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

Here are their family names—and one might almost think they were hired because of those names. For example, in the Kemerovo Provincial State Security Administration, there were: a prosecutor named Trutnev, “drone”; a chief of the interrogation section Major Shkurkin, “self-server”; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Balandin, “soupy”; and an interrogator Skorokhvatov, “quick-grabber.” When all is said and done, one could not invent names more appropriate. And they were all right there together! (I need hardly bother to mention again Volkopyalov—“wolfskin-stretcher”—or Grabishchenko—“plunderer.”) Are we to assume that nothing at all is expressed in people’s family names and such a concentration of them?

Again the prisoner’s faulty memory. I. Korneyev has forgotten the name of the colonel of State Security who was also Konkordiya Iosse’s friend (they both knew her, it turned out), who was in the Vladimir Detention Prison at the same time as Korneyev. This colonel was a living embodiment of the instincts for power and personal gain. At the beginning of 1945, during the height of the “war booty” period, he got himself assigned to that section of the Organs, headed by Abakumov himself, which was supposed to keep watch over the plundering—in other words, they tried to grab off as much as possible for themselves, not for the state. (And succeeded brilliantly.) Our hero pulled in whole freight car loads and built several dachas, one of them in Klin. After the war he operated on such a scale that when he arrived at the Novosibirsk Station he ordered all the customers chased out of the station restaurant and had girls and women rounded up and forced to dance naked on the tables to entertain him and his drinking companions. He would have gotten away with this too, but he violated another important rule. Like Kruzhkov, he went against his own kind. Kruzhkov deceived the Organs. And this colonel did perhaps even worse. He laid bets on which wives he could seduce, and not just ordinary wives, but the wives of his colleagues in the Security police. And he was not forgiven! He was sentenced to a political prison under Article 58, and was serving out his time fuming at their having dared to arrest him. He had no doubt they would change their minds. (And perhaps they did.)

That dread fate—to be thrown into prison themselves—was not such a rarity for the bluecaps. There was no genuine insurance against it. But somehow these men were slow to sense the lessons of the past. Once again this was probably due to their having no higher powers of reason; their low-grade intellect would tell them: It happens only rarely; very few get caught; it may pass me by; my friends won’t let me down.

Friends, as a matter of fact, did try not to leave their friends in a bad spot. They had their own unspoken understanding: at least to arrange favorable conditions for friends. (This was the case, for example, with Colonel I. Y. Vorobyev in the Marfino Special Prison, and with the same V. N. Ilin who was in the Lubyanka for more than eight years.) Thanks to this caste spirit, those arrested singly, as a result of only personal shortcomings, usually did not do too badly. And that was how they were able to justify their sense of immunity from punishment in their day-to-day work in the service. But there were several known cases when camp Security officers were tossed into ordinary camps to serve out their sentences. There were even instances when as prisoners they ran into zeks who had once been under their thumb and came off badly in the encounter. For example, Security officer Munshin, who cherished a particularly violent hatred toward the 58’s in camp and had relied heavily on the support of the blatnye, the habitual thieves, was driven right under the board bunks by those very same thieves. However, we have no way to learn more details about these cases in order to be able to explain them.

But those gaybisty—the State Security officers—who got caught in a wave were in very serious danger. (They had their own waves!) A wave is a natural catastrophe and is even more powerful than the Organs themselves. In this situation, no one was going to help anyone else lest he be drawn into the same abyss himself.

The possibility did exist, however, if you were well informed and had a sharp Chekist sensitivity, of getting yourself out from under the avalanche, even at the last minute, by proving that you had no connection with it. Thus it was that Captain Sayenko (not the Kharkov Chekist carpenter of 1918-1919, who was famous for executing prisoners with his pistol, punching holes in bodies with his saber, breaking shinbones in two, flattening heads with weights, and branding people with hot irons, [93] 14. Roman Gul, Dzerzhinsky. Menzhinsky—Peters—Latsis—Yagoda, Paris, 1936. but, perhaps, a relative) was weak enough to marry for love an ex-employee of the Chinese Eastern Railroad named Kokhanskaya. And suddenly he found out, right at the beginning of the wave, that all the Chinese Eastern Railroad people were going to be arrested. At this time he was head of the Security Operations Department of the Archangel GPU. He acted without losing a moment. How? He arrested his own beloved wife! And not on the basis of her being one of the Chinese Eastern Railroad people—but on the basis of a case he himself cooked up. Not only did he save himself, but he moved up and became the Chief of the Tomsk Province NKVD. [94] 15. This, too, is a theme for a story—and how many more there are in this field! Maybe someone will make use of them someday.

The waves were generated by the Organs’ hidden law of self-renewal—a small periodic ritual sacrifice so that the rest could take on the appearance of being purified. The Organs had to change personnel faster than the normal rate of human growth and aging would ensure. Driven by that same implacable urgency that forces the sturgeon to swim upriver and perish in the shallows, to be replaced by schools of small fry, a certain number of “schools” of gaybisty had to sacrifice themselves. This law was easily apparent to a higher intelligence, but the bluecaps themselves did not want to accept the fact of its existence and make provision for it. Yet, at the hour appointed in their stars, the kings of the Organs, the aces of the Organs, and even the ministers themselves laid their heads down beneath their own guillotine.

Yagoda took one such school of fish along with him. No doubt many of those “whose glorious names we shall come to admire when we come to the White Sea Canal were taken in this school and their names thenceforward expunged from the poetic eulogies.

Very shortly, a second school accompanied the short-lived Yezhov. Some of the finest cavaliers of 1937 vanished in this one. (Yet one ought not to exaggerate their number. It did not by any means include all the best.) Yezhov himself was beaten during his interrogation. He was pitiful. And Gulag was orphaned during this wave of arrests. For example, arrested with Yezhov were the Chief of the Financial Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Medical Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Guard Service of Gulag (VOKhR), [95] 16. VOKhR: Militarized Guard Service, formerly the Internal Guard Service of the Republic. and even the Chief of the Security Operations Department of Gulag, who oversaw the work of the camp “godfathers.”

And later there was the school of Beria.

The corpulent, conceited Abakumov had fallen earlier, separately.

Someday—if the archives are not destroyed—the historians of the Organs will recount all this step by step, with all the figures and all the glittering names.

Therefore, I am going to write only briefly about Ryumin and Abakumov, a story I learned only by chance. I will not repeat what I have already written about them in The First Circle.