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

There were no thieves aboard, but there were individuals among the prisoners who had already been infected by the thief-laden atmosphere of the prison. After all, the example of thieves is instructive and calls forth imitations: it demonstrates that there is an easy way to live in prison. Two recent officers were in one of the compartments—Sanin (from the navy) and Merezhkov. They were both 58’s, but their attitudes had already changed. Sanin, with Merezhkov’s support, proclaimed himself the monitor of the compartment and, through a convoy guard, requested a meeting with their chief. (He had fathomed that haughtiness and its need of a pimp!) This was unheard of, but Sanin was summoned, and they had a chat somewhere. Following Sanin’s example, someone in the second compartment also asked for a meeting. And that person was similarly received.

And the next morning they issued not twenty ounces of bread—the prisoner-transport ration at the time—but no more than nine ounces.

They gave out the ration, and a quiet murmur began. A murmur, but in fear of any “collective action,” these politicals did not speak up. In the event, only one among them loudly asked the guard distributing the bread: “Citizen chief! How much does this ration weigh?”

“The correct weight,” he was told.

“I demand a re weighing; otherwise I will not accept it!” the dissatisfied prisoner declared loudly.

The whole car fell silent. Many waited before beginning to eat their ration; expecting that theirs, too, would be reweighed. And at that moment, in all his spotlessness, the officer appeared. Everyone fell silent, which made his words all the weightier and all the more irresistible.

“Which one here spoke out against the Soviet government?”

All hearts stopped beating. (People will protest that this is a universal approach, that even out in freedom every little chief declares himself to be the Soviet government, and just try to argue with him about it. But for those who are panicky, who have just been sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, the threat is more frightening.)

“Who was starting a mutiny over the bread ration?” the officer demanded.

“Citizen lieutenant, I only wanted…” The guilty rebel was already trying to explain it all away.

“Aha, you’re the bastard? You’re the one who doesn’t like the Soviet government?”

(And why rebel? Why argue? Wasn’t it really easier to eat that little underweight ration, to suffer it in silence? And now he had fallen right in it!)

“You stinking shit! You counterrevolutionary! You ought to be hanged, and you have the nerve to demand that the bread ration be reweighed! You rat—the Soviet government gives you food and drink, and you have the brass to be dissatisfied? Do you know what you’re going to get for that?”

Orders to the guard: “Take him out!” The lock rattles. “Come on out, you! Hands behind your back!” They bring out the unfortunate.

“Now who else is dissatisfied? Who else wants his bread ration reweighed?”

(And it’s not as if you could prove anything anyway. It’s not as if they’d take your word against the lieutenant’s if you were to complain somewhere that there were only nine ounces instead of twenty.)

It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip. All the rest turned out to be satisfied, and that was how the penalty ration was confirmed for all the days of the long journey. And they began to withhold the sugar too. The convoy had appropriated it.

(And this took place during the summer of our two great victories—over Germany and Japan—victories which embellish the history of our Fatherland and which our grandsons and great-grandsons will learn about in school.)

The prisoners went hungry for a day and then a second day, by which time several of them began to get a bit wiser, and Sanin said to his compartment: “Look, fellows: If we go on this way, we’re lost. Come on now, all of you who have some good stuff with you, let me have it, and I’ll trade it for something to eat.” With great self-assurance he accepted some articles and turned down others. (Not all the prisoners were willing to let their things go—and, you see, no one forced them to either.) And then he and Merezhkov asked to be allowed to leave the compartment, and, strangely enough, the convoy let them out. Taking the things, they went off toward the compartment of the convoy guard, and they returned from there with sliced loaves of bread and with makhorka. These very loaves constituted the eleven ounces missing from the daily rations. Now, however, they were not distributed on an equal basis but went only to those who had handed over their belongings.

And that was quite fair: after all, they had all admitted they were satisfied with the reduced bread ration. It was also fair because the belongings were, after all, worth something, and it was right that they should be paid for. And it was also fair in the long view because those things were simply too good for camp and were destined anyway to be taken away or stolen there.

The makhorka had belonged to the guard. The soldiers shared their precious makhorka with the prisoners. And that was fair, too, since they had eaten the prisoners’ bread and drunk up their sugar, which was too good for enemies anyway. And, last, it was only fair, too, that Sanin and Merezhkov took the largest share for themselves even though they’d contributed nothing—because without them all this would not have been arranged.

And so they sat crammed in there, in the semidarkness, and some of them chewed on their neighbors’ chunks of bread and their neighbors sat there and watched them. The guard permitted smoking only on a collective basis, every two hours—and the whole car was as filled with smoke as if there’d been a fire. Those who at first had clung to their things now regretted that they hadn’t given them to Sanin and asked him to take them, but Sanin said he’d only take them later on.

This whole operation wouldn’t have worked so well and so thoroughly had it not been for the slow trains and slow Stolypin cars of the immediate postwar years, when they kept unhitching them from one train and hitching them to another and held them waiting in the stations. And, at the same time, if it hadn’t been the immediate postwar period, neither would there have been those greed-inspiring belongings. Their train took a week to get to Kuibyshev—and during that entire week they got only nine ounces of bread a day. (This, to be sure, was twice the ration distributed during the siege of Leningrad.) And they did get dried Caspian carp and water, in addition. They had to ransom their remaining bread ration with their personal possessions. And soon the supply of these articles exceeded the demand, and the convoy guards became very choosy and reluctant to take more things.

They were received at the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, given baths, and returned as a group to that very same Stolypin. The convoy which took them over was new—but, in passing on the relay baton, the previous crew had evidently told them how to put the squeeze on, and the very same system of ransoming their own rations functioned all the way to Novosibirsk. (It is easy to see how this infectious experiment might have spread rapidly through whole units of the convoy guards.)

And when they were unloaded on the ground between the tracks in Novosibirsk, some new officer came up and asked them: “Any complaints against the convoy?” And they were all so confused that nobody answered.

The first chief of convoy had calculated accurately—this was Russia!

Another factor which distinguishes Stolypin passengers from the rest of the train is that they do not know where their train is going and at what station they will disembark: after all, they don’t have tickets, and they don’t read the route signs on the cars. In Moscow, they sometimes load them on so far from the station platform that even the Muscovites among them don’t know which of the eight Moscow stations they are at. For several hours the prisoners sit all squeezed together in the stench while they wait for a switching engine. And finally it comes and takes the zak car to the already made-up train. If it is summertime, the station loudspeakers can be heard: “Moscow to Ufa departing from Track 3. Moscow to Tashkent still loading at Platform 1…” That means it’s the Kazan Station, and those who know the geography of the Archipelago are now explaining to their comrades that Vorkuta and Pechora are out: they leave from the Yaroslavl Station; and the Kirov and Gorky camps [291]are out too. They never send people from Moscow to Byelorussia, the Ukraine, or the Caucasus anyway. They have no room there even for their own. Let’s listen some more: the Ufa train has left, and ours hasn’t moved. The Tashkent train has started, and we’re still here. “Moscow to Novosibirsk departing. All those seeing passengers off, disembark…. All passengers show their tickets.…” We have started.