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

And so perhaps there isn’t any insoluble riddle?

It was all that same invincible theme song, persisting with only minor variations through so many different trials: “After all, we and you are Communists! How could you have gotten off the track and come out against us? Repent! After all, you and we together—is us!”

Historical comprehension ripens slowly in a society. And when it does ripen, it is so simple. Neither in 1922, nor in 1924, nor in 1937 were the defendants able to hang onto their own point of view so firmly that they could raise their heads and shout, in reply to that bewitching and anesthetizing melody:

“No, we are not revolutionaries with you! No, we are not Russians with you! No, we are not Communists with your

It would seem that if only that kind of shout had been raised, all the stage sets would have collapsed, the plaster masks would have fallen off, the Producer would have fled down the backstairs, and the prompters would have sneaked off into their ratholes. And out of doors it would have been, say, 1967!

But even the most superbly successful of these theatrical productions was expensive and troublesome. And Stalin decided not to use open trials any longer.

Or rather in 1937 he probably did have a plan for holding public trials on a wide scale in the local districts—so the black soul of the opposition would be made visible to the masses. But he couldn’t find producers who were good enough. It wasn’t practical to prepare things so carefully, and the mental processes of the accused weren’t so complex, and Stalin only got into a mess, although very few people know about it. The whole plan broke down after a few trials, and was abandoned.

It’s appropriate here to describe one such trial—the Kady case, detailed reports of which the Ivanovo provincial newspapers published initially.

At the end of 1934, a new local administrative district was created in the remote wilds of Ivanovo Province at the point where it joined Kostroma and Nizhni Novgorod Provinces, and its center was situated in the ancient, slow-moving village of Kady. New leaders were sent there from various localities, and they made one another’s acquaintance right in Kady. There they found a remote, sad, impoverished region, badly in need of money, machines, and intelligent economic management, but, instead, starved by grain procurements. It happened that Fyodor Ivanovich Smirnov, the First Secretary of the District Party Committee, was a man with a strong sense of justice; Stavrov, the head of the District Agricultural Department, was a peasant through and through, one of those peasants known as the intensivniki—in other words, the hard-working, zealous, and literate peasants who in the twenties had run their farms on a scientific basis, for which they were at that time rewarded by the Soviet government, since it had not yet been decided that all these intensivniki must be destroyed. Because Stavrov had entered the Party he had survived the liquidation of the kulaks. (And maybe he even took part in the liquidation of the kulaks?) These men tried to do something for the peasants in their new district, but directives kept pouring down from above and each one ran counter to some initiative of theirs; it was as if, up there, they were busy thinking up what they could do to make things worse and more desperate for the peasants. And at one point the leaders in Kady wrote the province leadership that it was necessary to lower the plan for procurement of breadgrains because the district couldn’t fulfill the plan without becoming impoverished well below the danger point. One has to recall the situation in the thirties (and maybe not only the thirties?) to realize what sacrilege against the plan and what rebellion against the government this represented! But, in accordance with then current style, measures were not taken directly from above, but were left to local initiative. When Smirnov was on vacation, his deputy, Vasily Fyodorovich Romanov, the Second Secretary, arranged to have a resolution passed by the District Party Committee: “The successes of the district would have been even more brilliant [?] if it were not for the Trotskyite Stavrov.” This set in motion the “individual case” of Stavrov. (An interesting approach: Divide and rule! For the time being, Smirnov was merely to be frightened, neutralized, and compelled to retreat; there would be time enough later on to get to him. And this, on a small scale, was precisely the Stalinist tactic in the Central Committee. ) At stormy Party meetings, however, it became clear that Stavrov was about as much of a Trotskyite as he was a Jesuit. The head of the District Consumer Cooperatives, Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov, a man with a ragtag, haphazard education but one of those native talents others are so surprised to find among Russians, a born retail trade executive, eloquent, adroit in an argument, who could get fired to red heat about anything he believed to be right, tried to persuade the Party meeting to expel Romanov from the Party for slander. And they actually did give Romanov an official Party rebuke! Romanov’s last words in this dispute were typical of this kind of person, demonstrating his assurance in regard to the general situation: “Even though they proved Stavrov was not a Trotskyite, nonetheless I &m sure he is a Trotskyite. The Party will investigate, and it will also investigate the rebuke to me.” And the Party did investigate: the District NKVD arrested Stavrov almost immediately, and one month later they also arrested Univer, the Chairman of the District Executive Committee and an Estonian. And Romanov took over Univer’s job as Chairman of the District Executive Committee. Stavrov was taken to the Provincial NKVD, where he confessed he was a Trotskyite, that he had acted in coalition with the SR’s all his life, that he was a member of an underground rightist organization in his district (this is a bouquet worthy of the times, the only thing missing being a connection with the Entente). Perhaps he never really did confess these things, but no one is ever going to know, since he died from torture during interrogation in the internal prison of the Ivanovo NKVD. The pages of his deposition were there in full. Soon afterward, they arrested Smirnov, the secretary of the District Party Committee, as the head of the supposed rightist organization; and Saburov, the head of the District Financial Department, and someone else as well.

Of interest is the way in which Vlasov’s fate was decided. He had only recently demanded the expulsion from the Party of Romanov, now the new Chairman of the District Executive Committee. He had also fatally offended Rusov, the district prosecutor, as we have already reported in Chapter 4, above. He had offended N. I. Krylov, the Chairman of the District NKVD, by protecting two of his energetic and resourceful executives from being arrested for supposed wrecking—both of them had black marks on their records because of their social origins. (Vlasov always hired all kinds of “former” people for his work—because they mastered the business effectively and, in addition, tried hard; people promoted from the ranks of the proletariat knew nothing and, more importantly, didn’t want to know anything.) Nonetheless the NKVD was prepared to make its peace with the trade cooperative! Sorokin, the Deputy Chairman of the District NKVD, came in person to see Vlasov with a peace proposal: to give the NKVD 700 rubles’ worth of materials without charging them for it (and later on we will somehow write it off). (The ragpickers! And that was two months’ wages for Vlasov, who had never taken anything illegally for himself.) “And if you don’t give it to us, you are going to regret it.” Vlasov kicked him out: “How do you dare offer me, a Communist, a deal like that?” The very next day Krylov paid a call on the District Consumer Cooperative, this time as the representative of the District Committee of the Party. (This masquerade, like all these tricks, was in the spirit of 1937.) And this time he ordered the convening of a Party meeting; the agenda: “On the wrecking activities of Smirnov and Univer in the Consumers’ Cooperatives,” the report to be delivered by Comrade Vlasov. Well, now, that’s a gem of a trick for you! No one at that point was making charges against Vlasov. But it would be quite enough for him to say two little words about the wrecking activities of the former secretary of the District Party Committee in his, Vlasov’s, field, and the NKVD would interrupt: “And where were you? Why didn’t you come to us in time?” In a situation of this sort many others would have lost their heads and allowed themselves to be trapped. But not Vlasov! He immediately replied: “I won’t make the report! Let Krylov make the report—after all, he arrested Smirnov and Univer and is handling their case.” Krylov refused: “I’m not familiar with the evidence.” Vlasov replied: “If even you aren’t familiar with the evidence, that means they were arrested without cause.” So the Party meeting simply didn’t take place. But how often did people dare to defend themselves? (We will not have a complete picture of the atmosphere of 1937 if we lose sight of the fact that there were still strong-willed people capable of difficult decisions, and if we fail to recall that late that night T., the senior bookkeeper of the District Consumer Cooperative, and his deputy N. came to Vlasov’s office with 10,000 rubles: “Vasily Grigoryevich! Get out of town tonight! Don’t wait for tomorrow. Otherwise you are finished!” But Vlasov thought it did not befit a Communist to run away.) The next morning there was a nasty article in the district paper on the work of the District Consumer Cooperative. (One has to point out that in 1937 the press always played hand in glove with the NKVD.) By evening Vlasov had been asked to give the District Party Committee an accounting of his own work. (Every step of the way, this was how things were in the entire Soviet Union.)