The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Under Paul, the abolition of capital punishment was confirmed. (Despite his many wars, there were no military tribunals attached to military units.) And during the whole long reign of Alexander I, capital punishment was introduced only for war crimes that took place during a campaign (1812). (Right at this point, some people will say to us: What about deaths from running the gantlet? Yes, indeed, there were, of course, hidden executions—for that matter, one can literally drive a person to death with a trade-union meeting!) But the yielding up of one’s God-given life because others, sitting in judgment, have so voted simply did not take place in our country even for crimes of state for an entire half-century—from Pugachev to the Decembrists.

  The blood of the five Decembrists whetted the appetite of our state. From then on, execution for crimes of state was no longer prohibited nor was it forgotten, right up to the February Revolution in 1917. It was confirmed by the Statutes of 1845 and 1904, and further reinforced by the criminal statutes of the army and navy.

  And how many people were executed in Russia during that period? We have already, in Chapter 8 above, cited the figures given by liberal leaders of 1905–1907. Let us add to them the verified figures of N. S. Tagantsev, the expert on Russian criminal law. Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia. For a period of thirty years—from 1876 to 1904 (the period of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries and the use of terrorism—a terrorism which did not consist merely of intentions murmured in the kitchen of a communal apartment—a period of mass strikes and peasant revolts; the period when the parties of the future revolution were created and grew in strength)—486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country. (This figure includes executions of ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!) During the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an abrupt end.

  When the Provisional Government came to power, it abolished capital punishment entirely. In July, 1917, however, it was reinstated in the active army and front-line areas for military crimes, murder, rape, assault, and pillage (very widespread in those areas at that time). This was one of the most unpopular of the measures which destroyed the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks’ slogan before the Bolshevik coup d’état was: “Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!”

  If we are to judge by official documents, capital punishment was restored in all its force in June, 1918. No, it was not “restored”; instead, a new era of executions was inaugurated. If one takes the view that Latsis is not deliberately understating the real figures but simply lacks complete information, and that the Revtribunals carried on approximately the same amount of judicial work as the Cheka performed in an extrajudicial way, one concludes that in the twenty central provinces of Russia in a period of sixteen months (June, 1918, to October, 1919) more than sixteen thousand persons were shot, which is to say more than one thousand a month.

  However, it may not even have been these individual executions, with or without formally pronounced death sentences, which added up to thousands and inaugurated the new era of executions in 1918 that stunned and froze Russia. Still more terrible to us was the practice—initially followed by both warring sides and, later, by the victors only—of sinking barges loaded with uncounted, unregistered hundreds, unidentified even by a roll call. (Naval officers in the Gulf of Finland, in the White, Caspian, and Black seas, and, as late as 1920, hostages in Lake Baikal.) This is outside the scope of our narrow history of courts and trials, but it belongs to the history of morals, which is where everything else originates as well. In all our centuries, from the first Ryurik on, had there ever been a period of such cruelties and so much killing as during the post-October Civil War?

  At one time 265 condemned prisoners were awaiting execution in Leningrad’s Kresty Prison alone. And during the whole year, it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in Kresty alone.

  And what kind of evildoers were these condemned men? Where did so many plotters and troublemakers come from? Among them, for example, were six collective farmers from nearby Tsarskoye Selo who were guilty of the following crime: After they had finished mowing the collective farm with their own hands, they had gone back and mowed a second time along the hummocks to get a little hay for their own cows. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee refused to pardon all six of these peasants, and the sentence of execution was carried out.

  What cruel and evil Saltychikha, what utterly repulsive and infamous serf-owner would have killed six peasants for their miserable little clippings of hay? If one had dared to beat them with birch switches even once, we would know about it and read about it in school and curse that name. But now, heave the corpses into the water, and pretty soon the surface is all smooth again and no one’s the wiser. And one must cherish the hope that someday documents will confirm the report of my witness, who is still alive. Even if Stalin had killed no others, I believe he deserved to be drawn and quartered just for the lives of those six Tsarskoye Selo peasants! And yet they still dare shriek at us (from Peking, from Tirana, from Tbilisi, yes, and plenty of big-bellies in the Moscow suburbs are doing it too): “How could you dare expose him?” “How could you dare disturb his great shade?” “Stalin belongs to the world Communist movement!” But in my opinion all he belongs to is the Criminal Code. “The peoples of all the world remember him as a friend.” But not those on whose backs he rode, whom he slashed with his knout.

  However, let us return to being dispassionate and impartial once more. Of course, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee would certainly have “completely abolished” the supreme measure, as promised, but unfortunately what happened was that in 1936 the Father and Teacher “completely abolished” the All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself. And the Supreme Soviet that succeeded it had an eighteenth-century ring. “The supreme measure” became a punishment once again, and ceased to be some kind of incomprehensible “social defense.”

  As for the executions of 1937–1938, what legal expert, what criminal historian, will provide us with verified statistics? Where is that Special Archive we might be able to penetrate in order to read the figures? There is none. There is none and there never will be any. Therefore we dare report only those figures mentioned in rumors that were quite fresh in 1939–1940, when they were drifting around under the Butyrki arches, having emanated from the high- and middle-ranking Yezhov men of the NKVD who had been arrested and had passed through those cells not long before. (And they really knew!) The Yezhov men said that during those two years of 1937 and 1938 a half-million “political prisoners” had been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 480,000 blatnye—habitual thieves—in addition. According to the testimony from Krasnodar, in 1937–1938 in the main building of the GPU on Proletarskaya Street they shot more than two hundred people every night.

  In May, 1947, Iosif Vissarionovich inspected his new starched dickey in his mirror, liked it, and dictated to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet the Decree on the Abolition of Capital Punishment in peacetime (replacing it with a new maximum term of twenty-five years—it was a good pretext for introducing the so-called quarter).

  But our people are ungrateful, criminal, and incapable of appreciating generosity. Therefore, after the rulers had creaked along and eked out two and a half years without the death penalty, on January 12, 1950, a new decree was published that constituted an about-face: “In view of petitions pouring in from the national republics [the Ukraine?], from the trade unions [oh, those lovely trade unions; they always know what’s needed], from peasant organizations [this was dictated by a sleepwalker: the Gracious Sovereign had stomped to death all peasant organizations way back in the Year of the Great Turning Point], and also
from cultural leaders [now, that is quite likely],” capital punishment was restored for a conglomeration of “traitors of the Motherland, spies, and subversives-diversionists.” (And, of course, they forgot to repeal the quarter, the twenty-five-year sentence, which remained in force.)

  And once this return to our familiar friend, to our beheading blade, had begun, things went further with no effort at all: in 1954, for premeditated murder; in May, 1961, for theft of state property, and counterfeiting, and terrorism in places of imprisonment (this was directed especially at prisoners who killed informers and terrorized the camp administration); in July, 1961, for violating the rules governing foreign currency transactions; in February, 1962, for threatening the lives of (shaking a fist at) policemen or Communist vigilantes; then for rape; and immediately thereafter for bribery.

  But all of this is simply temporary—until complete abolition. And that’s how it’s described today too.

  And so it turns out that Russia managed longest of all without capital punishment in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

  Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such reading, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.

  Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky

  Aleksandr Shtrobinder

  Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov

  Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin

  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky

  Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova

  In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died in camps that they have been able to collect—several dozen of them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment—somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together. And then they leave without saying good-bye.

  And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.

  So that they should not have died in vain!

  And I, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at these at least:

  Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky—shot in Moscow in 1918.

  Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student—shot in Petrograd in 1918.

  Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov—shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.

  Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General Staff—shot in 1935.

  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist—shot in Orel in 1938.

  Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova—shot in a camp on the Yenisei in 1942.

  They say that Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future marshal, was twice taken into the forest at night for a supposed execution. The firing squad leveled its rifles at him, and then they dropped them, and he was taken back to prison. And this was also making use of “the supreme measure” as an interrogator’s trick. But it was all right; nothing happened; and he is alive and healthy and doesn’t even cherish a grudge about it.

  And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be killed. Why is it that the death penalty has such a hypnotic effect? Those pardoned recall hardly anyone in their cell who offered any resistance.

  Chapter 12

  Tyurzak

  Tyurzak = TYURemnoye ZAKlyucheniye, “prison confinement.” Tyurzak is an official term.

  IN DECEMBER, 1917, it had already become clear that it was altogether impossible to do without prisons, that some people simply couldn’t be left anywhere except behind bars (see Chapter 2, above), because—well, simply because there was no place for them in the new society. The attention of the new prison authorities was directed toward the combat readiness of the prison guards outside the walls and the takeover of the stock of prisons inherited from the Tsar. Fortunately, it turned out that the Civil War had not resulted in the destruction of all the principal central prisons and jails.

  So we recall the Solovetsky Islands (nicknamed Solovki): it was such a good place, cut off from communication with the outside world for half a year at a time. You couldn’t be heard from there no matter how loud you shouted, and you could even burn yourself up for all anyone would know.

  From our experience of the past and our literature of the past we have derived a naïve faith in the power of a hunger strike. But the hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is afraid of public opinion. Only in such circumstances can it be effective.

  The Tsarist jailers were still inexperienced. They got nervous if one of their prisoners went on a hunger strike; they exclaimed over it; they looked after him; they put him in the hospital. There are many examples, but this work is not about them. It is even humorous to note that it was enough for Valentinov to go on a hunger strike for twelve days: as a result, he not only achieved some relaxation in the regimen but was totally released from interrogation—whereupon he went to Lenin in Switzerland. Even in the Orel central hard-labor prison the strikers always won. They got the regimen relaxed in 1912 and further relaxed in 1913, to the point of general access to outdoor walks for all political hard-labor prisoners—who were obviously so unrestricted by their supervisors that they managed to compose and send out to freedom their appeal “to the Russian people.” (And this from the hard-labor prisoners of a central prison!) Furthermore, it was published. (It’s enough to make one’s eyes pop out of one’s head! Someone has to have been crazy!)

  In the Revolution of 1905 and the years following it, the prisoners felt themselves to be masters of the prison to such an extent that they did not even go to the trouble of declaring a hunger strike; they simply destroyed prison property (so-called “obstructions”), or went so far as to declare a strike, although it might seem that for prisoners this would have hardly any meaning.

  In the twenties, the lively picture of hunger strikes grows clouded (though that depends, of course, on the point of view . . .). Still, it was possible in those years to achieve at least one’s personal demands by this means.

  From the thirties on, state thinking about hunger strikes took a new turn. What did the state want with even such watered-down, isolated, half-suppressed hunger strikes? Wasn’t the ideal picture one of prisoners who had no will of their own, nor the capacity to make their own decisions—and of a prison administration that did their thinking and their deciding for them? These are, if you will, the only prisoners who can exist in the new society. And so from the beginning of the thirties, they stopped accepting declarations of hunger strikes as legal. “The hunger strike as a method of resistance no longer exists,” they proclaimed to Yekaterina Olitskaya in 1932, and they said the same thing to many others. The government has abolished your hunger strikes—and that’s that. But Olitskaya refused to obey and began to fast. They let her go on fasting in solitary for fifteen days. Then they took her to the hospital and put milk and dried crusts in front of her to tempt her. But she stood firm, and on the nineteenth day she won her victory: she got an extended outdoor period and newspapers and parcels from the Political Red Cross. (That’s how one had to moan and groan in order to receive those legitimate relief parcels!) Overall, however, it was an insignificant victory and paid for too dearly. Olitskaya recalls such foolish hunger strikes on the part of others too: people starved up to twenty days in order to get delivery of a parcel or a change of companions for their outdoor walk. Was it worth it? After all, in the N
ew Type Prison one’s strength, once lost, could not be restored. The religious-sect member Koloskov fasted until he died on the twenty-fifth day. Could one in general permit oneself to fast in the New Type Prison? After all, the new prison heads, operating in secrecy and silence, had acquired several powerful methods of combating hunger strikes:

  1. Patience on the part of the administration. (We have seen enough of what this meant from preceding examples.)

  2. Deception. This, too, can be practiced thanks to total secrecy. When every step is reported by the newspapers, you aren’t going to do much deceiving. But in our country, why not? In 1933, in the Khabarovsk Prison, S. A. Chebotaryev, demanding that his family be informed of his whereabouts, fasted for seventeen days. (He had come from the Chinese Eastern Railroad in Manchuria and then suddenly disappeared, and he was worried about what his wife might be thinking.) On the seventeenth day, Zapadny, the Deputy Chief of the Provincial GPU, and the Khabarovsk Province prosecutor (their ranks indicate that lengthy hunger strikes were really not so frequent) came to see him and showed him a telegraph receipt (There, they said, they had informed his wife!), and thus persuaded him to take some broth. And the receipt was a fake!

  3. Forced artificial feeding. This method was adapted, without any question, from experience with wild animals in captivity. And it could be employed only in total secrecy. By 1937 artificial feeding was, evidently, already in wide use.

  4. A new view of the hunger strike: that hunger strikes are a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and must be punished with a new prison term.

  Approximately in the middle of 1937, a new directive came: From now on the prison administration will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes! The last vestige of personal responsibility on the part of the jailers had disappeared! (In these circumstances, the prosecutor of the province would not have come to visit Chebotaryev!) Furthermore, so that the interrogator shouldn’t get disturbed, it was also announced that days spent on hunger strike by a prisoner under interrogation should be crossed off the official interrogation period. In other words, it should not only be considered that the hunger strike had not taken place, but the prisoner should be regarded as not having been in prison at all during the period of the strike. Thus the interrogator would not be to blame for being behind schedule. Let the only perceptible result of the hunger strike be the prisoner’s exhaustion!