The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  And that's the way they tossed him back and forth from hot to cold for the entire half-year. On December 5 they adopted the Bukharin constitution with fanfare and celebration and named it the Stalinist Constitution for all eternity. At the December Plenum of the Central Committee, they brought in Pyatakov, with his teeth knocked out, and not a bit like himself. Behind his back stood silent Chekists (Yagoda men, and Yagoda, after all, was also being tested and prepared for a role). Pyatakov delivered himself of the most repulsive sort of testimony against Bukharin and Rykov, both of whom were sitting right there among the leaders. Ordzhonikidze put his hand up to his ear (he was hard of hearing): "See here, are you giving all this testimony voluntarily?" (Note that down! Ordzhonikidze will get a bullet of his own!) "Absolutely voluntarily"—and Pyatakov swayed on his feet. And during the recess, Rykov said to Bu- kharin: "Tomsky had will power. He understood it all back in August, and he ended his own life. While you and I, like fools, have gone on living."

  At this point Kaganovich made an angry, condemnatory speech (he wanted so much to believe in Bukharchik's innocence, but he couldn't any longer). And then Molotov. And then Stalin! What a generous heart! What a memory for the good things! "Nonetheless, I consider that Bukharin's guilt has not yet been proven. Perhaps Rykov is guilty, but not Bukharin." (Someone had drawn up charges against Bukharin against his will! )

  From cold to hot. That's how will power collapses. That's how to grow used to the role of a ruined hero.

  And then they began to bring to his home day after day the records of interrogations: the depositions of young ex-students in the Institute of Red Professors, of Radek, and all the rest of them. And they all provided the gravest proofs of Bukharin's black treason. They took these documents to his home, not as if he were a defendant—oh, by no means! Merely in his position as a member of the Central Committee—merely for his informa- tion.

  Usually, when he received a new batch of these materials, Bu- kharin would say to his twenty-two-year-old wife, who only that spring had given him a son: "You read them. I can't." And he would bury his head in his pillow. He had two revolvers at home. (Stalin was giving him time too.) And yet he did not commit suicide.

  Is it not clear that he had grown used to his ordained role?

  And one more public trial took place. And they shot one more batch of defendants. And yet they continued to be merciful to Bukharin. They had not taken Bukharin.

  At the beginning of February, 1937, he decided to go on a hunger strike at home, in order to force the Central Committee to hold a hearing and clear him of the charges against him. He announced it in a letter to "Dear Koba," and he honestly went through with it too. Then a Plenum of the Central Committee was convened with the following agenda: (1) the crimes of the Rightist Center; (2) the anti-Party conduct of Comrade Bu- kharin, as evidenced by his hunger strike.

  Bukharin hesitated. Had he perhaps really insulted the Party in some particular way? Unshaven, thin, wan, already a prisoner in appearance, he dragged himself along to the Plenum. "What on earth were you thinking of?" Dear Koba asked him cordially. "But what was I to do in the face of such accusations? They want to expel me from the Party." Stalin made a wry face at the absurdity: "Come on, now. No one is going to expel you from the Party!"

  Bukharin believed him and revived. He willingly assured the Plenum of his repentance, and immediately abandoned his hunger strike. (At home he said: "Come on now, cut me some sausage! Koba said they wouldn't expel me.") But in the course of the Plenum, Kaganovich and Molotov (impudent fellows they were, indeed!—paid no attention to Stalin's opinion!) both called Bukharin a Fascist hireling and demanded that he be shot.

  [See what a wealth of information we are deprived of because we're protecting Molotov's noble old age.]

  And once again Bukharin's spirits fell, and in his last days he began to compose his "Letter to the Future Central Committee." Committed to memory and thereby preserved, it recently became known to the whole world. However, it did not shake the world to its foundations.

  [Nor did it shake the "Future Central Committee" either.]

  For what were the last words this brilliant theoretician decided to hand down to future generations? Just one more cry of anguish and a plea to be restored to the Party. (He paid dearly in shame for that devotion!) And one more affirmation that he "fully approved" everything that had hap- pened up to and including 1937. And that included not only all the previous jeeringly mocking trials, but also all the foul-smelling waves of our great prison sewage disposal system.

  And that is how he himself certified that he, too, deserved to plunge into those waves.

  So, at long last, he had matured to the point of being turned over to the prompters and the assistant producers—this muscular man, this hunter and wrestler! (In playful tussles in the presence of the Central Committee, how many times had he landed Stalin flat on his back! And this, too, was probably something Koba couldn't forgive him.)

  And in the case of one so fully prepared, so demolished, that no torture was called for, how was his position any stronger than that of Yakubovich in 1931? How could he not be susceptible to the same two arguments? He was in fact much weaker, because Yakubovich longed for death, and Bukharin dreaded it.

  There remained an easy dialogue with Vyshinsky along set lines:

  "Is it true that every opposition to the Party is a struggle against the Party?" "In general it is, factually it is." "But a struggle against the Party cannot help but grow into a war against the Party." "According to the logic of things—yes, it must." "And that means that in the end, given the existence of oppositionist beliefs, any foul deeds whatever might be perpetrated against the Party [es- pionage, murder, sellout of the Motherland]?" "But wait a minute, none were actually committed." "But they could have been?" "Well, theoretically speaking." (Those are your theoreticians for you!) "But for us the highest of all interests are those of the Party?" "Yes, of course, of course!" "So you see, only a very fine distinction separates us. We are required to concretize the eventu- ality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could have, couldn't it?" "It could have." "And so it is necessary to recognize as actual what was possible; that's all. It's a small phi- losophical transition. Are we in agreement? . . . Yes, and one thing more, and it's not for me to explain to you, but if you re- treat and say something different during the trial, you understand that it will only play into the hands of the world bourgeoisie and will only do the Party harm. Well, and it's clear that in that case you yourself will not die an easy death. But if everything goes off all right, we will, of course, allow you to go on living. We'll send you in secret to the island of Monte Cristo, and you can work on the economics of socialism there." "But in previous trials, as I understand it, you did shoot them all?" "But what comparison is there between you and them! And then, we also left many of them alive too. They were shot only in the newspapers."

  And so perhaps there isn't any insoluble riddle?

  It was all that same invincible theme song, persisting with only minor variations through so many different trials: "After all, we and you are Communists! How could you have gotten off the track and come out against us? Repent! After all, you and we together—is us!"

  Historical comprehension ripens slowly in a society. And when it does ripen, it is so simple. Neither in 1922, nor in 1924, nor in 1937 were the defendants able to hang onto their own point of view so firmly that they could raise their heads and shout, in reply to that bewitching and anesthetizing melody:

  "No, we are not revolutionaries with you! No, we are not Rus- sians with you! No, we are not Communists with you!"

  It would seem that if only that kind of shout had been raised, all the stage sets would have collapsed, the plaster masks would have fallen off, the Producer would have fled down the backstairs, and the prompters would have sneaked off into their ratholes. And out of doors
it would have been, say, 1967!

  But even the most superbly successful of these theatrical pro- ductions was expensive and troublesome. And Stalin decided not to use open trials any longer.

  Or rather in 1937 he probably did have a plan for holding public trials on a wide scale in the local districts—so the black soul of the opposition would be made visible to the masses. But he couldn't find producers who were good enough. It wasn't practical to prepare things so carefully, and the mental processes of the accused weren't so complex, and Stalin only got into a mess, although very few people know about it. The whole plan broke down after a few trials, and was abandoned.

  It's appropriate here to describe one such trial—the Kady case, detailed reports of which the Ivanovo provincial newspapers published initially.

  At the end of 1934, a new local administrative district was created in the remote wilds of Ivanovo Province at the point where it joined Kostroma and Nizhni Novgorod Provinces, and its center was situated in the ancient, slow-moving village of Kady. New leaders were sent there from various localities, and they made one another's acquaintance right in Kady. There they found a remote, sad, impoverished region, badly in need of money, machines, and intelligent economic management, but, instead, starved by grain procurements. It happened that Fyodor Ivanovich Smirnov, the First Secretary of the District Party Committee, was a man with a strong sense of justice; Stavrov, the head of the District Agricultural Department, was a peasant through and through, one of those peasants known as the intensivniki—in other words, the hard-working, zealous, and literate peasants who in the twenties had run their farms on a scientific basis, for which they were at that time rewarded by the Soviet government, since it had not yet been decided that all these intensivniki must be de- stroyed. Because Stavrov had entered the Party he had survived the liquidation of the kulaks. (And maybe he even took part in the liquidation of the kulaks?) These men tried to do something for the peasants in their new district, but directives kept pouring down from above and each one ran counter to some initiative of theirs; it was as if, up there, they were busy thinking up what they could do to make things worse and more desperate for the peasants. And at one point the leaders in Kady wrote the province leadership that it was necessary to lower the plan for procurement of breadgrains because the district couldn't fulfill the plan without becoming impoverished well below the danger point. One has to recall the situation in the thirties (and maybe not only the thirties?) to realize what sacrilege against the plan and what rebellion against the government this represented! But, in ac- cordance with then current style, measures were not taken directly from above, but were left to local initiative.

  When Smirnov was on vacation, his deputy, Vasily Fyodorovich Romanov, the Sec- ond Secretary, arranged to have a resolution passed by the District Party Committee: "The successes of the district would have been even more brilliant [?] if it were not for the Trotskyite Stavrov." This set in motion the "individual case" of Stavrov. (An interest- ing approach: Divide and rule! For the time being, Smirnov was merely to be frightened, neutralized, and compelled to retreat; there would be time enough later on to get to him. And this, on a small scale, was precisely the Stalinist tactic in the Central Com- mittee.) At stormy Party meetings, however, it became clear that Stavrov was about as much of a Trotskyite as he was a Jesuit. The head of the District Consumer Cooperatives, Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov, a man with a ragtag, haphazard education but one of those native talents others are so surprised to find among Russians, a born retail trade executive, eloquent, adroit in an argument, who could get fired to red heat about anything he believed to be right, tried to persuade the Party meeting to expel Romanov from the Party for slander. And they actually did give Romanov an officiai Party rebuke! Romanov's last words in this dispute were typical of this kind of person, demonstrating his assurance in regard to the general situation: "Even though they proved Stavrov was not a Trotskyite, nonetheless I am sure he is a Trotskyite. The Party will investigate, and it will also investigate the rebuke to me." And the Party did investigate: the District NKVD arrested Stavrov almost immediately, and one month later they also arrested Univer, the Chairman of the District Executive Com- mittee and an Estonian. And Romanov took over Univer's job as Chairman of the District Executive Committee. Stavrov was taken to the Provincial NKVD, where he confessed he was a Trotskyite, that he had acted in coalition with the SR's all his life, that he was a member of an underground rightist organization in his district (this is a bouquet worthy of the times, the only thing missing being a connection with the Entente). Perhaps he never really did confess these things, but no one is ever going to know, since he died from torture during interrogation in the internal prison of the Ivanovo NKVD. The pages of his deposition were there in full. Soon afterward, they arrested Smirnov, the secretary of the District Party Committee, as the head of the supposed rightist organization; and Saburov, the head of the District Fi- nancial Department, and someone else as well.

  Of interest is the way in which Vlasov's fate was decided. He had only recently demanded the expulsion from the Party of Romanov, now the new Chairman of the District Executive Com- mittee. He had also fatally offended Rusov, the district prosecutor, as we have already reported in Chapter 4, above. He had offended N. I. Krylov, the Chairman of the District NKVD, by protecting two of his energetic and resourceful executives from being ar- rested for supposed wrecking—both of them had black marks on their records because of their social origins. (Vlasov always hired all kinds of "former" people for his work—because they mastered the business effectively and, in addition, tried hard; people pro- moted from the ranks of the proletariat knew nothing and, more importantly, didn't want to know anything.) Nonetheless the NKVD was prepared to make its peace with the trade cooperative! Sorokin, the Deputy Chairman of the District NKVD, came in person to see Vlasov with a peace proposal: to give the NKVD 700 rubles' worth of materials without charging them for it (and later on we will somehow write it off). (The ragpickers! And that was two months' wages for Vlasov, who had never taken anything illegally for himself. ) "And if you don't give it to us, you are going to regret it." Vlasov kicked him out: "How do you dare offer me, a Communist, a deal like that?" The very next day Krylov paid a call on the District Consumer Cooperative, this time as the rep- resentative of the District Committee of the Party. (This mas- querade, like all these tricks, was in the spirit of 1937.) And this time he ordered the convening of a Party meeting; the agenda: "On the wrecking activities of Smirnov and Univer in the Con- sumers' Cooperatives," the report to be delivered by Comrade Vlasov. Well, now, that's a gem of a trick for you! No one at that point was making charges against Vlasov. But it would be quite enough for him to say two little words about the wrecking ac- tivities of the former secretary of the District Party Committee in his, Vlasov's, field, and the NKVD would interrupt: "And where were you? Why didn't you come to us in time?" In a situa- tion of this sort many others would have lost their heads and allowed themselves to be trapped. But not Vlasov! He immedi- ately replied: "I won't make the report! Let Krylov make the report—after all, he arrested Smirnov and Univer and is handling their case." Krylov refused: "I'm not familiar with the evidence." Vlasov replied: "If even you aren't familiar with the evidence, that means they were arrested without cause.'' So the Party meeting simply didn't take place. But how often did people dare to defend themselves? (We will not have a complete picture of the atmosphere of 1937 if we lose sight of the fact that there were still strong-willed people capable of difficult decisions, and if we fail to recall that late that night T., the senior bookkeeper of the District Consumer Cooperative, and his deputy N. came to Vlasov's office with 10,000 rubles: "Vasily Grigoryevich! Get out of town tonight! Don't wait for tomorrow. Otherwise you are finished!" But Vlasov thought it did not befit a Communist to run away. ) The next morning there was a nasty article in the district paper on the work of the District Consumer Cooperative. (One has to point out that in 1937 the press always played hand in glove with
the NKVD.) By evening Vlasov had been asked to give the District Party Committee an accounting of his own work. (Every step of the way, this was how things were in the entire Soviet Union. )

  This was 1937, the second year of the so-called "Mikoyan prosperity" in Moscow and other big cities. And even today, in the reminiscences of journalists and writers, one gets the impres- sion that at the time there was already plenty of everything. This concept seems to have gone down in history, and there is a danger of its staying there. And yet, in November, 1936, two years after the abolition of bread rationing, a secret directive was published in Ivanovo Province (and in other provinces) prohibiting the sale of flour. In those years many housewives in small towns, and particularly in villages, still used to bake their own bread. Pro- hibiting the sale of flour meant: Do not eat bread! In the district center of Kady, long bread lines formed such as had never before been seen. (However, they attacked that problem, too, by for- bidding the baking of black bread in district centers, permitting only expensive white bread to be baked.) The only bakery in the whole Kady District was the one in the district center, and people began to pour into the center from the villages to get black bread. The warehouses of the District Consumer Cooperative had flour, but the two parallel prohibitions blocked off all avenues by which it could be made available to the public! Vlasov, however, man- aged to find a way out of the impasse, and despite the clever gov- ernment rulings he kept the district fed for a whole year: he went out to the collective farms and got eight of them to agree to set up public bakeries in empty "kulak" huts (in other words, they would simply bring in firewood and set the women to baking in ordinary Russian peasant ovens, but, mind you, ovens which were now socialized, publicly not privately owned). The District Con- sumer Cooperative would undertake to supply them with flour. There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been dis- covered! Without building any bakeries (for which he had no funds), Vlasov set them up in one day. Without carrying on a trade in flour, he released flour from the warehouse continuously and proceeded to order more from the provincial center. Without selling black bread in the district center, he gave the district black bread. Yes, he did not violate the letter of the instructions, but he violated their spirit—for their essence was to compel a reduc- tion in flour consumption by starving the people. And so, of course, there were good grounds for criticizing him at the Dis- trict Party Committee.