The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Read online

  That’s what shoulder boards do to a human being. And where have all the exhortations of grandmother, standing before an ikon, gone! And where the young Pioneer’s daydreams of future sacred Equality!

  And at the moment when my life was turned upside down and the SMERSH officers at the brigade command point tore off those cursed shoulder boards, and took my belt away and shoved me along to their automobile, I was pierced to the quick by worrying how, in my stripped and sorry state, I was going to make my way through the telephone operator’s room. The rank and file must not see me in that condition!

  The day after my arrest my march of penance began: the most recent “catch” was always sent from the army counterintelligence center to the counterintelligence headquarters of the front. They herded us on foot from Osterode to Brodnica.

  When they led me out of the punishment cell, there were already seven prisoners there in three and a half pairs standing with their backs to me. Six of them had on well-worn Russian Army overcoats which had been around for a long time, and on their backs had been painted, in indelible white paint, “SU,” meaning “Soviet Union.” I already knew that mark, having seen it more than once on the backs of our Russian POW’s as they wandered sadly and guiltily toward the army that was approaching to free them. They had been freed, but there was no shared happiness in that liberation. Their compatriots glowered at them even more grimly than at the Germans. And as soon as they crossed the front lines, they were arrested and imprisoned.

  The seventh prisoner was a German civilian in a black three-piece suit, a black overcoat, and black hat. He was over fifty, tall, well groomed, and his white face had been nurtured on gentleman’s food.

  I completed the fourth pair, and the Tatar sergeant, chief of the convoy, gestured to me to pick up my sealed suitcase, which stood off to one side. It contained my officer’s equipment as well as all the papers which had been seized as evidence when I was arrested.

  What did he mean, carry my suitcase? He, a sergeant, wanted me, an officer, to pick up my suitcase and carry it? A large, heavy object? Despite the new regulations? While beside me six men from the ranks would be marching empty-handed? And one representative of a conquered nation?

  I did not express this whole complex set of ideas to the sergeant. I merely said: “I am an officer. Let the German carry it.”

  None of the prisoners turned around at my words: turning around was forbidden. Only my mate in the fourth pair, also an “SU,” looked at me in astonishment. (When he had been captured, our army wasn’t yet like that.)

  But the sergeant from counterintelligence was not surprised. Even though I was not, of course, an officer in his eyes, still his indoctrination and mine coincided. He summoned the innocent German and ordered him to carry the suitcase. It was just as well the latter had not understood our conversation.

  The rest of us put our hands behind our backs. The former POW’s did not have even one bag among them. They had left the Motherland with empty hands and that is exactly how they returned to her. So our column marched off, four pairs in file. We did not converse with our convoy. And it was absolutely forbidden to talk among ourselves whether on the march, during a halt, or at overnight stops. As accused prisoners we were required to move as though separated by invisible partitions, as though suffocated, each in his own solitary-confinement cell.

  The early spring weather was changeable. At times a thin mist hung in the air, and even on the firm highway the liquid mud squelched dismally beneath our boots. At times the heavens cleared and the soft yellow sun, still uncertain of its talent, warmed the already thawing hillocks and showed us with perfect clarity the world we were about to leave. At times a hostile squall flew to the attack and tore from the black clouds a snow that was not really even white, which beat icily on faces and backs and feet, soaking through our overcoats and our footcloths.

  Six backs ahead of me, six constant backs. There was more than enough time to examine and re-examine the crooked, hideous brands “SU” and the shiny black cloth on the German’s back. There was more than enough time to reconsider my former life and to comprehend my present one. But I couldn’t. I had been smashed on the head with an oak club—but I still didn’t comprehend.

  Six backs! There was neither approval nor condemnation in their swing.

  The German soon tired. He shifted the suitcase from hand to hand, grabbed at his heart, made signs to the convoy that he couldn’t carry it any further. At that point his neighbor in the pair, a POW who only a little while before had experienced God knows what in German captivity (but, perhaps, mercy too), took the suitcase of his own free will and carried it.

  After that the other POW’s carried it in turn, also without being ordered to; and then the German again.

  All but me.

  And no one said a word to me.

  At one point we met a long string of empty carts. The drivers studied us with interest, and some of them jumped up to full height on top of the carts and stared. I understood very quickly that their stares and their malice were directed toward me. I was very sharply set off from the others: my coat was new, long, and cut to fit my figure snugly. My tabs had not yet been torn off, and in the filtered sunlight my buttons, also not cut off, burned with the glitter of cheap gold. It was easy to see I was an officer, with a look of newness, too, and newly taken into custody. Perhaps this very fall from the heights stimulated them and gave them pleasure, suggesting some gleam of justice, but more likely they could not get it into their heads, stuffed with political indoctrination, that one of their own company commanders could be arrested in this way, and they all decided unanimously I had come from the other side.

  “Aha, the Vlasov bastard got caught, did he! Shoot the rat!” They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good deal more in mother oaths.

  They regarded me as some kind of international operator who had, nonetheless, been caught—and as a result the advance at the front would move along faster and the war would come to an end sooner.

  How was I to answer them? I was forbidden to utter a single word, and I would have had to explain my entire life to each and every one of them. What could I do to make them understand that I was not a spy, a saboteur? That I was their friend? That it was because of them that I was here? I smiled. Looking up at them, I smiled at them from a column of prisoners under escort! But my bared teeth seemed to them the worst kind of mockery, and they shook their fists and bellowed insults at me even more violently than before.

  I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor treason, nor desertion, but because I had discovered through my power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to effect some small remedies and changes in our Russian way of life.

  But all that time my suitcase was being carried by others.

  And I didn’t even feel remorseful about it! And if my neighbor, whose sunken cheeks were already covered with a soft two-week growth of beard and whose eyes were filled to overflowing with suffering and knowledge, had then and there reproached me in the clearest of clear Russian words for having disgraced the honor of a prisoner by appealing to the convoy for help and had accused me of haughtiness, of setting myself above the rest of them, I would not have understood him! I simply would not have understood what he was talking about. I was an officer!

  And if seven of us had to die on the way, and the eighth could have been saved by the convoy, what was to keep me from crying out: “Sergeant! Save me. I am an officer!”

  And that’s what an officer is even when his shoulder boards aren’t blue!

  And if they are blue? If he has been indoctrinated to believe that even among other officers he is the salt of the earth? And that he knows more than others and is entrusted with more responsibility than others and that, consequently, it is his duty to force a prisoner’s head between his legs, and then to shove him like that into a pipe
. . .

  Why shouldn’t he?

  I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into an NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.

  So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.

  If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

  During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

  Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

  Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.

  If Malyuta Skuratov had summoned us, we, too, probably would have done our work well!

  From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.

  And correspondingly, from evil to good.

  From the moment when our society was convulsed by the reminder of those illegalities and tortures, they began on all sides to explain, to write, to protest: Good people were there too—meaning in the NKVD-MGB!

  We know which “good” people they are talking about: they were the ones who whispered to the old Bolsheviks: “Don’t weaken,” or even sneaked a sandwich in to them, and who kicked all the rest around wherever they found them. But weren’t there also some who rose above the Party—who were good in a general, human sense?

  Broadly speaking, they should not have been there. The Organs avoided employing such people, eliminating them at the recruitment stage. And such people played their hand shrewdly so as to get out of it.19 Whoever got in by mistake either adjusted to the milieu or else was thrown out, or eased out, or even fell across the rails himself. Still . . . were there no good people left there?

  In Kishinev, a young lieutenant gaybist went to Father Viktor Shipovalnikov a full month before he was arrested: “Get away from here, go away, they plan to arrest you!” (Did he do this on his own, or did his mother send him to warn the priest?) After the arrest, this young man was assigned to Father Viktor as an escort guard. And he grieved for him: “Why didn’t you go away?”

  Or here’s another. I had a platoon commander named Lieutenant Ovsyannikov. At the front no one was closer to me than he was. During half the war we ate from the same pot; even under enemy shellfire we would gulp down our food between explosions, so the stew wouldn’t get cold. He was a peasant lad with a clean soul and a view of life so undistorted that neither officer candidate school nor being an officer had spoiled him in any degree. He even did what he could to soften my hard edges in many ways. Throughout his service as an officer he concentrated on one thing only: preserving the lives and strength of his soldiers, many of whom were no longer young. He was the first to tell me what the Russian villages were like then and what the collective farms were like. He talked about all this without resentment, without protest, very simply and straightforwardly—just as a forest pool reflects the image of a tree and all its branches, even the smallest. He was deeply shocked by my arrest. He wrote me a combat reference containing the highest praise and got the divisional commander to sign it. After he was demobilized he continued to try to help me, through my relatives. And this, mind you, was in 1947, which was not very different from 1937. At my interrogation I had many reasons to be afraid on his account, especially lest they read my “War Diary,” which contained the stories he’d told me. When I was rehabilitated in 1957,1 very much wanted to find him. I remembered his village address and wrote once, and then again, but there was no reply. I discovered one thread I could follow—that he had graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute. When I inquired there, they replied: “He was sent to work in the Organs of State Security.” Fine! All the more interesting! I wrote to him at his city address, but there was no reply. Several years passed and Ivan Denisovich was published. Well, I thought, now he’ll turn up. No! Three years later I asked one of my Yaroslavl correspondents to go to him and personally hand him a letter. My correspondent did as I asked and wrote me: “Evidently he has never read Ivan Denisovich.” And truly, why should they know how things go with prisoners after they’ve been sentenced? This time Ovsyannikov couldn’t keep silent any longer. He wrote: “After the Institute they offered me work in the Organs, and it seemed to me I would be just as successful there.” (What did he mean, successful?) “I cannot say that I have prospered remarkably in my new walk of life. There are some things I did not like, but I work hard, and, if I am not mistaken, I shall not let my comrades down.” (And that’s the justification—comradeship!) He ended: “I no longer think about the future.”

  And that is all. Allegedly, he had not received my previous letters. Evidently, he doesn’t want to see me. (But if we had met, I think this would have been a better chapter.) In Stalin’s last years he had already become an interrogator—during those very years when they handed out a twenty-five-year sentence to everyone who came along. How did everything in his consciousness recircuit itself? How did everything black out? But remembering the once selfless, dedicated boy, as fresh as spring water, can I possibly believe that everything in him changed beyond recall, that there are no living tendrils left?

  When the interrogator Goldman gave Vera Korneyeva the “206” form on nondisclosure to sign, she began to catch on to her rights, and then she began to go into the case in detail, involving as it did all seventeen members of their “religious group.” Goldman raged, but he had to let her study the file. In order not to be bored waiting for her, he led her to a large office, where half a dozen employees were sitting, and left her there. At first she read quietly, but then a conversation began—perhaps because the others were bored—and Vera launched aloud into a real religious sermon. (One would have had to know her to appreciate this to the full. She was a luminous person, with a lively mind and a gift of eloquence, even though in freedom she had been no more than a lathe operator, a stable girl, and a housewife.) They listened to her impressively, now and then asking questions in order to clarify something or other. It was catching them from an unexpected side of things. People came in from other offices, and the room filled up. Even though they were only typists, stenographers, file clerks, and not interrogators, in 1946 this was still their milieu, the Organs. It is impossible to reconstruct her monologue. She managed to work in all sorts of things, including the question of “traitors of the Motherland.” Why were there no traitors in the 1812 War of the Fatherland, when there was still serfdom? It would have been natural to have traitors then! But mostly she spoke about religious faith and religious believers. Formerly, she declared, unbridled passions were the basis for everything—“Steal the stolen goods”—and, in that state of affairs, religious believers were naturally a hindrance to you. But now, when you want to build and prosper in this world, why do you persecute your best citizens? They represent your most precious material: after all, believers don’t need to be watched, they do not steal, and they do not shirk. Do you think you can build a just society on a foundation of self-serving and envious people? Everything in the country is falling apart. Why do you spit in the hearts of your best people? Separate church and state properly and do not touch the church; you will not lose a thing thereby. Are you materialists? In that case, put your faith in education—in the possibility that it will, as they say, disperse religious faith. But why arrest people? At this poi
nt Goldman came in and started to interrupt rudely. But everyone shouted at him: “Oh, shut up! Keep quiet! Go ahead, woman, talk.” (And how should they have addressed her? Citizeness? Comrade? Those forms of address were forbidden, and these people were bound by the conventions of Soviet life. But “woman”—that was how Christ had spoken, and you couldn’t go wrong there.) And Vera continued in the presence of her interrogator.

  So there in the MGB office those people listened to Korneyeva —and why did the words of an insignificant prisoner touch them so near the quick?

  That same D. Terekhov I mentioned earlier remembers to this day the first prisoner he sentenced to death. “I was sorry for him.” His memory obviously clings to something that came from his heart. (But after that first one, he forgot many and no longer kept count any more.)20

  No matter how icy the jailers in the Big House in Leningrad, the innermost nucleus of the nucleus of the heart—for a nucleus has its own nucleus—had to continue to exist, did it not? N. P—va recalls the time when she was being taken to interrogation by an impassive, silent woman guard with unseeing eyes—when suddenly the bombs began to explode right next to the Big House and it sounded as if at the next moment they would fall directly on them. The terrified guard threw her arms around her prisoner and embraced her, desperate for human companionship and sympathy. Then the bombing stopped. And her eyes became unseeing again. “Hands behind your back! Move along.”