The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic repub- lic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the eco- nomic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity? (And, excepting only the question of the moral leader- ship of society, is not this precisely where all social cybernetics is leading today? Is it not true that professional politicians are boils on the neck of society that prevent it from turning its head and moving its arms?) And why shouldn't engineers have politi- cal views? After all, politics is not even a science, but is an em- pirical area not susceptible to description by any mathematical apparatus; furthermore, it is an area subject to human egotism and blind passion. (Even in the trial Charnovsky speaks out: "Politics must, nonetheless, be guided to some degree by the findings of technology.")

  The wild pressures of War Communism could only sicken the engineers. An engineer cannot participate in irrationality, and until 1920 the majority of them did nothing, even though they were barbarically impoverished. When NEP—the New Eco- nomic Policy—got under way, the engineers willingly went back to work. They accepted NEP as an indication that the govern- ment had come to its senses. But, alas, conditions were not what they had been. The engineers were looked on as a socially sus- picious element that did not even have the right to provide an education for its own children. Engineers were paid immeasur- ably low salaries in proportion to their contribution to produc- tion. But while their superiors demanded successes in production from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.

  Krylenko objects: "Do you remember the Oldenborger trial?" (In other words, how we, so to speak, defended him.)

  Fedotov: "Yes. He had to lose his life in order to attract some attention to the predicament of the engineer."

  Krylenko (disappointed): "Well, that was not how the matter was put."

  Fedotov: "He died and he was not the only one to die. He died voluntarily, and many others were killed." Krylenko was silent. That meant it was true. (Leaf through the Oldenborger trial again, and just imagine the persecution. And with the additional final line: "Many others were killed.")

  So it was that the engineer was to blame for everything, even when he had done nothing wrong. But if he actually had made a real mistake, and after all he was a human being, he would be torn to pieces unless his colleagues could manage to cover things up. For would they value honesty? So the engineers then were forced at times to lie to the Party leadership?

  To restore their authority and prestige, the engineers really had to unite among themselves and help each other out. They were all in danger. But they didn't need any kind of conference, any membership cards, to achieve such unity. Like every kind of mutual understanding between intelligent and clear-thinking people, it was attained by a few quiet, even accidental words; no kind of voting was called for. Only narrow minds need resolu- tions and the Party stick. (And this was something Stalin could never understand, nor could the interrogators, nor their whole crowd. They had never had any experience of human relation- ships of that kind. They had never seen anything like that in Party history!) In any case, that sort of unity had long existed among Russian engineers in their big illiterate nation of petty tyrants. It had already been tested for several decades. But now a new government had discovered it and become alarmed.

  Then came 1927. And the rationality of the NEP period went up in smoke. And it turned out that the entire NEP was merely a cynical deceit. Extravagantly unrealistic projections of a super- industrial forward leap had been announced; impossible plans and tasks had been assigned. In those conditions, what was there for the collective engineering intelligence to do—the engineering leadership of the State Planning Commission and the Supreme Council of the Economy? To submit to insanity? To stay on the sidelines? It would have cost them nothing. One can write any figures one pleases on a piece of paper. But "our comrades, our colleagues in actual production, will not be able to fulfill these assignments." And that meant it was necessary to try to intro- duce some moderation into these plans, to bring them under the control of reason, to eliminate entirely the most outrageous assignments. To create, so to speak, their own State Planning Commission of engineers in order to correct the stupidities of the leaders. And the most amusing thing was that this was in their interests—the interests of the leaders—too. And in the interests of all industry and of all the people, since ruinous decisions could be avoided, and squandered, scattered millions could be picked up from the ground. To defend quality—"the heart of technology"—amid the general uproar about quantity, planning, and overplanning. And to indoctrinate students with this spirit.

  That's what it was, the thin, delicate fabric of the truth. That is what it really was.

  But to utter such thoughts aloud in 1930 meant being shot.

  And yet it was still too little and too invisible to arouse the wrath of the mob.

  It was therefore necessary to reprocess the silent and redeem- ing collusion of the engineers into crude wrecking and inter- vention.

  Thus, in the picture they substituted, we nonetheless caught a fleshless—and fruitless—vision of the truth. The work of the stage director began to fall apart. Fedotov had already blurted out something about sleepless nights ( ! ) during the eight months of his imprisonment; and about some important official of the GPU who had recently shaken his hand (?) (so there must have been a deal: you play your roles, and the GPU will carry out its promises?). And even the witnesses, though their role was in- comparably less important, began to get confused.

  Krylenko: "Did you participate in this group?"

  Witness Kirpotenko: "Two or three times, when questions of intervention were being considered."

  And that was just what was needed!

  Krylenko (encouragingly): "Go on."

  Kirpotenko (a pause): "Other than that nothing is known."

  Krylenko urges him on, tries to give him his cue again.

  Kirpotenko (stupidly): "Other than intervention nothing is known to me."

  Then, when there was an actual confrontation with Kupri- yanov, the facts no longed jibed. Krylenko got angry, and he shouted at the inept prisoners:

  "Then you just have to fix things so you come up with the same answers."

  And in the recess, behind the scenes, everything was once more brought up to snuff. All the defendants were once again nervously awaiting their cues. And Krylenko prompted all eight of them at once: the émigré industrialists had published an article abroad to the effect that they had held no talks at all with Ramzin and Larichev and knew nothing whatever about any Promparty, and that the testimony of the witnesses had in all likelihood been forced from them by torture. Well, what are you going to say to that?

  Good Lord! How outraged the defendants were! They clamored for the floor without waiting their turns. What had become of that weary calm with which they had humiliated themselves and their colleagues for seven days? Boiling indigna- tion at those émigrés burst from them. They demanded permis- sion to send a written declaration to the newspapers in defense of GPU methods. (Now, wasn't that an embellishment? Wasn't that a jewel?) And Ramzin declared: "Our presence here is sufficient proof that we were not subjected to tortures and tor- ments!" (And what, pray tell, would be the use of tortures that made it impossibl
e for the defendants to appear in court!) And Fedotov: "Imprisonment did me good and not only me. ... I even feel better in prison than in freedom." And Ochkin: "Me too. I feel better too!"

  It was out of sheer generosity that Krylenko and Vyshinsky declined their offer of a collective declaration. They certainly would have written one! And they certainly would have signed it!

  But maybe someone had some lingering suspicions still? Well, in that case, Comrade Krylenko vouchsafed them a flash of his brilliant logic. "If we should admit even for one second that these people were telling untruths, then why were they arrested and why did they all at once start babbling their heads off?"

  Now that is the power of logic for you! For a thousand years prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they had been arrested, that meant they were guilty!

  And, indeed, why had they started babbling away?

  "The question of torture we discard! . . . But let us put the question psychologically: Why did they confess? And I ask you: What else could they have done?"

  Well, how true! How psychological! If you ever served time in that institution, just recollect: what else was there to do?

  (Ivanov-Razumnik wrote that in 1938 he was imprisoned in the same cell in the Butyrki as Krylenko, and that Krylenko's place in the cell was under the board bunks. I can picture that vividly—since I have crawled there myself. The bunks were so low that the only way one could crawl along the dirty asphalt floor was flat on one's stomach, but newcomers could never adapt and would try to crawl on all fours. They would manage to get their heads under, but their rear ends would be left stick- ing out. And it is my opinion that the supreme prosecutor had a particularly difficult time adapting, and I imagine that his rear end, not yet grown thin, used to stick out there for the greater glory of Soviet justice. Sinful person that I am, I visualize with malice that rear end sticking out there, and through the whole long description of these trials it somehow gives me solace. )

  Yes, the prosecutor expounded, continuing along the same line, if all this about tortures was true, then it was impossible to understand what could have induced all the defendants to con- fess, unanimously and in chorus, without any arguments and deviations. Just where could such colossal collusion have been carried out? After all, they had no chance to communicate with each other during the interrogation period.

  (Several pages further along, a witness who survived will tell us where.)

  Now it is not for me to tell the reader but for the reader to tell me just what the notorious "riddle of the Moscow trials of the thirties" consisted of. At first people were astounded at the Promparty trial, and then that riddle was transferred to the trials of the Party leaders.

  After all, they didn't put on trial in open court the two thousand who had been dragged into it, or even two or three hundred, but only eight people. It is not as hard as all that to direct a chorus of eight. And as for his choices, Krylenko was free to choose from thousands over a period of two years. Pal- chinsky had not been broken, but had been shot—and posthum- ously named "the leader of the Promparty," which is what he was called in the testimony, even though no word of his survived.

  And they had hoped to beat what they wanted out of Khrenni- kov, and Khrennikov didn't yield to them either; therefore he appeared just once in the record—in a footnote in small type: "Khrennikov died during the course of his interrogation." The small type you are using is for fools, but we at least know, and we will write it in double-sized letters: TORTURED TO DEATH DURING INTERROGATION. He, too, was posthum- ously named a leader of the Promparty, but there wasn't one least little fact from him, not one tiny piece of testimony in the general chorus, not one. Because he did not give even one! (And then all at once Ramzin appeared! He was a find. What energy and what a grasp! And he was ready to do anything in order to live! And what talent! He had been arrested only at the end of the summer, just before the trial really—and he not only man- aged to enter fully into his role, but it seemed as though he had written the whole play. He had absorbed a whole mountain of interrelated material, and he could serve it up spick-and-span, any name at all, any fact at all. And sometimes he manifested the languid ornateness of a bigwig scientist: "The activity of the Promparty was so widespread that even in the course of an eleven-day trial there is no opportunity to disclose it in total detail.") (In other words, go on and look for it, look further!) "I am firmly convinced that a small anti-Soviet stratum still exists in engineering circles." (Go get 'em, go get 'em, grab some more!) And how capable he was: he knew that it was a riddle, and that a riddle must be given an artistic explanation. And, unfeeling as a stick of wood, he found then and there within himself "the traits of the Russian criminal, for whom purification lay in public recantation before all the people."

  [Ramzin has been undeservedly neglected in Russian memories. In my view, he fully deserved to become the prototype of a cynical and dazzling traitor. The Bengal fire of betrayal! He wasn't the only such villain of this epoch, but he was certainly a prominent case.]

  So what it comes down to is that all Krylenko and the GPU had to do was select the right people. But the risk was small. Goods spoiled in interrogation could always be sent off to the grave. And whoever managed to get through both the frying pan and the fire could always be given medical treatment and be fattened up, and put on public trial!

  So then where is the riddle? How they were worked over? Very simply: Do you want to live? (And even those who don't care about themselves care about their children or grandchildren.) Do you understand that it takes absolutely no effort to have you shot, without your ever leaving the courtyards of the GPU? (And there was no doubt whatever about that. Whoever hadn't yet learned it would be given a course in being ground down by the Lubyanka.) But it is useful both for you and for us to have you act out a certain drama, the text for which you, as specialists, are going to write yourselves, and we, as prosecutors, are going to learn by heart . . . and we will try to remember the technical terms. (Krylenko sometimes made mistakes during the trial. He said "freight car axle" instead of "locomotive axle.") It will be unpleasant to perform and you will feel ashamed, but you just have to suffer through it. After all, it is better to live. And what assurance have we that you won't shoot us afterward? Why should we take vengeance on you? You are excellent specialists and you have not committed any crimes and we value you. Look at how many wrecking trials there have been; you'll see that no one who behaved has been shot. (Mercy for the defendants who cooperated in one trial was an important prerequisite for the success of the next. And hope was transmitted via this chain right up to Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves.) But the under- standing is that you have to carry out all our conditions to the very last! The trial must work for the good of socialist society.

  And the defendants would fulfill all the conditions.

  Thus they served up all the subtlety of engineers' intellectual opposition as dirty wrecking on a level low enough to be com- prehensible to the last illiterate in the country. (But they had not yet descended to the level of ground glass in the food of the workers. The prosecutors had not yet thought that one up.)

  A further theme was ideological motivation. Had they begun to wreck? It was the result of a hostile motivation. And now they jointly collaborated in confessing? It was once again the result of ideological motivation, for they had been converted (in prison) by the blazing blast-furnace face of the third year of the Five-Year Plan! Although in their last words they begged for their lives, that wasn't the main thing for them. (Fedotov: "There is no forgiveness for us. The prosecutor is right!") The main thing for these strange defendants right at that moment, on the threshold of death, was to convince the people and the whole world of the infallibility and farsightedness of the Soviet govern- ment. Ramzin, in particular, glorified the "revolutionary con- sciousness of the proletarian masses and their leaders," who had been "able
to find immeasurably more dependable paths of economic policy" than the scientists, and who had calculated the tempos of economic growth rate far more correctly. And then: "I had come to understand it was necessary to make a jump ahead, and that it was necessary to make a leap forward, that it was necessary to capture by storm," etc., etc.

  [Protsess Prompartii, p. 504. And that is how they were talking here in the Soviet Union, in our own country, in 1930, when Mao Tse-tung was still a stripling.]

  And Larichev declared: "The Soviet Union is invincible against the weakening capitalist world." And Kalinnikov: "The dictatorship of the pro- letariat is an inevitable necessity." And further: "The interests of the people and the interests of the Soviet government merge into one purposeful whole." Yes, and in addition, in the country- side "the general line of the Party, the destruction of the kulaks, is correct." They had time, while awaiting execution, to deliver themselves of judgments about everything. And the repenting intellectuals even had enough voice for such a prophecy as this: "In proportion to the development of society, individual life is going to become more circumscribed. . . . Collective will is the highest form."

  Thus it was that with eight-horse traction all the goals of the trial were attained:

  1. All the shortages in the country, including famine, cold, lack of clothing, chaos, and obvious stupidities, were blamed on the engineer-wreckers.

  2. The people were terrified by the threat of imminent inter- vention from abroad and therefore prepared for new sacrifices.

  3. Leftist circles in the West were warned of the intrigues of their governments.

  4. The solidarity of the engineers was destroyed; all the in- telligentsia was given a good scare and left divided within itself. And so that there should be no doubt about it, this purpose of the trial was once more clearly proclaimed by Ramzin:

  "I would like to see that, in consequence of the present trial of the Promparty, the dark and shameful past of the entire intelli- gentsia will be buried once and for all."29