At night they would raid the village nearby, filch a pot or break into a pantry for flour, salt, an ax, some crockery. (Inevitably the escaper, like the partisan, soon becomes a thief, preying on the peaceful folk all around him.) Another time they took a cow from the village and slaughtered it in the forest. But then the first snow came, and to avoid leaving tracks they had to sit tight in their dugout. Kudla went out just once for brushwood and the forester immediately opened fire on him. “So you’re the thieves, are you! You’re the ones who stole the cow.” Sure enough, traces of blood were found around the dugout. They were taken to the village and locked up. The people shouted that they should be shot out of hand and no mercy shown to them. But an investigating officer arrived from the district center with the picture sent around to assist the nationwide search, and addressed the villagers. “Well done!” he said. “These aren’t thieves you’ve caught, but dangerous political criminals.”
Suddenly there was a complete change of attitude. The owner of the cow, a Chechen as it turned out, brought the prisoners bread, mutton, and even some money, collected by the Chechens. “What a pity,” he said. “You should have come and told me who you were and I’d have given you everything you wanted!” (There is no reason to doubt it; that’s how the Chechens are.) Kudla burst into tears. After so many years of savagery, he couldn’t stand sympathy.
The prisoners were removed to Kustanai and put in the railroad jail, where their captors not only took away the Chechen’s offering (and pocketed it), but gave them no food at all. (Didn’t Korneychuk tell you about it at the Peace Congress?) Before they were put on the train out of Kustanai, they were made to kneel on the station platform with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. They were kept like that for some time, for the whole world to see.
If it had been on a station platform in Moscow, Leningrad, or Kiev, or any other flourishing city, everybody would have passed by. The people of Kustanai, however, had little to lose. They were all either “sworn enemies,” or persons with black marks against them, or simply exiles. They started crowding around the prisoners, and tossing them makhorka, cigarettes, bread. Kudla’s wrists were shackled behind his back, so he bent over to pick up a piece of bread with his teeth—but the guard kicked it out of his mouth. Kudla rolled over, and again groveled to pick it up—and the guard kicked the bread farther away. (You progressive film makers, perhaps you will remember this scene and this old man?) The people began pressing forward and making a noise. “Let them go! Let them go!” A militia squad appeared. The policemen had the advantage and dispersed the people.
The train pulled in, and the prisoners were loaded for transport to the Kengir jail.
Chapter 9
The Kids with Tommy Guns
THE CAMPS WERE guarded by men in long greatcoats with black cuffs. They were guarded by Red Army men. They were guarded by prisoner guards. They were guarded by elderly reservists. Last came the robust youngsters born during the First Five-Year Plan, who had seen no war service when they took their nice new Tommy guns and set about guarding us.
Twice every day, for an hour at a time, we and they shuffled along, tied together in silent and deadly brotherhood: any one of them was at liberty to kill any one of us.
We walked with never a glance at their sheepskin coats and their Tommy guns—what were they to us? They walked watching our dark ranks all the time. It was there in the regulations that they must watch us all the time. Orders were orders. Duty was duty. Any wrong movement, any false step, they must cut short with a bullet.
How did they think of us, in our dark jackets, our gray caps of Stalin fur, our grotesque felt boots that had served three sentences and shed four soles, our crazy quilt of number patches? Decent people would obviously never be treated like that.
Was it surprising that our appearance inspired disgust? It was intended to do just that.
These kids were not allowed to know anything about us; they were allowed only the right to shoot without warning!
If they had just visited us in our huts of an evening, sat on our bunks and heard why this old man, or the other old fellow over there, was inside . . . those towers would have been unmanned and those Tommy guns would never have fired.
But the whole cunning and strength of the system was in the fact that our deadly bond was forged from ignorance. Any sympathy they showed for us was punishable as treason; any wish to speak to us, as a breach of a solemn oath. And what was the point of talking to us when the political instructor would come at fixed intervals to lead a discussion on the political and moral character of the enemies of the people whom they were guarding.
The political instructor will never contradict himself, never make a slip. He will never tell the boys that some people are imprisoned here simply for believing in God, or simply for desiring truth, or simply for love of justice. Or indeed for nothing at all.
Here is one such political lesson, as remembered by a former convoy guard (at Nyroblag). “Lieutenant Samutin was a lanky, narrow-shouldered man, and his head was flat above the temples. He looked like a snake. He was towheaded and almost without eyebrows. We knew that in the past he had shot people with his own hands. Now he was a political instructor, reciting in a monotonous voice: ‘The enemies of the people, over whom you stand guard, are the same as the Fascists, filthy scum. We embody the power and the punitive sword of the Motherland and we must be firm. No sentimentality, no pity.’”
That is how they mold the boys who make a point of kicking a runaway’s head when he is down. The boys who can boot a piece of bread out of the mouth of a gray-haired old man in handcuffs. Who can look with indifference at a shackled runaway jounced on the splintery boards of a lorry; his face is bloodied, his head is battered, but they look on unmoved. For they are the Motherland’s punitive sword, and he, so they say, is an American colonel.
After Stalin’s death, then living in eternal banishment, I was a patient in an ordinary free Tashkent clinic. Suddenly I heard a patient, a young Uzbek, telling his neighbors about his service in the army. His unit had, he said, kept guard on beasts and butchers. It enraged them that they, the convoy guards, had to freeze on top of watchtowers in the winter (in sheepskin coats down to their heels, it’s true), while the enemies of the people, once they entered the working area, scattered about the warming-up shacks (even from the watchtower he could have seen that it was not so) and slept there all day.
Here was an interesting opportunity—to look at a Special Camp through the eyes of a convoy guard! I began asking what kind of reptiles they were and whether my Uzbek friend had talked to them personally. And of course he told me that he had learned all this from political officers, that they had even had “cases” read out to them in their political indoctrination sessions. And his malicious misconceptions about prisoners sleeping all day had of course been reinforced in him by the approving nods of officers.
Woe unto you that cause these little ones to stumble. Better for you had you never been born! . . .
He told us of a number of incidents. Once, for instance, one of his comrades was marching in convoy and fancied that somebody was about to run out of the column. He pressed his trigger and killed five prisoners with a single burst. Since all the other guards later testified that the column had been moving quietly along, this soldier incurred a terrible punishment: for killing five people he was put in detention for fifteen days (in a warm guardhouse, of course).
But which of the Archipelago’s inhabitants has no stories of this sort to tell! . . . We knew so many of them in the Corrective Labor Camps. On a work site which had no fence but an invisible boundary line, a shot rang out and a prisoner fell dead.
Why? Because the man has a gun! Because one man has the arbitrary power to kill or not to kill another.
What’s more—it pays! The bosses are always on your side. They’ll never punish you for killing somebody. On the contrary, they’ll commend you, reward you, and the quicker you are on the trigger—bring him down when he’s only put half a foot wrong�
��the more vigilant you are seen to be, the higher your reward! A month’s pay. A month’s leave.
Yes, but their underlying common humanity must have been weak, or altogether lacking, if it was not proof against an oath and a few political discussion periods. Not every generation, and not every people, is of the stuff from which such boys are fashioned.
This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one’s conscience to someone else’s keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of evildoers and against the people!
Chapter 10
Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning
NO, THE SURPRISING thing is not that mutinies and risings did not occur in the camps, but that in spite of everything they did.
Like all embarrassing events in our history—which means three-quarters of what really happened—these mutinies have been neatly cut out, and the gap hidden with an invisible join. Those who took part in them have been destroyed, and even remote witnesses frightened into silence; the reports of those who suppressed them have been burned or hidden in safes within safes within safes—so that the risings have already become a myth, although some of them happened only fifteen and others only ten years ago. (No wonder some say that there was no Christ, no Buddha, no Mohammed. There you’re dealing in thousands of years. . . .)
When it can no longer disturb any living person, historians will be given access to what is left of the documents, archaeologists will do a little digging, heat something in a laboratory, and the dates, locations, contours of these risings, with the names of their leaders, will come to light.
Perhaps we (no, not we ourselves) shall learn at the same time about the legendary rising in 1948 at public works site No. 501, where the Sivaya Maska-Salekhard railway was under construction. It was legendary because everybody in the camps talked about it in whispers, but no one really knew anything. Legendary also because it broke out not in the Special Camp system, where the mood and the grounds for it by now existed, but in a Corrective Labor Camp, where people were isolated from each other by fear of informers and trampled under foot by thieves, where even their right to be “politicals” was spat upon, and where a prison mutiny therefore seemed inconceivable.
According to the rumors, it was all the work of ex-soldiers (recent ex-soldiers!). It could not have been otherwise. Without them the 58s lacked stamina, spirit, and leadership. But these young men (hardly any of them over thirty) were officers and enlisted men from our fighting armies, or their fellows who had been prisoners of war. These young men still retained in 1948 their wartime élan and belief in themselves, and they could not accept the idea that men like themselves, whole battalions of them, should meekly die. Even escape seemed to them a contemptible half-measure, rather like deserting one by one instead of facing the enemy together.
It was all planned and begun in one particular team. An ex-colonel called Voronin or Voronov, a one-eyed man, is said to have been the leader. A first lieutenant of armored troops, Sakurenko, is also mentioned. The team killed their convoy guards. Then they went and freed a second team, and a third. They attacked the convoy guards’ hamlet, then the camp from outside, removed the sentries from the towers, and opened up the camp area.
Arming themselves with weapons taken from the guards, the rebels went on to capture the neighboring Camp Division. With their combined forces they decided to advance on Vorkuta! It was only sixty kilometers away. But this was not to be. Parachute troops were dropped to bar their way. Then low-flying fighter planes raked them with machine-gun fire and dispersed them.
They were tried, more of them were shot, and others given twenty-five or ten years. (At the same time, many of those who had not joined in the operation but remained in the camp had their sentences “refreshed.”)
The hopelessness of this rising as a military operation is obvious. But would you say that dying quietly by inches was more “hopeful”?
Riddle: What is the quickest thing in the world? Answer: Thought.
It is and it isn’t. It can be slow, too—oh, how slow! Only slowly and laboriously do men, people, society, realize what has happened to them. Realize the truth about their position.
In herding the 58s into Special Camps, Stalin was exerting his strength mainly for his own amusement. He already had them as securely confined as they could be, but he thought he would be craftier than ever and improve on his best. He thought he knew how to make it still more frightening. The results were quite the opposite.
The whole system of oppression elaborated in his reign was based on keeping malcontents apart, preventing them from reading each other’s eyes and discovering how many of them there were; instilling it into all of them, even into the most dissatisfied, that no one was dissatisfied except for a few doomed individuals, blindly vicious and spiritually bankrupt.
In the Special Camps, however, there were malcontents by the thousands. They knew their numerical strength. And they realized that they were not spiritual paupers, that they had a nobler conception of what life should be than their jailers, than their betrayers, than the theorists who tried to explain why they must rot in camps.
The old camp mentality—you die first, I’ll wait a bit; there is no justice, so forget it; that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it will be—also began to disappear.
A bold thought, a desperate thought, a thought to raise a man up: how could things be changed so that instead of us running from them, they would run from us?
Once the question was put, once a certain number of people had thought of it and put it into words, and a certain number had listened to them, the age of escapes was over. The age of rebellion had begun.
Suddenly—a suicide. In the Disciplinary Barracks, hut No. 2, a man was found hanging. (I am going through the stages of the process as they occurred in Ekibastuz. But note that the stages were just the same in other Special Camps!) The bosses were not greatly upset; they cut him down and wheeled him off to the scrap heap.
A rumor went around the work team. The man was an informer. He hadn’t hanged himself. He had been hanged.
As a lesson to the rest.
“Kill the stoolie!” That was it, the vital link! A knife in the heart of the stoolie! Make knives and cut stoolies’ throats—that was it!
Now, as I write this chapter, rows of humane books frown down at me from the walls, the tarnished gilt on their well-worn spines glinting reproachfully like stars through cloud. Nothing in the world should be sought through violence! By taking up the sword, the knife, the rifle, we quickly put ourselves on the level of our tormentors and persecutors. And there will be no end to it. . . .
There will be no end. . . . Here, at my desk, in a warm place, I agree completely.
If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground—from the hole you’re in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.
The oppressed at least concluded that evil cannot be cast out by good.
Murders now followed one another in quicker succession than escapes in the best period. They were carried out confidently and anonymously: no one went with a bloodstained knife to give himself up; they saved themselves and their knives for another deed. At their favorite time—when a single warder was unlocking huts one after another, and while nearly all the prisoners were still sleeping—the masked avengers entered a particular section, went up to a particular bunk, and unhesitatingly killed the traitor, who might be
awake and howling in terror or might be still asleep. When they had made sure that he was dead, they walked swiftly away.
They wore masks, and their numbers could not be seen—they were either picked off or covered. But if the victim’s neighbors should recognize them by their general appearance, so far from hurrying to volunteer information, they would not now give in even under interrogation, even under threat from the godfathers, but would repeat over and over again: “No, no, I don’t know anything, I didn’t see anything.” And this was not simply in recognition of a hoary truth known to all the oppressed: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you”; it was self-preservation! Because anyone who gave names would have been killed next 5 A.M., and the security officer’s good will would have been no help to him at all.
And so murder (although as yet there had been fewer than a dozen) became the rule, became a normal occurrence. “Anybody been killed today?” prisoners would ask each other when they went to wash or collect their morning rations. In this cruel sport the prisoner’s ear heard the subterranean gong of justice.
Out of five thousand men about a dozen were killed, but with every stroke of the knife more and more of the clinging, twining tentacles fell away. A remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface, we were prisoners living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free—free because for the very first time in our lives, we had started saying openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced this transition can imagine what it is like!
An invisible balance hung in the air. In one of its scales all the familiar phantoms were heaped: interrogation officers, punches, beatings, sleepless standing, “boxes” (cells too small to sit or lie down in), cold, damp punishment cells, rats, bedbugs, tribunals, second and third sentences. But this could not all happen at once, this was a slow-grinding bone mill, it could not devour all of us at once and process us in a single day. And even when they had been through it—as every one of us had—men still went on existing.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 45