The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Read online

  Section 8 covered terror (not that terror from above for which the Soviet Criminal Code was supposed to “provide a foundation and basis in legality,”30 but terrorism from below).

  Terror was construed in a very broad sense, not simply a matter of putting bombs under governors’ carriages, but, for example, smashing in the face of a personal enemy if he was an activist in the Party, the Komsomol, or the police!—that was already terror. The murder of an activist, especially, was always treated more seriously than the murder of an ordinary person (as in the Code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B.C.). If a husband killed his wife’s lover, it was very fortunate for him if the victim turned out not to be a Party member; he would be sentenced under Article 136 as a common criminal, who was a “social ally” and didn’t require an armed escort. But if the lover turned out to have been a Party member, the husband became an enemy of the people, with a 58-8 sentence.

  An even more important extension of the concept was attained by interpreting Section 8 in terms of that same Article 19, i.e., intent in the sense of preparation, to include not only a direct threat against an activist uttered near a beer hall (“Just you wait!”) but also the quick-tempered retort of a peasant woman at the market (“Oh, drop dead!”). Both qualified as TN—Terrorist Intent—and provided a basis for applying the article in all its severity.31

  Section 9 concerned destruction or damage by explosion or arson (always with a counterrevolutionary purpose), for which the abbreviated term was “diversion”—in other words, sabotage.

  The expansion of this section was based on the fact that the counterrevolutionary purpose could be discerned by the interrogator, who knew best what was going on in the criminal’s mind. And every human error, failure, mistake at work or in the production process, remained unforgiven, and was therefore considered to be a case of “diversion.”

  But there was no section in Article 58 which was interpreted as broadly and with so ardent a revolutionary conscience as Section 10. Its definition was: “Propaganda or agitation, containing an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening of the Soviet power . . . and, equally, the dissemination or preparation or possession of literary materials of similar content.” For this section in peacetime a minimum penalty only was set (not any less! not too light!); no upper limit was set for the maximum penalty.

  Such was the fearlessness of the great Power when confronted by the word of a subject.

  The famous extensions of this famous section were as follows: The scope of “agitation containing an appeal” was enlarged to include a face-to-face conversation between friends or even between husband and wife, or a private letter. The word “appeal” could mean personal advice. And we say “could mean” because, in fact, it did.

  “Subverting and weakening” the government could include any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any particular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must weaken: Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in, coincide, subverts!

  And he who sings not with us today

  is against

  us!

  —MAYAKOVSKY

  The term “preparation of literary materials” covered every Tetter, note, or private diary, even when only the original document existed.

  Thus happily expanded, what thought was there, whether merely in the mind, spoken aloud, or jotted down, which was not covered by Section 10?

  Section 11 was a special one; it had no independent content of its own, but provided for an aggravating factor in any of the preceding ones: if the action was undertaken by an organization or if the criminal joined an organization.

  In actual practice, the section was so broadened that no organization whatever was required. I myself experienced the subtle application of this section. Two of us had secretly exchanged thoughts—in other words we were the beginnings of an organization, in other words an organization!

  Section 12 concerned itself closely with the conscience of our citizens: it dealt with the failure to make a denunciation of any action of the types listed. And the penalty for the mortal sin of failure to make a denunciation carried no maximum limit!

  This section was in itself such a fantastic extension of everything else that no further extension was needed. He knew and he did not tell became the equivalent of “He did it himself”!

  Section 13, presumably long since out of date, had to do with service in the Tsarist secret police—the Okhrana.32 (A subsequent form of analogous service was, on the contrary, considered patriotic.)

  Section 14 stipulated the penalties for “conscious failure to carry out defined duties or intentionally careless execution of same.” In brief this was called “sabotage” or “economic counterrevolution”—and the penalties, of course, included execution.

  It was only the interrogator who, after consulting his revolutionary sense of justice, could separate what was intentional from what was unintentional. This section was applied to peasants who failed to come across with food deliveries. It was also applied to collective farmers who failed to work the required minimum number of “labor days”; to camp prisoners who failed to complete their work norms; and, in a peculiar ricochet, after the war it came to be applied to members of Russia’s organized underworld of thieves, the blatnye or blatari, for escaping from camp. In other words, by an extension, a thief’s flight from camp was interpreted as subversion of the camp system rather than as a dash to freedom.

  Such was the last rib of the fan of Article 58—a fan whose spread encompassed all human existence.

  Now that we have completed our review of this great Article of the Criminal Code, we are less likely to be astounded further on. Wherever the law is, crime can be found.

  * * *

  The damascene steel of Article 58, first tried out in 1927, right after it was forged, was wetted by all the waves of the following decade, and with whistle and slash was used to the full to deal telling blows in the law’s attack upon the people in 1937–1938.

  Here one has to make the point that the 1937 operation was not arbitrary or accidental, but well planned well ahead of time, and that in the first half of that year many Soviet prisons were re-equipped. Cots were taken out of the cells and continuous one-or two-storied board benches or bunks were built.33 Old prisoners claim to remember that the first blow allegedly took the form of mass arrests, striking virtually throughout the whole country on one single August night. (But, knowing our clumsiness, I don’t really believe this.) In that autumn, when people were trustingly expecting a big, nationwide amnesty on the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin, the prankster, added unheard-of fifteen-and twenty-year prison terms to the Criminal Code.34

  There is hardly any need to repeat here what has already been widely written, and will be written many times more, about 1937: that a crushing blow was dealt the upper ranks of the Party, the government, the military command, and the GPU-NKVD itself.35 There was hardly one province of the Soviet Union in which the first secretary of the Party Committee or the Chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee survived. Stalin picked more suitable people for his purposes.

  Olga Chavchavadze tells how it was in Tbilisi. In 1938 the Chairman of the City Executive Committee, his first deputy, department chiefs, their assistants, all the chief accountants, all the chief economists were arrested. New ones were appointed in their places. Two months passed, and the arrests began again: the chairman, the deputy, all eleven department chiefs, all the chief accountants, all the chief economists. The only people left at liberty were ordinary accountants, stenographers, charwomen, and messengers. . . .

  In the arrest of rank-and-file members of the Party there was evidently a hidden theme not directly stated anywhere in the indictments and verdicts: that arrests should be carried out predominantly among Party members who had joined before 1924. This was pursued with particular rigor in Leningrad, because all of them there had signed the “platform
” of the New Opposition. (And how could they have refused to sign? How could they have refused to “trust” their Leningrad Provincial Party Committee?)

  Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter. . . . Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

  That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

  “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”36

  (And just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to stop?)

  Now that’s what Darwin’s natural selection is. And that’s also how to grind people down with stupidity.

  But today a new myth is being created. Every story of 1937 that is printed, every reminiscence that is published, relates without exception the tragedy of the Communist leaders. They have kept on assuring us, and we have unwittingly fallen for it, that the history of 1937 and 1938 consisted chiefly of the arrests of the big Communists—and virtually no one else. But out of the millions arrested at that time, important Party and state officials could not possibly have represented more than 10 percent. Most of the relatives standing in line with food parcels outside the Leningrad prisons were lower-class women, the sort who sold milk.

  The composition of the hordes who were arrested in that powerful wave and lugged off, half-dead, to the Archipelago was of such fantastic diversity that anyone who wants to deduce the rationale for it scientifically will rack his brain a long time for the answer. (To the contemporaries of the purge it was still more incomprehensible.)

  The real law underlying the arrests of those years was the assignment of quotas, the norms set, the planned allocations. Every city, every district, every military unit was assigned a specific quota of arrests to be carried out by a stipulated time. From then on everything else depended on the ingenuity of the Security operations personnel.

  The former Chekist Aleksandr Kalganov recalls that a telegram arrived in Tashkent: “Send 200!” They had just finished one clean-out, and it seemed as if there was “no one else” to take. Well, true, they had just brought in about fifty more from the districts. And then they had an idea! They would reclassify as 58’s all the nonpolitical offenders being held by the police. No sooner said than done. But despite that, they had still not filled the quota. At that precise moment the police reported that a gypsy band had impudently encamped on one of the city squares and asked what to do with them. Someone had another bright idea! They surrounded the encampment and raked in all the gypsy men from seventeen to sixty as 58’s! They had fulfilled the plan!

  This could happen another way as well: according to Chief of Police Zabolovsky, the Chekists of Ossetia were given a quota of five hundred to be shot in the Republic. They asked to have it increased, and they were permitted another 250.

  Telegrams transmitting instructions of this kind were sent via ordinary channels in a very rudimentary code. In Temryuk the woman telegrapher, in holy innocence, transmitted to the NKVD switchboard the message that 240 boxes of soap were to be shipped to Krasnodar the following day. In the morning she learned about a big wave of arrests and guessed the meaning of the message! She told her girl friend what kind of telegram it was—and was promptly arrested herself.

  (Was it indeed totally by chance that the code words for human beings were a box of soap? Or were they familiar with soap-making?)

  Of course, certain patterns could be discerned.

  Among those arrested were:

  Our own real spies abroad. (These were often the most dedicated Comintern workers and Chekists, and among them were many attractive women. They were called back to the Motherland and arrested at the border. They were then confronted with their former Comintern chief, for example, Mirov-Korona, who confirmed that he himself had been working for one of the foreign intelligence services—which meant that his subordinates were automatically guilty too. And the more dedicated they were, the worse it was for them.)

  Soviet employees of the Chinese Eastern Railroad, the KVZhD, were one and all arrested as Japanese spies, including their wives, children, and grandmothers. But we have to admit these arrests had already begun several years earlier.

  Koreans from the Far East were sent into exile in Kazakhstan—the first experiment in mass arrests on the basis of race.

  Leningrad Estonians were all arrested on the strength of having Estonian family names and charged with being anti-Communist Estonian spies.

  All Latvian Riflemen and all Latvian Chekists were arrested. Yes, indeed, those very Latvians who had been the midwives of the Revolution, who just a short while before had constituted the nucleus and the pride of the Cheka! And with them were taken even those Communists of bourgeois Latvia who had been exchanged in 1921—and been freed thereby from their dreadful Latvian prison terms of two and three years. (In Leningrad, the Latvian Department of the Herzen Institute, the House of Latvian Culture, the Estonian Club, the Latvian Technicum, and the Latvian and Estonian newspapers were all closed down.)

  In the midst of the general to-do, the Big Solitaire game was finally wound up. All those not yet taken were raked in. There was no longer any reason to keep it secret. The time had come to write “finis” to the whole game. So now the socialists were taken off to prison in whole “exiles” (for example, the Ufa “exile” and the Saratov “exile”), and they were all sentenced together and driven off in herds to the slaughterhouses of the Archipelago.

  Nowhere was it specifically prescribed that more members of the intelligentsia should be arrested than of other groups. But just as the intelligentsia had neve
r been overlooked in previous waves, it was not neglected in this one. A student’s denunciation (and this combination of words, “student” and “denunciation,” had ceased to sound outlandish) that a certain lecturer in a higher educational institution kept citing Lenin and Marx frequently but Stalin not at all was all that was needed for the lecturer not to show up for lectures any more. And what if he cited no one? All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel.37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year’s tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers—who by this time were no longer “bourgeois” but a whole Soviet generation of engineers.

  Because of an irregularity in the geological strata two mine tunnels which mine surveyor Nikolai Merkuryevich Mikov had calculated would meet failed to do so. He got Article 58-7—twenty years.

  Six geologists (the Kotovich group) were sentenced to ten years under 58-7 “for intentionally concealing reserves of tin ore in underground sites in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans.” (In other words, they had failed to find the deposits.)

  On the heels of the main waves followed an additional, special wave—of wives and the so-called “ChS” (Members of Families). Among them were the wives of important Party leaders and also, in certain places, Leningrad, for example, the wives of all those who had been sentenced to “ten years without the right to correspond”—in other words, those who were no longer among the living. The “ChS,” as a rule, all got eights—eight years. (Well, that was still less than the dispossessed kulaks got and their children did not go to the Archipelago.)

  Piles of victims! Hills of victims! A frontal assault of the NKVD on the city: In one wave, for example, G. P. Matveyeva saw not only her husband but all three of her brothers arrested, and all in different cases. (Of the four, three never returned.)