The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  "How do you know? Yes."

  Wonderful! One more link in the biography of a man I don't know. I have never met him, and perhaps I never shall. But my efficient memory has filed away everything I know about him: Makhotkin got a whole "quarter"—twenty-five years—but the island named after him couldn't be renamed because it was on all the maps of the world (it wasn't a Gulag island). They had taken him on at the aviation sharashka in Bolshino and he was unhappy there: an aviator among engineers, and not allowed to fly. They split that sharashka in two, and Makhotkin got assigned to the Taganrog half, and it seemed as though all connection with him had been severed. In the other half of it, however, in Rybinsk, I was told that he had asked to be allowed to fly in the Far North. And now I had just learned he had been given that permission. This was not information I needed, but I had remembered it all. And ten days later I turned up in the same Butyrki bath box (there are such lovely boxes in the Butyrki, with faucets and small washtubs so as not to tie up the big bath chambers) as a certain R. I didn't know this R. either, but it turned out he had been a patient in the Butyrki hospital for half a year and was about to leave for the Rybinsk sharashka. In another three days the prisoners in Rybinsk, too, a closed box where zeks are cut off from all ties with the outside world, would nevertheless learn that Makhotkin was in Dudinka, and they would also find out where I had been sent.

  Now this is the prisoners' telegraph system: attentiveness, memory, chance meetings.

  And this attractive man in horn-rimmed spectacles? He walked around the cell humming Schubert in a pleasant baritone.

  And youth again oppresses me,

  And the way to the grave is long.

  "Tsarapkin, Sergei Romanovich."

  "But look here, I know you very well indeed. You're a biol- ogist? A nonreturnee? From Berlin?"

  "How do you know?"

  "But after all, it's a small world! In 1946 with Nikolai Vladimirovich Timofeyev-Ressovsky . . ."

  Oh, what a cell that had been in 1946: The memories of it returned. It was perhaps the most brilliant cell in all my prison life. It was July. They had taken me from the camp to the Butyrki on those mysterious "instructions of the Minister of In- ternal Affairs." We arrived after lunch, but the prison was so overloaded that the reception processing took eleven hours, and it was not until 3 A.M. that, tired from the boxes, I was admitted to Cell 75. Lit by two bright electric bulbs below the two domes, the whole cell slept side by side, restless because of the stuffiness: the hot July air couldn't circulate through the windows blocked by the "muzzles." Sleepless flies kept buzzing, and the sleepers twitched when the flies lit on them. Some of the prisoners had put handkerchiefs over their faces to keep the light out of their eyes. The latrine barrel smelled acrid—everything decayed more quickly in such heat. Eighty people were stuffed into a cell for twenty-five—and this was not the limit either. Prisoners lay tightly packed together on the bunks to left and right and also on the supplementary planks laid across the aisle, and everywhere feet were sticking out from under the bunks, and the traditional Butyrki table-cupboard was pushed back to the latrine barrel. That was where there was still a piece of unoccupied floor, and that was where I lay down. And thus it was that whoever got up to use the latrine barrel before morning had to step across me.

  When the order "Get up!" was given, shouted through the swill trough in the door, everything started to stir: They began to take up the planks from across the aisles and push the table to the window. Prisoners came up to interview me—to find out whether I was a novice or a camp veteran. It turned out that two different waves had met in the cell: the ordinary wave of freshly sentenced prisoners being sent off to camp and a reverse wave of camp in- mates who were all technical specialists—physicists, chemists, mathematicians, design engineers—all being sent to unknown destinations, to some sort of thriving scientific research institutes. (At this point I relaxed: the Minister was not going to hang a new stretch on me.) I was approached by a man who was middle- aged, broad-shouldered yet very skinny, with a slightly aquiline nose:

  "Professor Timofeyev-Ressovsky, President of the Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75. Our society assembles every day after the morning bread ration, next to the left window. Perhaps you could deliver a scientific report to us? What precisely might it be?"

  Caught unaware, I stood before him in my long bedraggled overcoat and winter cap (those arrested in winter are foredoomed to go about in winter clothing during the summer too). My fingers had not yet straightened out that morning and were all scratched. What kind of scientific report could I give? And right then I remembered that in camp I had recently held in my hands for two nights the Smyth Report, the official report of the United States Defense Department on the first atom bomb, which had been brought in from outside. The book had been published that spring. Had anyone in the cell seen it? It was a useless question. Of course no one had. And thus it was that fate played its joke, compelling me, in spite of everything, to stray into nuclear physics, the same field in which I had registered on the Gulag card.

  After the rations were issued, the Scientific and Technical So- ciety of Cell 75, consisting of ten or so people, assembled at the left window and I made my report and was accepted into the society. I had forgotten some things, and I could not fully com- prehend others, and Timofeyev-Ressovsky, even though he had been in prison for a year and knew nothing of the atom bomb, was able on occasion to fill in the missing parts of my account. An empty cigarette pack was my blackboard, and I held an illegal fragment of pencil lead. Nikolai Vladimirovich took them away from me and sketched and interrupted, commenting with as much self-assurance as if he had been a physicist from the Los Alamos group itself.

  He actually had worked with one of the first European cyclo- trons, but for the purpose of irradiating fruit flies. He was a biologist, one of the most important geneticists of our time. He had already been in prison back when Zhebrak, not knowing that (or, perhaps, knowing it), had the courage to write in a Canadian magazine: "Russian biology is not responsible for Lysenko; Russian biology is Timofeyev-Ressovsky." (And during the destruction of Soviet biology in 1948 Zhebrak paid for this.) Schrödinger, in his small book What Is Life?, twice cited Timofeyev-Ressovsky, who had long since been imprisoned.

  And there he was in front of us, and he was simply bursting with information concerning all possible sciences. He had that breadth of scope which scientists of later generations don't even want to have. (Or is it that the possibilities of encompassing knowledge have changed?) And even though at the moment he was so worn down by the starvation of the interrogation period that these exercises were very difficult for him. On his mother's side he was descended from impoverished Kaluga gentlefolk who had lived on the Ressa River, and on his father's side he was a collateral descendant of Stepan Razin, and that Cossack energy was very obvious in him—in his broad frame, in his basic sound- ness, in his determined struggle with his interrogator, and also in the fact that he suffered from hunger more than we did.

  And his story was this: In 1922 the German scientist Vogt, who had founded the Brain Institute in Moscow, had asked to have two talented graduate students sent abroad to work with him permanently. And that was how Timofeyev-Ressovsky and his friend Tsarapkin had been sent off on a foreign assignment with no time limit. And even though they did not have any ideological guidance there, they nonetheless achieved great things in science, and when in 1937 (!) they were instructed to return to their homeland, this seemed to them, since it meant inter- rupting their work, impossible. They could not abandon either the logical continuation of their own researches or their apparatus or their students. And, no doubt, they also couldn't do it because back in the Motherland they would have been compelled to pour shit publicly all over their fifteen years of work in Germany. And only that would have earned them the right to go on existing (and would it have earned it for them?). And so they became non- returnees, remaining patriots nevertheless.

  In 1945 the Soviet armies
entered Buch (a northeast suburb of Berlin), and Timofeyev-Ressovsky and his entire institute joyously welcomed them: everything had worked out in the best possible way, and now he would not have to be separated from his institute! Soviet representatives came to inspect it and said: "Hmm! hmm! Put everything in packing cases, and we'll take it all to Moscow." "That's impossible," Timofeyev objected. "Every- thing will die on the way. The installations have taken years to set up." "Hmm!" The bigwigs acted astonished. And very shortly after that Timofeyev and Tsarapkin were arrested and taken off to Moscow. They were naive. They had thought that the institute would not be able to operate without them. Well, even if it didn't operate, the general line of the Party must triumph! In the Big Lubyanka it was very easily proven to the arrested individuals that they were traitors of the Motherland (or to it?), and they were sentenced to ten years, and now the President of the Scien- tific and Technical Society of Cell 75 took heart from the thought that he hadn't made any errors.

  In the Butyrki cells, the arched metal frames supporting the bunks were very, very low. Even the prison administration had never thought of having prisoners sleep under them. Therefore, you first tossed your neighbor your coat so that he could spread it out for you under there, and then you lay face down in the aisle and crawled your way in. Prisoners walked through the aisle, the floor underneath the bunks was swept maybe once a month, and you could wash your hands only during the evening trip to the toilet, and even then without soap—and it was thus impossible to say that you could perceive your body as a Divine vessel. But I was happy! There, on the asphalt floor, under the bunks, in a dog's den, with dust and crumbs from the bunks falling in our eyes, I was absolutely happy, without any qualifications. Epicurus spoke truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it. After camp, which had already seemed endless, and after a ten-hour workday, after cold, rain, and aching back, oh, what happiness it was to lie there for whole days on end, to sleep, and nevertheless receive a pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day—made from cattle feed, or from dolphin's flesh. In a word, the "BuTyur" Health Resort.

  To sleep was so important! To lie there on one's belly, to cover one's back and just to sleep. When you were asleep, you didn't spend your strength nor torment your heart—and meanwhile your sentence was passing, passing. When our life crackles and sparks like a torch, we curse the necessity of spending eight hours uselessly in sleep. When we have been deprived of everything, when we have been deprived of hope, then bless you, fourteen hours of sleep!

  But they kept me in that cell two months, and I slept enough to make up for the past year and the year ahead, and during that time I moved forward under the bunks to the window and then all the way back to the latrine barrel, but on the bunks this time, and then on the bunks I moved to the archway. I was sleeping very little by this time—I was gulping down the elixir of life and enjoying myself. In the morning the Scientific and Technical So- ciety, then chess, books (oh, those itinerant books, there were only three or four for eight or ten people, and there was always a waiting list for them), then a twenty-minute walk outdoors—a major chord! We never refused our walk even when it was raining heavily. And the main thing was people, people, people! Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov, one of the creators of the Dnieper Hy- droelectric Dam and Power Station. His POW friend, the engineer F. F. Karpov. Witty, caustic Viktor Kagan, a physicist. The musician and conservatory student Volodya Klempner, a com- poser. A woodcutter and hunter from the Vyatka forests, as pro- found as a forest lake. An Orthodox preacher from Europe, Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich. He did not confine himself to theology, but condemned Marxism, declaring that no one in Europe had taken it seriously for a long while—and I defended it, because after all I was a Marxist. And even a year ago I would have confidently demolished him with quotations; how disparagingly I would have mocked him! But my first year as a prisoner had left its mark inside me—and just when had that happened? I hadn't noticed: there had been so many new events, sights, meanings, that I could no longer say: "They don't exist! That's a bourgeois lie!" And now I had to admit: "Yes, they do exist." And right at that point my whole line of reasoning began to weaken, and so they could beat me in our arguments without half-trying.

  And again the POW's kept coming and coming and coming— this was the second year of the wave of them that kept unceasingly coming from Europe. And once more there were Russian emigres —from Europe, from Manchuria. One went about among the emigres seeking news of acquaintances by first asking what country they had come from, and did they know so and so? Yes, of course, they did. (And that is how I learned of the execution of Colonel Yasevich.)

  And the old German, that portly German, now emaciated and ill, whom I had once upon a time back in East Prussia (was it two hundred years ago?) forced to carry my suitcase. Oh, how small the world really is! Strange fate that brought us together again! The old man smiled at me. He recognized me too, and even seemed pleased by our meeting. He had forgiven me. He had been sentenced to ten years, but he certainly didn't have anywhere near that long to live. And there was another German there too- lanky and young, but unresponsive—perhaps because he didn't know one word of Russian. You wouldn't even take him for a German right off the bat: the thieves had torn off everything German he had on and given him a faded old Soviet field shirt in exchange. He was a famous German air ace. His first campaign had been in the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, his second in Spain, his third Poland, his fourth over England, his fifth Cyprus, his sixth the Soviet Union. Since he was an ace he could certainly not have avoided shooting down women and children from the air! That made him a war criminal and he got a prison sentence and a "muzzle" of five additional years. And, of course, there had to be one right-thinking person (like Prosecutor Kretov) in the cell: "They were right to imprison all you counterrevolu- tionary bastards! History will grind up your bones for fertilizer!" "You're going to be fertilizer yourself, you dog!" they shouted back. "No, they will reconsider my case. I am innocent!" And the whole cell howled and seethed. And a gray-haired Russian- language teacher stood up on the bunks, barefoot, and wrung his hands like a latter-day Jesus Christ: "Children of mine, make peace with one another! My children!" And they howled at him too: "Your children are in the Bryansk forests! We are nobody's children! All we are is the sons of Gulag,"

  After dinner and the evening trip to the toilet, night cloaked the window "muzzles" and the nagging electric lights below the ceiling lit up. Day divided the prisoners and night drew them closer together. There were no quarrels in the evening: lectures and concerts were given. And in this, too, Timofeyev-Ressovsky shone: he spent entire evenings on Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. The emigres spoke about the Balkans, about France. Someone delivered a lecture on Le Corbusier. Someone else delivered one on the habits of bees. Someone else on Gogol. This was when we smoked our lungs full. Smoke filled up the cell and hovered in the air like a fog, and there was no draft to pull it out the window because of the "muzzles." Kostya Kiula, twin to me in age, round-faced, blue-eyed, amusingly awkward, stepped up to the table and recited to us the verses he had composed in prison.

  [Kostya Kiula doesn't respond, he's disappeared. I am afraid he is not among the living.]

  His voice broke with emotion. His verses were entitled, "My First Food Parcel," "To My Wife," "To My Son." When in prison you strain to get by ear verses written in prison, you don't waste a single thought on whether the author's use of syllabic stress is faulty and whether his lines end in assonances or full rhymes. These verses are the blood of your own heart, the tears of your own wife. The cell wept.

  In that cell I myself set out to write verses about prison. And it was there that I recited the verses of Yesenin, who had almost but not quite been on the forbidden list before the war. And young Bubnov, a POW, and before that, apparently, a student who had not completed his studies, worshipfully gazed at those reciting, his face aglow. He was not a technical specialist and he hadn't come
from camp, but was on his way there, and because of the purity and forthrightness of his character he would in all likelihood die there. People like him don't survive there. And for him and for others—their fatal descent braked for the moment —the evenings in Cell 75 were a sudden revelation of that beauti- ful world which exists and will continue to exist but which their own hard fate hadn't given them one little year of, not even one little year of their young lives.

  The swill trough dropped down and the turnkey's mug barked at us: "Bed." No, even before the war, when I was studying at two higher educational institutions at the same time and earning my way by tutoring, and striving to write too, even then I had not experienced such full, such heart-rending, such completely filled days, as I did in Cell 75 that summer.

  "But listen," I said to Tsarapkin, "I've heard since then from someone called Deul, a sixteen-year-old boy who got a fiver (not on a school report card) for 'anti-Soviet' propaganda. . . ."

  "What, do you know him too? He was on our prisoner trans- port to Karaganda. .. ."

  "... I heard," I continued, "that you were given work as a laboratory assistant doing medical analyses and that Timofeyev- Ressovsky was constantly being sent out on general-assignment work. . ."

  "Yes, and he grew very weak. He was half-dead when they brought him from the Stolypin car here to the Butyrki. And he is in a hospital bed here right now, and the Fourth Special De- partment is issuing him cream and even wine, but it's hard to say whether he will ever get back on his feet again."

  [ The task of the Fourth Special Department of the MVD was to solve scientific problems, using prisoners.]

  "Did the Fourth Special Department summon you?"

  "Yes. They asked us whether we considered it might still be possible after six months of Karaganda to start setting up our in- stitute here, in the Fatherland."

  "And you, of course, agreed enthusiastically."