Thus it is that the Archipelago takes its vengeance on the Soviet Union for its creation.
Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact.
Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
To give a list of these places, these hick towns, these settlements, would be almost the same as recapitulating the geography of the entire Archipelago. Sometimes entire districts were infected and belonged to the world of campside. And when a camp was injected into the body of a big city, even Moscow itself, campside also existed. . . .
Who lived in campside? (1) The basic indigenous local inhabitants (there might be none). (2) The VOKhR—the Militarized Camp Guards. (3) The camp officers and their families. (4) The jailers and their families—and jailers, as distinct from camp guards, always lived with their families, even when they were listed as on military service. (5) Former zeks (released from the local camp or one nearby). (6) Various restricted persons—“half-repressed” people, people with “unclean” passports. (7) The works administration. These were highly placed people and constituted in all only a few people in a big settlement. (8) Then, too, there were the free employees proper, all the tramps and riffraff—all kinds of strays and good-for-nothings and seekers after easy money. After all, in these remote death traps you could work three times as poorly as in the metropolis and get four times the wages—with bonuses for the Arctic, for remoteness, and for hardship, and you could also steal the work of the prisoners. And, in addition, many flocked there under recruitment programs and on contract, receiving moving and traveling expenses as well. For those able to pan the gold out of the work sheets campside was a real Klondike. People swarmed there with forged diplomas; adventurers, rascals, and money-grabbers poured in. But there was also quite a different category among the free employees: the elderly, who had already lived in campside for whole decades and had become so assimilated to its atmosphere that they no longer needed some other, sweeter world. If their camp shut down, or if the administration stopped paying them what they demanded—they left. But invariably they would move to some other such zone near a camp. They knew no other way to live.
Chapter 22
We Are Building
AFTER EVERYTHING THAT has been said about the camps, the question simply bursts out: That’s enough! But was the prisoners’ labor profitable to the state? And if it was not profitable—then was it worthwhile undertaking the whole Archipelago?
In the camps themselves both points of view on this were to be found among the zeks, and we used to love to argue about it.
Of course, if one believed the leaders, there was nothing to argue about. On the subject of the use of the prisoners’ labor, Comrade Molotov, once the second-ranking man in the state, declared at the Sixth Congress of the Soviets of the U.S.S.R.: “We did this earlier. We are doing it now. And we are going to go on doing it in the future. It is profitable to society. It is useful to the criminals.”
Not profitable to the state, note that! But to society itself. And useful to the criminals. And we will go on doing it in the future! So what is there to argue about?
Yes, the entire system of the Stalin decades, when first the construction projects were planned, and only afterward the recruitment of criminals to man them took place, confirms that the government evidently had no doubt of the economic profitability of the camps. Economics went before justice.
But it is quite evident that the question posed needs to be made more precise and to be split into parts:
Did the camps justify themselves in a political and social sense?
Did they justify themselves economically?
Did they pay for themselves (despite the apparent similarity of the second and third questions, there is a difference)?
It is not difficult to answer the first question: For Stalin’s purposes the camps were a wonderful place into which he could herd millions as a form of intimidation. And so it appears that they justified themselves politically. The camps were also profitable in lucre to an enormous social stratum—the countless number of camp officers; they gave them “military service” safely in the rear, special rations, pay, uniforms, apartments, and a position in society. Likewise they sheltered throngs of jailers and hard-head guards who dozed atop camp towers (while thirteen-year-old boys were driven into trade schools). And all these parasites upheld the Archipelago with all their strength—as a nest of serf exploitation. They feared a universal amnesty like the plague.
But we have already understood that by no means only those with different ideas, by no means only those who had got off the trodden path marked out by Stalin, were in the camps. The recruitment into camps obviously and clearly exceeded political needs, exceeded the needs of terror. It was proportionate (although perhaps in Stalin’s head alone) to economic plans. Yes, and had not the camps (and exile) arisen out of the crisis unemployment of the twenties? From 1930 on, it was not that the digging of canals was invented for dozing camps, but that camps were urgently scraped together for the envisioned canals. It was not the number of genuine “criminals” (or even “doubtful persons”) which determined the intensity of the courts’ activities—but the requisitions of the economic establishment. At the beginning of the Belomor Canal there was an immediate shortage of Solovetsky Islands zeks, and it became clear that three years was too short and too unprofitable a sentence for the 58s, that they had to serve out two Five-Year plans taken together.
The reason why the camps proved economically profitable had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct housing, schools, hospitals, and stores for many years to come. For work with pick and spade—in the flowering of the twentieth century. For the erection of the great construction projects of socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist.
On the great Belomor Canal even an automobile was a rarity. Everything was created, as they say in camp, with “fart power.”
On the even larger Moscow-Volga Canal (seven times bigger in scale of work than the Belomor Canal and comparable to the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal), 80 miles of canal were dug to a depth of over sixteen feet and a top width of 280 feet. And almost all of it with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. The future bottom of the Rybinsk Sea was covered with forest expanses. All of them were cut down by hand, and nary an electric saw was seen there, and the branches and brushwood were burned by total invalids.
Who, except prisoners, would have worked at logging ten hours a day, in addition to marching four miles through the woods in predawn darkness and the same distance back at night, in a temperature of minus 20, and knowing in a year no other rest days than May 1 and November 7? (Volgolag, 1937.)
And who other than the Archipelago natives would have grubbed out stumps in winter? Or hauled on their backs the boxes of mined ore in the open goldfields of the Kolyma? Or have dragged cut timber a half-mile from the Koin River (a tributary of the Vym) through deep snow on Finnish timber-sledge runners, harnessed up in pairs in a horse collar (the collar bows upholstered with tatters of rotten clothing to make them softer and the horse collar worn over one shoulder)?
True, the authorized journalist Y. Zhukov assures us the Komsomols built the city of Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur (in 1932) thus: They cut down trees without axes, having no smithies, got no bread, and died from scurvy. And he is delighted: Oh, how heroically we built! And would it not be more to the point to be indignant? Who was it, hating their own people, who sent them to build in such conditions?
And how was it then that the camps were economically unprofitable?
Read, read, in the “The Dead Road” by Pobozhi, that description of how they disembarked from and unloaded the lighters on the Taz River, that Arctic Iliad of the Stalinist epoch: how in the savage tundra, where human
foot had never trod, the antlike prisoners, guarded by an antlike convoy, dragged thousands of shipped-in logs on their backs, and built wharves, and laid down rails, and rolled into that tundra locomotives and freight cars which were fated never to leave there under their own power. They slept five hours a day on the bare ground, surrounded by signboards saying, “CAMP COMPOUND.”
And he describes further how the prisoners laid a telephone line through the tundra: They lived in lean-tos made of branches and moss, the mosquitoes devoured their unprotected bodies, their clothing never dried out from the swamp mud, still less their footgear. The route had been surveyed hit or miss and poorly laid out (and was doomed to be redrawn); and there was no timber nearby for poles, and they had to go off to either side on two- and three-day expeditions (!) in order to drag in poles from out there.
There was unfortunately no other Pobozhi to tell how before the war another railroad was built—from Kotlas to Vorkuta, where beneath each tie two heads were left.
Now who would have done that without prisoners? And how on earth could the camps not be profitable?
The question of the camps’ paying for themselves was, however, a different question. The state’s saliva had been flowing over this for a long time. They so wanted to have their little camps—and free too! From 1929 all the corrective-labor institutions of the country were included in the economic plan.
But no matter how they huffed and puffed and broke all their nails on the crags, no matter how they corrected the plan fulfillment sheets twenty times over, and wore them down to holes in the paper, the Archipelago did not pay its own way, and it never will! The income from it would never equal the expenses, and our young workers’ and peasants’ state (subsequently the elderly state of all the people) is forced to haul this filthy bloody bag along on its back.
And here’s why. The first and principal cause was the lack of conscientiousness of the prisoners, the negligence of those stupid slaves. Not only couldn’t you expect any socialist self-sacrifice of them, but they didn’t even manifest simple capitalist diligence. All they were on the lookout for was ways to spoil their footgear—and not go out to work; how to wreck a crane, to buckle a wheel, to break a spade, to sink a pail—anything for a pretext to sit down and smoke. All that the camp inmates made for their own dear state was openly and blatantly botched: you could break the bricks they made with your bare hands; the paint would peel off the panels; the plaster would fall off; posts would fall down; tables rock; legs fall out; handles come off. Carelessness and mistakes were everywhere. And it could happen that you had to tear off a roof already nailed on, redig the ditch they had filled in, demolish with crowbar and drill a wall they had already built. In the fifties they brought a new Swedish turbine to Steplag. It came in a frame made of logs like a hut. It was winter, and it was cold, and so the cursed zeks crawled into this frame between the beams and the turbine and started a bonfire to get warm. The silver soldering on the blades melted—and they threw the turbine out. It cost 3,700,000 rubles. Now that’s being self-supporting for you!
And in the presence of the zeks—and this was a second reason—the free employees didn’t care either, as though they were working not for themselves but for some stranger or other, and they stole a lot, they stole a great, great deal. (They were building an apartment building, and the free employees stole several bathtubs. But the tubs had been supplied to match the number of apartments. So how could they hand over the apartment building as completed? They could not confess to the construction superintendent, of course—he was triumphantly showing the official acceptance committee around the first stair landing, yes, and he did not omit to take them into every bathroom too and show them each tub. And then he took the committee to the second-floor landing, and the third, not hurrying there either, and kept going into all the bathrooms—and meanwhile the adroit and experienced zeks, under the leadership of an experienced foreman plumber, broke bathtubs out of the apartments on the first landing, hauled them upstairs on tiptoe to the fourth floor and hurriedly installed and puttied them in before the committee’s arrival. This ought to be shown in a film comedy, but they wouldn’t allow it: there is nothing funny in our life; everything funny takes place in the West!)
The third cause was the zeks’ lack of independence, their inability to live without jailers, without a camp administration, without guards, without a camp perimeter complete with watchtowers, without a Planning and Production Section, a Records and Classification Section, a Security Operations Section, a Cultural and Educational Section, and without higher camp administrations right up to Gulag itself; without censorship, and without penalty isolators, without Strict Regimen Brigades, without trusties, without stockroom clerks and warehouses; their inability to move around without convoy and dogs. And so the state had to maintain at least one custodian for each working native (and every custodian had a family!). Well and good that it was so, but what were all these custodians to live on?
And there were some bright engineers who pointed out a fourth reason as well: that, so they claimed, the necessity of setting up a perimeter fence at every step, of strengthening the convoy, of allotting a supplementary convoy, interfered with their, the engineers’, technical maneuverability, as, for example, during the disembarkation on the River Taz; and because of this, so they claimed, everything was done late and cost more. But this was already an objective reason, this was a pretext! Summon them to the Party bureau, give them a good scolding, and the cause will disappear. Let them break their heads; they’ll find a solution.
And then, beyond all these reasons, there were the natural and fully condonable miscalculations of the Leadership itself. As Comrade Lenin said: Only the person who does nothing makes no mistakes.
Railroad from Salekhard to Igarka
For example, no matter how earth-moving work was planned—rarely did it take place in the summer, but always for some reason in the autumn and winter, in mud and in freezing weather.
Or at the Zarosshy Spring in the Shturmovoi goldfields (the Kolyma) in March, 1938, they sent out five hundred people to drive prospecting shafts to a depth of twenty-five to thirty feet in the permafrost. They completed them. (Half the zeks kicked the bucket.) It was time to start blasting, but they changed their minds: the metal content was low. They abandoned it. In May the prospecting shafts thawed, all the work was lost. And two years later, again in March, in the Kolyma frosts, they had another brainstorm: to drive prospecting shafts! In the very same place! Urgently! Don’t spare lives!
Well, that’s what superfluous expenditures are. . . .
Or, on the Sukhona River near the settlement of Opoki—the prisoners hauled earth and built a dam. And the spring freshets carried it away immediately. And that was that—gone.
Or, for example, the Talaga logging operation of the Archangel administration was given a plan to produce furniture, but the authorities forgot to assign supplies of lumber with which to make the furniture. But a plan is a plan, and has to be fulfilled! Talaga had to send out special brigades to fish driftwood out of the river—logs which had fallen behind the timber rafting. There was not enough. Then, in hit-and-run raids, they began to break up whole rafts and carry them off. But, after all, those rafts belonged to someone else in the plan, and now they wouldn’t have enough. And also it was quite impossible for Talaga to write up work sheets to pay those bold young fellows who had grabbed the timber; after all, it was thievery. So that’s what self-support is. . . .
Well, of course, these small mistakes are inevitable in any work. No Leader is immune to them.
What about the railroad from Salekhard to Igarka? Hundreds of kilometers of dikes had been laid across the swamps. By the time Stalin died, only 300 additional kilometers were needed to join both ends. That, too, was abandoned. But then one quails to say whose mistake that was. It was, after all, His Own. . . .
Due to all these causes not only does the Archipelago not pay its own way, but the nation has to pay dearly for the additional satisfac
tion of having it.
PART IV
The Soul and Barbed Wire
“Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not
all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
I Corinthians, 15:51
Chapter 1
The Ascent
AND THE YEARS go by. . . .
Not in swift staccato, as they joke in camp—“winter-summer, winter-summer”—but a long-drawn-out autumn, an endless winter, an unwilling spring, and only a summer that is short.
Even one mere year, whew, how long it lasts! Even in one year how much time is left for you to think! For 365 days you stomp out to line-up in a drizzling, slushy rain, and in a piercing blizzard, and in a biting and still subzero cold. For 365 days you work away at hateful, alien work with your mind unoccupied. For 365 evenings you squinch up, wet, chilled, in the end-of-work line-up, waiting for the convoy to assemble from the distant watchtowers. And then there is the march out. And the march back. And bending down over 730 bowls of gruel, over 730 portions of grits. Yes, and waking up and going to sleep on your multiple bunk. And neither radio nor books to distract you. There are none, and thank God.
And that is only one year. And there are ten. There are twenty-five. . . .
And then, too, when you are lying in the hospital with dystrophy—that, too, is a good time—to think.
Think! Draw some conclusions from misfortune.
And all that endless time, after all, the prisoners’ brains and souls are not inactive?! In the mass and from a distance they seem like swarming lice, but they are the crown of creation, right? After all, once upon a time a weak little spark of God was breathed into them too—is it not true? So what has become of it now?
The Gulag Archipelago Page 35