The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Yells of indignation! What’s that? What do you say? What about the bloodsuckers? Those who squeezed their neighbors dry? “Take your loan—and pay me back with your hide”?

  I suppose that bloodsuckers were a small part of the whole number (but were all the bloodsuckers there among them?). And were they bloodsuckers born? we may ask. Bloodsuckers through and through? Or was it just that all wealth—and all power—corrupts human beings? If only the “cleansing” of mankind, or of a social estate, were so simple! But if they had “cleansed” the peasantry of heartless bloodsuckers with their fine-toothed iron comb, cheerfully sacrificing fifteen millions for the purpose—whence all those vicious, fat-bellied rednecks who preside over collectivized villages (and District Party Committees) today? Those pitiless oppressors of lonely old women and all defenseless people? How was the root of this predatory weed missed during dekulakization? Surely, heaven help us, they can’t have sprung from the activists? . . .

  The principle underlying dekulakization can also be clearly seen in the fate of the children. Take Shurka Dmitriyev, from the village of Masleno (Selishchenskie Kazarmy, near the Volkhov). He was thirteen when his father, Fyodor, died in 1925, and the only son in a family of girls. Who was to manage his father’s holding? Shurka took it on. The girls and his mother accepted him as head of the family. A working peasant and an adult now, he exchanged bows with other adults in the street. He was a worthy successor to his hard-working father, and when 1929 came his bins were full of grain. Obviously a kulak! The whole family was driven out!

  Adamova-Sliozberg has a moving story about meeting a girl called Motya, who was jailed in 1936 for leaving her place of banishment without permission to go to her native village, Svetlovidovo near Tarussa, two thousand kilometers on foot! Sportsmen are given medals for that sort of thing. She had been exiled with her parents in 1929 when she was a little schoolgirl, and deprived of schooling forever. Her teacher’s pet name for her was “Motya, our little Edison”: the child was not only an excellent pupil, but had an inventive turn of mind, had rigged up a sort of turbine worked by a stream, and invented other things for the school. After seven years she felt an urge to look just once more at the log walls of her unattainable school—and for that “little Edison” went to prison and then to a camp.

  Did any child suffer such a fate in the nineteenth century?

  Every miller was automatically a candidate for dekulakization—and what were millers and blacksmiths but the Russian village’s best technicians?

  Let us look at one village blacksmith. In fact, we’ll start with his father, as Personnel Departments like to do. His father, Gordei Vasilyevich, served for twenty-five years in the Warsaw garrison, and earned enough silver to make a tin button: this soldier with twenty-five years’ service was denied a plot of land. He had married a soldier’s daughter while he was in the garrison, and after his discharge he went to his wife’s native place, the village of Barsuki in the Krasnensky district. The village got him tipsy, and he paid off its tax arrears with half of his savings. With the other half he leased a mill from a landowner, but quickly lost the rest of his money in this venture. He spent his long old age as a herdsman and watchman. He had six daughters, all of whom he gave in marriage to poor men, and an only son, Trifon (their family name was Tvardovsky). The boy was sent away to serve in a haberdasher’s shop, but fled back to Barsuki and found employment with the Molchanovs, who had the forge. After a year as an unpaid laborer, and four years as an apprentice, he became a smith himself, built a wooden house in the village of Zagorye, and married. Seven children were born (among them Aleksandr, the poet), and no one is likely to get rich from a forge. The oldest son, Konstantin, helped his father. If they smelted and hammered from one dawn to the next they could make five excellent steel axes, but the smiths of Roslavl, with their presses and their hired workmen, undercut their price. In 1929 their forge was still wood-built, they had only one horse, sometimes they had a cow and a calf, sometimes neither cow nor calf, and besides all this they had eight apple trees—you can see what bloodsuckers they were. . . . The Peasant Land Bank used to sell mortgaged estates on deferred payments. Trifon Tvardovsky had taken eleven desyatins of wasteland, all overgrown with bushes, and the year of the Plague found them still sweating and straining to clear it: they had brought five desyatins into cultivation, and the rest they abandoned to the bushes. The collectivizers marked them down for dekulakization—there were only fifteen households in the village and somebody had to be found. They assessed the income from the forge at a fantastic figure, imposed a tax beyond the family’s means, and when it was not paid on time: Get ready to move, you damned kulaks, you!

  If a man had a brick house in a row of log cabins, or two stories in a row of one-story houses—there was your kulak: Get ready, you bastard, you’ve got sixty minutes! There aren’t supposed to be any brick houses in the Russian village, there aren’t supposed to be two-story houses! Back to the cave! You don’t need a chimney for your fire! This is our great plan for transforming the country: history has never seen the like of it.

  But we still have not reached the innermost secret. The better off were sometimes left where they were, provided they joined the kolkhoz quickly, while the obstinate poor peasant who failed to apply was deported.

  This is very important, the most important thing. The point of it all was not to dekulakize, but to force the peasants into the kolkhoz. Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs.

  It was a second Civil War—this time against the peasants. It was indeed the Great Turning Point, or as the phrase had it, the Great Break. Only we are never told what it was that broke.

  It was the backbone of Russia.

  We can find described in books, or even see in films, barns and pits in the ground, full of grain hoarded by bloodsuckers. What they won’t show us is the handful of belongings earned in a lifetime of toil: the livestock, the utensils—things as close to the owner as her own skin—which a weeping peasant woman is ordered to leave forever.

  What they will not show us are the little bundles with which the family are allowed onto the state’s cart. We shall not learn that in the Tvardovsky house, when the evil moment came there was neither suet nor bread; their neighbor Kuzma saved them: he had several children and was far from rich himself, but brought them food for the journey.

  The journey itself, the peasant’s Via Crucis, is something which our socialist realists do not describe at all. Get them aboard, pack them off—and that’s the end of the story. Episode concluded. Three asterisks, please.

  They were loaded onto carts . . . if they were lucky enough to be taken in the warm months, but it might be onto sledges in a cruel frost, with children of all ages, babes in arms as well. In February, 1931, when hard frosts were interrupted only by blizzards, the strings of carts rolled endlessly through the village of Kochenevo (Novosibirsk oblast), flanked by convoy troops, emerging from the snowbound steppe and vanishing into the snowbound steppe again. Even going into a peasant hut for a warm-up required special permission from the convoy, which was given only for a few minutes, so as not to hold up the cart train. They all shuffled into the Narym marshes—and in those insatiable quagmires they all remained. Many of the children had already died a wretched death on the cruel journey.

  This was the nub of the plan: the peasant’s seed must perish together with the adults. Since Herod was no more, only the Vanguard Doctrine has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes. Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.

  It is hard to believe in such cruelty: on a winter evening out in the taiga they were told: You’ve arrived! Can human beings really behave like this? Well, they’re moved by day so they arrive at nightfall—that’s all there is to it. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands were carried into the wilds and dumped
down like this, old men, women, children, and all.

  As the Plague approached in 1929, all the churches in Archangel were closed: they were due to be closed anyway, but the very real need for somewhere to put the dekulakized hurried things along. Great streams of deported peasants poured through Archangel, and for a time the whole town became one big transit prison. Many-tiered sleeping platforms were put up in the churches, but there was no heat. Consignment after consignment of human cattle was unloaded at the station, and with dogs barking around them, the bast-shod went sullenly to church and a bed of planks. (S., then a boy, would never forget one peasant walking along with a shaft bow around his neck: he had been hurried away before he could decide what would be most useful. Another man carried a gramophone with a horn. Cameramen—there’s work for you in this! . . .) In the Church of the Presentation, an eight-tiered bed platform which was not fastened to the wall collapsed in the night and several families were crushed. Their cries brought troops rushing to the church.

  This was how they lived in that plague-stricken winter. They could not wash. Their bodies were covered with festering sores. Spotted fever developed. People were dying. Strict orders were given to the people of Archangel not to help the special resettlers (as the deported peasants were now called)! Dying peasants roamed the town, but no one could take a single one of them into his home, feed him, or carry tea out to him: the militia seized local inhabitants who tried to do so and took away their passports. A starving man would stagger along the street, stumble, fall—and die. But even the dead could not be picked up (besides the militia, plainclothesmen went around on the lookout for acts of kindness). At the same time market gardeners and livestock breeders from areas near big towns were also being expelled, whole villages at a time (once again—what about the theory that they were supposed to arrest exploiters only?), and the residents of Archangel themselves dreaded deportation. They were afraid even to stop and look down at a dead body.

  The plight of these peasants differed from that of all previous and subsequent Soviet exiles in that they were banished not to a center of population, a place made habitable, but to the haunt of wild beasts, into the wilderness, to man’s primitive condition. No, worse: even in their primeval state our forebears at least chose places near water for their settlements. For as long as mankind has existed no one has ever made his home elsewhere. But for the special settlements the Cheka (not the peasants themselves—they had no right of choice) chose places on stony hillsides. Three or four kilometers off there might be convenient water meadows—but no, according to instructions no one was supposed to settle there. So the hayfields were dozens of kilometers away from the settlement, and the hay had to be brought in by boat. Sometimes settlers were bluntly forbidden to sow grain crops. (What they should grow was also determined by the Cheka!) Yet another thing we town folk do not understand—what it means to have lived from time immemorial with animals. A peasant’s life is nothing without animals—and here he was condemned for many years never to hear neighing or lowing or bleating; never to saddle, never to milk, never to fill a trough.

  On the river Chulym in Siberia, the special settlement of Kuban Cossacks was encircled with barbed wire and towers were put up, as though it were a prison camp.

  Everything necessary seemed to have been done to ensure that these odious work fiends should die off quickly and rid our country of themselves and of bread. Indeed, many such special settlements died off to a man. Where they once stood, chance wayfarers are gradually burning what is left of the huts, and kicking the skulls out of sight.

  No Genghis Khan ever destroyed so many peasants as our glorious Organs, under the leadership of the Party.

  Take, for instance, the Vasyugan tragedy. In 1930, 10,000 families (60,000–70,000 people, as families then went) passed through Tomsk and from there were driven farther, at first on foot, down the Tom although it was winter, then along the Ob, then upstream along the Vasyugan—still over the ice. (The inhabitants of villages on the route were ordered out afterward to pick up the bodies of adults and children.) In the upper reaches of the Vasyugan and the Tara they were marooned on patches of firm ground in the marshes. No food or tools were left for them. The roads were impassable, and there was no way through to the world outside, except for two brushwood paths, one toward Tobolsk and one toward the Ob. Machine-gunners manned barriers on both paths and let no one through from the death camp. They started dying like flies. Desperate people came out to the barriers begging to be let through, and were shot on the spot.

  They died off—every one of them.

  And yet—exiles survived! Under their conditions it seems incredible—but live they did.

  True, when during the war there was a shortage of reckless Russian fighting power at the front, they turned among others to the “kulaks”: they must surely be Russians first and kulaks second! They were invited to leave the special settlements and the camps for the front to defend their sacred fatherland.

  And—they went. . . .

  Not all of them, however. N. Kh———v, a “kulak’s” son—whose early years I used for Tyurin, but whose subsequent biography I could not bring myself to recount—was given the chance, denied to Trotskyite and Communist prisoners, however much they yearned to go, of defending his fatherland. Without a moment’s hesitation, Kh———v snapped back at the head of the Prisoner Registration and Distribution Section: “It’s your fatherland—you defend it, you dung-eaters! The proletariat has no fatherland!”

  Marx’s exact words, I believe.

  The things that could have been done with such people if they had been allowed to live and develop freely!!!

  The Old Believers—eternally persecuted, eternal exiles—they are the ones who three centuries earlier divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority! In 1950 a plane was flying over the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. The training of airmen had improved greatly since the war, and the zealous aviator spotted something that no one before him had seen in twenty years: an unknown dwelling place in the taiga. He worked out its position. He reported it. It was far out in the wilds, but to the MVD all things are possible, and half a year later they had struggled through to it. What they had found were the Yaruyevo Old Believers. When the great and longed-for Plague began—I mean collectivization—they had fled from this blessing into the depths of the taiga, a whole village of them. And they lived there without ever poking their noses out, allowing only their headman to go to Yaruyevo for salt, metal fishing and hunting gear, and bits of iron for tools. Everything else they made themselves, and in lieu of money the headman no doubt came provided with pelts. When he had completed his business he would slink away from the marketplace like a hunted criminal. In this way the Yaruyevo Old Believers had won themselves twenty years of life! Twenty years of life as free human beings among the wild beasts, instead of twenty years of kolkhoz misery. They were all wearing homespun garments and homemade knee boots, and they were all exceptionally sturdy.

  Well, these despicable deserters from the kolkhoz front were now all arrested, and the charge pinned on them was . . . guess what? Links with the international bourgeoisie? Sabotage? No, Articles 58-10, on Anti-Soviet Agitation (!?!?), and 58-11, on hostile organizations. (Many of them landed later on in the Dzhezkazgan group of Steplag, which is how I know about them.)

  In 1946 some other Old Believers were stormed in a forgotten monastery somewhere in the backwoods by our valiant troops, dislodged (with the help of mortars, and the skills acquired in the Fatherland War), and floated on rafts down the Yenisei. Prisoners still, and still indomitable—the same under Stalin as they had been under Peter!—they jumped from the rafts into the waters of the Yenisei, where our Tommy-gunners finished them off.

  Warriors of the Soviet Army! Tirelessly consolidate your combat training!

  Chapter 3

  The Ranks of Exile Thicken

  ONLY THE PEASANTS were deported so ferociously, to such desolate places, with such frankly murderous intent: no on
e had been exiled in this way before, and no one would be in the future. Yet in another sense and in its own steady way, the world of exiles grew denser and darker from year to year: more were banished, they were settled more thickly, the rules became more severe.

  We could offer the following rough time scheme. In the twenties, exile was a sort of preparatory stage, a way station before imprisonment in a camp. For very few did it all end with exile; nearly all were later raked into the camps.

  From the mid-thirties and especially from Beria’s time, perhaps because the world of exile became so populous (think how many Leningrad alone contributed!), it acquired a completely independent significance as a totally satisfactory form of restriction and isolation. In the war and postwar years, the exile system steadily grew in capacity and importance together with the camps. It required no expenditure on the construction of huts and boundary fences, on guards and warders, and there was room in its capacious embrace for big batches, especially those including women and children. (At all major transit prisons cells were kept permanently available for women and children, and they were never empty.) Exile made possible a speedy, reliable, and irreversible cleansing of any important region in the “mainland.” The exile system established itself so firmly that from 1948 it acquired yet another function of importance to the state—that of rubbish dump or drainage pool, where the waste products of the Archipelago were tipped so that they would never make their way back to the mainland. In spring, 1948, this instruction was passed down to the camps: at the end of their sentences 58s, with minor exceptions, were to be released into exile. In other words, they were not to be thoughtlessly unleashed on a country which did not belong to them, but each individual was to be delivered under escort from the camp guardhouse to the commandant’s office in an exile colony, from fish trap to fish trap. Since the exile system embraced only certain strictly defined areas, these together constituted yet another separate (though interlocking) country between the U.S.S.R. and the Archipelago—a sort of purgatory in reverse, from which a man could cross to the Archipelago, but not to the mainland.