General Pliev
Shortly afterward the workers’ delegation came back. The delegates reported to the crowd that they had seen the Central Committee members and told them about this “bloody Saturday,” and that Kozlov had wept when he heard about the children falling from the trees at the first volley. (You know Frol Kozlov, the Leningrad Party gang boss, the cruelest of Stalinists? He wept! . . .) The Central Committee members had promised to investigate these events and severely punish those responsible, but for the present everyone must go home to prevent the outbreak of fresh disorders in the town.
The meeting, however, did not disperse! The crowd grew ever denser toward the evening. The desperate courage of Novocherkassk!
Around nine in the evening they tried to drive the people away from the palace with tanks. But as soon as the drivers switched on their engines people clustered around the tanks, blocking the hatches and the observation slits. The tanks stalled. The riflemen stood by and made no effort to help the tank crews.
An hour later tanks and armored personnel carriers appeared from the opposite side of the square, with an escort of Tommy-gunners perched on top of them.
At last, toward midnight, the riflemen began firing tracer bullets into the air and the crowd slowly dispersed.
(What power there is in a popular disturbance! How quickly it changes the whole political situation! The night before there had been a curfew, and people had been frightened anyway, but now the whole town was strolling about and hooting at the soldiers. A people transformed—can it be so near to breaking through the crust of this half-century, into a completely different atmosphere?)
On June 3 the town radio broadcast speeches by Mikoyan and Kozlov. Kozlov did not weep. Nor did they any longer promise to find the culprits. What they now said was that these events were the result of enemy provocation, and that these enemies would be severely punished. Mikoyan said further that dumdum bullets had never been adopted as part of the equipment of Soviet troops, and that they must therefore have been used by enemies of the state.
(But who were these enemies? How had they parachuted into the country? Where were they hiding? Show us just one! We are so used to being treated like fools: “Enemies,” they say, and all is explained. In the Middle Ages it was “devils.”)
The shops were immediately the richer for butter, sausage, and many other things not seen in those parts for a long time, or anywhere outside the capitals.
The wounded all vanished without trace; not one of them went home. Instead, the families of the wounded and the killed (who of course wanted to know what had become of their kin) were deported to Siberia. So were many of those involved in the demonstration who had been noticed or photographed. Some participants were dealt with in a series of trials in camera. There were also two “public” trials (with entry by ticket for factory Party officials and for the town apparatchiki). At one of these, nine men were sentenced to be shot and two women to fifteen years’ imprisonment.
On the Saturday following “bloody Saturday,” the town radio announced that the “workers of the Electric Locomotive Works have solemnly undertaken to fulfill their seven-year plan ahead of time.”
At Alexandrovo in 1961, a year before Novocherkassk, the police beat a man to death while he was under arrest and then would not allow his body to be carried past their “precinct” to the cemetery. The crowd was furious and burned down the police station. Arrests followed immediately. (There was a similar incident about the same time in Murom.) What would the appropriate charge now be? Under Stalin, even a tailor who stuck a needle in a newspaper could get Article 58. Now a more sensible view was taken: wrecking a police station should not be regarded as a political act. It was ordinary banditry. Instructions were handed down to this effect: “mass disorders” should not be treated as political offenses. (If they are not political, what is?)
So all at once—there were no more politicals.
But one stream has never dried up in the U.S.S.R., and still flows. A stream of criminals untouched by the “beneficent wave summoned to life . . .” etc. A stream which flowed uninterruptedly through all those decades—whether “Leninist norms were infringed” or strictly observed—and flowed in Khrushchev’s day more furiously than ever.
I mean the believers. Those who resisted the new wave of cruel persecution, the wholesale closing of churches. Monks who were slung out of their monasteries. Stubborn sectarians, especially those who refused to perform military service: there’s nothing we can do about it, we’re really very sorry, but you’re directly aiding imperialism; we let you off lightly nowadays—it’s five years first time around.
These are in no sense politicals, they are “religionists,” but still they have to be re-educated. Believers must be dismissed from their jobs merely for their faith; Komsomols must be sent along to break the windows of believers; believers must be officially compelled to attend antireligious lectures, church doors must be cut down with blowtorches, domes pulled down with hawsers attached to tractors, gatherings of old women broken up with fire hoses. (Is this what you mean by dialogue, French comrades?)
As the monks of the Pochayev Monastery were told in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies: “If we always observe Soviet laws, we shall have to wait a long time for Communism.”
Only in extreme cases, when educational methods do not help, is recourse to the law necessary.
Here we can dazzle the world with the diamond-pure nobility of our laws today. We no longer try people in closed courts, as under Stalin, we no longer try them in absentia, we try them semi-publicly (that is to say, in the presence of a semi-public).
I hold in my hand a record of the trial of some Baptists at Nikitovka in the Donbas, in January, 1964.
This is how it’s done. On the pretense that their identity must be checked, the Baptists who arrived to attend the trial were held in jail for three days (until the trial was over, and to give them a fright). Someone (a free citizen!) who threw flowers to the defendants got ten days. So did a Baptist who kept a record of the trial, and his notes were taken away (but another record survived). A bunch of hand-picked Komsomols were let in before the general public by a side door, so that they could occupy the front rows. While the trial was in progress there were shouts from the spectators: “Pour kerosene over the lot and set fire to them!” The court did nothing to curb this righteous indignation. Typical of its procedures: it admitted the evidence of hostile neighbors and also that of terrorized minors; little girls of nine and eleven were brought before the court (who the hell cares what effect it has on them as long as we get our verdict). Their exercise books with texts from the Scriptures were introduced as exhibits.
One of the defendants, Bazbei, father of nine children, was a miner who had never received any support from the Union committee at his pit because he was a Baptist. But they managed to confuse his daughter Nina, a schoolgirl in the eighth grade, and to suborn her with fifty rubles from the Union committee and a promise to place her in an institute later on, so that during the investigation she made fantastic statements against her father: he had tried to poison her with a sour fruit drink; when the believers were hiding in the woods for their prayer meetings (because they were persecuted in the settlement) they had had a radio transmitter—“a tall tree with wire wound all around it.” Afterward these lying statements began to prey on Nina’s mind, she became mentally ill and was put in the violent ward of an asylum. Nonetheless, she was produced in court in the expectation that she would stick to her evidence. But she repudiated every word of it! “The interrogator dictated what I had to say himself.” It made no difference. The shameless judge ignored her latest statements and regarded only her earlier evidence as valid. (Whenever depositions favorable to the prosecution come unstuck, this is the typical and regular dodge used by the courts: they ignore what is brought out in court and base themselves on faked evidence obtained in the preliminary investigation: “Now, what do you mean by that? It says here in your deposition . . . You testifie
d during the investigation . . . What right have you to retract now? That’s an offense, too, you know!”)
The judge is not at all interested in the substance of the case, in the truth. The Baptists are persecuted because they do not accept preachers sent by an atheist plenipotentiary of the state, but prefer their own. (Under Baptist rules, any brother can preach the Gospel.) There is a directive from the Oblast Party Committee: put them on trial and forcibly take their children from them. And this will be carried out, although with its left hand the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet has just (July 2, 1962) signed the world convention on “the fight against discrimination in the sphere of education.” One of its points is that “parents must be allowed to provide for the religious and moral education of their children in accordance with their own convictions.” But that is precisely what we cannot allow! Anyone who speaks in court on the substance of the case, anyone who tries to clarify the issue, is invariably interrupted, diverted from his train of thought, deliberately confused by the judge, who conducts the debate on this level: “How can you talk about the end of the world when we are committed to the building of Communism?”
This is from the closing statement made by one young girl, Zhenya Khloponina. “Instead of going to the cinema or to dances, I used to read the Bible and say my prayers—and just for that you are taking my freedom from me. Yes, to be free is a great happiness, but to be free from sin is a greater still. Lenin said that only in Turkey and Russia did such shameful phenomena as religious persecution still exist. I’ve never been in Turkey and know nothing about it, but how things are in Russia you can see for yourselves.” She was cut short.
The sentences: Two of them got five years in the camps, two of them four years, and Bazbei, father of all those children, got three. The defendants accepted their sentences joyfully, and said a prayer. The “representatives from enterprises” shouted: “Not long enough! Make it more!” (Throw kerosene over them and put a match to it. . . .)
The long-suffering Baptists took note and kept count: and set up a “Council of Prisoners’ Relatives,” which began issuing manuscript bulletins about all the persecutions. From these bulletins we learn that from 1961 to June, 1964, 197 Baptists were condemned, 15 of them women. (They are all listed by name. Prisoners’ dependents, now left without means of support, have also been counted: 442, of whom 341 are under school age.) The majority get five years of exile, but some get five years in a strict regime camp (narrowly escaping the hardened criminals’ motley!), with three to five years of exile in addition. B. M. Zdorovets from Olshany in Kharkov oblast got seven years of strict regime for his faith. A seventy-six-year-old, Y. V. Arend, was put inside, as were the whole Lozovoy family (father, mother, and son). Yevgeny M. Sirokhin, a (Group 1) disabled veteran of the Fatherland War, blind in both eyes, was condemned in the village of Sokolovo, Zmievski district, Kharkov oblast, to three years in a camp for bringing up his children Lyuba, Nadya, and Raya as Christians, and they were taken away from him by order of the court.
The court trying the Baptist M. I. Brodovsky (at Nikolayev, October 6, 1966) was not too squeamish to use crudely faked documents; when the defendant protested—“This is dishonest of you!”—they barked back at him: “The law will crush you, smash you, destroy you!”
The law, my friend. Not one of your acts of “extrajudicial vengeance,” as practiced in the years when “norms were still observed.”
We recently got to know S. Karavansky’s soul-chilling “Petition,” which was transmitted from a camp to the outside world. The author had been sentenced to twenty-five years, had served sixteen of them (1944–1960), had been released (evidently under the “two-thirds” rule), had married, had begun a university course—but no! In 1965 they came for him again. Get yourself ready! You still have nine years to go.
Where else is this possible, under what other code of law on earth except ours?
There are quite a few people like this. People who were not affected by the epidemic of releases under Khrushchev, the teammates, cellmates, transit prison acquaintances whom we left behind. We have long ago forgotten them in our new lives, but they still shuffle hopelessly, drearily, numbly about the same little patches of trampled earth, with the same watchtowers and barbed-wire fences all around them. The faces in the papers change, the speeches from platforms change, people fight against the cult and then stop fighting—but the twenty-five-year prisoners, Stalin’s godchildren, are still inside. . . .
Karavansky cites the blood-freezing prison careers of several such people.
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
Still, there really is no comparison between the numbers of political prisoners now and in Stalin’s time; they are no longer counted in millions or in hundreds of thousands.
Is this because the law has been reformed?
No, it is just that the ship has changed course (for a time).
We called this chapter “The Law Today.” It should rightly be called “There Is No Law.”
The same treacherous secrecy, the same fog of injustice, still hangs in our air, worse than the smoke of city chimneys.
For half a century and more the enormous state has towered over us, girded with hoops of steel. The hoops are still there. There is no law.
Afterword
Instead of my writing this book alone, the chapters should have been shared among people with special knowledge, and we should then have met in editorial conference and helped each other to put the whole in true perspective.
But the time for this was not yet. Those whom I asked to take on particular chapters would not do so, but instead offered stories, written or oral, for me to use as I pleased. I suggested to Varlam Shalamov that we write the whole book together, but he also declined.
What was really needed was a well-staffed office. To advertise in the newspapers and on the radio (“Please reply!”), to carry on open correspondence, to do what was done with the story of the Brest fortress.
Not only could I not spread myself like this; I had to conceal the project itself, my letters, my materials, to disperse them, to do everything in deepest secrecy. I even had to camouflage the time I spent working on the book with what looked like work on other things.
As soon as I began the book, I thought of abandoning it. I could not make up my mind: should I or should I not be writing such a book by myself? And would I have the stamina for it? But when, in addition to what I had collected, prisoners’ letters converged on me from all over the country, I realized that since all this had been given to me, I had a duty.
I must explain that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time! In September, 1965, when work on the Archipelago was at its most intensive, I suffered a setback: my archive was raided and a novel impounded. At this point the parts of the Archipelago already written, and the materials for the other parts, were scattered, and never reassembled: I could not take the risk, especially when all the names were given correctly. I kept jotting down reminders to myself to check this and remove that, and traveled from place to place with these bits of paper. The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature. Take the book for what it is.
I have stopped work on the book not because I regard it as finished, but because I cannot spend any more of my life on it.
Besides begging for indulgence, I want to cry aloud: When the time and the opportunity come, gather together, all you friends who have survived and know the story well, write your own commentaries to go with my book, correct and add to it where necessary (but do not make it too unwieldy, do not duplicate what is there already). Only then w
ill the book be definitive. God bless the work!
I am surprised to have finished it safely, even in this form. I have several times thought they would not let me.
I am finishing it in the year of a double anniversary (and the two anniversaries are connected): it is fifty years since the revolution which created Gulag, and a hundred since the invention of barbed wire (1867).
This second anniversary will no doubt pass unnoticed.
Ryazan—Ukryvishche
April 27, 1958-February 22, 1967
P.P.S.
I was in a hurry when I wrote what you have just read, because I expected that even if I did not perish in the explosion set off by my letter to the Writers’ Congress I should lose my freedom to write and access to my manuscripts. But as things turned out, I was not only not arrested as a result of the letter, but found myself on a granite footing. I realized then that I must and could complete and correct this book.
A few friends have now read it. They have helped me to see the serious defects in it. I did not try it out on a wider circle, and if this ever becomes possible, it will be too late for me.
In this last year I have done what I could to improve it. Let no one blame me for its incompleteness; there is no end to the additions which could be made, and every single person who has had the slightest contact with the subject or thought seriously about it will always be able to add something—often something precious. But there are laws of proportion. In size my book has reached the utmost limit. Push in a few more little grains and the whole cliff will come tumbling down.
For sometimes expressing myself badly, for repetition in places and loose construction in others, I ask forgiveness. I was not granted a quiet year after all, and during the last few months the ground has been burning under my feet again, and the desk under my hand. Even while preparing this last version I have never once seen the whole book together, never once had it all on my desk at one time.
The Gulag Archipelago Page 54