The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Those were the last months during which millions of Soviet people were still out of Stalin’s reach and could fight against Bolshevik slavery and organize their own independent existence. But the German leadership had no hesitations: on June 8, 1943, on the eve of the Kursk-Orlov battle, Hitler confirmed that a Russian independent army would never be created and that Germany needed Russians only as manpower. Hitler was unable to understand the historical fact that the opportunity to overthrow a Communist regime can come only from a popular movement, from an uprising of the long-suffering population. But Hitler was more afraid of such a Russia and such a victory than of a defeat. Even after Stalingrad, even after he had lost the Caucasus, Hitler did not notice anything new. While Stalin was assuming the role of the supreme defender of the nation, reintroducing the old Russian epaulettes, restoring the Orthodox Church, and dissolving the Comintern, Hitler was helping him as much as he could by ordering, in September, 1943, that all volunteer units be disarmed and assigned to guarding coal mines. Later, he changed his mind and transferred them to the Western front, to fight against the Allies.

  Such was, fundamentally, the end of the entire project of an independent Russian army. So what did Vlasov do? He did not quite know how bad things really were (he did not know that after his March and April journeys he was again considered a prisoner of war and was in danger); he adopted the irreparable and fatal course of hoping and to a certain extent attempting to reach an agreement with the Beast, whereas in dealing with apocalyptic beasts there is only one way to safety: unswerving firmness from the first minute to the last. But here one must ask whether such an avenue to safety ever existed for the liberation movement of the citizens of Russia. It was doomed right from the start to be one more victim on the 1917 sacrificial altar, which had not yet cooled off completely. The first war winter of 1941–1942, which destroyed several million Soviet prisoners of war, extended the long chain made out of victims’ bones—the chain begun in the summer, when unarmed people’s militia units had been sent to save Bolshevism.

  Thus, the already fading significance of this bitter volunteer struggle was altogether lost. These people were sent as cannon fodder in the fight against the Allies and against the French Resistance, that is, against the only forces with whom the Russians in Germany could have had a genuine feeling of solidarity, having experienced both the cruelty and the self-satisfaction of the Germans. This was the end of the secret hope cherished by those around Vlasov: If the British and Americans support Communists against Hitler, they simply must help a democratic non-Communist Russia in the same struggle. . . . At the downfall of the Third Reich, when it will become quite clear that the Soviet Union is increasing the pressure to extend its regime to all Europe and to the whole world, how could the West continue to support the Bolshevik dictatorship?

  But there was a gap between the Russian and the Western conscience which exists to this day. The West was fighting only against Hitler, and for this purpose all means and all allies were good, the Soviets above all. Not only could the West not concede that the Soviet people might have their own purposes which did not coincide with the goals of the Communist government; it did not want to admit any such thought, because it would have been embarrassing and difficult to live with. It is a tragicomic fact that on the leaflets which the Western allies were distributing among the anti-Bolshevik volunteer battalions on the Western front, they wrote: “We promise all defectors that they will be immediately sent back to the Soviet Union (to prison. . . .).”

  We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an antitank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting.

  In East Prussia, a trio of captured Vlasov men was being marched along the roadside a few steps away from me. At that moment a T-34 tank thundered down the highway. Suddenly one of the captives twisted around and dived underneath the tank. The tank veered, but the edge of its track crushed him nevertheless. The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He preferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.

  They had no choice. There was no other way for them to fight. They had no chance to find a way out, to safeguard their lives, by some more cautious mode of fighting. If “pure” surrender was considered unforgivable treason to the Motherland, then what about those who had taken up enemy arms? Our propaganda, in all its crudity, explained their conduct as: (1) treason (was it biologically based? carried in the bloodstream?); or (2) cowardice—which it certainly was not! A coward tries to find a spot where things are easy, soft, safe. And men could be induced to enter the Wehrmacht’s Vlasov detachments only in the last extremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of inexhaustible hatred of the Soviet regime, only with total contempt for their own safety. For they knew they would never have the faintest glimpse of mercy! When we captured them, we shot them as soon as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths. In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians.

  In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the world was to be a Russian.

  The Vlasov men had a presentiment of all this; they knew it ahead of time; nevertheless, on the left sleeve of their German uniforms they sewed the shield with the white-blue-red edging, the field of St. Andrew, and the letters “ROA.”

  However, by February, 1945, the First Division of the Russian Liberation Army had been formed, and the formation of the Second Division had begun. It was too late even to hypothesize that these divisions would ever fight together with the Germans. The old secret hope of the Vlasov leadership that a conflict would arise between the Soviets and the Allies was now gaining strength. This hope was reflected in a report by the German Ministry of Propaganda (in February, 1945): “The Vlasov movement does not consider itself bound for life and for death to Germany; there are within it strong pro-English feelings, and they are thinking about a change of course. It is not a national socialist movement, and they simply do not recognize the existence of the Jewish problem.”

  The breakdown of Germany, which by that time was total, made it possible for the commander of the division, Buniachenko, to take it out of the front line by his own decision; despite the opposition of the German generals, the division started fighting its way into Czechoslovakia. (On the way it freed Soviet prisoners of war, who joined it “so that Russians may all be together.”) The men reached the outskirts of Prague at the beginning of May. The Czechs had started an uprising in the capital on May 5 and asked them for help. On May 6 Buniachenko’s division entered Prague and, in a violent battle on May 7, saved both the uprising and the city. As if ironically, as if to confirm the farsightedness of the most shortsighted Germans, the first and last independent action of the First Vlasov Division was a blow dealt the Germans; it must have been a relief for all those Russian hearts which during the past three senseless and cruel years had accumulated so much bitterness and anger against them. (In those days the Czechs welcomed the Russians with flowers; they understood. But who knows whether all of them remembered later which Russians had saved their city? The official Soviet version is that Prague was liberated by the Soviet army. It is true that, in accordance with Stalin’s wishes, Churchill was in no hurry in those days to arm the inhabitants of Prague; and as to the U.S. army, it slowed down its advance in order to allow the Soviets to enter
the city first. Joseph Smrkovsky, who at that time was a leading Czech Communist, did not foresee the distant future and insulted the “traitors” of the Vlasov units. The only freedom which he wanted had to come from the Soviets.)

  Vlasov consistently refused to escape alone (a plane was ready to take him to Spain); in what must have been a paralysis of will, he gave up and accepted the end. During these last weeks his activity was limited to dispatching secret delegations in an effort to establish a contact with the British and Americans.

  The only sense the Vlasovites could see in all these events, so as to justify somehow their long dangling in the German noose, was in getting a chance to be useful to the Allies now that everything was finished. The hope kept glimmering, or rather burning high, that at this time, after the end of the war, the powerful English and American Allies would ask Stalin to change his domestic policy. The armies coming from the West and from the East were getting closer and closer; they might well clash over Hitler’s crushed remains, and that would be the time when the West could gain by saving and using the anti-Bolshevik Russians. The West simply had to understand that Bolshevism is an enemy for all mankind.

  But the West did not understand at all. The democratic West simply could not understand: What do you mean when you call yourselves a political opposition? An opposition exists inside your country? Why has it never publicly declared its existence? If you are dissatisfied with Stalin, go back home and, in the first subsequent election, do not re-elect him. That would be the honest course. But why did you have to take up arms, and, what is worse, German arms? No, we have to extradite you; it would be terribly bad form to act otherwise, and we might spoil our relations with a gallant ally.

  In World War II the West kept defending its own freedom and defended it for itself. As for us and as for Eastern Europe, it buried us in an even more absolute and hopeless slavery.

  Vlasov’s last effort was his statement that the leadership of the ROA was ready to appear before an international court and that turning the army over to the Soviets for extermination contravened international law, since it would involve extraditing an opposition movement. But nobody heard that squeaking. Most of the American military commanders were amazed to learn about the existence of Russians who were not Soviets; they thought it quite natural to hand them all over to the Soviet state.

  The ROA not only surrendered to the Americans; it implored them to accept its capitulation and begged for one thing only: the promise that the Americans would not extradite them to the Soviets. Midlevel American officers who did not know anything about big politics sometimes naïvely gave such promises. (But all of them were broken; the ROA soldiers were deceived.) The First Division (on May 11 near Pilsen) found itself facing an armed wall of American military men; it was almost the same with the Second Division. The Americans refused to consider them prisoners of war and refused to let them into their zone. In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

  At the same time, in May, 1945, Great Britain also acted as a loyal ally of the Soviets; the usual modesty of the Soviet leadership prevented this action from being publicized. The English turned over to the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with a perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The gist of the matter is that the Cossacks meant to fight to the death or emigrate overseas, maybe to Paraguay, maybe to Indochina, anywhere—as long as they would not have to surrender to the Soviets alive. The British provided the Cossacks with military food rations of extra quality, dressed them in fine British uniforms, promised them that they could serve in the British army, and even held military reviews. Therefore, the Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28 all officers, from squadron commanders upward, were summoned separately from their soldiers to the town of Judenburg, on the pretext that they would confer with Field Marshal Alexander about the future fate of the army. En route the officers were surreptitiously placed under a strong escort (the British beat them until they bled), and the whole motorcade was gradually surrounded by Soviet tanks. When they arrived in Judenburg, police vans were waiting, as were armed guards holding lists of names. They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. Among the generals thus turned over to the Soviets, the majority were émigrés who had fought as allies of the British during World War I. During the Civil War the British had not had enough time to show their gratitude; now they were paying their debt. In the following days the British extradited the enlisted men as treacherously, in trains which were covered with barbed wire.

  In the meantime, a Cossack transport had arrived from Italy, carrying 35,000 people. They stopped in the Drava Valley near Lienz. There were Cossack soldiers among them, but also many old people, children, and women; none of them wanted to go back to their beloved Cossack rivers. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. The British commanding officer, Major Davies, whose name will certainly survive from now on in Russian history at least, could be exuberantly friendly or merciless, as needed. After the surreptitious extradition of the officers, he openly announced on June 1 that there would be a compulsory extradition. Thousands of voices yelled: “We will not go!” Black flags appeared over the refugees’ camp, where church services were being celebrated non-stop: people arranging their own funeral services while they were still alive! . . . British tanks and soldiers arrived. The order was given through loudspeakers for everybody to get into the trucks. The crowd was singing hymns from the requiem service; the priests lifted their crosses high above their heads; the young people formed a chain around the elderly, the women, and the children. Then British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them onto the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. As the crowd retreated, first the platform on which the priests were standing broke down under their weight; then the camp fence collapsed. The crowd rushed to the bridge over the Drava; British tanks rolled on to stop them, but entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death were buried still exists in Lienz.)

  In those same days, just as treacherously and mercilessly, the British extradited to the Yugoslav Communists thousands of their regime’s enemies who had been Great Britain’s allies in 1941! They, too, were to be shot and exterminated without trial.

  But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

  I myself fell under Vlasov fire a few days before my arrest. There were Russians in the East Prussian “sack” which we had surrounded, and one night at the end of January their unit tried to break through our position to the west, without artillery preparation, in silence. There was no firmly delineated front in any case, and they penetrated us in depth, catching my sound-locator battery, which was out in front, in a pincers. I just barely managed to pull it back by the last remaining road. But then I went back for a piece of damaged equipment, and, before dawn, I watched as they suddenly rose fr
om the snow where they’d dug in, wearing their winter camouflage cloaks, hurled themselves with a cheer on the battery of a 152-millimeter gun battalion at Adlig Schwenkitten, and knocked out twelve heavy cannon with hand grenades before they could fire a shot. Pursued by their tracer bullets, our last little group ran almost two miles in fresh snow to the bridge across the Passarge River. And there they were stopped.

  Soon after that I was arrested. And now, on the eve of the Victory Parade, here we all were sitting together on the board bunks of the Butyrki. I took puffs from their cigarettes and they took puffs from mine. And paired with one or another of them, I used to carry out the six-bucket tin latrine barrel.

  Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of the Vlasov men have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy. Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland? One cannot explain this treason biologically. It has to have had a social cause.

  Because, as the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don’t rampage.

  Then picture to yourself a field in which starved, neglected, crazed horses are rampaging back and forth.

  That same spring many Russian émigrés were also in those cells.

  It was very like a dream: the resurrection of buried history. The weighty tomes on the Civil War had long since been completed and their covers shut tight. The causes for which people fought in it had been decided. The chronology of its events had been set down in textbooks. The leaders of the White movement were, it appeared, no longer our contemporaries on earth but mere ghosts of a past that had melted away. The Russian émigrés had been more cruelly dispersed than the tribes of Israel. And, in our Soviet imagination, if they were still dragging out their lives somewhere, it was as pianists in stinking little restaurants, as lackeys, laundresses, beggars, morphine and cocaine addicts, and virtual corpses. Right up to 1941, when the war came, it would have been impossible to find out from any hints in our newspapers, our lofty literature, our criticism of the arts (nor did our own well-fed masters of art and literature help us find out) that Russia Abroad was a great spiritual world, that in it Russian philosophy was living and developing; that out there were philosophers like Bulgakov, Berdyayev, and Lossky; that Russian art had enchanted the world; that Rachmaninoff, Chaliapin, Benois, Diaghilev, Pavlova, and the Don Cossack Chorus of Jaroff were out there; that profound studies of Dostoyevsky were being undertaken (at a time when he was anathema in the Soviet Union); that the incredible writer Nabokov-Sirin also existed out there; that Bunin himself was still alive and had been writing for all these twenty years; that journals of the arts were being published; that theatrical works were being produced; that Russians from the same areas of Russia came together in groups where their mother tongue could be heard; and that émigré men had not given up marrying émigré women, who in turn presented them with children, which meant young people our own age.