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

How many wars Russia has been involved in! (It would have been better if there had been fewer.) And were there many traitors in all those wars? Had anyone observed that treason had become deeply rooted in the hearts of Russian soldiers? Then, under the most just social system in the world, came the most just war of all—and out of nowhere millions of traitors appeared, from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population. How is this to be understood and explained?

Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the working class in that same England. Why was it that in this war only one traitor could be found among them, the businessman “Lord Haw Haw”—but in our country millions?

It is frightening to open one’s trap about this, but might the heart of the matter not be in the political system?

One of our most ancient proverbs justifies the war prisoner: “The captive will cry out, but the dead man never.” During the reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, nobility was granted for durance in captivity! And in all subsequent wars it was considered society’s duty to exchange prisoners, to comfort one’s own and to give them sustenance and aid. Every escape from captivity was glorified as the height of heroism. Throughout World War I, money was collected in Russia to aid our prisoners of war, and our nurses were permitted to go to Germany to help our prisoaers, and our newspapers reminded their readers daily that our prisoners of war, our compatriots, were languishing in evil captivity.

All the Western peoples behaved the same in our war: parcels, letters, all kinds of assistance flowed freely through the neutral countries. The Western POW’s did not have to lower themselves to accept ladlefuls from German soup kettles. They talked back to the German guards. Western governments gave their captured soldiers their seniority rights, their regular promotions, even their pay.

The only soldier in the world who cannot surrender is the soldier of the world’s one and only Red Army. That’s what it says in our military statutes. (The Germans would shout at us from their trenches: “Ivan plen nicht!”—“Ivan no prisoner!”) Who can picture all that means? There is war; there is death—but there is no surrender! What a discovery! What it means is: Go and die; we will go on living. And if you lose your legs, yet manage to return from captivity on crutches, we will convict you. (The Leningrader Ivanov, commander of a machine-gun platoon in the Finnish War, was subsequently thus imprisoned in Ustvym-lag, for example.)

Our soldiers alone, renounced by their Motherland and degraded to nothing in the eyes of enemies and allies, had to push their way to the swine swill being doled out in the backyards of the Third Reich. Our soldiers alone had the doors shut tight to keep them from returning to their homes, although their young souls tried hard not to believe this. There was something called Article 58-1b—and, in wartime, it provided only for execution by shooting! For not wanting to die from a German bullet, the prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner of war! Some get theirs from the enemy; we get it from our own!

Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.

What, then, were the courses of action open to Russian war prisoners? There was only one legally acceptable course: to lie down and let oneself be trampled to death. Every blade of grass pushes its fragile length upward in order to live. As for you—lie down and be trampled on. Even though you’ve been slow about it, even though you couldn’t do it on the battlefield, at least die now; then you will not be prosecuted.

The soldiers sleep. They spoke their word And they are right for eternity.

And every other path which, in desperation, your mind may invent is going to lead you into conflict with the Law.

Escape and return to the Motherland—past the guards ringing the camp, across half Germany, then through Poland or the Balkans—led straight to SMERSH and prison. They were asked: How did you manage to escape when others couldn’t? This stinks! Come on, you rat, what assignment did they give you? (Mikhail Burnatsev, Pavel Bondarenko, and many, many others.) [130] 5. It has become the accepted thing for our literary critics to say that Shol-okhov, in his immortal story “Sudba Cheloveka”—“The Fate of a Man”—spoke the “bitter truth” about “this side of our life” and that he “revealed” the problem. But we must retort that in this story, which is in general very inferior, and in which the passages about the war are pale and unconvincing—since the author evidently knew nothing about the last war—and the descriptions of Germans are unconvincing cartoon cliches (only the hero’s wife is successfully portrayed—because she is a pure Christian straight out of Dostoyevsky), in this story about a war prisoner, the real problem of the war prisoners was hidden or distorted: (1) The author picked the least incriminating form of being taken prisoner conceivable—the soldier was captured while unconscious, so as to make him noncontroversial and to bypass the whole poignancy of the problem. (What if he had been conscious when he was taken prisoner, as was most often the case? What would have happened to him then?) (2) The fact that the Motherland had deserted us, had renounced us, had cursed us, was not presented as the war prisoner’s chief problem. Sholokhov says not a word about it. But it was because of that particular factor that there was no way out. On the contrary, he identifies the presence of traitors among us as constituting the problem. (But if this really was the main thing, one might then expect him to have investigated further and explained where they came from a full quarter-century after a Revolution that was supported by the entire people!) (3) Sholokhov dreamed up a fantastic, spy-story escape from captivity, stretching innumerable points to avoid the obligatory, inevitable procedural step of the returned war prisoner’s reception in SMERSH—the Identification and Screening Camp. Not only was Sokolov, the hero, not put behind barbed wire, as provided in the regulations, but—and this is a real joke—he was given a month’s holiday by his colonel! (In other words: the freedom to carry out the assignment given him by the Fascist intelligence service. So his colonel would end up in the same place as he!)

Escaping to the Western partisans, to the Resistance forces, only postponed your full reckoning with the military tribunal; also, it made you still more dangerous. You could have acquired a very harmful spirit through living freely among Europeans. And if you had not been afraid to escape and continue to fight, it meant you were a determined person and thus doubly dangerous in the Motherland.

Did you survive POW camp at the expense of your compatriots and comrades? Did you become a member of the camp Polizei, or a commandant, a helper of the Germans and of death? Stalinist law did not punish you any more severely than if you had operated with the Resistance forces. It was the same article of the Code and the same term—and one could guess why too. Such a person was less dangerous. But the inert law that is inexplicably implanted in us forbade this path to all except the dregs.