The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  On many occasions Krylenko drives his actors to tones of exhaustion, thanks to the nonsense they are compelled to grind out over and over again . . . like a bad play in which the actor is ashamed for the dramatist, and yet has to go on and on any- way, to keep body and soul together.

  Krylenko: "Do you agree?"

  Fedotov: "I agree . . . even though in general I do not think . . ,"

  Krylenko: "Do you confirm this?"

  Fedotov: "Properly speaking ... in certain portions . . . and so to speak, in general . . . yes."

  For the engineers (those who were still free, not yet imprisoned, and who had to face the necessity of working cheerfully after the defamation at the trial of their whole class), there was no way out. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. If they went forward, it was wrong, and if they went backward, it was wrong too. If they hurried, they were hurrying for the pur- pose of wrecking. If they moved methodically, it meant wrecking by slowing down tempos. If they were painstaking in develop- ing some branch of industry, it was intentional delay, sabotage. And if they indulged in capricious leaps, their intention was to produce an imbalance for the purpose of wrecking. Using capital for repairs, improvements, or capital readiness was tying up capital funds. And if they allowed equipment to be used until it broke down, it was a diversionary action! (In addition, the interrogators would get all this information out of them by sub- jecting them to sleeplessness and punishment cells and then de- manding that they give convincing examples of how they might have carried on wrecking activities.)

  "Give us a clear example! Give us a clear example of your wrecking activity!" the impatient Krylenko urges them on.

  (They will give you outstanding examples! Just wait! Soon someone will write the history of the technology of those years! He will give you examples—and negative examples. He will evaluate for you all the convulsions of your epileptic "Five-Year Plan in Four Years." Then we will find out how much of the people's wealth and strength was squandered. Then we will find out how all the best projects were destroyed, and how the worst projects were carried out by the worst means. Well, yes, if the Mao Tse-tung breed of Red Guard youths supervise brilliant engineers, what good can come of it? Dilettante enthusiasts— they were the ones who egged on their even stupider leaders.)

  Yes, full details are a disservice. Somehow the more details provided, the less the evil deeds seem to smell of execution.

  But just a moment! We've not had everything yet! The most important crimes all lie ahead! Here they are, here they come, comprehensible and intelligible to every illiterate! The Promparty (1 ) prepared the way for the Intervention; (2) took money from the imperialists; (3) conducted espionage; (4) assigned cabinet posts in a future government.

  And that did it! All mouths were shut. And all those who had been expressing their reservations fell silent. And only the tramp- ing of demonstrators could be heard, and the roars outside the window: "Death! Death! Death!"

  What about some more details? Why should you want more details? Well, then, if that's the way you want it; but they will only be more frightening. They were all acting under orders from the French General Staff. After all, France doesn't have enough worries, or difficulties, or party conflicts of its own, and it is enough just to whistle, and, lo and behold, divisions will march.

  ... Intervention! First they planned it for 1928. But they couldn't come to an agreement, they couldn't tie up all the loose ends. All right, so they postponed it to 1930. But once more they couldn't agree among themselves. All right, 1931 then. And, as a matter of fact, here's how it was to go: France herself would not fight but, as her commission for organizing the deal, would take the Ukraine right bank as her share. England wouldn't fight either, of course, but, in order to raise a scare, promised to send her fleet into the Black Sea and into the Baltic—in return, she would get Caucasian oil. The actual warriors would, for the most part, be the following: 100,000 émigrés (true, they had long since scattered to the four winds, but it would take only a whistle to gather them all together again immediately) ; Poland —for which she would get half the Ukraine; Rumania (whose brilliant successes in World War I were famous—she was a formidable enemy). And then there were Latvia and Estonia. (These two small countries would willingly drop all the concerns of their young governments and rush forth en masse to do battle.) And the most frightening thing of all was the direction of the main blow. How's that? Was it already known? Yes! It would begin from Bessarabia, and from there, keeping to the right bank of the Dnieper, it would move straight on Moscow.

  [Who drew that arrow for Krylenko on a cigarette pack—was it not drawn by the same hand that thought up our entire defense strategy in 1941?]

  And at that fateful moment, would not all our railroads certainly be blown up? No, not at all. Bottlenecks would be created! And the Promparty would also yank out the fuses in electric power sta- tions, and the entire Soviet Union would be plunged into dark- ness, and all our machinery would come to a halt, including the textile machinery! And sabotage would be carried out. (Atten- tion, defendants! You must not name your methods of sabotage, nor the factories which were your objectives, nor the geographic sites involved, until the closed session. And you must not name names, whether foreign or our own!) Combine all this with the fatal blow which will have been dealt the textile industry by that time! Add the fact that the saboteurs will have constructed two or three textile factories in Byelorussia which will serve as a base of operations for the interventionists.

  [Protsess Prompartii, p. 356. This was not intended as a joke.]

  With the textile fac- tories already in their hands, the interventionists would march implacably on Moscow. But here was the cleverest part of the whole plot: though they didn't succeed in doing so, they had wanted to drain the Kuban marshes and the Polesye swamps, and the swamp near Lake Urnen (Vyshinsky had forbidden them to name the exact places, but one of the witnesses blurted them out), and then the interventionists would open up the shortest routes and would get to Moscow without wetting their feet or their horses' hoofs. (And why was it so hard for the Tatars? Why was it that Napoleon didn't reach Moscow? Yes! It was because of the Polesye and the Ilmen swamps. And once those swamps were drained, the capital would lie exposed.) On top of that, don't forget to add that hangars had been built there under the guise of sawmills (places not to be named!) so that the planes of the interventionists would not get wet in the rain and could be taxied into them. And housing for the intervention- ists had also been built (do not name the places!). (And where had all the homeless occupation armies been quartered in previous wars?) The defendants had received all the directives on these matters from the mysterious foreign gentlemen K. and R. (It is strictly forbidden to name their names—or to name the countries they come from!) And most recently they had even begun "the preparation of treasonable actions by individual units of the Red Army." (Do not name the branches of the service, nor the units, nor the names of any persons involved!) True, they hadn't done any of this; but they had also intended (though they hadn't done that either) to organize within some central army institution a cell of financiers and former officers of the White armies. (Ah, the White Army? Write it down! Start making arrests! ) And cells of anti-Soviet students. (Students? Write it down! Start making arrests!)

  (Incidentally, don't push things too far. We wouldn't want the workers to get despondent and begin to feel that everything is falling apart, that the Soviet government has been caught nap- ping. And so they also threw a good deal of light on that side of it: that they had intended to do a lot and had accomplished very little, that not one industry had suffered serious losses!)

  But why didn't the Intervention take place anyway? For various complex reasons. Either because Poincaré hadn't been elected in France, or else because our émigré industrialists decided that their former enterprises had not yet been sufficiently restored by the Bolsheviks—let the Bolsheviks do more. And then, too, they couldn't seem to come to terms with Poland and Ru
mania.

  So, all right, there hadn't been any intervention, but there was, at least, a Promparty! Do you hear the tramp of marching feet? Do you hear the murmur of the working masses: "Death! Death! Death!"? And the marchers were "those who in the event of war would have to atone with their deaths, and deprivations and sufferings, for the work of these men."

  (And it was as if he had looked into a crystal ball: it was in- deed with their deaths, and deprivations and sufferings, that those trusting demonstrators would atone in 1941 for the work . . . of these men! But where is your finger pointing, prosecutor? At whom is your finger pointing?)

  So then—why was it the Industrial Party! Why a party and not an Engineering-Technical Center? We are accustomed to having a Center!

  Yes, there was a Center too. But they had decided to reorganize themselves into a party. It was more respectable. That way it would be easier to fight over cabinet posts in the future govern- ment. It would "mobilize the engineering-technical masses for the struggle for power." And whom would they be struggling against? Other parties, of course. Against the Working Peasants Party—the TKP—in the first place, for after all they had 200,000 members! Against the Menshevik Party in the second place! And as for a Center, those three parties together were to have con- stituted a United Center. But the GPU had destroyed them. "And it's a good thing they destroyed us." (All the defendants were glad!)

  (And it was flattering to Stalin to annihilate three more parties. Would there have been any glory, indeed, in merely adding another three "Centers" to his list?)

  And having a party instead of a Center meant having another Central Committee—yes, the Promparty's own Central Com- mittee! True, there had not been any party conferences, nor had there been any elections, not even one. Whoever wanted to be on the Central Committee just joined up—five people all told. They all made way for one another, and they all yielded the post of chairman to one another too. There were no meetings— either of the Central Committee (no one else would remember this, but Ramzin would remember it very well indeed, and he would name names) or of the groups from various branches of industry. There seemed even to be some dearth of members. As Charnovsky said, "There never was any formal organization of a Promparty." And how many members had there been? Larichev: "A count of members would have been difficult; the exact composition was unknown." And how had they carried out their wrecking? How had directives been communicated? Well, it was just a matter of whoever met whomever in some particular institution—directives were passed on orally. From then on everyone would carry out his own wrecking on his own conscience. (Well, now, Ramzin confidently named two thou- sand members. And whenever he named two, they arrested five. According to the documents in the trial, there were altogether thirty to forty thousand engineers throughout the U.S.S.R. That meant they would arrest every seventh one, and terrify the other six.) And what about contacts with the Working Peasants Party? Well, they might meet in the State Planning Commission, or else in the Supreme Council of the Economy, and "plan systematic acts against village Communists."

  Where have we seen all this before? Aha! In Aida. They are seeing Radames off on his campaign, and the orchestra is thun- dering, and eight warriors are standing there in helmets and with spears—and two thousand more are painted on the backdrop.

  That's your Promparty.

  But that's all right. It works. The show goes on! (Today it is quite impossible to believe just how threatening and serious it all looked at the time.) And it is hammered in by repetition, and every individual episode is gone over several times. And be- cause of this the awful visions multiply. And, in addition, so that things won't become too bland, the defendants suddenly "forget" something terribly unimportant, or else they "try to renounce testimony"—and right then and there "they pin them down with cross-questioning," and it all winds up being as lively as the Moscow Art Theatre.

  But Krylenko pressed too hard. On the one hand he planned to disembowel the Promparty—to disclose its social basis. That was a question of class, and his analysis couldn't go wrong. But Krylenko abandoned the Stanislavsky method, didn't assign the roles, relied on improvisation. He let everyone tell his own story of his own life, and what his relationship to the Revolution had been, and how he was led to participate in wrecking.

  And, in one fell swoop, that thoughtless insertion, that human picture, spoiled all five acts.

  The first thing that we learn to our astonishment is that all eight of these big shots of the bourgeois intelligentsia came from poor families: the son of a peasant; one of the many children of a clerk; the son of an artisan; the son of a rural schoolteacher; the son of a peddler. At school, they were all impoverished and earned the money for their education themselves, from the ages of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Some gave lessons, and some worked on locomotives. And here was what was monstrous: no one barred their way to an education! They all completed the courses in high school and in higher technological institutions, and they became important and famous professors. (How could that have been? They always told us that under Tsarism only the children of landowners and capitalists . . . Those calendars cer- tainly couldn't have been lying! )

  And here and now, in the Soviet period, engineers were in a very difficult position. It was almost impossible for them to provide their children with a higher education (after all, the children of the intelligentsia had the lowest priority, remember! ). The court didn't argue, nor did Krylenko. (And the defendants themselves hastened to qualify what they had said, asserting that, against the background of the general and over-all victories, this, of course, was unimportant.)

  Here we begin to distinguish bit by bit among the defendants, who, up to this point, had talked very much like one another. Their age differential also divided them with respect to probity. Those close to sixty and older made statements that aroused a friendly, sympathetic reaction. But forty-three-year-old Ramzin and Larichev, and thirty-nine-year-old Ochkin (the same one who had denounced Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee—in 1921), were glib and shameless. And all the major testimony about the Promparty and intervention comes from them. Ramzin was the kind of person (as a result of his early and extraordinary successes) who was shunned by the entire engineering profession, and he endured it. At the trial he caught Krylenko's hints on the wing and volunteered precise statements. All the charges were founded on Ramzin's recollections. He possessed such self-control and force that he might very well have conducted plenipotentiary talks in Paris about intervention (on assignment from the GPU, obviously). Ochkin, too, was a fast climber: at twenty-nine he had already possessed "the unlimited trust of the Council of Labor and Defense and the Council of People's Commissars."

  One couldn't say the same about sixty-two-year-old Professor Charnovsky: Anonymous students had persecuted him in the wall newspapers. After twenty-three years of lecturing, he had been summoned to a general students' meeting to "give an account of his work." He hadn't gone.

  And in 1921 Professor Kalinnikov had headed an open struggle against the Soviet government—specifically a professors' strike. What it amounted to was this: Back in the days of the Stolypin repression, the Moscow Higher Technical School had won academic autonomy (including the right to fill important posts, elect a rector, etc.). In 1921 the professors in this school had re-elected Kalinnikov to a new term as rector, but the People's Commissariat didn't want him there and had designated its own candidate. However, the professors went on strike and were supported by the students—at that time there were no truly proletarian students—and Kalinnikov was rector for a whole year despite the wishes of the Soviet government. (It was only in 1922 that they had wrung the neck of that autonomy, and even then, in all probability, not without arrests.)

  Fedotov was sixty-six years old and he had been a factory engineer eleven years longer than the whole life span of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party—from which the Soviet Communist Party had sprung. He had worked at all the spinning mills and textile factories in Russia. (How h
ateful such people are, and how desirable it is to get rid of them as quickly as possible!) In 1905 he had left his position as a director of the Morozov textile firm and the high salary which went with it because he preferred to attend the "Red Funerals" which fol- lowed the caskets of the workers killed by the Cossacks. And now he was ill, had poor eyesight, and was too weak to leave home at night even to go to the theater.

  And such people organized intervention? And economic ruin? Charnovsky had not had any free evenings for many years be- cause he had been so busy with his teaching and with developing new sciences—such as the science of the organization of produc- tion and the scientific principles of rationalization. I recall from my own childhood the engineering professors of those years, and that's exactly what they were like. Their evenings were given up to their students at all levels, and they didn't get home to their families until 11 P.M. After all, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan there were only thirty thousand of them for the whole country. They were all strained to the breaking point.

  And it was these people who were supposed to have con- trived a crisis, to have spied in exchange for handouts?

  Ramzin uttered just one honest phrase during the whole trial: "The path of wrecking is alien to the inner structure of engineer- ing."

  Throughout the trial Krylenko forced the defendants to con- cede apologetically that they were "scarcely conversant" with or were "illiterate" in politics. After all, politics is much more diffi- cult and much loftier than some kind of metallurgy or turbine design. In politics your head won't help you, nor will your educa- tion. Come on! Answer me! What was your attitude toward the October Revolution when it happened? Skeptical. In other words, immediately hostile. Why? Why? Why?

  Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us— as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble had been blown.