The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Read online

  “Just give us a person—and we’ll create the case!” That was what many of them said jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of as torture they think of as good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”

  What prompted them all to slip into harness and pursue so zealously not truth but totals of the processed and condemned? Because it was most comfortable for them not to be different from the others. And because these totals meant an easy life, supplementary pay, awards and decorations, promotions in rank, and the expansion and prosperity of the Organs themselves. If they ran up high totals, they could loaf when they felt like it, or do poor work or go out and enjoy themselves at night. And that is just what they did. Low totals led to their being kicked out, to the loss of their feedbag. For Stalin could never be convinced that in any district, or city, or military unit, he might suddenly cease to have enemies.

  That was why they felt no mercy, but, instead, an explosion of resentment and rage toward those maliciously stubborn prisoners who opposed being fitted into the totals, who would not capitulate to sleeplessness or the punishment cell or hunger. By refusing to confess they menaced the interrogator’s personal standing. It was as though they wanted to bring him down. In such circumstances all measures were justified! If it’s to be war, then war it will be! We’ll ram the tube down your throat—swallow that salt water!

  Excluded by the nature of their work and by deliberate choice from the higher sphere of human existence, the servitors of the Blue Institution lived in their lower sphere with all the greater intensity and avidity. And there they were possessed and directed by the two strongest instincts of the lower sphere, other than hunger and sex: greed for power and greed for gain. (Particularly for power. In recent decades it has turned out to be more important than money.)

  Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.

  Remember what Tolstoi said about power? Ivan Ilyich had accepted an official position which gave him authority to destroy any person he wanted to! All without exception were in his hands, and anyone, even the most important, could be brought before him as an accused. (And that is just where our blueboys are! There is nothing to add to the description.) The consciousness of this power (and “the possibilities of using it mercifully”—so Tolstoi qualifies the situation, but this does not in any way apply to our boys) constituted for Ivan Ilyich the chief interest and attraction of the service.

  But attraction is not the right word—it is intoxication! After all, it is intoxicating. You are still young—still, shall we say parenthetically, a sniveling youth. Only a little while ago your parents were deeply concerned about you and didn’t know where to turn to launch you in life. You were such a fool you didn’t even want to study, but you got through three years of that school—and then how you took off and flew! How your situation changed! How your gestures changed, your glance, the turn of your head! The learned council of the scientific institute is in session. You enter and everyone notices you and trembles. You don’t take the chairman’s chair. Those headaches are for the rector to take on. You sit off to one side, but everyone understands that you are head man there. You are the Special Department. And you can sit there for just five minutes and then leave. You have that advantage over the professors. You can be called away by more important business—but later on, when you’re considering their decision, you will raise your eyebrows or, better still, purse your lips and say to the rector: “You can’t do that. There are special considerations involved.” That’s all! And it won’t be done. Or else you are an osobist—a State Security representative in the army—a SMERSH man, and a mere lieutenant; but the portly old colonel, the commander of the unit, stands up when you enter the room and tries to flatter you, to play up to you. He doesn’t even have a drink with his chief of staff without inviting you to join them. The fact that you have only two tiny stars on your shoulder boards doesn’t mean a thing; it is even amusing. After all, your stars have a very different weight and are measured on a totally different scale from those of ordinary officers. (On special assignments you are sometimes even authorized to wear major’s insignia, for example, which is a sort of incognito, a convention.) You have a power over all the people in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater than that of the military commander, or factory director, or secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you control people’s freedom. And no one dares speak about you at meetings, and no one will ever dare write about you in the newspaper—not only something bad but anything good! They don’t dare. Your name, like that of a jealously guarded deity, cannot even be mentioned. You are there; everyone feels your presence; but it’s as though you didn’t exist. From the moment you don that heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly acknowledged power. No one dares check up on what you do. But no one is exempt from your checking up on him. And therefore, in dealing with ordinary so-called citizens, who for you are mere blocks of wood, it is altogether appropriate for you to wear an ambiguous and deeply thoughtful expression. For, of course, you are the one—and no one else—who knows about the special considerations. And therefore you are always right.

  There is just one thing you must never forget. You, too, would have been just such a poor block of wood if you had not had the luck to become one of the little links in the Organs—that flexible, unitary organism inhabiting a nation as a tapeworm inhabits a human body. Everything is yours now! Everything is for you! Just be true to the Organs! They will always stand up for you! They will help you swallow up anyone who bothers you! They will help move every obstacle from your path! But—be true to the Organs! Do everything they order you to! They will do the thinking for you in respect to your functions too: today you serve in a special unit; tomorrow you will sit in an interrogator’s armchair; and then perhaps you will travel to Lake Seliger as a folklorist,4 partly, it may be, to get your nerves straightened out. And next you may be sent from a city where you are too well known to the opposite end of the country as a Plenipotentiary in Charge of Church Affairs.5 Or perhaps you will become Executive Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers.6 Be surprised at nothing. People’s true appointments and true ranks are known only to the Organs. The rest is merely play-acting. Some Honored Artist or other, or Hero of Socialist Agriculture, is here today, and tomorrow, puff! he’s gone.7

  The duties of an interrogator require work, of course: you have to come in during the day, at night, sit for hours and hours—but not split your skull over “proof.” (Let the prisoner’s head ache over that.) And you don’t have to worry whether the prisoner is guilty or not but simply do what the Organs require. And everything will be all right. It will be up to you to make the interrogation periods pass as pleasurably as possible and not to get overly fatigued. And it would be nice to get some good out of it—at least to amuse yourself. You have been sitting a long time, and all of a sudden a new method of persuasion occurs to you! Eureka! So you call up your friends on the phone, and you go around to other offices and tell them about it—what a laugh! Who shall we try it on, boys? It’s really pretty monotonous to keep doing the same thing all the time. Those trembling hands, those imploring eyes, that cowardly submissiveness—they are really a bore. If you could just get one of them to resist! “I love strong opponents! It’s such fun to break their backs!” said the Leningrad interrogator Shitov to G. G—v.

  And if your opponent is so strong that he r
efuses to give in, all your methods have failed, and you are in a rage? Then don’t control your fury! It’s tremendously satisfying, that outburst! Let your anger have its way; don’t set any bounds to it! Don’t hold yourself back! That’s when interrogators spit in the open mouth of the accused! And shove his face into a full cuspidor!8 That’s the state of mind in which they drag priests around by their long hair! Or urinate in a kneeling prisoner’s face! After such a storm of fury you feel yourself a real honest-to-God man!

  Or else you are interrogating a “foreigner’s girl friend.”9 So you curse her out and then you say: “Come on now, does an American have a special kind of——? Is that it? Weren’t there enough Russian ones for you?” And all of a sudden you get an idea: maybe she learned something from those foreigners. Here’s a chance not to be missed, like an assignment abroad! And so you begin to interrogate her energetically: How? What positions? More! In detail! Every scrap of information! (You can use the information yourself, and you can tell the other boys too!) The girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” That’s power for you! She gives you the full details. If you want, she’ll draw a picture for you. If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punishment cell and her prison term.

  And if you have asked for a stenographer10 to take down the questions and answers, and they send in a pretty one, you can shove your paw down into her bosom right in front of the boy being interrogated.11 He’s not a human being after all, and there is no reason to feel shy in his presence.

  In fact, there’s no reason for you to feel shy with anyone. And if you like the broads—and who doesn’t?—you’d be a fool not to make use of your position. Some will be drawn to you because of your power, and others will give in out of fear. So you’ve met a girl somewhere and she’s caught your eye? She’ll belong to you, never fear; she can’t get away! Someone else’s wife has caught your eye? She’ll be yours too! Because, after all, there’s no problem about removing the husband.12 No, indeed! To know what it meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you saw was yours! Any apartment you looked at was yours! Any woman was yours! Any enemy was struck from your path! The earth beneath your feet was yours! The heaven above you was yours—it was, after all, like your cap, sky blue!

  The passion for gain was their universal passion. After all, in the absence of any checking up, such power was inevitably used for personal enrichment. One would have had to be holy to refrain!

  If we were able to discover the hidden motivation behind individual arrests, we would be astounded to find that, granted the rules governing arrests in general, 75 percent of the time the particular choice of whom to arrest, the personal cast of the die, was determined by human greed and vengefulness; and of that 75 percent, half were the result of material self-interest on the part of the local NKVD (and, of course, the prosecutor too, for on this point I do not distinguish between them).

  How, for example, did V. G. Vlasov’s nineteen-year-long journey through the Archipelago begin? As head of the District Consumer Cooperatives he arranged a sale of textiles for the activists of the local Party organization. (These materials were of a sort and quality which no one nowadays would even touch.) No one was bothered, of course, by the fact that this sale was not open to the general public. But the prosecutor’s wife was unable to buy any: She wasn’t there at the time; Prosecutor Rusov himself had been shy about approaching the counter; and Vlasov hadn’t thought to say: “I’ll set some aside for you.” (In fact, given his character, he would never have said this anyway.) Furthermore, Prosecutor Rusov had invited a friend to dine in the restricted Party dining room—such restricted dining rooms used to exist in the thirties. This friend of his was not high enough in rank to be admitted there, and the dining room manager refused to serve him. The prosecutor demanded that Vlasov punish the manager, and Vlasov refused. Vlasov also managed to insult the district NKVD, and just as painfully. And he was therefore added to the rightist opposition.

  The motivations and actions of the bluecaps are sometimes so petty that one can only be astounded. Security officer Senchenko took a map case and dispatch case from an officer he’d arrested and started to use them right in his presence, and, by manipulating the documentation, he took a pair of foreign gloves from another prisoner. (When the armies were advancing, the bluecaps were especially irritated because they got only second pick of the booty.) The counterintelligence officer of the Forty-ninth Army who arrested me had a yen for my cigarette case—and it wasn’t even a cigarette case but a small German Army box, of a tempting scarlet, however. And because of that piece of shit he carried out a whole maneuver: As his first step, he omitted it from the list of belongings that were confiscated from me. (“You can keep it.”) He thereupon ordered me to be searched again, knowing all the time that it was all I had in my pockets. “Aha! what’s that? Take it away!” And to prevent my protests: “Put him in the punishment cell!” (What Tsarist gendarme would have dared behave that way toward a defender of the Fatherland?)

  Every interrogator was given an allowance of a certain number of cigarettes to encourage those willing to confess and to reward stool pigeons. Some of them kept all the cigarettes for themselves.

  Even in accounting for hours spent in interrogating, they used to cheat. They got higher pay for night work. And we used to note the way they wrote down more hours on the night interrogations than they really spent.

  Interrogator Fyodorov (Reshety Station, P. O. Box No. 235) stole a wristwatch while searching the apartment of the free person Korzukhin. During the Leningrad blockade Interrogator Nikolai Fyodorovich Kruzhkov told Yelizaveta Viktorovna Strakhovich, wife of the prisoner he was interrogating, K. I. Strakhovich: “I want a quilt. Bring it to me!” When she replied: “All our warm things are in the room they’ve sealed,” he went to her apartment and, without breaking the State Security seal on the lock, unscrewed the entire doorknob. “That’s how the MGB works,” he explained gaily. And he went in and began to collect the warm things, shoving some crystal in his pocket at the same time. She herself tried to get whatever she could out of the room, but he stopped her.13 “That’s enough for you!”—and he kept on raking in the booty.

  There’s no end to such cases. One could issue a thousand “White Papers” (and beginning in 1918 too). One would need only to question systematically former prisoners and their wives. Maybe there are and were bluecaps who never stole anything or appropriated anything for themselves—but I find it impossible to imagine one. I simply do not understand: given the bluecaps’ philosophy of life, what was there to restrain them if they liked some particular thing? Way back at the beginning of the thirties, when all of us were marching around in the German uniforms of the Red Youth Front and were building the First Five-Year Plan, they were spending their evenings in salons like the one in the apartment of Konkordiya Iosse, behaving like members of the nobility or Westerners, and their lady friends were showing off their foreign clothes. Where were they getting those clothes?

  Here are their family names—and one might almost think they were hired because of those names. For example, in the Kemerovo Provincial State Security Administration, there were: a prosecutor named Trutnev, “drone”; a chief of the interrogation section Major Shkurkin, “self-server”; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Balandin, “soupy”; and an interrogator Skorokhvatov, “quick-grabber.” When all is said and done, one could not invent names more appropriate. And they were all right there together! (I need hardly bother to mention again Volkopyalov—“wolf-skin-stretcher”—or Grabishchenko—“plunderer.”) Are we to assume that nothing at all is expressed in people’s family names and such a concentration of them?

  Again the prisoner’s faulty memory. I. Korneyev has forgotten the name of the colonel of State Security who was also Konkordiya Iosse’s friend (they both knew her, it turned out), who was in the Vladimir Detention Prison at
the same time as Korneyev. This colonel was a living embodiment of the instincts for power and personal gain. At the beginning of 1945, during the height of the “war booty” period, he got himself assigned to that section of the Organs, headed by Abakumov himself, which was supposed to keep watch over the plundering—in other words, they tried to grab off as much as possible for themselves, not for the state. (And succeeded brilliantly.) Our hero pulled in whole freight car loads and built several dachas, one of them in Klin. After the war he operated on such a scale that when he arrived at the Novosibirsk Station he ordered all the customers chased out of the station restaurant and had girls and women rounded up and forced to dance naked on the tables to entertain him and his drinking companions. He would have gotten away with this too, but he violated another important rule. Like Kruzhkov, he went against his own kind. Kruzhkov deceived the Organs. And this colonel did perhaps even worse. He laid bets on which wives he could seduce, and not just ordinary wives, but the wives of his colleagues in the Security police. And he was not forgiven! He was sentenced to a political prison under Article 58, and was serving out his time fuming at their having dared to arrest him. He had no doubt they would change their minds. (And perhaps they did.)

  That dread fate—to be thrown into prison themselves—was not such a rarity for the bluecaps. There was no genuine insurance against it. But somehow these men were slow to sense the lessons of the past. Once again this was probably due to their having no higher powers of reason; their low-grade intellect would tell them: It happens only rarely; very few get caught; it may pass me by; my friends won’t let me down.