The Gulag Archipelago

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Something told me to do as she said: I went over to the central square. A crowd of perhaps two hundred people—a lot for Kok-Terek—huddled around the post under the loudspeaker and the sullen sky. Before I could make out what the announcer was saying (he spoke with a histrionic catch in his voice), understanding dawned on me.

  This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to even in our student days. The moment for which every zek in Gulag (except the orthodox Communists) had prayed! He’s dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died!

  I could have howled with joy there by the loudspeaker; I could even have danced a wild jig! But alas, the rivers of history flow slowly. My face, trained to meet all occasions, assumed a frown of mournful attention. For the present I must pretend, go on pretending as before.

  All the same, my exile had begun with magnificent auguries!

  Chapter 6

  The Good Life in Exile

  This autobiographical chapter records Solzhenitsyn’s experiences during his time of internal exile in Kazakhstan: his school teaching, his writing, his thoughts at that time.

  Chapter 7

  Zeks at Liberty

  WE HAVE HAD a chapter in this book on “Arrest.” Do we need one now called “Release”?

  Of those on whom the thunderbolt of arrest at one time or another fell (I shall speak only of 58s), I doubt whether a fifth, I should like to think that an eighth lived to experience this “release.”

  And anyway, release is surely something everybody understands. It has been described so often in world literature, shown in so many films: unlock my dungeon—out into the sunshine—the crowd goes wild—open-armed relatives.

  But there is a curse on those “released” under the joyless sky of the Archipelago, and as they move into freedom the clouds will grow darker.

  Only in its long-windedness, its leisureliness, its otiose flourishes (what need has the law to hurry now?), does release differ from the lightning stroke of arrest. In all other respects, release is arrest all over again, the same sort of punishing transition from state to state, shattering your breast, the structure of your life and your ideas, and promising nothing in return.

  Because in this country, whenever someone is released, somewhere an arrest must follow.

  The space between two arrests—that is what release meant throughout the forty pre-Khrushchev years.

  A life belt thrown between two islands—splash your way from camp to camp! . . . The walk from one camp boundary to the next—that’s what is meant by release.

  You will not be given a residence permit in a town, even a small one, nor will you ever get a decent job. In the camp at least you received your rations, but here you do not.

  Moreover, your freedom of movement is illusory. . . .

  Not “released,” but “deprived of exile” would be the best description of these unfortunates. Denied the blessings of an exile decreed by fate, they cannot force themselves to go into the Krasnoyarsk taiga or the Kazakh desert, where there are so many of their own kind, so many exes, all around. No, they plunge deep into the tormented world of freedom, where everyone recoils from them, and where they are marked men, candidates for a new spell inside.

  It’s a vicious circle: no job without a residence permit, no residence permit unless you have a job. And without a job you have no bread card either. Former zeks did not know the rule that the MVD is required to find them work. And those who did know were afraid to apply in case they were put back inside. . . .

  You may be free, but your troubles are only beginning.

  But on the Kolyma there was really not much choice: they hung on to people. The discharged zek immediately signed a voluntary undertaking to go on working for Dalstroi. (Permission to leave for the mainland was even harder to obtain than your discharge.)

  Just as a common illness develops differently in different people, the effects of freedom upon us varied greatly.

  Its physical effects, to begin with . . . Some had overstrained themselves in the fight to end their time in the camps alive. They had endured it all like men of steel, consuming for ten whole years a fraction of what the body requires; working and slaving; breaking stones half-naked in freezing weather—and never catching cold. But once their sentence was served, once the inhuman pressure from outside was lifted, the tension inside them also slackened. Such people are destroyed by a sudden drop in pressure. The giant Chulpenyov, who had never caught cold in seven years as a lumberjack, contracted a variety of illnesses once he was freed.

  There used to be a saying: The hard times brace you, and the soft times drive you to drink. Sometimes a man’s teeth would all fall out in a year. Sometimes he would grow old overnight. Another man’s strength would give out as soon as he got home, and he would die burned out.

  Yet there were others who took heart when they were released. For them, it was time to grow younger and spread their wings. It comes as a sudden revelation: life after all is so easy when you’re free! There, on the Archipelago, the force of gravity is quite different, your legs are as heavy as an elephant’s, but here they move as nimbly as a sparrow’s. All the problems which tease and torment men who have always been free we solve with a single click of the tongue. We have our own cheerful standards: “Things have been worse!” Things used to be worse—so now everything is quite easy. We never get tired of repeating it: Things have been worse! Things have been worse!

  But the pattern of a man’s future may be even more firmly drawn by the emotional crisis which he undergoes at the moment of release. This crisis can take very different forms. Only on the threshold of the guardhouse do you begin to feel that what you are leaving behind you is both your prison and your homeland. This was your spiritual birthplace, and a secret part of your soul will remain here forever—while your feet trudge on into the dumb and unwelcoming expanse of freedom.

  The camps bring out a man’s character—but so does release! This is how Vera Alekseyevna Korneyeva, whom we have met before in our story, took leave of a Special Camp in 1951. “The five-meter gates closed behind me, and although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom. Weeping for what? . . . I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed—and it was all finished. I should never see those people again, never receive any news from them. It was as though I had passed on to the next world. . . .”

  To the next world! . . . Release as a form of death. Perhaps we had not been released? Perhaps we had died, to begin a completely new life beyond the grave? A somewhat ghostly existence, in which we cautiously felt the objects about us, trying to identify them.

  It was as though our freedom was stolen, not authentic. Those who felt like this seized their scrap of stolen freedom and ran with it to some lonely place. “While in the camp almost all my closest comrades thought, as I did, that if ever God allowed us to leave the camp alive, we would not live in towns, or even in villages, but somewhere in the depths of the forest. We would find work as foresters, rangers, or failing that, as herdsmen, and stay as far away as we could from people, politics, and all the snares and delusions of the world.” (V. V. Pospelov) For some time after he was discharged Avenir Borisov shunned other people and took refuge in the countryside. “I felt like hugging and kissing every birch tree, every poplar. The rustle of fallen leaves (I was released in autumn) was like music to me, and tears came to my eyes. I didn’t give a damn that I only got 500 grams of bread—I could listen to the silence for hours on end, and read books, too. Any sort of work seemed easy and simple now that I was free, the days flew by like hours, my thirst for life was unquenchable. If there is any happiness in the world at all, it is certainly that which comes to any zek in the first year of his life as a free man!”

  It is a long time before people like this want to own anything: they remember that property is easily lost, vanishes into thin air. They have an almost superstitious ave
rsion to new things, go on wearing the same old clothes, sitting on the same old broken chairs. One friend of mine had furniture so rickety that there was nothing you could safely sit or lean on. They made a joke of it. “This is the way to live—between camps.” (His wife had also been inside.)

  But people vary. And many crossed the line to freedom with quite different feelings (especially in the days when the Cheka-KGB seemed to be closing its eyes a little). Hurrah! I’m free! One thing I solemnly swear: Never to land inside again! Now I’m going all out to make up for what I’ve missed.

  For two centuries Europe has been prating about equality—but how very different we all are! How unlike are the furrows life leaves on our souls. We can forget nothing in eleven years—or forget everything the day after. . . .

  Each year on the anniversary of my arrest I organize myself a “zek’s day”: in the morning I cut off 650 grams of bread, put two lumps of sugar in a cup and pour hot water on them. For lunch I ask them to make me some broth and a ladleful of thin mush. And how quickly I get back to my old form: by the end of the day I am already picking up crumbs to put in my mouth, and licking the bowl. The old sensations start up vividly.

  I had also brought out with me, and still keep, my number patches. Am I the only one? In some homes they will be shown to you like holy relics.

  Associations of former zeks gather once a year, varying the place from time to time, to drink and reminisce. “And strangely enough,” says V. P. Golitsyn, “the pictures of the past conjured up are by no means all dark and harrowing; we have many warm and pleasant memories.”

  Another normal human characteristic. And not the worst.

  “My identification number in camp began with yery,” V. L. Ginzburg rapturously informs me. “And the passport they issued to me was in the ‘Zk’ series!”

  You read it—and feel a warm glow. No, honestly—however many letters you receive, those from zeks stand out unmistakably. Such extraordinary toughness they show! Such clarity of purpose combined with such vigor and determination! In our day, if you get a letter completely free from self-pity, genuinely optimistic—it can only be from a former zek. They are used to the worst the world can do, and nothing can depress them.

  I am proud to belong to this mighty race! We were not a race, but they made us one! They forged bonds between us, which we, in our timid and uncertain twilight, where every man is afraid of every other, could never have forged for ourselves. The orthodox and the stoolies automatically removed themselves from our midst when we were freed. We need no explicit agreement to support each other. We no longer need to test each other. We meet, look into each other’s eyes, exchange a couple of words—and what need for further explanation? We are ready to help each other out. Our kind has friends everywhere. And there are millions of us!

  Freedom has something else in store for former convicts—reunion with family and friends. Reunion of fathers with sons. Of husbands with wives. And it is not often that good comes out of these reunions. In the ten or fifteen years lived apart from us, how could our sons grow in harmony with us: sometimes they are simply strangers, sometimes they are enemies. Nor are women who wait faithfully for their husbands often rewarded: they have lived so long apart, long enough for a person to change completely, so that only his name is the same. His experience and hers are too different—and it is no longer possible for them to come together again.

  This is a subject which others can make into films and novels, but there is no room for it in this book.

  PART VII

  Stalin Is No More

  “Neither repented they of their murders . . .”

  REVELATION 9:21

  Chapter 1

  Looking Back on It All

  WE NEVER, OF course, lost hope that our story would be told: since sooner or later the truth is told about all that has happened in history. But in our imagining this would come in the rather distant future—after most of us were dead. And in a completely changed situation. I thought of myself as the chronicler of the Archipelago, I wrote and wrote, but I, too, had little hope of seeing it in print in my lifetime.

  History is forever springing surprises even on the most perspicacious of us. We could not foresee what it would be like: how for no visible compelling reason the earth would shudder and give, how the gates of the abyss would briefly, grudgingly part so that two or three birds of truth would fly out before they slammed to, to stay shut for a long time to come.

  So many of my predecessors had not been able to finish writing, or to preserve what they had written, or to crawl or scramble to safety—but I had this good fortune: to thrust the first handful of truth through the open jaws of the iron gates before they slammed shut again.

  Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!

  Its explosion touched off in turn an explosion of letters—that was to be expected. But also an explosion of newspaper articles—written with gritted teeth, with ill-concealed hatred and resentment: an explosion of official praise that left a sour taste in my mouth.

  When former zeks heard this fanfare from all the newspapers in unison, learned that some sort of story about the camps had come out and that the journalists were slavering over it, their unanimous conclusion was: “More lying nonsense! Nothing’s safe from those crafty liars!” That our newspapers, with their habitual immoderation, might suddenly start falling over each other to praise the truth was something no one could possibly imagine! Some of them were reluctant to risk soiling their hands on my story [of Ivan Denisovich].

  But when they started reading it, a single groan broke from all those thousands—a groan of joy and of pain. Letters poured in.

  I treasure those letters. Only too rarely do our fellow countrymen have a chance to speak their mind on matters of public concern—and former prisoners still more rarely. Their faith had proved false, their hopes had been cheated so often—yet now they believed that the era of truth was really beginning, that at last it was possible to speak and write boldly!

  And they were disappointed, of course, for the hundredth time. . . .

  Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.

  The prolonged absence of any free exchange of information within a country opens up a gulf of incomprehension between whole groups of the population, between millions and millions.

  We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.

  Nonetheless, a breakthrough had been made! Oh, it was stout, the wall of lies, it looked so secure, looked built to last forever—but a breach yawned, and news broke through. Only yesterday we had had no camps, no Archipelago, and today there they were for the whole people, the whole world to see—prison camps! Camps, what is more, of the Fascist type!

  When Khrushchev, wiping the tear from his eye, gave permission for the publication of Ivan Denisovich, he was quite sure that it was about Stalin’s camps, and that he had none of his own.

  I myself was taken by surprise when I received a stream of letters—from present-day zeks. On crumpled scraps of paper, in a blurred pencil scrawl, in stray envelopes often addressed and posted by free employees, in other words, on the sly, today’s Archipelago sent me its criticisms, and sometimes its angry protests.

  These letters, too, were a single many-throated cry. But a cry that said: “What about us!!??”

  And the zeks set up a howl: What do you mean, never happen again? We’re here inside now, and our conditions are just the same!

  “Nothing has changed since Ivan Denisovich’s time”—the message was the same in letters from many different places.

  “Any zek who reads your book will feel bitterness and disgust because everything is just as it was.”

  “What has changed, if all the laws providing for twenty-five years’ imprisonment issued under Stalin are still in force?”

  After reading all these letters, I who had been thinking myself a hero saw that I hadn’t a leg to sta
nd on: in ten years I had lost my vital link with the Archipelago.

  For them, for today’s zeks, my book is no book, my truth is no truth unless there is a continuation, unless I go on to speak of them, too. Truth must be told—and things must change!

  In a declaration by the Soviet government dated December, 1964, we read: “The perpetrators of monstrous crimes must never and in no circumstances escape just retribution. . . . The crimes of the Fascist murderers, who aimed at the destruction of whole peoples, have no precedent in history.”

  This was to prevent the Federal German Republic from introducing a statute of limitations for war criminals after twenty years had elapsed.

  But they show no desire to face judgment themselves, although they, too, “aimed at the destruction of whole peoples.”

  But in the U.S.S.R. no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.

  While in the records office they carry out a leisurely inspection and destroy all unwanted documents: lists of people shot, orders committing prisoners to solitary confinement or the Disciplinary Barracks, files on investigations in the camps, denunciations from stoolies, superfluous information about practical workers and convoy guards.

  Chapter 2

  Rulers Change, the Archipelago Remains

  THE SPECIAL CAMPS must have been among the best-loved brainchildren of Stalin’s old age. After so many experiments in punishment and re-education, this ripe perfection was finally born: a compact, faceless organization of numbers, not people, psychologically divorced from the Motherland that bore it, having an entrance but no exit, devouring only enemies and producing only industrial goods and corpses. It is difficult to imagine the paternal pain which the Visionary Architect would have felt if he had witnessed in turn the bankruptcy of this great system of his. While he yet lived it was shaken, it was giving off sparks, it was covered with cracks—but probably caution prevailed and these things were not reported to him. If the Great Coryphaeus had lived a year or eighteen months longer, it would have been impossible to conceal these explosions from him, and his weary senile brain would have been burdened with a new decision: either to abandon his pet scheme and mix the camps again, or, on the contrary, to crown it by systematically shooting all the index-lettered thousands.