The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  In that same Kresty Prison in Leningrad, in 1932, two of the men in death cells were Feldman, convicted of possessing foreign currency, and Faitelevich, a student at the conservatory, for having sold steel ribbon for pen points. Primordial commerce, the bread and butter and pastime of the Jew, had also become worthy of the death penalty.

  Ought we to be surprised then that the Ivanovo Province village lad Geraska got the death penalty? In honor of the spring St. Nicholas holiday, he went off to the next village to celebrate; he drank heavily and, with a stick, he hit the rear end—no, not of the policeman himself, but of the policeman's horse. (True, in a rage at the police he ripped a piece of board off the village soviet building and then yanked out the village soviet telephone by the cord, shouting: "Smash the devils!")

  Whether our destiny holds a death cell in store for us is not determined by what we have done or not done. It is determined by the turn of a great wheel and the thrust of powerful external circumstances. For example, Leningrad was under siege and blockade. And what would its highest-ranking leader, Comrade Zhdanov, think if there were no executions among the cases in Leningrad State Security during such difficult times? He would think the Organs were lying down on the job, would he not? Were there not big underground plots, directed from outside by the Germans, to be discovered? Why were such plots discovered under Stalin in 1919 and not under Zhdanov in 1942? No sooner ordered than done. Several ramified plots were discovered. You were asleep in your unheated Leningrad room, and the sharp claws of the black hand were already hovering over you. And yet none of this depended on you. Notice was taken of a Lieutenant General Ignatovsky, whose windows looked out on the Neva; he had pulled out a white handkerchief to blow his nose. Aha, a signal! Furthermore, because Ignatovsky was an engineer, he liked to talk about machinery with the sailors. And that clinched it! Ignatovsky was arrested. The time for reckoning came. Come on now, name forty members of your organization. He named them. And so, if you happened to be an usher at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, your chances of being named as one of his particular forty were minimal. But if you were a professor at the Technological Institute, there you were on that list (once more, that accursed intelligentsia). So how could it depend on you? To be on such a list amounted to execution for each one.

  And so they shot all of them. But here is how Konstantin Ivanovich Strakhovich, a very important Russian scientist in hydrodynamics, remained alive: Some even higher bigwigs in State Security were dissatisfied because the list was too small and not enough people were being shot. Therefore Strakhovich was selected as a suitable center for uncovering a new organization. He was summoned by Captain Altshuller: "What's this all about? Did you rush to confess everything so that you'd get shot and thereby conceal the underground government? What was your role in it?" Thus Strakhovich found himself in a new round of interrogations while he remained on death row. He proposed that they consider him the underground Minister of Education. (He wanted to get it over with as soon as possible!) But that wasn't good enough for Altshuller. The interrogation continued, and by this time Ignatovsky's group was being executed. During one of the interrogation sessions Strakhovich got angry. It wasn't that he wanted to live but that he was tired of dying, and, more than anything else, the lies made him sick. And so while he was being cross-questioned in the presence of some Security police bigwig, he pounded on the table: "You are the ones who ought to be shot. I am not going to lie any longer. I take back all my testimony." And his outburst helped! Not only did they stop interrogating him, but they forgot about him in his death cell for a long time.

  In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

  Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such read- ing, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.

  In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to collect—several dozen of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment —somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then they leave without saying good-bye.

  And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.

  So that they should not have died in vain!

  And I, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at these at least:

  Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky—shot in Moscow in 1918.

  Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student—shot in Petrograd in 1918.

  Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov—shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.

  Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General Staff—shot in 1935.

  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist—shot in Orel in 1938.

  Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova—shot in a camp on the Yenisei in 1942.

  How does all that happen? What is it like for people to wait there? What do they feel? What do they think about? And what decisions do they come to? And what is it like when they are taken away? And what do they feel in their last moments? And how, actually, do they . . . well ... do they ... ?

  The morbid desire to pierce that curtain is natural. (Even though it is, of course, never going to happen to any of us.) And it is natural that those who have survived cannot tell us about the very end—because, after all, they were pardoned.

  What happens next is something the executioners know about. But the executioners are not about to talk. (Take, for instance, that famous Uncle Lyosha in the Kresty Prison in Leningrad, who twisted the prisoner's hands behind his back and put handcuffs on him, and then, if the prisoner shouted down the nighttime corridor, "Farewell, brothers!" crammed a rolled-up rag into his mouth—just why should he tell you about it? He is probably still walking around Leningrad, well dressed. But if you happen to run into him in a beer parlor on the islands or at a soccer game, ask him!)

  However, even the executioner doesn't know about everything right to the very end. While a motor roars its accompaniment, he fires his pistol bullets, unheard, into the back of a head, and he is himself stupidly condemned not to understand what he has done. He doesn't know about the very end! Only those who have been killed know it all to the very end—and that means no one.

  It's true, however, that the artist, however obliquely and un- clearly, nevertheless knows some part of what happens right up to the actual bullet, the actual noose.

  So we are going to construct—from artists and from those who were pardoned—an approximate picture of the death cell. We know, for example, that they do not sleep at night but lie there waiting. That they calm down again only in the morning.

  Narokov (Marchenko) in his novel, Imaginary Values, a work much spoiled by the author's self-assigned task of describ- ing everything as though he were Dostoyevsky, of tearing at the reader's heartstrings and trying to move him even more than Dostoyevsky, nevertheless in my opinion described the death cell and the scene of the execution itself very well. One cannot verify it, of course, but somehow one believes it.

  [N. Narokov, Mnimyye Velichiny, Roman v 2-kh Chastyakh (Imaginary Values; a Novel in Two Parts), New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1952.]

  The interpretations of earlier artists, for example, Leonid Andreyev, seem today somehow to belong willy-nilly to Krylo
v's time, a century and a half ago. And for that matter, what fantasist could have imagined the death cells of 1937? Of neces- sity, he would have woven his psychological threads : what it was like to wait, how the condemned man kept listening, and the like. But who could have foreseen and described such unexpected sensations on the part of prisoners condemned to death as:

  1. Prisoners awaiting execution suffered from the cold. They had to sleep on the cement floor under the windows, where it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. (Strakhovich.) You could freeze to death while you were waiting to be shot.

  2. They suffered from being in stuffy, overcrowded cells. Into a cell intended for solitary confinement they would shove seven (never fewer), sometimes ten, fifteen, even twenty-eight prisoners awaiting execution. (Strakhovich in Leningrad, 1942.) And they remained packed in this way for weeks or even months! What kind of nightmare was your seven to be hanged? People in these circumstances don't think about execution, and it's not being shot they worry about, but how to move their legs, how to turn over, how to get a gulp of air.

  In 1937, when up to forty thousand prisoners were being held at one time in the prisons of Ivanovo—the internal prison of the NKVD, No. 1, No. 2, and the cells for preliminary detention —although they were just barely designed to hold three to four thousand, Prison No. 2 held a mixture of prisoners under inter- rogation, prisoners condemned to camp, prisoners sentenced to be executed, prisoners whose death sentences had been com- muted, and ordinary thieves—and all of them stood for several days so jammed in against each other in one big cell that it was impossible either to raise or lower an arm and those who were shoved up against the bunks could easily break their legs on the edges. It was winter, but in order not to be suffocated the prisoners broke the glass in the windows. (It was in this cell that the old Bolshevik Alalykin, with his snow-white head of hair—he had joined the Party in 1898 and had quit the Party in 1917 after the April Theses—waited for his death sentence to be carried out.)

  3. Prisoners sentenced to death also suffered from hunger. They waited such a long time after the death sentence had been imposed that their principal sensation was no longer the fear of being shot but the pangs of hunger: where could they get something to eat? In 1941 Aleksandr Babich spent seventy-five days in a death cell in the Krasnoyarsk Prison. He had already reconciled himself to death and awaited execution as the only possible end to his unsuccessful life. But he began to swell up from starvation. At that point, they commuted his death sentence to ten years, and that was when he began his camp career. And what was the record stay in a death cell? Who knows? Vsevolod Petrovich Golitsyn, the elder of a death cell, so to speak, spent 140 days in it in 1938. But was that a record? The glory of Russian science, famed geneticist N. I. Vavilov, waited several months for his execution—yes, maybe even a whole year. As a prisoner still under death sentence he was evacuated to the Saratov Prison, where he was kept in a basement cell that had no window. When his death sentence was commuted in the sum- mer of 1942, he was transferred to a general cell, and he could not even walk. Other prisoners carried him to the daily outdoor walk, supporting him under the arms.

  4. Prisoners sentenced to death were given no medical at- tention. Okhrimenko was kept in a death cell for a long time in 1938, and he became very ill. Not only did they refuse to put him in the hospital, but the doctor took forever to come to see him. When she finally did come, she didn't go into the cell; instead, without examining him or even asking him any questions, she handed him some powders through the bars. And fluid began to accumulate in Strakhovich's legs—dropsy. He told the jailer about it—and they sent him, believe it or not, a dentist.

  And when a doctor did enter the picture, was it right for him to cure the prisoner under sentence of death—in other words, to prolong his expectation of death? Or did humanitarianism dictate that the doctor should insist on execution as quickly as possible? Here is another little scene from Strakhovich: The doctor entered and, talking with the duty jailer, he pointed a finger at the prisoners awaiting execution: "He's a dead man! He's a dead man! He's a dead man!" (He was pointing out to the jailer the victims of malnutrition and insisting that it was wrong to torment people so, that it was time to shoot them.)

  What, in fact, was the reason for holding them so long? Weren't there enough executioners? One must point out that the prison authorities often suggested to and even asked many of the condemned prisoners to sign appeals for commutation; and when prisoners objected strongly and refused, not wanting any more "deals," they signed appeals in the prisoners' names. And at the very least it took months for the papers to move through the twists and turns of the machine.

  A clash between two different institutions was probably in- volved. The interrogatory and judicial apparatus—as we learned from the members of the Military Collegium, they were one and the same—anxious to expose nightmarish and appalling cases, could not impose anything less than a deserved penalty on the criminals—death. But as soon as the sentences had been pro- nounced and entered into the official record of interrogation and trial, the scarecrows now called condemned men no longer interested them. And, in actual fact, there hadn't been any sedi- tion involved, nor would the life of the state be affected in any way if these condemned men remained alive. So they were left entirely to the prison administration. And that administration, which was closely associated with Gulag, looked at prisoners from the economic point of view. To them the important figures were not an increase in the number of executions but an increase in the manpower sent out to the Archipelago.

  And that is exactly the light in which Sokolov, the chief of the internal prison of the Big House in Leningrad, viewed Strakhovich, who finally became bored in the death cell and asked for paper and pencil for his scientific work. In a notebook he first composed "On the Interaction of a Liquid and a Solid Moving in It," and then "Calculations for Ballistas, Springs and Shock Absorbers," and then "Bases of the Theory of Stability." They had already allotted him an individual "scientific" cell and fed him better, and questions began to come to him from the Leningrad Front. He worked out for them "Volumetric Weapons' Fire Against Aircraft." And it all ended with Zhdanov's com- muting his death sentence to fifteen years. (The mail from the mainland was slow, but soon his regular commutation order came from Moscow, and it was more generous than Zhdanov's: merely a tenner.)

  [Strakhovich has all his prison notebooks even now. And his "scientific career" outside the bars only began with them. He was destined later on to head up one of the first projects in the U.S.S.R. for a turbojet engine.]

  And N.P., a mathematician with the rank of assistant pro- fessor, was exploited by the interrogator Kruzhkov (yes, yes, that same thief) for his personal ends. Kruzhkov was taking correspondence courses. And so he summoned P. from the death cell and gave him problems to solve in the theory of functions of a complex variable for Kruzhkov's assignments (and probably they weren't even his either).

  So what did world literature understand about pre-execution suffering?

  Finally, we learn from a story of Ch------v that a death cell can be used as an element in interrogation, as a method of coercing a prisoner. Two prisoners in Krasnoyarsk who had refused to confess were suddenly summoned to a "trial," "sen- tenced" to the death penalty, and taken to the death cell. (Ch------v said: "They were subjected to a staged trial." But in a context in which every trial is staged, what word can we use to distinguish this sort of pseudo trial from the rest? A stage on a stage, or a play within a play, perhaps?) They let them get a good swallow of that deathlike life. And then they put in stoolies who were allegedly sentenced to die also and who suddenly be- gan to repent having been so stubborn during interrogation and begged the jailer to tell the interrogator that they were now ready to sign everything. They were given their confessions to sign and then taken out of the cell during the day—in other words, not to be shot.

  And what about the genuine prisoners in that cell who had served as the raw material for the interrogators' game? They no d
oubt experienced reactions of their own when people in there "repented" and were pardoned? Well, of course, but those are the producer's costs, so to speak.

  They say that Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future marshal, was twice taken into the forest at night for a supposed execution. The firing squad leveled its rifles at him, and then they dropped them, and he was taken back to prison. And this was also mak- ing use of "the supreme measure" as an interrogator's trick. But it was all right; nothing happened; and he is alive and healthy and doesn't even cherish a grudge about it.

  And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be killed. Why is it that the death penalty has such a hypnotic effect? Those pardoned recall hardly anyone in their cell who offered any resistance. But there were such cases. In the Lenin- grad Kresty Prison in 1932, the prisoners sentenced to execution took the jailers' revolvers away and opened fire. Following this, a different approach was adopted: After peering through the peephole to locate the person they wanted to take, they swarmed into the cell—five armed jailers at a time—and rushed to grab their man. There were eight prisoners under sentence of death in the cell, but every one of them, after all, had sent a petition to Kalinin and every one expected a commutation, and therefore: "You today, me tomorrow." They moved away and looked on indifferently while the condemned man was tied up, while he cried out for help, while they shoved a child's rubber ball into his mouth. (Now, looking at that child's ball, could one really guess all its possible uses? What a good example for a lecturer on the dialectical method!)

  Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man? If the con- demned men in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they came in and choked them, wouldn't this have ended the executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?