The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  (Incidentally, don’t push things too far. We wouldn’t want the workers to get despondent and begin to feel that everything is falling apart, that the Soviet government has been caught napping. And so they also threw a good deal of light on that side of it: that they had intended to do a lot and had accomplished very little, that not one industry had suffered serious losses!)

  But why didn’t the Intervention take place anyway? For various complex reasons. Either because Poincare hadn’t been elected in France, or else because our émigré industrialists decided that their former enterprises had not yet been sufficiently restored by the Bolsheviks—let the Bolsheviks do more. And then, too, they couldn’t seem to come to terms with Poland and Rumania.

  So, all right, there hadn’t been any intervention, but there was, at least, a Promparty! Do you hear the tramp of marching feet? Do you hear the murmur of the working masses: “Death! Death! Death!”? And the marchers were “those who in the event of war would have to atone with their deaths, and deprivations and sufferings, for the work of these men.”20

  (And it was as if he had looked into a crystal ball: it was indeed with their deaths, and deprivations and sufferings, that those trusting demonstrators would atone in 1941 for the work . . . of these men! But where is your finger pointing, prosecutor? At whom is your finger pointing?)

  So then—why was it the Industrial Party? Why a party and not an Engineering-Technical Center? We are accustomed to having a Center!

  Yes, there was a Center too. But they had decided to reorganize themselves into a party. It was more respectable. That way it would be easier to fight over cabinet posts in the future government. It would “mobilize the engineering-technical masses for the struggle for power.” And whom would they be struggling against? Other parties, of course. Against the Working Peasants Party—the TKP—in the first place, for after all they had 200,000 members! Against the Menshevik Party in the second place! And as for a Center, those three parties together were to have constituted a United Center. But the GPU had destroyed them. “And it’s a good thing they destroyed us.” (All the defendants were glad!)

  (And it was flattering to Stalin to annihilate three more parties. Would there have been any glory, indeed, in merely adding another three “Centers” to his list?)

  And having a party instead of a Center meant having another Central Committee—yes, the Promparty’s own Central Committee! True, there had not been any party conferences, nor had there been any elections, not even one. Whoever wanted to be on the Central Committee just joined up—five people all told. They all made way for one another, and they all yielded the post of chairman to one another too. There were no meetings—either of the Central Committee (no one else would remember this, but Ramzin would remember it very well indeed, and he would name names) or of the groups from various branches of industry. There seemed even to be some dearth of members. As Charnovsky said, “There never was any formal organization of a Promparty.” And how many members had there been? Larichev: “A count of members would have been difficult; the exact composition was unknown.” And how had they carried out their wrecking? How had directives been communicated? Well, it was just a matter of whoever met whomever in some particular institution—directives were passed on orally. From then on everyone would carry out his own wrecking on his own conscience. (Well, now, Ramzin confidently named two thousand members. And whenever he named two, they arrested five. According to the documents in the trial, there were altogether thirty to forty thousand engineers throughout the U.S.S.R. That meant they would arrest every seventh one, and terrify the other six.) And what about contacts with the Working Peasants Party? Well, they might meet in the State Planning Commission, or else in the Supreme Council of the Economy, and “plan systematic acts against village Communists.”

  Where have we seen all this before? Aha! In Aïda. They are seeing Radames off on his campaign, and the orchestra is thundering, and eight warriors are standing there in helmets and with spears—and two thousand more are painted on the backdrop.

  That’s your Promparty.

  But that’s all right. It works. The show goes on! (Today it is quite impossible to believe just how threatening and serious it all looked at the time.) And it is hammered in by repetition, and every individual episode is gone over several times. And because of this the awful visions multiply. And, in addition, so that things won’t become too bland, the defendants suddenly “forget” something terribly unimportant, or else they “try to renounce testimony”—and right then and there “they pin them down with cross-questioning,” and it all winds up being as lively as the Moscow Art Theatre.

  But Krylenko pressed too hard. On the one hand he planned to disembowel the Promparty—to disclose its social basis. That was a question of class, and his analysis couldn’t go wrong. But Krylenko abandoned the Stanislavsky method, didn’t assign the roles, relied on improvisation. He let everyone tell his own story of his own life, and what his relationship to the Revolution had been, and how he was led to participate in wrecking.

  And, in one fell swoop, that thoughtless insertion, that human picture, spoiled all five acts.

  The first thing that we learn to our astonishment is that all eight of these big shots of the bourgeois intelligentsia came from poor families: the son of a peasant; one of the many children of a clerk; the son of an artisan; the son of a rural schoolteacher; the son of a peddler. At school, they were all impoverished and earned the money for their education themselves, from the ages of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Some gave lessons, and some worked on locomotives. And here was what was monstrous: no one barred their way to an education! They all completed the courses in high school and in higher technological institutions, and they became important and famous professors. (How could that have been? They always told us that under Tsarism only the children of landowners and capitalists . . . Those calendars certainly couldn’t have been lying!)

  And here and now, in the Soviet period, engineers were in a very difficult position. It was almost impossible for them to provide their children with a higher education (after all, the children of the intelligentsia had the lowest priority, remember!). The court didn’t argue, nor did Krylenko. (And the defendants themselves hastened to qualify what they had said, asserting that, against the background of the general and over-all victories, this, of course, was unimportant.)

  Here we begin to distinguish bit by bit among the defendants, who, up to this point, had talked very much like one another. Their age differential also divided them with respect to probity. Those close to sixty and older made statements that aroused a friendly, sympathetic reaction. But forty-three-year-old Ramzin and Larichev, and thirty-nine-year-old Ochkin (the same one who had denounced Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee—in 1921), were glib and shameless. And all the major testimony about the Promparty and intervention comes from them. Ramzin was the kind of person (as a result of his early and extraordinary successes) who was shunned by the entire engineering profession, and he endured it. At the trial he caught Krylenko’s hints on the wing and volunteered precise statements. All the charges were founded on Ramzin’s recollections. He possessed such self-control and force that he might very well have conducted plenipotentiary talks in Paris about intervention (on assignment from the GPU, obviously). Ochkin, too, was a fast climber: at twenty-nine he had already possessed “the unlimited trust of the Council of Labor and Defense and the Council of People’s Commissars.”

  One couldn’t say the same about sixty-two-year-old Professor Charnovsky: Anonymous students had persecuted him in the wall newspapers. After twenty-three years of lecturing, he had been summoned to a general students’ meeting to “give an account of his work.” He hadn’t gone.

  And in 1921 Professor Kalinnikov had headed an open struggle against the Soviet government—specifically a professors’ strike. What it amounted to was this: Back in the days of the Stolypin repression, the Moscow Higher Technical School had won academic autonomy (including the right to fill impo
rtant posts, elect a rector, etc.). In 1921 the professors in this school had re-elected Kalinnikov to a new term as rector, but the People’s Commissariat didn’t want him there and had designated its own candidate. However, the professors went on strike and were supported by the students—at that time there were no truly proletarian students—and Kalinnikov was rector for a whole year despite the wishes of the Soviet government. (It was only in 1922 that they had wrung the neck of that autonomy, and even then, in all probability, not without arrests.)

  Fedotov was sixty-six years old and he had been a factory engineer eleven years longer than the whole life span of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party—from which the Soviet Communist Party had sprung. He had worked at all the spinning mills and textile factories in Russia. (How hateful such people are, and how desirable it is to get rid of them as quickly as possible!) In 1905 he had left his position as a director of the Morozov textile firm and the high salary which went with it because he preferred to attend the “Red Funerals” which followed the caskets of the workers killed by the Cossacks. And now he was ill, had poor eyesight, and was too weak to leave home at night even to go to the theater.

  And such people organized intervention? And economic ruin?

  Charnovsky had not had any free evenings for many years because he had been so busy with his teaching and with developing new sciences—such as the science of the organization of production and the scientific principles of rationalization. I recall from my own childhood the engineering professors of those years, and that’s exactly what they were like. Their evenings were given up to their students at all levels, and they didn’t get home to their families until 11 P.M. After all, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan there were only thirty thousand of them for the whole country. They were all strained to the breaking point.

  And it was these people who were supposed to have contrived a crisis, to have spied in exchange for handouts?

  Ramzin uttered just one honest phrase during the whole trial: “The path of wrecking is alien to the inner structure of engineering.”

  Throughout the trial Krylenko forced the defendants to concede apologetically that they were “scarcely conversant” with or were “illiterate” in politics. After all, politics is much more difficult and much loftier than some kind of metallurgy or turbine design. In politics your head won’t help you, nor will your education. Come on! Answer me! What was your attitude toward the October Revolution when it happened? Skeptical. In other words, immediately hostile. Why? Why? Why?

  Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us—as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble had been blown.

  What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d’etat was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn’t the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity? (And, excepting only the question of the moral leadership of society, is not this precisely where all social cybernetics is leading today? Is it not true that professional politicians are boils on the neck of society that prevent it from turning its head and moving its arms?) And why shouldn’t engineers have political views? After all, politics is not even a science, but is an empirical area not susceptible to description by any mathematical apparatus; furthermore, it is an area subject to human egotism and blind passion. (Even in the trial Chamovsky speaks out: “Politics must, nonetheless, be guided to some degree by the findings of technology.”)

  The wild pressures of War Communism could only sicken the engineers. An engineer cannot participate in irrationality, and until 1920 the majority of them did nothing, even though they were barbarically impoverished. When NEP—the New Economic Policy—got under way, the engineers willingly went back to work. They accepted NEP as an indication that the government had come to its senses. But, alas, conditions were not what they had been. The engineers were looked on as a socially suspicious element that did not even have the right to provide an education for its own children. Engineers were paid immeasurably low salaries in proportion to their contribution to production. But while their superiors demanded successes in production from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.

  Krylenko objects: “Do you remember the Oldenborger trial?” (In other words, how we, so to speak, defended him.)

  Fedotov: “Yes. He had to lose his life in order to attract some attention to the predicament of the engineer.”

  Krylenko (disappointed): “Well, that was not how the matter was put.”

  Fedotov: “He died and he was not the only one to die. He died voluntarily, and many others were killed.”21

  Krylenko was silent. That meant it was true. (Leaf through the Oldenborger trial again, and just imagine the persecution. And with the additional final line: “Many other were killed.”)

  So it was that the engineer was to blame for everything, even when he had done nothing wrong. But if he actually had made a real mistake, and after all he was a human being, he would be torn to pieces unless his colleagues could manage to cover things up. For would they value honesty? So the engineers then were forced at times to lie to the Party leadership?