One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  He was gazing at something in the distance, trying to look uninterested, but seeing the cigarette grow shorter and the red tip creep closer to the holder every time Tsezar took an absentminded drag.

  That scavenger Fetyukov was there too, leeching onto Tsezar, standing right in front of him and staring hot-eyed at his mouth.

  Shukhov had not a shred of tobacco left, and couldn’t see himself getting hold of any before evening. He was on tenterhooks. Right then he seemed to yearn for that butt more than for freedom itself, but he wouldn’t lower himself like Fetyukov, wouldn’t look at Tsezar’s mouth.

  Tsezar was a mixture of all nationalities. No knowing whether he was Greek, Jew, or gypsy. He was still young. Used to make films, but they’d put him inside before he finished his first picture. He had a heavy black walrus mustache. They’d have shaved it off, only he was wearing it when they photographed him for the record.

  Fetyukov couldn’t stand it any longer. “Tsezar Markovich,” he drooled. “Save me just one little drag.”

  His face was twitching with greed.

  … Tsezar raised his half-closed eyelids and turned his dark eyes on Fetyukov. He’d taken to smoking a pipe to avoid this sort of thing—people barging in, begging for the last drag. He didn’t grudge them the tobacco, but he didn’t like being interrupted when he was thinking. He smoked to set his mind racing in pursuit of some idea. But the moment he lit a cigarette he saw “Leave a puff for me!” in several pairs of eyes.

  … He turned to Shukhov and said, “Here you are, Ivan Denisovich.”

  His thumb eased the glowing butt out of the short amber holder.

  That was all Shukhov had been waiting for. He sprang into action and gratefully caught hold of the butt, keeping the other hand underneath for safety. He wasn’t offended that Tsezar was too fussy to let him finish the cigarette in the holder. Some mouths are clean, others are dirty, and anyway his horny fingers could hold the glowing tip without getting burned. The great thing was that he’d cut the scavenger Fetyukov out and was now inhaling smoke, with the hot ash beginning to burn his lips. Ah, lovely. The smoke seemed to reach every part of his hungry body, he felt it in his feet as well as in his head.

  But no sooner had this blissful feeling pervaded his body than Ivan Denisovich heard a rumble of protest: “They’re taking our undershirts off us.”

  A zek’s life was always the same. Shukhov was used to it: relax for a minute and somebody was at your throat.

  What was this about undershirts? The camp commandant had issued them himself. No, it couldn’t be right.

  There were only two gangs ahead waiting to be searched, so everybody in 104 got a good view: the disciplinary officer, Lieutenant Volkovoy, walked over from HQ hut and barked at the warders. They had been frisking the men halfheartedly before Volkovoy appeared, but now they went mad, setting upon the prisoners like wild beasts, with the head warder yelling, “Unbutton your shirts!”

  Volkovoy was dreaded not just by the zeks and the warders but, so it was said, by the camp commandant himself. God had marked the scoundrel with a name to suit his wolfish looks.* He was lanky, dark, beetle-browed, quick on his feet: he would pop up when you least expected him, shouting, “Why are you all hanging around here?” There was no hiding from him. At one time he’d carried a lash, a plaited leather thing as long as your forearm. They said he thrashed people with it in the camp jail. Or else, when zeks were huddled outside the door during the evening hut search, he would creep up and slash you across the neck with it: “Why aren’t you lined up properly, you scum?” The crowd would reel back like an ebbing wave. The whipped man would clutch his burning neck, wipe the blood away, and say nothing: he didn’t want a spell in the hole as well.

  Just lately he’d stopped carrying his lash for some reason.

  In frosty weather, body searches were usually less strict in the morning than in the evening; the prisoner simply undid his jacket and held its skirts away from his body. Prisoners advanced five at a time, and five warders stood ready for them. They slapped the sides of each zek’s belted jerkin, and tapped the one permitted pocket on his right knee. They would be wearing gloves themselves, and if they felt something strange they didn’t immediately pull it out but lazily asked what it was.

  What would you expect to find on a zek in the morning? A knife? They don’t carry knives out, they bring them in. Just make sure he hasn’t got three kilograms of food on him, to run away with—that’s all that matters in the morning. At one time they got so worried about the two hundred grams every zek took with him for dinner that each gang was ordered to make a wooden chest to hold the lot. Why the bastards thought that would do any good was a mystery. They were probably just out to make life more miserable, give the men something extra to worry about. You took a bite and looked hard at your bread before you put it in the chest. But the pieces were still all alike, still just bread, so you couldn’t help fretting all the way to work in case somebody switched rations. Men argued with each other and sometimes came to blows. Then one day three men helped themselves to a chest full of bread and escaped from a work site in a truck. The brass came to their senses, had the chests chopped up in the guardhouse, and let everybody carry his own ration again.

  Another thing the searchers looked for in the morning: men wearing civilian dress under prison clothes. Never mind that everybody had been stripped of his civilian belongings long ago, and told that he’d get them back the day his sentence ended (a day nobody in that camp had yet seen).

  And one other thing—prisoners carrying letters for free workers to smuggle out. Only, if you searched everybody for letters, you’d be messing about till dinnertime.

  But Volkovoy only had to bawl out an order and the warders peeled off their gloves, made the prisoners unbelt the jerkins under which they were all hugging the warmth of the hut and unbutton their shirts, and set about feeling for anything hidden underneath contrary to regulations. A zek was allowed two shirts—shirt and undershirt; everything else must come off. That was the order from Volkovoy relayed from rank to rank. The teams that had gone past earlier were the lucky ones. Some of them were already through the gates, but for those left behind, it was “Open up!” All those with too much on underneath must take it off right there in the cold.

  They made a start, but the result was confusion: the gates had already been cleared and the guards were bawling, “Hurry it up! Let’s go!” So Volkovoy swallowed his wrath and let 104 off lightly: note down those wearing anything extra, and make them turn everything in to the clothes store at the end of the day, together with an explanation in writing where and why they hid it.

  Shukhov was wearing only camp issue anyway: go ahead, he told them silently, have a feel, nothing here except a bare chest with a soul inside it. But a note was made of Tsezar’s flannel vest, and Buynovsky—surprise—had a little waistcoat or cummerbund of some sort. Buynovsky shouted at the top of his voice—he’d been used to torpedo-boats, and had spent less than three months in the camp. “You have no right to make people undress in freezing cold! You don’t know Article 9 of the Criminal Code!”

  But they did have. They did know. It’s you, brother, who don’t know anything yet!

  The captain kept blazing away at them: “You aren’t real Soviet people!”

  Volkovoy didn’t mind Article 9, but at this he looked as black as a thundercloud.

  “Ten days’ strict regime!” he shouted.

  “Starting this evening,” he told the head warder, lowering his voice.

  They never like putting a man in the hole first thing in the morning: it means the loss of one man-shift. Let him sweat and strain all day, and sling him in the hole at night.

  The jailhouse stood nearby, to the left of the midway: a stone building, with two wings. The second wing had been added that autumn—there wasn’t room enough in just one. It was an eighteen-cell jail and there were walled-off recesses for solitary confinement. The rest of the camp was built of wood, only the jail was of stone
.

  Now that the cold had been let in under their shirts, there was no getting rid of it. They had all muffled themselves up for nothing. And the dull pain in Shukhov’s back would not go away. If only he could lie down there and then on a cot in sick bay and sleep. He had no other wish in the world. Just a good heavy blanket.

  The zeks stood near the gate buttoning and belting themselves, with the guards outside yelling, “Hurry it up! Let’s go!”

  And the work assigner was also shoving them from behind and shouting, “Let’s go! Look alive!”

  Through the first gate. Into the outer guarded area. Through the second gate. Between the railings by the guardhouse.

  “Halt!” roared the sentry. “Like a flock of sheep! Sort yourselves out in fives!”

  By now the darkness was lifting. The bonfire lit by the convoy guards was burning out. They always got a good fire going before work parade—so they could keep warm and see better to count.

  One of the sentries counted them off in a loud, harsh voice: “First five! Second! Third!”

  And the groups of five peeled off and moved forward in separate ranks so that, looking from the front or from behind, you saw five heads, five trunks, and ten legs.

  A second sentry stood by the railings opposite, silently checking the count.

  A lieutenant also stood watching.

  All this on behalf of the administration.

  Every man was more precious than gold. A single head short behind the wire and your own head would make up for it.

  The gang closed up again.

  Now the escort party’s sergeant was counting.

  And again the groups of five detached themselves and went forward in separate ranks.

  The assistant guard commander checked the count from the other side.

  And a lieutenant double-checked.

  All this on behalf of the convoy.

  On no account must they make a mistake. Sign for one head too many and your own would make up the number.

  There were escort troops all over the place. They held the Power Station column in a semicircular embrace, automatic weapons leveled, stuck right in your mug. Then there were the handlers with their gray dogs. One dog bared its teeth as though laughing at the zeks. The convoy were all wearing short fur coats, except for half a dozen in sheepskins. The whole shift shared the sheepskins—you put one on when it was your turn to go up on the watchtower.

  Once again the convoy mixed the teams together and re-counted the Power Station column by fives.

  “The cold is worst at sunup,” the captain told the world. “It’s the lowest point of nighttime temperature loss.”

  The captain was fond of explaining things. Ask him and he’d work out for you whether the moon would be new or old on whatever day in whichever year you liked.

  The captain was going downhill while you watched. His cheeks were sunken. But he kept his spirits up.

  Outside camp the frost, with that nagging little wind blowing, nipped even Shukhov’s case-hardened features painfully. Realizing that it would be blowing in his face all the way to the Power Station, he decided to put his face cloth on. He and many of the others had a bit of rag with two long strings to tie on when they were marched into the wind. The zeks found that it helped. He buried his face in it up to his eyes, drew the strings around over the lobes of his ears, and tied them behind his head. Then he covered the back of his neck with the back flap of his cap and turned up his overcoat collar. Next he let down the front flap of his cap over his forehead. Seen from the front, he was nothing but eyes. He drew the rope end tight around his jacket. Everything was fine now, except that his mittens were not much good and his hands were stiff with cold already. He rubbed them together and clapped them, knowing that any minute now he would have to put them behind his back and keep them there the whole way.

  The escort commander recited the convict’s daily “prayer,” of which they were all heartily sick:

  “Your attention, prisoners! Keep strictly to your column on the march! No spreading out, no running into the column in front, no moving from rank to rank, keep your eyes straight ahead, keep your hands behind your backs and nowhere else! One step to the right or left will be considered an attempt to escape and the guards will open fire without warning! Leader—quick march!”

  The two foremost guards marched off along the road. The column in front wavered, shoulders began swaying, and the guards twenty paces to the right and left of the column, at intervals of ten paces, moved along, weapons at the ready.

  The snow on the road was packed tight and firm underfoot—none had fallen for a week. As they rounded the camp, the wind hit their faces from the side. Hands behind backs, heads lowered, the column moved off as if to a funeral. All you could see were the legs of the two or three men in front of you and the patch of trampled ground on which you were about to tread. From time to time a guard would yell: “Yu-40! Hands behind you! B-502! Close up!” Then the shouts became less frequent: keeping tabs wasn’t easy in that cutting wind. The guards weren’t allowed to tie rags around their faces, mind. Theirs wasn’t much of a job, either.

  When it was a bit warmer, they all talked on the march, however much they were yelled at. But today they kept their heads down, every man trying to shelter behind the man in front, thinking his own thoughts.

  A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually. Will they poke around in my mattress and find my bread ration? Can I get off work if I report sick tonight? Will the captain be put in the hole, or won’t he? How did Tsezar get his hands on his warm vest? Must have greased somebody’s palm in the storeroom, what else?

  Because he had eaten only cold food, and gone without his bread ration at breakfast, Shukhov felt emptier than usual. To stop his belly whining and begging for something to eat, he put the camp out of his mind and started thinking about the letter he was shortly going to write home.

  The column went past a woodworking plant (built by zeks), past a housing estate (zeks again had assembled these huts, but free workers lived in them), past the new recreation center (all their own work, from the foundations to the murals—but it was the free workers who watched films there), and out onto the open steppe, walking into the wind and the reddening sunrise. Not so much as a sapling to be seen out on the steppe, nothing but bare white snow to the left or right.

  In the year just beginning—1951—Shukhov was entitled to write two letters. He had posted his last in July, and got an answer in October. In Ust-Izhma the rules had been different—you could write every month if you liked. But what was there to say? Shukhov hadn’t written any more often than he did now.

  He had left home on 23 June 1941. That Sunday, people had come back from Mass in Polomnya and said, “It’s war.” The post office there had heard the news—nobody in Temgenyovo had a radio before the war. Shukhov knew from letters that nowadays there was piped radio jabbering away in every cottage.

  Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like. Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.

  They wrote twice a year as well, and there was no way in which he could understand how things were with them. So the kolkhoz had a new chairman—well, it had a new one every year, they never kept one any longer. So the kolkhoz had been enlarged—well, they’d enlarged it before and cut it down to size again. Then there was the news that those not working the required number of days had had their private plots trimmed to fifteen-hundredths of a hectare, or sometimes right up to the very house. There was, his wife wrote, also a law that people could be tried and put in jail for not working the norm, but that law hadn’t come into force for some reason.

  One thing Shukhov couldn’t take in at all was that, from what his wife wrote, not a single living soul had joined the kolkhoz since the
war: all the young lads and girls had somehow wangled their way to town to work in a factory, or else to the peat works. Half of the men hadn’t come back from the war, and those who had didn’t want anything to do with the kolkhoz: they just stayed at home and did odd jobs. The only men on the farm were the foreman Zakhar Vasilievich and the carpenter Tikhon, who was eighty-four but had married not long ago and had children. The kolkhoz was kept going by the women who’d been herded into it back in 1930. When they collapsed, it would drop dead with them.

  Try as he might, Shukhov couldn’t understand the bit about people living at home and working on the side. He knew what it was to be a smallholder, and he knew what it was to be in a kolkhoz, but living in the village and not working in it was something he couldn’t take in. Was it like when the men used to hire themselves out for seasonal work? How did they manage with the haymaking?

  But his wife told him that they’d given up hiring themselves out ages ago. They didn’t travel around carpentering anymore either—their part of the world was famous for its carpenters—and they’d given up making wicker baskets, there was no call for them. Instead, there was a lively new trade—dyeing carpets. A demobbed soldier had brought some stencils home, and it had become all the rage. There were more of these master dyers all the time. They weren’t on anybody’s payroll, they had no regular job, they just put in a month on the farm, for haymaking and harvest, and got a certificate saying that kolkhoz member so-and-so had leave of absence for personal reasons and was not in arrears. So they went all around the country, they even flew in airplanes to save their precious time, and they raked the money in by the thousand, dyeing carpets all over the place. They charged fifty rubles to make a carpet out of an old sheet that nobody wanted, and it only took about an hour to paint the pattern on. His wife’s dearest hope was that when he got home he would keep clear of the kolkhoz and take up dyeing himself. That way they could get out of the poverty she was struggling against, send their children to trade schools, and build themselves a new cottage in place of their old tumble-down place. All the dyers were building themselves new houses. Down by the railroad, houses now cost twenty-five thousand instead of the five thousand they cost before.