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

Fedotov was sixty-six years old and he had been a factory engineer eleven years longer than the whole life span of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party—from which the Soviet Communist Party had sprung. He had worked at all the spinning mills and textile factories in Russia. (How hateful such people are, and how desirable it is to get rid of them as quickly as possible!) In 1905 he had left his position as a director of the Morozov textile firm and the high salary which went with it because he preferred to attend the “Red Funerals” which followed the caskets of the workers killed by the Cossacks. And now he was ill, had poor eyesight, and was too weak to leave home at night even to go to the theater.

And such people organized intervention? And economic ruin?

Charnovsky had not had any free evenings for many years because he had been so busy with his teaching and with developing new sciences—such as the science of the organization of production and the scientific principles of rationalization. I recall from my own childhood the engineering professors of those years, and that’s exactly what they were like. Their evenings were given up to their students at all levels, and they didn’t get home to their families until 11 p.m. After all, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan there were only thirty thousand of them for the whole country. They were all strained to the breaking point.

And it was these people who were supposed to have contrived a crisis, to have spied in exchange for handouts?

Ramzin uttered just one honest phrase during the whole trial: “The path of wrecking is alien to the inner structure of engineering.”

Throughout the trial Krylenko forced the defendants to concede apologetically that they were “scarcely conversant” with or were “illiterate” in politics. After all, politics is much more difficult and much loftier than some kind of metallurgy or turbine design. In politics your head won’t help you, nor will your education. Come on! Answer me! What was your attitude toward the October Revolution when it happened? Skeptical. In other words, immediately hostile. Why? Why? Why?

Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us—as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble had been blown.

What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d’etat was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn’t the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity? (And, excepting only the question of the moral leadership of society, is not this precisely where all social cybernetics is leading today? Is it not true that professional politicians are boils on die neck of society that prevent it from turning its head and moving its arms?) And why shouldn’t engineers have political views? After all, politics is not even a science, but is an empirical area not susceptible to description by any mathematical apparatus; furthermore, it is an area subject to human egotism and blind passion. (Even in the trial Charnovsky speaks out: “Politics must, nonetheless, be guided to some degree by the findings of technology.”)

The wild pressures of War Communism could only sicken the engineers. An engineer cannot participate in irrationality, and until 1920 the majority of them did nothing, even though they were barbarically impoverished. When NEP—the New Economic Policy—got under way, the engineers willingly went back to work. They accepted NEP as an indication that the government had come to its senses. But, alas, conditions were not what they had been. The engineers were looked on as a socially suspicious element that did not even have the right to provide an education for its own children. Engineers were paid immeasurably low salaries in proportion to their contribution to production. But while their superiors demanded successes in production from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.

Krylenko objects: “Do you remember the Oldenborger trial?” (In other words, how we, so to speak, defended him.)

Fedotov: “Yes. He had to lose his life in order to attract some attention to the predicament of the engineer.”

Krylenko (disappointed): “Well, that was not how the matter was put.”

Fedotov: “He died and he was not the only one to die. He died voluntarily, and many others were killed.” 21

Krylenko was silent. That meant it was true. (Leaf through the Oldenborger trial again, and just imagine the persecution. And with the additional final line: “Many other were killed.”)

So it was that the engineer was to blame for everything, even when he had done nothing wrong. But if he actually had made a real mistake, and after all he was a human being, he would be torn to pieces unless his colleagues could manage to cover things up. For would they value honesty? So the engineers then were forced at times to lie to the Party leadership?

To restore their authority and prestige, the engineers really had to unite among themselves and help each other out. They were all in danger. But they didn’t need any kind of conference, any membership cards, to achieve such unity. Like every kind of mutual understanding between intelligent and clear-thinking people, it was attained by a few quiet, even accidental words; no kind of voting was called for. Only narrow minds need resolutions and the Party stick. (And this was something Stalin could never understand, nor could the interrogators, nor their whole crowd. They had never had any experience of human relationships of that kind. They had never seen anything like that in Party history!) In any case, that sort of unity had long existed among Russian engineers in their big illiterate nation of petty tyrants. It had already been tested for several decades. But now a new government had discovered it and become alarmed.

Then came 1927. And the rationality of the NEP period went up in smoke. And it turned out that the entire NEP was merely a cynical deceit. Extravagantly unrealistic projections of a super-industrial forward leap had been announced; impossible plans and tasks had been assigned. In those conditions, what was there for the collective engineering intelligence to do—the engineering leadership of the State Planning Commission and the Supreme Council of the Economy? To submit to insanity? To stay on the sidelines? It would have cost them nothing. One can write any figures one pleases on a piece of paper. But “our comrades, our colleagues in actual production, will not be able to fulfill these assignments.” And that meant it was necessary to try to introduce some moderation into these plans, to bring them under the control of reason, to eliminate entirely the most outrageous assignments. To create, so to speak, their own State Planning Commission of engineers in order to correct the stupidities of the leaders. And the most amusing thing was that this was in their interests—the interests of the leaders—too. And in the interests of all industry and of all the people, since ruinous decisions could be avoided, and squandered, scattered millions could be picked up from the ground. To defend quality—“the heart of technology”—amid the general uproar about quantity, planning, and overplanning. And to indoctrinate students with this spirit.