4. And if this was in the Big House in Leningrad during the siege, you may also have seen cannibals. Those who had eaten human flesh, those who had traded in human livers from dissecting rooms, were for some reason kept by the MGB with the political prisoners.
5. New measures of oppression, additions to the traditional prison regulations, were invented only gradually in the internal prisons of the GPU-NKVD-MGB. At the beginning of the twenties, prisoners were not subjected to this particular measure, and lights were turned off at night as in the ordinary world. But they began to keep the lights on, on the logical grounds that they needed to keep the prisoners in view at all times. (When they used to turn the lights on for inspection, it had been even worse.) Arms had to be kept outside the blanket, allegedly to prevent the prisoner from strangling himself beneath the blanket and thus escaping his just interrogation. It was demonstrated experimentally that in the winter a human being always wants to keep his arms under the bedclothes for warmth; consequently the measure was made permanent.
6. I am almost fearful of saying it, but it seems as though on the eve of the 1970’s these people are emerging once again. That is surprising. It was almost too much to hope for.
7. One attached to a State Security headquarters.
8. Who among us has not learned by heart from our school history courses, as well as from the Short Course in the history of the Soviet Communist Party, that this “provocative and foul manifesto” was a mockery of freedom, that the Tsar had proclaimed: “Freedom for the dead, and prison for the living”? But the epigram was bogus. The manifesto declared that all political parties were to be tolerated and that a State Duma was to be convened, and it provided for an amnesty which was honest and extremely extensive. (The fact that it had been issued under duress was something else again.) Indeed, under its terms none other than all political prisoners without exception were to be released without reference to the term and type of punishment they had been sentenced to. Only criminals remained imprisoned. The Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945—true, it was not issued under duress—was exactly the opposite. All the political prisoners remained imprisoned.
9. After Stalin’s amnesty, as I will recount later, those amnestied were held in prison for another two or three months and were forced to slog away just as before. And no one considered this illegal.
10. Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.
11. G. V. Plekhanov, “An Open Letter to the Workers of Petrograd,” in the newspaper Yedinstvo, October 28, 1917.
12. This was one of Stalin’s pet themes—to ascribe to every arrested Bolshevik, and in general to every arrested revolutionary, service in the Tsarist Okhrana. Was this merely his intolerant suspiciousness? Or was it intuition? Or, perhaps, analogy? . . .
13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”]. Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers were shoved through for the prisoners to sign.
14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian. Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”
15. Where indeed in our country did this casting of lots not happen? It was the result of our universal and endless hunger. In the army, all rations were divided up the same way. And the Germans, who could hear what was going on from their trenches, teased us about it: “Who gets it? The political commissar!”
16. Soon the biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, whom I have already mentioned, would be brought here from Berlin. There was nothing at the Lubyanka, it appeared, which so offended him as this spilling on the floor. He considered it striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers, and of all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of Lubyanka’s existence as a prison by 730 times (twice for each day of the year), and then by 111 cells—and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to spill boiling water on the floor 2,188,000 times and then come and wipe it up with a rag the same number of times than to make pails with spouts.
17. Dr. F. P. Gaaz would have earned nothing extra in our country.
18. This company acquired a piece of Moscow earth that was well acquainted with blood. The innocent Vereshchagin was torn to pieces in 1812 on Furkasovsky, near the Rostopchin house. And the murderess and serf-owner Saltychikha lived—and killed serfs—on the other side of the Bolshaya Lubyanka. (Po Moskve [In Moscow], edited by N. A. Geinike and others, Moscow, Sabashnikov Publishers, 1917, p. 231.)
19. Susi remembered me later as a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat. Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.
20. We did not recognize that 1907 Convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through for its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners—simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisoners inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here. (Melgunov, Vospominaniya i Dnevniki, Vol. I, pp. 199 and 203.)
21. Of course, our Soviet interrogators did not accept this line of reasoning. What right did they have to want to live—at a time when privileged families in the Soviet rear lived well without collaborating? No one ever thought of considering that these boys had refused to take up German arms against their own people. For playing spies, they were nailed with the very worst and most serious charges of all—Article 58-6, plus sabotage with intent. This meant: to be held until dead.
22. He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting because of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.
23. The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the chauffeur with his former employer.
24. When they introduced me to Khrushchev in 1962, I wanted to say to him: “Nikita Sergeyevich! You and I have an acquaintance in common.” But I told him something else, more urgent, on behalf of former prisoners.
1. Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn’t smell right!
2. Now, after twenty-seven years, the first honest work on this subject has appeared—P. G. Grigorenko, “A Letter to the Magazine Problems of the History
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” samizdat, 1968—and such works are going to multiply from here on out. Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity and treason.
3. One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief of the Red Army’s intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the repatriates home and swallowing them up.
4. Vitkovsky writes about this, on the basis of the thirties, in more general terms. It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren’t wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn’t worked for foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.
5. It has become the accepted thing for our literary critics to say that Sholokhov, in his immortal story “Sudba Cheloveka”—“The Fate of a Man”—spoke the “bitter truth” about “this side of our life” and that he “revealed” the problem. But we must retort that in this story, which is in general very inferior, and in which the passages about the war are pale and unconvincing—since the author evidently knew nothing about the last war—and the descriptions of Germans are unconvincing cartoon cliches (only the hero’s wife is successfully portrayed—because she is a pure Christian straight out of Dostoyevsky), in this story about a war prisoner, the real problem of the war prisoners was hidden or distorted:
(1)The author picked the least incriminating form of being taken prisoner conceivable—the soldier was captured while unconscious, so as to make him noncontroversial and to bypass the whole poignancy of the problem. (What if he had been conscious when he was taken prisoner, as was most often the case? What would have happened to him then?)
(2)The fact that the Motherland had deserted us, had renounced us, had cursed us, was not presented as the war prisoner’s chief problem. Sholokhov says not a word about it. But it was because of that particular factor that there was no way out. On the contrary, he identifies the presence of traitors among us as constituting the problem. (But if this really was the main thing, one might then expect him to have investigated further and explained where they came from a full quarter-century after a Revolution that was supported by the entire people!)
(3)Sholokhov dreamed up a fantastic, spy-story escape from captivity, stretching innumerable points to avoid the obligatory, inevitable procedural step of the returned war prisoner’s reception in SMERSH—the Identification and Screening Camp. Not only was Sokolov, the hero, not put behind barbed wire, as provided in the regulations, but—and this is a real joke—he was given a month’s holiday by his colonel! (In other words: the freedom to carry out the assignment given him by the Fascist intelligence service. So his colonel would end up in the same place as he!)
6. Iosip Tito just barely escaped this fate. And Popov and Tanev, fellow defendants of Dimitrov in the Leipzig trial, both got prison terms. (For Dimitrov himself Stalin prepared another fate.)
7. In actual fact, even when POW’s actually knew what would happen to them, they behaved in exactly the same way. Vasily Aleksandrov was taken prisoner in Finland. He was sought out there by some elderly Petersburg merchant who asked him his name and patronymic and then said: “In 1917 I owed your grandfather a large debt, and I didn’t have the chance to pay it. Here you are—take it!” An old debt is a windfall! After the war Aleksandrov was accepted by the circle of Russian émigrés, and he got engaged to a girl there whom he came to love—and not just casually. To educate him, his future father-in-law gave him a bound set of Pravda—just as it was issued from 1918 to 1941, without any deletions or corrections. At the same time, he recounted to him more or less completely the history of the waves of arrests, as we have set it forth in Chapter 2, above. And nevertheless . . . Aleksandrov abandoned his fiancée, and his wealth, and returned to the U.S.S.R., where he was given, as one can easily guess, ten years and disenfranchisement for five more. In 1953 he was happy to have managed to snag himself a job as foreman in a Special Camp.
8. As far as one can establish at this late date, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, prevented by the Revolution from completing his studies at the Nizhni Novgorod Orthodox Seminary, was drafted into the Red Army in 1919 and fought as an enlisted man. On the southern front, against Denikin and Wrangel, he rose to be commander of a platoon, then of a company. In the twenties he completed the Vystrel courses. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1930. In 1936, having attained the rank of regimental commander, he was sent to China as a military adviser. Evidently he had no ties to the top military and Party circles, and he therefore turned up naturally in that Stalinist “second echelon” of officers promoted to replace the purged commanders of armies, divisions, and brigades. From 1938 on he commanded a division. And in 1940, when “new” (in other words, old) officer ranks were created, he became a major general. From additional information one can conclude that in that corps of newly made generals, many of whom were totally stupid and inexperienced, Vlasov was one of the most talented. His 99th Infantry Division, which he had instructed and trained from the summer of 1940 on, was not caught off balance by the German attack. On the contrary, while the rest of the army reeled backward, his division advanced, retook Przemysl, and held it for six days. Quickly skipping the rank of corps commander, in 1941 Lieutenant General Vlasov was in command of the Thirty-seventh Army near Kiev. He made his way out of the enormous Kiev encirclement and in December, 1941, near Moscow he commanded the Twentieth Army, whose successful Soviet counter-offensive for defense of the capital (the taking of Solnechnogorsk) was noted in the Sovinformburo communique for December 12. And the list of generals mentioned there was as follows: Zhukov, Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov, Vlasov, Rokossovsky, Govorov. Thanks to the speed with which officers were promoted in those months, he became Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front (under Meretskov), and took over command of the Second Shock Army. On January 7, 1942, at the head of that army, he began a drive to break the Leningrad blockade—an attack across the Volkhov River to the northwest. This had been planned as a combined operation, a concerted push from several directions and from Leningrad itself. At scheduled intervals the Fifty-fourth, the Fourth, and the Fifty-second armies were to take part in it also. But those three armies either did not advance because they were unready or else came to a quick halt. At that time we still didn’t have the capacity to plan such complex combined operations, and, more importantly, provide supplies for them. Vlasov’s Second Shock Army, however, was successful in its assault, and by February, 1942, it was 46 miles deep inside the German lines! And from then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor ammunition to reinforce even those troops. (That’s the kind of reserves they had begun the offensive with!) Leningrad, too, was left to die behind the blockade, having received no specific information from Novgorod. During March the winter roads still held up. From April on, however, the entire swampy area through which the Second Army had advanced melted into mud, and there were no supply roads, and there was no help from the air. The army was without food and, at the same time, Vlasov was refused permission to retreat. For two months they endured starvation and extermination. In the Butyrki, soldiers from that army told me how they had cut off the hoofs of dead and rotting horses and boiled the scrapings and eaten them. Then, on May 14, a German attack was launched from all sides against the encircled army. The only planes in the air, of course, were German. And only then, in mockery, were they given permission to pull back behind the Volkhov. They made several hopeless a
ttempts to break through—until the beginning of July.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 82