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

10. Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.

11. G. V. Plekhanov, “An Open Letter to the Workers of Petrograd,” in the newspaper Yedinstvo, October 28, 1917.

12. This was one of Stalin’s pet themes—to ascribe to every arrested Bolshevik, and in general to every arrested revolutionary, service in the Tsarist Okhrana. Was this merely his intolerant suspiciousness? Or was it intuition? Or, perhaps, analogy?…

13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”]. Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers were shoved through for the prisoners to sign.

14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian. Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”

15. Where indeed in our country did this casting of lots not happen? It was the result of our universal and endless hunger. In the army, all rations were divided up the same way. And the Germans, who could hear what was going on from their trenches, teased us about it: “Who gets it? The political commissar!”

16. Soon the biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, whom I have already mentioned, would be brought here from Berlin. There was nothing at the Lubyanka, it appeared, which so offended him as this spilling on the floor. He considered it striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers, and of all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of Lubyanka’s existence as a prison by 730 times (twice for each day of the year), and then by 111 cells—and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to spill boiling water on the floor 2,188,000 times and then come and wipe it up with a rag the same number of times than to make pails with spouts.

17. Dr. F. P. Gaaz would have earned nothing extra in our country.

18. This company acquired a piece of Moscow earth that was well acquainted with blood. The innocent Vereshchagin was torn to pieces in 1812 on Furkasovsky, near the Rostopchin house. And the murderess and serf-owner Saltychikha lived—and killed serfs—on the other side of the Bolshaya Lubyanka. (Po Moskve [In Moscow], edited by N. A. Geinike and others, Moscow, Sabashnikov Publishers, 1917, p. 231.)

19. Susi remembered me later as a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat. Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.

20. We did not recognize that 1907 Convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through for its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners—simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisoners inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here. (Melgunov, Vos-pominaniya i Dnevniki, Vol. I, pp. 199 and 203.)

21. Of course, our Soviet interrogators did not accept this line of reasoning. What right did they have to want to live—at a time when privileged families in the Soviet rear lived well without collaborating? No one ever thought of considering that these boys had refused to take up German arms against their own people. For playing spies, they were nailed with the very worst and most serious charges of all—Article 58-6, plus sabotage with intent. This meant: to be held until dead.

22. He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting because of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.

23. The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the chauffeur with his former employer.

24. When they introduced me to Khrushchev in 1962, I wanted to say to him: “Nikita Sergeyevich! You and I have an acquaintance in common.” But I told him something else, more urgent, on behalf of former prisoners.

1. Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn’t smell right!

2. Now, after twenty-seven years, the first honest work on this subject has appeared—P. G. Grigorenko, “A Letter to the Magazine Problems of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” samizdat, 1968—and such works are going to multiply from here on out. Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity and treason.

3. One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief of the Red Army’s intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the repatriates home and swallowing them up.

4. Vitkovsky writes about this, on the basis of the thirties, in more general terms. It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren’t wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn’t worked for foreign intelligence services and had hot sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.