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

And if one glances over all Russia’s jail customs and conduct, at the entire institution during, say, the last ninety years, then you’ll see not just one horn really, but two horns. The Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) revolutionaries began at the tip of one horn, right where it gores, right where it’s too excruciatingly painful to take even on the breastbone. They kept wearing it down gradually until it got rounded off, shrank to a stump, and was hardly a horn any longer, and finally became just a woolly open spot (this was the beginning of the twentieth century). But then, after 1917, the first swelling of a new knob could be felt, and there, there, splaying out and with the slogan “You don’t have the right!”—it began to thrust upward again, and to narrow to a point and harden, to acquire a horny surface—until by 1938 it was pinning the human being right in that gap between the collarbone and the neck: tyurzak. [267]And once a year, the single stroke of a watchman’s bell could be heard in the night in the distance: “TONnnnnn!” [268]

If we pursue this parabola with the help of one of the prisoners in the Schliisselburg Fortress near St. Petersburg, we find that initially things were pretty bad. [269]The prisoner had a number, and no one called him by his family name; the gendarmes acted as if they had been trained in the Lubyanka. They didn’t speak a word on their own. If you stammered out: “We…,” the reply came: “Speak only for yourself!” The silence of the grave. The cell was in eternal shadows, the windows were frosted glass, the floor asphalt. The hinged ventilation pane in the window was open for forty minutes a day. The food consisted of grits and cabbage soup without meat. They would not allow you any scholarly books from the library. You wouldn’t see another human being for two years at a stretch. Only after three years would they let you have sheets of paper—numbered. [270]And then, little by little, things got to be more lenient as the point of the horn got rounded off; there was white bread; and then the prisoners were allowed tea and sugar; one could have money and could buy things in addition to the rations; smoking was permitted; they put transparent glass in the windows; and the transom could be kept open all the time; they painted the walls a light color; in no time at all you could get books by subscribing to the St. Petersburg library; there were gratings between the garden plots; one could converse through them, and prisoners even delivered lectures to other prisoners. By then the prisoners were urging the prison administration: “Give us more land to work on, more!” So they planted two large prison courtyards in flowers and vegetables—no fewer than 450 varieties! And then there were scientific collections, a carpentry shop, a smithy, and they could earn money and buy books, even Russian political books, [271]and also magazines from abroad. And they wrote their families and got letters from them. And they could go out to walk the whole day long if they liked.

And gradually, as Figner recollects, “it was no longer the superintendent who shouted at the prisoners, but we who shouted at him.” In 1902, because he refused to forward a protest of hers, she ripped the shoulder boards off his uniform. And the result was that a military investigator came and apologized profusely to Figner for the ignoramus superintendent!

How did that horn come to shrink and broaden? Figner explains it to some extent by the humanitarian attitudes of individual prison superintendents, and also by the fact that the “gendarmes became friendly with the prisoners,” got used to them. One significant factor certainly was the prisoners’ determination and dignity and adroitness in conducting themselves. But nonetheless I myself believe that it was the temper of the times: this moisture and freshness in the air which drove away the thundercloud; this breeze of freedom, which was sweeping through society, it was decisive. Without it one could have given the gendarmes instructions from the Short Course every Monday, and kept tightening things up, kept putting the screws on. And instead of “impressed labor,” Vera Nikolayevna Figner, for tearing off an officer’s shoulder boards, would have gotten nine grams in the back of her head in a cellar.

The weakening and shaking up of the Tsarist prison system did not come about on its own, of course, but because all society, in concert with the revolutionaries, was shaking it up and ridiculing it in every possible way. Tsarism lost its chance to survive not in the street skirmishes of February but several decades earlier, when youths from well-to-do families began to consider a prison term an honor; when army officers (even guard officers) began to regard it as dishonorable to shake the hand of a gendarme. And the more the prison system weakened, the more clearly evident were the triumphant ethics of the political prisoners, and the more visibly did the members of the revolutionary parties realize their strength and regard their own laws as superior to those of the state.

And that was how Russia of 1917 arrived, bearing 1918 on its shoulders. The reason we have proceeded immediately to 1918 is that the subject of our investigation does not permit us to dwell on 1917. In February, 1917, all political prisons, both those used for interrogation and those in which sentences were served, and all hard-labor prisons as well were emptied. It is a wonder that all the jailers managed to get through the year. Perhaps to make ends meet they simply set to work raising potatoes in their vegetable gardens. (But from 1918 on, things began to get much better for them, and at Shpalernaya Prison they were still serving the new regime even in 1928, and why not!)

In December, 1917, it had already become clear that it was altogether impossible to do without prisons, that some people simply couldn’t be left anywhere except behind bars (see Chapter 2, above), because—well, simply because there was no place for them in the new society. And so it was that the new rulers managed to feel their way across the space between the two horns and grope for the budding of the second horn.

Of course, they proclaimed immediately that the horrors of the Tsarist prisons would not be repeated; that fatiguing correction would not be permitted; that there would be no compulsory silence in prison, no solitary confinement, no separating the prisoners from one another during outdoor walks, no marching in step and single file, not even any locked cells. [272]Go ahead, dear guests, get together, and talk as much as you like and complain about the Bolsheviks. And the attention of the new prison authorities was directed toward the combat readiness of the prison guards outside the walls and the takeover of the stock of prisons inherited from the Tsar. (This was one particular part of the machinery of state that did not have to be destroyed and rebuilt from its foundations.) Fortunately, it turned out that the Civil War had not resulted in the destruction of all the principal central prisons and jails. What was really necessary, however, was to repudiate all those old, besmirched words. So now they called them political isolators—political detention centers—demonstrating with this phrase their view of the members of once revolutionary parties as political enemies and stressing not the punitive role of the bars but only the necessity of isolating (and only temporarily, it appeared) these old-fashioned revolutionaries from the onward march of the new society. So that was how the arches of the old central prisons (evidently including the one in Suzdal from the very beginning of the Civil War) came to receive SR’s, Social Democrats, and Anarchists.

They all returned to prison with a consciousness of their rights as convicts and a long-established tradition of how to stand up for them. They accepted as their legal due a special political ration (conceded by the Tsar and confirmed by the Revolution), which included half a pack of cigarettes a day; purchases from the market (cottage cheese, milk); unrestricted walks outdoors during most hours of the day; being addressed with the formal personal pronoun by prison personnel and not having to stand up when addressed by them; confinement of husband and wife in the same cell; the right to have newspapers, magazines, books, writing materials, and personal articles, even including razors and scissors; sending and receiving letters three times a month; visits from relatives once a month; windows without bars, of course (at that time the concept of the “muzzle” did not exist); unrestricted visits from cell to cell; courtyards with greenery and lilacs for outdoor walks; the freedom to choose companions for outdoor walks and to toss small mailbags from one courtyard to another; and the dispatching of pregnant women from prison into exile two months before they were due to give birth. [273]