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

My fellow kept on whining and complaining of his fate. And at that point, I decided to enter a somewhat mystifying demurrer. “And what about the ones you’re guarding, the ones who got ten years for nothing—is it any easier for them?” He immediately subsided and remained silent until morning: earlier, in the semi-darkness, he had noticed that I was wearing some kind of semi-military overcoat and field shirt. And he had thought I was simply a soldier boy, but now the devil only knew what I might be: Maybe I was a police agent? Maybe I was out to catch escapees? Why was I in this particular car? And he had criticized the camps there in my presence.

By this time the candle end in the lantern was floating but still burning. On the third baggage shelf some youth was talking in a pleasant voice about the war—the real war, the kind you don’t read about in books: he had been with a unit of field engineers and was describing incidents that were true to life. And it was so pleasant to realize that unvarnished truth was, despite everything, pouring into someone’s ears.

I could have told tales too. I would even have liked to. But no, I didn’t really want to any more. Like a cow, the war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.

One wedge knocks out another.

And after spending a few hours among free people, here is what I feel: My lips are mute; there is no place for me among them; my hands are tied here. I want free speech! I want to go back to my native land! I want to go home to the Archipelago!

In the morning I deliberately forgot my postcard on an upper shelf: after all, the conductor will get around to cleaning up the car; she will carry it to a mailbox—if she is a human being.

We emerge onto the square in front of the Northern Station in Moscow. Again my jailers are newcomers to Moscow, and don’t know the city. We travel on streetcar “B,” and I make the decisions for them. There is a mob at the streetcar stop in the middle of the square; everyone is on the way to work at this hour. One jailer climbs up to the streetcar motorman and shows him his MVD identity card. We are allowed to stand imposingly on the front platform for the whole trip, as if we were deputies of the Moscow Soviet, and we don’t bother to get tickets. An old man isn’t allowed to board there—he isn’t an invalid and he has to board in the rear like the others.

We approach Novoslobodskaya and disembark—and for the first time I see Butyrki Prison from the outside, even though it’s the fourth time I’ve been brought there and I can draw its interior plan without difficulty. Oof, what a grim, high wall stretches for two blocks there! The hearts of the Muscovites shiver when they see the steel maw of its gates slide open. But I leave the sidewalks of Moscow behind me without regret, and as I enter that tower of the gatehouse I feel I am returning home. I smile at the first courtyard and recognize the familiar main doors of carved wood. And it’s nothing at all to me that they are now going to make me face the wall—and they already have—and ask me: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of birth?”

My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.

I know: after several hours of inevitable processing of my body—confinement in a box, search, issuing receipts, filling out the admissions card, after the roaster and the bath—I shall be taken to a cell with two domes, with a hanging arch in the middle (all the cells are like that), with two large windows and a long combination table and cupboard. And I shall be greeted by strangers who are certain to be intelligent, interesting, friendly people, and they will begin to tell me their stories, and I will begin to tell them mine, and by night we will not even feel like going off to sleep right away.

And on the bowls will be stamped (so we shouldn’t make off with them on the prisoner transport) the mark “Bu-Tyur”—for flwtyrskaya Tywrma, Butyrki Prison. The “BuTyur” Health Resort, as we mocked it last time. A health resort, incidentally, very little known to the paunchy bigwigs who want so badly to lose weight. They drag their stomachs to Kislovodsk, and go out for long hikes on prescribed trails, do push-ups, and sweat for a whole month just to lose four to six pounds. And there in the “BuTyur” Health Resort, right near them, anyone of them could lose seventeen or eighteen pounds just like that, in one week, without doing any exercises at all.

This is a tried and true method. It has never failed.

One of the truths you learn in prison is that the world is small, very small indeed. True, the Gulag Archipelago, although it extended across the entire Soviet Union, had many fewer inhabitants than the Soviet Union as a whole. How many there actually were in the Archipelago one cannot know for certain. We can assume that at any one time there were not more than twelve million in the camps [309](as some departed beneath the sod, the Machine kept bringing in replacements). And not more than half of them were politicals. Six million? Well, that’s a small country, Sweden or Greece, and in such countries many people know one another. And quite naturally when you landed in any cell of any transit prison and listened and chatted, you’d be certain to discover you had acquaintances in common with some of your cellmates. (And so D., after having spent more than a year in solitary confinement, after Sukhanovka, after Ryumin’s beatings and the hospital, could land in a Lubyanka cell and give his name, and then and there a bright chap named F. could greet him: “Aha, so now I know who you are!” “Where from?” D. shied away from him. “You are mistaken.” “Certainly not. You are that very same American, Alexander D., whom the bourgeois press lied about, saying you had been kidnaped—and TASS denied it. I was free at the time and read about it.”)

I love that moment when a newcomer is admitted to the cell for the first time (not a novice who has only recently been arrested and will inevitably be depressed and confused, but a veteran zek). And I myself love to enter a new cell (nonetheless, God grant I never have to do it again) with an unworried smile and an expansive gesture: “Hi, brothers!” I throw my bag on the bunks. “Well, so what’s new this past year in Butyrki?”

We begin to get acquainted. Some fellow named Suvorov, a 58. At first glance there’s nothing remarkable about him, but you probe and pry: at the Krasnoyarsk Transit Prison a certain Makhotkin was in his cell.

“Just a moment, wasn’t he an Arctic aviator?”

“Yes. They named…”

“…an island after him in the Taimyr Gulf. And he’s in prison for 58-10. So does that mean they let him go to Dudinka?”

“How do you know? Yes.”

Wonderful! One more link in the biography of a man I don’t know. I have never met him, and perhaps I never shall. But my efficient memory has filed away everything I know about him: Makhotkin got a whole “quarter”—twenty-five years—but the island named after him couldn’t be renamed because it was on all the maps of the world (it wasn’t a Gulag island). They had taken him on at the aviation sharashka in Bolshino and he was unhappy there: an aviator among engineers, and not allowed to fly. They split that sharashka in two, and Makhotkin got assigned to the Taganrog half, and it seemed as though all connection with him had been severed. In the other half of it, however, in Rybinsk,

I was told that he had asked to be allowed to fly in the Far North. And now I had just learned he had been given that permission. This was not information I needed, but I had remembered it all. And ten days later I turned up in the same Butyrki bath box (there are such lovely boxes in the Butyrki, with faucets and small washtubs so as not to tie up the big bath chambers) as a certain R. I didn’t know this R. either, but it turned out he had been a patient in the Butyrki hospital for half a year and was about to leave for the Rybinsk sharashka. In another three days the prisoners in Rybinsk, too, a closed box where zeks are cut off from all ties with the outside world, would nevertheless learn that Makhotkin was in Dudinka, and they would also find out where I had been sent.