The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1

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  1. The regulation, purposeless in itself, derives, N.M. recalls, from that strange time when the citizenry not only was supposed to but actually dared to verify the actions of the police.

  2. When in 1937 they wiped out Dr. Kazakov’s institute, the “commission” broke up the jars containing the lysates developed by him, even though patients who had been cured and others still being treated rushed around them, begging them to preserve the miraculous medicines. (According to the official version, the lysates were supposed to be poisons; in that case, why should they not have been kept as material evidence?)

  3. In other words, “We live in the cursed conditions in which a human being can disappear into the void and even his closest relatives, his mother and his wife . . . do not know for years what has become of him.” Is that right or not? That is what Lenin wrote in 1910 in his obituary of Babushkin. But let’s speak frankly: Babushkin was transporting arms for an uprising, and was caught with them when he was shot. He knew what he was doing. You couldn’t say that about helpless rabbits like us.

  4. And there is a separate Science of Searches too. I have had the chance to read a pamphlet on this subject for correspondence-school law students in Alma-Ata. Its author praises highly those police officials who in the course of their searches went so far as to turn over two tons of manure, eight cubic yards of firewood, or two loads of hay; cleaned the snow from an entire collective-farm vegetable plot, dismantled brick ovens, dug up cesspools, checked out toilet bowls, looked into doghouses, chicken coops, birdhouses, tore apart mattresses, ripped adhesive tape off people’s bodies and even tore out metal teeth in the search for microfilm. Students were advised to begin and to end with a body search (during the course of the search the arrested person might have grabbed up something that had already been examined). They were also advised to return to the site of a search at a different time of day and carry out the search all over again.

  5. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

  If . . . if . . . We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (Arthur Ransome describes a workers’ meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the opposition, Y. Larin, explained to the workers that their trade union must be their defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had won and upon which no one else had any right to infringe. The workers, however, were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the spokesman for the Party line rebuked them for their laziness and for getting out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them—overtime work without pay, reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration—this aroused great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

  6. Here is what is most surprising of all: one can be a human being despite everything! Nothing happened to Travkin. Not long ago, we met again cordially, and I really got to know him for the first time. He is a retired general and an inspector of the Hunters’ Alliance.

  1. Vestnik NKVD (NKVD Herald), 1917, No. 1, p. 4.

  2. Lenin, Sobrannye Sochineniya (Collected Works), fifth edition, Vol. 35, p. 68.

  3. Ibid., p. 204.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., p. 203.

  6. Vestnik NKVD, 1918, No. 21–22, p. 1.

  7. Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet Regime), Vol. 4, Moscow, 1968, p. 627.

  8. M. I. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte; Populyarni Obzor Deyatelnosti ChK (Two Years of Struggle on the Home Front; Popular Review of the Activity of the Cheka), Moscow, GIZ, 1920, p. 61.

  9. Ibid., p. 60.

  10. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, pp. 47, 48.

  11. Ibid., p. 48.

  12. Ibid., p. 47.

  13. Ibid., p. 49.

  14. “The hardest-working sector of the nation was positively uprooted.” Korolenko, letter to Gorky, August 10, 1921.

  15. Tukhachevsky, “Borba s Kontrrevolyutsionnymi Vostaniyami” (“The Struggle Against Counterrevolutionary Revolts”), in Voina i Revolyutsiya (War and Revolution), 1926, No. 7/8.

  16. Korolenko’s letter to Gorky, September 14, 1921. Korolenko also reminds us of a particularly important situation in the prisons of 1921: “Everywhere they are saturated with typhus.” This has been confirmed by Skripnikova and others imprisoned at the time.

  17. V. G. Korolenko wrote to Gorky, June 29, 1921: “History will someday note that the Bolshevik Revolution used the same means to deal with true revolutionaries and socalists as did the Tsarist regime, in other words, purely police measures.”

  18. Sometimes, reading a newspaper article, one is astonished to the point of disbelief. In Izvestiya of May 24, 1959, one could read that a year after Hitler came to power Maximilian Hauke was arrested for belonging to none other than the Communist Party. Was he destroyed? No, they sentenced him to two years. After this was he, naturally, sentenced to a second term? No, he was released. You can interpret that as you please! He proceeded to live quietly and build an underground organization, in connection with which the Izvestiya article on his courage appeared.

  19. Evidently, the monarchist in question assassinated Voikov as an act of private vengeance: it is said that as Urals Provincial Commissar of Foodstuffs, in July, 1918, P. L. Voikov had directed the destruction of all traces of the shooting of the Tsar’s family (the dissection and dismemberment of the corpses, the cremation of the remains, and the dispersal of the ashes).

  20. A. F. Velichko, a military engineer, former professor of the Military Academy of the General Staff, and a lieutenant general, had been in charge of the Administration for Military Transport in the Tsarist War Ministry. He was shot. Oh, how useful he would have been in 1941!

  21. They say that when Ordzhonikidze used to talk with the old engineers, he would put one pistol on his desk beside his right hand and another beside his left.

  22. The Sukhanov referred to here was the same Sukhanov in whose apartment, on the Karpovka, in Petrograd, and with whose knowledge (and the guides there nowadays are lying when they say it was without his knowledge), the Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10, 1917, and adopted its decision to launch an armed uprising.

  23. He might well have been a better one than those who held the job for the next forty years! But how strange is human fate! As a matter of principl
e, Doyarenko was always nonpolitical! When his daughter used to bring home fellow students who expressed opinions savoring of Socialist Revolutionary views, he made them leave!

  24. Kondratyev, sentenced to solitary confinement, became mentally ill there and died. Yurovsky also died. Chayanov was exiled to Alma-Ata after five years in solitary and was arrested again there in 1948.

  25. This kind of peasant and his fate were portrayed immortally in the character of Stepan Chausov in S. Zalygin’s novel.

  26. I remember very well that in our youth this term seemed quite logical; there was nothing in the least unclear about it.

  27. This particular unremitting wave grabbed up anyone at all at any moment. But when it came to outstanding intellectuals in the thirties, they sometimes considered it cleverer to fabricate a case based on some conspicuously shameful violation (like pederasty; or, in the case of Professor Pletnev, the allegation that, left alone with a woman patient, he bit her breast. A national newspaper reports such an incident—and just try to deny it!).

  28. A. Y. Vyshinsky (editor), Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam (From Prisons to Rehabilitative Institutions), a collection of articles published by the Criminal Policy Institute, Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo Publishing House, 1934.

  29. And very likely spy mania was not merely the narrow-minded predilection of Stalin alone. It was very useful for everyone who possessed any privileges. It became the natural justification for increasingly widespread secrecy, the withholding of information, closed doors and security passes, fenced-off dachas and secret, restricted special shops. People had no way of penetrating the armor plate of spy mania and learning how the bureaucracy made its cozy arrangements, loafed, blundered, ate, and took its amusements.

  30. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 190.

  31. This sounds like an exaggeration, a farce, but it was not I who invented that farce. I was in prison with these individuals.

  32. There are psychological bases for suspecting I. Stalin of having been liable under this section of Article 58 also. By no means all the documents relating to this type of service survived February, 1917, to become matters of public knowledge. V. F. Dzhunkovsky a former Tsarist police director, who died in the Kolyma, declared that the hasty burning of police archives in the first days of the February Revolution was a joint effort on the part of certain self-interested revolutionaries.

  33. It was similarly not by chance that the “Big House’’ in Leningrad was finished in 1934, just in time for Kirov’s asassination.

  34. The twenty-five-year term was added for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution in 1947.

  35. These days, as we observe the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the same stage—in the seventeenth year after its final victory—we can begin to consider it very likely that there exists a fundamental law of historical development. And even Stalin himself begins to seem only a blind and perfunctory executive agent.

  36. Told me by N. G—ko.

  37. Five of them died before trial from tortures suffered during interrogation. Twenty-four died in camps. The thirtieth, Ivan Aristaulovich Punich, returned after his release and rehabilitation. (Had he died, we would have known nothing about the thirty, just as we know nothing about millions of others.) And the many “witnesses” who testified against them are still there in Sverdlovsk today—prospering, occupying responsible positions, or living on as special pensioners. Darwinian selection!

  38. Who remembers them? They went on and on every day for hours! Stupefyingly identical! Levitan, the announcer, probably remembers them well: he used to read them in rolling tones, with great expression!

  39. Vyshinsky, op. cit.

  40. I myself almost felt the impact of that decree. I was standing in line at the bread store, when a policeman called me out and took me off for the sake of his score. If it had not been for a fortunate intervention, I might have started out in Gulag right away instead of going off to war.

  41. They judged blood by family name. The design engineer Vasily Okorokov had found it inconvenient to sign his drawings with his real name. Consequently, in the thirties, when it was still legally possible, he had changed his name to Robert Shtekker. It was elegant, and he was able to work up a good-looking professional signature with it. Now he was arrested as a German—and given no chance to prove he was not. So he was exiled. “Is this your real name? What assignments were you given by the Fascist intelligence service?” Then there was that native of Tambov whose real name was Kaverznev, and who changed it to Kolbe in 1918. At what point did he share Okorokov’s fate?

  42. That was not such a clear-cut decision at the start. Even in 1943 there were certain separate waves which were like no others—like the so-called “Africans,” who bore this nickname for a long time at the Vorkuta construction projects. These were Russian war prisoners of the Germans, who had been taken prisoner a second time when the Americans captured them from Rommel’s army in Africa (the “Hiwi”). In 1943 they were sent in Studebakers, through Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, to their Motherland. And on a desert gulf of the Caspian, they were immediately put behind barbed wire. The police who received them ripped off their military insignia and liberated them of all things the Americans had given them (keeping them for themselves, of course, not turning them over to the state); then they sent them off to Vorkuta to await special orders, without (due to inexperience) sentencing them to a specific term under any article of the Code. These “Africans” lived in Vorkuta in a betwixt-and-between condition. They were not under guard, but they were given no passes, and without passes they could not take so much as one step in Vorkuta. They were paid wages at the same rate as free workers, but they were treated like prisoners. And the special orders never did come. They were forgotten men.

  43. What happened to this group later makes an anecdote. In camp they kept their mouths shut about Sweden, fearing they’d get a second term. But people in Sweden somehow found out about their fate and published slanderous reports in the press. By that time the boys were scattered far and near among various camps. Suddenly, on the strength of special orders, they were all yanked out and taken to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad. There they were fed for two months as though for slaughter and allowed to let their hair grow. Then they were dressed with modest elegance, rehearsed on what to say and to whom, and warned that any bastard who dared to squeak out of turn would get a bullet in his skull—and they were led off to a press conference for selected foreign journalists and some others who had known the entire crew in Sweden. The former internees bore themselves cheerfully described where they were living, studying, and working, and expressed their indignation at the bourgeois slander they had read about not long before in the Western press (after all, Western papers are sold in the Soviet Union at every corner newsstand!). And so they had written to one another and decided to gather in Leningrad. (Their travel expenses didn’t bother them in the least.) Their fresh, shiny appearance completely gave the lie to the newspaper canard. The discredited journalists went off to write their apologies. It was wholly inconceivable to the Western imagination that there could be any other explanation. And the men who had been the subjects of the interview were taken off to a bath, had their hair cut off again, were dressed in their former rags, and sent back to the same camps. But because they had conducted themselves properly, none of them was given a second term.

  44. Without knowing the details, I am nevertheless convinced that a great many of these Japanese could not have been sentenced legitimately. It was an act of revenge, as well as a means of holding onto manpower for as long a period as possible.

  45. It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps, I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-ce
ntury that the public in the West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. “After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise. . . . They did not realize they were being repatriated. . . . They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial.” They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. (Author’s note, dated 1973.)