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

23. He might well have been a better one than those who held the job for the next forty years! But how strange is human fate! As a matter of principle, Doyarenko was always nonpolitical! When his daughter used to bring home fellow students who expressed opinions savoring of Socialist Revolutionary views, he made them leave!

24. Kondratyev, sentenced to solitary confinement, became mentally ill there and died. Yurovsky also died. Chayanov was exiled to Alma-Ata after five years in solitary and was arrested again there in 1948.

25. This kind of peasant and his fate were portrayed immortally in the character of Stepan Chausov in S. Zalygin’s novel.

26. I remember very well that in our youth this term seemed quite logical; there was nothing in the least unclear about it.

27. This particular unremitting wave grabbed up anyone at all at any moment. But when it came to outstanding intellectuals in the thirties, they sometimes considered it cleverer to fabricate a case based on some conspicuously shameful violation (like pederasty; or, in the case of Professor Pletnev, the allegation that, left alone with a woman patient, he bit her breast. A national newspaper reports such an incident—and just try to deny it!).

28. A. Y. Vyshinsky (editor), Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam (From Prisons to Rehabilitative Institutions) , a collection of articles published by the Criminal Policy Institute, Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo Publishing House, 1934.

29. And very likely spy mania was not merely the narrow-minded predilection of Stalin alone. It was very useful for everyone who possessed any privileges. It became the natural justification for increasingly widespread secrecy, the withholding of information, closed doors and security passes, fenced-oflf dachas and secret, restricted special shops. People had no way of penetrating the armor plate of spy mania and learning how the bureaucracy made its cozy arrangements, loafed, blundered, ate, and took its amusements.

30. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 190.

31. This sounds like an exaggeration, a farce, but it was not I who invented that farce. I was in prison with these individuals.

32. There are psychological bases for suspecting I. Stalin of having been liable under this section of Article 58 also. By no means all the documents relating to this type of service survived February, 1917, to become matters of public knowledge. V. F. Dzhunkovsky a former Tsarist police director, who died in the Kolyma, declared that the hasty burning of police archives in the first days of the February Revolution was a joint effort on the part of certain self-interested revolutionaries.

33. It was similarly not by chance that the “Big House” in Leningrad was finished in 1934, just in time for Kirov’s asassination.

34. The twenty-five-year term was added for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution in 1947.

35. These days, as we observe the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the same stage—in the seventeenth year after its final victory—we can begin to consider it very likely that there exists a fundamental law of historical development. And even Stalin himself begins to seem only a blind and perfunctory executive agent.

36. Told me by N. G-ko.

37. Five of them died before trial from tortures suffered during interrogation. Twenty-four died in camps. The thirtieth, Ivan Aristaulovich Punich, returned after his release and rehabilitation. (Had he died, we would have known nothing about the thirty, just as we know nothing about millions of others.) And the many “witnesses” who testified against them are still there in Sverdlovsk today—prospering, occupying responsible positions, or living on as special pensioners. Darwinian selection!

38. Who remembers them? They went on and on every day for hours! Stupefyingly identical! Levitan, the announcer, probably remembers them well: he used to read them in rolling tones, with great expression!

39. Vyshinsky, op. cit.

40. I myself almost felt the impact of that decree. I was standing in line at the bread store, when a policeman called me out and took me off for the sake of his score. If it had not been for a fortunate intervention, I might have started out in Gulag right away instead of going off to war.

41. They judged blood by family name. The design engineer Vasily Okorokov had found it inconvenient to sign his drawings with his real name. Consequently, in the thirties, when it was still legally possible, he had changed his name to Robert Shtekker. It was elegant, and he was able to work up a good-looking professional signature with it. Now he was arrested as a German—and given no chance to prove he was not. So he was exiled. “Is this your real name? What assignments were you given by the Fascist intelligence service?” Then there was that native of Tambov whose real name was Kaverznev, and who changed it to Kolbe in 1918. At what point did he share Okorokov’s fate?

42. That was not such a clear-cut decision at the start. Even in 1943 there were certain separate waves which were like no others—like the so-called “Africans,” who bore this nickname for a long time at the Vorkuta construction projects. These were Russian war prisoners of the Germans, who had been taken prisoner a second time when the Americans captured them from Rommel’s army in Africa (the “Hiwi”). In 1943 they were sent in Studebakers, through Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, to their Motherland. And on a desert gulf of the Caspian, they were immediately put behind barbed wire. The police who received them ripped off their military insignia and liberated them of all things the Americans had given them (keeping them for themselves, of course, not turning them over to the state); then they sent them off to Vorkuta to await special orders, without (due to inexperience) sentencing them to a specific term under any article of the Code. These “Africans” lived in Vorkuta in a betwixt-and-between condition. They were not under guard, but they were given no passes, and without passes they could not take so much as one step in Vorkuta. They were paid wages at the same rate as free workers, but they were treated like prisoners. And the special orders never did come. They were forgotten men.

43. What happened to this group later makes an anecdote. In camp they kept their mouths shut about Sweden, fearing they’d get a second term. But people in Sweden somehow found out about their fate and published slanderous reports in the press. By that time the boys were scattered far and near among various camps. Suddenly, on the strength of special orders, they were all yanked out and taken to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad. There they were fed for two months as though for slaughter and allowed to let their hair grow. Then they were dressed with modest elegance, rehearsed on what to say and to whom, and warned that any bastard who dared to squeak out of turn would get a bullet in his skull—and they were led off to a press conference for selected foreign journalists and some others who had known the entire crew in Sweden. The former internees bore themselves cheerfully described where they were living, studying, and working, and expressed their indignation at the bourgeois slander they had read about not long before in the Western press (after all, Western papers are sold in the Soviet Union at every corner newsstand!). And so they had written to one another and decided to gather in Leningrad. (Their travel expenses didn’t bother them in the least.) Their fresh, shiny appearance completely gave the lie to the newspaper canard. The discredited journalists went off to write their apologies. It was wholly inconceivable to the Western imagination that there could be any other explanation. And the men who had been the subjects of the interview were taken off to a bath, had their hair cut off again, were dressed in their former rags, and sent back to the same camps. But because they had conducted themselves properly, none of them was given a second term.