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

For two weeks Yuri was torn by hesitation. But during the Soviet offensive beyond the Vistula, after he had led his school well out of the way, he ordered them to turn in to a quiet Polish farm, lined them all up, and declared: “I am going over to the Soviet side! There is a free choice for everyone!” And these sad-sack spies, with the milk hardly dry on their lips, who just one hour before had pretended loyalty to the German Reich, now cried out with enthusiasm: “Hurrah! Us too!” (They were shouting “hurrah” for their future lives at hard labor.)

Then the entire spy school hid until the arrival of the Soviet tanks; and then came SMERSH. Yuri saw his boys no more. They took him off by himself and gave him ten days to describe the whole history of the school, the programs, the sabotage assignments. He really thought that they valued his “experience and knowledge.” They were already talking about his going home to his family.

Only when he arrived at the Lubyanka did he realize that even in Salamanca he would have been closer to his native Neva. He could now await being shot, or, in any case, a sentence of certainly not less than twenty years.

So immutably does a human being surrender to the mist of the Motherland! Just as a tooth will not stop aching until the nerve is killed, so is it with us; we shall probably not stop responding to the call of the Motherland until we swallow arsenic. The lotus-eaters in the Odyssey knew of a certain lotus for that purpose….

In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him during all those weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips: before trying our hands at revolution, we should have exterminated the bedbugs in this country! (Sometimes, oddly, he and Fastenko arrived at the same conclusions, approaching them from such different beginnings.) I said there had been a long period in which the people in charge of everything important in our country had been people of unimpeachably lofty intentions, and totally dedicated. He said that from the very beginning they were all cut from the same cloth as Stalin. (We agreed that Stalin was a gangster.) I praised Gorky to the skies. What a smart man he had been! How correct his point of view! What a great artist he was! And Yuri parried. He was an insignificant, terribly boring personality! He invented himself; he invented his heroes; and his books were fabrications from beginning to end. Lev Tolstoi—he was the king of our literature.

As a result of these daily arguments, vehement because of our youth, he and I were never able to become really close or to discerp and accept in each other more than we rejected.

They took him out of our cell; and since then, no matter how often I have inquired, I have found no one who was imprisoned with him in the Butyrki, and no one who encountered him in a transit prison. Even the rank-and-file Vlasov men have all disappeared without a trace, under the earth, most likely, and even now some of them do not have the documents they need in order to leave the northern wastes. But even among them, the fate of Yuri Y. was not a rank-and-file fate.

At long last our Lubyanka lunch arrived. Long before it got to us we could hear the cheery clatter in the corridor, and then, as in a restaurant, they brought in a tray with two aluminum plates—not bowls—for each prisoner. One plate held a ladleful of soup and the other a ladleful of the thinnest kind of thin gruel, with no fat in it.

In his first excitement, a prisoner couldn’t get anything down his throat. There were those who didn’t touch their bread for several days, who didn’t know where to put it. But gradually one’s appetite returned; and then a chronically famished state ensued that became almost uncontrollable. Then, if one managed to get it under control, one’s stomach shrank and adapted itself to inadequate food, at which point the meager Lubyanka fare became just right. One needed to have self-control to achieve this, and also needed to stop looking around to see who might be eating something extra. All those extremely dangerous prison conversations about food had to be outlawed, and one had to try to lift oneself, as far as possible, into higher spheres. At the Lubyanka this was made easier by our being permitted two hours of rest after lunch—something else that was astonishingly resortlike. We lay down, our backs to the peephole, set up open books for appearance’ sake, and dozed off. Sleep was forbidden, strictly speaking, and the guards could see that the pages of the books hadn’t been turned for a long time. But ordinarily they did not knock during this period. (The explanation for this humanitarian-ism was that whoever wasn’t resting during these hours was undergoing interrogation. Thus, for those who were stubborn, who had not signed the depositions, the contrast was unmistakable: they returned to the cell at the very end of the rest period.)

And sleep was the very best thing for hunger and anguish. One’s organism cooled off, and the brain stopped recapitulating one’s mistakes over and over again.

Then they brought in dinner—another ladle of gruel. Life was setting all its gifts before you. After that, you were not going to get anything to eat in the five or six hours before bedtime, but that was not so terrible; it was easy to get used to not eating in the evenings. That has long been known in military medicine. And in reserve regiments they don’t have anything to eat in the evening.

Then came the time for the evening visit to the toilet, for which, in all likelihood, you had waited, all atremble, all day. How relieved, how eased, the whole world suddenly became! How the great questions all simplified themselves at the same instant—did you feel it?

Oh, the weightless Lubyanka evenings! (Only weightless, incidentally, if you were not awaiting a night interrogation.) A weightless body, just sufficiently satisfied by soup so that the soul did not feel oppressed by it. What light, free thoughts! It was as if we had been lifted up to the heights of Sinai, and there the truth manifested itself to us from out the fire. Was it not of this that Pushkin dreamed:

I want to live to think and suffer!

And there we suffered, and we thought, and there was nothing else in our lives. How easy it turned out to be to attain that ideal.

Some evenings I would get involved in arguments, withdrawing from a chess game with Susi or from a book. Again I would have the sharpest quarrels with Yuri, because the questions were all explosive ones—for example, the question of the outcome of the war. The jailer, without any word or change of expression, would come in and pull down the dark-blue blackout blind on the window. And then, out there on the other side of the blind, evening Moscow would begin to send up salutes. And just as we could not see the salutes lighting up the heavens, we were unable to see the map of Europe. Yet we tried to picture it in all its details and to guess which cities had been taken. Yuri was especially tormented by those salutes. Appealing to fate to correct his own mistakes, he assured us that the war was by no means finished and that the Red Army and the Anglo-American forces would now go for each other’s throats: that the real war would really begin now. The others in the cell took a greedy interest in this prediction. How would such a conflict end? Yuri claimed it would end with the easy destruction of the Red Army. (Would this result in our liberation or our execution?) I objected to this, and we got into heated arguments. It was his contention that our army was worn down, bled white, poorly supplied, and, most importantly, that it Would not fight with its usual determination against the Allies. I, however, insisted, on the basis of the units I had been familiar with, that the army was not so much worn down as experienced, that it had now become both strong and mean, and that in such an event it would crush the Allies even more thoroughly than it had the Germans. “Never,” cried Yuri in a half-whisper. “And what about the Ardennes?” I answered in a half-whisper. Fastenko interrupted us, ridiculing us both, informing us that we did not understand the West and that no one, now or ever, could compel the Allied armies to fight against us.