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

12. This surrender was an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy. The heart of the matter was that the Cossacks were determined to fight to the death, or to cross the ocean, all the way to Paraguay or Indochina if they had to… anything rather than surrender alive. Therefore, the English proposed, first, that the Cossacks give up their arms on the pretext of replacing them with standardized weapons. Then the officers—without the enlisted men—were summoned to a supposed conference on the future of the army in the city of Judenburg in the English occupation zone. But the English had secretly turned the city over to the Soviet armies the night before. Forty busloads of officers, all the way from commanders of companies on up to General Krasnov himself, crossed a high viaduct and drove straight down into a semicircle of Black Marias, next to which stood convoy guards with lists in their hands. The road back was blocked by Soviet tanks. The officers didn’t even have anything with which to shoot themselves or to stab themselves to death, since their weapons had been taken away. They jumped from the viaduct onto the paving stones below. Immediately afterward, and just as treacherously, the English turned over the rank-and-file soldiers by the train-load—pretending that they were on their way to receive new weapons from their commanders.

In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious. How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guarantees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles’ heel? And what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender? They say it was the price they paid for Stalin’s agreeing to enter the war against Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and for giving Kim II Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political thought! And when, subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajczyk, when Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Budapest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain’s Conservatives fled from Suez, could one really believe that those among them with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the Cossacks?

13. This, in fact, is the number of Soviet citizens who were in the Wehrmacht—in pre-Vlasov and Vlasov formations, and in the Cossack, Moslem, Baltic, and Ukrainian units and detachments.

14. On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws—just give them the chance to reach out that far.

15. Does not the prisoner’s dream of the Altai simply continue the old peasant dream about it? The so-called lands of His Majesty’s Cabinet were in the Altai, and because of this the area was closed to colonization much longer than the rest of Siberia. But it was there that the peasants wanted most of all to settle—and where they actually settled. Is it not from this that the enduring legend has arisen?

16. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam , p. 396, presents the figures. In the 1927 amnesty, 7.3 percent of the prisoners were amnestied. This is a credible figure. Pretty poor for a tenth anniversary. Among the political prisoners, women with children were freed and those who had only a few months left to serve. In the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison Isolator, for example, twelve out of the two hundred prisoners there were released. But, in the middle of it, they regretted even this wretched amnesty and began to block it: they delayed some releases, and some people who were freed were given a “minus” restriction instead of full freedom to go where they pleased.

17. Perhaps, only in the twentieth century, if one is to believe the stories one hears, has their stagnating well-being led to moral indigestion.

18. Indeed, the bastards were wrong by only one digit! For more details on the great Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945, see Part III, Chapter 6.

19. Many years later, this time as a tourist, I saw another, similar park, except that it was even smaller, in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad. The other tourists exclaimed over the darkness of the corridors and cells, but I kept thinking to myself that with such a park to walk in, the prisoners of the Trubetskoi bastion were not lost men. We were taken out to walk only in deathly cell-like stone enclosures.

1. They had met to sentence me on the very day of the amnesty. The work must go on….

Case heard: Accusation of so-and-so (name, year of birth, place of birth)

2. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam .

3. Ch-n’s group.

4. That same collection edited by A. Y. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospita-telnym Uchrezhdeniyam , includes materials indicating that the predetermination of verdicts is an old, old story. In 1924-1929, sentences were determined by joint administrative and economic considerations. Beginning in 1924, because of national unemployment, the courts reduced the number of verdicts which sentenced prisoners to corrective labor while they continued to live at home and increased short-term prison sentences. These cases involved only nonpolitical offenders, of course. As a result, prisons were overcrowded with short-termers serving sentences of up to six months, and not enough use was being made of them in labor colonies. At the beginning of 1929, the People’s Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., in Circular No. 5, condemned short-term sentences and, on November 6, 1929, the eve of the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, when the country was supposedly entering on the construction of socialism, a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars simply forbade all sentences of less than one year!

5. In the Republic of South Africa, terror has gone to such lengths in recent years that every suspicious (SDE—Socially Dangerous Element) black can be arrested and held for three months without investigation or trial. Anyone can see immediately the flimsiness of this: why not from three to ten years?

6. This is something we hadn’t known, something the newspaper Izvestiya told us in July, 1957.

7. Babayev, in fact a nonpolitical, shouted at them: “You can ‘muzzle’ me for three hundred years! But I’ll never lift my hand for you, you benefactors!”

8. Thus it was that a real spy (Schultz, in Berlin, in 1948) could get ten years, and someone who had never been a spy, Gunther Waschkau, got twenty-five. Because he was in the wave of 1949.

10. Today Lozovsky holds the degree of candidate in medical sciences and lives in Moscow. Everything is going well with him. Chulpenyev drives a trolley bus.