The Gulag Archipelago (73 page)

2. Deception. This, too, can be practiced thanks to total secrecy. When every step is reported by the newspapers, you aren't going to do much deceiving. But in our country, why not? In 1933, in the Khabarovsk Prison, S. A. Chebotaryev, demand- ing that his family be informed of his whereabouts, fasted for seventeen days. (He had come from the Chinese Eastern Railroad in Manchuria and then suddenly disappeared, and he was worried about what his wife might be thinking. ) On the seventeenth day, Zapadny, the Deputy Chief of the Provincial GPU, and the Khabarovsk Province prosecutor (their ranks indicate that lengthy hunger strikes were really not so frequent) came to see him and showed him a telegraph receipt (There, they said, they had in- formed his wife!), and thus persuaded him to take some broth. And the receipt was a fake! (Why had these high-ranking officials gone to this trouble? Not, certainly, for Chebotaryev's life. Evi- dently, in the
first
half of the thirties there was still some sort of personal responsibility on the part of higher-ups for long-drawn- out hunger strikes.)

3. Forced artificial feeding. This method was adapted, with- out any question, from experience with wild animals in captivity. And it could be employed only in total secrecy. By 1937 arti- ficial feeding was, evidently, already in wide use. For example, in the group hunger strike of socialists in the Yaroslavl Central Prison, artificial feeding was forced on everyone on the fifteenth day.

Artificial feeding has much in common with rape. And that's what it really is: four big men hurl themselves on one weak being and deprive it of its one interdiction—they only need to do it once and what happens to it next is not important. The element of rape inheres in the violation of the victim's will: "It's not going to be the way you want it, but the way I want it; lie down and sub- mit." They pry open the mouth with a flat disc, then broaden the crack between the jaws and insert a tube: "Swallow it." And if you don't swallow it, they shove it farther down anyway and then pour liquefied food right down the esophagus. And then they massage the stomach to prevent the prisoner from resorting to vomiting. The sensation is one of being morally defiled, of sweetness in the mouth, and a jubilant stomach gratified to the point of delight.

Science did not stand still, and other methods were developed for artificial feeding: an enema through the anus, drops through the nose.

4. A new view of the hunger strike: that hunger strikes are a continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and must be punished with a new
prison term
. This aspect promised to give rise to a very rich new category in the practices of the New Type Prison, but it remained essentially in the realm of threats. And it was not, of course, any sense of humor that cut it short, but most likely simple laziness: why bother with all that when patience will take care of it? Patience and more patience—the patience of a well-fed person vis-à-vis one who is starving.

Approximately in the middle of 1937, a new directive came: From now on the prison administration
will not in any respect be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes!
The last vestige of personal responsibility on the part of the jailers had disap- peared! (In these circumstances, the prosecutor of the province would not have come to visit Chebotaryev!) Furthermore, so that the interrogator shouldn't get disturbed, it was also announced that days spent on hunger strike by a prisoner under interroga- tion should be crossed off the official interrogation period. In other words, it should not only be considered that the
hunger strike had not taken place
, but the prisoner should be regarded as not having been in prison at all during the period of the strike. Thus the interrogator would not be to blame for being behind schedule. Let the only perceptible result of the hunger strike be the prisoner's exhaustion!

And that meant: If you want to kick the bucket, go ahead!

Arnold Rappoport had the misfortune to declare a hunger strike in the Archangel NKVD Internal Prison at the very moment when this directive arrived. It was a particularly severe form of hunger strike, and that ought, it would seem, to have given it more impact. His was a "dry" strike—without fluids— and he kept it up for thirteen days. (Compare the five-day "dry" strike of Dzerzhinsky, who probably wasn't isolated in a separate cell. And who in the end won total victory.) And during those
thirteen
days in solitary, to which Rappoport had been moved, only a medical assistant looked in now and then. No doctor came. And no one from the administration took the slightest interest in
what he was demanding
with his hunger strike. They never even asked him. The only attention the administration paid him was to search his cell carefully, and they managed to dig out some hidden makhorka and several matches. What Rappoport wanted was to put an end to the interrogator's humiliation of him. He had prepared for his hunger strike in a thoroughly scientific way. He had received a food parcel earlier, and so he ate only butter and ring-shaped rolls, baranki, and he quit eating black bread a week before his strike. He starved until he could see the light through his hands. He recalls experiencing a sensation of lightheadedness and clarity of thought. At a certain moment, a kindly, compassionate woman jailer named Marusya came to his cell and whispered to him: "Stop your hunger strike; it isn't going to help; you'll just die! You should have done it a week earlier." He listened to her and called off his hunger strike without having gotten anywhere at all. Nevertheless, they gave him hot red wine and a roll, and afterward the jailers took him back to the common cell in a hand-carry. A few days later, his interrogation began again. But the hunger strike had not been entirely useless: the interrogator had come to understand that Rappoport had will power enough and no fear of death, and he eased up on the interrogation. "Well, now, it turns out you are quite a wolf," the interrogator said to him. "A wolf!" Rappoport affirmed. "And I'll certainly never be your dog."

Rappoport declared another hunger strike later on, at the Kotlas Transit Prison, but it turned out somewhat comically. He announced that he was demanding a new interrogation, and that he would not board the prisoner transport. They came to him on the third day: "Get ready for the prisoner transport." "You don't have the right. I'm on a hunger strike!" At that point four young toughs picked him up, carried him off, and tossed him into the bath. After the bath, they carried him to the guardhouse. With nothing else left to do, Rappoport stood up and went to join the column of prisoners boarding the prisoner transport—after all, there were dogs and bayonets at his back.

And that is how the New Type Prison defeated bourgeois hunger strikes.

Even a strong man had no way left him to fight the prison machine, except perhaps suicide. But is suicide really resistance? Isn't it actually submission?

The SR Yekaterina Olitskaya thinks that the Trotskyites, and, subsequently, the Communists who followed them into prison, did a great deal to weaken the hunger strike as a weapon for fighting back: they declared hunger strikes too easily and lifted them too easily. She says that even the Trotskyite leader I. N. Smirnov, after going on a hunger strike four days before their Moscow trial, quickly surrendered and lifted it. They say that up to 1936 the Trotskyites rejected any hunger strike
against the Soviet government
on principle, and never supported SR's and Social Democrats who were on hunger strikes.

[But they always demanded support for themselves from the SR's and Social Democrats. On a prisoner transport to Karaganda and the Kolyma in 1936, they addressed as traitors and provocateurs all those who refused to sign their telegram to Kalinin protesting "against sending the
vanguard of the Revolution
[i.e., themselves] to the Kolyma." (The story was told by Mako- tinsky.)]

Let history say how true or untrue that reproach is. However, no one paid for hunger strikes so much and so grievously as the Trotskyites. (We will come to their hunger strikes and their strikes in camps in Part III.)

Excessive haste in declaring and lifting hunger strikes was probably characteristic of impetuous temperaments which reveal their feelings too quickly. But there were, after all, such natures, such characters, among the old Russian revolutionaries, too, and there were similar temperaments in Italy and France, but no- where, either in prerevolutionary Russia, in Italy, or in France, were the authorities so successful in discouraging hunger strikes as in the Soviet Union. There was probably no less physical sacrifice and no less spiritual determination in the hunger strikes in the second quarter of our century than there had been in the first. But there was no public opinion in the Soviet Union. And on that basis the New Type Prison waxed and grew strong. And instead of easy victories, the prisoners suffered hard-earned de- feats.

Decades passed and time produced its own results. The hunger strike—the first and most natural weapon of the prisoner—in the end became alien and incomprehensible to the prisoners themselves. Fewer and fewer desired to undertake them. And to prison administrations the whole thing began to seem either plain stupidity or else a malicious violation.

When, in 1960, Gennady Smelov, a nonpolitical offender, declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad prison, the prosecutor went to his cell for some reason (perhaps he was making his regular rounds) and asked him: "Why are you tor- turing yourself?"

And Smelov replied: "Justice is more precious to me than life."

This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor there told him:

"We suspect you may be a schizophrenic."

Along the rings of the horn, where it began to narrow to its point, the former central prisons arose, rechristened, by the be- ginning of 1937, the "special isolators." The last little weaknesses were now being squeezed out of the system, the last vestiges of light and air. And the hunger strike of the tired socialists, their numbers sparse by now, in the Yaroslavl Penalty Isolator at the beginning of 1937 was one of their last, desperate efforts.

They were still demanding that everything should be restored to what it once had been. They were demanding both the election of spokesmen and free communication between cells, but it is unlikely that even they had hopes of this any longer. By a fifteen- day hunger strike, even though it ended with their being force- fed through a tube, they had apparently succeeded in defending some portions of their regimen: a one-hour period outdoors, access to the provincial newspaper, notebooks for their writing. These they kept. But the authorities promptly took away their personal belongings and threw at them the common prison cloth- ing of the special isolator. And a little while later, they cut half an hour off their time outdoors. And then they reduced it by another fifteen minutes.

These were the same people who were being dragged through a sequence of prisons and exiles according to the rules of the Big Solitaire. Some hadn't lived an ordinary, decent human life for ten years; some for fifteen; all they had was this meager prison life, with hunger strikes to boot. A few who had gotten used to winning out over the prison administrations before the Revolu- tion were still alive. However, before the Revolution they were marching in step with Time against a weakening enemy. And now Time was against them and allied with an enemy growing steadily stronger. Among them were young people too (how strange that seems to us nowadays)—those who considered them- selves SR's, Social Democrats, or Anarchists even after the parties themselves had been battered out of existence—and the only future these new recruits had to look forward to was life in prison.

The loneliness surrounding the entire prison struggle of the socialists, which became more hopeless with every year that passed, grew more and more acute, approaching a vacuum in the end. That was not how it had been under the Tsar: Throw open the prison doors and the public greeted them with flowers. Now they leafed through the newspapers and saw that they were being drenched in vituperation, with slops even. (For it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin saw as the most dan- gerous enemies of his socialism.) And the people were silent. And what could give them any reason to dare suppose that the people had any kindly feelings left toward those they had not long before elected to the Constituent Assembly? And finally the newspapers stopped showering profanity on them because Rus- sian socialists had by that time come to seem so unimportant and so impotent and even nonexistent. By this time these socialists were remembered outside in freedom only as something belong- ing to the past—the distant past. And young people hadn't the slightest idea that SR's and Mensheviks were still alive some- where. And in the sequence of Chimkent and Cherdyn exile, and the Verkhne-Uralsk and Vladimir isolators—how could they not tremble in their dark solitary-confinement cells, cells with "muzzles" by this time, and feel that perhaps their program and their leaders had been mistaken, that perhaps their tactics and actions had been mistaken too? And all their actions began to seem nothing but inaction—and their lives, devoted only to suffering, a fatal delusion.

Their lonely prison struggle had been essentially undertaken for all of us, for all future prisoners (even though they themselves might not think so, nor understand this), for
how
we would exist in imprisonment and how we would be kept there. And if they had won out, then probably nothing of what happened to us would have happened, nothing of what this book is about, all seven of its parts.

But they were beaten. They failed to protect either themselves or us.

In part, too, the canopy of loneliness spread over them because, in the very first postrevolutionary years, having naturally accepted from the GPU the well-merited identification of
politicals
, they naturally agreed with the GPU that all who were "to the right" [ I do not like these "left" and "right" classifications; they are conditional concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.] of them, beginning with the Cadets, were not politicals but KR's —
Counter-Revolutionaries
—the manure of history. And they also regarded as KR's those who suffered for their faith in Christ. And whoever didn't know what "right" or "left" meant —and that, in the future, would be all of us—they considered to be KR's also. And thus it was that, in part voluntarily, in part involuntarily, keeping themselves aloof and shunning others, they gave their blessing to the future "Fifty-eight" into whose maw they themselves would disappear.