The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Long live our tolerance of religion!

  Long live our children, the masters of Communism!

  And let any country speak up that can say it has loved its children as we have ours!

  Chapter 18

  The Muses in Gulag

  This chapter recounts the attempts of the Gulag’s Cultural and Educational Section (the KVCL) to re-educate zeks, which included organizing such groups as propagandists, artists, sculptors, poets, and actors.

  Chapter 19

  The Zeks as a Nation

  AN ETHNOGRAPHICAL ESSAY BY FAN FANYCH

  This chapter is a grimly ironic tour de force, a mock-serious anthropological treatise which describes the zeks as though they were a separate race.

  Chapter 20

  The Dogs’ Service

  THE TITLE OF this chapter was not intended as an intentionally scathing insult, but it is our duty to uphold the camp tradition. If you think about it, they themselves chose this lot: their service is the same as that of guard dogs, and their service is connected with dogs. And there even exists a special statute on service with dogs, and there are whole officers’ committees which monitor the work of an individual dog, fostering a good viciousness in the dog. And if the maintenance of one pup for a year costs the people 11,000 pre-Khrushchev rubles (police dogs are fed better than prisoners), then the maintenance of each officer must cost even more.

  And then throughout this book we have also had the difficulty of knowing what to call them in general. “The administration,” “the chiefs,” are too generalized and relate to freedom as well, to the whole life of the whole country, and they are shopworn terms anyway. “The bosses”—likewise. “The camp managers”? But this is a circumlocution that only demonstrates our impotence. Should they be named straightforwardly in accordance with camp tradition? That would seem crude, profane. It would be fully in the spirit of the language to call them lagershchiki—“camp keepers.” . . . And it expresses an exact and unique sense: those who manage and govern the camps.

  And that is what this chapter is about: the “camp keepers” (and the “prison keepers” with them). We could begin with the generals—and it would be a marvelous thing to do—but we don’t have any material. It was quite impossible for us worms and slaves to learn about them and to see them close up. And when we did see them, we were dazzled by the glitter of gold braid and couldn’t make anything out.

  So we really know nothing at all about the chiefs of Gulag who followed one another in turn—those tsars of the Archipelago.

  In this chapter we are going to cover those from colonel down. Our limitation is this: when you are confined in prison or in camp, the personality of the prison keepers interests you only to the extent that it helps you evade their threats and exploit their weaknesses. As far as anything else is concerned, you couldn’t care less. They are unworthy of your attention.

  And then later, too late, you suddenly realize that you didn’t observe them closely enough.

  Without even discussing the question of talent, can a person become a jailer in prison or camp if he is capable of the very least kind of useful activity? Let us ask: On the whole, can a camp keeper be a good human being? What system of moral selection does life arrange for them? The first selection takes place on assignment to the MVD armies, MVD schools, or MVD courses. Every man with the slightest speck of spiritual training, with a minimally circumspect conscience, or capacity to distinguish good from evil, is instinctively going to back out and use every available means to avoid joining this dark legion. But let us concede that he did not succeed in backing out. A second selection comes during training and the first service assignment, when the bosses themselves take a close look and eliminate all those who manifest laxity (kindness) instead of strong will and firmness (cruelty and merciless-ness). And then a third selection takes place over a period of many years: All those who had not visualized where and into what they were getting themselves now come to understand and are horrified. To be constantly a weapon of violence, a constant participant in evil! Not everyone can bring himself to this, and certainly not right off. You see, you are trampling on others’ lives. And inside yourself something tightens and bursts. You can’t go on this way any longer! And although it is belated, men can still begin to fight their way out, report themselves ill, get disability certificates, accept lower pay, take off their shoulder boards—anything just to get out, get out, get out!

  Does that mean the rest of them have got used to it? Yes. The rest of them have got used to it, and their life already seems normal to them. And useful too, of course. And even honorable. And some didn’t have to get used to it; they had been that way from the start.

  Thanks to this process of selection one can conclude that the percentage of the merciless and cruel among the camp keepers is much higher than in a random sample of the population. And the longer, the more constantly, and the more notably a person serves in the Organs, the more likely it becomes that he is a scoundrel.

  Do a similarity of paths in life and a similarity of situations give rise to a similarity in characters? As a general thing it doesn’t. For people with strong minds and spirits of their own it does not. They have their own solutions, their own special traits, and they can be very surprising. But among the camp keepers, who have passed through a severe negative-selection process—both in morality and mentality—the similarity is astonishing, and we can, in all likelihood, describe without difficulty their basic universal characteristics.

  Arrogance. The camp chief lives on a separate island, flimsily connected with the remote external power, and on this island he is without qualification the first. No limits are set to his power, and it admits to no mistakes; every person complaining is always proven wrong (repressed). He has the best house on the island. The best means of transportation. The camp keepers immediately below him in rank are also raised extremely high. And since their whole preceding life has not given birth to any spark of critical capacity inside them, it is impossible for them to see themselves as other than a special race—of born rulers. Out of the fact that no one is capable of resisting them, they draw the conclusion that they rule very wisely, that this is their talent (“organizational”). Every day each ordinary event permits them visibly to observe their superiority: people rise before them, stand at attention, bow; at their summons people do not just approach but run up to them; on their orders people do not simply leave but run out.

  Stupidity always follows on the heels of smugness. Deified alive, each knows everything inside out, doesn’t need to read or learn, and no one can tell him anything worth pausing over. If Kudlaty, the chief of one of the Ust-Vym work parties, decided that the 100 percent fulfillment of state work norms was not 100 percent at all, and that instead what had to be fulfilled was his own daily norm (taken out of his head) and that otherwise he would put everyone on a penalty ration—there was no way to get him to change his mind. So, having fulfilled 100 percent, they all got penalty rations. In Kudlaty’s office there were whole piles of volumes of Lenin. He summoned V. G. Vlasov and unctuously informed him: “Lenin writes what attitude one must take toward parasites.” (He understood parasites to mean prisoners who had fulfilled the work norm by only 100 percent, and he understood by the term “proletariat” . . . himself. These two things fitted into their heads simultaneously: Here is my estate, and I am a proletarian.)

  But the old serf-owning gentry were incomparably better educated; many of them had studied in St. Petersburg, and some of them even in Göttingen. From them, after all, came the Aksakovs, the Radishchevs, the Turgenevs. But no one ever emerged from our MVD men, and no one ever will.

  Autocracy. Autotyranny. In this respect the camp keepers were fully the equals of the very worst of the serf owners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Innumerable are the examples of senseless orders, the sole purpose of which was to demonstrate their power. And the farther into Siberia and the North they were, the truer this was.

  A sense of posses
sing a patrimonial estate was typical of all camp chiefs. They perceived their camp not as a part of some state system but as a patrimonial estate entrusted them indivisibly for as long as they occupied their positions. Hence came all the tyranny over lives, over personalities, and hence also came the bragging among themselves. The chief of one of the Kengir camps said: “I’ve got a professor working in the baths!” But the chief of another camp, Captain Stadnikov, put him down with “And in my camp I’ve got an academician barracks orderly who carries out latrine barrels.”

  Greed and money-grubbing. Among the camp keepers this was the most widespread trait of all. Not every one was stupid, and not every one was a petty tyrant—but every last one was engaged in attempting to enrich himself from the free labor of the zeks and from state property, whether he was the chief in that camp or one of his aides. Neither I nor any one of my friends could recollect any disinterested camp keeper, nor have any of the zeks who have been corresponding with me ever named one.

  In their greed to grab as much as possible, none of their multitudinous legitimate monetary advantages and privileges could satisfy them. Neither high pay (with double and triple bonuses for work “in the Arctic,” “in remote areas,” “for dangerous work”). Nor prize money (provided management executives of camp by Article 79 of the Corrective Labor Code of 1933—that same code that did not hinder them from establishing a twelve-hour workday without any Sundays for the prisoners). Nor the exceptionally advantageous calculation of their seniority (in the North, where half the Archipelago was located, one year of work counted as two, and the total required for “military personnel” to earn a pension was twenty years; thus an MVD officer on completing MVD school at age twenty-two could retire on a full pension and go to live at Sochi at thirty-two!).

  It was not enough for the camp bosses that both they and their families were clothed and shod by the camp craftsmen. It was not enough for them that they had their own furniture manufactured there, as well as all other kinds of household supplies. It was not enough for them that their pigs were fattened by the camp kitchen. It was too little! They were distinguished from the old serf owners because their power was not for a lifetime and not hereditary. And because of this difference the serf owners did not have to steal from themselves, but the camp keepers had their heads occupied with one thing—how to steal something from their own enterprise.

  And what happened when they laid their hands on “American gifts” (collected by people in the United States for the Soviet people)? According to T. Sgovio’s description, in 1943 in Ust-Nera the chief of the camp Colonel Nagorny, the head of the political section Goloulin, the chief of the Indigir administrative section Bykov, and the chief of the geological section Rakovsky, together with their wives, personally opened the boxes containing the gifts, picking what they wanted and fighting over the spoils. What they did not take for themselves they distributed as premiums to the camp employees. As late as 1948 the chiefs’ orderlies were selling on the black market what remained of the gifts from the United States.

  Lasciviousness. This was not true of each and every one of them, of course, and it was closely tied to individual physiology. But the situation of camp chief and the absoluteness of his rights allowed harem inclinations full sway. The chief of the Burepolom Camp, Grinberg, had each comely young woman brought to him immediately on arrival. (And what other choice did she have except death?) In Kochmes the camp chief Podlesny enjoyed nighttime roundups in the women’s barracks (of the same sort we have already seen in Khovrino). He himself personally pulled the blankets off the women.

  Malice, cruelty. There was no curb, either practical or moral, to restrain these traits. Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. (And we cite here all this similarity in vices to those of the serf owners not merely for eloquent argument. This similarity, alas, demonstrates that the nature of our compatriots has not changed in the slightest in two hundred years; give as much power as that and there will be all the same vices!)

  They are still going about among us today. They may well turn out to be next to us in a train (though not in anything less than a first-class compartment). Or in a plane. An oaken cruelty is etched into their faces, and they always have a gloomy, dissatisfied expression. It would seem as if everything was going well in their lives, but there is that expression of dissatisfaction. Perhaps they have the feeling that they are missing out on something better? Or perhaps God has marked them out infallibly for all their evildoings?

  In 1962 I traveled through Siberia on a train for the first time as a free man. And it just had to happen! In my compartment there was a young MVD man. . . . I pretended to be a sympathetic idiot, and he told me how they went through probationary work in contemporary camps, and how impudent, feelingless, and hopeless the prisoners were. On his face there had not yet set in that constant, permanent cruelty, but he triumphantly showed me a photo of the third graduating class at Tavda, in which there were not only boys—but also veteran camp keepers finishing up their education (in training dogs, in criminal investigation, in camp management and in Marxism-Leninism) more for the sake of their pensions than for the sake of service. And even though I had been around, nonetheless I exclaimed! Their blackness of heart stands out on their faces! How adroitly they pick them out from all humanity!

  But I feel that my tale is becoming monotonous: Does it seem that I am repeating myself? Or is it that we have already read about this here, there, and elsewhere?

  I hear objections! I hear objections! Yes, there were such individual facts. . . . But for the most part under Beria . . . But why don’t you give some of the bright examples? Just describe some of the good ones for us! Show us our dearly beloved fathers. . . .

  But no! Let those who saw them show them. I didn’t see them. I have already deduced the generalized judgment that a camp keeper could not be a decent person—either he had to change direction or they got rid of him.

  The camp custodial staff was considered the junior command staff of the MVD. These were the Gulag noncoms. And that was the kind of assignment they had—to worry the prey and not let go. They were on the same Gulag ladder, only lower. Year by year they coarsened in the service, and you couldn’t observe in them the least cloudlet of pity toward the soaked, freezing, hungry, tired, and dying prisoners. And they could vent their malice and display cruelty—they encountered no barriers. The jailers willingly copied their officers in their conduct, and in character traits too—but they didn’t have that gold on their shoulder boards and their greatcoats were dirtyish, and they went everywhere on foot, and they were not allowed prisoner-servants, and they dug in their own gardens, and looked after their own farm animals. Well, of course, they did manage to haul off a zek to their places for half a day now and then—to chop wood, to wash floors—this they could do, but not on a lavish scale. At work you could make the zek do a small task for you—solder, cook, hammer, or sharpen something. Anything larger than a stool you’d not always manage to carry out. This limitation on thievery deeply affronted the jailers, especially their wives, and because of this there was much bitterness against the chiefs, because of this life seemed very unjust, and within the jailer’s breast there stirred not so much sensitive heart strings as a sense of unfulfillment, an emptiness echoing a human groan. And sometimes the lower-ranking jailers were capable of talking sympathetically with the zeks. Not so often, but not all that rarely either. In any case, among both prison and camp jailers it was possible to find human beings. Every prisoner encountered more than one in his career. In an officer it was virtually impossible.

  This, properly speaking, was the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.

  Self-guarding constitutes a special area in the history of the camp guard. Back, indeed, in the first postrevolutionary years it was proclaimed that self-watch was a duty of Soviet prisoners.

  We will not affirm that this was a special, diabolical plan for the moral disintegration of the peop
le. As always in the half-century of our most recent modern history, a lofty, bright theory and creeping moral vileness somehow got naturally interwoven, and were easily transformed into one another. But from the stories of the old zeks it has become known that the prisoner trusty guards were cruel to their own brothers, strove to curry favor and to hold on to their dogs’ duties, and sometimes settled old accounts with a bullet on the spot.

  And this has also been noted in our literature on jurisprudence: “In many cases those who were deprived of freedom carried out their duties of guarding the colonies and maintaining order better than the staff jailers.”

  And so tell me—what bad is there that one cannot teach a nation? Or people? Or all humanity?

  Chapter 21

  Campside

  LIKE A PIECE of rotten meat which not only stinks right on its own surface but also surrounds itself with a stinking molecular cloud of stink, so, too, each island of the Archipelago created and supported a zone of stink around itself. This zone, more extensive than the Archipelago itself, was the intermediate transmission zone between the small zone of each individual island and the Big Zone—the Big Camp Compound—comprising the entire country.

  Everything of the most infectious nature in the Archipelago—in human relations, morals, views, and language—in compliance with the universal law of osmosis in plant and animal tissue, seeped first into this transmission zone and then dispersed through the entire country. It was right here, in the transmission zone, that those elements of camp ideology and culture worthy of entering into the nationwide culture underwent trial and selection. And when camp expressions ring in the corridors of the new building of the Moscow State University, or when an independent woman in the capital delivers a verdict wholly from out of camp on the essence of life—don’t be surprised: it got there via the transmission zone, via campside.