Chapter 2
The First Whiff of Revolution
This chapter, which touches on several themes, including Russian-Ukrainian relations, in the end focuses on the increasing spirit of resistance (“the vague mutinous anticipations which had grown in us”) among the prisoners.
Chapter 3
Chains, Chains . . .
OUR EAGER HOPES, our leaping expectations, were soon crushed. The wind of change was blowing only in drafty corridors—in the transit prisons. Here, behind the tall fences of the Special Camps, its breath did not reach us. And although there were only political prisoners in these camps, no mutinous leaflets hung on posts.
They say that at Minlag the blacksmiths refused to forge bars for hut windows. All glory to those as yet nameless heroes!
The Special Camps began with that uncomplaining, indeed eager submission to which prisoners had been trained by three generations of Corrective Labor Camps.
Prisoners brought in from the Polar North had no cause to be grateful for the Kazakh sunshine. At Novorudnoye station they jumped down from the red boxcars onto ground no less red. This was the famous Dzhezkazgan copper, and the lungs of those who mined it never held out more than four months. There and then the warders joyfully demonstrated their new weapon on the first prisoners to step out of line: handcuffs, which had not been used in the Corrective Labor Camps, gleaming nickel handcuffs, which went into mass production in the Soviet Union to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution. These handcuffs were remarkable in that they could be clamped on very tight. Serrated metal plates were let into them, so that when a camp guard banged a man’s handcuffed wrists against his knee, more of the teeth would slip into the lock, causing the prisoner greater pain. In this way the handcuffs became an instrument of torture instead of a mere device to inhibit activity: they crushed the wrists, causing constant acute pain, and prisoners were kept like that for hours, always with their hands behind their backs, palms outward. The warders also perfected the practice of trapping four fingers in the handcuffs, which caused acute pain in the finger joints.
In Berlag the handcuffs were used religiously: for every trifle, even for failure to take off your cap to a warder, they put on the handcuffs (hands behind the back) and stood you by the guardhouse. The hands became swollen and numb, and grown men wept: “I won’t do it again, sir! Please take the cuffs off!”
It was easy enough for someone to scribble the order: “Establish Special Camps! Submit draft regulations by such and such a date!” But somewhere hard-working penologists (and psychologists, and connoisseurs of camp life) had to think out the details: How could screws already galling be made yet tighter? How could burdens already back-breaking be made yet heavier? How could the lives of Gulag’s denizens, already far from easy, be made harder yet? Transferred from Corrective Labor Camps to Special Camps, these animals must be aware at once of their strictness and harshness—but obviously someone must first devise a detailed program!
Then again, they quite blatantly borrowed from the Nazis a practice which had proved valuable to them—the substitution of a number for the prisoner’s name, his “I,” his human individuality, so that the difference between one man and another was a digit more or less in an otherwise identical row of figures. This measure, too, could be a great hardship, provided it was implemented consistently and fully. This they tried to do. Every new recruit, when he “played the piano” in the Special Section (i.e., had his fingerprints taken, as was the practice in ordinary prisons, but not in Corrective Labor Camps), had to hang around his neck a board suspended from a rope. And in this guise he had his picture taken by the Special Section’s photographer. (All those photographs are still preserved somewhere! One of these days we shall see them!)
In work rolls, too, it was the rule to write numbers before names. Why before and not instead of names? They were afraid to give up names altogether! However you look at it, a name is a reliable handle, a man is pegged to his name forever, whereas a number is blown away at a puff. If only the numbers were branded or picked out on the man himself, that would be something! But they never got around to it. Though they might easily have done so; they came close enough.
All this was in 1949 (the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine), the thirty-second year after the October Revolution, four years after the war, with its harsh imperatives, had ended, three years after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, where mankind at large had learned about the horrors of the Nazi camps and said with a sigh of relief: “It can never happen again.”
If you remember all this, it may not surprise you to hear that making him wear numbers was not the most hurtful and effective way of damaging a prisoner’s self-respect.
But there were people for whom the numbers were indeed the most diabolical of the camp’s devices. Among them were the devout women members of certain religious sects. These women refused to wear numbers—the mark of Satan! Nor would they give signed receipts (to Satan, of course) in return for regulation dress. The camp authorities showed laudable firmness! They gave orders that the women should be stripped to their shifts, and have their shoes taken from them, thus enlisting winter’s help in forcing these senseless fanatics to accept regulation dress and sew on their numbers. But even with the temperature below freezing, the women walked about the camp in their shifts and barefoot, refusing to surrender their souls to Satan!
Faced with this spirit (the spirit of reaction, needless to say; enlightened people like ourselves would never protest so strongly about such a thing!), the administration capitulated and gave their clothing back to the sectarians, who put it on without numbers!
Chapter 4
Why Did We Stand For It?
IN THE CONVENTIONAL Cadet (let alone socialist) interpretation, the whole of Russian history is a succession of tyrannies. The Tatar tyranny. The tyranny of the Moscow princes. Five centuries of indigenous tyranny on the Oriental model, and of a social order firmly and frankly rooted in slavery. (Forget about the Assemblies of the Land, the village commune, the free Cossacks, the free peasantry of the North.) Whether it is Ivan the Terrible, Alexis the Gentle, heavy-handed Peter, velvety Catherine, or even Alexander II—until the Great February Revolution, all the Tsars right up to the Crimean War knew one thing only—how to crush.
Only . . . only . . . Crushed, yes, but the word needs qualification. Not crushed in our modern technical sense. After the war with Napoleon, when our army came back from Europe, the first breath of freedom passed over Russian society. Faint as it was, the Tsar had to reckon with it. The common soldiers, for instance, who took part in the Decembrist rising—was a single one of them strung up? Was a single one shot? And in our day would a single one of them have been left alive? Neither Pushkin nor Lermontov could be simply put inside for a tenner—roundabout ways of dealing with them had to be found. Whereas all of us have felt on our own hides the workings of a mechanized judicial system.
Seven attempts were made on the life of Alexander II himself. What did he do about it? Ruin and banish half Petersburg, as happened after Kirov’s murder? You know very well that such a thing could never enter his head. Did he apply the methods of prophylactic mass terror? Total terror, as in 1918? Take hostages? The concept didn’t exist. Imprison dubious persons? It simply wasn’t possible. . . . Execute thousands? They executed . . . five. Fewer than three hundred were convicted by the courts in this period. (If just one such attempt had been made on Stalin, how many million lives would it have cost us?)
The Bolshevik Olminsky writes that in 1891 he was the only political prisoner in the whole Kresty Prison. Transferred to Moscow, he was the only one in the Taganka. It was only in the Butyrki, awaiting deportation, that a small party of them was assembled. And a quarter of a century later the February Revolution revealed the presence of seven political prisoners in the Odessa castle prison and another three such prisoners in Mogilev.
The Tsars persecuted revolutionaries just sufficiently to broaden their circle of acquaintance in
prisons, toughen them, and ring their heads with haloes. We now have an accurate yardstick to establish the scale of these phenomena—and we can safely say that the Tsarist government did not persecute revolutionaries but tenderly nurtured them, for its own destruction. The uncertainty, half-heartedness, and feebleness of the Tsarist government are obvious to all who have experienced an infallible judicial system.
Let us examine, for instance, some generally known biographical facts about Lenin. In spring, 1887, his brother was executed for an attempt on the life of Alexander III. And what happened to him? In the autumn of that very year Vladimir Ulyanov was admitted to the Imperial University at Kazan, and what is more, to the Law Faculty! Surprising, isn’t it?
True, Vladimir Ulyanov was expelled from the university in the same academic year. But this was for organizing a student demonstration against the government. The younger brother of a would-be regicide inciting students to insubordination? What would he have got for that in our day? He would certainly have been shot! Whereas he was merely expelled. Such cruelty! Yes, but he was also banished. . . . To Sakhalin? No, to the family estate of Kokushkino, where he intended to spend the summer anyway. He wanted to work—so they gave him an opportunity. . . . To fell trees in the frozen north? No, to practice law in Samara, where he was simultaneously active in illegal political circles. After this he was allowed to take his examinations at St. Petersburg University as an external student. (With his curriculum vitae? What was the Special Section thinking of?)
Then a few years later this same young revolutionary was arrested for founding in the capital a “League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class”—no less! He had repeatedly made “seditious” speeches to workers, had written political leaflets. Was he tortured, starved? No, they created for him conditions conducive to intellectual work. In the Petersburg investigation prison, where he was held for a year, and where he was allowed to receive the dozens of books he needed, he wrote the greater part of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and, moreover, forwarded—legally, through the Prosecutor’s Office—his Economic Essays to the Marxist journal Novoye Slovo. While in prison, he followed a prescribed diet, could have dinners sent in at his own expense, buy milk, buy mineral water from a chemist’s shop, and receive parcels from home three times a week. (Trotsky, too, was able to put the first draft of his theory of permanent revolution on paper in the Peter and Paul Fortress.)
But then, of course, he was condemned by a three-man tribunal and shot? No, he wasn’t even jailed, only banished. To Yakutya, then, for life? No, to a land of plenty, Minusinsk, and for three years. He was taken there in handcuffs? In a prison train? Not at all! He traveled like a free man, went around Petersburg for three days without interference, then did the same in Moscow—he had to leave instructions for clandestine correspondence, establish connections, hold a conference of revolutionaries still at large. He was even allowed to go into exile at his own expense—that is, to travel with free passengers. Lenin never sampled a single convict train or a single transit prison on his way out to Siberia or, of course, on the return journey. Then, in Krasnoyarsk, two more months’ work in the library saw The Development of Capitalism finished, and this book, written by a political exile, appeared in print without obstruction from the censorship. (Measure that by our yardstick!) But what would he live on in that remote village, where he would obviously find no work? He asked for an allowance from the state, and they paid him more than he needed. It would have been impossible to create better conditions than Lenin enjoyed in his one and only period of banishment. A healthy diet, at extremely low prices, plenty of meat (a sheep every week), milk, vegetables; he could hunt to his heart’s content (when he was dissatisfied with his dog, friends seriously considered sending him one from Petersburg; when mosquitoes bit him while he was out hunting, he ordered kid gloves); he was cured of his gastric disorders and the other illnesses of his youth, and rapidly put on weight. He had no obligations, no work to do, no duties, nor did his womenfolk exert themselves; for two and a half rubles a month, a fifteen-year-old peasant girl did all the rough work about the house. Lenin had no need to write for money, turned down offers of paid work from Petersburg, and wrote only things which could bring him literary fame.
He served his term of banishment (he could have “escaped” without difficulty, but was too circumspect for that). Was his sentence automatically extended? Converted to deportation for life? How could it be—that would have been illegal. He was given permission to reside in Pskov, on condition that he did not visit the capital. He did visit Riga and Smolensk. He was not under surveillance. Then he and his friend (Martov) took a basket of forbidden literature to the capital, traveling via Tsarskoye Selo, where there were particularly strict controls (they had been too clever by half). He was picked up in Petersburg. True, he no longer had the basket, but he did have a letter to Plekhanov in invisible ink with the whole plan for launching Iskra. The police, though, could not put themselves to all that trouble; he was under arrest and in a cell for three weeks, the letter was in their hands—and it remained undeciphered.
What was the result of this unauthorized absence from Pskov? Twenty years’ hard labor, as it would have been in our time? No, just those three weeks under arrest! After which he was freed completely, to travel around Russia setting up distribution centers for Iskra, then abroad, to arrange publication (“the police see no objection” to granting him a passport for foreign travel!).
But this was the least of it! As an émigré he would send home to Russia an article on Marx for the Granat Encyclopedia! And it would be printed. Nor was it the only one!
Finally, he carried on subversive activity from a little town in Austrian Poland, near the Russian frontier, but no one sent undercover thugs to abduct him and bring him back alive. Though it would have been the easiest thing in the world.
Tsardom was always weak and irresolute in pursuit of its enemies.
The most important special feature of persecution (if you can call it that) in Tsarist times was perhaps just this: that the revolutionary’s relatives never suffered in the least. Any member of the Ulyanov family (though nearly all of them were arrested at one time or another) could readily obtain permission to go abroad at any moment. When Lenin was on the “wanted” list for his exhortations to armed uprising, his sister Anna legally and regularly transferred money to his account with the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris.
Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoi came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom.
Of course, no one is in need of freedom if he already has it. We can agree with him that political freedom is not what matters in the end. The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run: what about the beginning? What about the first step? Yasnaya Polyana in those days was an open club for thinkers. But if it had been blockaded as Akhmatova’s apartment was when every visitor was asked for his passport, if Tolstoi had been pressed as hard as we all were in Stalin’s time, when three men feared to come together under one roof, even he would have demanded political freedom.
Russian public opinion by the beginning of the century constituted a marvelous force, was creating a climate of freedom. The defeat of Tsarism came not when Kolchak was routed, not when the February Revolution was raging, but much earlier! It was overthrown without hope of restoration once Russian literature adopted the convention that anyone who depicted a gendarme or policeman with any hint of sympathy was a lickspittle and a reactionary thug; when you didn’t have to shake a policeman’s hand, cultivate his acquaintance, nod to him in the street, but merely brush sleeves with him in passing to consider yourself disgraced.
Whereas we have butchers who—because they are now redundant and because their qualifications are right—are in charge of literature and culture. They order us to extol them as legendary heroes. And
to do so is for some reason called . . . patriotism.
The reason why we put up with it all in the camps is that there was no public opinion outside.
What conceivable ways has the prisoner of resisting the regime to which he is subjected? Obviously, they are:
1. Protest.
2. Hunger strike.
3. Escape.
4. Mutiny.
So, then, it is obvious to anybody, as the Great Deceased liked to say (and if it isn’t, we’ll ram it into him), that if the first two have some force (and if the jailers fear them), it is only because of public opinion! Without that behind us we can protest and fast as much as we like and they will laugh in our faces!
It is a very dramatic way of obtaining your demands—standing before the prison authorities and tearing open your shirt, as Dzerzhinsky did. But only where public opinion exists. Without it—you’ll be gagged with the tatters and pay for a government-issue shirt into the bargain!
Let me remind you of a celebrated event which took place in the Kara hard-labor prison at the end of the last century. Political prisoners were informed that in future they would be liable to corporal punishment. Nadezhda Sigida was due to be thrashed first (she had slapped the commandant’s face . . . to force him to resign!). She took poison and died rather than submit to the birch. Three other women then poisoned themselves—and also died! In the men’s barracks fourteen prisoners volunteered to commit suicide, though not all of them succeeded. As a result, corporal punishment was abolished outright and forever! The prisoners had counted on frightening the prison authorities. For news of the tragedy at Kara would reach Russia, and the whole world.
You see from what a lofty plane prison behavior has declined. And how low we have fallen. And how by the same token our jailers have risen in the world! No, these are not the bumpkins of Kara! Even if we had plucked up our courage and risen above ourselves—four women and fourteen men—we should all have been shot before we got at any poison. If you did manage to poison yourself, you would only make the task of the authorities easier. And the rest would be treated to a dose of the birch for not denouncing you. And needless to say, no word of the occurrence would ever leak through the boundary wires.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 41