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

So that the prisoner shouldn’t attempt to escape during the moment he was in the toilet, and also for a faster turnaround, the door to the toilet was not closed, and the convoy guard, watching the process from the platform of the car, could encourage it: “Come on, come on now! That’s plenty, that’s enough for you!” Sometimes the orders came before you even started: “All right, number one only!” And that meant that from the platform they’d prevent your doing anything else. And then, of course, you couldn’t wash your hands. There was never enough water in the tank there, and there wasn’t enough time either. If the prisoner even so much as touched the plunger of the washstand, the convoy guard would roar: “Don’t you touch that, move along.” (And if someone happened to have soap or a towel among his belongings, he wouldn’t dare take it out anyway, simply out of shame: that would really be acting like a sucker.) The toilet was filthy. Quicker, quicker! And tracking back the liquid mess on his shoes, the prisoner would be shoved back into the compartment, where he would climb up over somebody’s arms and shoulders, and then, from the top row, his dirty shoes would dangle to the middle row and drip.

When women were taken to the toilet, the statutes of the convoy service, and common sense as well, required that the toilet door be kept open, but not every convoy insisted on this and some allowed the door to be shut: Oh, all right, go ahead and shut it. (Later on one of the women was sent in to wash out the toilet, and the guard again had to stand right there beside her so that she didn’t try to escape.)

And even at this fast tempo, visits to the toilet for 120 people would take more than two hours—more than a quarter of the entire shift for three convoy guards! And in spite of that, you still couldn’t make them happy. In spite of that, some old sandpiper or other would begin to cry half an hour later and ask to go to the toilet, and, of course, he wouldn’t be allowed to go, and then he would soil himself right there in the compartment, and once again that meant trouble for the private first class: the prisoner had to be forced to pick it up in his hands and carry it away.

So that was all there was to it: fewer trips to the toilet! And that meant less water, and less food too—because then they wouldn’t complain of loose bowels and stink up the air; after all, how bad could it be? A man couldn’t even breathe.

Less water! But they had to hand out the herring anyway, just as the regulations required! No water—that was a reasonable measure. No herring—that was a service crime.

No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose! The convoy’s actions were quite reasonable! But, like the ancient Christians, we sat there in the cage while they poured salt on our raw and bleeding tongues.

Also the prisoner-transport convoys did not often deliberately (though sometimes they did) mix the thieves—blatari—and non-political offenders in with Article 58 politicals in the same compartment. But a particular situation existed: There were a great many prisoners and very few railroad cars and compartments, and time was always short, and so when was there time enough to sort them out? One of the four compartments was kept for women, and if the prisoners in the other three were to be sorted out on one basis or another, the most logical basis would be by destination so that it would be easier to unload them.

After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day—and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short. And so he was numbered with the transgressors.

I am afraid even to think what I would have had to suffer if I had been in the position of a common convict…. The convoy and the transport officers dealt with me and my comrades with cautious politeness…. Being a political, I went to hard labor in relative comfort—on the transports, I had quarters separate from the criminal prisoners, and my pood—my thirty-six pounds—of baggage was moved about on a cart….

…I left out the quotation marks around the above paragraph to enable the reader to understand things a little better. After all, quotation marks are always used either for irony or to set something apart. And without quotation marks the paragraph sounds wild, does it not?

It was written by P. F. Yakubovich about the nineties of the last century. His book was recently republished as a sermon on that dark and dismal age. We learn from it that even on a barge the political prisoners had special quarters and a special section set aside for their walks on deck. (The same thing appears in Tolstoi’s Resurrection, in which, furthermore, an outsider, Prince Nekhlyudov, is allowed to visit the political prisoners in order to interview them.) And it was only because the “magic word ‘political’ had been left out by mistake” opposite Yakubovich’s name on the list (his own words) that he was met at Ust-Kara “by the hard-labor inspector… like an ordinary criminal prisoner—> rudely, provocatively, impudently.” However, this misunderstanding was all happily cleared up.

What an unbelievable time! It was almost a crime to mix politicals with criminals! Criminals were teamed up and driven along the streets to the station so as to expose them to public disgrace. And politicals could go there in carriages. (Olminsky, in 1899.) Politicals were not fed from the common pot but were given a food allowance instead and had their meals brought from public eating houses. The Bolshevik Olminsky didn’t want even the hospital rations because he found the food too coarse. [285]The Bu-tyrki Prison superintendent apologized to Olminsky for the jailer’s having addressed him too familiarly: You see, we seldom get politicals here, and the jailer didn’t know any better!

Seldom get politicals in the Butyrki? What kind of dream is this? Then where were they? The Lubyanka didn’t exist as a prison at the time, and neither did Lefortovo!

The writer Radishchev was taken to the prisoner transport in shackles, and when the weather got cold they threw over him a “repulsive, raw sheepskin coat,” which they had taken from a watchman. However, the Empress Catherine immediately issued orders that his shackles be removed and that he be provided with everything he required for his journey. But in November, 1927, Anna Skripnikova was sent on a transport from the Butyrki to the Solovetsky Islands in a straw hat and a summer dress. (That was what she had been wearing when she was arrested in the summer, and since that time her room had been sealed and no one was willing to give her permission to get her winter things out of it.)

To draw a distinction between political prisoners and common criminals is the equivalent of showing them respect as equal opponents, of recognizing that people may have views of their own. Thus a political prisoner is conscious of political freedom even when under arrest .

But since the time when we all became KR’s and the socialists failed to retain their status as politicals, since then any protest that as a political you ought not to be mixed up with ordinary criminals has resulted only in laughter on the prisoners’ part and bewilderment on the part of the jailers. “All are criminals here,” the jailers reply—sincerely.

This mingling, this first devastating encounter, takes place either in the Black Maria or in the Stolypin car. Up to this moment, no matter how they have oppressed, tortured, and tormented you during the interrogation, it has all originated with the bluecaps, and you have never confused them with human beings but have seen in them merely an insolent branch of the service. But at the same time, even if your cellmates have been totally different from you in development and experience, and even if you have quarreled with them, and even if they have squealed on you, they have all belonged to that same ordinary, sinful, everyday humanity among which you have spent your whole life.