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

That tedious prison spring had, to the tune of the victory marches, become the spring of reckoning for my whole generation.

Over our cradles the rallying cry had resounded: “All power to the Soviets!” It was we who had reached out our suntanned childish hands to clutch the Pioneers’ bugle, and who in response to the Pioneer challenge, “Be prepared,” had saluted and answered: “We are always prepared!” It was we who had smuggled weapons into Buchenwald and joined the Communist Party there. And it was we who were now in disgrace, only because we had survived. [126] 1. Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn’t smell right!

Back when the Red Army had cut through East Prussia, I had seen downcast columns of returning war prisoners—the only people around who were grieving instead of celebrating. Even then their gloom had shocked me, though I didn’t yet grasp the reason for it. I jumped down and went over to those voluntarily formed-up columns. (Why were they marching in columns? Why had they lined themselves up in ranks? After all, no one had compelled them to, and the war prisoners of all other nations went home as scattered individuals. But ours wanted to return as submissively as possible.) I was wearing a captain’s shoulder boards, and they, plus the fact that I was moving forward, helped prevent my finding out why our POW’s were so sad. But then fate turned me around and sent me in the wake of those prisoners along the same path they had taken. I had already marched with them from army counterintelligence headquarters to the headquarters at the front, and when we got there I had heard their first stories, which I didn’t yet understand; and then Yuri Y. told me the whole thing. And here beneath the domes of the brick-red Butyrki castle, I felt that the story of these several million Russian prisoners had got me in its grip once and for all, like a pin through a specimen beetle. My own story of landing in prison seemed insignificant. I stopped regretting my torn-off shoulder boards. It was mere chance that had kept me from ending up exactly where these contemporaries of mine had ended. I came to understand that it was my duty to take upon my shoulders a share of their common burden—and to bear it to the last man, until it crushed us. I now felt as if I, too, had fallen prisoner at the Solovyev crossing, in the Kharkov encirclement, in the quarries of Kerch, and, hands behind my back, had carried my Soviet pride behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps; that I, too, had stood for hours in the freezing cold for a ladle of cold Kawa (an ersatz coffee) and had been left on the ground for dead, without even reaching the kettle; that in Oflag 68 (Suwalki) I had used my hands and the lid of a mess tin to dig a bell-shaped (upturned, that is) foxhole, so as not to have to spend the winter on the open field; and that a maddened prisoner had crawled up to me as I lay dying to gnaw on the still warm flesh beneath my arm; and with every new day of exacerbated, famished consciousness, lying in a barracks riddled with typhus, or at the barbed wire of the neighboring camp for English POW’s, the clear thought had penetrated my dying brain: Soviet Russia has renounced her dying children. She had needed them, “proud sons of Russia,” as long as they let the tanks roll over them and it was still possible to rouse them to attack. But to feed them once they were war prisoners? Extra mouths. And extra witnesses to humiliating defeats.

Sometimes we try to lie but our tongue will not allow us to. These people were labeled traitors, but a remarkable slip of the tongue occurred—on the part of the judges, prosecutors, and interrogators. And the convicted prisoners, the entire nation, and the newspapers repeated and reinforced this mistake, involuntarily letting the truth out of the bag. They intended to declare them “traitors to the Motherland.” But they were universally referred to, in speech and in writing, even in the court documents, as “traitors of the Motherland.”

You said it! They were not traitors to her. They were her traitors. It was not they, the unfortunates, who had betrayed the Motherland, but their calculating Motherland who had betrayed them, and not just once but thrice.

The first time she betrayed them was on the battlefield, through ineptitude—when the government, so beloved by the Motherland, did everything it could to lose the war: destroyed the lines of fortifications; set up the whole air force for annihilation; dismantled the tanks and artillery; removed the effective generals; and forbade the armies to resist. [127] 2. Now, after twenty-seven years, the first honest work on this subject has appeared—P. G. Grigorenko, “A Letter to the Magazine Problems of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” samizdat, 1968—and such works are going to multiply from here on out. Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity and treason. And the war prisoners were the men whose bodies took the blow and stopped the Wehrmacht.

The second time they were heartlessly betrayed by the Motherland was when she abandoned them to die in captivity.

And the third time they were unscrupulously betrayed was when, with motherly love, she coaxed them to return home, with such phrases as “The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland calls you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. [128] 3. One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief of the Red Army’s intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the repatriates home and swallowing them up.

It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors?

How easily we left them out of our own accounting! He was a traitor? For shame! Write him off! And our Father wrote them off, even before we did: he threw the flower of Moscow’s intelligentsia into the Vyazma meat grinder with Berdan single-loading rifles, vintage 1866, and only one for every five men at that. What Lev Tolstoi is going to describe that Borodino for us? And with one stupid slither of his greasy, stubby finger, the Great Strategist sent 120,000 of our young men, almost as many as all the Russian forces at Borodino, across the Strait of Kerch in December, 1941—senselessly, and exclusively for the sake of a sensational New Year’s communique—and he turned them all over to the Germans without a fight.

And yet, for some reason, it was not he who was the traitor, but they.

(How easily we let ourselves be taken in by partisan labels; how easily we agreed to regard these devoted men as—traitors! In one of the Butyrki cells that spring, there was an old man, Lebedev, a metallurgist, a professor in rank, and in appearance a stalwart artisan of the last century or maybe even the century before, from, say, the famous Demidov iron foundries. He was broad of shoulder, broad of head, wore a Pugachev-like beard, and the wide span of his hand could lift a 150-pound bucket. In the cell he wore a faded gray laborer’s smock over his underwear; he was slovenly and might have been an auxiliary prison worker—until he sat down to read, and then his habitual powerful intelligence lit up his face. The men often gathered around him. He discussed metallurgy very little, but explained to us in his kettledrum bass voice that Stalin was exactly the same kind of dog as Ivan the Terrible: “Shoot!” “Strangle!” “Don’t hesitate!” He explained to us also that Maxim Gorky had been a slobbering prattler, an apologist for executioners. I was very much taken with this Lebedev. It was as though the whole Russian people were embodied, there before my eyes, in that one thick-set torso with that intelligent head and the arms and legs of a plowman. He had already thought through so much! I learned from him to understand the world! And suddenly, with a chopping gesture of his huge hand, he thundered out that those charged under Article 58-1b were traitors of the Motherland and must not be forgiven. And those very same 1b’s were piled up on the board bunks all around. And how hurtful to them this was! The old man was pontificating with such conviction in the name of Russia’s peasantry and labor that they were abashed and found it hard to defend themselves against the attack from this new direction. I was the one to whom it fell, along with two boys charged under 58-10, to defend them and to argue with the old man. But what depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered.) [129] 4. Vitkovsky writes about this, on the basis of the thirties, in more general terms. It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren’t wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn’t worked for foreign intelligence services and had hot sabotaged the Red Army, believed readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way: I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poisonings, wrecking, espionage.