But, amid weeping and wailing, the Thinker died, and soon afterward his frozen hand brought crashing down his still rosy-cheeked, still hale and vigorous comrade in arms—the Minister of those extraordinarily extensive, intricate, and irresolvable Internal Affairs.
The fall of the Archipelago’s Boss tragically accelerated the breakdown of the Special Camps. Number patches—the supreme discovery of twentieth-century prison-camp science—were hurriedly ripped off, thrown away, and forgotten! This alone was enough to rob the Special Camps of their austere uniformity. It hardly mattered, when the bars had also been removed from hut windows and locks from hut doors, so that the Special Camps had lost the pleasant jail-like peculiarities which distinguished them from Corrective Labor Camps. They also lifted restrictions on correspondence, which more than anything had made prisoners in Special Camps really feel buried alive. They even allowed visits—dreadful thought! Visits!. . . The tide of liberalism swept on so irresistibly over the erstwhile Special Camps that prisoners were allowed to choose their own hair styles. Instead of credit accounts, instead of Special Camp coupons, the natives were allowed to handle ordinary Soviet currency and settle their bills with cash like people outside.
Carelessly, recklessly they demolished the system which had fed them—the system which they had spent decades weaving and binding and lashing together.
And were those hardened criminals at all mollified by this pampering? They were not! On the contrary! They showed their depravity and ingratitude by adopting the profoundly inappropriate, offensive, and nonsensical word “Beria-ites”—and now whenever something upset them they would yell this insult at conscientious convoy guards, long-suffering warders, and their solicitous guardians, the camp chiefs. Not only did the word pain the tenderhearted practical workers, it could even be dangerous so soon after Beria’s fall, because someone might make it the starting point of an accusation.
For this reason the head of one of the Kengir Camp Divisions was compelled to deliver the following address from the platform: “Men!” (In those few short years, from 1954 to 1956, they found it possible to call the prisoners “men.”) “You hurt the feelings of the supervisory staff and the convoy troops by shouting ‘Beria-ites’ at them! Please stop it.” To which the diminutive V. G. Vlasov replied: “Your feelings have been hurt in the last few months. But I’ve heard nothing but ‘Fascist’ from your guards for eighteen years. Do you think we have no feelings?” And so the major promised to cut out the abusive word “Fascist.” A fair trade.
After all these pernicious and destructive reforms we may consider the separate history of the Special Camps concluded in 1954, and need no longer distinguish them from Corrective Labor Camps.
Throughout the topsy-turvy Archipelago easier times set in from 1954 and lasted till 1956—an era of unprecedented indulgences. . . . Historians attracted to the ten-year reign of Nikita Khrushchev—when certain physical laws to which we had grown accustomed suddenly seemed to stop operating, when objects miraculously began defying the forces in the electromagnetic field, defying the pull of gravity—will inevitably be astounded to see how many opportunities were briefly concentrated in those hands, and how playfully, how frivolously they were used before they were nonchalantly tossed aside. Endowed with greater power than anyone in our history except Stalin, a power which though impaired was still enormous, he used it like Krylov’s Mishka in the forest clearing, rolling his log first this way, then that, and all to no purpose. He was given the chance to draw the lines of freedom three times, five times more firmly, and he failed to understand his duty, abandoned it as though it were a game—for space, for maize, for rockets in Cuba, for Berlin ultimatums, for persecution of the church, for the splitting of Oblast Party Committees, for the battle with abstract art.
He never carried anything through to its conclusion—least of all the fight for freedom! Stir him up against the intelligentsia? Nothing could have been simpler. Use his hands, the hands that wrecked Stalin’s camps, to reinforce the camps now? That was easily achieved! And just think when!
In 1956, the year of the Twentieth Congress, the first orders limiting relaxation of the camp regime were promulgated! They were extended in 1957—the year when Khrushchev achieved undivided power.
But the caste of practical workers was still not satisfied. Scenting victory, they went over to the offensive. We can’t go on like this! The camp system is the main prop of the Soviet regime and it is collapsing!
Yielding to this pressure, without examining anything closely, without pausing to reflect that crime had not increased in those last five years (or that if it had, the causes must be sought in the political system), without considering how these new measures could be squared with his faith in the triumphal advance of Communism, or attempting to study the matter in detail, or even to look at it with his own eyes—this Tsar who had spent “all his life on the road” light-heartedly signed the order for nails to knock the scaffold together again quickly, in its old shape and as sturdy as ever.
And all this happened in the very year—1961—when Nikita made his last, expiring effort to tug the cart of freedom up into the clouds. It was in 1961—the year of the Twenty-second Congress—that a decree was promulgated on the death penalty in the camps for “terrorist acts against reformed prisoners [in other words, stoolies] and against supervisory staff” (something which had never happened), and the plenum of the Supreme Court confirmed (in June, 1961) regulations for four disciplinary categories in camps—Khrushchev’s camps now, not Stalin’s.
When he climbed onto the Congress platform for another attack on Stalin’s tyranny, Nikita had only just allowed the screws of his very own system to be turned no less tight. And he sincerely believed that all this could be fitted together and made consistent!
The camps today are as approved by the Party before the Twenty-second Congress. Six years later they are just as they were then.
They differ from Stalin’s camps not in regime, but in the composition of their population: there are no longer millions and millions of 58s. But there are still millions inside, and just as before, many of them are helpless victims of perverted justice: swept in simply to keep the system operating and well fed.
Rulers change, the Archipelago remains.
It remains because that particular political regime could not survive without it. If it disbanded the Archipelago, it would cease to exist itself.
Every story must have an end. It must be broken off somewhere. To the best of our modest and inadequate ability we have followed the history of the Archipelago from the crimson volleys which greeted its birth to the pink mists of rehabilitation. In the glorious period of leniency and disarray on the eve of Khrushchev’s measures to make the camps harsher again, on the eve of a new Criminal Code, let us consider our story ended. Other historians will appear—historians who to their sorrow know the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev camps better than we do.
Two have in fact appeared already: S. Karavansky and Anatoly Marchenko. And they will float to the surface in great numbers.
Chapter 3
The Law Today
THE READER HAS seen throughout this book that from the very beginning of the Stalin age there have been no politicals in our country. The crowds, the millions driven past while you watched, all those millions of 58s, were merely common criminals.
Besides, merry, mouthy Nikita Sergeyevich took so many bows from so many platforms: Politicals? Not a one!! We just don’t have them!
And as grief grew forgetful, as distance softened craggy contours, as fat formed under the skin—we almost believed it! Even former zeks did. Millions of zeks were released for all to see—so perhaps there really were no politicals left? We had returned, others joined us, our friends and families were back. The gaps in our little world of urban intellectuals seemed to be filled, the ring closed. You could sleep undisturbed, and no one would have been taken from the house when you awoke. Friends would telephone—no one was missing. Not that we altogether be
lieved it—but for practical purposes we accepted that there were no longer any politicals in jail.
And Nikita was there, glued to his platform. “There can be no return to deeds and occurrences such as these, either in the Party or in the country generally” (May 22, 1959—that was before Novocherkassk). “Now everyone in our country can breathe freely . . . with no need to worry about the present or the future” (March 8, 1963, after Novocherkassk).
Novocherkassk! A town of fateful significance in Russia’s history. As though the Civil War had not left scars enough, it thrust itself beneath the saber yet again.
Novocherkassk! A whole town rebels—and every trace is licked clean and hidden. Even under Khrushchev the fog of universal ignorance remained so thick that no one abroad got to know about Novocherkassk, there were no Western broadcasts to inform us of it, and even local rumor was stamped out before it could spread, so that the majority of our fellow citizens do not know what event is associated with the name Novocherkassk and the date June 2, 1962.
Let me then put down here all that I have been able to gather.
We can say without exaggeration that this was a turning point in the modern history of Russia. If we leave out the Ivanovo weavers at the beginning of the thirties (theirs was a large-scale strike, but it ended without violence), the flare-up at Novocherkassk was the first time the people had spoken out in forty-one years (since Kronstadt and Tambov): unorganized, leaderless, unpremeditated, it was a cry from the soul of a people who could no longer live as they had lived.
On Friday, June 1, one of those carefully considered enactments of which Khrushchev was so fond was published throughout the Union—raising the prices of meat and butter. On that very same day, as demanded by another and quite separate economic plan, piece rates at the huge Electric Locomotive Works in Novocherkassk (NEVZ) were lowered, in some cases by 30 percent. That morning the workers in two shops (the forge and the foundry), usually obedient creatures of habit, geared to their jobs, could not force themselves to work—so hot had things become for them. Their loud, excited discussions developed into a spontaneous mass meeting. An everyday event in the West, an extraordinary one for us.
By noon the strike had spread throughout the enormous locomotive works. (Runners were sent to other factories, where the workers wavered but did not come out in support.) The Moscow-Rostov railway line runs close to the works. Either to make sure that the news would reach Moscow more quickly, or to prevent troops and tanks from moving in, a large number of women sat down on the tracks to hold up trains, whereupon the men began pulling up the rails and building barriers. Strike action of such boldness is unusual in the history of the Russian workers’ movement. Slogans appeared on the works building: “Down with Khrushchev!” “Use Khrushchev for sausage meat!”
While all this was happening, troops and police began converging on the works. Tanks took up position on the bridge over the Tuzlov. From evening until the following morning, movement inside the city or across the bridge was completely forbidden. Even during the night the workers’ settlement did not quiet down for a moment. Overnight about thirty workers were arrested as “ringleaders” and carried off to the city police station.
On the morning of June 2, some other enterprises in the town struck (but by no means all of them). Another spontaneous mass meeting at NEVZ decided on a protest march into the town to demand the release of the arrested workers. The procession (only about three hundred strong to begin with—you had to be brave!), with women and children in its ranks, carrying portraits of Lenin and peaceful slogans, marched over the bridge past the tanks without obstruction, then uphill into the town. Here their numbers were quickly swelled by curious onlookers, individual workers from other enterprises, and little boys. At several places in the city people stopped lorries and used them as platforms for speech-making. The whole town was seething. The NEVZ demonstrators marched along the main street (Moskovskaya) and some of them began trying to break down the locked doors of the town police station in the belief that their arrested comrades were inside. They were met with pistol shots. All the streets were choked with people and here, on the square, the crowd was densest.
The Party offices were found to be empty—the city authorities had fled to Rostov.
It was about 11 A.M. There were no police to be seen in the town, but there were more and more troops. (A revealing picture: at the first slight shock the civil authorities hid behind the army.) Soldiers had occupied the post office, the radio station, the bank. By this time the whole of Novocherkassk was beleaguered, and every entry and exit barred. Tanks crawled slowly along Moskovskaya Street, following the route the demonstrators had taken toward Party headquarters. Boys started scrambling onto the tanks and obstructing the observation slits. The tanks fired a few blank shells, rattling the windows of shops and houses all along the street. The boys scattered and the tanks crawled on.
And the students? Novocherkassk is of course a town of students! Where were they all? . . . The students of some institutes, including the Polytechnic, and of some technical secondary schools, had been locked in their dormitories or in other school buildings from early morning. Their rectors had thought quickly. But we may as well say it: the students for their part showed little civic courage. They were presumably glad of this excuse to do nothing. It would take more than the turn of a key to hold back rebel students in the West today (and took more in Russia in days gone by).
A scuffle broke out inside the Party building, step by step the speakers were dragged back inside and soldiers emerged onto the balcony, more and more of them. A file of riflemen began forcing the crowd back from the small square immediately before the palace toward the railings of the garden. (Several witnesses say unanimously that these soldiers were all non-Russians—Caucasians brought in from the other end of the oblast to replace the cordon from the local garrison previously posted there. But not all witnesses agree that the previous cordon had been ordered to open fire, and that the order was not carried out because the captain who received it killed himself in front of his men rather than pass it on. That an officer committed suicide is beyond doubt, but accounts of the circumstances are vague and no one knows the name of this hero of conscience.) It is not known who gave the order, but these soldiers raised their rifles and fired a first volley over the heads of the crowd.
The burst fired over the heads of the crowd found the trees in the little garden and the boys who had climbed into them, some of whom fell to the ground. The crowd, it seems, gave a roar, whereupon the soldiers, whether at a command, or because they saw red, or in panic, started firing freely into the crowd, and—yes—with dumdum bullets. (Remember Kengir? The sixteen at the guardhouse?) The crowd fled in panic, jamming the narrow paths around the garden, but the troops went on firing at their backs as they retreated. Information from a variety of sources is more or less unanimous that some seventy or eighty people were killed. The soldiers looked around for lorries and buses, commandeered them, loaded them with the dead and the wounded, and dispatched them to the high-walled military hospital. (For a day or two afterward these buses went around with bloodstained seats.)
That day, just as in Kengir, movie cameras took pictures of the rebels on the streets.
The firing ceased, the terror passed, the crowd poured back onto the square, and was fired upon again.
All this happened between noon and 1 P.M.
This is what an observant witness saw at 2 P.M.: “There are about eight tanks of different types standing on the square in front of Party headquarters. A cordon of soldiers stands before them. The square is almost deserted, there are only small groups of people, mostly youngsters, standing about and shouting at the soldiers. On the square puddles of blood have formed in the depressions in the pavement. I am not exaggerating; I never suspected till now that there could be so much blood. The benches in the public garden are spattered with blood, there are bloodstains on its sanded paths and on the whitewashed tree trunks in the public garden. The whole square
is scored with tank tracks. A red flag, which the demonstrators had been carrying, is propped against the wall of Party headquarters, and a gray cap splashed with red-brown blood has been slung over the top of its pole. Across the façade of the Party building hangs a red banner, there for some time past: ‘The People and the Party are one.’
“People go up to the soldiers, to curse them or to appeal to their conscience. ‘How could you do it?’ ‘Who did you think you were shooting at?’ ‘Your own people you were shooting at!’ They make excuses: ‘It wasn’t us! We’ve only just been brought in and posted here. We had nothing to do with it.’
“That’s how efficient our murderers are (and yet people talk about bureaucratic sluggishness). He knows his business, that General Pliev. . . .”
Toward five or six o’clock the square gradually filled with people again. (They were brave, the people of Novocherkassk! The town radio kept appealing to them: “Citizens, do not fall for provocation, go home quietly!” The riflemen still stood there, the blood had not been mopped up, and again they pressed forward.) Shouts from the crowd, more and more people, and another impromptu meeting. They knew by now that six senior members of the Central Committee had flown in (probably arriving before the first shootings?), among them, needless to say, Mikoyan (the expert on Budapest-type situations), Suslov, and Frol Kozlov. A delegation of younger workers from NEVZ was sent to tell them what had happened. A buzz went through the crowd: “Let Mikoyan come down here! Let him see all this blood for himself!” Mikoyan wouldn’t come down, thank you. But a reconnaissance helicopter flew low over the square around six o’clock. Inspected it. Flew off again.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 53