The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest? Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.

  Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov remembers that night after he'd been sentenced when he was being taken through dark Kady, and four pistols were brandished on four sides of him. His main thought was: "What if they shoot right now, as a provocation, claiming I was trying to escape?" Obviously he didn't yet believe in his sentence. He still hoped to live.

  They confined him in the police room. He was allowed to lie down on the desk to sleep, and two or three policemen kept continuous guard by the light of a kerosene lamp. They talked among themselves: "I kept listening and listening for four days, and I never could understand what they were being condemned for." "It's not for us to understand."

  Vlasov lived in this room for five days: they were waiting for an official confirmation of the verdict in order to execute them right there in Kady; it was not easy to convoy the condemned men to some other point. Someone sent a telegram for Vlasov requesting pardon: "I do not admit my guilt, and I request that my life be spared." There was no reply. During these days Vlasov's hands shook so that he could not lift his spoon to his mouth and, instead, picked up his bowl and drank directly from it. Klyugin visited him to jeer. (Soon after the Kady case, he was transferred from Ivanovo to Moscow. That year saw swift ascendancies and swift declines among those crimson stars of the Gulag heaven. The time was approaching when they, too, would be hurled into that same pit, but they didn't know it. )

  Neither confirmation nor commutation of the sentence arrived, so they had to take the four condemned men to Kineshma. They took them in four one-and-a-half-ton trucks, with one condemned man guarded by seven policemen in each truck.

  In Kineshma they were put in the crypt of a monastery. (Monastery architecture, liberated from monkish ideology, was very useful for us.) At this point some other condemned prisoners were added to their group, and they were all taken in a prisoners' railroad car to Ivanovo.

  In the freight yard in Ivanovo they separated three from the rest—Saburov, Vlasov, and one of the men from the other group —and immediately took the others away—to be shot—so as not to crowd the prison any further. And thus it was that Vlasov said farewell to Smirnov.

  The three others were put in the courtyard of Prison No. 1 in the dank and raw October air and held there for four hours while they led out, led in, and searched other groups of prisoners in transit. There still was no actual proof that they wouldn't be shot that very day. During those four hours, they had to sit there on the ground and think about it. At one point Saburov thought they were being taken to be shot, but they were actually taken to a cell instead. He did not cry out, but he gripped his neighbor's arm so hard that the latter yelled with pain. The guards had to drag Saburov and prod him with their bayonets.

  There were four death cells in this prison—in the same cor- ridor as the juvenile cells and the hospital cells! The death cells had two doors: the customary wooden door with a peephole and a door made of iron grating; each door had two locks, and the jailer and the block supervisor each had a key to a different one, so the doors could be opened only by the two together. Cell 43 was on the other side of a wall of the interrogator's office, and at night, while the condemned men were waiting to be executed, their ears were tormented by the screams of prisoners being tortured.

  Vlasov was put into Cell 61. This was a cell intended for solitary confinement, sixteen feet long and a little more than three feet wide. Two iron cots were anchored to the floor by thick iron bolts, and on each cot two condemned men were lying, their heads at opposite ends. Fourteen other prisoners were lying crosswise on the cement floor.

  Though it has long been well known that even a corpse has a right to three arshins of earth (and even that seemed too little to Chekhov), in this cell each of the condemned had been allotted, while waiting for death, a little less than a third of that!

  Vlasov asked whether executions were carried out immedi- ately. "See for yourself. We've been here for ages and we're still alive."

  The time of waiting began—of the well-known kind: the prisoners didn't sleep all night long; in a state of total depression, they waited to be led out to death; they listened for every rustling in the corridor. (And the worst thing was that endless waiting destroys the will to resist.) Particularly nerve-racking were the nights following a day on which someone received a commutation of sentence. He went off with cries of happiness, and fear thick- ened in the cell. After all, rejections as well as commutation had rolled down from the high mountain that day. And at night they would come for someone.

  Sometimes the locks rattled at night and hearts fell: Is it for me? Not me! ! And the turnkey would open the wooden door for some nonsense or other: "Take your things off the window sill." That unlocking of the door probably took a year off the lives of all nineteen inmates; maybe if that door was unlocked a mere fifty times, they wouldn't have to waste bullets! But how grateful to him everyone was because everything was all right: "We'll take them off right away, citizen chief!"

  After the morning visit to the toilet, they went to sleep, liberated from their fears. Then the jailer brought in the pail of gruel and said: "Good morning!" According to prison rules, the inner, iron door was supposed to be opened only in the presence of the duty officer for the prison. But, as is well known, human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instruc- tions, and in the morning the jailer came in without the duty officer and greeted them quite humanly—no, it was even more precious than that: "Good morning!"

  To whom else on all the earth was that morning as good as it was to them! Grateful for the warmth of that voice and the warmth of that dishwater, they drifted off to sleep until noon. (They ate only in the morning!) Many were unable to eat when they woke during the day. Someone had received a parcel. Rela- tives might or might not know about the death sentence. Once in the cell, these parcels became common property, but they lay and rotted there in the stagnant damp.

  By day there was still a little life and activity in the cell. The block supervisor might come around—either gloomy Tarakanov or friendly Makarov—and offer paper on which to write petitions, and ask whether any of them who had some money wanted to buy smokes from the commissary. Their ques- tions seemed either too outrageous or extraordinarily human: the pretense was being made that they weren't condemned men at all, was that it?

  The condemned men broke off the bottoms of matchboxes, marked them like dominoes, and played away. Vlasov eased his tension by telling someone about the Consumer Cooperatives, and his narrative always took on a comic touch.

  [His stories about the consumer cooperatives are remarkable and deserve to be published.]

  Yakov Petrovich Kolpakov, the Chairman of the Sudogda District Executive Com- mittee, a Bolshevik since the spring of 1917 who joined up at the front, sat for dozens of days without changing his position, squeezing his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, always staring at the same spot on the wall. (It must have been so jolly to recall the spring of 1917.) Vlasov's garrulity irritated him: "How can you?" And Vlasov snapped back at him: "And what are you doing? Preparing yourself for heaven?" Vlasov spoke with round "o's" even in a fast retort. "For myself, I've decided one thing only. I'm going to tell the executioner: 'You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren't for you willing executioners, there would be no death sen- tences!' So then let him kill me, the rat!"

  Kolpakov was shot. Konstantin Sergeyevich Arkadyev, the former Manager of the Aleksandrov District Agricultural De- partment in Vladimir Province, was shot. Somehow, in his case, the farewells were particularly hard. During the night six guards came tramping in for him, making a big rush of it, while he, gentle, well mannered, kept turning around, twisting his cap in his hands, putting off the moment of his leavetaking—from the last people on earth for him. And when h
e said his final "Fare- well," you could hardly hear his voice.

  At the very first moment, when the victim has been pointed out, the rest are relieved (It's not me!). But right after he has been taken away, the ones left behind are in a state that is hardly any easier to bear than his. All the next day, those left behind are destined to silence and they won't want to eat.

  However, Geraska, the young fellow who broke up the build- ing of the village soviet, ate well and slept a lot, getting used to things, even here, with typical peasant facility. He somehow couldn't believe they would shoot him. (And they didn't. They commuted his sentence to a tenner.)

  Several of the inmates turned gray in three or four days before their cellmates' eyes.

  When people wait so long for execution, their hair grows, and orders are given for the whole cell to get haircuts, for the whole cell to get baths. Prison existence goes on, without regard to sentences.

  Some individuals lost the ability to speak intelligibly and to understand. But they were left there to await their fate anyway. Anyone who went insane in the death cell was executed insane.

  Many sentences were commuted. It was right then, in that fall of 1937, that fifteen- and twenty-year terms were introduced for the first time since the Revolution, and in many cases they replaced the executioners' bullets. There were also commuta- tions to ten-year sentences. And even to five years. In the country of miracles even such miracles as this were possible: yesterday he deserved to be executed, and this morning he gets a juvenile sentence; he is a minor criminal, and in camp he may even be able to move around without convoy.

  V. N. Khomenko, a sixty-year-old Cossack captain from the Kuban, was also imprisoned in their cell. He was the "soul of the cell," if a death cell can be said to have a soul: he cracked jokes; he smiled to himself; he didn't act as if things were bad. He had become unfit for military service way back after the Japanese War, had studied horse breeding, and then served in the pro- vincial local self-government council; by the thirties he was at- tached to the Ivanovo Provincial Agricultural Department as "inspector of the horse herd of the Red Army." In other words, he was supposed to see to it that the best horses went to the army. He was arrested and sentenced to be shot for wrecking—for recom- mending that stallions be gelded before the age of three, by which means he allegedly "subverted the fighting capacity of the Red Army." Khomenko appealed the verdict. Fifty-five days later the block supervisor came around and pointed out to him that he had addressed his appeal to the wrong appeals jurisdiction. Right then and there, propping the paper against the wall and using the block supervisor's pencil, Khomenko crossed out one jurisdiction and substituted another, as if it were a request for a pack of cigarettes. Thus clumsily corrected, the appeal made the rounds for another sixty days, so Khomenko had been awaiting death for four months. (As for waiting a year or two, after all, we spend year after year waiting for the angel of death! Isn't our whole world just a death cell? ) And one day complete rehabilitation for Khomenko arrived. (In the interval since his sentence, Voroshilov had given orders that gelding should be done before age three.) Die one minute and dance the next!

  Many sentences were commuted, and many prisoners had high hopes. But Vlasov, comparing his case with those of the others, and keeping in mind his conduct at the trial as the principal factor, felt that things were likely to go badly for him. They had to shoot someone. They probably had to shoot at least half of those condemned to death. So he came to believe they would shoot him. And he wanted just one thing—not to bow his head when it happened. That recklessness which was one of his charac- teristics returned to him and increased within him, and he was all set to be bold and brazen to the very end.

  And an opportunity came his way. Making the rounds of the prison for some reason—most likely just to give himself a thrill —the Chief of the Investigation Department of Ivanovo State Security, Chinguli, ordered the door of their cell opened and stood on the threshold. He spoke to someone and asked: "Who is here from the Kady case?"

  He was dressed in a short-sleeved silk shirt, which had just begun to appear in Russia and therefore still seemed effeminate.

  And either he or his shirt was doused in a sweetish perfume that drifted into the cell.

  Vlasov swiftly jumped up on the cot and shouted shrilly: "What kind of colonial officer is this? Get out of here, you murderer!" And from that height he spat juicily full into Chinguli's face.

  And he hit his mark.

  Chinguli wiped his face and retreated. Because he had no right to enter the cell without six guards, and maybe not even with six guards either.

  A reasonable rabbit ought not to behave in that fashion. What if Chinguli had been dealing with your case at that moment and was the one to decide whether to commute or not? After all, he must have had a reason for asking: "Who is here from the Kady case?" That was probably why he came.

  But there is a limit, and beyond it one is no longer willing, one finds it too repulsive, to be a reasonable little rabbit. And that is the limit beyond which rabbits are enlightened by the common understanding that all rabbits are foredoomed to become only meat and pelts, and that at best, therefore, one can gain only a postponement of death and not life in any case. That is when one wants to shout: "Curse you, hurry up and shoot!"

  It was this particular feeling of rage which took hold of Vlasov even more intensely during his forty-one days of waiting for execution. In the Ivanovo Prison they had twice suggested that he write a petition for pardon, but he had refused.

  But on the forty-second day they summoned him to a box where they informed him that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had commuted the supreme measure of punishment to twenty years of imprisonment in corrective-labor camps with dis- enfranchisement for five additional years.

  The pale Vlasov smiled wryly, and even at that point words did not fail him:

  "It is strange. I was condemned for lack of faith in the victory of socialism in our country. But can even Kalinin himself believe in it if he thinks camps will still be needed in our country twenty years from now?"

  At the time it seemed quite inconceivable: after twenty years. Strangely, they were still needed even after thirty.

  Chapter 12

  Tyurzak

  Oh, that good Russian word "ostróg"—meaning "jail." What a powerful word it is and how well put together. One senses in it the strength of those thick, impenetrable walls from which one cannot escape. And it is all expressed in just six letters. And it has so many interesting connotations deriving from words that are close to it in sound: as, for instance, strógost—meaning "severity"; and ostrogá—meaning "harpoon"; and ostrotá— meaning "sharpness" (the sharpness of the porcupine's quills when they land in your snout, the sharpness of the blizzard lashing your frozen face, the sharpness of the pointed stakes of the camp perimeter, and the sharpness of the barbed wire too); and the word "ostorózhnost"—meaning "caution" (a convict's caution)— is somewhere close too; and then the word "rog"—meaning "horn." Yes, indeed, the horn juts out boldly and is pointed for- ward! It is aimed straight at us.

  And if one glances over all Russia's jail customs and conduct, at the entire institution during, say, the last ninety years, then you'll see not just one horn really, but two horns. The Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") revolutionaries began at the tip of one horn, right where it gores, right where it's too excruciatingly pain- ful to take even on the breastbone. They kept wearing it down gradually until it got rounded off, shrank to a stump, and was hardly a horn any longer, and finally became just a woolly open spot (this was the beginning of the twentieth century). But then, after 1917, the first swelling of a new knob could be felt, and there, there, splaying out and with the slogan "You don't have the right!"—it began to thrust upward again, and to narrow to a point and harden, to acquire a horny surface—until by 1938 it was pinning the human being right in that gap between the collar- bone and the neck: tyurzak!

  [Tyurzak=TYURemnoye ZAKlyucheniye = prison confinement. Tyurzak
is an official term.]

  And once a year, the single stroke of a watchman's bell could be heard in the night in the distance: "TONnnnnn!"

  [TON=Tyurma Osobogo Naznacheniya=Special Purpose Prison. TON is likewise an official abbreviation.]

  If we pursue this parabola with the help of one of the prisoners in the Schlüsselburg Fortress near St. Petersburg, we find that in- itially things were pretty bad.3 The prisoner had a number, and no one called him by his family name; the gendarmes acted as if they had been trained in the Lubyanka. They didn't speak a word on their own. If you stammered out: "We . . . ," the reply came: "Speak only for yourself!" The silence of the grave. The cell was in eternal shadows, the windows were frosted glass, the floor asphalt. The hinged ventilation pane in the window was open for forty minutes a day. The food consisted of grits and cabbage soup without meat. They would not allow you any scholarly books from the library. You wouldn't see another human being for two years at a stretch. Only after three years would they let you have sheets of paper—numbered.

  [According to the account of M. Novorussky, from 1884 to 1906 three prisoners in Schlüsselburg committed suicide and five others went insane.]

  And then, little by little, things got to be more lenient as the point of the horn got rounded off; there was white bread; and then the prisoners were allowed tea and sugar; one could have money and could buy things in addition to the rations; smoking was permitted; they put transparent glass in the windows; and the transom could be kept open all the time; they painted the walls a light color; in no time at all you could get books by subscribing to the St. Petersburg library; there were gratings between the garden plots; one could converse through them, and prisoners even delivered lectures to other prisoners. By then the prisoners were urging the prison adminis- tration: "Give us more land to work on, more!" So they planted two large prison courtyards in flowers and vegetables—no fewer than 450 varieties! And then there were scientific collections, a carpentry shop, a smithy, and they could earn money and buy books, even Russian political books, and also magazines from abroad. And they wrote their families and got letters from them. And they could go out to walk the whole day long if they liked.