The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  While in the other scale lay nothing but a single knife—but that knife was meant for you, if you gave in! It was meant for you alone, in the breast, and not sometime or other, but at dawn tomorrow, and all the forces of the Cheka-MGB could not save you from it! It was not a long one, but just right for neat insertion between your ribs. It didn’t even have a proper handle, just a piece of old insulation tape wound around the blunt end of the blade—but this gave a very good grip, so that the knife would not slip out of the hand!

  And this bracing threat weighed heavier!

  So that now the bosses were suddenly blind and deaf.

  The information machine on which alone the fame of the omnipotent and omniscient Organs had been based in decades past had broken down.

  Foremen started escaping into the Disciplinary Barracks—hiding behind stone walls! Not only they, but bloodsucking work assigners, stoolies on the brink of exposure or, something told them, next on the list, suddenly took fright and ran for it!

  This was a new period, a heady and spine-tingling period in the life of the Special Camp. It wasn’t we who had taken to our heels—they had, ridding us of their presence! A time such as we had never experienced or thought possible on this earth: when a man with an unclean conscience could not go quietly to bed! Retribution was at hand—not in the next world, not before the court of history, but retribution live and palpable, raising a knife over you in the light of dawn. It was like a fairy tale: the ground is soft and warm under the feet of honest men, but under the feet of traitors it prickles and burns.

  The masters of our bodies and souls were particularly anxious not to admit that our movement was political in character. In their menacing orders (warders went around the huts reading them out) the new trend was declared to be nothing but gangsterism. This made it all simpler, more comprehensible, somehow cozier. It seemed only yesterday that they had sent us gangsters labeled “politicals.” Well, politicals—real politicals for the first time—had now become “gangsters.” It was announced, not very confidently, that these gangsters would soon be discovered (so far not one of them had been), and still less confidently, that they would be shot. The orders further appealed to the prisoner mass to condemn the gangsters and struggle against them!

  The prisoners listened and went away chuckling. Seeing the disciplinary officers afraid to call “political” behavior by its name, we were aware of their weakness.

  The orders were of no avail. The prisoner masses did not start condemning and struggling on behalf of their masters. The next measure was to put the whole camp on a punitive routine.

  The object of the camp administration was to make things so hard for us that we would betray the murderers out of exasperation. But we braced ourselves to suffer, to hang on a bit: it was worth it! Their other object was to keep the huts closed so that murderers could not come from outside, and so would be easier to find. But another murder took place, and still no one was caught—just as before no one had ever seen anything or knew anything. Then somebody’s head was smashed in at work—locked huts are no safeguard against that.

  They revoked the punitive regime. Instead they had the bright idea of building the “Great Wall of China.” This was a wall two bricks thick and four meters high, to cut across the width of the camp. They were preparing to divide the camp into two parts. We greatly resented that wall—we knew that the bosses had some dirty trick in store—but we had no choice but to build it. Only a little of us was as yet free—our heads and our mouths—but we were still stuck up to our shoulders in the quagmire of slavery.

  Two warders came into a hut after work, and casually told a man, “Get ready and come with us.”

  The prisoner looked around at the other lads and said, “I’m not going.”

  In fact, this simple everyday situation—a snatch, an arrest—which we had never resisted, which we were used to accepting fatalistically, held another possibility: that of saying, “I’m not going!” Our liberated heads understood that now.

  The warders pounced on him. “What do you mean, not going?”

  “I’m just not going,” the zek answered, firmly. “I’m all right where I am.”

  There were shouts from all around:

  “Where’s he supposed to go? . . . What’s he got to go for? . . . We won’t let you take him! . . . We won’t let you! . . . Go away!”

  And the wolves understood that we were not the sheep we used to be. That if they wanted to grab one of us now they would have to use trickery, or do it at the guardhouse, or send a whole detail to take one prisoner. With a crowd around, they would never take him.

  Purged of human filth, delivered from spies and eavesdroppers, we looked about and saw, wide-eyed, that . . . we were thousands! that we were . . . politicals! that we could resist!

  We had chosen well; the chain would snap if we tugged at this link—the stoolies, the talebearers and traitors! Our own kind had made our lives impossible. As on some ancient sacrificial altar, their blood had been shed that we might be freed from the curse that hung over us.

  The revolution was gathering strength. The wind that seemed to have subsided had sprung up again in a hurricane to fill our eager lungs.

  Chapter 11

  Tearing at the Chains

  THE MIDDLE GROUND had now collapsed, the ditch which ran between us and our custodians was now a deep moat, and we stood on opposite slopes, taking the measure of the situation.

  “Stood” is of course a manner of speaking. We went to work daily, we were never late for work line-up, we never let each other down, there were no shirkers, we chalked up a good day’s work—you might think that our masters could be pleased with us.

  All the same, we and they were thinking hard about the next stage. Things could not remain as they were: we could not be satisfied with what had happened, nor could they. Someone had to strike a blow.

  But what should be our aim? We could now say out loud, without looking nervously around, whatever we liked—all those things which had seethed inside us (and freedom of speech, even if it was only there in the camp, even though it had come so late, was a delight!). But could we hope to spread that freedom beyond the camp, or carry it out with us? Of course not. We, from where we were, could not demand that the country should change completely, nor that it should give up the camps: they would have rained bombs on us.

  As to whether we should fight for an eight-hour working day—there was no unanimity among us. . . . We were so unused to freedom that we seemed to have lost all appetite for it.

  Ways and means were also discussed. How should we present our demands? What action should we take? Clearly, we could do nothing with bare hands against modern arms, and therefore the course for us to take was not armed rebellion, but a strike.

  But the blood in our veins was still slavish, still servile. . . . The word “strike” sounded so terrifying to our ears that we sought firmer ground: by refusing food when we refused to work it seemed to us that our moral right to strike would be reinforced. We felt that we had some sort of right to go on a hunger strike—but to strike in the ordinary sense?

  So that by voluntarily undertaking an unnecessary hunger strike, we voluntarily agreed to undermine the physical strength which we needed for the struggle. (Fortunately, no other camp seems to have repeated Ekibastuz’s mistake.)

  We went over and over the details of the proposed work stoppage-hunger strike. It was talked over in various places, in one group and another; it seemed inevitable and desirable, yet, because it was so novel, somehow impossible.

  But our custodians were less likely to lose by acting than by failing to act—and they got their blow in first.

  After that, events took on a momentum of their own.

  At peace and at ease on our familiar bunks, in our familiar sections, we greeted the new year, 1952. Then on Sunday, January 6, the Orthodox Christmas Eve, when the Ukrainians were getting ready to observe the holiday in style—they would make kutya, fast till the first star appeared, and t
hen sing carols—the doors were locked after morning inspection and not opened again.

  So that was it! A regrouping! Guards were posted by the break in the Chinese Wall. It would be bricked up next day. We were taken past the guardhouse and herded, hundreds of us, with sacks and mattresses, like refugees from a burning village, around the boundary fence, past another guardhouse, into the other camp area. Passing those who were being driven in the opposite direction.

  In one half of the camp (Camp Division No. 2) only the Ukrainian nationalists, some 2,000 of them, were left. In the half to which we had been driven, and which was to be Camp Division No. 1, there were some 3,500 men belonging to all the other ethnic groups—Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Tatars, Caucasians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Poles, Moldavians, Germans, and a variegated sprinkling of other nationalities. The Ukrainians, the Banderists, the most dangerous rebels, had been moved farther away from it. What did this mean?

  We soon learned what. Reliable rumors went around the camp (from the working prisoners who took the gruel to the BUR) that the stoolies in the “safe deposit” had grown cheeky. Suspects, picked up here and there, two or three at a time, had been put in with the stoolies, who were torturing them in their common cell, choking them, beating them, trying to make them “sing” and to name names. “Who’s doing the slashing?” This made the whole scheme as clear as daylight. They were using torture! Not the dog pack themselves—they probably had no authorization for it, and might run into trouble, so they had entrusted the stoolies with the job: find your murderers yourselves!

  So many deep historians have written so many clever books—and still they have not learned how to predict those mysterious conflagrations of the human spirit, to detect the mysterious springs of a social explosion, nor even to explain them in retrospect.

  Sometimes you can stuff bundle after bundle of burning tow under the logs, and they will not take. Yet up above, a solitary little spark flies out of the chimney and the whole village is reduced to ashes.

  Our three thousand had no plans made, were quite unprepared, but one evening on their return from work the prisoners in a hut next to the BUR began dismantling their bunks, seized the long bars and crosspieces, ran through the gloom to batter down the stout fence around the camp jail. They had neither axes nor crowbars. . . .

  There was a hammering noise—they worked like a team of good carpenters, levering the planks away as soon as they gave—and the grating protests of 12-centimeter nails could be heard all over the camp.

  The warders hustled over to the BUR, to the half-dark wall where all the activity was—and raced like scalded cats to the staff barracks. Somebody rushed after a warder with a stick. Then, to provide full musical accompaniment, somebody started breaking windows in the staff barracks with stones or a stick. The staff’s windowpanes shattered with a merry menacing crash.

  What the lads had in mind was not to raise a rebellion, nor even to capture the BUR (no easy matter), but merely to pour petrol into the stoolies’ cell, and toss in something burning—meaning: Watch your step, we’ll show you yet! But machine-gun fire from the towers suddenly rattled across the camp, and they never did start their blaze.

  The warders and Chief Disciplinary Officer Machekhovsky had fled from the camp and informed Division. Division gave telephonic instructions for the corner towers to open fire from machine guns—on three thousand unarmed people who knew nothing of what had happened. (Our team, for instance, was in the mess hall, and we were completely mystified when we heard all the shooting outside.)

  Firing at random in the darkness, the machine-gunners blasted away. They pierced the flimsy walls of the huts, and, as always happens, wounded not those who had stormed the BUR, but others, who had no part in it. In hut No. 9 a harmless old man, nearing the end of a ten-year sentence, was killed in his bed. He was due to be released in a month’s time.

  The besiegers left the prison yard and quickly dispersed to their barracks (where they had to put their bunks together again so as to cover their traces). Many others took the shooting as a warning to stay inside their huts. Yet others, on the contrary, poured out excitedly and scurried about the camp, trying to understand what it was all about.

  By then there were no warders left in the camp area. The staff barracks was empty of officers, and terrible jagged holes yawned in its windows. The towers were silent. The curious, and the seekers after truth, roamed the camp.

  Suddenly the gates of our Camp Division were flung wide and a platoon of convoy troops marched in with Tommy guns at the ready, firing short bursts at random. They fanned out in all directions, and behind them came the enraged warders, with lengths of iron pipe, clubs, or anything else they had been able to lay their hands on.

  A lethal crush developed at the entrance to our hut: the prisoners were so anxious to shove their way in that no one could enter. (Not that the thin boards of the hut walls gave any protection against bullets, but once inside, a man ceased to be a mutineer.) I was one of those by the steps. I remember very well my state of mind: a nauseated indifference to my fate; a momentary indifference whether I survived or not. Why have you fastened your hooks on us, curse you! Why must we go on paying you till the day we die for the crime of being born into this unhappy world? Why must we sit forever in your jails? The prison sickness which is at once nausea and peace of mind flooded my being. Even my constant fear for the as-yet-unrecorded poem and the play I carried within me was in abeyance. In full view of the death which was wheeling toward us in military greatcoats, I made no effort at all to push through the door. This was the true convict mentality; this was what they had brought us to.

  Our pursuers did not break into the huts. They locked us in. They hunted down and beat those who had not been quick enough to run inside.

  The work stoppage-hunger strike had not been carefully prepared, it was not even a coherent concept, and it began impulsively, with no directing center, no signal system.

  Those prisoners in other camps who took over the food stores and then stayed away from work of course behaved more sensibly. But our action, if not very clever, was impressive: three thousand men simultaneously swore off both food and work.

  Next morning not a single team sent its man to the bread-cutting room. Not a single team went to the mess hall, where broth and mush awaited them. The warders just could not understand it: twice, three times, four times they came into the huts to summon us with brisk commands, then to drive us out with threats, then to ask us nicely—no farther than to the mess hall, to collect our bread, with never a word for the present about work line-up.

  But nobody went. They all lay on their bunks, fully dressed, wearing their shoes, and silent. Only we, the foremen (I had become a foreman in that hot year), felt called upon to answer, since the warders kept addressing themselves to us. We lay on our bunks like the rest and muttered from our pillows: “It’s no good, boss. . . .”

  This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly.

  In the end they stopped coaxing us and locked up the huts.

  In the days that followed, no one left the huts except the orderlies—to carry the latrine buckets out and bring drinking water and coal in. Only bed cases in the Medical Section were by general agreement allowed not to fast.

  The bosses could no longer see us, no longer peer into our souls. A gulf had opened between the overseers and the slaves!

  None of those who took part will ever forget those three days in our lives. We could not see our comrades in other huts, nor the corpses lying there unburied. Nonetheless, the bonds which united us, at opposite ends of the deserted camp, were of steel.

  This was a hunger strike called not by well-fed people with reserves of subcutaneous fat, but by gaunt, emaciated men, who had felt the whip of hunger daily for years on end, who had achieved with difficulty some sort of physical equilibrium, and who suf
fered acute distress if they were deprived of a single 100-gram ration. Even the goners starved with the rest, although a three-day fast might tip them into irreversible and fatal decline. The food which we had refused, and which we had always thought so beggarly, was a mirage of plenty in the feverish dreams of famished men.

  This was a hunger strike called by men schooled for decades in the law of the jungle: “You die first and I’ll die later.” Now they were reborn, they struggled out of their stinking swamp, they consented to die today, all of them together, rather than to go on living in the same way tomorrow.

  In the huts roommates began to treat each other with a sort of ceremonious affection. Whatever scraps of food anyone—this meant mainly those who received parcels—had left were pooled, placed on a piece of rag spread out like a tablecloth, and then, by joint decision of the whole room, some eatables were shared out and others put aside for the next day.

  What the bosses would do no one could predict. We thought that perhaps they would start firing on the huts again from the towers. The last thing we expected was any concession. We had never in our lives wrested anything from them, and our strike had the bitter tang of hopelessness.

  But there was a sort of satisfaction in this feeling of hopelessness. We had taken a futile, a desperate step, it could only end badly—and that was good. Our bellies were empty, our hearts were in our boots—but some higher need was being satisfied. During those long hungry days, evenings, nights, three thousand men brooded over their three thousand sentences, their families, their lack of families, all that had befallen and would yet befall them, and although the hearts in thousands of breasts could not beat together—and there were those who felt only regret, only despair—yet most of them kept time: Things are as they should be! We’ll keep it up to spite you! Things are bad! So much the better!

  This, too, is a phenomenon which has never been adequately studied: we do not know the law that governs sudden surges of mass emotion, in defiance of all reason. I felt this soaring emotion myself. I had only one more year of my sentence to serve. I might have been expected to feel nothing but dismay and vexation that I was dirtying my hands on a broil from which I should hardly escape without a new sentence. And yet I had no regrets. Damn and blast the lot of you, I’ll serve my time all over again if you like!