Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” begins the skeptical reader.

What? That isn’t enough for you? But if, at the trial, we repeat every point and chew it over five or eight times, then perhaps it turns out not to be so negligible?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The reader of the sixties nonetheless sticks to his own view. “Mightn’t all that have happened precisely because of those competing industrial and financial plans? Aren’t things bound to be out of balance if any union meeting, without consulting Gosplan, can twist the ratios around as it pleases?”

Oh, the prosecutor’s bread is bitter! After all, they decided to publish every last word! That meant that engineers would read it too. “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” And Krylenko rushed in fearlessly to discuss and to question and cross-question engineering details! And the inside pages and inserts of the enormous newspapers were full of small print about fine technical points. The notion was that every reader would be overcome by the sheer mass of material, that he wouldn’t have enough time, even if he used up all his evenings and his rest days too, and so he wouldn’t read it all but would only notice the refrain following every few paragraphs: “We were wreckers, wreckers, wreckers.”

But suppose someone did begin, and read every last line?

In that case, he would come to see, through the banality of self-accusations, composed with such ineptitude and stupidity, that the Lubyanka boa constrictor had gotten involved in something outside its competence, its own kind of work, that what breaks free of the crude noose is the strong-winged thought of the twentieth century. There the prisoners are: in the dock, submissive, repressed—but their thought leaps out. Even their terrified, tired tongues manage to name everything with its proper name and to tell us everything.

…Here is the situation in which they worked. Kalinnikov: “Well, to be sure, a situation of technical distrust was created.” Larichev: “Whether we wanted to or not, we still had to produce that 42 millions of tons of petroleum [i.e., it had been thus ordered from on high]… because, no matter what, 42 million tons of petroleum could not have been produced under any circumstances whatever.” 10

All the work of that unhappy generation of our engineers was squeezed between two such impossibilities. The Thermal Engineering Institute was proud of its principal research achievement, which was the sharply improved coefficient of fuel consumption. On this basis, lower requirements for fuel production had been stipulated in the preliminary plan. And that meant wrecking—reducing fuel resources. In the transportation plan, they had provided for all freight cars to be equipped with automatic coupling. And that meant wrecking: they had tied up capital funds. After all, it takes a long time to introduce automatic coupling, and the capital investment involved in installing it can only be recouped over a long period, and we want everything immediately! In order to make more efficient use of single-track railroads, they decided to increase the size of the locomotives and freight cars. And was that considered modernization? No, it was wrecking. Because in that case it would have been necessary to invest funds in strengthening the roadbeds and the superstructures of the bridges. From the profound economic consideration that in America capital is cheap and labor dear, and that the situation here is just the opposite, and that we therefore ought not to borrow things with monkeylike imitativeness, Fedotov concluded that it was useless for us to purchase expensive American assembly-line machinery. For the next ten years it would be more profitable for us to buy less sophisticated English machinery and to put more workers on it, since it was inevitable that in ten years’ time whatever we had purchased would be replaced anyway, no matter what. And we could then buy more expensive machinery. So that, too, was wrecking. Alleging economy as his reason, what he really wanted, they charged, was to avoid having the most advanced type of machinery in Soviet industry. They began to build new factories out of reinforced concrete, instead of cheaper ordinary concrete, on the grounds that over a hundred-year period reinforced concrete would recoup the additional investment many times over. So that, too, was wrecking: tying up capital; using up scarce reinforcing rods when iron was in short supply. (What was it supposed to be kept for—false teeth?)

From among die defendants, Fedotov willingly conceded: Of course, if every kopeck must be counted today, then it could be considered wrecking. The English say: I’m not rich enough to buy cheap goods.

He tries softly to explain to the hardheaded prosecutor: “Theoretical approaches of every kind project norms which in the final analysis are [they will be considered to be] wrecking….” [236]

Well, tell me now: how much more clearly could a frightened defendant speak out? What is theory to us is wrecking to you! Because you are compelled to grab today, without any thought for tomorrow.

Old Fedotov tries to explain where thousands and millions of rubles are lost in the insane rush of the Five-Year Plan: Cotton is not sorted where it is grown so that every factory can be sent that grade and kind of cotton it requires; instead, it is shipped any old way, all mixed up. But the prosecutor doesn’t listen to him. With the stubbornness of a block of stone he keeps coming back again and again—ten times—to the more obvious question he has put together out of children’s building blocks: Why did they begin to build the so-called “factory-palaces,” with high ceilings, broad corridors, and unnecessarily good ventilation? Was that not the most obvious sort of wrecking? After all, that amounted to tying up capital irrevocably! The bourgeois wreckers explain to him that the People’s Commissariat of Labor wanted to build factories for the workers in the land of the proletariat which were spacious and had good air. [That means there are also wreckers in the People’s Commissariat of Labor. Make a note of that!] The doctors had insisted on thirty feet of space between floors, and Fedotov reduced it to twenty—so why not to sixteen? Now that was wrecking] (If he had reduced it to fifteen, that would have been flagrant wrecking: he would have wanted to create the nightmare conditions of a capitalist factory for free Soviet workers.) They explain to Krylenko that in relation to the entire cost of the factory and its equipment, this difference accounted for 3 percent of the total—but no, again and again and again, he keeps on about the height of the ceilings! And how did they dare install such powerful ventilators? They took into account the hottest summer days. Why the hottest days? So what! Let the workers sweat a little on the hottest days!

And in the meantime: “The disproportions were inherent…. Bungling organization saw to that before there was any ‘Engineers Center.’” (Charnovsky.) [237]“No wrecking activities were ever necessary…. All one had to do was carry out the appropriate actions and everything would happen on its own.” (Charnovsky again.) 13He could not have expressed himself more clearly. And he said this after many months in the Lubyanka and from the defendants’ bench in court. The appropriate actions—i.e., those imposed by bungling higher-ups—were quite enough: carry them out and the unthinkable plan would destroy itself. Here was their kind of wrecking: “We had the capability of producing, say, 1,000 tons and we were ordered [in other words, by a nonsensical plan] to produce 3,000, so we took no steps to produce them.” [238]…

You must admit that for an official, double-checked, spruced-up stenographic record in those years, this is not so little.

On many occasions Krylenko drives his actors to tones of exhaustion, thanks to the nonsense they are compelled to grind out over and over again… like a bad play in which the actor is ashamed for the dramatist, and yet has to go on and on anyway, to keep body and soul together.