The body becomes worn out at that kind of work, and everything that is feminine in a woman, whether it be constant or whether it be monthly, ceases to be. If she manages to last to the next “commissioning,” the person who undresses before the physicians will be not at all like the one whom the trusties smacked their lips over in the bath corridor: she has become ageless; her shoulders stick out at sharp angles, her breasts hang down in little dried-out sacs; superfluous folds of skin form wrinkles on her flat buttocks; there is so little flesh above her knees that a big enough gap has opened up for a sheep’s head to stick through or even a soccer ball; her voice has become hoarse and rough and her face is tanned by pellagra. (And, as a gynecologist will tell you, several months of logging will suffice for the prolapse and falling out of a more important organ.)
Work—the miracle worker!
External legislation (for outside Gulag) seemingly abetted camp love. An All-Union Decree of July 8, 1944, on the strengthening of marriage ties was accompanied by an unpublished decree of the Council of People’s Commissars and an instruction of the People’s Commissariat of Justice dated November 27, 1944, in which it was stated that the court was required to dissolve unconditionally a marriage with a spouse in prison (or in an insane asylum) at the first indication of desire on the part of a free Soviet person, and even to encourage this by freeing such a person from the fee for issuance of a divorce decree. (And at the same time no one was obliged legally to inform the other spouse of the accomplished divorce!) By this token, citizenesses and citizens were called on to abandon their imprisoned wives and husbands all the more speedily in misfortune. And prisoners were correspondingly invited . . . to forget about their marriages all the more thoroughly.
Yes, the zeks were to forget about their marriages, but Gulag instructions also forbade indulgence in love affairs as a diversionary action against the production plan. After all, these unscrupulous women who wandered about the work sites, forgetting their obligations to the state and the Archipelago, were ready to lie down on their backs anywhere at all—on the damp ground, on wood chips, on road stone, on slag, on iron shavings—and the plan would collapse! And the Five-Year Plan would mark time! And there would be no prize money for the Gulag chiefs! And besides some of those zechkas secretly nurtured a desire to get pregnant and, on the strength of this pregnancy, exploiting the humanitarianism of our laws, to snatch several months off their terms, which were often a short three or five years anyway, and not work at all those months. That was why Gulag instructions required that any prisoners caught cohabiting should be immediately separated, and that the less useful of the two should be sent off on a prisoner transport.
Plundered of everything that fulfills female life and indeed human life in general—of family, motherhood, the company of friends, familiar and perhaps even interesting work, in some cases perhaps in art or among books, and crushed by fear, hunger, abandonment, and savagery—what else could the women camp inmates turn to except love? With God’s blessing the love which came might also be almost not of the flesh, because to do it in the bushes was shameful, to do it in the barracks in everyone’s presence was impossible, and the man was not always up to it, and then the jailers would drag the culprits out of every hideout (seclusion) and put them in the punishment block. But from its unfleshly character, as the women remember today, the spirituality of camp love became even more profound. And it was particularly because of the absence of the flesh that this love became more poignant than out in freedom! Women who were already elderly could not sleep nights because of a chance smile, because of some fleeting mark of attention they had received. So sharply did the light of love stand out against the dirty, murky camp existence!
But it was not only the custodial staff and camp chiefs who would break up camp marriages. The Archipelago was such an upside-down land that in it a man and a woman could be split up by what ought to have united them even more firmly: the birth of a child. A month before giving birth a pregnant woman was transported to another camp, where there was a camp hospital with a maternity ward and where husky little voices shouted that they did not want to be zeks because of the sins of their parents.
And these issues of whether to give birth or not, which were difficult enough for any woman at all, were still more confused for a woman camp inmate. And what would happen to the child subsequently? And if such a fickle camp fate gave one the chance to become pregnant by one’s loved one, then how could one go ahead and have an abortion? Should you have the child? That meant certain separation immediately, and when you left would he not pair off with some other woman in the same camp? And what kind of child would it be? (Because of the malnutrition of the parents it was often defective.) And when you stopped nursing the child and were sent away (you still had many years left to serve), would they keep an eye out so as not to do him in? And would you be able to take the child into your own family? (For some this was excluded.) And if you didn’t take him, would your conscience then torment you all your life?
But why rake up all that past? Why reopen the old wounds of those who were living in Moscow and in country houses at the time, writing for the newspapers, speaking from rostrums, going off to resorts and abroad?
Why recall all that when it is still the same even today? After all, you can only write about whatever “will not be repeated.”
Chapter 9
The Trusties
“Trusties” were prisoners who got themselves what were by camp standards soft jobs. They were despised by other prisoners.
Chapter 10
In Place of Politicals
BUT IN THAT grim world where everyone gnawed up whomever he could, where a human’s life and conscience were bought for a ration of soggy bread—in that world who and where were the politicals, bearers of the honor and the torch of all the prison populations of history?
We have already traced how the original “politicals” were divided, stifled, and exterminated.
And in their place?
Well—what did take their place? Since then we have had no politicals. And we could not possibly have any. What kind of “politicals” could we have if universal justice had been established? They simply . . . abolished the politicals. There are none, and there won’t be any.
The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin. They bought it. The bust was big and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand barrow, both of them together, but the manager’s status did not allow him to. “All right, you’ll manage it if you take it slowly.” And he went off ahead. The old watchman couldn’t work out how to do it for a long time. If he tried to carry it at his side, he couldn’t get his arm around it. If he tried to carry it in front of him, his back hurt and he was thrown off balance backward. Finally he figured out how to do it. He took off his belt, made a noose for Comrade Stalin, put it around his neck, and in this way carried it over his shoulder through the village. Well, there was nothing here to argue about. It was an open-and-shut case. Article 58–8, terrorism, ten years.
A shepherd in a fit of anger swore at a cow for not obeying: “You collective-farm wh—!” And he got 58, and a term.
A deaf and dumb carpenter got a term for counterrevolutionary agitation! How? He was laying floors in a club. Everything had been removed from a big hall, and there was no nail or hook anywhere. While he was working, he hung his jacket and his service cap on a bust of Lenin. Someone came in and saw it. 58, ten years.
The children in a collective farm club got out of hand, had a fight, and accidentally knocked some poster or other off the wall with their backs. The two eldest were sentenced under Article 58. (On the basis of the Decree of 1935, children from the age of twelve on had full criminal responsibility for all crimes!) They also sentenced the parents for having allegedly told them to and sent them to do it.
A sixteen-year-old Chuvash schoolboy made a mistake in Russian in a slogan in the wall newspaper; it was not his native language. Article 58, five years.
&
nbsp; And in a state farm bookkeeping office the slogan hung: “Life has become better; life has become more gay. (Stalin)” And someone added a letter in red pencil to Stalin’s name, making the slogan read as though life had become more gay for Stalin. They didn’t look for the guilty party—but sentenced the entire bookkeeping office.
Boris Mikhailovich Vinogradov, with whom I served time in prison, had in his youth been a locomotive engineer. After the workers’ school and an institute, he became a railway transport engineer (and was not put immediately on Party work, as often happens too), and he was a good engineer (in the sharashka he carried out complex calculations in gas dynamics for jet turbines). But by 1941, it’s true, he had become the Party organizer of the Moscow Institute for Railroad Engineering. In the bitter Moscow days of October 16 and 17, 1941, seeking instructions, he telephoned but no one replied. He went to the District Party Committee, the City Party Committee, the Provincial Party Committee, and found no one there; everyone had scattered to the winds; their chambers were empty. And it seems he didn’t go any higher than that. He returned to his own people in the Institute and declared: “Comrades! All the leaders have run away. But we are Communists, we will join the defense.” And they did just that. But for that remark of his, “They have all run away,” those who had run away sent him who had not run away to prison for eight years—for Anti-Soviet Propaganda. He was a quiet worker, a dedicated friend, and only in heart-to-heart conversation would he disclose that he believed, believes, and will go on believing. And he never wore it on his sleeve.
Irina Tuchinskaya was arrested while leaving church. (The intention was to arrest their whole family.) And she was charged with having “prayed in church for the death of Stalin.” (Who could have heard that prayer?!) Terrorism! Twenty-five years!
However, for the most part fantastic accusations were not really required. There existed a very simple standardized collection of charges from which it was enough for the interrogator to pick one or two and stick them like postage stamps on an envelope:
Discrediting the Leader
A negative attitude toward the collective-farm structure
A negative attitude toward state loans (and what normal person could have had a positive attitude!)
A negative attitude toward the Stalinist constitution
A negative attitude toward whatever was the immediate, particular measure being carried out by the Party
Sympathy for Trotsky
Friendliness toward the United States
Etc., etc., etc.
The pasting on of these stamps of varying value was monotonous work requiring no artistry whatsoever. All the interrogator needed was the next victim in line, so as not to lose time. Such victims were selected on the basis of arrest quotas by Security chiefs of local administrative districts, military units, transportation departments, and educational institutions. And so that the Security chiefs did not have to strain their brains, denunciations from informers came in very handy.
In the conflicts between people in freedom, denunciations were the superweapon, the X-rays: it was sufficient to direct an invisible little ray at your enemy—and he fell. And it always worked. I can affirm that I heard many stories in imprisonment about the use of denunciations in lovers’ quarrels: a man would remove an unwanted husband; a wife would dispose of a mistress, or a mistress would dispose of a wife; or a mistress would take revenge on her lover because she had failed to separate him from his wife.
Europe, of course, won’t believe it. Not until Europe itself serves time will she believe it. Europe has believed our glossy magazines and can’t get anything else into her head.
Chapter 11
The Loyalists
HERE WE SHALL concern ourselves particularly with those orthodox Communists who made a display of their ideological orthodoxy first to the interrogator, then in the prison cells, and then in camp to all and everyone, and now recall their camp past in this light.
By a strange selective process none of them will be sloggers. Such people ordinarily had held big jobs before their arrest, and had had an enviable situation; and in camp they found it hardest of all to reconcile themselves to extinction, and they fought fiercest of all to rise above the universal zero. In this category were all the interrogators, prosecutors, judges, and camp officials who had landed behind bars. And all the theoreticians, dogmatists, and loud-mouths.
We have to understand them, and we won’t scoff at them. It was painful for them to fall. “When you cut down trees, the chips will fly!” was the cheerful proverb of justification. And then suddenly they themselves were chopped off with all the other chips.
To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their dear Party, and, from all appearances, for nothing at all. After all, they had been guilty of nothing as far as the Party was concerned—nothing at all.
It was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them, uncomradely, to ask: “What were you imprisoned for?” The only squeamish generation of prisoners! The rest of us, in 1945, with tongues hanging out, used to recount our arrests, couldn’t wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met and to the whole cell, as if it were an anecdote.
Here’s the sort of people they were. Olga Sliozberg’s husband had already been arrested, and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too. The search lasted four hours—and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the congress of Stakhanovites of the bristle and brush industry, of which she had been the secretary until the previous day. The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children, whom she was leaving forever! Even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her: “Come on now, say farewell to your children!”
Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her fifteen-year-old daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsvetkova in the Kazan Prison for long-term prisoners: “Mama! Tell me, write to me—are you guilty or not? I hope you weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, and I won’t forgive them because of you. But if you are guilty—I won’t write you any more and will hate you.” And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp gravelike cell with its dim little lamp: How could her daughter live without the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me. And she wrote: “I am guilty. . . . Enter the Komsomol!”
How could it be anything but hard! It was more than the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved ax—then to have to justify its wisdom.
But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.
Even today any orthodox Communist will affirm that Tsvetkova acted correctly. Even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely the “perversion of small forces,” that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul.
Here’s the sort of people they were: Y.T. gave sincere testimony against her husband—anything to aid the Party!
Oh, how one could pity them if at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness!
This whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views!
Loyalty? And in our view it is just plain pigheadedness. These devotees of the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of any personal development whatsoever. As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchik said, after serving seventeen years: “We believed in the Party—and we were not mistaken!” Is this loyalty or pigheadedness?
No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government’s actions. They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness—otherwise insanity was not far off.
How easily one could sympathize with them all! But they all see so clearly what their sufferings were—and they don’t see wherein lies their
own guilt.
This sort of person was not arrested before 1937. And after 1938 very few such people were arrested. And that is why they were named the “call-up of 1937,” and this would be permissible but shouldn’t be allowed to blur the overall picture: even at the peak they were not the only ones being arrested, and those same peasants, and workers, and young people, and engineers, and technicians, and agronomists, and economists, and ordinary believers continued to stream in as well.
The “call-up of 1937” was very loquacious, and having access to the press and radio created the “legend of 1937,” a legend consisting of two points:
1. If they arrested people at all under the Soviet government, it was only in 1937, and it is necessary to speak out and be indignant only about 1937.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 29