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

That was the most intelligent thing to do. At any minute, one of us could have been pulled out for interrogation and held until 6 a.m., when the interrogator .would go home to sleep but we were forbidden to.

One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all the fates on earth!

One more thing held me back, which I didn’t quite catch right away but had felt nonetheless from the first words of my story, although I could not at this early date find a name for it: As each of us had been arrested, everything in our world had switched places, a 180-degree shift in all our concepts had occurred, and the good news I had begun to recount with such enthusiasm might not be good news for us at all.

My cellmates turned on their sides, covered their eyes with their handkerchiefs to keep out the light from the 200-watt bulb, wound towels around their upper arms, which were chilled from lying on top of the blankets, hid their lower arms furtively beneath them, and went to sleep.

And I lay there, filled to the brim with the joy of being among them. One hour ago I could not have counted on being with anyone. I could have come to my end with a bullet in the back of my head—which was what the interrogator kept promising me—without having seen anyone at all. Interrogation still hung over me, but how far it had retreated! Tomorrow I would be telling them my story (though not talking about my case, of course) and they would be telling me their stories too. How interesting tomorrow would be, one of the best days of my life! (Thus, very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.)

Every detail of the cell interested me. Sleep fled, and when the peephole was not in use I studied it all furtively. Up there at the top of one wall was a small indentation the length of three bricks, covered by a dark-blue paper blind. They had already told me it was a window. Yes, there was a window in the cell. And the blind served as an air-raid blackout. Tomorrow there would be weak daylight, and in the middle of the day they would turn off the glaring light bulb. How much that meant—to have daylight in daytime!

There was also a table in the cell. On it, in the most conspicuous spot, were a teapot, a chess set, and a small pile of books. (I was not yet aware why they were so conspicuously positioned. It turned out to be another example of the Lubyanka system at work. During his once-a-minute peephole inspection, the jailer was supposed to make sure that the gifts of the prison administration were not being misused: that the teapot was not being used to break down the wall; that no one was swallowing the chessmen and thereby possibly cashing in his chips and ceasing to be a citizen of the U.S.S.R.; and that no one was starting a fire with the books in the hope of burning down the whole prison. And a prisoner’s eyeglasses were considered so potentially dangerous that they were not allowed to remain on the table during the night; the prison administration took them away until morning.)

What a cozy life! Chess, books, cots with springs, decent mattresses, clean linen. I could not remember having slept like this during the whole war. There was a worn parquet floor. One could take nearly four strides from window to door in the aisle between the cots. No, indeed! This central political prison was a real resort.

And no shells were falling. I remembered their sounds: the high-pitched sobbing way up overhead, then the rising whistle, and tie crash as they burst. And how tenderly the mortar shells whistled. And how everything trembled from the four blasts of what we called “Dr. Goebbels’ mortar-rockets.” And I remembered the wet snow and mud near Wormditt, where I had been arrested, which our men were still wading through to keep the Germans from breaking out of our encirclement.

All right then, the hell with you; if you don’t want me to fight, I won’t.

Among our many lost values there is one more: the high worth of those people who spoke and wrote Russian before us. It is odd that they are almost undescribed in our prerevolutionary literature. Only very rarely do we feel their breath—from Marina Tsvetayeva, or from “Mother Mariya” (in her Recollections of Blok). They saw too much to settle on any one thing. They reached toward the sublime too fervently to stand firmly on the earth. Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more. And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked! As though they stuck in the craw of people whose deeds and actions were single-minded and narrow-minded. And the only nickname they were christened with was “rot.” Because these people were a flower that bloomed too soon and breathed too delicate a fragrance. And so they were mowed down.

These people were particularly helpless in their personal lives: they could neither bend with the wind, nor pretend, nor get by; every word declared an opinion, a passion, a protest. And it was just such people the mowing machine cut down, just such people the chaff-cutter shredded. [107] 6. I am almost fearful of saying it, but it seems as though on the eve of the 1970’s these people are emerging once again. That is surprising. It was almost too much to hope for.

They had passed through these very same cells. But the cell walls—for the wallpaper had long since been stripped off, and they had been plastered, whitewashed, and painted more than once—gave off nothing of the past. (On the contrary, the walls now tried to listen to us with hidden microphones.) Nowhere is anything written down or reported of the former inhabitants of these cells, of the conversations held in them, of the thoughts with which earlier inmates went forth to be shot or to imprisonment on the Solovetsky Islands. And now such a volume, which would be worth forty freight car loads of our literature, will in all probability never be written.

Those still alive recount to us all sorts of trivial details: that there used to be wooden trestle beds here and that the mattresses were stuffed with straw. That, way back in 1920, before they put muzzles over the windows, the panes were whitewashed up to the top. By 1923 “muzzles” had been installed (although we unanimously ascribed them to Beria). They said that back in the twenties, prison authorities had been very lenient toward prisoners communicating with each other by “knocking” on the walls: this was a carry-over from the stupid tradition in the Tsarist prisons that if the prisoners were deprived of knocking, they would have no way to occupy their time. And another thing: back in the twenties all the jailers were Latvians, from the Latvian Red Army units and others, and the food was all handed out by strapping Latvian women.

All this was trivial detail, but it was certainly food for thought.

I myself had needed very badly to get into this main Soviet political prison, and I was grateful that I had been sent here: I thought about Bukharin a great deal and I wanted to picture the whole thing as it had actually been. However, I had the impression that we were by now merely the remnants, and that in this respect we might just as well have been in any provincial “internal” prison. [108] 7. One attached to a State Security headquarters. Still, there was a good deal of status in being here.

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions in my new cell. They were people to listen to and people with whom to compare notes.

The old fellow with the lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell—both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole.