The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  In today's terms, Elizabeth had a universally human point of view on all this, while the Empress Catherine the Great had, on the contrary, a class point of view (which was consequently more correct). Not to execute anyone at all seemed to her appalling and indefensible. She found capital punishment entirely appropriate to defending herself, her throne, and her system—in other words, in political cases, such as those of Mirovich, the Moscow plague mutiny, and Pugachev. But for habitual criminals, for nonpolitical offenders, why not consider capital punishment abolished?

  Under Paul, the abolition of capital punishment was confirmed. (Despite his many wars, there were no military tribunals attached to military units.) And during the whole long reign of Alex- ander I, capital punishment was introduced only for war crimes that took place during a campaign (1812). (Right at this point, some people will say to us: What about deaths from running the gantlet? Yes, indeed, there were, of course, hidden executions— for that matter, one can literally drive a person to death with a trade-union meeting! ) But the yielding up of one's God-given life because others, sitting in judgment, have so voted simply did not take place in our country even for crimes of state for an entire half-century—from Pugachev to the Decembrists.

  The blood of the five Decembrists whetted the appetite of our state. From then on, execution for crimes of state was no longer prohibited nor was it forgotten, right up to the February Revolu- tion in 1917. It was confirmed by the Statutes of 1845 and 1904, and further reinforced by the criminal statutes of the army and navy.

  And how many people were executed in Russia during that period? We have already, in Chapter 8 above, cited the figures given by liberal leaders of 1905-1907. Let us add to them the verified figures of N. S. Tagantsev, the expert on Russian criminal law.

  [ N. S. Tagantsev, Smertnaya Kazn (Capital Punishment), St. Petersburg, 1913.]

  Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia. For a period of thirty years—from 1876 to 1904 (the period of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries and the use of terrorism—a terrorism which did not consist merely of intentions murmured in the kitchen of a communal apartment —a period of mass strikes and peasant revolts; the period when the parties of the future revolution were created and grew in strength)—486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country. (This figure includes executions of ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!)

  [Thirteen people were executed in Schlüsselburg from 1884 to 1906. An awesome total—for Switzerland perhaps!]

  During the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an abrupt end.

  When the Provisional Government came to power, it abolished capital punishment entirely. In July, 1917, however, it was re- instated in the active army and front-line areas for military crimes, murder, rape, assault, and pillage (very widespread in those areas at that time). This was one of the most unpopular of the measures which destroyed the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks' slogan before the Bolshevik coup d'état was: "Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!"

  A story has come down to us that on the night of October 25-26 a discussion arose in Smolny as to whether one of the first decrees shouldn't be the abolition of capital punishment in perpetuity—whereupon Lenin justly ridiculed the idealism of his comrades. He, at any rate, knew that without capital punishment there would be no movement whatever in the direction of the new society. However, in forming a coalition government with the Left SR's, he gave in to their faulty concepts, and on October 28, 1917, capital punishment was abolished. Nothing good, of course, could come from that "goody-goody" position. (Yes, and how did they get rid of it? At the beginning of 1918, Trotsky ordered that Aleksei Shchastny, a newly appointed admiral, be brought to trial because he had refused to scuttle the Baltic Fleet. Karklin, the Chairman of the Verkhtrib, quickly sentenced him in broken Russian: "To be shot within twenty-four hours." There was a stir in the hall: But it has been abolished! Prosecutor Krylenko explained: "What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot." And they did shoot him.)

  If we are to judge by official documents, capital punishment was restored in all its force in June, 1918. No, it was not "re- stored"; instead, a new era of executions was inaugurated. If one takes the view that Latsis is not deliberately understating the real figures but simply lacks complete information, and that the Revtribunals carried on approximately the same amount of judicial work as the Cheka performed in an extrajudicial way, one concludes that in the twenty central provinces of Russia in a period of sixteen months (June, 1918, to October, 1919) more than sixteen thousand persons were shot, which is to say more than one thousand a month.

  [Now that we have started to make comparisons, here is another: during the eighty years of the Inquisition's peak effort (1420 to 1498), in all of Spain ten thousand persons were condemned to be burned to death at the stake—in other words, about ten a month.]

  (This, incidentally, is when they shot both Khrustalev-Nosar, the Chairman of the 1905 St. Peters- burg Soviet—the first Russian soviet—and the artist who designed the legendary uniform worn by the Red Army throughout the Civil War.)

  However, it may not even have been these individual execu- tions, with or without formally pronounced death sentences, which added up to thousands and inaugurated the new era of executions in 1918 that stunned and froze Russia. Still more terrible to us was the practice—initially followed by both warring sides and, later, by the victors only—of sinking barges loaded with uncounted, unregistered hundreds, unidentified even by a roll call. (Naval officers in the Gulf of Finland, in the White, Caspian, and Black seas, and, as late as 1920, hostages in Lake Baikal. ) This is outside the scope of our narrow history of courts and trials, but it belongs to the history of morals, which is where everything else originates as well. In all our centuries, from the first Ryurik on, had there ever been a period of such cruelties and so much killing as during the post-October Civil War?

  We would omit from view one of the characteristic ups-and- downs of the Russian capital-punishment story if we neglected to mention that capital punishment was abolished in January, 1920. Yes, indeed! And some students of the subject might con- ceivably be at a loss to interpret the credulity and helplessness of a dictatorship that deprived itself of its avenging sword when Denikin was still in the Kuban, Wrangel still in the Crimea, and the Polish cavalry were saddling up for a campaign. But, in the first place, this decree was quite sensible: it did not extend to the decisions of military tribunals, but applied only to extrajudicial actions of the Cheka and the decisions of tribunals in the rear. In the second place, the way was prepared for it by first cleaning out the prisons by the wholesale execution of prisoners who might otherwise have come "under the decree." And, in the third place, it was in effect for a brief period—four months. (It lasted only until the prisons had filled up again.) By a decree of May 28, 1920, capital punishment was restored to the Cheka.

  The Revolution had hastened to rename everything, so that everything would seem new. Thus the death penalty was re- christened "the supreme measure"—no longer a "punishment" but a means of social defense. From the groundwork of the criminal legislation of 1924 it is clear that the supreme measure was introduced only temporarily, pending its total abolition by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

  And in 1927 they actually did begin to abolish it. It was re- tained solely for crimes against the state and the army—Article 58 and military crimes—and, true, for banditry also. (But the broad political interpretation of "banditry" was as well known then as it is now: from a Central Asian "Basmach," right up to a Lithuanian forest guerrilla, every armed nati
onalist who doesn't agree with the central government is a "bandit," and how could one possibly get along without that article? Similarly, any par- ticipant in a camp rebellion and any participant in an urban rebellion is also a "bandit.") But where articles protecting private individuals were concerned, capital punishment was abolished to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolu- tion.

  And for the fifteenth anniversary, the law of Seven-eighths was added to the roster of capital punishment—that law so vitally important to advancing socialism, which guaranteed the Soviet subject a bullet for each crumb stolen from the state's table.

  As always happens at the start, they hurried to apply this law in 1932-1933 and shot people with special ferocity. In this time of peace in December, 1932 (while Kirov was still alive), at one time 265 condemned prisoners were awaiting execution in Leningrad's Kresty Prison alone.

  [Testimony of B., who brought food to the cells of the prisoners con- demned to be shot.]

  And during the whole year, it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in Kresty alone.

  And what kind of evildoers were these condemned men? Where did so many plotters and troublemakers come from? Among them, for example, were six collective farmers from nearby Tsarskoye Selo who were guilty of the following crime: After they had finished mowing the collective farm with their own hands, they had gone back and mowed a second time along the hummocks to get a little hay for their own cows. The Ail- Russian Central Executive Committee refused to pardon all six of these peasants, and the sentence of execution was carried out.

  What cruel and evil Saltychikha, what utterly repulsive and infamous serf-owner would have killed six peasants for their miserable little clippings of hay? If one had dared to beat them with birch switches even once, we would know about it and read about it in school and curse that name.

  [What isn't known in our schools is the fact that Saltychikha, by a verdict of her own peers, was imprisoned for eleven years in the subterranean crypt of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow for the atrocities inflicted on her serfs. (Prugavin, Monastyrskiye Tyurmy [Monastery Prisons], Posrednik Publishers, p. 39.)]

  But now, heave the corpses into the water, and pretty soon the surface is all smooth again and no one's the wiser. And one must cherish the hope that someday documents will confirm the report of my witness, who is still alive. Even if Stalin had killed no others, I believe he deserved to be drawn and quartered just for the lives of those six Tsarskoye Selo peasants! And yet they still dare shriek at us (from Peking, from Tirana, from Tbilisi, yes, and plenty of big-bellies in the Moscow suburbs are doing it too): "How could you dare expose him?" "How could you dare disturb his great shade?" "Stalin belongs to the world Communist move- ment!" But in my opinion all he belongs to is the Criminal Code. "The peoples of all the world remember him as a friend." But not those on whose backs he rode, whom he slashed with his knout.

  However, let us return to being dispassionate and impartial once more. Of course, the All-Russian Central Executive Com- mittee would certainly have "completely abolished" the supreme measure, as promised, but unfortunately what happened was that in 1936 the Father and Teacher "completely abolished" the All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself. And the Supreme Soviet that succeeded it had an eighteenth-century ring. "The supreme measure" became a punishment once again, and ceased to be some kind of incomprehensible "social defense." Even to the Stalinist ear the executions of 1937-1938 could hardly fit into any framework of "defense."

  What legal expert, what criminal historian, will provide us with verified statistics for those 1937-1938 executions? Where is that Special Archive we might be able to penetrate in order to read the figures? There is none. There is none and there never will be any. Therefore we dare report only those figures mentioned in rumors that were quite fresh in 1939-1940, when they were drifting around under the Butyrki arches, having emanated from the high- and middle-ranking Yezhov men of the NKVD who had been arrested and had passed through those cells not long before. (And they really knew!) The Yezhov men said that dur- ing those two years of 1937 and 1938 a half-million "political prisoners" had been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 480,- 000 blatnye—habitual thieves—in addition. (The thieves were all shot under Article 59-3 because they constituted "a basis of Yagoda's power"; and thereby the "ancient and noble companion- ship of thieves" was pruned back. )

  How improbable are these figures? Taking into consideration that the mass executions went on not for two full years but only for a year and a half, we would have to assume (under Article 58—in other words, the politicals alone) an average of 28,000 executions per month in that period. For the whole Soviet Union. But at how many different locations were executions being carried out? A figure of 150 would be very modest. (There were more, of course. In Pskov alone, the NKVD set up torture and execution chambers in the basements of many churches, in former hermits' cells. And even in 1953 tourists were still not allowed into these churches, on the grounds that "archives" were kept there. The cobwebs hadn't been swept out for ten years at a stretch: those were the "archives" they kept there. And before beginning restoration work on these churches, they had to haul away the bones in them by the truckload.) On the basis of this calculation, an average of six people were shot in the course of one day at each execution site. What's so fantastic about that? It is even an understatement! (According to other sources, 1,700,000 had been shot by January 1, 1939.)

  During the years of World War II, the use of capital punish- ment was occasionally extended for various reasons (as, for example, by the militarization of the railroads), and, at times, was broadened as to method (from April, 1943, on, for example, with the decree on hanging).

  All these events delayed to a certain extent the promised full, final, and perpetual repeal of the death penalty. However, the patience and loyalty of our people finally earned them this re- ward. In May, 1947, losif Vissarionovich inspected his new starched dickey in his mirror, liked it, and dictated to the Presi- dium of the Supreme Soviet the Decree on the Abolition of Capital Punishment in peacetime (replacing it with a new maximum term of twenty-five years—it was a good pretext for introducing the so-called quarter).

  But our people are ungrateful, criminal, and incapable of ap- preciating generosity. Therefore, after the rulers had creaked along and eked out two and a half years without the death penalty, on January 12, 1950, a new decree was published that constituted an about-face: "In view of petitions pouring in from the national republics [the Ukraine?], from the trade unions [oh, those lovely trade unions; they always know what's needed], from peasant organizations [this was dictated by a sleepwalker: the Gracious Sovereign had stomped to death all peasant organi- zations way back in the Year of the Great Turning Point], and also from cultural leaders [now, that is quite likely]," capital punishment was restored for a conglomeration of "traitors of the Motherland, spies, and subversives-diversionists." (And, of course, they forgot to repeal the quarter, the twenty-five-year sentence, which remained in force.)

  And once this return to our familiar friend, to our beheading blade, had begun, things went further with no effort at all: in 1954, for premeditated murder; in May, 1961, for theft of state property, and counterfeiting, and terrorism in places of imprison- ment (this was directed especially at prisoners who killed in- formers and terrorized the camp administration); in July, 1961, for violating the rules governing foreign currency transactions; in February, 1962, for threatening the lives of (shaking a fist at) policemen or Communist vigilantes, the so-called "druzhinniki"; then for rape; and immediately thereafter for bribery.

  But all of this is simply temporary—until complete abolition. And that's how it's described today too.

  ["Osnovy Ugolovnogo Zakonodatelstva SSSR" ("Fundamental Principles of Criminal Legislation of the U.S.S.R."), Article 22, in Vedomosti Ver- khovnogo Soveta SSSR (Bulletin of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.), 1959, No. 1.]

  And so it turns out that Russia managed longest of all without
capital punishment in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

  In our happy, blind existence, we picture condemned men as a few ill-fated, solitary individuals. We instinctively believe that we could never end up on death row, that it would take an out- standing career if not heinous guilt for that to happen. A great deal has still to be shaken up inside our heads for us to get the real picture: a mass of the most ordinary, average, gray people have languished in death cells for the most ordinary, everyday misdemeanors, and, although some were lucky and had their death sentences commuted, which was purely a matter of chance, they very often got the super (which is what the prisoners called "the supreme measure," since they hate lofty words and manage somehow to give everything a nickname that is both crude and short).

  The agronomist of a District Agricultural Department got a death sentence for his mistaken analysis of collective farm grain! (Maybe it was because his analysis wasn't what his chiefs wanted from him?) That was in 1937.

  Melnikov, the chairman of a handicraft artel that made spools for thread, was sentenced to death because a spark from a steam engine in his artel had caused a fire! That was in 1937. (True, his death sentence was commuted to a "tenner.")