The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  Such a mass movement could not help but develop subsequent ramifications. It became necessary to rid the villages also of those peasants who had merely manifested an aversion to joining the collective farms, or an absence of inclination for the collective life, which they had never seen with their own eyes, about which they knew nothing, and which they suspected (we now know how well founded their suspicions were) would mean a life of forced labor and famine under the leadership of loafers. Then it was also necessary to get rid of those peasants, some of them not at all prosperous, who, because of their daring, their physical strength, their determination, their outspokenness at meetings, and their love of justice, were favorites with their fellow villagers and by virtue of their independence were therefore dangerous to the leadership of the collective farm.25 Beyond this, in every village there were people who in one way or another had personally gotten in the way of the local activists. This was the perfect time to settle accounts with them of jealousy, envy, insult. A new word was needed for all these new victims as a class—and it was born. By this time it had no “social” or “economic” content whatsoever, but it had a marvelous sound: podkulachnik—“a person aiding the kulaks.” In other words, I consider you an accomplice of the enemy. And that finishes you! The most tattered landless laborer in the countryside could quite easily be labeled a podkulachnik.26

  And so it was that these two terms embraced everything that constituted the essence of the village, its energy, its keenness of wit, its love of hard work, its resistance, and its conscience. They were torn up by the roots—and collectivization was accomplished.

  But new waves rolled from the collectivized villages: one of them was a wave of agricultural wreckers. Everywhere they began to discover wrecker agronomists who up until that year had worked honestly all their lives but who now purposely sowed weeds in Russian fields (on the instructions, of course, of the Moscow institute, which had now been totally exposed; indeed, there were those same 200,000 unarrested members of the Working Peasants Party, the TKP!). Certain agronomists failed to put into effect the profound instructions of Lysenko—and in one such wave, in 1931, Lorkh, the so-called “king” of the potato, was sent to Kazakhstan. Others carried out the Lysenko directives too precisely and thus exposed their absurdity. (In 1934 Pskov agronomists sowed flax on the snow—exactly as Lysenko had ordered. The seeds swelled up, grew moldy, and died. The big fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow was a kulak or that he himself was an ass. He accused the agronomists of being kulaks and of distorting his technology. And the agronomists went off to Siberia.) Beyond all this, in almost every Machine and Tractor Station wrecking in the repairing of tractors was discovered—and that is how the failures of the first collective farm years were explained!

  There was a wave “for harvest losses” (losses in comparison with the arbitrary harvest figures announced the preceding spring by the “Commission for Determination of the Harvest”).

  There was a wave “for failure to fulfill obligations undertaken for delivery to the state of breadgrains”—the District Party Committee had undertaken the obligation, and the collective farm had not fulfilled it: go to prison!

  There was a wave for snipping ears, the nighttime snipping of individual ears of grain in the field—a totally new type of agricultural activity, a new type of harvesting! The wave of those caught doing this was not small—it included many tens of thousands of peasants, many of them not even adults but boys, girls, and small children whose elders had sent them out at night to snip, because they had no hope of receiving anything from the collective farm for their daytime labor. For this bitter and not very productive occupation (an extreme of poverty to which the peasants had not been driven even in serfdom) the courts handed out a full measure: ten years for what ranked as an especially dangerous theft of socialist property under the notorious law of August 7, 1932—which in prisoners’ lingo was known simply as the law of Seven-eighths.

  This law of “Seven-eighths” produced another big, separate wave from the construction projects of the First and Second Five-Year Plans, from transport, trade, and industry. Big thefts were turned over to the NKVD. This wave must further be kept in mind as one that kept on flowing steadily for the next fifteen years, until 1947, especially during the war years. (Then in 1947 the original law was expanded and made more harsh.)

  Now at last we can catch our breath! Now at last all the mass waves are coming to an end! Comrade Molotov said on May 17, 1933: “We do not see our task as being mass repressions.” Whew! At last! Begone, nighttime fears! But what’s that dog howling out there? Go get ’em. Go get ’em.

  And here we are! The Kirov wave from Leningrad has begun. While it lasted the tension was acknowledged to be so great that special staffs of the NKVD were set up in each and every District Executive Committee of the city and an “accelerated” judicial procedure was introduced. (Even earlier, it had not been famous for being slow.) And there was no right of appeal. (There had been no appeal earlier.) It is also believed that one-quarter of Leningrad was purged—cleaned out—in 1934–1935. Let this estimate be disproved by those who have the exact statistics and are willing to publish them. (To be sure, this wave took in much more than Leningrad alone. It had a substantial impact on the rest of the country in a form that was consistent though chaotic: the firing from the civil service of all those still left there whose fathers had been priests, all former noblewomen, and all persons having relatives abroad.)

  Among such lashing waves as this, certain modest, changeless wavelets always got lost; they were little heard of, but they, too, kept flowing on and on:

  • There were Schutzbündlers who had lost the class battles in Vienna and had come to the Fatherland of the world proletariat for refuge.

  • There were Esperantists—a harmful group which Stalin undertook to smoke out during the years when Hitler was doing the same thing.

  • There were the unliquidated remnants of the Free Philosophic Society—illegal philosophical circles.

  • There were teachers who disagreed with the advanced laboratory-team system of instruction. (In 1933, for instance, Natalya Ivanovna Bugayenko was arrested by the Rostov GPU—but in the third month of her interrogation, a government decree suddenly announced that the system was a faulty one. And she was let go.)

  • There were employees of the Political Red Cross, which, through the efforts of Yekaterina Peshkova, was still defending its existence.

  • There were mountain tribes of the North Caucasus who were arrested for their 1935 revolt. And non-Russian nationalities kept rolling in from one area, then another. (On the Volga Canal construction site newspapers were published in four national languages: Tatar, Turkish, Uzbek, and Kazakh. And, of course, there were readers to read them!)

  • There were once again believers, who this time were unwilling to work on Sundays. (They had introduced the five-and the six-day week.) And there were collective farmers sent up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast days, as had been their custom in the era of individual farms.

  • And, always, there were those who refused to become NKVD informers. (Among them were priests who refused to violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of confessions—the only use they found for religion.)

  • And members of non-Orthodox sects were arrested on an ever-wider scale.

  • And the Big Solitaire game with the socialists went on and on.

  And last of all there was a category I have not yet named, a wave that was continually flowing: Section 10, also known as KRA (Counter-Revolutionary Agitation) and also known as ASA (Anti-Soviet Agitation). The wave of Section 10 was perhaps the most constant of all. It never stopped, and whenever there was another big wave, as, for instance, in 1937, 1945, and 1949, its waters became particularly swollen.27

  * * *

  Paradoxically enough, every act of the all-penetrating, eternally wakeful Or
gans, over a span of many years, was based solely on one article of the 140 articles of the nongeneral division of the Criminal Code of 1926. One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide-sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.

  Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing embrace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.

  The article itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved possible to interpret it this broadly.

  Article 58 was not in that division of the Code dealing with political crimes; and nowhere was it categorized as “political.” No. It was included, with crimes against public order and organized gangsterism, in a division of “crimes against the state.” Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize anyone under its jurisdiction as a political offender. All are simply criminals.

  Article 58 consisted of fourteen sections.

  In Section 1 we learn that any action (and, according to Article 6 of the Criminal Code, any absence of action) directed toward the weakening of state power was considered to be counterrevolutionary.

  Broadly interpreted, this turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in a state of starvation and exhaustion. This was a weakening of state power. And it was punished by execution. (The execution of malingerers during the war.)

  From 1934 on, when we were given back the term Motherland, subsections were inserted on treason to the Motherland—la, lb, lc, Id. According to these subsections, all actions directed against the military might of the U.S.S.R. were punishable by execution (lb), or by ten years’ imprisonment (la), but the lighter penalty was imposed only when mitigating circumstances were present and upon civilians only.

  Broadly interpreted: when our soldiers were sentenced to only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner (action injurious to Soviet military might), this was humanitarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist code, they should all have been shot on their return home.

  (Here is another example of broad interpretation. I remember well an encounter in the Butyrki in the summer of 1946. A certain Pole had been born in Lemberg when that city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until World War II he lived in his native city, by then located in Poland; then he went to Austria, where he entered the service, and in 1945 he was arrested there by the Russians. Since by this time Austrian Lemberg had become Ukrainian Lvov, he received a tenner under Article 54-la of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: i.e., for treason to his motherland, the Ukraine! And at his interrogation the poor fellow couldn’t prove that treason to the Ukraine had not been his purpose when he went to Vienna! And that’s how he conned his way into becoming a traitor.)

  One important additional broadening of the section on treason was its application “via Article 19 of the Criminal Code”—“via intent.” In other words, no treason had taken place; but the interrogator envisioned an intention to betray—and that was enough to justify a full term, the same as for actual treason. True, Article 19 proposes that there be no penalty for intent, but only for preparation, but given a dialectical reading one can understand intention as preparation. And “preparation is punished in the same way [i.e., with the same penalty] as the crime itself” (Criminal Code). In general, “we draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeois legislation.”28

  Section 2 listed armed rebellion, seizure of power in the capital or in the provinces, especially for the purpose of severing any part of the U.S.S.R. through the use of force. For this the penalties ranged up to and included execution (as in every succeeding section).

  This was expanded to mean something which could not be explicitly stated in the article itself but which revolutionary sense of justice could be counted on to suggest: it applied to every attempt of any national republic to act upon its right to leave the U.S.S.R. After all, the word “force” is not defined in terms of whom it applies to. Even when the entire population of a republic wants to secede, if Moscow is opposed, the attempted secession will be forcible. Thus, all Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Turkestan nationalists very easily received their tens and their twenty-fives under this section.

  Section 3 was “assisting in any way or by any means a foreign state at war with the U.S.S.R.”

  This section made it possible to condemn any citizen who had been in occupied territory—whether he had nailed on the heel of a German soldier’s shoe or sold him a bunch of radishes. And it could be applied to any citizeness who had helped lift the fighting spirit of an enemy soldier by dancing and spending the night with him. Not everyone was actually sentenced under this section—because of the huge numbers who had been in occupied territory. But everyone who had been in occupied territory could have been sentenced under it.

  Section 4 spoke about (fantastic!) aid to the international bourgeoisie.

  To whom, one wonders, could this possibly refer? And yet, broadly interpreted, and with the help of a revolutionary conscience, it was easy to find categories: All émigrés who had left the country before 1920, i.e., several years before the Code was even written, and whom our armies came upon in Europe a quarter-century later—in 1944 and 1945—received 58-4: ten years or execution. What could they have been doing abroad other than aiding the international bourgeoisie? (In the example of the young people’s musical society already cited, we have seen that the international bourgeoisie could also be aided from inside the U.S.S.R.) They were, in addition, aided by all SR’s, all Mensheviks (the section was drafted with them in mind), and, subsequently, by the engineers of the State Planning Commission and the Supreme Council of the Economy.

  Section 5 was inciting a foreign state to declare war against the U.S.S.R.

  A chance was missed to apply this section against Stalin and his diplomatic and military circle in 1940–1941. Their blindness and insanity led to just that. Who if not they drove Russia into shameful, unheard-of defeats, incomparably worse than the defeats of Tsarist Russia in 1904 or 1915? Defeats such as Russia had never known since the thirteenth century.

  Section 6 was espionage.

  This section was interpreted so broadly that if one were to count up all those sentenced under it one might conclude that during Stalin’s time our people supported life not by agriculture or industry, but only by espionage on behalf of foreigners, and by living on subsidies from foreign intelligence services. Espionage was very convenient in its simplicity, comprehensible both to an undeveloped criminal and to a learned jurist, to a journalist and to public opinion.29

  The breadth of interpretation of Section 6 lay further in the fact that people were sentenced not only for actual espionage but also for:

  PSh—Suspicion of Espionage—or NSh—Unproven Espionage—for which they gave the whole works.

  And even SVPSh—Contacts Leading to (!) Suspicion of Espionage.

  In other words, let us say that an acquaintance of an acquaintance of your wife had a dress made by the same seamstress (who was, of course, an NKVD agent) used by the wife of a foreign diplomat.

  These 58-6 PSh’s and SVPSh’s were sticky sections. They required the strict confinement and incessant supervision of those convicted (for, after all, an intelligence service might reach out its tentacles to its protégé even in a camp); also, such prisoners could be moved only under convoy—armed escort. In general, all the lettered articles—which were, in fact, not articles of the Code at all but frightening combinations of capital letters (and we shall encounter more of them in this chapter)—always contained a touch of the enigmatic, always remained incomprehensible, and it wasn’t at all clear whether they were offshoots of Article
58 or independent and extremely dangerous. In many camps prisoners convicted under the provisions of these lettered articles were subjected to restrictions even more stringent than those of the ordinary 58’s.

  Section 7 applied to subversion of industry, transport, trade, and the circulation of money.

  In the thirties, extensive use was made of this section to catch masses of people—under the simplified and widely understood catchword wrecking. In reality, everything enumerated under Section 7 was very obviously and plainly being subverted daily. So didn’t someone have to be guilty of it all? For centuries the people had built and created, always honorably, always honestly, even for serf-owners and nobles. Yet no one, from the days of Ryurik on, had ever heard of wrecking. But now, when for the first time all the wealth had come to belong to the people, hundreds of thousands of the best sons of the people inexplicably rushed off to wreck. (Section 7 did not provide for wrecking in agriculture, but since it was impossible otherwise to explain rationally how and why the fields were choked with weeds, why harvests were falling off, why machines were breaking down, then dialectic sensitivity brought agriculture, too, under its sway.)