The Gulag Archipelago (39 page)

And that was the jeweler's precision of a behemoth—Stalin's trademark.

Now and then recruiters turned up who were of quite a dif- ferent stripe—Russians, usually recent Communist political com- missars. White Guards didn't accept that type of employment. These recruiters scheduled a meeting in the camp, condemned the Soviet regime, and appealed to prisoners to enlist in spy schools or in Vlasov units.

People who have never starved as our war prisoners did, who have never gnawed on bats that happened to fly into the barracks, who have never had to boil the soles of old shoes, will never understand the irresistible material force exerted by any kind of appeal, any kind of argument whatever, if behind it, on the other side of the camp gates, smoke rises from a field kitchen, and if everyone who signs up is fed a bellyful of kasha right then and there—if only once! Just once more before I die!

And hovering over the steaming kasha and the inducements of the recruiter was the apparition of freedom and a real life— wherever it might call! To the Vlasov battalions. To the Cossack regiments of Krasnov. To the labor battalions—pouring cement in the future Atlantic Wall. To the fjords of Norway. To the sands of Libya. To the "Hiwi" units ("Hilfswillige"—volunteers in the German Wehrmacht—there being twelve "Hiwi" men in each German company). And then, finally, to the village Polizei, who pursued and caught partisans—many of whom the Mother- land would also renounce. Wherever it might call, any place at all, at least anything so as not to stay there and die like abandoned cattle.

We
ourselves
released from every obligation, not merely to his Motherland but to all humanity, the human being whom we drove to gnawing on bats.

And those of our boys who agreed to become half-baked spies still had not drawn any drastic conclusions from their abandoned state; they were still, in fact, acting very patriotically. They saw this course as the least difficult means of getting out of POW camp. Almost to a man, they decided that as soon as the Germans sent them across to the Soviet side, they would turn themselves in to the authorities, turn in their equipment and instructions, and join their own benign command in laughing at the stupid Germans. They would then put on their Red Army uniforms and return to fight bravely in their units. And tell me,
who, speaking in human terms, could have expected anything else? How could it have been any other way?
These were straightforward, sincere men. I saw many of them. They had honest round faces and spoke with an attractive Vyatka or Vladimir accent. They boldly joined up as spies, even though they'd had only four or five grades of rural school and were not even competent to cope with map and compass.

It appears that they picked the only way out they could. And one would suppose that the whole thing was an expensive and stupid game on the part of the German Command. But no! Hitler played in rhythm and in tune with his brother dictator! Spy mania was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin's insanity. It seemed to Stalin that the country was swarming with spies. All the Chinese who lived in the Soviet Far East were convicted as spies—Article 58-6—and were taken to the northern camps, where they perished. The same fate had awaited Chinese participants in the Soviet civil war—if they hadn't cleared out in time. Several hundred thousand Koreans were exiled to Kazakhstan, all similarly ac- cused of spying. All Soviet citizens who at one time or another had lived abroad, who at one time or another had hung around Intourist hotels, who at one time or another happened to be photographed next to a foreigner, or who had themselves photo- graphed a city building (the Golden Gate in Vladimir) were accused of the same crime. Those who stared too long at railroad tracks, at a highway bridge, at a factory chimney were similarly charged. All the numerous foreign Communists stranded in the Soviet Union, all the big and little Comintern officials and em- ployees, one after another, without any individual distinctions, were charged first of all with espionage.

[ Iosip Tito just barely escaped this fate. And Popov and Tanev, fellow defendants of Dimitrov in the Leipzig trial, both got prison terms. (For Dimi- trov himself Stalin prepared another fate.)]

And the Latvian Rifle- men—whose bayonets were the most reliable in the first years of the Revolution—were also accused of espionage when they were arrested to a man in 1937. Stalin seems somehow to have twisted around and maximized the famous declaration of that coquette Catherine the Great: he would rather that 999 innocent men should rot than miss one genuine spy. Given all this, how could one believe and trust Russian soldiers who had really been in the hands of the German intelligence service? 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. What an astonishing con- firmation of the predictions of the Wisest of the Wise! Come on, keep coming, you silly fools! The article and the retribution have long since been waiting for you!

But it is appropriate to ask one thing more. There still were prisoners of war who did not accept recruiting offers, who never worked for the Germans at their profession or trade, and who were not camp police,
who spent the whole war in POW camps, without sticking their noses outside
, and who, in spite of every- thing, did not die, however unlikely this was. For example, they made cigarette lighters out of scrap metal, like the electrical engineers Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov and Fyodor Fyodoro- vich Karpov, and in that way managed to get enough to eat. And did the Motherland forgive them for surrendering?

No, it did not forgive them! I met both Semyonov and Karpov in the Butyrki after they had already received their lawful sen- tence. And what was it? The alert reader already knows:
ten years of imprisonment and five muzzled
. As brilliant engineers, they had
rejected
German offers to work at their profession. In 1941 Junior Lieutenant Semyonov had gone to the front as a
volunteer
. In 1942 he still didn't have a revolver; instead, he had
an empty holster
—and the interrogator could not understand why he hadn't shot himself with his holster! He had escaped from captivity
three times
. And in 1945, after he had been liberated from a concentration camp, seated atop a tank as a member of a penalty unit of tank-borne infantry,
he took part in the capture of Berlin
and received the Order of the
Red Star
. Yet, after all that, he was finally imprisoned and
sentenced
. All of this mirrored our Nemesis.

Very few of the war prisoners returned across the Soviet border as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident be- cause of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on, even as late as 1946 or 1947. Some were arrested at assembly points in Ger- many. Others weren't arrested openly right away but were trans- ported from the border in freight cars, under convoy, to one of the numerous Identification and Screening Camps (PFL's) scat- tered throughout the country. These camps differed in no way from the common run of Corrective Labor Camps (ITL's) ex- cept that their prisoners had not yet been sentenced but would be sentenced there. All these PFL's were also attached to some kind of factory, or mine, or construction project, and the former POW's, looking out on the Motherland newly restored to them through the same barbed wire through which they had seen Germany, could begin work from their first day on a ten-hour work day. Those under suspicion were questioned during their rest periods, in the evenings, and at night, and there were large numbers of Security officers and interrogators in the PFL's for this purpose. As always, the interrogation began with the hypothesis that you were obviously guilty. And you, without going outside the barbed wire, had to prove that you were
not
guilty. Your only available means to this end was to rely on witnesses who were exactly the same kind of POW's as you.

Obviously they might not have turned up in your own PFL; they might, in fact, be at the other end of the country; in that case, the Security officers of, say, Kemerovo would send off inquiries to the Security officers of Solikamsk, who would question the wit- nesses and send back their answers along with new inquiries, and you yourself would be questioned as a witness in some other case. True, it might take a year or two before your fate was resolved, but after all, the Motherland was losing nothing in the process. You were out mining coal every day. And if one of your witnesses gave the wrong sort of testimony about you, or if none of your witnesses was alive, you had only yourself to blame, and you were sure to be entered in the documents as a traitor
of
the Motherland. And the visiting military court would rubber- stamp your
tenner
. And if, despite all their twisting things about, it appeared that you really hadn't worked for the Germans, and if—and this was the main point—you had not had the chance to see the Americans and English with your own eyes (to have been liberated from captivity by
them
instead of by us was a gravely aggravating circumstance), then the Security officers would decide the degree of isolation in which you were to be held. Certain people were ordered to change their place of resi- dence—which always breaks a person's ties with his environment and makes him more vulnerable. Others were valiantly offered the chance to go to work in the VOKhR, the Militarized Guard Service. In that situation, while nominally remaining free, a man lost all his personal freedom and was sent off to some isolated area. There was a third category: after a handshake, some were humanely permitted to return home, although, even without aggravating circumstances, they deserved to be shot for having surrendered. But people in this category celebrated prematurely! Even before the former prisoner arrived home, his
case
had reached his home district through the secret channels of State Security. These people remained eternally
outsiders
. And with the first mass arrests, like those of 1948-1949, they were im- mediately arrested for hostile propaganda or some other reason. I was imprisoned with people in that category too.

"Oh, if I had only known!" That was the refrain in the prison cells that spring. If I had only known that this was how I would be greeted! That they would deceive me so! That this would be my fate! Would I have really returned to my Motherland? Not for anything! I would have made my way to Switzerland, to France! I would have gone across the sea, across the ocean! Across three oceans!

[In actual fact, even when POW's actually
knew
what would happen to them, they behaved in exactly the same way. Vasily Aleksandrov was taken prisoner in Finland. He was sought out there by some elderly Petersburg merchant who asked him his name and patronymic and then said: "In 1917 I owed your grandfather a large debt, and I didn't have the chance to pay it. Here you are—take it!" An old debt is a windfall! After the war Aleksandrov was accepted by the circle of Russian émigrés, and he got engaged to a girl there whom he came to love—and not just casually. To educate him, his future father-in-law gave him a bound set of
Pravda
—just as it was issued from 1918 to 1941, without any deletions or corrections. At the same time, he recounted to him more or less completely the history of the
waves
of arrests, as we have set it forth in Chapter 2, above. And nevertheless . . . Aleksandrov abandoned his fiancée, and his wealth, and returned to the U.S.S.R., where he was given, as one can easily guess,
ten years and disenfranchisement for five more
. In 1953 he was happy to have managed to snag himself a job as foreman in a Special Camp.]

But the more thoughtful prisoners corrected them. They had made their mistake earlier! They were stupid to have dashed off to the front lines in 1941. It takes a fool to rush off to war! Right from the start, they should have gotten themselves set up in the rear. Somewhere quiet. Those who did are heroes now. And it would have been an even surer thing just to desert. Almost cer- tainly, one's skin would be whole. They didn't get ten years either—but eight, or seven. And they weren't excluded from any of the cushy jobs in camp. After all, a deserter was not regarded as an enemy or a traitor or a political prisoner. He was con- sidered not a hostile factor but a friendly one,
a nonpolitical offender
, so to speak. That point of view aroused passionate argument and objections. The deserters had to spend all those years rotting in prison, and they would not be forgiven. But there would soon be an amnesty for everyone else; they would all be released. (At that time the principal advantage of being a deserter was still unknown.)

Those who had gotten in via 58-10, snatched from their apartments or from the Red Army, often envied the rest. What the hell! For
the very same money
, in other words for the same ten-year sentence, they could have seen so many interesting things, like those other fellows, who had been just about every- where! And here we are, about to croak in camp, without ever having seen anything beyond our own stinking stairs. Inciden- tally, those who were in on Article 58-10 could hardly conceal their triumphant presentiment that they would be the first to be amnestied.

The only ones who did not sigh: "Oh, if I had only known"— because they knew very well what they were doing—and the only ones who did not expect any mercy and did not expect an amnesty—were the Vlasov men.

I had known about them and been perplexed about them long before our unexpected meeting on the board bunks of prison.

First there had been the leaflets, repeatedly soaked through, dried out, and lost in the high grass—uncut for the third year— of the front-line strip near Orel. In December, 1942, they had announced the creation in Smolensk of a "Russian Committee" —which apparently claimed to be some sort of Russian govern- ment and yet at the same time seemed not to be one. Evidently the Germans themselves had not yet made up their minds. For that reason, the communiqué seemed to be a hoax. There was a photograph of General Vlasov in the leaflets, and his biography was outlined. In the fuzzy photograph, his face looked well fed and successful, like all our generals of the new stripe. They told me later that this wasn't so, that Vlasov's face was more like that of a Western general—high, thin, with horn-rimmed glasses. His biography testified to a penchant for success. He had begun in a peasant family, and 1937 had not broken his skyrocketing career; nor was it ruined by his service as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. The first and only disaster of his earlier life had occurred when his Second Shock Army, after being en- circled, was ineptly abandoned to die of starvation. But how much of that whole biography could be believed?

[As far as one can establish at this late date, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov, prevented by the Revolution from completing his studies at the Nizhni Nov- gorod Orthodox Seminary, was drafted into the Red Army in 1919 and fought as an enlisted man. On the southern front, against Denikin and Wrangel, he rose to be commander of a platoon, then of a company. In the twenties he completed the Vystrel courses. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1930. In 1936, having attained the rank of regimental commander, he was sent to China as a military adviser. Evidently he had no ties to the top military and Party circles, and he therefore turned up naturally in that Stalinist "second echelon" of officers promoted to replace the purged commanders of armies, divisions, and brigades. From 1938 on he commanded a division. And in 1940, when "new" (in other words, old) officer ranks were created, he became a major general. From additional information one can conclude that in that corps of newly made generals, many of whom were totally stupid and inexperi- enced, Vlasov was one of the most talented. His 99th Infantry Division, which he had instructed and trained from the summer of 1940 on, was not caught off balance by the German attack. On the contrary, while the rest of the army reeled backward, his division advanced, retook Przemysl, and held it for six days. Quickly skipping the rank of corps commander, in 1941 Lieutenant Gen- eral Vlasov was in command of the Thirty-seventh Army near Kiev. He made his way out of the enormous Kiev encirclement and in December, 1941, near Moscow he commanded the Twentieth Army, whose successful Soviet counter- offensive for defense of the capital (the taking of Solnechnogorsk) was noted in the Sovinformburo communiqué for December 12. And the list of generals mentioned there was as follows: Zhukov, Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov, Vlasov, Rokossovsky, Govorov. Thanks to the speed with which officers were promoted in those months, he became Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front (under Meretskov), and took over command of the Second Shock Army. On January 7, 1942, at the head of that army, he began a drive to break the Leningrad blockade—an attack across the Volkhov River to the northwest. This had been planned as a combined operation, a concerted push from several direc- tions and from Leningrad itself. At scheduled intervals the Fifty-fourth, the Fourth, and the Fifty-second armies were to take part in it also. But those three armies either did not advance because they were unready or else came to a quick halt. At that time we still didn't have the capacity to plan such complex combined operations, and, more importantly, provide supplies for them. Vlasov's Second Shock Army, however, was successful in its assault, and by February, 1942, it was 46 miles deep inside the German lines! And from then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor ammunition to reinforce even those troops. (That's the kind of reserves they had begun the offensive with!) Leningrad, too, was left to die behind the blockade, having received no specific information from Novgorod. During March the winter roads still held up. From April on, however, the entire swampy area through which the Second Army had advanced melted into mud, and there were no supply roads, and there was no help from the air. The army was
without food
and, at the same time, Vlasov
was refused permission to re- treat
. For two months they endured starvation and extermination. In the Butyrki, soldiers from that army told me how they had cut off the hoofs of dead and rotting horses and boiled the scrapings and eaten them. Then, on May 14, a German attack was launched from all sides against the encircled army. The only planes in the air, of course, were German. And only then, in mockery, were they given permission to pull back behind the Volkhov. They made several hopeless attempts to break through—until the beginning of July.

And so it was that Vlasov's Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitu- lating the fate of Samsonov's Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into encirclement.

Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin's. Treason does not necessarily involve selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one's own marshal's uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?

Unlike Samsonov, Vlasov did not commit suicide. After his army had been wiped out, he wandered among the woods and swamps and, on July 6, per- sonally surrendered in the area of Siverskaya. He was taken to the German headquarters near Lötzen in East Prussia, where they were holding several captured generals and a brigade political commissar, G. N. Zhilenkov, formerly a successful Party official and secretary of one of the Moscow District Party Committees. These captives had already confessed their disagreement with the policy of the Stalin government. But they had no real leader. Vlasov became it.]

From his photograph, it was impossible to believe that he was an outstanding man or that for long years he had suffered pro- foundly for Russia. As for the leaflets reporting the creation of the ROA, the "Russian Liberation Army," not only were they written in bad Russian, but they were imbued with an alien spirit that was clearly German and, moreover, seemed little con- cerned with their presumed subject; besides, and on the other hand, they contained crude boasting about the plentiful chow available and the cheery mood of the soldiers. Somehow one couldn't believe in that army, and, if it really did exist, what kind of cheery mood could it be in? Only a German could lie like that.

[In reality there was no Russian Liberation Army until almost the very end of the war. Both the name and the insignia devised for it were invented by a German of Russian origin, Captain Strik-Strikfeldt, in the Ost-Propaganda- Abteilung. Although he held only a minor position, he had influence, and he tried to convince the Hitlerite leadership that a German-Russian alliance was essential and that the Russians should be encouraged to collaborate with Ger- nany. A vain undertaking for both sides! Each side wanted only to use and leceive the other. But, in the given situation, the Germans had power—they were on top of the setup. And the Vlasov officers had only their fantasy—at the bottom of the abyss. There was no such army, but anti-Soviet formations made up of Soviet citizens were organized from the very start of the war. The irst to support the Germans were the Lithuanians. In the one year we had been there we had aroused their deep, angry hostility! And then the SS-Galicia Division was created from Ukrainian volunteers. And Estonian units afterward. In the fall of 1941, guard companies appeared in Byelorussia. And a Tatar battalion in the Crimea. We ourselves had sowed the seeds of all this!

Take, for example, our stupid twenty-year policy of closing and destroying the Moslem mosques in the Crimea. And compare that with the policy of the farsighted conqueror Catherine the Great, who contributed state funds for building and expanding the Crimean mosques. And the Hitlerites, when they arrived, were smart enough to present themselves as their defenders. Later, Caucasian detachments and Cossack armies—more than a cavalry corps—put in an appearance on the German side. In the first winter of the war, platoons and companies of Russian volunteers began to be formed. But the German Command was very distrustful of these Russian units, and their master ser- geants and lieutenants were Germans. Only their noncoms below master ser- geant were Russian. They also used such German commands as "Achtung!," "Halt!" etc. More significant and entirely Russian were the following units: a brigade in Lokot, in Bryansk Province, from November, 1941, when a local teacher of engineering, K. P. Voskoboinikov, proclaimed the "National Labor Party of Russia" and issued a manifesto to the citizens of the nation, hoisting the flag of St. George; a unit in the Osintorf settlement near Orsha, formed at the beginning of 1942 under the leadership of Russian émigrés (it must be said that only a small group of Russian émigrés joined this movement, and even they did not conceal their anti-German feelings and allowed many cross- overs [including a whole battalion] to the Soviet side . . . after which they were dropped by the Germans); and a unit formed by Gil, in the summer of 1942, near Lublin. (V. V. Gil, a Communist Party member and even, it seems, a Jew, not only survived as a POW but, with the help of other POW's, became the head of a camp near Suwalki and offered to create a "fighting alliance of Russian nationalists" for the Germans.) However, there was as yet no Russian Liberation Army in all of this and no Vlasov. The companies under German command were put on the Russian front, as an experiment, and the Russian units were sent against the Bryansk, Orsha, and Polish partisans.]

We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they had built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they lobbed in an antitank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting.