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

14. I do not like these “left” and “right” classifications; they are conditional concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.

15. This term actually exists! And it has a sky-blue swampy coloration!

1. Does this perhaps satisfy those who are astonished and reproachful because people didn’t fight?

2. When he got to Moscow, a miracle took place in accordance with the laws of the country of miracles. Officers carried Timofeyev-Ressovsky from the prisoner transport in their arms, and he was driven away in an ordinary automobile: he was off to advance science!

3. P. F. Yakubovich ( V Mire Otverzhennykh [ In the World of the Outcasts ], Vol. 1, Moscow, 1964), writing about the nineties of the last century, recounts that in those terrible years they gave out ten-kopecks-a-day mess money per person in Siberian prisoner transports, when the price of a loaf of wheat bread (weighing ten and a half ounces?) was five kopecks; a pot of milk (two quarts?) three kopecks. “The prisoners were simply in clover,” he writes. But then in Irkutsk Province the prices were higher. A pound of meat cost ten kopecks there and the “prisoners were simply famished!” One pound of meat per day per person—it’s not half a herring, is it?

4. This, it seems, is what is meant by the phrase “Stalin’s cult of personality”?

5. Because of all of this the ordinary criminal mob christened the professional revolutionaries “mangy swells.” (P. F. Yakubovich.)

6. I have heard of a few cases in which three seasoned, young, and healthy men stood up against the thieves—not to defend justice in general, but to protect, not those who were being plundered right next to them, but themselves only. In other words: armed neutrality.

7. V. I. Ivanov (now from Ukhta) got Article 162 (thievery) nine times and Article 82 (escape) five times, for a total of thirty-seven years in prison—and he “served out” five to six years for all of them.

8. “Frayer” is a blatnoi—underworld—word meaning nonthief—in other words, not a Chelovek (“Human being,” with a capital letter). Well, even more simply: the frayera were all nonthief, nonunderworld mankind.

9. A. S. Makarenko, Flagi na Bashnyakh ( Flags on the Towers ).

10. A beaver in the blatnoi—underworld—jargon was any rich zek who had “trash”—meaning good clothes—and “bacilli”—meaning fats, sugar, and other goodies.

11. Thus it is that weeds get into the harvest of fame. But are they weeds? After all, there are no Pushkin, Gogol, or Tolstoi camps—but there are Gorky camps, and what a nest of them too! Yes, and there is a separate mine “named for Maxim Gorky” (twenty-five miles from Elgen in the Kolyma)! Yes, Aleksei Maximovich Gorky… “with your heart and your name, comrade…” If the enemy does not surrender… You say one reckless little word, and look—you’re not in literature any longer.

12. Ahead of him lay another sentence—for twenty-five years—that he was given in camp, and he would not get out of Ozerlag until 1957.

13. V. G. Korolenko, Istoriya Moyego Sovremennika ( A History of My Contemporary ), Moscow, 1955, Vol. III, p. 166.

1. “Without the last one!”—a menacing command to be understood literally. It meant: “I will kill the last man” (literally or at least warm his hide with a club). And so all piled out so as not to be last.

2. Say there, Bertrand Russell’s “War Crimes Tribunal”! Why don’t you use this bit of material? Or doesn’t it suit you?

3. This transit prison with its glorious revolutionary name is little known to Muscovites. There are no excursions to it, and how could there be when it is still in operation? But to get a close look at it, you don’t have to travel any distance at all. It’s a mere stone’s throw from the Novokhoroshevo Highway on the circle line.

4. Of all the transit prisons Karabas was worthiest of becoming a museum. But, alas, it no longer exists: in its place there is a factory for reinforced-concrete products.

5. Galina Serebryakova! Boris Dyakov! Aldan-Semyonov! Did you ever gulp from a washbasin, ten at a time? And if you had, you would never, of course, have descended to the “animal needs” of Ivan Denisovich, would you? And in the midst of the mob scene at the washbasin you would have continued to think only about your dear Party?

6. After all, someday the hidden and all but lost story of our Archipelago will be portrayed in monuments too! And I visualize, for example, one more such project: somewhere on a high point in the Kolyma, a most enormous Stalin, just such a size as he himself dreamed of, with mustaches many feet long and the bared fangs of a camp commandant, one hand holding the reins and the other wielding a knout with which to beat his team of hundreds of people harnessed in fives and all pulling hard. This would also be a fine sight on the edge of the Chukchi Peninsula next to the Bering Strait. (I had written this before I read “The Bas-Relief on the Cliff.” And that means there is something to the idea. They say that on Mogutova Hill at the Zhiguli Gates on the Volga, a mile from the camp, there used to be an enormous oil portrait of Stalin which had been painted on the cliff for the benefit of passing steamers.)

7. Since that time I have asked Swedes I have met or travelers going to Sweden how to find his family. Have they heard anything about such a missing person? The only reply I have received is a smile. The name Andersen in Sweden is like Ivanov in Russia—and there is no such billionaire. And it is only now, twenty-two years later, rereading this book for the last time, that I have suddenly realized: of course, they must have forbidden him to give his real name! He must have been warned by Abakumov, of course, that he would be destroyed if he did. And so he traveled through the transit prisons in the guise of a Swedish Ivanov. And it was only through unforbidden, secondary details of his biography that he was able to leave behind in the memories of those he encountered by chance some trace of his ruined life. More likely he still thought it could be saved—which was only human—like millions of other rabbits in this book. He thought he would be imprisoned for a while and that thereupon the indignant West would free him. He did not understand the strength of the East. And he did not understand that such a witness as himself, who had displayed such firmness of will, unheard of in the soft West, could never be released.

Yet perhaps he is still alive even today. (Author’s note, 1972.)

8. The rations guaranteed by Gulag when no work is being done.

9. “Half-breeds” or “mulattoes” (polutsvetnye in Russian) were prisoners who had grown spiritually close to the thieves and tried to imitate them, but who had nonetheless not been accepted by the thieves’ law.

10. And, as P. Yakubovich writes in reference to the so-called “cadgers,” the sale of prison terms took place in the last century too. It is an ancient prison trick.