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

44. Without knowing the details, I am nevertheless convinced that a great many of these Japanese could not have been sentenced legitimately. It was an act of revenge, as well as a means of holding onto manpower for as long a period as possible.

45. It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps, I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-century that the public in the West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until 1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. “After having remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore taken completely by surprise…. They did not realize they were being repatriated…. They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment “reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not expected to give them a fair trial.” They were all sent to destruction on the Archipelago. (Author’s note, dated 1973.)

46. In the actual documents of the “spool of thread” case, they wrote down “200 meters of sewing material.” The fact remains that they were ashamed to write “a spool of thread.”

47. And the death penalty itself was kept veiled for a brief period only; the veil was removed, amid a show of bared fangs, two and a half years later—in January, 1950.

48. It has always been impossible to learn the truth about anything in our country—now, and always, and from the beginning. But, according to Moscow rumors, Stalin’s plan was this: At the beginning of March the “doctor-murderers” were to be hanged on Red Square. The aroused patriots, spurred on, naturally, by instructors, were to rush into an anti-Jewish pogrom. At this point the government—and here Stalin’s character can be divined, can it not?—would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people, and that same night would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia—where barracks had already been prepared for them.

1. Dr. S., according to the testimony of A.P.K.

2. K. S. T e.

3. Cf. Part I, Chapter 8, below.

4. A. A. Akhmatova told me she was convinced that this was so. She even gave me the name of the Chekist who cooked up the case—Y. Agranov, it seems.

5. Article 93 of the Code of Criminal Procedure has this to say: “An anonymous declaration can serve as reason for beginning a criminal case”! (And there is no need to be surprised at the word “criminal” here, since all “politicals” were considered criminals, too, under the Code.)

6. N. V. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922) (The Last Five Years [1918-1922]), Moscow-Petrograd, GIZ, 1923, p. 401.

7. Y. Ginzburg writes that permission for “physical measures of persuasion” was given in April, 1938. V. Shalamov believes that tortures were permitted from the middle of 1938 on. The old prisoner M ch is convinced that there was an “order to simplify the questioning and to change from psychological methods to physical methods.” Ivanov-Razumnik singles out the middle of 1938 as the “period of the most cruel interrogations.”

8. Perhaps Vyshinsky, no less than his listeners, needed this ideological comfort at this time. When he cried out from the prosecutor’s platform: “Shoot them all like mad dogs!” he, at least, who was both evil and quick of mind, understood that the accused were innocent. And in all probability he and that whale of Marxist dialectics, the defendant Bukharin, devoted themselves with all the greater passion to the dialectical elaboration of the judicial lie: for Bukharin it was too stupid and futile to die if he was altogether innocent (thus he needed to find his own guilt!); and for Vyshinsky it was more agreeable to see himself as a logician than as a plain downright scoundrel.

9. Compare the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Not be compelled! (The same thing appears in the seventeenth-century Bill of Rights.)

10. It is common talk that Rostov-on-the-Don and Krasnodar were particularly distinguished for the cruelty of their tortures, but this has not been proved.

11. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And, curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself considered evidence.

12. Today she says: “After eleven years, during rehabilitation proceedings they let me reread those ‘depositions,’ and I was gripped by a feeling of spiritual nausea. What was there to be proud of?” I myself, during the rehabilitation period, felt the very same way on hearing excerpts from my earlier depositions. As the saying goes: They bent me into a bow, and I became someone else. I did not recognize myself—how could I have signed them and still think I had not gotten off too badly?

13. This, evidently, is a Mongolian theme. In the magazine Niva (March 15, 1914, p. 218) there is a drawing of a Mongolian prison: each prisoner is shut in a separate trunk with a small opening for his head or for food. A jailer patrols between the trunks.

14. That, after all, is how somebody’s career was launched—standing guard over a prisoner on his knees. And now, in all probability, that somebody has attained high rank and his children are already grown up.

15. Just picture a foreigner, who knows no Russian, in this muddled state, being given something to sign. Under these conditions the Bavarian Jupp Aschen-brenner signed a document admitting that he had worked on wartime gas vans. It was not until 1954, in camp, that he was finally able to prove that at the time he had been in Munich, studying to become an electric welder.

16. G. M-ch.

17. Inspection, by the way, was so totally impossible and had so emphatically never taken place that in 1953, when real inspectors entered the cell of former Minister of State Security Abakumov, himself a prisoner by that time, he roared with laughter, thinking their appearance was a trick intended to confuse him.