The Gulag Archipelago (35 page)

Gradually, explanations came in from here and there: it turned out that the U.S.S.R. did not recognize as binding Russia's signa- ture to the Hague Convention on war prisoners. That meant that the U.S.S.R. accepted no obligations at all in the treatment of war prisoners and took no steps for the protection of its own soldiers who had been captured.

[We did not recognize that 1907 Convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov reports
rumors
that Russia would not let aid go through for its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners—simply in order to prevent
rumors
about the good life of war prisoners inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here. (Melgunov,
Vos- pominaniya i Dnevniki
, Vol. I, pp. 199 and 203.)]

The U.S.S.R. did not recognize the In- ternational Red Cross. The U.S.S.R. did not recognize its own soldiers of the day before: it did not intend to give them any help as POW's.

And the heart of Yuri, enthusiastic twin of the October Revo- lution, grew cold. In their barracks room, he and the elderly artist clashed and argued. It was difficult for Yuri to accept. Yuri re- sisted. But the old man kept peeling off layer after layer. What was it all about? Stalin? But wasn't it too much to ascribe every- thing to Stalin, to those stubby hands? He who draws a con- clusion only halfway fails to draw it at all. What about the rest of them? The ones right next to Stalin and below him, and every- where around the country—all those whom the Motherland had authorized to speak for it?

What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers—is that really a Motherland?

And everything turned topsy-turvy for Yuri! He used to take pride in his father-—now he cursed him! For the first time he began to consider that his father had, in essence, betrayed his oath to that army in which he had been brought up—had betrayed it in order to help establish this system which now betrayed its own soldiers. Why, then, was Yuri bound by his own oath to that traitorous system?

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorus- sian "legions" put in an appearance, some POW's signed up with them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction, with a clear mind. But he didn't stay in the legion for long. As the saying goes: "Once they've skinned you, there's no point in grieving over the wool." By this time Yuri had given up hiding his excellent knowledge of German, and soon a certain Chief, a German from near Kassel, who had been assigned to create an espionage school with an accelerated wartime output, took Yuri as his right-hand man. And that was how Yuri began the down- ward slide he had not foreseen. That was how things got turned around. Yuri passionately desired to free his Motherland, and what did they do but shove him into training spies? The Germans had their own plans. Just where could one draw the line? Which step was the fatal one? Yuri became a lieutenant in the German Army. He traveled through Germany, in German uniform, spent some time in Berlin, visited Russian émigrés, and read authors like Bunin, Nabokov, Aldanov, Amfiteatrov, whose works were forbidden at home. Yuri had anticipated that in all their writing» in Bunin's, for example, the blood flowing from Russia's living wounds would pour from every page. What was wrong with them? To what did they devote their unutterably precious free- dom? To the female body, to ecstasy, sunsets, the beauty of noble brows, to anecdotes going back to dusty years. They wrote as if there had been no revolution in Russia, or as if it were too com- plex for them to explain. They left it to young Russian people to find for themselves what was highest in life. And Yuri dashed back and forth, in a hurry to see, in a hurry to know, and mean- while, in accordance with ancient Russian tradition, he kept drowning his confusion more and more often and more and more deeply in vodka.

What was their spy school really? It was, of course, not a real one. All they could be taught in six months was to master the parachute, the use of explosives, and the use of portable radios. The Germans put no special trust in them. In sending them across the lines they were simply whistling in the dark. And for those dying, hopelessly abandoned Russian POW's, those schools, in Yuri's opinion, were a good way out. The men ate their fill, got new warm clothing, and, in addition, had their pockets stuffed with Soviet money. The students (and their teachers) acted as if all this nonsense were genuine—as if they would actually carry out spying missions in the Soviet rear, blow up the designated objectives, get back in touch with the Germans via radio, and return to the German lines. But in reality in their eyes this school was simply a means of sidestepping death and captivity. They wanted to live, but not at the price of shooting their own compatriots at the front.

[Of course, our Soviet interrogators did not accept this line of reasoning. What right did
they
have to want to live—at a time when privileged families in the Soviet rear lived well without collaborating? No one ever thought of considering that these boys had refused to take up German arms against their own people. For playing spies, they were nailed with the very worst and most serious charges of all—Article 58-6, plus sabotage with intent. This meant: to be held until dead.]

The Germans sent them across the front lines, and from then on their free choice depended on their own morality and conscience. They all threw away their TNT and radio apparatus immediately. The only point on which they differed was whether to surrender to the authorities immedi- ately, like the snub-nosed "shhpy" I had encountered at army counterintelligence headquarters, or whether to get drunk first and have some fun squandering all that free money. None of them ever recrossed the front lines to the Germans.

Suddenly, as the new year of 1945 approached, one smart fellow did return and reported he had carried out his assignment. (Just go and check on it!) He created a sensation. The Chief hadn't the slightest doubt that SMERSH had sent him back and decided to shoot him. (The fate of a conscientious spy!) But Yuri insisted that he be given a decoration instead and held up as an example to the others taking the course. The returned "spy" invited Yuri to drink a quart of vodka with him and, crimson from drink, leaned across the table and disclosed: "Yuri Nikola- yevich! The Soviet Command promises you forgiveness if you will come over to us immediately."

Yuri trembled. And that heart which had already grown hard, which had renounced everything, was flooded with warmth. The Motherland? Accursed, unjust, but nonetheless still precious! Forgiveness? And he could go back to his own family? And walk along Kamennoostrovsky in Leningrad? All right, so what? We are Russian! If you will forgive us, we will return, and we will behave ourselves, oh, how well! That year and a half since he had left the POW camp had not brought Yuri happiness. He did not repent, but he could see no future either. And when, while drinking, he encountered other such unrepentant Russians, he learned that they realized clearly that they had nothing to stand on. It wasn't real life. The Germans were twisting them to suit themselves. But now, when the Germans were obviously losing the war, Yuri had been offered an out. His Chief, who liked him, confided that he had a second estate in Spain which they could head for together if the German Reich went up in smoke. But there across the table sat his drunken compatriot, coaxing him at the risk of his own life: "Yuri Nikolayevich! The Soviet Command values your experience and knowledge. They want you to tell them about the organization of the German in- telligence service."

For two weeks Yuri was torn by hesitation. But during the Soviet offensive beyond the Vistula, after he had led his school well out of the way, he ordered them to turn in to a quiet Polish farm, lined them all up, and declared: "I am going over to the Soviet side! There is a free choice for everyone!" And these sad-sack spies, with the milk hardly dry on their lips, who just one hour before had pretended loyalty to the German Reich, now cried out with enthusiasm: "Hurrah! Us too!" (They were shout- ing "hurrah" for their future lives at hard labor.)

Then the entire spy school hid until the arrival of the Soviet tanks; and then came SMERSH. Yuri saw his boys no more. They took him off by himself and gave him ten days to describe the whole history of the school, the programs, the sabotage assignments. He really thought that they valued his "experience and knowledge." They were already talking about his going home to his family.

Only when he arrived at the Lubyanka did he realize that even in Salamanca he would have been closer to his native Neva. He could now await being shot, or, in any case, a sentence of cer- tainly not less than twenty years.

So immutably does a human being surrender to the mist of the Motherland! Just as a tooth will not stop aching until the nerve is killed, so is it with us; we shall probably not stop responding to the call of the Motherland until we swallow arsenic. The lotus- eaters in the
Odyssey
knew of a certain lotus for that purpose. . . .

In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him during all those weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips: before trying our hands at revolution, we should have exterminated the bedbugs in this country! (Sometimes, oddly, he and Fastenko arrived at the same conclusions, approaching them from such different be- ginnings.) I said there had been a long period in which the people in charge of everything important in our country had been people of unimpeachably lofty intentions, and totally dedicated. He said that from the very beginning they were all cut from the same cloth as Stalin. (We agreed that Stalin was a gangster.) I praised Gorky to the skies. What a smart man he had been! How correct his point of view! What a great artist he was! And Yuri parried. He was an insignificant, terribly boring personality! He invented himself; he invented his heroes; and his books were fabrications from beginning to end. Lev Tolstoi—he was the king of our literature.

As a result of these daily arguments, vehement because of our youth, he and I were never able to become really close or to discern and accept in each other more than we rejected.

They took him out of our cell; and since then, no matter how often I have inquired, I have found no one who was imprisoned with him in the Butyrki, and no one who encountered him in a transit prison. Even the rank-and-file Vlasov men have all dis- appeared without a trace, under the earth, most likely, and even now some of them do not have the documents they need in order to leave the northern wastes. But even among them, the fate of Yuri Y. was not a rank-and-file fate.

At long last our Lubyanka lunch arrived. Long before it got to us we could hear the cheery clatter in the corridor, and then, as in a restaurant, they brought in a tray with two aluminum plates—not bowls—for each prisoner. One plate held a ladleful of soup and the other a ladleful of the thinnest kind of thin gruel, with no fat in it.

In his first excitement, a prisoner couldn't get anything down his throat. There were those who didn't touch their bread for several days, who didn't know where to put it. But gradually one's appetite returned; and then a chronically famished state ensued that became almost uncontrollable. Then, if one managed to get it under control, one's stomach shrank and adapted itself to inadequate food, at which point the meager Lubyanka fare became just right. One needed to have self-control to achieve this, and also needed to stop looking around to see who might be eating something extra. All those extremely dangerous prison conversations about food had to be outlawed, and one had to try to lift oneself, as far as possible, into higher spheres. At the Lubyanka this was made easier by our being permitted two hours of rest after lunch—something else that was astonishingly resort- like. We lay down, our backs to the peephole, set up open books for appearance' sake, and dozed off. Sleep was forbidden, strictly speaking, and the guards could see that the pages of the books hadn't been turned for a long time. But ordinarily they did not knock during this period. (The explanation for this humanitarian- ism was that whoever wasn't resting during these hours was under- going interrogation. Thus, for those who were stubborn, who had not signed the depositions, the contrast was unmistakable: they returned to the cell at the very end of the rest period.)

And sleep was the very best thing for hunger and anguish. One's organism cooled off, and the brain stopped recapitulating one's mistakes over and over again.

Then they brought in dinner—another ladle of gruel. Life was setting all its gifts before you. After that, you were not going to get anything to eat in the five or six hours before bedtime, but that was not so terrible; it was easy to get used to not eating in the evenings. That has long been known in military medicine. And in reserve regiments they don't have anything to eat in the evening.

Then came the time for the evening visit to the toilet, for which, in all likelihood, you had waited, all atremble, all day. How relieved, how eased, the whole world suddenly became! How the great questions all simplified themselves at the same instant— did you feel it?

Oh, the weightless Lubyanka evenings! (Only weightless, in- cidentally, if you were not awaiting a night interrogation.) A weightless body, just sufficiently satisfied by soup so that the soul did not feel oppressed by it. What light, free thoughts! It was as if we had been lifted up to the heights of Sinai, and there the truth manifested itself to us from out the fire. Was it not of this that Pushkin dreamed:

I want to live to think and suffer!

And there we suffered, and we thought, and there was nothing else in our lives. How easy it turned out to be to attain that ideal.

Some evenings I would get involved in arguments, withdraw- ing from a chess game with Susi or from a book. Again I would have the sharpest quarrels with Yuri, because the questions were all explosive ones—for example, the question of the outcome of the war. The jailer, without any word or change of expression, would come in and pull down the dark-blue blackout blind on the window. And then, out there on the other side of the blind, evening Moscow would begin to send up salutes. And just as we could not see the salutes lighting up the heavens, we were unable to see the map of Europe. Yet we tried to picture it in all its details and to guess which cities had been taken. Yuri was espe- cially tormented by those salutes. Appealing to fate to correct his own mistakes, he assured us that the war was by no means fin- ished and that the Red Army and the Anglo-American forces would now go for each other's throats: that the real war would really begin now. The others in the cell took a greedy interest in this prediction. How would such a conflict end? Yuri claimed it would end with the easy destruction of the Red Army. (Would this result in our liberation or our execution?) I objected to this, and we got into heated arguments. It was his contention that our army was worn down, bled white, poorly supplied, and, most importantly, that it would not fight with its usual determination against the Allies. I, however, insisted, on the basis of the units I had been familiar with, that the army was not so much worn down as experienced, that it had now become both strong and mean, and that in such an event it would crush the Allies even more thoroughly than it had the Germans. "Never," cried Yuri in a half-whisper. "And what about the Ardennes?" I answered in a half-whisper. Fastenko interrupted us, ridiculing us both, informing us that we did not understand the West and that no one, now or ever, could compel the Allied armies to fight against us.