The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  [P. A. Krasikov, who, as we have seen, later condemned the Metropolitan Veniamin to death, read Marx's Capital in the Peter and Paul Fortress. (But he was there only a year, and then they let him out.)]

  And gradually, as Figner recollects, "it was no longer the superintendent who shouted at the prisoners, but we who shouted at him." In 1902, because he refused to forward a protest of hers, she ripped the shoulder boards off his uniform. And the result was that a military investigator came and apologized profusely to Figner for the ignoramus superintendent!

  How did that horn come to shrink and broaden? Figner ex- plains it to some extent by the humanitarian attitudes of indi- vidual prison superintendents, and also by the fact that the "gen- darmes became friendly with the prisoners," got used to them. One significant factor certainly was the prisoners' determination and dignity and adroitness in conducting themselves. But nonetheless I myself believe that it was the temper of the times: this moisture and freshness in the air which drove away the thundercloud; this breeze of freedom, which was sweeping through society, it was decisive. Without it one could have given the gendarmes instruc- tions from the Short Course every Monday, and kept tightening things up, kept putting the screws on. And instead of "impressed labor," Vera Nikolayevna Figner, for tearing off an officer's shoulder boards, would have gotten nine grams in the back of her head in a cellar.

  The weakening and shaking up of the Tsarist prison system did not come about on its own, of course, but because all society, in concert with the revolutionaries, was shaking it up and ridi- culing it in every possible way. Tsarism lost its chance to survive not in the street skirmishes of February but several decades earlier, when youths from well-to-do families began to consider a prison term an honor; when army officers (even guard officers) began to regard it as dishonorable to shake the hand of a gendarme. And the more the prison system weakened, the more clearly evident were the triumphant ethics of the political prisoners, and the more visibly did the members of the revolutionary parties realize their strength and regard their own laws as superior to those of the state.

  And that was how Russia of 1917 arrived, bearing 1918 on its shoulders. The reason we have proceeded immediately to 1918 is that the subject of our investigation does not permit us to dwell on 1917. In February, 1917, all political prisons, both those used for interrogation and those in which sentences were served, and all hard-labor prisons as well were emptied. It is a wonder that all the jailers managed to get through the year. Perhaps to make ends meet they simply set to work raising potatoes in their vegetable gardens. (But from 1918 on, things began to get much better for them, and at Shpalernaya Prison they were still serving the new regime even in 1928, and why not!)

  In December, 1917, it had already become clear that it was altogether impossible to do without prisons, that some people simply couldn't be left anywhere except behind bars (see Chap- ter 2, above), because—well, simply because there was no place for them in the new society. And so it was that the new rulers managed to feel their way across the space between the two horns and grope for the budding of the second horn.

  Of course, they proclaimed immediately that the horrors of the Tsarist prisons would not be repeated; that fatiguing correction would not be permitted; that there would be no compulsory silence in prison, no solitary confinement, no separating the prisoners from one another during outdoor walks, no marching in step and single file, not even any locked cells. Go ahead, dear guests, get together, and talk as much as you like and complain about the Bolsheviks. And the attention of the new prison authori- ties was directed toward the combat readiness of the prison guards outside the walls and the takeover of the stock of prisons inherited from the Tsar. (This was one particular part of the machinery of state that did not have to be destroyed and rebuilt from its foundations.) Fortunately, it turned out that the Civil War had not resulted in the destruction of all the principal central prisons and jails. What was really necessary, however, was to repudiate all those old, besmirched words. So now they called them political isolators—political detention centers—demonstrat- ing with this phrase their view of the members of once revolution- ary parties as political enemies and stressing not the punitive role of the bars but only the necessity of isolating (and only tempor- arily, it appeared) these old-fashioned revolutionaries from the onward march of the new society. So that was how the arches of the old central prisons (evidently including the one in Suzdal from the very beginning of the Civil War) came to receive SR's, Social Democrats, and Anarchists.

  They all returned to prison with a consciousness of their rights as convicts and a long-established tradition of how to stand up for them. They accepted as their legal due a special political ration (conceded by the Tsar and confirmed by the Revolution), which included half a pack of cigarettes a day; purchases from the market (cottage cheese, milk) ; unrestricted walks outdoors during most hours of the day; being addressed with the formal personal pronoun by prison personnel and not having to stand up when addressed by them; confinement of husband and wife in the same cell; the right to have newspapers, magazines, books, writing materials, and personal articles, even including razors and scissors; sending and receiving letters three times a month; visits from rela- tives once a month; windows without bars, of course (at that time the concept of the "muzzle" did not exist) ; unrestricted visits from cell to cell; courtyards with greenery and lilacs for outdoor walks; the freedom to choose companions for outdoor walks and to toss small mailbags from one courtyard to another; and the dispatching of pregnant women from prison into exile two months before they were due to give birth.

  [From 1918 on, they did not hesitate to imprison women SR's, even when they were pregnant.]

  All this was just the politregime—the prison regimen for po- litical prisoners. But the political prisoners of the twenties re- membered well something even more important: self-government for political prisoners, and hence even in prison the sense of one- self as part of a whole, a member of a community. Self-govern- ment (the free election of spokesmen who represented all the interests of all the prisoners in negotiations with the prison ad- ministration) weakened the pressure on the individual because all shoulders bore it together; and it augmented each protest because all voices spoke as one.

  They undertook to defend all this! And the prison authorities undertook to take it all away from them. And a silent battle began in which no artillery shells were fired, and rifle shots only rarely, and the crash of broken glass wasn't audible even half a verst away. A mute struggle went on for vestiges of freedom, for vestiges of the right to have individual opinions, and it went on for almost twenty years—but no large, richly illustrated volumes describing it have ever been published. And all its ups-and-downs, its catalogue of victories and of defeats, are almost lost to us now, because, after all, there is no written language in the Archipelago and oral communication is broken off when people die. And only random particles of that struggle have occasionally come down to us, illuminated by moonlight that is indirect and indistinct.

  And since that time we have grown so supercilious! We are familiar with tank battles; we know about nuclear explosions. What kind of struggle is it over the question of whether cells are kept locked and whether prisoners, to exercise their right to com- municate, can openly spell out messages to each other by knock- ing on the walls, shout from window to window, drop notes from floor to floor on threads, and insist that at least the elected spokes- men of the various party fractions be allowed to move freely among the cells? What sort of a struggle is it to us when the chief of the Lubyanka goes into the cell and the Anarchist Anna G------va (in 1926) or the SR Katya Olitskaya (1931) refuses to stand up when he enters? And that savage beast thought up a punishment for Katya: to deprive her of the right to go to the toilet. What kind of struggle was it when two girls, Shura and Vera (in 1925), in protest against the Lubyanka rule—intended to stifle personality—that conversations may be carried on only in whispers, sang loudly in their cell (only about l
ilacs and the spring), and thereupon the prison chief, the Latvian Dukes, dragged them through the corridor to the toilet by their hair? Or when the students in a Stolypin car en route from Leningrad (1924) sang revolutionary songs and the convoy thereupon de- prived them of water? They yelled out: "A Tsarist convoy wouldn't have done that!" and the convoy beat them. Or when the SR Kozlov, at the transit prison in Kem, loudly called the guards "executioners"—and because of that was dragged off and beaten?

  After all, we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor—civil valor. And that's all our society needs, just that, just that, just that! That's all we need and that's exactly what we haven't got.

  In 1923, in Vyatka Prison, the SR Struzhinsky and his com- rades (how many were there? who were they? what were they protesting against?) barricaded themselves in a cell, poured kero- sene over all the mattresses, and incinerated themselves. Now that was an act altogether in the tradition of Schlüsselburg before the Revolution; and, not to go further, what an uproar such an act provoked then, before the Revolution, and how all Russian society was aroused! But this time around neither Vyatka knew about them, nor Moscow, nor history. And yet the human flesh crackled in the flames in exactly the same way.

  That was the initial purpose of imprisonment on the Solovetsky Islands (nicknamed Solovki) : it was such a good place, cut off from communication with the outside world for half a year at a time. You couldn't be heard from there no matter how loud you shouted, and you could even burn yourself up for all anyone would know. In 1923 the imprisoned socialists were transported there from Pertominsk on the Onega Peninsula—and split up among three isolated monasteries.

  Take Savvatyevsky Monastery, consisting of the two buildings which had formerly been guest quarters for religious believers on pilgrimage. Part of the lake was included in the prison compound. In the early months everything seemed to be all right: they had their special political regimen, several relatives succeeded in get- ting there for visits, and three spokesmen from the three parties were wholly responsible for negotiating with the prison adminis- tration. And the monastery compound was a free zone. Inside it the prisoners could talk, think, and do as they pleased without hindrance.

  But even then, at the dawn of the Archipelago, there were in- sistent unpleasant latrine rumors (not yet so called) to the effect that the special political regimen was going to be liquidated.

  And, in reality, having waited until the middle of December, until the White Sea was no longer navigable, with the consequent cutoff in all communication with the outside world, the chief of the Solovetsky Camp, Eichmans, [How like Eichmann, is it not?] announced that new instruc- tions had indeed been received regarding the regimen. They wouldn't, of course, take everything away, not by any means! They would cut down on correspondence, and then on something else, too, and, as the most keenly felt measure of the lot, from that day on, December 20, 1923, the right to go in and out of prison buildings twenty-four hours a day would be curtailed— limited to the daylight hours up to 6 P.M.

  The party fractions decided to protest, and the SR's and An- archists called for volunteers: on the first day of the new pro- hibition they would go outside exactly at 6 P.M. But, as it turned out, Nogtyev, the chief of the Savvatyevsky Monastery Prison, had such an itchy trigger finger that even before the appointed hour of 6 (and maybe their watches showed different times; after all, there was no checking it by radio in those days), the guards entered the compound with rifles and opened fire on the prisoners there, who were out of doors quite legally. Three volleys killed six and critically wounded three.

  The next day Eichmans himself showed up: there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Nogtyev was removed (trans- ferred and promoted). A funeral was held for the victims. They sang in chorus across the Solovetsky wilderness:

  You fell a victim in a fateful fray.

  (Was not this perhaps the last occasion when that long-drawn-out melody was permitted for newly dead victims?) They pushed a great boulder onto the common grave and carved on it the names of those who had been killed.

  [In 1925 the stone was overturned, and the names on it were thus buried too. Any of you who clamber about Solovki—seek it out and gaze upon it!]

  One cannot say that the press concealed this event. Pravda, for example, carried a report in small type: the prisoners had attacked the convoy, and six had been killed. The honest news- paper Rote Fahne reported revolt on Solovki.

  [One of the SR's in the Savvatyevsky Monastery was Yuri Podbelsky. He collected the medical documents on the Solovetsky massacre—for publica- tion at some future date. But a year later, at the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison, they discovered a false bottom in his suitcase and confiscated the material he'd hidden. And that is how Russian history stumbles and falls.]

  Yet the prisoners had defended the regimen successfully! And for a whole year no one spoke of changing it.

  For the whole of 1924, yes. But toward the end of the year, insistent rumors circulated again that they were planning to in- troduce a new system in December. The Dragon had grown hungry again. He wanted new victims. So even though the three monasteries in which socialists were confined—Savvatyevsky, Troitsky, and Muksalmsky—were on separate islands, they man- aged, by conspiratorial methods, to reach an agreement that all the party fractions in all three monasteries would on one and the same day deliver an ultimatum to Moscow and to the Solovki ad- ministration: They must either be removed from the Solovetsky Islands before navigation stopped or else the previous political regimen must be left unchanged. The ultimatum stipulated a time limit of two weeks, and then all three prisons would go on a hunger strike.

  This kind of unity compelled attention. It wasn't the sort of thing you could allow to go in one ear and out the other. One day before the time limit expired, Eichmans visited each monas- tery and announced that Moscow had refused. And on the ap- pointed day a hunger strike began (not a dry hunger strike— water was allowed) in all three monastery prisons (which were now unable to communicate with each other). In Savvatyevsky, about two hundred people struck. Those who fell ill were ex- empted from striking. A doctor from among the prisoners ex- amined the strikers every day. A collective hunger strike is always more difficult to carry out than an individual one; after all, the weakest rather than the strongest of the strikers can determine its outcome. The only point to a hunger strike is to carry it out with implacable determination and in such a way that everyone knows everyone else involved personally and trusts them fully. Given various party fractions, given several hundred people, both dis- agreements and moral anguish on other people's behalf were in- evitable. After fifteen days, it was necessary to vote by secret ballot in Savvatyevsky—the urn with the ballots was taken from room to room—whether to continue or to lift the hunger strike.

  And Moscow and Eichmans waited them out! After all, they were well fed, and there wasn't a peep from the capital news- papers about the hunger strike, and there were no student pro- test meetings at Kazan Cathedral. Silence was already confi- dently shaping our history.

  The monasteries lifted the hunger strike. They had not won out, but they hadn't lost either. The political regimen was left intact for the winter, except that cutting firewood in the forests was added, but that was logical enough. And in the spring of 1925 it looked as though the hunger strike had brought victory: the prisoners from all three monastery prisons were removed from Solovki! To the mainland! No more Arctic night and no more half-year cut off from communication!

  But both the convoy and their rations en route were very harsh for that time. And soon they were all perfidiously tricked: On the pretext that their spokesmen would be more comfortable in the "staff" car with the stores and equipment, they were deprived of their leaders. The "staff" car was detached at Vyatka, and the spokesmen were taken to the Tobolsk Isolator. Only at that point did it become clear that the
hunger strike of the previous fall had failed. The strong and influential spokesmen had been taken away so as to tighten up on the rest. Yagoda and Katanyan personally directed the incarceration of the former Solovetsky Islands pris- oners in the long-standing but until then unused buildings of the Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator, which they thus "opened" in the spring of 1925 (under Chief Dupper). It was destined to be a particular bugbear to prisoners for many decades ahead.

  The relocated former Solovki prisoners immediately lost their freedom to move about. The cells were locked. They succeeded in electing spokesmen nonetheless, but the spokesmen didn't have the right to go from cell to cell. The unlimited circulation between cells of money, personal articles, and books, which had existed earlier, was now forbidden. They shouted back and forth from window to window—until the guard fired from his tower into the cells. In reply they organized a protest—they broke windowpanes and destroyed prison equipment. (And, after all, breaking a windowpane is something to think about twice. They might just not replace it all winter, and there would be no big surprise in that. It was under the Tsar that the glaziers used to come on the run.) The struggle continued, but it was now being carried on in desperation and under grave handicaps.

  In the year 1928 (according to Pyotr Petrovich Rubin) some event or other precipitated a new joint hunger strike by the entire Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator. But this time the earlier stern and solemn atmosphere was absent, as were the approval of friends and a doctor of their own. On a certain day of the strike, the jailers came bursting into the cells in overwhelming numbers, and simply began to beat the weakened prisoners with clubs and boots. They beat them to within an inch of their lives—and the hunger strike ended.