The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]

An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062941664
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Russie

"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20 TH CENTURY." — Time

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner's towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. "The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." —George F. Kennan "It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century." —David Remnick, The New Yorker "Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today." —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

Part III

The Destructive-Labor Camps*

“Only those can understand us who ate from the same bowl with us.”

Quotation from a letter of a Hutzul* girl, a former zek

Chapter 1

The Fingers of Aurora

Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago.

When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mihajlov claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed in our country as far back as 1921, many of us (and many in the West too) were astonished: That early really? Even in 1921?

Of course not! Of course Mihajlov was in error. In 1921, in fact, concentration camps were already in full flower (already even coming to an end). It would be far more accurate to say that the Archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora.*

And how could it have been otherwise? Let us pause to ponder.

Didn’t Marx and Engels teach that the old bourgeois machinery of compulsion had to be broken up, and a new one created immediately in its place? And included in the machinery of compulsion were: the army (we are not surprised that the Red Army was created at the beginning of 1918); the police (the militia* was inaugurated even sooner than the army); the courts (from November 22, 1917); and the prisons. How, in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, could they delay with a new type of prison?

That is to say that it was altogether impermissible to delay in the matter of prisons, whether old or new. In the first months after the October Revolution Lenin was already demanding “the most decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline.”¹ And are draconic measures possible—without prison?

What new could the proletarian state contribute here? Lenin was feeling out new paths. In December, 1917, he suggested for consideration the following assortment of punishments: “confiscation of all property . . . confinement in prison, dispatch to the front and forced labor for all who disobey the existing law.”² Thus we can observe that the leading idea of the Archipelago—forced labor—had been advanced in the first month after the October Revolution.

And even while sitting peacefully among the fragrant hay mowings of Razliv* and listening to the buzzing bumblebees, Lenin could not help but ponder the future penal system. Even then he had worked things out and reassured us: “The suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that it is going to cost much less in blood . . . will be much cheaper for humanity” than the preceding suppression of the majority by the minority.³

According to the estimates of émigré Professor of Statistics Kurganov, this “comparatively easy” internal repression cost us, from the beginning of the October Revolution up to 1959, a total of . . . sixty-six million—66,000,000—lives. We, of course, cannot vouch for his figure, but we have none other that is official. And just as soon as the official figure is issued the specialists can make the necessary critical comparisons.

It is interesting to compare other figures. How large was the total staff of the central apparatus of the terrifying Tsarist Third Department, which runs like a strand through all the great Russian literature? At the time of its creation it had sixteen persons, and at its height it had forty-five. A ridiculously small number for even the remotest Cheka provincial headquarters in the country. Or, how many political prisoners did the February Revolution find in the Tsarist “Prison of the Peoples”? All these figures do exist somewhere. In all probability there were more than a hundred such prisoners in the Kresty Prison alone, and several hundred returned from Siberian exile and hard labor, and how many more were languishing in the prison of every provincial capital! But it is interesting to know—exactly how many. Here is a figure for Tambov, taken from the fiery local papers. The February Revolution, which opened wide the doors of the Tambov Prison, found there political prisoners in the number of . . . seven (7) persons. And there were more than forty provinces. (It is superfluous to recall that from February to July, 1917, there were no political arrests, and after July the number imprisoned could be counted on one’s fingers.)

Here, however, was the trouble: The first Soviet government was a coalition government, and a portion of the people’s commissariats had to be allotted, like it or not, to the Left SR’s, including, unhappily, the People’s Commissariat of Justice, which fell to them. Guided by rotten petty bourgeois concepts of freedom, this People’s Commissariat of Justice brought the penal system to the verge of ruin. The sentences turned out to be too light, and they made hardly any use at all of the progressive principle of forced labor. In February, 1918, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Comrade Lenin, demanded that the number of places of imprisonment be increased and that repression of criminals be intensified,⁴ and in May, already going over to concrete guidance, he gave instructions⁵ that the sentence for bribery must be not less than ten years of prison and ten years of forced labor in addition, i.e., a total of twenty years. This scale might seem pessimistic at first: would forced labor really still be necessary after twenty years? But we know that forced labor turned out to be a very long-lived measure, and that even after fifty years it would still be extremely popular.

For many months after the October Revolution the prison personnel everywhere remained Tsarist, and the only new officials named were Commissars of prisons. The brazen jailers went so far as to create their own trade union (“The Union of Prison Employees”) and established an elective basis for prison administration! (The only time in all Russian history!) The prisoners were not to be left behind either—they, too, had their own internal self-government. (Circular of the People’s Commissariat of Justice, April 24, 1918: prisoners, wherever possible, were to be brought into self-verification and self-supervision.)

Naturally such a free commune of convicts (“anarchical licentiousness”) did not correspond to the needs of the dictatorship of the progressive class and was of sorry help in purging harmful insects from the Russian land. (And what could one expect—if the prison chapels had not been closed, and our Soviet prisoners were willingly going there on Sundays, even if only to pass the time!)

Of course, even the Tsarist jailers were not entirely a loss to the proletariat, for after all theirs was a profession important to the most immediate purposes of the Revolution. And therefore it was necessary to “select those persons of the prison administration who have not become totally calloused and stupefied in the patterns of Tsarist prisons [And what does ‘not totally’ mean? And how would you find that out? Does it mean they had forgotten ‘God save the Tsar’?] who can be used for work at the new tasks.”⁶ (Did they, for example, answer precisely, “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir,” or turn the key in the lock quickly?) And, of course, the prison buildings themselves, their cells, their bars and locks, although in appearance they remained exactly as before, in actual fact had acquired a new class content, a lofty revolutionary meaning.

And nevertheless, the habit of the courts, right up to the middle of 1918, of keeping right on, out of inertia, sentencing “to prison, to prison,” slowed the breakup of the old machinery of state in its prison area.

In the middle of 1918, to be exact on July 6, an event took place whose significance is not grasped by everyone, an event superficially known as the “suppression of the revolt of the Left SR’s.” But this was, in fact, a coup d’état, of hardly any less significance than October 25. On October 25 the power—the government—of the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies was proclaimed, whence the name Soviet power. But in its first months this new government was very much beclouded by the presence in it of other parties besides the Bolsheviks. Although the coalition government consisted only of the Bolsheviks and the Left SR’s, nonetheless, in the membership of the All-Russian Congresses (the Second, Third, and Fourth), and of the All-Russian Central Executive Committees (VTsIK’s) which they elected, there were still included some representatives of other socialist parties—SR’s, Social Democrats, Anarchists, Popular Socialists, etc. Because of this fact the VTsIK’s possessed the unhealthy character of “socialist parliaments.” But in the course of the first months of 1918, by a whole series of decisive measures (supported by the Left SR’s), the representatives of the other socialist parties were either expelled from VTsIK (by its own decision, an original parliamentary procedure) or else were simply not allowed to be elected to it. The last non-Bolshevik party, which still constituted one-third of the parliament (the Fifth Congress of Soviets), was the Left SR’s. And the time finally came to get rid of them too. On July 6, 1918, they were excluded in toto from VTsIK and from the Council of People’s Commissars. Thereby the power of the Soviet of Deputies (by tradition called the “Soviet”) ceased to stand in opposition to the will of the Bolshevik Party and took the form of the Democracy of a New Type.

Only on this historic day could the reconstruction of the old prison machinery and the creation of the Archipelago really begin.⁷

And the direction of this desired reconstruction had long since been understood. After all, Marx himself had pointed out in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” that productive labor was the only method of prisoner correction. It was clear, of course, as Vyshinsky explained much later on, that what was meant here was “not that kind of work which dries out the mind and the heart of a human being,” but “the miracle worker [!] which transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance into heroes.”⁸ Why is it that our prisoner must not chew the rag or read nice little books in a cell, but must labor instead? Because in the Republic of the Soviets there can be no place for forced idleness, for that “forced parasitism”⁹ which could exist in a parasitical society, for example in Schlüsselburg. Such idleness as this on the part of prisoners would have very simply been contrary to the bases of the work structure of the Soviet Republic as defined in the Constitution of July 10, 1918: “He who does not work does not eat.” Consequently, if the prisoners were not set to work, they were, according to the Constitution, to be deprived of their bread ration.

The Central Penal Department of the People’s Commissariat of Justice,¹⁰ which had been created in May, 1918, had immediately begun to send off to work the then-existing zeks (“began to organize productive labor”). But this legislation had been proclaimed only after the July coup—to be precise, on July 23, 1918—in “Temporary instructions on deprivation of freedom”:¹¹ “Those deprived of freedom who are capable of labor must be recruited for physical work on a compulsory basis.”

One can say that the camps originated and the Archipelago was born from this particular instruction of July 23, 1918 (nine months after the October Revolution). (Someone may enter a reproach that this birth was premature?)

The necessity of forced labor by prisoners (which was anyway quite clear for everyone by then) was further clarified at the Seventh All-Union Congress of the Soviets: “Labor is the best means of paralyzing the disintegrating influence . . . of the endless conversations of prisoners among themselves in the course of which the more experienced instruct the newcomers.”¹² (Aha, so that’s why!)

Soon after that there began the Communist “subbotniki”*—“voluntary Saturdays.” And that same People’s Commissariat of Justice issued an appeal: “It is essential to teach [the prisoners] to become accustomed to Communist, collective labor.”¹³ In other words, the spirit of the Communist “subbotniki” was to be applied to the forced-labor camps.

And that is how that hasty epoch instantly heaped up a mountain of problems which it took decades to sort out.

The bases of corrective-labor policy were included in the Party program at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (March, 1919). The complete organizational structuring of the camp network throughout Soviet Russia coincided rigidly with the first Communist subbotniki (April 12-May 17, 1919): the decrees of VTsIK on camps for forced labor were issued on April 15, 1919, and May 17, 1919.¹⁴ Under their provisions, camps for forced labor were obligatorily created (by the provincial Cheka) in each provincial capital (if convenient, within the city limits, or in a monastery or on a nearby country estate) and also in several counties as well (although for the time being not in all of them). The camps were required to accommodate no fewer than three hundred persons each (in order that the cost of the guard and the administration should be paid for by the prisoners’ labor), and they were under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Penal Departments.

The early forced-labor camps seem to us nowadays to be something intangible. The people imprisoned in them seem not to have said anything to anyone—there is no testimony. Literature and memoirs, when they speak of War Communism, recall executions and prisons, but do not have a thing to say about camps. And nowhere, even between the lines, nowhere outside the text, are they implied. So it was natural for Mihajlo Mihajlov to make his mistake. Where were those camps? What were their names? What did they look like?

The Instruction of July 23, 1918, had the decisive fault (noted by all jurists) that nothing was mentioned there about class differentiation among the prisoners, in other words that some prisoners should be maintained in better conditions and some in worse. But it did outline the labor system—and that is the only reason we can get any picture of what they were like. The workday was set at eight hours. Because of the novelty of it all, the hasty decision was made to pay the prisoners for all their work, other than camp maintenance, at 100 percent of the rates of the corresponding trade unions. (Oh, what a monstrous thing! The pen can hardly bear to write it!) (They were being compelled to work by the Constitution, and they were also being paid according to the same Constitution—logical enough!) It is true that the cost of maintenance of the camp and the camp guard was deducted from their wages. For “conscientious” prisoners there was a special benefit: to be allowed to live in a private apartment and to come to the camp for work only. And release ahead of term was promised as a reward for “special labor enthusiasm.” And in general there were no detailed instructions on the regimen, and every camp had its own. “In the period of building a new governmental system, tak...