The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  This is the point, this is where their power lies: no news could leak out. If some muffled rumor did, with no confirmation from newspapers, with informers busily nosing it out, it would not get far enough to matter: there would be no outburst of public indignation. So what is there to fear? So why should they lend an ear to our protests? If you want to poison yourselves—get on with it.

  Escape, then? History has preserved for us accounts of some major escapes from Tsarist prisons. All of them, let us note, were engineered and directed from outside—by other revolutionaries, Party comrades of the escapers, with incidental help from many sympathizers. Many people were involved in the escape itself, in concealing the escapers afterward, and in slipping them across the frontier. Perhaps it was all a jolly game, and a legal one? Fluttering your handkerchief from a window, letting a runaway share your bedroom, helping him with his disguise? These were not indictable offenses. When Pyotr Lavrov ran away from his place of banishment, the governor of Vologda [Khominsky] gave his civil-law wife permission to leave and catch up with her man. . . . Even for forging passports you could just be rusticated to your own farm, as we saw. People were not afraid.

  I have at present no access to information about security at the principal locations of the Tsarist katorga; but if escape from them was ever as desperately difficult as it was from their Soviet counterparts, with one chance in 100,000 of success, I have never heard it. There was obviously no reason for prisoners to take great risks: they were not threatened with premature death from exhaustion by hard labor, nor with extensions of sentence which they had done nothing to deserve: the second half of their term they served not in prison but in places of banishment, and they usually put off escapes till then.

  Laziness would seem to be the only reason for not escaping from Tsarist places of banishment. Escape in our time has always been an enterprise for giants among men, but for doomed giants. Such daring, such ingenuity, such will power never went into prerevolutionary escape attempts—yet they were very often successful, and ours hardly ever.

  The reason for our failure was that success depends in the later stages of the attempt on the attitude of the population. And our population was afraid to help escapers, or even betrayed them, for mercenary or ideological reasons.

  “So much for public opinion! . . .”

  As for prison mutinies, involving as many as three, five, or eight thousand men—the history of our three revolutions knew nothing of them.

  Yet we did.

  But the same curse was upon them, and very great efforts, very great sacrifices, produced the most trivial results.

  Because society was not ready. Because without a response from public opinion, a mutiny even in a huge camp has no scope for development.

  So that when we are asked: “Why did you put up with it?” it is time to answer: “But we didn’t!” Read on and you will see that we didn’t put up with it at all.

  In the Special Camps we raised the banner of the politicals—and politicals we became.

  Chapter 5

  Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone

  AT THE BEGINNING of my camp career I was very anxious to avoid general duties, but did not know how. When I arrived at Ekibastuz in the sixth year of my imprisonment I had changed completely, and set out at once to cleanse my mind of the camp prejudices, intrigues, and schemes, which leave it no time for deeper matters. So that instead of resigning myself to the grueling existence of a general laborer until I was lucky enough to become a trusty, as educated people usually have to, I resolved to acquire a skill, there and then, in katorga. When we joined Boronyuk’s team (Oleg Ivanov and I), a suitable trade (that of bricklayer) came our way. Later my fortunes took a different turn and I was for some time a smelter.

  I was anxious and unsure of myself to begin with. Could I keep it up? We were unhandy cerebral creatures, and the same amount of work was harder for us than for our teammates. But the day when I deliberately let myself sink to the bottom and felt it firm under my feet—the hard, rocky bottom which is the same for all—was the beginning of the most important years in my life, the years which put the finishing touches to my character. From then onward there seem to have been no upheavals in my life, and I have been faithful to the views and habits acquired at that time.

  I needed an unmuddled mind because I had been trying to write a poem for two years past. This was very rewarding, in that it helped me not to notice what was being done with my body. Sometimes in a sullen work party with Tommy-gunners barking about me, lines and images crowded in so urgently that I felt myself borne through the air, overleaping the column in my hurry to reach the work site and find a corner to write. At such moments I was both free and happy.

  But how could I write in a Special Camp?

  Memory was the only hidey-hole in which you could keep what you had written and carry it through all the searches and journeys under escort. In the early days I had little confidence in the powers of memory and decided therefore to write in verse. It was of course an abuse of the genre. I discovered later that prose, too, can be quite satisfactorily tamped down into the deep hidden layers of what we carry in our head. No longer burdened with frivolous and superfluous knowledge, a prisoner’s memory is astonishingly capacious, and can expand indefinitely. We have too little faith in memory!

  I started breaking matches into little pieces and arranging them on my cigarette case in two rows (of ten each, one representing units and the other tens). As I recited the verses to myself, I displaced one bit of broken match from the units row for every line. When I had shifted ten units I displaced one of the “tens.” Every fiftieth and every hundredth line I memorized with special care, to help me keep count. Once a month I recited all that I had written. If the wrong line came out in place of one of the hundreds or fifties, I went over it all again and again until I caught the slippery fugitives.

  In the Kuibyshev Transit Prison I saw Catholics (Lithuanians) busy making themselves rosaries for prison use. They made them by soaking bread, kneading beads from it, coloring them (black ones with burnt rubber, white ones with tooth powder, red ones with red germicide), stringing them while still moist on several strands of thread twisted together and thoroughly soaped, and letting them dry on the window ledge. I joined them and said that I, too, wanted to say my prayers with a rosary but that in my particular religion I needed one hundred beads in a ring (later, when I realized that twenty would suffice, and indeed be more convenient, I made them myself from cork), that every tenth bead must be cubic, not spherical, and that the fiftieth and the hundredth beads must be distinguishable at a touch. The Lithuanians were amazed by my religious zeal, but with true brotherly love helped me to put together a rosary such as I had described, making the hundredth bead in the form of a dark red heart. I never afterward parted with this marvelous present of theirs; I fingered and counted my beads inside my wide mittens—at work line-up, on the march to and from work, at all waiting times; I could do it standing up, and freezing cold was no hindrance. I carried it safely through the search points, in the padding of my mittens, where it could not be felt. The warders found it on various occasions, but supposed that it was for praying and let me keep it. Until the end of my sentence (by which time I had accumulated 12,000 lines) and after that in my place of banishment, this necklace helped me to write and remember.

  I realized that I was not the only one, that I was party to a great secret, a secret maturing in other lonely breasts like mine on the scattered islands of the Archipelago, to reveal itself in years to come, perhaps when we were dead, and to merge into the Russian literature of the future.

  How many of us were there? Many more, I think, than have come to the surface in the intervening years. Not all of them were to survive. Some buried manuscripts in bottles, without telling anyone where. Some put their work in careless or, on the contrary, in excessively cautious hands for safekeeping. Some could not write their work down in time.

  Even on the isle of Ekibastuz, could w
e really get to know each other? encourage each other? support each other? Like wolves, we hid from everyone, and that meant from each other, too. Yet even so I was to discover a few others in Ekibastuz.

  Meeting the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin was a surprise which I owed to the Baptists. Day in and day out he was meek and gentle with everyone, but reserved. Only when we began talking to each other freely, and strolling about the camp for hours at a stretch on our Sundays off, while he recited his very long religious poems to me (like me, he had written them right there in the camp), I was startled not for the first time or the last to realize what far from ordinary souls are concealed within deceptively ordinary exteriors.

  A homeless child, brought up an atheist in a children’s home, he had come across some religious books in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and had been carried away by them. From then on he was not only a believer, but a philosopher and theologian! “From then on” he had also been in prison or in camps without a break, and so had spent his whole theological career in isolation, rediscovering for himself things already discovered by others, perhaps going astray, since he had never had either books or advisers. Now he was working as a manual laborer and ditchdigger, struggling to fulfill an impossible norm, returning from work with bent knees and trembling hands—but night and day the poems, which he composed from end to end without writing a word down, in iambic tetrameters with an irregular rhyme scheme, went round and round in his head. He must have known some twenty thousand lines by that time. He, too, had a utilitarian attitude to them: they were a way of remembering and of transmitting thoughts.

  His sensitive response to the riches of nature lent warmth and beauty to his view of the world. Bending over one of the rare blades of grass which grew illegally in our barren camp, he exclaimed:

  “How beautiful are the grasses of the earth! But even these the Creator has given to man for a carpet under his feet. How much more beautiful, then, must we be than they!”

  “But what about ‘Love not this world and the things that are of this world’?” (A saying which the sectarians often repeated.)

  He smiled apologetically. He could disarm anyone with that smile.

  “Why, even earthly, carnal love is a manifestation of a lofty aspiration to Union!”

  His theodicy, that is to say his justification of the existence of evil in the world, he formulated like this:

  Does God, who is Perfect Love, allow

  This imperfection in our lives?

  The soul must suffer first, to know

  The perfect bliss of paradise. . . .

  Harsh is the law, but to obey

  Is for weak men the only way

  To win eternal peace.

  Christ’s sufferings in the flesh he daringly explained not only by the need to atone for human sins, but also by God’s desire to feel earthly suffering to the full.

  “God always knew these sufferings, but never before had he felt them,” Silin boldly asserted. Even of the Antichrist, who had

  Corrupted man’s Free Will—perverted

  His yearning toward the One True Light

  Silin found something fresh and humane to say:

  The bliss that God had given him

  That angel haughtily rejected:

  He nothing knew of human pain;

  He loved not with the love of men—

  By grief alone is love perfected.

  Thinking so freely himself, Silin found a warm place in his generous heart for all shades of Christian belief.

  This is the crux:

  That though Christ’s teaching is its theme

  Genius must ever speak with its own voice.

  The atheist’s impatient refusal to believe that spirit could beget matter only made Silin smile.

  “Why don’t they ask themselves how crude matter could beget spirit? That way round, it would surely be a miracle. Yes, a still greater miracle!”

  My brain was full of my own verses, and these fragments are all that I have succeeded in preserving of the poems I heard from Silin—fearing perhaps that he himself would preserve nothing. A doomed and exhausted slave, with four number patches on his clothes, this poet had more in his heart to say to living human beings than the whole tribe of hacks firmly established in journals, in publishing houses, in radio—and of no use to anyone except themselves.

  Silin ate from the same pot as the Baptists, shared his bread and warm victuals with them. Of course, he needed appreciative listeners, people with whom he could join in reading and interpreting the Gospel, and in concealing the little book itself. But Orthodox Christians he either did not seek out (suspecting that they would reject him as a heretic), or did not find. The Baptists, however, seemed to respect Silin, listened to him; they even considered him one of their own: but they, too, disliked all that was heretical in him, and hoped in time to bend him to their ways. Silin was subdued when he talked to me in their presence, and blossomed out when they were not there—it was difficult for him to force himself into their mold, though their faith was firm, pure, and ardent, helping them to endure katorga without wavering, and without spiritual collapse. They were all honest, free from anger, hard-working, quick to help others, devoted to Christ.

  That is why they are being rooted out with such determination. In the years 1948–1950 several hundred of them were sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment and dispatched to Special Camps for no other reason than that they belonged to Baptist communes (a commune is of course an organization).

  The camp is different from the Great Outside. Outside, everyone uninhibitedly tries to express and emphasize his personality in his outward behavior. In prison, on the contrary, all are depersonalized—identical haircuts, identical fuzz on their cheeks, identical caps, identical padded jackets. The face presents an image of the soul distorted by wind and sun and dirt and heavy toil. Discerning the light of the soul beneath this depersonalized and degraded exterior is an acquired skill.

  But the sparks of the spirit cannot be kept from spreading, breaking through to each other. Like recognizes and is gathered to like in a manner none can explain.

  Chapter 6

  The Committed Escaper

  WHEN GEORGI PAVLOVICH Tenno talks nowadays about past escapes—his own, those of comrades, and those of which he knows only by repute—his words of praise for the most uncompromising and persistent heroes—Ivan Vorobyov, Mikhail Khaidarov, Grigory Kudla, Hafiz Hafizov—are these:

  “There was a committed escaper!”

  A committed escaper! One who never for a minute doubts that a man cannot live behind bars—not even as the most comfortable of trusties, in the accounts office, in the Culture and Education Section, or in charge of the bread ration. One who once he lands in prison spends every waking hour thinking about escape and dreams of escape at night. One who has vowed never to resign himself, and subordinates every action to his need to escape. One for whom a day in prison can never be just another day; there are only days of preparation for escape, days on the run, and days in the punishment cells after recapture and a beating.

  A committed escaper! This means one who knows what he is undertaking. One who has seen the bullet-riddled bodies of other escapers on display along the central tract. He has also seen those brought back alive—like the man who was taken from hut to hut, black and blue and coughing blood, and made to shout: “Prisoners! Look what happened to me! It can happen to you, too!” He knows that a runaway’s body is usually too heavy to be delivered to the camp. And that therefore the head alone is brought back in a duffel bag, sometimes (this is more reliable proof, according to the rulebook) together with the right arm, chopped off at the elbow, so that the Special Section can check the fingerprints and write the man off.

  A committed escaper! It is for his benefit that window bars are set in cement, that the camp area is encircled with dozens of strands of barbed wire, towers, fences, reinforced barriers, that ambushes and booby traps are set, that red meat is fed to gray dogs.

&n
bsp; The committed escaper is also one who refuses to be undermined by the reproaches of the average prisoner: You escapers make it worse for the rest! Discipline will be stiffer! Ten inspections a day! Thinner gruel! He ignores the whispered suggestions of other prisoners—not only those who urge resignation (“Life’s not so bad even in a camp, especially if you get parcels”), but those who want him to join in protests or hunger strikes, because all that is not struggle but self-deception. Of all possible means of struggle, he has eyes only for one, believes only in one, devotes himself only to one—escape!

  He cannot do otherwise! That is how he is made. A bird cannot renounce seasonal migration, and a committed escaper cannot help running away.

  In the intervals between unsuccessful attempts, peaceful prisoners would ask Tenno: “Why can’t you just sit still? Why do you keep running? What do you expect to find on the Outside—especially now?” Tenno was amazed. “What d’you mean—what do I expect to find? Freedom, of course! A whole day in the taiga without chains—that’s what I call freedom!”

  That was Tenno for you. In each new camp (he was transferred frequently) he was depressed and miserable until his next escape plan matured. Once he had a plan, Tenno was radiant, and a smile of triumph never left his lips.

  There is no room in this book for his complicated life story. But the urge to escape had been with him from birth. As a small boy he had run away from boarding school in Bryansk to “America”—down the Desna in a rowboat. He had climbed the iron gates of the Pyatigorsk orphanage in his underwear in midwinter, and run away to his grandmother. He was a very unusual amalgam of sailor and circus performer. He had gone through a school for seamen, served before the mast on an icebreaker, as boatswain on a trawler, as navigation officer in the merchant navy. He had graduated from the army’s Institute of Foreign Languages, spent the war with the Northern Fleet, sailed to Iceland and England as liaison officer with British convoys. But he had also, from his childhood on, practiced acrobatics; he had appeared in circuses, had trained gymnasts on the beam, performed as a memory man (memorizing masses of words and figures) and as a mind reader. The circus, and living in seaports, had led to some slight contact with the criminal world: he had picked up something of their language, their adventurousness, their quick-wittedness, their daredeviltry. Later on, serving time with thieves in numerous Disciplinary Barracks, he had absorbed more and more from them. This, too, would come in handy for the committed escaper.