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

The prison doctor was the interrogator’s and executioner’s right-hand man. The beaten prisoner would come to on the floor only to hear the doctor’s voice: “You can continue, the pulse is normal.” After a prisoner’s five days and nights in a punishment cell the doctor inspects the frozen, naked body and says: “You can continue.” If a prisoner is beaten to death, he signs the death certificate: “Cirrhosis of the liver” or “Coronary occlusion.” He gets an urgent call to a dying prisoner in a cell and he takes his time. And whoever behaves differently is not kept on in the prison. [118] 17. Dr. F. P. Gaaz would have earned nothing extra in our country.

But our stoolie was better informed about his rights. (According to him he had already been under interrogation eleven months. And he was taken to interrogation only during the day.) He spoke up and asked for an appointment with the prison chief. What, the chief of the whole Lubyanka? Yes. His name was taken down. (And in the evening, after taps, when the interrogators were already in their offices, he was summoned. And he returned with some makhorka.) This was very crude, of course, but so far they had not been able to think up anything better. It would have been a big expense to convert entirely to microphones in the walls and impossible to listen in on all 111 cells for whole days at a time. Who would do it? Stool pigeons were cheaper and would continue to be used for a long time to come. But Kramarenko had a hard time with us. Sometimes he eavesdropped so hard that the sweat poured from him, and we could see from his face that he didn’t understand what we were saying.

There was one additional right—the privilege of writing applications and petitions (which replaced freedom of the press, of assembly, and of the ballot, all of which we had lost when we left freedom). Twice a month the morning duty officer asked: “Who wants to write a petition?” And they listed everyone who wanted to. In the middle of the day they would lead you to an individual box and lock you up in it. In there, you could write whomever you pleased: the Father of the Peoples, the Central Committee of the Party, the Supreme Soviet, Minister Beria, Minister Abakumov, the General Prosecutor, the Chief Military Prosecutor, the Prison Administration, the Investigation Department. You could complain about your arrest, your interrogator, even the chief of the prison! In each and every case your petition would have no effect whatever. It would not be stapled into any file, and the most senior official to read it would be your own interrogator. However, you were in no position to prove this. In fact, it was rather more likely that he would not read it, because no one would be able to read it. On a piece of paper measuring seven by ten centimeters—in other words, three by four inches—a little larger than the paper given you each morning at the toilet, with a pen broken in the middle or bent into a hook, and an inkwell with pieces of rag in it and ink diluted with water, you would just be able to scratch out “Petit…” Then the letters would all run together on the cheap paper, “ion” couldn’t be worked into the line, and everything would come through on the other side of the sheet.

You might have still other rights, but the duty officer would keep quiet about them. And you wouldn’t be losing much, truth to tell, even if you didn’t find out about them.

The check-up came and went. And the day began. The interrogators were already arriving there somewhere. The turnkey would summon one of us with a great air of secrecy; he called out the first letter of the name only. Like this: “Whose name begins with ‘S’?” and: “Whose name begins with ‘T’?” Or perhaps: “Whose begins with ‘M’?—with ‘Am’?” And you yourself had to be quick-witted enough to recognize that it was you he wanted and offer yourself as a victim. This system was introduced to prevent mistakes on the jailer’s part. He might have called out a name in the wrong cell, and that way we might have found out who else was in prison. And yet, though cut off from the entire prison, we were not deprived of news from other cells. Because they tried to crowd in as many prisoners as possible, they shuffled them about from cell to cell, and every newcomer brought all his accumulated experience to his new cell. Thus it was that we, imprisoned on the fourth floor, knew all about the cellar cells, about the boxes on the first floor, about the darkness on the second floor, where the women were all kept, about the split-level arrangement of the fifth, and about the biggest cell of all on the fifth floor—No. 111. Before my time, the children’s writer Bondarin had been a prisoner in our cell, and before that he had been on the women’s floor with some Polish correspondent or other, who had previously been a cellmate of Field Marshal von Paulus—and that was how we learned all the details about von Paulus.

The period for being summoned to interrogation passed. And for those left in the cell a long, pleasant day stretched ahead, lightened by opportunities and not overly darkened by duties. Duties could include sterilizing the cots with a blow torch twice a month. (At the Lubyanka, matches were categorically forbidden to prisoners; to get a light for a cigarette we had to signal patiently with a finger when the peephole was opened, thus asking the jailer for a light. But blow torches were entrusted to us without hesitation.) And once a week we might be called into the corridor to have our faces clipped with a dull clipper—allegedly a right but strongly resembling a duty. And one might be assigned the duty of cleaning the parquet floor in the cell. (Z-v always avoided this work because it was beneath his dignity, like any other work, in fact.) We got out of breath quickly because we were underfed; otherwise we would have considered this duty a privilege. It was such gay, lively work—pushing the brush forward with one’s bare foot, torso pulled back, and then turn about; forward-back, forward-back, and forget all your grief! Shiny as a mirror! A Potemkin prison!

Besides, we didn’t have to go on being overcrowded in our old Cell 67 any longer. In the middle of March they added a sixth prisoner to our number, and since here in the Lubyanka they did not fill all the cells with board bunks, nor make you sleep on the floor, they transferred all of us into a beauty of a cell—No. 53. (I would advise anyone who has not yet been in it to pay it a visit.) This was not a cell. It was a palace chamber set aside as a sleeping apartment for distinguished travelers! The Rossiya Insurance Company, without a thought for economy, had raised the height of the ceiling in this wing to sixteen and a half feet. [119] 18. This company acquired a piece of Moscow earth that was well acquainted with blood. The innocent Vereshchagin was torn to pieces in 1812 on Furkasovsky, near the Rostopchin house. And the murderess and serf-owner Saltychikha lived—and killed serfs—on the other side of the Bolshaya Lubyanka. (Po Moskve [In Moscow], edited by N. A. Geinike and others, Moscow, Sabashnikov Publishers, 1917, p. 231.) (Oh, what four-story bunks the chief of counterintelligence at the front would have slapped in here. And he could have gotten one hundred people in, results guaranteed.) And the window! It was such an enormous window that standing on its sill the jailer could hardly reach the “fortochka,” that hinged ventilation pane. One section of this window alone would have made a fine whole window in an ordinary house. Only the riveted steel sheets of the muzzle closing off four-fifths of it reminded us that we were not in a palace after all.

Nonetheless, on clear days, above this muzzle, from the wall of the Lubyanka courtyard, from some windowpane or other on the sixth or seventh floor, we now and then got a pale reflection of a ray of sunlight. To us it was a real ray of sunlight—a living, dear being! We followed with affection its climb up the wall. And every step it made was filled with meaning, presaging the time of our daily outing in the fresh air, counting off several half-hours before lunch. Then, just before lunch, it disappeared.