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

From the beginning of the thirties I had lost contact with that milieu. Then came the war. And here before me stood—an engineer, one of those who had replaced those destroyed.

No one could deny him one point of superiority. He was much stronger, more visceral, than those others had been. His shoulders and hands retained their strength even though they had not needed it for a long time. Freed from the restraints of courtesy, he stared sternly and spoke impersonally, as if he didn’t even consider the possibility of a dissenting view. He had grown up differently from those others too, and he worked differently.

His father had plowed the earth in the most literal sense.

Lenya Z-v had been one of those disheveled, unenlightened peasant boys whose wasted talents so distressed Belinsky and Tolstoi. He was certainly no Lomonosov, and he could never have gotten to the Academy on his own, but he was talented. If there had been no revolution, he would have plowed the land, and he would have become well-to-do because he was energetic and active, and he might have raised himself into the merchant class.

It being the Soviet period, however, he entered the Komsomol, and his work in the Komsomol, overshadowing his other talents, lifted him out of anonymity, out of his lowly state, out of the countryside, and shot him like a rocket through the Workers’ School right into the Industrial Academy. He arrived there in 1929—at the very moment when those other engineers were being driven in whole herds into Gulag. It was urgently necessary for those in power to produce their own engineers—politically-conscious, loyal, one-hundred percenters, who were to become bigwigs of production, Soviet businessmen, in fact, rather than people who did things themselves. That was the moment when the famous commanding heights overlooking the as-yet-uncreated industries were empty. And it was the fate of Z-v’s class in the Industrial Academy to occupy them.

Z-v’s life became a chain of triumphs, a garland winding right up to the peak. Those were the exhausting years, from 1929 to 1933, when the civil war was being waged, not as in 1918 to 1920 with tachankas—machine guns mounted on horse-drawn carts—but with police dogs, when the long lines of those dying of famine trudged toward the railroad stations in the hope of getting to the cities, which was where the breadgrains were evidently ripening, but were refused tickets and were unable to leave—and lay dying beneath the station fences in a submissive human heap of homespun coats and bark shoes. In those same years Z-v not only did not know that bread was rationed to city dwellers but, at a time when a manual laborer was receiving 60 rubles a month in wages, he enjoyed a student’s scholarship of 900 rubles a month. Z-v’s heart did not ache for the countryside whose dust he had shaken from his feet. His new life was already soaring elsewhere among the victors and the leaders. He never had time to be an ordinary, run-of-the-mill foreman. He was immediately assigned to a position in which he had dozens of engineers and thousands of workers under him. He was the chief engineer of the big construction projects outside Moscow. From the very beginning of the war he, of course, had an exemption from military service. He was evacuated to Alma-Ata, together with the department he worked for, and in this area he bossed even bigger construction projects on the Hi River. But in this case his workers were prisoners. The sight of those little gray people bothered him very little at the time, nor did it inspire him to any reappraisals nor compel him to take a closer look. In that gleaming orbit in which he circled, the only important thing was to achieve the projected totals, fulfillment of the plan. And it was quite enough for Z-v merely to punish a particular construction unit, a particular camp, and a particular work superintendent—after that, it was up to them to manage to fulfill their norm with their own resources. How many hours they had to work to do it or what ration they had to get along on were details that didn’t concern him.

The war years deep in the rear were the best years in Z-v’s life. Such is the eternal and universal aspect of war: the more grief it accumulates at one of its poles, the more joy it generates at the other. Z-v had not only a bulldog’s jaw but also a swift, enterprising, businesslike grasp. With the greatest skill he immediately switched to the economy’s new wartime rhythm. Everything for victory. Give and take, and the war will write it all off. He made just one small concession to the war. He got along without suits and neckties, and, camouflaging himself in khaki color, had chrome-leather boots made to order and donned a general’s tunic—the very one in which he appeared before us. That was fashionable and not uncommon at the time. It provoked neither anger in the war-wounded nor reproachful glances from women.

Women usually looked at him with another sort of glance. They came to him to get well fed, to get warmed up, to have some fun. He had wild money passing through his hands. His billfold bulged like a little barrel with expense money, and to him ten-ruble notes were like kopecks, and thousands like single rubles. Z-v didn’t hoard them, regret spending them, or

keep count of them. He counted only the women who passed through his hands, and particularly those he had “uncorked.” This count was his sport. In the cell he assured us that his arrest had broken off the count at 290 plus, and he regretted that he had not reached 300. Since it was wartime and the women were alone and lonely. And since, in addition to his power and money, he had the virility of a Rasputin, one can probably believe him. And he was quite prepared to describe one episode after another. It was just that our ears were not prepared to listen to him. Even though no danger threatened him during those last years, he had frantically grabbed these women, messed them up, and then thrown them away, like a greedy diner eating boiled crayfish—grabbing one, devouring it, sucking it, then grabbing the next.

He was so accustomed to the malleability of material, to his own vigorous boarlike drive across the land! (Whenever he was especially agitated, he would dash about the cell like a powerful boar who might just knock down an oak tree in his path.) He was so accustomed to an environment in which all the leaders were his own kind of people, in which one could always make a deal, work things out, cover them up! He forgot that the more success one gains, the more envy one arouses. As he found out during his interrogation, a dossier had been accumulating against him since way back in 1936, on the basis of an anecdote he had carelessly told at a drunken party. More denunciations had followed, and more testimony from agents (after all, one has to take women to restaurants, where all types of people see you!). Another report pointed out that he had been in no hurry to leave Moscow in 1941, that he had been waiting for the Germans. He had in actual fact stayed on longer than he should have, apparently because of some woman. Z v took great care to keep

his business deals clean. But he quite forgot the existence of Article 58. Nonetheless, the avalanche might not have overwhelmed him had he not grown overconfident and refused to supply building materials for a certain prosecutor’s dacha. That was what caused his dormant case to awaken and tremble and start rolling. (And this was one more instance of the fact that cases begin with the material self-interest of the blueboys.)

The scope of Z-v’s concepts of the world can be judged by the fact that he believed there was a Canadian language. During the course of two months in the cell, he did not read a single book, not even a whole page, and if he did read a paragraph, it was only to be distracted from his gloomy thoughts about his interrogation. It was clear from his conversation that he had read even less in freedom. He knew of Pushkin—as the hero of bawdy stories. And of Tolstoi he knew only, in all probability, that he was—a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet!