, this is terrible! Eight years! What for?"

  And I could hear how false my own words sounded. Neither he nor I detected anything terrible.

  "Right there." The major showed me once again where to sign. I signed. I could simply not think of anything else to do.

  "In that case, allow me to write an appeal right here. After all, the sentence is unjust."

  "As provided by regulations," the major assented with a nod, placing my sheet of paper on the left-hand pile.

  "Let's move along," commanded the jailer.

  And I moved along.

  (I had not really shown much initiative. Georgi Tenno, who, to be sure, had been handed a paper worth twenty-five years, answered: "After all, this is a life sentence. In olden times they used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was given a life sentence. And here it's like being on a list for a soap ration—twenty-five years and run along!"