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

However, in the evening we didn’t want to argue so much as to hear something interesting that might bring us closer together, and to talk in a spirit of fellowship.

One favorite subject of conversation was prison traditions, how it used to be in prison. We had Fastenko and were therefore able to hear these stories at first hand. What dismayed us most of all was to learn that it had previously been an honor to be a political prisoner, and that it was not only their relatives who stuck by them and refused to renounce them, but that girls who had never even met them came to visit them, pretending for that purpose to be their fiancées. And what about the once universal tradition of gifts for the prisoners on holidays? No one in Russia ever broke the Lenten fast without first taking gifts for unknown prisoners to the common prison kitchen. They brought in Christmas hams, tarts, and kulichi—the special Russian Easter cakes. One poor old lady even used to bring a dozen colored Easter eggs; it made her feel better. And where had all that Russian generosity gone? It had been replaced by political consciousness. That was how cruelly and implacably they had terrified our people and cured them of taking thought for and caring for those who were suffering. Today it would seem silly to do such a thing. If it was proposed today that some institution organize a preholiday collection of gifts for prisoners in the local prison, it would be virtually considered an anti-Soviet revolt! That’s how far we have gone along the road to being brutalized!

And what about those holiday gifts? Were they only a matter of tasty food? More importantly, those gifts gave the prisoners the warm feeling that people in freedom were thinking about them and were concerned for them.

Fastenko told us that even in the Soviet period a Political Red Cross had existed. We found this difficult to imagine. It wasn’t that we thought he was telling us an untruth. Somehow we just couldn’t picture such a thing. He told us that Y. P. Peshkova, taking advantage of her personal immunity, had traveled abroad, collected money there (you’d not collect much here), and then seen to it that foodstuffs were bought in Russia for political prisoners who had no relatives. For all political prisoners? And he explained at this point that the KR’s—the so-called “Counter-Revolutionaries”—engineers and priests, for example, weren’t included, but only members of former political parties. Well, why didn’t you say so right away? Yes, and then for the most part the Political Red Cross, except Peshkova, was itself liquidated and its staff imprisoned.

It was also very pleasant, on those evenings when one wasn’t expecting interrogation, to talk about getting out of prison. Yes, they said there had been astonishing instances when they did release someone. One day they took Z-v from our cell, “with his things”—perhaps to free him? But his interrogation could not have been completed so swiftly. Ten days later he returned. They had dragged him off to Lefortovo. When he got there, he had evidently begun to sign things very quickly. So they brought him back to us. “Now if they should just release you,” we would say to a fellow prisoner, “since your case, after all, isn’t very serious, as you yourself say, then you must promise to go see my wife and, to show you’ve done it, tell her, let’s say, to put two apples in my next parcel…. But there aren’t any apples anywhere right now, so tell her to put in three bagels. But then there mightn’t be any bagels in Moscow either. So all right, it will just have to be four potatoes!” (That’s how the discussion went, and then they actually did take N. off, “with his things,” and M. got four potatoes in his next parcel. Truly astonishing! It was more than a coincidence! So they had really let him go! And his case was much more serious than mine. So maybe soon… However, what really happened was that M.’s wife brought five potatoes, but one of them got crushed in her bag, and N. was in the hold of a ship en route to the Kolyma.)

And so it went. We talked about all kinds of things and recalled something amusing, and it was all very jolly and delightful to be among interesting people who were so different from those you used to spend your life with, and who came from outside your own circle of experience. Meanwhile the silent evening check-up had come and gone, and they had taken eyeglasses away and the light bulb had blinked three times. That meant that bedtime would be in five minutes.

Quick! Quick! Grab a blanket! Just as you never knew at the front when a hail of shells would begin to fall all around you, here you didn’t know which would be your fateful interrogation night. And we would lie down with one arm on top of the blanket and try to expel the whirlwind of thought from our heads. Go to sleep!

And at a certain moment on an April evening, soon after we had seen Yuri off, the lock rattled. Hearts tightened. For whom had they come? Now the jailer would whisper: “Name with ‘S’? Name with ‘Z’?” But the guard did not whisper anything. The door closed. We raised our heads. There was a newcomer at the door: on the thin side, young, in a cheap blue suit and a dark-blue cap. He had nothing with him. He looked around in a state of confusion.

“What’s the cell number?” he asked in alarm.

“Fifty-three.”

He shuddered a bit.

“Are you from freedom?” we asked.

“No!” He shook his head in a painful sort of way.

“When were you arrested?”

“Yesterday morning.”

We roared. He had a very gentle, innocent sort of face, and his eyebrows were nearly white.

“What for?”

(It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an answer.)

“Oh, I don’t know…. Nothing much.”

That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his own case always seemed especially nothing much.

“But anyway, what was it?”

“Well, you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian people.”

“Whaaat?”

(None of us had ever run into that sort of “nothing much.”)

“Are they going to shoot me?” His face grew longer. He kept pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off.

“Well, no, probably not,” we reassured him. “They don’t shoot anyone nowadays. They give out tenners—every time the clock strikes.”

“Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?” asked the Social Democrat, true to his class principles.

“A worker.”

Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly proclaimed to me: “You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that’s the mood of the working class!”

He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was nowhere else to go from there and nothing else to listen to.

But he was wrong.

“What do you mean, a proclamation? Just like that? Without any reason? In whose name was it issued?”

“In my own.”

“And who are you?”

The newcomer smiled with embarrassment: “The Emperor, Mikhail.”

An electric shock ran through us all. Once again we raised ourselves on our cots and looked at him. No, his shy, thin face was not in the least like the face of Mikhail Romanov. And then his age too…

“Tomorrow, tomorrow. Time to sleep now,” said Susi sternly.

We went to sleep, confident that the two hours before the morning bread ration were not going to be boring.

They brought in a cot and bedding for the Emperor, and he lay down quietly next to the latrine bucket.

In 1916 a portly stranger, an elderly man with a light-brown beard, entered the home of the Moscow locomotive engineer Belov and said to the engineer’s pious wife: “Pelageya! You have a year-old son. Take good care of him for the Lord. The hour will come—and I will come to you again.” Then he left.