Gulag

by Anne Applebaum

  And frequently, more and more frequently, they asked: “Why did they publish it?”66

  Why indeed? It seems the Party bosses themselves began to wonder. Perhaps Solzhentisyn’s honest portrayal of camp life was too much for them: it represented too momentous a change, its appearance came about too swiftly for the tastes of men who still feared their own heads might roll next. Or perhaps they were tired of Khrushchev already, feared he had gone too far, and used Solzhenitsyn’s novel as an excuse. Indeed, Khrushchev was deposed soon afterward, in October 1964. His replacement, Leonid Brezhnev, was the leader of the Party’s reactionary, anti-change, anti-Thaw, neo-Stalinists.

  In either case, it is clear that in the aftermath of the novel’s publication, the conservatives rallied, and with amazing speed. Ivan Denisovich appeared in November. In December—a few days after Khrushchev met Solzhenitsyn and personally congratulated him—Leonid Ilyichev, the chairman of the Central Committee’s new Ideological Commission, lectured a group of 400 writers and artists gathered at the Writers’ Union. Soviet society, he told them, must not be “shaken and weakened under the pretext of the struggle against the cult of the individual ...” 67

  The rapidity of the change reflected the Soviet Union’s ambivalent attitude toward its own history—an ambivalence which has never been resolved, even today. If the Soviet Union’s elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had endured pointless suffering. If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was stupid and wasteful and tragic too. It was difficult, and it would remain difficult, for any Soviet citizen, whether a member of the elite or a simple peasant, to accept that their lives had been governed by a set of lies.

  After a period of wavering—a few arguments for, a few arguments against—the attacks on Solzhenitsyn started coming thick and fast. In earlier chapters, I have already described the angry reactions, of both prisoners and guards, to Ivan Denisovich’s many efforts to evade hard work. But there were more elevated criticisms too. Lydia Fomenko, the critic of Literaturnaya Rossiya, accused Solzhenitsyn of failing to “disclose the full dialectic of that time.” Solzhenitsyn had condemned the “cult of personality,” in other words, but had failed to point the way to the optimistc future, and had failed to include “good” communist characters who would triumph in the end. This kind of criticism was echoed by others, and some even tried to correct Solzhenitsyn’s mistakes in literary form. Boris Dyakov’s “A Story of Survival,” the “loyal” camp novel published in 1964, explicitly featured descriptions of hardworking, loyal Soviet prisoners.68

  As Solzhenitsyn’s novel was being considered for the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest literary award, the insults grew worse. In the end— using tactics that would be repeated in later years—the establishment resorted to personal insults. At the Lenin Prize Committee meeting, the head of the Komsomol, Sergei Pavlov, stood up and accused Solzhenitsyn of having surrendered to the Germans during the war, and of having been convicted on criminal charges after that. Tvardovsky got Solzhenitsyn to produce his rehabilitation certificate, but it was too late. The Lenin Prize went to The Sheep Bell, a book best described as well-forgotten, and Solzhenitsyn’s official literary career was at an end.

  He kept writing, but none of his subsequent novels appeared in print in the Soviet Union—or at least not legally—until 1989. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union, and eventually took up residence in Vermont. Until the Gorbachev era, only a tiny group of Soviet citizens—those who had access to underground, illegal typescripts or smuggled foreign copies— had read The Gulag Archipelago, his history of the camp system.

  Yet Solzhenitsyn was not the only victim of this conservative backlash. For just as the debate about Ivan Denisovich was growing angrier, another literary drama was also unfolding: on February 18, 1964, the young poet Joseph Brodsky was put on trial for “parasitism.” The era of the dissidents was about to begin.

  Chapter 26

  THE ERA OF THE DISSIDENTS

  Do not rejoice too early

  And let some oracle proclaim

  That wounds do not reopen

  That evil crowds don’t rise again.

  And that I risk seeming retarded;

  Let him orate. I firmly know that

  Stalin is not dead.

  As if the dead alone had mattered

  And those who vanished nameless in the North.

  The evil he implanted in our hearts,

  Had it not truly done the damage?

  As long as poverty divides from wealth

  As long as we don’t stop the lies

  And don’t unlearn to fear

  Stalin is not dead.

  —Boris Chichibabin, “Stalin Is Not Dead,” 1967 1

  THE DEATH OF STALIN really did signal the end of the era of massive slave labor in the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union’s repressive policies were to take some very harsh forms over the subsequent forty years, nobody ever again proposed to revive concentration camps on a large scale. Nobody ever again tried to make them a central part of the economy, or used them to incarcerate millions of people. The secret police never again controlled such a large slice of the nation’s productive capacity, and camp commanders never again found themselves acting as the bosses of enormous industrial enterprises. Even the Lubyanka building, the postwar KGB headquarters, ceased to be a prison: Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot whose spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960, was the last person to be incarcerated in its cells.2

  Yet the camps did not disappear altogether. Nor did Soviet prisons become part of an “ordinary” penal system, organized for criminals alone. Instead, they evolved.

  To begin with, the nature of the political prisoners evolved. In Stalin’s era, the repressive system had resembled a vast game of roulette: anyone could be arrested, for any reason, at any time—peasants, workers, and Party bureaucrats alike. After Khrushchev, the secret police still occasionally arrested people “for nothing,” as Anna Akhmatova had once put it. But most of the time, Brezhnev’s KGB arrested people for something— if not for a genuine criminal act, then for their literary, religious, or political opposition to the Soviet system. Usually called “dissidents,” or sometimes “prisoners of conscience,” this new generation of politicals knew why they had been arrested, identified themselves as political prisoners, and were treated as such. They were kept separate from criminal prisoners, given different uniforms, and were subjected to different regimes. They would also be marked as dissidents for the rest of their lives, subjected to discrimination at work, and mistrusted by their relatives and neighbors.

  There were also far fewer political prisoners than there had been in Stalin’s time. In the middle of the 1970s, Amnesty International estimated that no more than 10,000 of the Soviet Union’s one million prisoners had political sentences, and most of them were incarcerated in the two “political” camp complexes, one in Mordovia, south of Moscow, and one in Perm, on the western edge of the Urals.3 In a given year, there were probably no more than a few thousand openly political arrests. Although this would have been a high number in any other country, it was certainly low by the standards of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

  According to former prisoners’ accounts, this new sort of prisoner began appearing in the camps as early as 1957, in the wake of the Hungarian revolution of October 1956, following the arrests of Soviet soldiers and citizens who had sympathized with the rebellion.4 At about this time, the first tiny wave of “refuseniks,” Jews who were refused the right to emigrate to Israel, also appeared in Soviet prisons. In 1958, Bym Gindler, a Polish Jew who had been left on the Soviet side of the border after the war, was refused the right to be repatriated to Poland, on the grounds that he would take the opportunity to emigrate to Israel.5

  The late 1950s also saw the arrests of the first groups of Soviet Baptists, who would quickly become the largest single dissident group behi
nd barbed wire, as well as members of other religious sects. In 1960, the dissident Avraham Shifrin even encountered a group of Old Believers, followers of the older rites of the Orthodox Church, in a punishment cell in the political camp at Potma. Their community had emigrated to the virgin forests of the northern Urals in 1919, and had lived there in complete secrecy, until a KGB helicopter discovered them fifty years later. When Shifrin met them, they had become permanent residents of the camp punishment cells, having refused categorically to work for the Soviet anti-Christ.6

  Shifrin himself also represented a new category of prisoner: the sons and daughters of “enemies of the people,” who found themselves, in the late 1950s, unable to slot easily into the routines of Soviet life. In subsequent years, a striking number of the members of the dissident generation, particularly the human rights activists, would turn out to be children or relatives of Stalin’s victims. The twin Medvedev brothers, Zhores and Roy, are among the most famous examples. Roy, a historian, became one of the best-known underground publicists in the Soviet Union; Zhores was a dissident scientist, who would be locked up in a psychiatric hospital as a result. Both were the sons of an “enemy of the people”: their father had been arrested when they were children.7

  There were others. In 1967, forty-three children of communists, all repressed by Stalin, sent an open letter to the Central Committee, warning of the threat of neo-Stalinism. The letter, one of the first of many open protest letters to the authorities, contained several names of underground publishers and dissident leaders, many of whom would soon be in prison themselves: Pyotr Yakir, the son of General Yakir; Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, son of the Bolshevik revolutionary; and Larisa Bogoraz, whose father was arrested for Trotskyite activities in 1936. A family’s experience of the camps could be enough, it seemed, to radicalize its younger members. 8

  If the prisoners had changed, so too had some aspects of the legal system. In 1960—the year usually remembered as the height of the Thaw—a new criminal code was established. Without question, the new code was more liberal. It specifically abolished nighttime interrogations, and limited the powers of the KGB (who conducted political investigations) and the MVD (who ran the prison system). It mandated the greater independence of prosecutors and, most of all, abolished the hated Article 58.9

  Some of these changes were rightly dismissed as mere camouflage, linguistic change instead of real change. “You are mistaken,” the novelist Yuli Daniel wrote a few years later, in a letter from prison smuggled out to a friend. “You are mistaken if you thought I was sitting in prison. I was being ‘held in an investigative isolator,’ whence I was not thrown in the cooler, but was ‘installed in a punishment isolator.’ And this was done not by jailers but by ‘controllers,’ and this letter is not being sent from a concentration camp but from an ‘institution.’” 10

  Daniel was also right in another sense: if the state authorities wanted to arrest someone on suspicion of thinking differently, they still could. In place of Article 58, the code created Article 70, on “Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda,” and Article 72, on “Organizational Activity of Especially Dangerous Crimes Against the State and Also Participation in Anti-Soviet Organizations.” In addition, the authorities added Article 142, on “Violation of Law on Separation of Church and State.” If the KGB wanted to arrest someone for his religion, in other words, they still could.11

  Yet not everything was exactly the same either. In the post-Stalin era, the authorities—prosecutors, prisoners, camp guards, warders—were far more sensitive about appearances, and really did try to adhere to a semblance of legality. When, for example, the language of Article 70 proved too loose to convict everyone whom the authorities felt it necessary to put behind bars, they added Article 190-1 to the criminal code, which forbade the “dissemination by word of mouth of deliberate fabrications discrediting the Soviet political and social system.” The judicial system had to look like a judicial system, even if everyone knew it was a sham.12

  In what was also a clear reaction against the old system of troikas and special commissions, the new law stipulated that arrestees must be tried in a court of justice. This, it turned out, would inconvenience the Soviet authorities far more than they could have anticipated.

  Although he had not been condemned under any of the new, anti-dissident laws, the trial of Joseph Brodsky was in many ways a harbinger of the new era to come. The fact that it was held at all was a novelty: in the past, people who irritated the state had not been tried in public except in pre-arranged show trials, if they were tried at all. More important, Brodsky’s behavior at the trial was enough to prove that he already belonged to a different generation from Solzhenitsyn, and from the political prisoners of the recent past.

  Brodsky once wrote that his generation was “spared” the experience of indoctrination endured by those just a few years older. “We emerged from under the post-war rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn’t look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and the poverty were visible all around. You cannot cover a ruin with a page of Pravda.” 13

  If they were Russians, Brodsky’s generation typically arrived at their critique of the Soviet status quo via their literary or artistic tastes, which could not be expressed in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. If they were Balts, Caucasians, or Ukrainians, they were more likely to have got there through nationalist sentiments, inherited from their parents. Brodsky was a classic Leningrad dissident. He rejected Soviet propaganda from a very early age, and dropped out of school at fifteen. He worked in a series of temporary jobs, and began to write poetry. By his early twenties he was well known in the Leningrad literary world. The aging Akhmatova made him her protégé. His poems were circulated among friends, and read aloud at secret literary gatherings, another new feature of this era.

  Predictably, all of that unofficial activity brought Brodsky to the attention of the secret police. Brodsky was first harassed, then arrested. The charge was “parasitism”: since Brodsky was not a poet licensed by the Writers’ Union, he qualified as a vagrant. At his trial in February 1964, the state produced witnesses, mostly unknown to Brodsky, who testified that he was “morally depraved, a draft-dodger, and a writer of anti-Soviet verses.” In his defense, there were letters and speeches from famous poets and writers, including Akhmatova. To all of this, the prosecution witnesses responded angrily:

  This is nothing but his fancy friends ringing all the bells and demanding, “Save the young man!” But he should be treated with forced labor, and no one will help him, no fancy friends. I do not know him personally, I know about him from the newspapers. And I am acquainted with the certificates. I’m suspicious about the certificates which deferred him from service in the army. I’m not a doctor, but I’m suspicious about it.14

  Clearly, the trial was directed not just against Brodsky, but against the remnants of the independent intellectual class, with their connections, their suspected opposition to Soviet authority, and their scorn for “labor.” And, in a certain sense, those who organized the trial had hit an accurate target: Brodsky did oppose Soviet authority; he did feel scorn for pointless, fruitless labor; and he did represent an alienated class, a group of people deeply frustrated by the clampdown which followed the Thaw. Knowing this perfectly well, Brodsky was not astonished or surprised by his arrest, and was not flummoxed by his trial. Instead, he sparred with the judge:

  JUDGE: What is your occupation?

  BRODSKY: I am a poet.

  JUDGE: Who recognized you as a poet? Who gave you the authority to call

  yourself a poet?

  BRODSKY: No one. Who gave me the authority to enter the human race?

  JUDGE: Have you studied for it?

  BRODSKY: For what?

  JUDGE: To become a poet. Why didn’t you take further education at a

  school where they prepare you, where you can learn?

  BRODSKY: I didn’t think poetry was a mat
ter of learning.

  JUDGE: What is it then?

  BRODSKY: I think it is . . . a gift from God.

  Later, asked if he had any petitions to make to the court, Brodsky said, “I would like to know why I am arrested.” The judge responded, “That’s a question, not a petition.” Said Brodsky, “In that case I have no petitions.”15

  Technically, Brodsky lost the argument: the judge condemned him to five years of hard labor in a prison colony near Arkhangelsk, on the grounds that he had “systematically failed to fulfill the obligations of a Soviet citizen, failed to produce anything of material value, failed to provide for his own upkeep, as is evident from his frequent change of jobs.” Citing statements made by the “Commission for Work with Young Poets,” the judge also declared that Brodsky—who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature— was “not a poet.” 16

  Yet, in another sense, Brodsky “won” in a way that previous generations of Russian prisoners could not have done. Not only did he publicly challenge the logic of the Soviet legal system, but his challenge was also recorded for posterity. A journalist took surreptitious notes at the trial, which were ultimately smuggled to the West. Thanks to this, Brodsky immediately became famous, in Russia and abroad. His behavior at his trial not only became a model for others to follow; it also inspired both Russian and foreign writers to petition the government for his release. After two years, release was granted, and he was eventually expelled from the USSR.

  Nothing like this had happened while Stalin was alive. “People are as ever thrown behind bars and as ever transported to the East,” wrote Valentyn Moroz, a Ukrainian dissident historian, shortly afterward. “But this time, they have not sunk into the unknown.”17 And that, in the end, was to be the greatest difference between Stalin’s prisoners, and the prisoners of Brezhnev and Andropov: the outside world knew about them, cared about them, and above all could affect their fate. Nevertheless, the Soviet regime was not growing more liberal—and events moved quickly in the wake of the Brodsky trial.