The Gulag Archipelago (93 page)

"I am an intelligence officer of the Rumanian General Staff! Lieutenant Vladimirescu!"

I started—this was real dynamite. I had met a couple of hun- dred fabricated spies, and I had never thought I might meet up with a real one. I thought they didn't exist.

According to his story, he was of an aristocratic family. From the age of three he had been destined to serve on the General Staff. At six he had entered the intelligence service school. Growing up, he had picked his own field of future activity—the Soviet Union, taking into account that here in Russia the most relentless counterintelligence service in the world existed and that it was particularly difficult to work here because everyone suspected everyone else. And, he now concluded, he had worked here not at all badly. He had spent several prewar years in Nikolayev and, it appears, had arranged for the Rumanian armies to capture a shipyard intact. Subsequently he had been at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and after that at the Urals Heavy Machinery Factory. In the course of collecting trade-union dues he had entered the office of the chief of a major division of the plant, had shut the door behind him, and his idiotic smile had promptly left his face, and that saber-sharp cutting expression had appeared: "Ponomaryev! [And Ponomaryev was using an altogether different name at the Urals Heavy Machinery Factory.] We have been keeping track of you from Stalingrad on. You left your job there. [He had been some kind of bigwig at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.] And you have set yourself up here under an assumed name. You can choose—to be shot by your own people or to work with us." Ponomaryev chose to work with them, and that indeed was very much in the style of those supersuccessful pigs.

The lieutenant supervised his work until he himself was trans- ferred to the jurisdiction of the German intelligence officer resi- dent in Moscow, who sent him to Podolsk
to work at his specialty
. As Vladimirescu explained to me, intelligence officers and sa- boteurs are given an all-round training, but each of them has his own
narrow
area of specialization. And Vladimirescu's special field was cutting the main cord of a parachute on the inside. In Podolsk he was met at the parachute warehouse by the chief of the warehouse guard (who was it? what kind of person was he?), who at night let Vladimirescu into the warehouse for eight hours. Climbing up to the piles of parachutes on his ladder and manag- ing not to disturb the piles, Vladimirescu pulled out the braided main support-cord and, with special scissors, cut four-fifths of the way through it, leaving one-fifth intact, so that it would break in the air. Vladimirescu had studied many long years in preparation for this one night. And now, working feverishly, in the course of eight hours he ruined, according to his account, upwards of two thousand parachutes (fifteen seconds per parachute?). "I de- stroyed a whole Soviet parachute division!" His cherrylike eyes sparkled with malice.

When he was arrested, he refused to give any testimony for eight whole months—imprisoned in the Butyrki, he uttered not one word. "And didn't they torture you?" "No!" His lips twitched as though to indicate he didn't even consider such a thing possible in the case of a non-Soviet citizen. (Beat your own people so foreigners will be more afraid of you! But a real spy's a gold mine! After all, we may have to use him for an exchange.) The day came when they showed him the newspapers: Rumania had capitulated; come on, now, testify. He continued to keep silent: the newspapers could have been forgeries. They showed him an order of the Rumanian General Staff: under the conditions of the armistice the General Staff ordered all its intelligence agents to cease operations and surrender. He continued to keep silent. (The order could have been a forgery.) Finally he was con- fronted with his immediate superior on the General Staff, who ordered him to disclose his information and surrender. At this point Vladimirescu coldbloodedly gave his testimony, and now, in the slow passing of the cell day, it was no longer of any im- portance and he told me some of it too. They had not even tried him! They had not even given him a sentence! (After all, he wasn't one of our own! "I am a career man—and will remain one until I die. And they won't waste me.")

"But you are revealing yourself to me," I pointed out. "I might very well remember your face. Just imagine our meeting someday in public."

"If I am convinced that you haven't recognized me, you will remain alive. If you recognize me, I will kill you, or else force you to work for us."

He had not the slightest desire to spoil his relationship with his cell neighbor. He said this very simply, with total conviction. I was really convinced that he wouldn't hesitate for a moment to gun someone down or cut their throat.

In this whole long prisoners' chronicle, we will not again meet such a hero. It was the only encounter of the sort I ever had in my eleven years of prison, camp, and exile, and others didn't even have one. And our mass-circulation comics try to dupe young people into believing that these are the only people the
Organs
catch.

It was enough to look around that church cell to grasp that it was youth itself the Organs were catching in the first place. The war had ended, and we could allow ourselves the luxury of ar- resting everyone who had been singled out: they were no longer needed as soldiers. They said that in 1944 and 1945 a so-called "Democratic Party" had passed through the cells of the Small (Moscow Province) Lubyanka. According to rumor, it had consisted of half a hundred boys, had its own statutes and its membership cards. The eldest of them was a pupil in the tenth grade of a Moscow school, and he was its "general secretary." Students were also glimpsed fleetingly in the prisons during the last year of the war. I met some here and there. I was pre- sumably not old myself, but they at any rate were younger.

How imperceptibly all that crept up on us! While we—I, my codefendant, and others of our age—had been fighting for four years at the front, a whole new generation had grown up here in the rear. And had it been very long since we ourselves had tramped the parquet floors of the university corridors, consider- ing ourselves the youngest and most intelligent in the whole country and, for that matter, on earth? And then suddenly pale youths crossed the tile floors of the prison cells to approach us haughtily, and we learned with astonishment that we were no longer the youngest and most intelligent—they were. But I didn't take offense at this; at that point I was already happy to move over a bit to make room. I knew so very well their passion for arguing with everyone, for finding out everything, I understood their pride in having chosen a worthy lot and in not regretting it. It gave me gooseflesh to hear the rustle of the prison halos hover- ing over those self-enamored and intelligent little faces.

One month earlier, in another Butyrki cell, a semihospital cell, I had just stepped into the aisle and had still not seen any empty place for myself—when, approaching in a way that hinted at a verbal dispute, even at an entreaty to enter into one, came a pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped, despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier's overcoat shot full of holes: he was chilled. His name was Boris Gammerov. He began to question me; the conversation rolled along: on one hand, our biographies, on the other, politics. I don't remember why, but I recalled one of the prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which had been published in our newspapers, and I expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it:

"Well, that's hypocrisy, of course."

And suddenly the young man's yellowish brows trembled, his pale lips pursed, he seemed to draw himself up, and he asked me: "Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?"

And that is all that was said! But what a direction the attack
had
come from! To hear such words from someone born in 1923? I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been im- planted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: "Do you believe in God?"

"Of course," he answered tranquilly.

Of course? Of course . . . Yes, yes. The Komsomols were flying ahead of the flock—everywhere, but so far only the NKGB had noticed.

Notwithstanding his youth, Borya Gammerov had not only fought as a sergeant in an antitank unit with those antitank 45's the soldiers had christened "Farewell, Motherland!" He had also been wounded in the lungs and the wound had not yet healed, and because of this TB had set in. Gammerov was given a medical discharge from the army and enrolled in the biology department of Moscow University. And thus two strands intertwined in him: one from his life as a soldier and the other from the by no means foolish and by no means dead students' life at war's end. A circle formed of those who thought and reasoned about the future (even though no one had given them any instructions to do so), and the experienced eye of the Organs singled out three of them and pulled them in. (In 1937, Gammerov's father had been killed in prison or shot, and his son was hurrying along the same path. During the interrogation he had read several of his own verses to the interrogator
with feeling
. And I deeply regret that I have not managed to remember even one of them, and there is nowhere to seek them out today. Otherwise I would have cited them here.)

For a number of months after that my path crossed those of all three codefendants: right there in a Butyrki cell I met Vyacheslav D.—and there is always someone like him when young people are arrested: he had taken an
iron stand
within the group, but he quickly broke down under interrogation. He got less than any of the others—five years—and it looked as though he were secretly counting a good deal on his influential papa to get him out.

And then in the Butyrki church I encountered Georgi Ingal, the eldest of the three. Despite his youth, he was already a candi- date-member of the Union of Soviet Writers. He had a very bold pen. His style was one of strong contrasts. If he had been willing to make his peace politically, vivid and untrodden literary paths would have opened up before him. He had already nearly finished a novel about Debussy. But his early success had not emasculated him, and at the funeral of his teacher, Yuri Tynyanov, he had made a speech declaring that Tynyanov had been persecuted— and by this means had assured himself of an eight-year term.

And right then Gammerov caught up with us, and, while wait- ing to go to Krasnaya Presnya, I had to face up to their united point of view. This confrontation was not easy for me. At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it the "hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgoisie," or the "militant nihilism of the declasse intelligentsia." I don't recall that Ingal and Gammerov attacked Marx in my presence, but I do remember how they attacked Lev Tolstoi, and from what direction the attack was launched! Tolstoi rejected the church? But he failed to take into account its mystical and its organizing role. He rejected the teachings of the Bible? But for the most part modern science was not in conflict with the Bible, not even with its opening lines about the creation of the world. He rejected the state? But without the state there would be chaos. He preached the combining of mental and physical work in one individual's life? But that was a senseless leveling of capabilities and talents. And, finally, as we see from Stalin's violence, an historical per- sonage can be omnipotent, yet Tolstoi scoffed at the very idea.

[In my preprison and prison years I, too, had long ago come to the conclusion that Stalin had set the course of the Soviet state in a fateful direc- tion. But then Stalin died quietly—and did the ship of state change course very noticeably? The personal, individual imprint he left on events consisted of dismal stupidity, petty tyranny, self-glorification. And in all the rest he followed the beaten path exactly as it had been signposted, step by step.] The boys read me their own verses and demanded mine in exchange, and I as yet had none. They read Pasternak particu- larly, whom they praised to the skies. I had once read "My Sister Life" and hadn't liked it, considering it precious, abstruse, and very, very far from ordinary human paths. But they recited to me Lieutenant Shmidt's last speech at his trial, and it touched me deeply because it applied so to us:

For thirty years I have nurtured
My love for my native land,
And I shall neither expect
Nor miss your leniency.

Gammerov and Ingal were just as shiningly attuned as that: We do not need your leniency! We are not languishing from
imprison- ment;
we are proud of it. (But who is really capable of not lan- guishing? After a few months Ingal's young wife renounced and abandoned him. Gammerov, because of his revolutionary inclina- tions, did not even have a sweetheart yet.) Was it not here, in these prison cells, that the great truth dawned? The cell was con- stricted, but wasn't
freedom
even more constricted? Was it not our own people, tormented and deceived, that lay beside us there under the bunks and in the aisles?

Not to arise with my whole land
Would have been harder still,
And for the path that I have trod
I have no qualms at all.

The young people imprisoned in these cells under the political articles of the Code were never the average young people of the nation, but were always separated from them by a wide gap. In those years most of our young people still faced a future of "dis- integrating," of becoming disillusioned, indifferent, falling in love with an easy life—and then, perhaps, beginning all over again the bitter climb from that cozy little valley up to a new peak- possibly after another twenty years? But the young prisoners of 1945, sentenced under 58-10, had leaped that whole future chasm of indifference in one jump—and bore their heads boldly erect under the ax.

In the Butyrki church, the Moscow students, already sentenced, cut off and estranged from everything, wrote a song, and before twilight sang it in their uncertain voices:

Three times a day we go for gruel,
The evenings we pass in song,
With a contraband prison needle
We sew ourselves
bags
for the road.
We don't care about ourselves any more,
We signed
—just to be quicker!
And when will we ever return here again
From the distant Siberian camps?
Good Lord, how could we have missed the main point of the whole thing? While we had been plowing through the mud out there on the bridgeheads, while we had been cowering in shell holes and pushing binocular periscopes above the bushes, back home a new generation had grown up and gotten moving. But hadn't it started moving in
another
direction? In a direction we wouldn't have been able and wouldn't have dared to move in? They weren't brought up the way we were.

Our generation would return—having turned in its weapons, jingling its heroes' medals, proudly telling its combat stories. And our younger brothers would only look at us contemptuously: Oh, you stupid dolts!

END OF PART II

Translator's Notes

These
translator's notes
are not intended to overlap the extensive explanatory and reference material contained in the author's own notes in the text and in the glossary which follows. They attempt to give that minimum of factual material about this book and the whole work of which it is a part which will enable the reader better to put it in perspective and understand what it is, and also to deal with several areas of special Russian terminology.

The
glossary
which follows these notes can be very useful. It gives in alphabetical order capsule identification of persons, institutions and their acronyms, political movements, and events mentioned in the text.

The
title
of the book in Russian—
Arkhipelag GULag
—has a resonance resulting from a rhyme which cannot be rendered in English.

The
image
evoked by this title is that of one far-flung "country" with millions of "natives," consisting of an
archipelago
of islands, some as tiny as a detention cell in a railway station and others as vast as a large Western European country, contained within another country—the U.S.S.R. This archipelago is made up of the enormous network of penal institutions and all the rest of the web of machinery for police oppression and terror imposed throughout the author's period of reference on all Soviet life. Gulag is the acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps which supervised the larger part of this system.

The author's decision to publish
this work was triggered by a tragedy of August, 1973: A Leningrad woman to whom the author had entrusted a portion of his manuscript for safekeeping broke down after 120 sleepless hours of intensive questioning by Soviet Security officers and revealed where she had hidden it—enabling them to seize it. Thereupon, in her desperation and depression, she committed suicide. It is to this event that the author refers in the statement that precedes the text: "Now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately."

This present English-language edition
of Parts I and II of
The Gulag Archipelago
differs very slightly, as a result of author's corrections and other corrections, from the Russian-language first edition of these parts which was published by the YMCA-Press in Paris in late December, 1973.

The Gulag Archipelago
is a sweeping, panoramic work which consists in all of seven parts divided into three volumes—of which this present book, the first volume, contains two parts, representing about
one-third
of the whole.

One of the important aspects of Solzhenitsyn as a Russian literary figure is his contribution to the revival and expansion of the Russian literary language through introducing readers in his own country (and abroad) to the language, terminology, and slang of camps, prisons, the police, and the underworld. Millions of Soviet citizens became fully familiar with a whole new vocabulary through imprisonment. But this vocabulary did not find its way into Russian literature until Solzhenitsyn put it there—to the bewilderment of some of the uninitiated.

In this category there are terms in this book which require explanation.

Soviet Security services personnel
, for example, are referred to in a variety of special epithets, some of them carrying overtones of contempt. Most of these have been manufactured from the various initials, at one time and another, of the basic Soviet secret police organization:

The oldest of these terms is, of course, "Chekist"—pronounced "Che-keest," with the accent on the last syllable—from "Cheka." Though the name "Cheka" was replaced more than half a century ago, this label for Soviet Security personnel is still used—and is much beloved by the personnel of the
Organs
themselves.

"Gaybíst," which is pronounced "gay-beest," with the accent on the last syllable, is derived from the letters "g" and "b" standing for State Security.

Likewise "Gaybéshnik"—pronounced "gay-besh-neek," with the accent on the second syllable.

"Emvaydéshnik"—pronounced as it is spelled here, with the accent on the third syllable—is derived similarly from the Russian pronunciation of the letters "M" "V" "D"—for Ministry of Internal Affairs.

"Gaypayóoshnik"—accent also on the third syllable—comes from "G" "P" "U" or "Gaypayóo."

"Osobíst"—pronounced "oh-so-beest," with accent on the last syllable—is an officer of the Special Branch, representing State Security, usually in a military unit—the "
Osóby
Otdél."

All these terms have their pungent flavor, which comes through even to the English-speaking reader—and they have therefore often been used as is in the text of this translation.

In the Gulag world there was one particular type of police official who had special significance. This was the "operupolnomóchenny"—"óper" for short. Literally rendered, this title means "operations plenipotentiary"—the operations being Security operations, often in a forced-labor camp, where he had enormous power deriving from the fact that he represented State Security in an institution under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His nickname among the prisoners was "Kum," which can be translated approximately as "godfather" or "father confessor." He was in charge of all camp stool pigeons and he had responsibility for the political supervision of all the prisoners. Throughout this work his title has been translated as "Security operations officer" or more usually just "Security officer," or "Security chief."

The Russian thieves
are not just plain ordinary thieves, but constitute a whole underworld subculture which gets much attention and is well described in this book. The Russian thieves are "vóry"—meaning thieves. They are also the "blatnýe" (plural); "blatnói" is the masculine singular form and also the adjective, describing a thing or person attached to the underworld or to the
law
or companionship of thieves.

The Russian thieves are also the "blatarí" and the "úrki." They are also "tsvetnýe"—in other words "colored." And a person "polutsvetnói"—"half-colored" or "mulatto"—is a non-thief who has begun to take up the ways of the thieves.

By and large, to the extent that these and other terms appear in their original form in this translation they are clearly enough explained. But wherever the word "thief" appears it means one of the "blatnýe."

The language of the Russian thieves is used in this work to refer to much more than themselves.

Thus a nonthief in thief language is a "fráyer." By virtue of being a nonthief he is also naturally "a mark," "a cull," "a pigeon," "an innocent," "a sucker." In this translation, "frayer" has been rendered throughout as "sucker."

Some other terms that relate to the world of Gulag require special explanation:

At times in the text "ugolóvniki" (which we have translated as "habitual criminals") and "bytovikí" (which we have translated as "nonpolitical offenders") have been grouped together in contrast to the political prisoners.

A "bytovík" is
any
prisoner who is
not
a political nor one of the Russian thieves—and the "bytovikí" or "nonpolitical offenders" make up the enormous main mass of the prisoners. The distinction here is just as much psychological as legal, and in English there is nothing that exactly translates this Russian term.

The "ugolóvniki" or "habitual criminals" are obviously professionals and therefore approximately the same as the thieves.

Chapter 3 in Part I is entitled in Russian "Slédstviye." The correct, legally formal rendering of this word into English would be "investigation." The official conducting the "investigation" is a "slédovatel" or, again in the formal rendering, "investigator." I have, however, chosen, deliberately and after consideration and consultation, generally to translate these Russian terms respectively as "interrogation" and "interrogator." The text of the book makes the reason amply clear. There was in the period and the cases described here no content of "investigation" in this process, nor was there anyone who could legitimately be called an "investigator." There
was
interrogation and there
were
interrogators.

In camps prisoners were divided into those who went out on general-assignment work every day—and therefore died off—and those who got "cushy" jobs within the camp compound at office work, as hospital orderlies, as cooks, bread cutters, assistants in the mess hall, etc., etc.—and thereby were in a better position to survive. These latter were contemptuously christened by the other prisoners "pridúrki"—derived from a verb meaning to shirk general-assignment work. I have here translated "pridúrki" as "trusties". As in many other cases there is no exact English equivalent, but this is certainly as close as there is.

Anyone who wishes to delve further into the lingo of Russian thieves and camps can well make use of the valuable book
Soviet Prison Camp Speech, a Survivor's Glossary
, compiled by Meyer Galler and Harlan E. Marquess, University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

I wish to thank those who have given me invaluable assistance with this translation—and in the first place and in particular Frances Lindley, my experienced, able, and long-suffering editor at Harper & Row; Dick Passmore, my brilliant copy editor; Theodore Shabad, who has labored long and industriously over the glossary and details in footnotes and text; and also Nina Sobolev, for her long faithful hours of help of all kinds.

Michael Scammell, the well-known British translator and editor, was kind enough to come to New York during the final stages of the preparation of this manuscript and provide the benefit of his own considerable experience in giving the text one last thorough and most useful going over. I am deeply grateful to him.

There are several others who have done more for this project than I can possibly thank them for. But I can at least try—in the knowledge that they will know whom I mean when they read these lines.

Yet with all this, if there are faults in this translation, as no doubt there are, mine is the responsibility.

T.P.W.

Glossary

NAMES

Abakumov, Viktor Semyonovich (1894-1954). Stalin's Minister of State Security, 1946-1952. Executed in December, 1954, under Khrushchev.

Agranov, Yakov Savlovich (7-1939). Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs under Yagoda and Yezhov. Played important role in preparing show trials of 1936-1938. Shot in purges.

Aikhenvald, Yuli Isayevich (1872-1928). Critic and essayist, translated Schopenhauer into Russian. Exiled in 1922.

Akhmatova (Gorenko), Anna Andreyevna (1889-1966). Acmeist poet, wife of Nikolai Gumilyev. Denounced in 1946 as "alien to the Soviet people." Long unpublished in Soviet Union; some works published after 1956.

Aldanov (Landau), Mark Aleksandrovich (1886-1957). Writer of historical novels; emigrated 1919 to Paris, and later to New York.

Aldan-Semyonov, Andrei Ignatyevich (1908-). Soviet writer; imprisoned in Far East camps, 1938-1953. Author of memoirs.

Aleksandrov, A. I. Head of Arts Section of All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries; purged in 1935.

Alliluyevs.
Family of Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna.

Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Valentinovich (1862-1938). Russian writer; emigrated 1920.

Anders, Wladyslaw (1892-1970). Polish general; formed Polish military units in Soviet Union and led them out to Iran in 1943.

Andreyev, Leonid Nikolayevich (1871-1919). Playwright and short story writer, close to Expressionism; died in Finland.

Andreyushkin, Pakhomi Ivanovich (1865-1887). Member of Narodnaya Volya terrorist group; executed after attempt to assassinate Alexander III in 1887.

Antonov-Saratovsky, Vladimir Pavlovich (1884-1965). Old Bolshevik, served as judge in Shakhty (1928) and Promparty (1930) trials.

Averbakh, I. L. Soviet jurist; associate of Vyshinsky.