The believers . . . prayed, and leaving the outcome of the Kengir revolt in God’s hands, were as always the calmest of people. Services for all religions were held in the mess hall according to a fixed timetable. The Jehovah’s Witnesses felt free to observe their rules strictly and refused to build fortifications or stand guard. They sat for hours on end with their heads together, saying nothing. (They were made to wash the dishes.) A prophet, genuine or sham, went around the camp putting crosses on bunks and foretelling the end of the world.
Some knew that they were fatally compromised and that the few days before the troops arrived were all that was left of life. The theme of all their thoughts and actions must be how to hold out longer. These people were not the unhappiest. (The unhappiest were those who were not involved and who prayed for the end.)
But when all these people gathered at meetings to decide whether to surrender or to hold on, they found themselves again in that heated climate where their personal opinions dissolved, and ceased to exist even for themselves. Or else they feared ridicule even more than the death that awaited them.
And when they voted for or against holding out, the majority were for.
Why did it drag on so long? What can the bosses have been waiting for? For the food to run out? They knew it would last a long time. Were they considering opinion in the settlement? They had no need to. Were they carefully working out their plan of repression? They could have been quicker about it. Were they having to seek approval for the operation up top? How high up? There is no knowing on what date and at what level the decision was taken.
On several occasions the main gate of the service yard suddenly opened—perhaps to test the readiness of the defenders? The duty picket sounded the alarm, and the platoons poured out to meet the enemy. But no one entered the camp grounds.
In the middle of June several tractors appeared in the settlement. They were working, shifting something perhaps, around the boundary fence. They began working even at night. The unfriendly roar made the night seem blacker.
Then suddenly the skeptics were put to shame! And the defeatists! And all who had said that there would be no mercy, and that there was no point in begging. The orthodox alone could feel triumphant. On June 22 the outside radio announced that the prisoners’ demands had been accepted! A member of the Presidium of the Central Committee was on his way!
The rosy spot turned into a rosy sun, a rosy sky! It is, then, possible to get through to them! There is, then, justice in our country! They will give a little, and we will give a little. If it comes to it, we can walk about with number patches, and the bars on the windows needn’t bother us, we aren’t thinking of climbing out. You say they’re tricking us again? Well, they aren’t asking us to report for work beforehand!
Just as the touch of a stick will draw off the charge from an electroscope so that the agitated gold leaf sinks gratefully to rest, so did the radio announcement reduce the brooding tension of that last week.
Even the loathsome tractors, after working for a while on the evening of June 24, stopped their noise.
Prisoners could sleep peacefully on the fortieth night of the revolt. He would probably arrive tomorrow; perhaps he had come already. . . .
In the early dawn of Friday, June 25, parachutes carrying flares opened out in the sky, more flares soared from the watchtowers, and the observers on the rooftops were picked off by snipers’ bullets before they could let out a squeak! Then cannon fire was heard! Airplanes skimmed the camp, spreading panic. Tanks, the famous T-34’s, had taken up position under cover of the tractor noise and now moved on the gaps from all sides. (One of them, however, fell into a ditch.) Some of the tanks dragged concatenations of barbed wire on trestles so that they could divide up the camp grounds immediately. Behind others ran helmeted assault troops with Tommy guns. (Both Tommy-gunners and tank crews had been given vodka first. However special the troops may be, it is easier to destroy unarmed and sleeping people with drink inside you.) Operators with walkie-talkies came in with the advancing troops. The generals went up into the towers with the snipers, and from there, in the daylight shed by the flares (and the light from a tower set on fire by the zeks with their incendiary bombs), gave their orders: “Take hut number so-and-so! . . .”
The camp woke up—frightened out of its wits. Some stayed where they were in their huts, lying on the floor as their one chance of survival, and because resistance seemed senseless. Others tried to make them get up and join in the resistance. Yet others ran right into the line of fire, either to fight or to seek a quicker death.
The Third Camp Division fought—the division which had started it all. They hurled stones at the Tommy-gunners and warders, and probably sulfur bombs at the tanks. . . . Nobody thought of the powdered glass. One hut counterattacked twice, with shouts of “Hurrah.”
The tanks crushed everyone in their way. (Alla Presman, from Kiev, was run over—the tracks passed over her abdomen.) Tanks rode up onto the porches of huts and crushed people there. The tanks grazed the sides of huts and crushed those who were clinging to them to escape the caterpillar tracks. Semyon Rak and his girl threw themselves under a tank clasped in each other’s arms and ended it that way. Tanks nosed into the thin board walls of the huts and even fired blank shells into them. Faina Epstein remembers the corner of a hut collapsing, as if in a nightmare, and a tank passing obliquely over the wreckage and over living bodies; women tried to jump and fling themselves out of the way: behind the tank came a lorry, and the half-naked women were tossed onto it.
The cannon shots were blank, but the Tommy guns were shooting live rounds, and the bayonets were cold steel. Women tried to shield men with their own bodies—and they, too, were bayoneted! Security Officer Belyaev shot two dozen people with his own hand that morning; when the battle was over he was seen putting knives into the hands of corpses for the photographer to take pictures of dead gangsters. Suprun, a member of the Commission, and a grandmother, died from a wound in her lung. Some prisoners hid in the latrines, and were riddled with bullets there.
As groups of prisoners were taken, they were marched through the gaps onto the steppe and between files of Kengir convoy troops outside. They were searched and made to lie flat on their faces with their arms stretched straight out. As they lay there thus crucified, MVD fliers and warders walked among them to identify and pull out those whom they had spotted earlier from the air or from the watchtowers. (So busy were they with all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme—a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.)
The victorious generals descended from the towers and went off to breakfast. Without knowing any of them, I feel confident that their appetite that June morning left nothing to be desired and that they drank deeply. An alcoholic hum would not in the least disturb the ideological harmony in their heads. And what they had for hearts was something installed with a screwdriver.
The number of those killed or wounded was about six hundred, according to the stories, but according to figures given by the Kengir Division’s Production Planning Section, which became known some months later, it was more than seven hundred.
All day on June 25, the prisoners lay face down on the steppe in the sun (for days on end the heat had been unmerciful), while in the camp there was endless searching and breaking open and shaking out.
The members of the Commission and other suspects were locked up in the camp jail. More than a thousand people were selected for dispatch either to closed prisons or to Kolyma (as always, these lists were drawn up partly by guesswork, so that many who had not been involved at all found their way into them).
May this picture of the pacification bring peace to the souls of those on whom the last chapters have grated.
On June 26, the prisoners were made to spend the whole day taking down the barricades and bricking in the gaps.
/> On June 27, they were marched out to work. Those trains in the sidings would wait no longer for working hands!
The tanks which had crushed Kengir traveled under their own power to Rudnik and crawled around for the zeks to see. And draw their conclusions. . . .
PART VI
Exile
Chapter 1
Exile in the First Years of Freedom
HUMANITY PROBABLY INVENTED exile first and prison later. Expulsion from the tribe was of course exile. We were quick to realize how difficult it is for a man to exist, divorced from his own place, his familiar environment.
In the Russian Empire as elsewhere they were not slow to discover exile. It was given legal sanction under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich by the Code of Laws of 1648. But even earlier, at the end of the sixteenth century, people were exiled without legal sanction. Our great spaces gave their blessing—Siberia was ours already. Altogether in the course of the nineteenth century half a million were exiled, and at the end of the century those in exile at any one time numbered 300,000. Exile was so common in Russia precisely because there weren’t enough jails for long-term prisoners.
A feature of the exile system in the Tsarist nineteenth century which was taken for granted and seemed natural to everyone, but to us now seems surprising, was that it concerned itself only with individuals: whether he was dealt with by the courts or administratively, each man was sentenced separately and not as a member of some group.
The conditions of life in exile, the degree of harshness, changed from one decade to the next, and different generations of exiles have left us a variety of evidence. Transported prisoners traveling from transit prison to transit prison had a hard time of it; but we learn from P. F. Yakubovich and from Lev Tolstoi that politicals were transported in quite tolerable conditions. . . .
This mild treatment of exiles was not confined to socially distinguished or famous people. In the twentieth century, too, it was enjoyed by many revolutionaries and frondeurs—by the Bolsheviks in particular, who were not thought dangerous. Stalin, with four escapes behind him, was exiled for a fifth time . . . all the way to Vologda.
Yet exile even under these conditions, lenient as it seems to us, exile with no danger of starving to death, was sometimes taken hard by the exile himself. Many revolutionaries recall how painful they found the move from prison, where they were assured of bread, warmth, shelter, and leisure for their “universities” and their party wrangles, to a place of exile, where you were all by yourself among strangers, and had to use your own ingenuity to find food and shelter. Where there was no need to worry about these things it was, so we are informed (by F. Kon, for instance), still worse: “the horrors of idleness . . . The most dreadful thing of all is that people are condemned to inactivity.” Indeed, some of them even abandoned study for moneymaking, for trade, and some simply despaired and took to drink.
Here we see that the threat of exile—of mere displacement, of being set down with your feet tied—has a somber power of its own, the power which even ancient potentates understood, and which Ovid long ago experienced.
Emptiness. Helplessness. A life that is no life at all. . . .
The revolution had scarcely taken its first steps on legs still infirm, it was still in its infancy, when it realized that exile was indispensable. Let me quote verbatim Marshall Turkhachevsky about the year 1921 in the province of Tambov. “It was decided to organize large-scale deportation of the families of bandits [i.e., “partisans”—A.S.]. Extensive concentration camps were organized, in which these families could be confined while waiting.”
Only the fact that it was so convenient to shoot people on the spot rather than carry them elsewhere, guard them and feed them on the way, resettle them and go on guarding them—only this delayed the introduction of a regular exile system until the end of War Communism. Soon after that, in 1922, a permanent Exile Commission was set up under the Commissariat of the Interior to deal with “socially dangerous persons.” Thus even in the early twenties exile was a familiar and smoothly operating institution.
Because people are so complacently gullible, the regime’s intentions dawned on them slowly: the regime was simply not strong enough yet to eradicate all the unwanted at once. So for the time being they were uprooted not from life itself, but from the memory of their fellows.
There was, however, in the exile system one residual snag: the parasitical attitude of the exiles, who thought the state had an obligation to feed them. The Tsarist government did not dare to try compelling the exiles to increase the national product. And professional revolutionaries considered it beneath them to work.
Lenin received (and did not refuse) his 12 rubles a month, and prices in Siberia were one-half or one-third those in Russia, so that the state’s maintenance allowance for exiles was in fact overgenerous. It enabled Lenin to spend three whole years comfortably studying the theory of revolution, not worrying at all about the source of his livelihood.
From 1929 they started elaborating a system of exile in conjunction with forced labor. One worry the exiles were free from was how to cope with senseless idleness. . . . Their one concern now was: how to avoid dying of hunger.
Exile was a temporary pen to hold sheep marked for slaughter. Exiles in the first Soviet decades were not meant to settle but to await the summons—elsewhere. There were clever people—“former” people, and also some simple peasants—who already realized in the twenties all that lay before them. And when they reached the end of their first three-year term they stayed exactly where they were—in Archangel, for instance—just in case. Sometimes this helped them not to be caught under the nit comb again.
This was what exile had become in our time. . . .
You will see that we had heavier burdens than Ovid’s homesickness to bear.
Chapter 2
The Peasant Plague
THIS CHAPTER WILL deal with a small matter. Fifteen million souls. Fifteen million lives.
They weren’t educated people, of course. They couldn’t play the violin.
In the First World War we lost in all three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn’t Iosif keep track of his capital?). All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!
But about the silent, treacherous Plague which starved fifteen million of our peasants to death, choosing its victims carefully and destroying the backbone and mainstay of the Russian people—about that Plague there are no books.
Our country as well as our European neighbors keep silent about the six million people who were subsequently starved to death during the famine artificially brought about by the Bolsheviks. In the prosperous Poltava region, corpses were left lying around in the villages, on the roads and in the fields. It was impossible to walk through the groves near the stations: the stench of rotting corpses, among them those of babies, would make one faint. The situation was perhaps most horrible in the Kuban region. In many places in Byelorussia special crews had to be brought in from other regions to collect the corpses; those on the spot who were still alive were too few to bury the dead.
No bugles bid our hearts beat faster for them. Not even the traditional three stones mark the crossroads where they went in creaking carts to their doom. Our finest humanists, so sensitive to today’s injustices, in those years only nodded approvingly: Quite right, too! Just what they deserve!
It was all kept very dark, every stain carefully scratched out, every whisper swiftly choked.
Where did it all start? With the dogma that the peasantry is petit bourgeois? (And who in the eyes of these people is not petit bourgeois? In their wonderfully clear-cut scheme, apart from factory workers [not the skilled workers, though] and big-shot businessmen, all the rest, the whole people—peasants, office workers, actors, airmen, professors, students, doctors—are nothing but
the “petite bourgeoisie.”) Or did it start with a criminal scheme in high places to rob some and terrorize the rest?
From the last letters which Korolenko wrote to Gorky in 1921, just before the former died and the latter emigrated, we learn that this villainous assault on the peasantry had begun even then, and was taking almost the same form as in 1930.
But as yet their strength did not equal their impudence, and they backed down.
The devastating peasant Plague began, as far as we can judge, in 1929—the compilation of murder lists, the confiscations, the deportations. But only at the beginning of 1930 (after rehearsals were complete, and necessary adjustments made) was the public allowed to learn what was happening—in the decision of the Central Committee of the Party dated January 5. (The Party is “justified in shifting from a policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class.”)
The savage law of the Civil War (Ten for every one! A hundred for every one!) was reinforced—to my mind an un-Russian law: where will you find anything like it in Russian history? For every activist (which usually meant big-mouthed loafer: A. Y. Olenyev is not the only one to recall that thieves and drunkards were in charge of “dekulakization”)—for every activist killed in self-defense, hundreds of the most industrious, enterprising, and level-headed peasants, those who should keep the Russian nation on an even keel, were eliminated.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 49