Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1973)
(Source)
- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Volume 1
- PART I The Prison Industry
- PART II Perpetual Motion
- Volume 2
- PART III The Destructive-Labor Camps
- 1. The Fingers of Aurora
- 2. The Archipelago Rises from the Sea
- 3. The Archipelago Metastasizes
- 4. The Archipelago Hardens
- 5. What the Archipelago Stands On
- 6. “They’ve Brought the Fascists!”
- 7. The Ways of Life and Customs of the Natives
- 8. Women in Camp
- 9. The Trusties
- 10. In Place of Politicals
- 11. The Loyalists
- 12. Knock, Knock, Knock …
- 13. Hand Over Your Second Skin Too!
- 14. Changing One’s Fate!
- 15. Punishments
- 16. The Socially Friendly
- 17. The Kids
- 18. The Muses in Gulag
- 19. The Zeks as a Nation
- 20. The Dogs’ Service
- 21. Campside
- 22. We Are Building
- PART IV The Soul and Barbed Wire
- PART III The Destructive-Labor Camps
- Volume 3
- PART V Katorga
- 1. The Doomed
- 2. The First Whiff of Revolution
- 3. Chains, Chains …
- 4. Why Did We Stand For It?
- 5. Poetry Under a Tombstone, Truth Under a Stone
- 6. The Committed Escaper
- 7. The White Kitten (Georgi Tenno’s Tale)
- 8. Escapes-Morale and Mechanics
- 9. The Kids with Tommy Guns
- 10. Behind the Wire the Ground Is Burning
- 11. Tearing at the Chains
- 12. The Forty Days of Kengir
- PART VI Exile
- PART VII Stalin Is No More
- PART V Katorga
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- born in Kislovodsk, Russia, on December 11, 1918
- earned a degree in mathematics and physics from Rostov University and studied literature through a correspondence course from the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature
- captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, he was
- arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters
- sentenced to eight years of incarceration, to be followed by “perpetual” internal exile, but was cleared of all charges in 1957 as part of Nikita Khruschchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization
- became internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Khruschchev himself authorized
- increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974
- for eighteen years of his exile, he and his family lived in Vermont
- 1994 he returned to Russia, thus fulfilling his longstanding prediction
- died at his home in Moscow on August 3, 2008
- in 1970 Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature
Volume 1
PART I The Prison Industry
1. Arrest
For those destined for the Gulag, the start of their journey was arrest. The state security Organs preferred night arrests, a knock on the door at night which would catch their victim unprepared and with little resistance from witnesses. However the Organs didn’t neglect other forms of arrest among the millions they picked up, to which A.S. includes many examples and anecdotes. Those who might be considered more dangerous, such as VIP’s in the military or the Party were sometimes first given new assignments, and while ensconced in a private railway car, were arrested on route.
A.S. spends some time on the seeming lack of any resistance, despite there being millions of people being gathered up. Those in the camps later burned thinking about how different things would have been if people had simply resisted rather than submit so meekly. And yet, at which point would you resist? Some still hoped for a favorable outcome to their case are are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry.
For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever… A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. (Page 14)
2. The History of Our Sewage Disposal System
In this chapter we get a detailed description of all the various waves of prisoners sent to the Gulag, from the 1920’s through to the 1950’s. The list is simply staggering, with some examples being:
- Members or former members of any non-Bolshevik political parties (and later, members of factions of the Bolshevik’s who have fallen out of favor, such as supporters of Trotsky)
- White Guards (those opposed to the Communists in the Russian Civil War) and their families
- Peasant Hostages (an example: early in the revolution orders came down to take hostage peasants from those localities where the removal of snow from railroad tracks was not proceeding satisfactorily, and if snow removal did not take place they were to be shot)
- Students and Intellectuals
- Members of Churches, Clergy
- Russians returning from abroad (including even returning soldiers and former POW’s in particular)
- Nationalities and ethnic groups who were resisting or perceived to be resisting the establishment of Soviet power in their homelands
- Former Tsarist state officials
A few groups in more details:
The Technical Intelligentsia (ie. Engineers)
_In other words we never did trust the engineers – and from the very first years of the Revolution we saw to it that those lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses were kept in line by healthy suspicion and surveillance by the workers. The more our economic leadership matured – the more the number of plans increased, and the more those plans overlapped and conflicted with one another, the clearer became the old engineers’ basic commitment to wrecking. The Sentinel of the Revolution [ie. State Security] narrowed its eyes with ever greater vigilance, and wherever it directed its narrowed gaze it immediately discovered a nest of wreckers. This therapy continued full speed from 1927 on, and immediately exposed to the proletariat all the causes of our economic failures and shortages. (Page 43-44)
A.S. goes on to describe many interesting anecdotes about situations where engineers would be accused of ‘Wrecking’, such as this one:
And what accomplished villains these old engineers were! What diabolical ways to sabotage they found! Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People’s Commissariat of Railroads, pretended to be terribly devoted to the development of the new economy, and would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems involved in the construction of socialism, and he loved to give advice. One such pernicious piece of advice was to increase the size of freight trains and not worry about heavier than average loads. The GPU exposed von Meck, and he was shot: his objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention! When, not long afterward, the new People’s Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich, ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of Lenin)-the malicious engineers who protested became known as limiters. They raised the outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport. (Page 44-45)
At the time these engineers were being rounded up, the masses of people showed their support in voting for the death penalty for these wreckers. Very, very great bravery was required to say “No”! in the midst of that roaring chorus of approval, and frequently those who did would be arrested.
The Dispossessed Kulaks
In sheer size this nonrecurring tidal wave swelled beyond the bounds of anything the penal system of even an immense state can permit itself. There was nothing to be compared with it in all Russian history … But yet so cleverly were the channels of the GPU-Gulag organized that the cities would have noticed nothing had they not been stricken by a strange three year famine – a famine that came about without drought and without war (Page 54)
The term ‘Kulak’ originally referred to a miserly, dishonest rural trader, who grows rich not through his own labor but through the labor of others, through usury and operating as a middleman. Gradually, the term took on a broader and broader meaning:
the inflation of this scathing term Kulak proceeded relentlessly, and by 1930 all strong peasants in general were being so called – all peasants strong in management, strong in work, or even strong merely in convictions (Page 55)
At this point (around 1930) only a dozen years had passed since the great Decree on the Land, where the land had been fully redistributed based on the number of ‘mouths’ per family, equally.
Then suddenly there were kulaks and there were poor peasants. How could that be? Sometimes it was the result of differences in initial stock and equipment; sometimes it may have resulted from luck in the mixture of the family. But wasn’t it most often a matter of hard work and persistence? And now these peasants, whose breadgrain had fed Russia in 1928, were hastily uprooted by local good-for-nothings and city people sent in from outside. Like raging beasts, abandoning every concept of “humanity,” abandoning all humane principles which had evolved through the millennia, they began to round up the very best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of their possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and the taiga. (Page 56)
This was also a time for activists and neighbors to settle personal accounts, of jealousy, envy or insult.
Article 58 of the Criminal Code
This chapter also gives our first introduction to Article 58 of the Criminal Code of 1926, an Article whose sections are so broad that almost any human activity could be captured within them, some examples:
Section 1: An action (or absence of action) directed toward the weakening of state power
Section 10: Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of Soviet power … and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content
The real law underlying the arrests over those years was the assignment of quotas (ie. higher levels of government would simply give a region a quota to make a certain number of arrests) A.S. includes various anecdotes about some of the ways these quotas were fulfilled.
3. The Interrogation
Because virtually all of the people being caught up in the Gulag system were essentially innocent, the interrogation was an important part of the process, in order to gain a confession from the subject and to get him or her to implicate others. In this chapter A.S. describes in detail various tortures and psychological techniques used to drive confessions.
The time allotted for investigation was not used to unravel the case but, in 95 cases out of 100, to exhaust, wear down, weaken and render helpless the defendant, so that he would want it to end at any cost. (Page 97)
Stalin himself did not pronounce that final word [torture] in his instructions, his subordinates had to guess what he wanted. So no list of tortures and torments existed in printed form. All that was required was for every Interrogation Department to supply the tribunal within a specified period with a stipulated number of confessions. This explained the variety of different techniques employed at different interrogation centers.
When interrogation begins, for many people the logical thing would seem to be to simply sign the confession, knowing that a guilty conviction is inevitable, so as to preserve your strength and health before heading to an inevitable term at a camp. And that would be the smart choice if the matter concerned only yourself. However – this was rarely the case, as prisoners were frequently pressured to accuse others.
Some of the more pervasive techniques are outlined below:
- Sleep Deprivation: Prisoners would often be deprived of sleep for days at a time. 4-5 days of sleeplessness before an interrogation started was common.
- Starvation: Denied food or put on starvation rations
- Punishment Cells: Cells which are painfully small, sometimes such that you can’t even sit down in. Often these are also extremely cold, such that at first you feel you likely won’t live more then a few hours. Prisoners can spend days in such cells.
- Physical Beatings: Beatings of all types, often with rubber truncheons in order to leave fewer visible marks.
- Psychological Techniques: Threatening your close family members if you don’t confess, lying about other people having confessed against you
Although there were plenty of awful interrogation and torture techniques described by A.S. in this chapter, he points out that nothing incredibly creative was required along the lines of medieval torture devices. Sleep deprivation along with starvation and punishment cells is plenty enough for most people to confess.
He notes during the chapter how ruthless the Soviet state was in dealing with interrogations, in contrast to what the Revolutionaries had been put through in Tsarist times, many of whom nonetheless buckled under the slightest pressure. Another example:
The Tsarist gendarmes seized the manuscript of Lenin’s essay “What Are Our Ministers Thinking Of?” but were unable to get at its author: “At the interrogation the gendarmes, just as one might have expected, learned very little from the student Vaneyev. He informed them only that the manuscripts found at his place had been brought to him in one package for safekeeping several days before the search by a certain person whom he did not wish to name. Therefore the interrogator’s sole alternative was to tum the manuscripts over for expert analysis.” The experts learned nothing. (What did he mean-his “sole alternative”? What about icy water up to the ankles? Or a salt-water douche? Or Ryumin’s truncheon?) (Page 132-133)
The key to making the best of your interrogation, as we learn from A.S. in this chapter, is that the moment you cross the threshold into the prison, you need to entirely leave your old life behind. It is over with – you are dead to that world, don’t hold out hope of getting out:
So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap? From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.” Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory. (Page 130)
He shares the story of an old woman who displayed such an attitude:
N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbor on the Butyrki bunks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every night. Two years earlier, a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her home on his way through Moscow. “But he wasn’t the former Metropolitan, he was the Metropolitan! Truly, I was worthy of receiving him.” “All right then. To whom did he go when he left Moscow?” “I know, but I won’t tell you!” (The Metropolitan had escaped to Finland via an underground railroad of believers.) At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman’s face, and she replied: “There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me.” (They would lose contact with the underground railroad.) “But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute. (Page 131)
We learn about his own interrogation at a prison in Moscow. It didn’t leave him much to be proud of but his main relief was that he survived it without getting anyone else imprisoned (which was a major concern considering he had kept detailed diaries of his wartime service, including details of candid political conversations with his fellow front line soldiers. Luckily, the investigators were too lazy to go through his stash of notes and diaries, and they were eventually poured into the prison furnace. This included his years of notes which had been meant to be the basis of a future novel). A.S. spoke of once being in his interrogator’s chamber and noticing a mound of manuscripts nearby:
In notebooks, in file folders, in homemade binders, in tied and untied bundles, and simply in loose pages. The manuscripts lay there like the burial mound of some interred human spirit, its conical top rearing higher than the interrogator’s desk, almost blocking me from his view. And brotherly pity ached in me for the labor of that unknown person who had been arrested the previous night, these spoils from the search of his premises having been dumped that very morning on the parquet floor of the torture chamber, at the feet of that thirteen-foot Stalin. I sat there and I wondered: Whose extraordinary life had they brought in for torment, for dismemberment, and then for burning? Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building -a whole lost culture? Oh, soot, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys! And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descendants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less vocal than in actual fact it was. (Page 137)
When A.S. meets with the prosecutor to finalize his case, he asks for him to exclude the additional charge under Section 11 (member of an organized group – this because A.S. was arrested for exchanging politically critical letters with a friend. 2 people = a group). The prosecutor doesn’t modify the charge. When his confession is ultimately presented for his signature, A.S. briefly refuses to sign. However after his interrogator threatens to start all over again with him, he loses his nerve and signs, including the Section 11. Although he doesn’t know it at the time, because of that Section 11 he is eventually sent to a hard labor camp. Because of that Section 11, even after “liberation” and his prison term is completed, without additional charge he is sent into eternal exile.
4. The Bluecaps
This chapter discusses ‘the Bluecaps’, those members of State Security responsible for the investigations, arrests and interrogations. Throughout this chapter (and as with much of the book) A.S. discusses human nature and good vs evil with a tremendous nuance and depth which is one of the reasons I personally found this book very compelling, and is difficult to express in these simple notes.
Discussing those Bluecaps:
They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a human being), … or it was a matter of the Progressive Doctrine [ie. means justify the ends] (Page 145)
Why would someone have wanted to become a Bluecap? Throughout the time of the Gulags, to be a Bluecap meant essentially unlimited power over the lives of others, given the arbitrary nature of the arrests and how spurious the charges could be. A military leader or a factory manager may have power to control people’s duties, wages and reputations, but the Bluecaps control people’s very freedom. No one was exempt from a Bluecap checking up on them, while no one would dare to check up on what a Bluecap does. A.S. discusses various anecdotes about what this meant in practice (for example, how easy it was to take advantage of women, some of whom were drawn to them simply by their power, while others would give in out of fear. If there was a man in the picture, there was no problem about removing him). Given a near-total lack of accountability, the only rule that moderated the Bluecaps was that they remain loyal to their own organization. However, given Stalin’s endless paranoia, the Bluecaps themselves were subject to periodic purges, where enough arrests would need to be made to convince Stalin that his enemies had been removed.
A.S. speaks to how easy it is to judge those people as evil, or to feel a sense of moral superiority. He speaks of his own experience when they had tried to recruit him and his classmates in college. Despite good wages and the aforementioned power, he said there was simply a feeling in the gut which told him to steer clear. However if enough pressure was applied, almost anyone would join.
Let everyone ask himself: ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?’ (Page 160)
A.S. reflects on his time as an officer in the army, with the various petty demands and ego-stroking behaviors he engaged in against his subordinates, and how easily it had come to him.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? (Page 168)
Considering the magnitude of the evil involved in this system (much of which we’ve not yet even touched on), A.S. contemplates just the nature of that evil and how it could come about.
We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past–Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens-inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black… But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble-and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even lago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology-that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors…
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. (Page 173-174)
A.S. speaks finally to the fact that evil within the human mind seems to have a ‘threshold’ level. A man might bob back and forth between good an evil his entire life. But when, through the density of evil or the extremeness of his actions, that threshold is crossed, a man can leave humanity behind, perhaps without the possibility of return.
He discusses the need, at this time being in the 1960s-1970s, to keep a record of what had happened, to find those people who had been involved (now entering old age), to bring them to trial. Not even necessarily to punish them but simply to compel them to admit loudly that they had been involved, that they had been an executioner and a murderer. There are numerous instances throughout the book where A.S. expresses a real bitterness at the lack of justice applied to those who had participated in this system, either actively as a guard or Bluecap, or as one of those informants who used the system to make false accusations and settle personal scores. These were people who were now comfortably living out their pensions or were in leadership positions, never held to account for the lives they’d helped to destroy, all in the interest of not ‘stirring up the past’.
5. First Cell, First Love
Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.” (Page 183)
The first cell is typically a prisoner’s first encounter with other prisoners. In this chapter A.S. describes in detail his own experiences in his cell, this taking place around the time of the end of WWII. The prisoners were kept on a very regimented schedule, for example only being allowed to the toilet at specific times (and how overlooked it is in freedom to be able to relieve yourself when you desire to). They needed to wake up promptly at 6AM each morning, with any oversleeping subject to punishment. Enforced wakefulness was an important part of the prison regime. Despite the day to day monotomy, A.S. describes thinking about his newfound imprisonment as an opportunity to re-examine his life and perhaps as an opportunity to gather more wisdom.
The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events, but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere sixteen minutes’ wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying glass. (Page 202)
One of the recurring topics throughout the book is the scarcity of food available to prisoners, there never seemed to be enough to eat.
That pound of unrisen wet bread, with its swamplike sogginess of texture, made half with potato flour, was our crutch and the main event of the day. Life had begun! The day had begun-this was when it began! And everyone had countless problems. Had he allocated his bread ration wisely the day before? Should he cut it with a thread? Or break it up greedily? Or slowly, quietly nip off pieces one by one? Should he wait for tea or pile into it right now? Should he leave some for dinner or finish it off at lunch? And how much? (Page 206)
This chapter is also A.S. first encounter with what he refers to as a ‘Stool Pigeon’, which is another recurring topic throughout the book. These are prisoners who have agreed to inform on their fellow cellmates in return for special privileges, and the practice was widespread throughout the Gulag. A.S. discusses how human beings have an internal ‘sensor relay’ to detect people who don’t mean you well, a sense which doesn’t frequently get used in modern society, and perhaps is an inheritance picked up by humans over the millennia of evolution. In the Gulag, where such things can be a matter of life or death, prisoners once again come to develop and rely on this intuition about other people, such that in many years of imprisonment A.S. notes that he had never made an error when deciding who he could safely confide in, versus who he needed to keep at bay.
A.S. gives us a description and background stories of some of his first cellmates, who include
- Fastenko, a former Social Democrat revolutionary who was in his 60’s at that time. He had experience in the Tsarist prisons and exile (from which he simply escaped to Europe without much trouble), and had traveled widely to Europe, Canada and America, including meeting and working with Lenin during his time in Paris. After the revolution, he felt called to return to Russia in order to participate. At that time he’d been encouraged to take a senior position, given his revolutionary credentials, but had instead been interested in keeping his head down and taking a simple job. It was an unlucky break that caused him to be arrested so many years later, after a gun was found in his neighbors apartment, and further investigation discovered his own background. This man brought a valued perspective to the cell since he could speak of prison traditions and had seen so much. He spoke in particular about how in Tsarist times, it had actually been an honor to be a political prisoner, and the public would send gifts of food for unknown prisoners.
Fastenko includes an anecdote:
Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fled from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm. (Page 183)
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Another prisoner had been a leading engineer, responsible for building projects employing dozens of engineers and thousands of workers. He’d been a man with access to resources, with huge expense accounts and the ability to procure materials. He was fond of bragging in detail about the number of women he had been with (keeping in mind, this was during the war when many men had been taken to the front), and A.S. notes with distaste how this man had seemed almost to gouge himself with women, discarding them as soon as he’d gotten what he wanted. A.S. speaks with fondness of his memories of the engineers of the 1920’s, who had been intelligent men of varied interests and intellectual passions. He noted that the ‘old generation’ engineers had long been purged. The new class of engineers had come up after the revolution. As the old engineers were being herded into the Gulag, it became urgently necessary for those in power to produce their own class of engineers, who were politically loyal. So this man had rapidly advanced to the heights of industry, and had the brisk authority and impersonal tone of someone who doesn’t consider the possibility of a dissenting view. The man was full of energy. And yet he had forgotten one thing: the more success one gains, the more envy one arouses. So sure enough, a dossier against him had begun to accumulate going back for years. Nonetheless, he still may have survived had he not gotten overconfident and refused to supply building materials to a certain prosecutor’s dacha. This slip up is what caused the case against him to begin rolling. For this man, his fall was particularly harsh.
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Yuri was a former Russian officer. He had spent time in a German POW camp - and he experienced first hand the horrible conditions of those Soviet prisoners, who were practically starving to death. He himself worked as an artist for the German officers in order to remain fed and alive. Seeing how badly the Soviet prisoners fared in comparison to those of other nationalities (who had access to the Red Cross and food parcels from home), he gradually realized that the Soviet soldiers were intentionally abandoned if only to make the prospect of surrender terrifying for those soldiers still fighting. Able to speak German, he eventually joined the Germans in their scheme to develop Russians into spies. The Germans put no special trust in these spies, but from their perspective there was no harm in trying, and for the Russians involved it was a way to escape starvation in the POW camp. Yuri was promised forgiveness by the Soviet high command if he were to return and share his valuable knowledge of the German intelligence systems - and having returned, he was given 10 days to share everything he had learned. Upon conclusion, he was promptly arrested and sent to prison.
A.S. includes in this chapter various details of his day to day life in the prison. At some point, they hear a 40 gun salute ring out over Moscow, and realize that the second world war has come to an end.
6. That Spring
This chapter describes the spring after the war ended, with a focus on the fate of the returning POW’s. At that time there was a wave of former POW’s being swallowed up by the gulag. A.S. notes how these former soldiers had been deeply betrayed by their Motherland:
- First, by being thrown into a war that was incompetently executed, their lives simply thrown away.
- Second, by being abandoned to die in captivity without the slightest support or concern.
- By being coaxed home, only to be imprisoned and sent off to the gulag
In the Red Army, it was illegal to surrender- a solider was supposed to lie down and die rather than surrender. So any former POW had broken the law and was considered a traitor. Later, many soldiers realized they would have been better to desert prior to seeing any battle: they would have been punished, but a deserter was not regarded as an enemy or a traitor or a political prisoner.
In discussing the need to imprison these former prisoners, A.S. notes that one of the reasons was to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe, and to have belonged to a camp which was liberated by Americans or English was considered an aggravating factor. Another reason was that Stalin needed manpower for his massive construction projects – few young men would willingly volunteer for such projects so shortly after returning from war, instead wanting to be with their families.
There was also the fact that the Germans had implemented a systematic program to convert Russian POW’s into spies. The effort was half-baked, and the Russians themselves would pretend to be willing, knowing that as soon as they were sent back across the front lines they would abandon their explosives, go rejoin their former units and laugh together at the stupidity of the Germans. However, A.S. speculates that Hitler knew too well the spy-paranoia of Stalin, and implemented this procedure consciously, in order to stoke Stalin’s paranoia. This was a man who would rather 999 innocent men should rot then to miss one genuine spy. Sure enough, these POW’s would be arrested immediately upon their return.
And how it eased the burden for the MGB executioners when thousands of soldiers pouring in from Europe did not even try to conceal that they had voluntarily enlisted as spies. (Page 247)
The Vlasov Men
In addition to enrolling as spies, another route for Russian POW’s to escape the horrific conditions of the POW camps was to enlist with the Russian Liberation Army. This was a scheme whereby the Germans created an army of Russian soldiers who would fight against the Soviets, and this was led by Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, a former Soviet general. Vlasov had, over his career, risen to become one of Russia’s most competent Generals. He was in command of the Second Shock Army which was meant to help lift the blockade of Leningrad in co-ordination with various other units. When the time came, the other units failed to advance - while Vlasov’s men were successful in their assault and before long were 46 miles deep inside the German lines. They gradually became thoroughly encircled, since the Russian command was unable to properly support them, and as winter had turned to spring the roads behind them became unusable. As they gradually starved, they were eventually forced to surrender, including Vlasov himself. Eventually, he was brought together with other officers who had purportedly also renounced their homeland.
From Vlasov’s perspective, he may not have felt he had much choice, considering what Stalin might do to him for losing his army and being forced to surrender. Having been witness over the course of the years to many of Stalin’s purges, he (as well as other captured officers) may have genuinely believed that it was best to work with the Germans to overthrow his regime.
In any event, Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army were caught without any good options. The Germans deeply distrusted them, happy to use them for cannon fodder, while the soldiers knew they could only face a traitors fate if they were ever to try to return home, now that they were fighting against the Red Army. Their only hope was for a German victory, and as a result they fought with desperation.
Near the end of the war, Vlasov’s men turned against the German SS who were in the process of destroying Prague. Whether this was a humanitarian instinct to save the city, or an opportunistic action to gain more favorable treatment from the advancing Red Army is hard to say. But regardless of the motivation, the Russian Liberation Army saved Prague from destruction, before needing to flee from the advancing Red Army shortly thereafter.
Vlasov tried to surrender to the allies, knowing that a dark fate awaited them if they were forced back to the Soviet Union. The Allies refused, not wanting to upset their uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union. In fact, A.S. points out the betrayal of the Allies of many Russians who they knew would face execution or prison upon their return to the Soviet Union, but did so nonetheless.
A.S. provides a few interesting anecdotes about how Russians ended up fighting each other.
Near Malye Kozlovichi, I was told, an interesting event took place. As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines, things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one another. No longer very accurately oriented, they kept shooting at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols. Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods -and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap … the eagle and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me (Page 255)
He also notes that he himself came under fire from Vlasov men only a few days before his own arrest:
Pursued by their tracer bullets, our last little group ran almost two miles in fresh snow to the bridge across the Passarge River. And there they were stopped. Soon after that I was arrested. And now, on the eve of the Victory Parade, here we all were sitting together on the board bunks of the Butyrki [their prison]. (Page 260)
Here we learn also about the Russian Emigres, those who had opposed the Russian Revolution as White Guards and had been living in Europe. Now many of these people were gradually being picked up and sent to the Gulag, sometimes after being tricked into returning to Russia with offers of forgiveness.
Given the millions who were being picked up by the Gulag dragnet, many prisoners imagined an amnesty could be coming (and A.S. points out that the talk of amnesty is a recurring one during prison life, every time a major anniversary approaches). He tells the story of many prisoners being summoned in a group, and they are hoping they are about to be amnestied, but instead are handed out 5-15 year sentences.
7. In the Engine Room
In this chapter, A.S. describes the court system, and how sentences are determined and handed out. A.S. starts with the day he and his fellow cellmates have received their sentence. He is brought into a room and seated on a stool opposite a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Leafing through a pile of papers, the major finds the paper which referred to A.S. and reads it aloud in a bored patter, where A.S. learns he has been sentenced to 8 years of corrective labor.
It is so everyday and routine that A.S. finds it anti-climactic. Trying to give the moment at least a little importance, A.S. asks the major with a tragic expression “But really, this is terrible! Eight years! What for?” “Right there” the major shows once again where to sign. A.S., unable to think of anything else to do, signs. “Let’s move along” commanded the jailer. And I moved along.
A.S. discusses the OSO (special council of the NKVD) which is empowered by law to hand out administrative sentences (ie. without any trial). Russia had administrative sentences to a certain extent even under the Tsars, where a Tsar might occasionally exile without any trial those who had incurred their displeasure:
Thus the tradition of the “dotted line” – the administratively issued sentence – dragged on. But it was too lax; it was suitable for a drowsy Asiatic country, but not for a country that was rapidly advancing … and if it was still possible to enumerate names and cases, this was not, begging your pardon, real scope.
Real scope entered the picture with the twenties, when permanently operating Troikas – panels of three, operating behind closed doors – were created to bypass the courts permanently. (Page 281)
The Troikas which handed out these administrative sentences generally operated behind closed doors, and in the strictest privacy. A prisoner never saw or confronted these judges who were passing out administrative sentences, and one couldn’t be certain in fact that the Troika existed at all. A.S. wonders half in jest but half seriously whether all that existed was a remarkably efficient group of typists printing out sentences. A.S. notes that in the world of communist ideology, one can’t in any event be too squeamish about terms like “guilt” or “innocence”:
Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism – this concept of “guilt”, and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly.
But lacking legal training, we can be forgiven. For the 1926 Code, according to which we lived for twenty-five years and more, was itself criticized for an “impermissible bourgeois approach” .., for some kind of “bourgeois weighing of punishments in relation to the gravity of what had been committed”. (Page 282)
The OSO process had the ‘advantage’ (from the perspective of those running this system), that it could work at tremendous speed, and its penalty could not be appealed. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. In the words of A.S. “It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan”.
A.S. includes various anecdotes about prisoners discovering their sentences. There’s the woman who, expecting a 15 year sentence finds that a typo has given her only a 5 year sentence, causing her to gratefully and thankfully sign her sentence quickly (to the confusion of the officer giving her the sentence). There is the group of unsentenced prisoners who have already arrived at the camp, and are driven to the courtyard to receive the NKVD officer who has arrived to inform them of their penalties. Squinting at their thin footwear and the steaming frost of the cold winter day, he says “Well anyway men, why should you freeze out here? The OSO gave you all ten years apiece. There are just a very, very few who got eight. You understand? Disperse!”
Aside from the OSO, there were also more normal courts. Here A.S. describes the key characteristics of the courts in the USSR at this time:
- They were first of all closed courts. They kept their affairs private and did not get stuck in the mud of public trials or in arguments between sides.
- There was a lack of ambiguity in their work – which is to say, the verdicts were predetermined. You, as a judge, always knew what the higher ups expect of you (and there’s a telephone if you still have any doubts).
- The criminal code was broad enough, that virtually anything or anyone could be plausibly found to be guilty of some crime. Aside from violations of the code itself, guilt could be found simply because of social origin (7-35: belonging to a socially dangerous milieu) or for contacts with dangerous persons (who is “dangerous” and what “contacts” consist of, only the judge can say).
A.S. discusses the fact that the mere existence of these various security branches provided a strong incentive to continue to bring cases, if only to prove that they were actually doing something. Ultimately, most of those caught up in the system understood it was a farce.
At the Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945 they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. “So and so! Article 58-1a, twenty-five years.” The chief of the convoy guard was curious: “What did you get it for?” “For nothing at all.” “You’re lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.“ (Page 293)
A.S. gives some anecdotes for those cases which did in fact come before courts, where a prisoner would confront his/her judge. He discusses a prisoner who, just before his court session, gave word through his guard that he wanted to give supplementary testimony. Eager to get such supplementary testimony, the prosecutor receives him:
Karetnikov displayed his infected collarbone, broken by the interrogator who had struck him with a stool, and declared: “I signed everything under torture”. By this time the prosecutor was cursing himself for having been so greedy to get “supplementary” testimony, but it was too late.
Each of them is fearless only as long as he is an anonymous cog in the whole machine. But just as soon as the responsibility has become personalized, individualized, concentrated on him, just as soon as the searchlight is on him, he grows pale and realizes that he is nothing and can slip on any chance banana peel. So Karetnikov caught the prosecutor, who was now unwilling to suppress the whole business …
They took Karetnikov back to prison, treated his collarbone, and kept him another three months. A very polite new interrogator entered the case … Karetnikov, sensing freedom in the offing, conducted himself staunchly and refused to admit any guilt whatsoever. And what happened next? He got eight years from an OSO (page 295)
A.S. concludes his chapter by discussing his personal visit to the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1963, when he was able to meet in person seventy officials of that court. The very same court that had been handing out endless sentences for decades. But he was assured that it had not been them handing out those sentences and perpetrating injustice for many years, those others were no longer present. A.S. hears stories about how the courts had been humiliatingly subservient to the (State Security) Organs. A.S. describes looking around himself in astonishment, finding that in the end these judges were still just people, real people. Smiling and telling stories, explaining their intentions. And he had no illusions that if things turned full circle and it was once again up to them to try him, maybe in that very hall – well, so they would convict him.
For many centuries there had been a proverb: “Don’t fear the law, fear the judge”. But in the case of the USSR, individual people and judges lagged behind the system in terms of cruelty. The proverb needed to be reversed and the system itself condemned “Don’t fear the judge, fear the law”.
8. The Law as a Child
In this chapter we learn about the law in the early years following the October Revolution, which included the Revolutionary Tribunals. A substantial portion of this chapter describes the exploits of N.V. Krylenko, a high-level prosecutor in the Peoples Commissariat of Justice. A.S. was provided by well-wishers an intact copy of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by Krylenko, although A.S. laments that this record is naturally one-sided since it doesn’t include the records from the defense perspective. Stenographic records of many such trials were either never kept or were ultimately destroyed.
The All-Russian Central Executive Commitee had the right to intervene in any judicial proceeding … (And, as the reader understands, it was not necessary for the entire Executive Committe to assemble at a meeting to this end, since its Chairman, Sverdlov, could correct a sentence without leaving his office). All of this, Krylenko explains, “shows the superiority of our system over the false theory of the separation of powers” that is, the theory of the independence of the judiciary.
(True, Sverdlov also said: “It is very good that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly) (Page 307)
One gets the impression that in the early years following the Revolution, the state of the law and court system was fairly chaotic. There were very few established codes and standardized judicial process in those early years, they had thrown out the Tsarist codes but had not yet composed their own.
And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was not that kind of court! [ie. one concerned with the guilt or innocence of a particular defendant] On another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at all: “A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies” and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution … having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants. “No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency“ (Page 308)
A.S. leads the reader through some of the early trials. One of these concerns the trial of a high ranking Chekist (the Cheka being the early state police) who was accused (and almost certainly guilty of) a high degree of corruption, living a lavish lifestyle afforded by his near limitless power to arrest and release people at will, in the still early revolutionary environment of Russia in those days. This case was perhaps a reaction by the leadership against the the increasingly visible corruption of the Chekists, and the need to find a few scapegoats to show that something was being done, while allowing the Cheka itself to continue intact.
There are trials against leaders of the Orthodox church (which has been resistant to the confiscation of church property), and the so called ‘intelligentsia’ (ie. university professors, scientists, authors etc).
9. The Law Becomes a Man
A.S. continues his review of various cases, this time focused on the later period following 1920.
1921 was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories – strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame?
Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the Communist leaders did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem”. Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had re-figured the calculations, which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated!
If there was no coal, firewood or petroleum, it was because the engineers had brought about a mixed-up, chaotic situation. And it was their own fault that they hadn’t resisted the urgent telephonograms from Rykov and the government – and had issued and allotted fuels outside the scope of the plan.
The engineers were to blame for everything. But the proletarian court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient. Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed engineers remains in proletarian hearts – but one can’t get along without them; everything goes to rack and ruin. . . . The engineers are to blame, but not out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept; they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers.
And so at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a surprising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to the engineers. (Page 335)
We learn about the case of the suicide of engineer Oldenborger. Here was a man who had worked for thirty years in the Moscow water-supply system and had become its chief engineer back at the beginning of the century. He had never married and had no children, his whole life had consisted of dedication to running that one water-supply system. When his colleagues went on strike in answer to the Bolshevik coup d’état and invited him to take part in the strike with them, his reply was “On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on strike . . . In everything else, I-well, yes, I am on strike”. He needed to dash off to repair a broken pipe.
Lenin had instructed that “to keep watch over the bourgeois specialists we need a watchdog – the RKI – the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection”.
And they began by assigning two such watchdogs to Oldenborger on a full-time basis. One of them, a swindler and a former clerk in the water system, had been fired for “improper conduct” and had entered the service of the RKI and then got promoted to the Central People’s Commissariat. From that height, he had returned to check up on his former chief and take hearty vengeance on the man who had wronged him.
Then of course, the local Party committee wasn’t dozing either. And Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only Communists at leadership level”
And so they all immediately began to order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around without his knowledge. . . They started bringing inspection commissions into the water-supply system, but the commissions found that everything was in good order . . The RKI men refused to be satisfied with this, and they kept pouring in report after report. They put what obstacles in his way that they could; they prevented wasteful boiler repairs and replacing the wooden tanks with concrete ones. Despite all this, the operation of the water-supply system not only didn’t improve, but deteriorated.
What was particularly offensive to the “hereditary proletarian psychology” of the RKI and trade unions was that the majority of the workers at the pumping stations “had been infected with petty-bourgeois psychology” and, unable to recognize Oldenborger’s sabotage, had come to his defense. (Pages 336-338)
The harassment of Oldenborger continued for some time, he was kept under constant investigation, continually summoned before a multitude of commissions and sub-commissions, they kept giving him assignments that were to be urgently carried out. They opened up a case against him with the Cheka. Ultimately, Oldenborger committed suicide. His primary harassers were brought to trial, and got off with one year in jail.
Around this time there was an incredible famine developing in the Volga region of Russia. In order to try to solve this problem, the authorities decided to let the Orthodox church feed the peasants. To have permitted any direct help to go straight from the church into the mouths of those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat – so the funds needed to be confiscated and turned over directly to the state treasury. If the church refused, they could be blamed for the famine – and if they agreed, the church’s resources would be cleaned out. The church resisted this order.
From the distance of a half-century, it is easy to reproach the Patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian church ought not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was who had driven the Volga to famine in the first place.
… In Petrograd things seemed to be working out peacefully . . . Veniamin announced: “The Orthodox Church is prepared to give everything to help the starving” … “In Smolny they agreed that the church vessels and ikon coverings would be melted down into ingots in the presence of the believers” …
Again things were getting fouled up with some kind of compromise! The noxious fumes of Christianity were poisoning the revolutionary will. That kind of unity and that way of handing over the valuables were not what the starving people of the Volga needed! The spineless membership of the Petrograd Pomgol was changed. The newspapers began to howl about the “evil pastors” and “princes of the church” and the representatives of the church were told: “We don’t need your donations! And there won’t be any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government – and the government will take whatever it considers necessary” And so forcible requisitions, accompanied by strife, began in Petrograd, as they did everywhere else. And this provided the legal basis for initiating trials of the clergy (Pages 345-346)
During the following trial, 5 priests were sentenced to be shot and the Patriarch was removed from office and taken to the Donskoi Monastery and kept there in strict incarceration. In another trial against the church A.S. includes some interesting details pointing to the peril of defense lawyers and witnesses acting against the government case:
The tribunal roared out a threat to arrest Bobrishchev-Pushkin – the principal defense lawyer – and this was already so in accord with the spirit of the times, and the threat was so real that Bobrishchev-Pushkin made haste to hand over his gold watch and his billfold to lawyer Gurovich. And right then and there the tribunal actually ordered the imprisonment of a witness, Professor Yegorov, because of his testimony on behalf of the Metropolitan (Page 350)
One of the major trials in 1922 was that of the SR’s (Socialist Revolutionaries), for which the Criminal Code needed to be finalized. A.S. includes the text of a letter sent by Lenin on May 17, 1922. The document is especially important because it was one of Lenin’s last directives on earth, and is a revealing view of his political testament:
Comrade Kursky!
As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code . . . the basic concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.
The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice
With Communist Greetings, LENIN (Page 353)
In Lenin’s review of the criminal code, Lenin added 6 more articles requiring execution by shooting in addition to the 6 that originally called for execution. Once such crime he included as a capital offense was ” . . . propaganda or agitation, or participation in an organization, or assistance (objectively assisting or being capable of assisting) . . . organizations or persons whose activity has the character . . .”.
The SR’s had been one of the competing revolutionary parties alongside the Bolsheviks, and having come out on the losing side were now destroyed. They were tried for a variety of treasons, including their initial armed resistance to the October seizure of power. There was the inconvenient fact that an amnesty specifically for the SR’s had been declared in 1919 in exchange for their support in the Civil War, and that most of their ‘crimes’ dated from 1918 and earlier. But Krylenko was able to determine that the SR’s were engaged in terrorism, which was not covered by the 1919 amnesty. And so “evidence” was compiled of this terrorism, primarily in the form of dubious witness testimony.
Krylenko makes heavy use of the new Criminal Code
And especially new and important was the fact that we did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or on the penalties imposed! For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution had been passed – we would try them for that. And whether it “was carried out or not had no essential significance”
There was, of course, “only one possible verdict – execution – for every last one of them!” But Krylenko qualifies this generously. Because this case is being watched by the whole world, the prosecutor’s demand “does not constitute a directive to the court” which the latter would be “obliged to accept immediately for consideration or decision”.
What a fine court, too, that requires such an explanation! And, indeed, the tribunal did demonstrate its daring in the sentences it imposed: it did not hand down the death penalty for “every last one of them”, but for fourteen only. Most of the rest got prison and camp sentences . . . and just remember, reader, remember: All the the courts of the Republic watch what the Supreme Tribunal does. It provides them with guidelines. . . As to how many more would now be railroaded in the provinces, you can figure that out for yourself. (Page 364-366)
A.S. concludes this chapter, wondering why the ruling Party members were then surprised when they themselves were caught up in Stalin’s purge of 1937. All the foundations of lawlessness had been laid – first by the extrajudicial reprisals of the Cheka, and then by these early trials and this young Code. When expediency had been enshrined as the most important aspect of their legal system rather than justice.